Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  Elena was genuinely surprised. “That’s hard to believe, Jack.”

  “You remember Joe Tully, don’t you?” Jack said. “Got his throat cut open on Second Avenue a few weeks ago. Some psycho killed him for the few bucks in his wallet.” He shook his head. “An old codger like me, hell, I’m a sitting duck, just like Tully was.”

  “So you’re going to a safer shore,” I said.

  “Poetically put, Bill,” Jack said. “Fact is, I can’t just dismiss all this as class war at the level of the street. I know it’s true, but it doesn’t matter when you’re shaking like a leaf every time you leave your lousy little room.” A definite sadness moved into his face. “I’d still die on the goddamn barracades,” he said. “I haven’t lost all my nerve. But I don’t want my last minute on earth to be spent staring at some crazy bastard who’s about to cut my throat for twenty dollars and a faded picture of my mother.”

  “I can certainly understand that,” I told him.

  He didn’t seem to care whether I understood or not. He looked at Elena. “So it’s Connecticut, old girl. It’s the Flight from Egypt, you know?”

  Elena reached over and touched his hand. “I hope you like it there. You’ve earned a little peace, Jack, you have a right to it. Not everyone does.”

  Jack smiled at me. “All this sentiment must be making you pretty sick, right, Bill?”

  “It is rather nauseating, Jack. I prefer you both a bit more crusty.”

  Jack popped the last of the tart into his mouth. “I’m soft at the core. All us aging Commie bastards are.”

  I smiled obliquely. “Stalin would be glad to hear it.”

  Jack laughed and winked at Elena. “Gotten to be a Red baiter in his old age, has he?”

  “Just a saintly liberal,” I told him.

  “You missed something, Bill,” Jack said, now serious. “Let me tell you — just one old man to another — you missed something.”

  “In what way?”

  “By standing aloof, by being superior.”

  “You mean during the thirties?”

  “I mean always, Bill.”

  I looked at Elena. “Do you agree?”

  Elena shook her head. “No.”

  Jack seemed surprised by her answer. “You knew the fire, Elena, don’t deny it.”

  “I’m not,” Elena said. “Why should I?”

  “When we were on the road, they were the best years, right?”

  “I don’t think so, Jack,” Elena said.

  “Really? Why not?”

  “We were merely living,” Elena said. “That’s not enough.”

  “We were fighting the good fight, Elena,” Jack said, “you know that. We were passionate.” He smiled knowingly. “Remember that night outside Tucson, remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you tell me that we were merely living that night, just blandly living?” Jack asked vehemently. “No, Elena, we were not just living, we were alive!” He stopped, as if to calm himself, then, subdued, went on. “There are things the blood remembers, isn’t that right?”

  Elena nodded.

  “Things the blood remembers, yes,” Jack said softly. He turned toward me. “Kids today, graduate students, they come to me with their oral-history projects, you know? They ask me questions and I talk about the thirties and the fifties. I talk into their little microphones and I look into their little eyes and I try to get through, somehow, to their little souls.” He shook his head. “But I never can. Because they think, you see, that if you didn’t win the prize, you never ran the course. To them, we were just a bunch of wild-eyed fools following a stupid dream. That’s what they think of me, and Tully, poor Tully, and you, Elena, at least for the few years before you wrote Calliope.”

  “Yes,” Elena said, “I suppose they do think that.”

  “It’s a gap we can’t cross and they can’t cross,” Jack said. “How do you tell somebody that a few thugs beat the hell out of you in Texas one afternoon and left you bleeding in the dust, and you pulled yourself up and realized that, by God, you felt great, just great. You felt like screaming, ‘Come on back here, you bastards, come on back and do your worst.’” His eyes shot over to me. “You look me straight in the face, Bill, and tell me that’s not something the blood remembers.”

  “I would never be that presumptuous, Jack,” I said quietly.

  “Maybe I was a clown for the Party, Elena,” he said, turning back to her, “a sucker for the cause, hmm?”

  “We are all something like that, Jack,” Elena said.

  “I guess we are,” Jack said, almost wearily. “Except for Cold Bill, here.”

  “Is this the spot in our program when I’m supposed to admit that yes, even I, have been a fool?” I asked.

  “I’d love to hear more, Bill,” Jack said. “Please go on.” He sat back and folded his arms over his chest. “I’m all ears.”

  “Well, if you want to know the truth,” I said, “I’ve always felt that I had a great book in me, but evidently I didn’t. How’s that for soul-rending confession?”

  Jack shook his head. “Petty stuff, Bill. You’ll have to do better.”

  “My father didn’t love me.”

  “Nothing new in that,” Jack said, grinning fiendishly.

  “I was not a perfect husband.”

  “Oh, Christ, Bill, who was?” Jack asked loudly.

  Elena began to laugh, lifting one trembling hand to her lips as she did so.

  “I coulda been a contendah,” I said, laughing now myself.

  “Oh, God, not that,” Jack thundered, slapping his hand against his forehead, “not that old Brando line.”

  “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” I said.

  “No more quoting, goddammit,” Jack shouted. He pounded his fist on the table. “No Eliot, no Rousseau, no Augustine.”

  I looked at Elena. She was still laughing.

  Toward evening I began making a light dinner while Elena and Jack went for a walk on the beach. Elena was using a cane by then, but only for occasional support. Jack joked with her about it, calling it a “prop to add dignity to your disreputable life,” and he would sometimes snatch it from her and dart away. But beneath all this, I knew, he understood. He thought he might go before her, I think, but he knew nonetheless that she was going.

  Dinner was at that small wooden table in the kitchen. I placed two white candles on it. Jack insisted that Elena be the one to light them.

  “Forgive my notorious sexism, won’t you?” he said. “But I have always found the image of a woman lighting a candle to be very beautiful.”

  Elena smiled. “Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to deprive you of it,” she said. She struck a match and lit each of them.

  During dinner we spoke casually of the past and the present but carefully sidestepped references to anything but the immediate future. There was no talk of books yet to be written, things yet to be accomplished. We were now concerned with what we had already done, not with what we might yet do.

  “At times I think of heading overseas again,” Jack said, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands over his stomach, “but it seems so far away, you know. I think Connecticut is about as far as I’m likely to go.” He looked at me. “Who do you think will fall most quickly into obscurity, Bill, you or me?”

  I shrugged. “That probably depends on which of us has the most pages listed after his name in the index of Elena’s biography.”

  We both laughed, but I think that we both understood that to some extent what I had said was true, that ultimately we were destined to a second-stringer’s fame, the men who’d held a towel for the champ.

  After dinner we had brandies in the back room. Elena was looking tired indeed by then, and so as casually as I could I suggested that it might be time for all of us to retire.

  “There’s a pull-out sofa in the living room,” I said to Jack.

  Elena rose slowly. “But there’s a bed in mine,” she said to him.


  Jack smiled pointedly. “But if we become excited, Elena, we might break something.”

  “We could take a chance,” Elena said.

  I remember hearing them talking quietly in Elena’s room for almost half the night. There was some laughter here and there, and then the quiet talk resumed.

  Jack left early the next morning. I came out of my room and found him all but tiptoeing out the door.

  “I thought you’d stay the weekend,” I said.

  Jack shook his head. “No, I can’t. Elena will understand.” He lifted his hand to the brim of his hat. “Watch after my old girl, will you, Bill?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s nothing to say, of course.”

  “No, nothing.”

  He turned silently and walked down the stairs to his car.

  Elena came out of her room, fully awake, as I am sure she had been for some time.

  “I knew he’d go this morning,” she said as she joined me at the window.

  “Well, did you two break anything?” I asked lightly.

  Elena took my arm and leaned one side of her face into my shoulder. “Just each other’s hearts,” she said, “but that was long ago.” Then, although Jack could not see her, she stepped to the window and raised her hand to wave good-by.

  Toward spring Elena was still able to get around fairly easily. On warm days we took slow strolls down the beach, and often these outings raised her spirits markedly. Having lived for so long in the city, she enjoyed the spaciousness of the sea and the near-empty beach. But there were also moments when she grew remote, lost in thought, as if a vital part of her were already gone.

  And yet an element of her character urged her forward, resisting depression and malaise. She continued to write to various friends and associates, even fired off an occasional note to such uninspiring personages as Barney Nesbitt. It was this part of her that provided the energy to continue the long poem she had begun and to make her last public appearance in early May.

  She had been invited to address a discussion group at the Brewster Ladies’ Library on the subject of Moby-Dick, the book they had been reading all spring. Elena agreed immediately. It was held in the mid-morning of a sunny day. The night before had been very restless for her, and I expected her to be dreadfully tired. But when she emerged from her bedroom, her face was glowing with that youthful energy which rose in her from time to time like a sparkling mist.

  “You look … well … very much yourself, Elena,” I told her as she walked into the living room, where I had been watching the morning news on the small television set we kept there.

  She smiled and gathered her shawl around her shoulders. “I think I look like an old bohemian gone to seed,” she said. “Sort of an emaciated Gertrude Stein.”

  I rose from my chair and walked over to her. “Not at all. You look rather commanding, if you don’t mind my saying so. We’d better be going. The friends of the library will be waiting for their star attraction.”

  Once out the door, I eased her down the front stairs. She was anxious to be on her way but distrustful of her strength. She held on to me like a child afraid to fall, and I realized that she had reached the point where she could not depend upon her own body for support.

  She was breathing heavily by the time I maneuvered her into the car.

  “Perhaps you’d rather cancel?” I asked as I closed her door.

  “No.”

  “I’m sure they’d set another date.”

  Elena turned toward me. “Get in the car, William. We will go today.”

  It was only a mile or so to the library. Even driving at an old man’s cautious pace we arrived within a few minutes. Elena spoke very little on the way, though from time to time I could see her lips move suddenly, as if she were in the midst of some silent recitation. In all her life I don’t believe she ever gave a purely extemporaneous speech. Others have written of how eloquent she could be, as if her eloquence were utterly spontaneous. It never was. She memorized her speeches and delivered them almost as an actress would. She knew, as she once told Jack, that an address is a performance, and that a good one requires the gifts of a good performer.

  The setting for Elena’s address at the Ladies’ Library was very pleasant. It was a small, book-lined room, in which a few chairs and a lectern had been set up. There were already quite a few people in the room when Elena and I arrived, and they whispered energetically as we moved among them, slowly making our way to the front.

  Elena sat quietly in a chair behind the lectern. No one approached her. Perhaps she appeared too imposing, or perhaps too frail. I sat in the front row but she rarely looked at me. She studied the paintings on the wall and then scanned the bookshelves to her right and left. I remember thinking that even in this casual setting she seemed wonderfully engaged.

  She was introduced a few minutes later by a man who was no doubt associated in some way with the library. He was tall and thin and suitably bespectacled. His introduction was so full of exaggerated appreciation that Elena later told me she could not imagine such praise for someone who was still alive. It was mercifully short, however. Elena sat mutely behind him, staring straight ahead, as if his remarks concerned someone in another galaxy.

  She rose shakily when he stepped aside. The young man offered his hand, but she did not take it. She walked to the lectern and grasped it tightly for support.

  “I’d like to thank the library for its invitation,” she said. “The staff here has helped me several times since I moved to the Cape. I have learned, at last, to return books relatively near the required date.”

  There was a patter of polite laughter at this, and Elena added to it with her smile. She seemed genuinely pleased to be able to confront once more that mysterious public which had given her so much. She could never fathom exactly who they were, this unheralded community, but I suspect she knew them to be simply the ones who do not write but ably read, do not speak but wisely listen.

  “I am pleased to be here today,” she began, “and I am especially happy to be able to talk for just a few minutes about what may be the greatest book written by an American.”

  She surveyed her audience a moment, and when she spoke again, her tone was more serious.

  “Anyone can have an interpretation of a book, and sometimes it seems that the greater the work the sillier some of the interpretations. Moby-Dick is one of those great books which has drawn the attention of both wise and foolish commentators.” She laughed lightly, then shrugged. “Now it’s my turn.”

  The audience laughed again, warming to her.

  “Like all great books, Moby-Dick is about many things, and so one finally can’t help resorting to impressionistic criticism, that is, to saying that this is what it means to me. With this caveat, then, I will say simply that I think Moby-Dick is about striving, that its theme is as old as the myth of Icarus. But Melville attached to this theme elements of tragic grandeur which give the work a special wisdom. This wisdom is something that is felt as powerfully as it is known. I think he knew that great striving is that which both raises man up and sets him apart, isolates him from the family of unconscious life, and by that means lends a special poignancy to his existence. We feel an empathy in the presence of failure that we do not feel in the presence of victory. Victory causes us to celebrate; failure causes us to reflect.”

  She smiled slightly, then continued. “I believe that Melville knew that it is only those who soar who have a right to fall as Ahab does. And Ahab is part of a long mythic chain. In the cause of human enlightenment, he comes to us both as a hero and as a victim. Adam gave up his innocence, Faust his soul, and Ahab his life, in search of that knowledge which we have every right to pursue. We know this knowledge will finally bring us peace, and that we live sad, narrow, and blighted lives for the lack of it. Without it, we continue to live, generation after generation, shrouded in a darkness which moves only toward a final, endless night.”

  She stopped again, her eyes searching the room as if
looking for encouragement there, that single comprehending face to which every speaker speaks, every actor plays.

  “Moby-Dick is a great book both in its form and in its content,” she said as she began again, “for its notion of titanic striving is embodied both in what it says and in what it is. Melville allowed his book to sprawl in magnificent disorder, to stretch out toward impossible limits; that is, he allowed it to fail in its own mighty endeavor, so that the book itself becomes the physical embodiment of its own extended yearning. Thus, Moby-Dick relates Ahab’s failure all the more powerfully because it also relates Melville’s. In doing both, it is able powerfully to convey two inescapable truths of human life: that our beauty is as inseparable from our travail as our goodness is inseparable from our bafflement.”

  There was little more than polite applause when Elena resumed her seat. Clearly it had not been the address the group had expected, brief, somber in its tone, unflinching in its manner. The young man who followed her to the podium stammered his gratitude for her having come, rather nervously thanked her for her remarks, then quickly opened the meeting to questions.

  For a moment there was nothing but awkward uneasiness. Then a few hands rose tentatively into the air, and Elena answered each question crisply and concisely. Through it all she seemed unusually subdued, as if this speech had somehow drained her of her mission, that now, at last, there was nothing left to say.

  “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her as we drove home.

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Tired?”

  “All the time, now.”

  Once at the house, Elena shed her pensiveness a bit. She seemed happy that David was to arrive for a visit a few days later and that Alexander was due the following week. “When you get right down to the core,” she said, “they are really the only family we have.”

  By late afternoon, however, she had weakened, her steady walk becoming a cautious shuffle. She gripped her cane as if it were a life line, and only rarely and briefly did she walk without it again. She ate very little at dinner and retired early. Toward midnight, I heard her pacing the house once again.