Elena (15 page)

“New York will seem very gay indeed, compared to this,” I added.

Elena said nothing.

“Remember how frightened I was, Elena, the day I left?” I asked cheerfully.

“I'm not frightened,” Elena said quite firmly.

At the time, I thought her all bravado, saw her only as a timid country girl on her way to the big city. I did not know that she had already watched the world knock back more than a few in steamy roadside bars.

Elizabeth came into the station house a few minutes later. She seemed very excited for Elena.

“I wish I could go with you,” she said.

Perhaps she might have, had not Mr. Brennan been in such ill health. I know that for a time Elena and Elizabeth talked of going to New York together, but that Elizabeth had finally declined.

“Maybe when Papa gets better,” she said. “Maybe I'll come to New York then.” She embraced Elena. “I'll miss you. Please write.”

“I will,” Elena promised.

“I have to get back to the house,” Elizabeth said. “He had a very bad night, coughing a lot, you know. I can't stay away too long. But I just had to say good-by, Elena.”

They embraced again, then Elizabeth disappeared behind the station house doors.

“Too bad about Mr. Brennan,” I said casually.

“She wouldn't have come anyway,” Elena replied.

It seemed an odd remark, but Elena did not choose to explain it. Instead, she walked a few paces toward the front of the station, then glanced back at me. “Let's go out on the platform, William.”

“All right.”

My father arrived a minute or so later. He had driven us to the station but had then insisted upon driving back to the house for something he claimed to have forgotten. I suspected that the sight of Elena's departure was too much for him and that, typically, he had decided not to face it.

Yet there he was, striding through the station house doors and onto the platform, his coat unbuttoned and fluttering in the breeze. He had a package with him, rather large and cumbersome.

“This is for you, Elena,” he said breathlessly. He hoisted it over to me. “Figure she'll be needing this at Barnard. For God's sake, don't drop it, William.”

“What is it?”

He looked at Elena. “Typewriter,” he said. He seemed almost to glow. Later in life, strolling proudly about various literary parties, martini in hand, his belly edging over his belt, he would boast of how early he had known of his daughter's gifts. “Lots faster than poor Billy, here,” he'd say, slapping me playfully on the back.

Within a few minutes, we were on the train, Elena pressed up against the window, staring down at him. He was smiling very happily. He did not seem sad at all, only confident of her destiny.

We rode together very quietly that day. Elena read her book or watched out the window. I scribbled notes for one of my upcoming papers. I suppose I looked like a student, tall and plain and spindly as a desk lamp. And Elena? She looked like nothing more than an attractive young woman, a small-town girl little different from thou sands of others, on her way to meet her destiny in the city.

But this young woman was Elena Franklin, and her life would wind neither toward a palace nor toward that bleak dead-letter office in which Bartleby came to rest at last. Instead, it would be her own, singularly guided by her mind, each part an episode within what Carlyle called “the thought of thinking souls.”

“Well, you're here,” I said happily as the train pulled into Pennsylvania Station.

She nodded. “Yes.”

I did not know at that time how carefully Elena had planned her steps, how determined she was, as Manfred Owen tells his daughter in Elena's last book, “not to have my life handed to me like my head upon a platter.”

Harry Morton met us at the train. He was leaning against one of the wrought iron pillars that supported the arcade, and he looked almost ghostly in his long coat and gray fedora, his faced locked in an attitude of forced reserve, “a fellow who seemed to think of life,” as Elena characterized him in her first published work, a short story called “Manhattan,” “as one long unanswered prayer.”

“So this is Elena,” Harry said, bowing slightly as we came up to him. “William, I had no idea your sister was so attractive.” He turned to Elena. “Welcome to New York.”

“Thank you,” Elena said. She neither smiled nor frowned but only regarded him closely, as if determined to sum him up.

“It's almost six,” Harry said. “I thought we might all have an early dinner.” He smiled politely. “Of course, you may be tired from the train ride.” This he said only to Elena.

“I'm not tired,” Elena said immediately.

“Good,” Harry said brightly. He offered Elena his right arm, and with the other picked up her single suitcase. “May I escort you through this vast and confusing terminal, then?”

Elena glanced at me quickly, as if asking how she should deal with this oddity. Then she took Harry's arm and allowed herself to be ushered through the glass-domed and steel-ribbed pandemonium of Penn Station.

Once outside, Harry stepped up to the curb and opened the door of one of the many taxis that lined the entire block in front of the station in those days. Then he came back for our bags. Elena was staring up at the imposing façade of the station.

“It's patterned on the Caracalla Baths,” he said.

Elena gave him a blank look. “What is?”

“The station.”

“Oh,” Elena said, getting into the cab.

I lumbered in after her, dragging the typewriter with me. The driver slung our suitcases into the trunk, then Harry pulled himself into the back seat.

“The Commodore, please,” he said.

The cab cruised up Seventh Avenue, past Macy's and along the line of plain brick buildings that stretched toward Times Square in those days. At Forty-second Street we turned east, and all the glitter of Times Square spread out before us, a whirling dervish of multicolored illuminated signs, which certainly would have looked beautiful, as Chesterton once remarked, to one who could not read.

Mary was already waiting for us in the Palm Room of the Commodore. She was sitting alone at a table near the back, the waiters buzzing about while she puffed languidly at her cigarette.

“I don't know why you chose this place, Harry,” she said as the three of us approached her. “It's so dreary.”

“Where would you have preferred, my dear?” Harry asked with mock concern.

“The Algonquin.”

Harry shook his head disapprovingly. “So passé. The Algonquin is all tourists now,” Harry said to Elena. “Everyone coming in from Indiana to see where Dorothy Parker sat. The literary wits aren't there anymore, Mary.”

“Well, at least it has the memory of wit,” Mary said testily. “Not like this place — palm fronds and curtains. It looks like a mortuary.”

Elena smiled thinly.

“Where is everyone?” Harry asked Mary.

“Sam can't make it,” she said crisply. “He's got some kind of meeting with backers for that publishing company scheme of his.”

Harry sighed. “What an absurd idea,” he said. “Poor Sam presumes that the literacy rate in this country is increasing.” He smiled at Elena. “That's the first of his many mistakes, I fear.”

We were still standing by the table, the waiters edging around us laden with enormous silver trays.

“Mary, I'd like you to meet William's sister, Elena,” Harry said at last.

“Oh, I know who she is,” Mary said. She forced herself to smile.

“Welcome to New York.” She stared impatiently at the three of us. “Well, don't just stand there, for God's sake. Please, sit, sit, sit.”

When we had all taken our seats, Mary turned to Harry. “Tom can't make it either,” she said. “Working on one of his great poetry projects.” She looked at Elena. “Has William told you about Tom?”

“Very little,” Elena said.

“Fancies himself a poet,” Mary said. “Of course, the stuff he writes, a seed catalogue wouldn't publish.”

“I wouldn't be so harsh,” Harry said mildly.

Mary's eyes widened. “You wouldn't? Why not?”

“Well, he's just beginning. He has a lot to learn.”

Mary turned to Elena. “He doesn't hang around with the rest of us much anymore. That's romantic, don't you think? The lone poet, tormented in his isolation but learning the dark path of inner vision.” She laughed. “I don't suppose you have such grand ideas, Elena?”

Elena shook her head. “I don't suppose so.”

“Good,” Mary said. “With a little luck, you may never be a fool.” She took a long draw on her cigarette. “I'd like to get fried in the hat tonight.”

“Mary, please,” Harry said.

Mary glared at the little teacup that rested by her ashtray. “The hooch hounds are ruining the world,” she muttered. She crushed her cigarette into the ashtray and promptly lit another.

“William tells me that you're going to study literature at Barnard,” Harry said gently to Elena.

“Yes,” Elena said. She continued to watch Mary warily, as if she thought Mary's frenetic display was little more than a parody of the Modern City Woman.

“I'm just drifting, myself,” Mary said. “No graduate school for me. I'll leave that for William. No family business to take over, like Harry.” She smiled. “No, I'm just a woman on the prowl.”

We ordered dinner a few minutes later. Elena ordered trout amandine because, I suppose, it was the only familiar thing on the menu.

“I'm sure you'll do fine at Barnard,” Harry told her. “Of course, with William at Columbia, you'll have a little help available.”

“Is that why you came here, Elena,” Mary asked, “for William's help?”

Elena looked pointedly at Mary. “No, it isn't,” she said. “I came to New York when I was a little girl. I always wanted to come back.”

Harry stroked his chin and nodded sagely. “You seem to have a serious nature, Elena.”

Mary laughed dismissively. “Serious! What is seriousness, anyway?”

It appeared for a moment that Elena might actually try to answer Mary's question: her lips parted briefly, then closed again.

“Tom, for example,” Mary went on, “thinks of himself as a serious poet. But he is living in a mist. He's never really faced himself. He thinks he's a tragic figure, but actually he's just a pathetic one.”

“Please, Mary,” Harry said, “could we talk about something else? Elena doesn't even know Tom.”

“Oh, sorry. Yes, you're right. Sorry, Elena. It's very rude.”

Elena smiled politely. “Not really. I'm very interested.”

In my memory I can see her clearly at that moment in her life, suddenly surrounded by a group of young moderns who know so little of the world they think they know it all, a tiny circle of poseurs, harmless and ineffectual as we surely were, slightly snide but basically generous, the sort who could with a nudge in one direction or the other either enrich the world a bit or draw it more deeply into poverty.

“Interesting? Is that what you're finding all this?” Mary asked with a grin.

Elena nodded. “I really am. I'm like the country mouse in the story.”

“But that was the wise one, wasn't it?” Mary asked. She smiled, then looked at me knowingly. “Your sister's all right, William.” She glanced back at Elena. “Quite all right, I think.” She took out another cigarette and lit it. “So you've come to New York to experience things, is that right, Elena?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Mary nodded. “Well, would you like to begin this very night?”

Harry leaned forward. “What are you talking about, Mary?”

“I'm proposing, my dear Harry, that we all go have a drink to celebrate Elena's arrival in New York.”

Harry eyed her in disbelief. “I'm not sure it's the best way for Elena to spend her first night in the city.”

“Oh, stop being so pompous, Harry,” Mary said. She looked at me. “Have you ever noticed the way Harry pours cold water on everything? My God, the minute Harry shows up the whole damn world turns gray. Even Tom, the wild poet, even he gets stuffy around Harry.” She frowned impatiently. “Haven't you ever noticed the way we act? Like a bunch of elderly ladies having tea in Cornwall.” She looked determinedly at Elena. “I'm off for a drink, Elena, and I would love your company.”

“Sit down, Mary,” Harry said firmly.

Mary continued to watch Elena. “Stuff it, Harry.”

Elena got to her feet. “I'd like to see a speakeasy.”

“Perhaps we'd better go with them,” I said to Harry.

“Absolutely,” Harry said. He glared at Mary. “I presume you have time to permit me to get the check?”

Mary laughed. “Harry loves to get the check. Do you know why? He doesn't want all his friends grappling for it over the table like a gang of hairy Goths.”

Harry paid the check and we walked out to find a cab. On the way downtown, Mary suggested we sing together and was good enough to wave her finger back and forth, counting out the rhythm, as if she were directing a disorganized choir through a classical arrangement. Her voice often rose painfully above the others, then broke up in laughter. In a letter fired off to me from the seclusion of her old age, she described herself as “a gray old thing with rouged cheeks and puffy eyes and ostrich legs who sits in the park, barely moving, a vulgar piece of sculpture called
Decrepitude.
” But I have her finger waving in the air that night in 1928, and the sound of her voice belting random lyrics from
The Pirates of Penzance.

The speakeasy was very much like the one painted by Ben Shahn. It had a short bar with a brass rail along the bottom. There were a few wooden tables with unmatching but comfortable chairs. There was no music, not so much as a lone saxophone player, but couples swayed slowly before the radio that rested on the corner of the bar. It was smoky, and the conversation tended to be rather hushed, al though the crowd was young and spiffily dressed.