Elena (16 page)

“What'll you have?” The bartender did not bother to come to the table but simply called to us from behind the bar.

“Gin and tonic for me,” Mary said immediately.

I ordered a Scotch and Harry ordered a brandy. Then he turned to Elena. “And the young lady will have a White Rock, please.”

“White Rock?” Mary said loudly. “She won't have a White Rock, Harry. She'll have a drink like the rest of us.”

Harry glared resentfully at Mary. “Perhaps Elena would not like to get — as you put it, Mary — ‘fried in the hat' on her first night in the city.”

“Well, why not let her decide,” Mary said hotly.

All eyes turned to my sister.

She smiled. “Do they have sherry?”

“Of course,” Harry said.

“Then I will have a sherry,” Elena said. Then she looked at the bartender. “A sherry, please.”

“I've never understood the appeal of these places,” Harry said, glancing about. A couple was now dancing slowly a few feet from the radio. “Quite an interesting experience for you, I suppose,” he said to Elena.

Elena nodded but she did not look at him. She was watching the couple at the bar, the boredom of their embrace.

“Perhaps you'd like to dance, Elena,” Harry said.

Elena shook her head. “I don't dance very well.”

It was news to me, of course, that she danced at all.

“Neither do I,” Harry said, “but we could give it a try.”

“Go ahead, Elena,” Mary said. “I've never seen Harry dance, or do anything heedless.”

Harry laughed and stretched out his hand. “Shall we?”

Elena took his hand and followed him to the small makeshift dance floor. I took a sip of my drink and watched them out of the corner of my eye.

“She's really quite an interesting girl, William,” Mary said. “How well do you know her?”

“She's my sister.”

“You might be surprised how little that tells me,” Mary said. “I have four brothers, all of them idiots.” She looked at me intently. “None of them know the foggiest thing about me.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Well, what is it you want to know about Elena?”

Mary shook her head. “Nothing specific. But let me tell you some thing. I've caught on to this already. Your sister sees through us, William, sees right through us like we were made of glass.”

I laughed. “How do you know that?”

“When Harry asked her to dance, did you see her face, just that quick little shadow that passed over her face?”

“No, I didn't.”

“You have a brother's blindness, my dear.”

“What shadow are you talking about?”

“The one that told me quite plainly, William, that she was going to dance with Harry because she felt sorry for him.”

“That's ridiculous, Mary,” I said. “Harry's wealthy, and almost debonair. He might even be able to sweep Elena off her feet.”

I glanced back toward the front of the room. The melody on the radio was drawing to a close, and as it did, Harry said something to Elena, and she tossed her head backward, her hair turning almost black beneath the light.

I
n Elena's story “Manhattan,” a dour young man tritely muses that every individual should have one delightful year. I am relatively sure that Elena did have hers, and that it took place during the time between her arrival in New York and the beginning of her brief but profoundly important relationship with Dr. Stein.

Since I was very busy in my first year of graduate school at that time, I saw relatively little of my sister. But not long after her death, I found a kind of diary she kept of that first year in the city. It was entitled “What I Saw,” and it is the only available record of her life during the period that Martha, at least, thought so important — “the critical plunge,” as she called it, “into the literary and geo graphical landscape that would hold her all her life.”

The problem with the observations in “What I Saw,” however, is that they are not very critical. Martha herself pronounced the journal trivial and used it very little in her own book. But for me it is evidence of my sister's happiness at this time in her life, and given the rather somber tones that shaded most of what came after, it seems important to relate its spirit, if not its details.

In part, “What I Saw” is the description of Elena's early friendship with Mary Longford. Time after time they meet at Hewett Hall, the tall pink-brick dormitory where Elena lived during her first year at Barnard. From that central point, they move in all directions around the campus, Mary smoking everywhere, even in the old Milbank buildings, as Elena reports, the only place on campus where it was forbidden.

They attend various political rallies, and in the fall of 1928, with the presidential election in full swing, there were plenty of them: “Mary and I went to meetings of the Democratic, Republican and Socialist clubs,” Elena writes in her journal, “and Mary was equally offended by them all.” The campus was covered with banners and posters: “At noon in the Jungle, stump speakers come from everywhere and hold forth about everything from Coolidge to Kropotkin.” In November, as the election drew near, the women of Barnard staged a huge parade in which various political factions participated: “It was like a sort of toast to the madness and energy of it all,” Elena writes, “with everybody laughing and cheering and singing disrespectful songs. Two girls even dressed themselves up as a donkey and wandered the campus braying at the top of their voices.”

After the election, political life on campus subsided, and Elena's journal turns to other aspects of her life on Morningside Heights. She writes of her daily routine, of trudging up to the laundry on the top floor of Hewett Hall, of entertaining a male or two in those rooms especially provided for that purpose: “I talked to Harry for a while in one of the manholes on the first floor. He said he thought the ten-dollar-a-pointtuition at Barnard was absurdly high. He kept going on about it, figuring up the cost of a twenty-eight-point major with fourteen points in three other areas, which the college requires. When he got the grand total, he shook his head over it and talked as if it were an impossible amount of money. He's always going on about the HCL, as if he could be affected by it.”

In December Elena decides to investigate campus clubs. She attends meetings of the Botanical Club, the Wigs and Cues, the Politics Club, and even the Deutscher Kreis, but she does not join any of them, although she does audition for the Glee Club, which rejects her: “They were very nice in the way they told me that I sounded rather like the banging of a pan.”

But Elena also leaves the campus quite often, wandering the city with Mary. They take a bus down Fifth Avenue from Central Park to Washington Square, riding on the top of a double-decker. “For this one experience,” Elena writes, “I am eternally grateful to the Fifth Avenue Coach Company.”

For New Year's Eve, 1928, Elena records the frenzy of Times Square:

We all went in Harry's car and sat in it passing the flask while the pandemonium continued outside. The revelers were everywhere, and even the mounted police were full of spirit. One of them took a swig from a bottle of bonded that someone from the crowd had handed him, laughed, and passed it back. Harry predicted that 1929 would be a good year, “businesswise,” as he always says. Mary made a New Year's resolution that if she weren't married within twelve months, she'd hire herself out to Texas Guinan down in the Village and specialize in men “with a college-girl fetish.” William looked rather out of sorts, forever mumbling about his Cowper paper, about how much trouble he was having with it. Tom commiserated with him, said he'd like to write a poem about Times Square on New Year's Eve, but since language has structure, it can't portray chaos. Later that night, in a speakeasy downtown, Harry gave the waiter a huge tip. I told him that in light of his conservative politics, such behavior could be called “noblesse oblique,” and Mary laughed and leaned over to me and whispered, “You know, Elena, my dear, you're almost smart enough to be a man.”

The winter months that follow constrict Elena's movements, and her response is to sink deeply into her studies. She records classes in Roman history, organic chemistry, and eighteenth-century literature. As often as possible, she rejected the so-called instrument courses, hygiene and physical education, in favor of classes in history and literature. She makes reference to the authors she is reading — Austen, the Brontës, Scott, Tennyson. “I am more excited than ever about literature,” she writes, “and Mary thinks this preoccupation unnatural. Yesterday she said that she spotted me trotting down Columbia Walk toward the library, and that I looked like a Hottentot heading for a wadi.”

It is at this time that she becomes somewhat more aggressive in the classroom: “Dr. H. treated my statement on
Emma
with what seemed to me pure condescension. He kept nodding and muttering, ‘Interesting, Miss Franklin, yes, yes, interesting,' but it was clear that he thought me more or less unworthy of his time. He is a Columbia professor, and Ann Dodd told me that they don't like teaching the girls at Barnard, that they consider Barnard a weak stepchild of the great Columbia, a ‘little girls' school,' nothing more.” Tension builds between Elena and Dr. H. until, in March, there is a confrontation: “I finally stood up and told Dr. H. that I wished to be excused from his class. He seemed a bit nonplused but still tried to keep the upper hand, telling me that although my contributions would be greatly missed he nonetheless expected to be able to conduct his class without them.”

But there were victories as well. Later that same month, Elena wrote: “Professor B. asked me to stay after class and talked for a while about my paper on Walter Scott. He said another professor was working in Scottish mythology and might be interested in taking on a student assistant. He asked if he might show the paper to this professor, and I said yes.”

I actually saw Elena in class only once during that year. I was on my way to one of my own professor's offices, when I glanced into one of the classrooms and saw her sitting quietly in her seat, her eyes fixed on the instructor, her hand tightly gripping a pencil poised above her note pad. Frozen by the artist's brush, that scene might have been a painting entitled
Young Scholar.
For all the elements were there: the open, receptive expression on her face, the pencil held in suspension like a conductor's baton at that instant before the symphony begins, the sense of thoughtfulness that should precede, I think, the ultimate devotion.

In late April, a dazzling spring swept over New York, and Elena's journal records scores of long walks through the city: “I told Mary that when winter finally ends it seems that New York must be discovered all over again.” For sheer entertainment, she joins Mary in a tour of Columbus Circle: “It was a fool's paradise, in a way. Countless people were milling about, listening to the soapbox orators who gather on the Circle. You could get just about any idea you wanted — socialism, anarchism, any form of religion — everything was there. I mentioned a quotation from Samuel Johnson to Mary, the one in which he said that the library was the depository of all the great variety of human hope, and I said that Columbus Circle with all these speakers was like that.”

By May summer is upon the city, and Elena describes the sweltering little room she occupies at Hewett Hall. “There is hardly enough room to turn around, unless one wishes to stand upon one's bed. The windows are so small that hardly any air comes through, and since almost all the rooms are singles, there is not even a roommate with whom to share the misery. Thus we fly to the out-of-doors and sit beneath that double row of European linden trees that stretches between Brooks and Barnard halls, the kindly legacy of Dr. Griffin's sweet regime.”

Despite the heat, however, Elena continues to work. She submits a short piece to the
Barnacle
, but it is rejected as highbrow. She never sends anything to that publication again.

In June, after classes have ended for the summer, Elena takes a job in the admissions office, which Mary had arranged for her. Entries in her journal taper off, until the final one, recorded on July 22, 1929: “Tom brought over one of his poems. I went out to sit on a bench in the commons to read it. It was an odd poem, the style rather like Tennyson, although the references were terribly modern, shot through with allusions to ‘hennaed hair' and ‘marcel waves,' which seems very strange since someone is always playing an octavina or a viola da gamba in the background.”

Elena's journal ends with this observation. Thus there is no record of that day late in August when we all gathered on Rockaway Beach to escape the heat of Manhattan.

We lounged there under Harry's beach umbrella, looking every bit as dissolute as young people can on such occasions. Harry wiped his brow with a plain white handkerchief. “I hear Tom's completed a new poem,” he said to me. “Have you read it?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Neither have I,” Harry said. He glanced at Elena, and something seemed to empty out of him. By then his infatuation had become a deep romantic yearning, even though she continually broke luncheon and dinner engagements, a rudeness he could dismiss only with much difficulty, but which, as he told me much later in one of the few poetic usages I ever heard from him, “came from her abundance, William, that overflowing cup she was.” One afternoon a year later, he came to my apartment and sat massaging his hat like a dislocated shoulder while he related how deep his love was for my sister. His longing was so great it appeared almost comical. “I want you to play John Alden to my Miles Standish, William,” he said in a low, strained voice. “I trust that since Elena is your sister, history will not repeat itself.” Harry's love became a topic of solemn conversation within our circle as the months passed. Tom even wrote a poem about it, though so well disguising its ultimate meaning that when Harry read it he thought it was about a cousin of his then living in Brazil. Of all of us, Mary was, not surprisingly, the most generous. “It's all rather sad, William,” she once told me. “He loves her for the very things that make it impossible for her to love him.”