Elena (24 page)

“It's more like a first paragraph.”

“Want to read it to me?”

“Sure,” Elena said. She took a piece of paper from the pocket of her blouse and unfolded it on the table. “This sets the mood for the whole story. As you said, whimsical.”

“Go ahead. No preface necessary.”

Then, hesitantly, Elena read what she conceived at that time to be the opening paragraph of
New England Maid:
“I was born to a father who, though not a Christian parson, had his trials, and a mother who, though not a noble lady of the stage, had her quirks and crinolines. To their duo, I made a trio, and with Brother, a curious quartet.” She looked up slowly. “What do you think?”

“Well, it's breezy.”

Elena folded the paper. “You don't like it?”

“I read Cowper, remember?” I said, smiling to allay Elena's fears. “I really am sort of dour, Elena. Whimsical writing is for a different audience. But I'll tell you this, Sam will love it, and so will many other people. I mean it. Go ahead and finish the book in just that style.”

Elena placed the paper back in her pocket. I could tell that I had spoken hastily, unmindful of the sensitivity with which Elena regarded her work at that time, of the extraordinary need she must have felt that evening for my unconditional approval. Later in her life, having been wounded so much, she could no longer be wounded so easily. “There was a point in Elena's life,” Jason wrote in his memoir, “when it became almost impossible to touch her. By then I think her soul must have resembled Rodin's statue of Balzac, towering, monumental, as impregnable as a fortress on the Rhine. I am not sure, however, whether this invulnerability could be accounted loss or gain.” Nor, I might add, am I.

But that evening in the Village, while the air grew dark around us and the first streetlights began to glow, Elena sat silently, no doubt wondering if she had gotten everything wrong — the whole tone of the story, the characters, the rhythm of the sentence, everything from the smallest detail to the overall structure of the novel, which, at that time, existed only in her mind.

Finally she looked up. “I don't know what's right, William.”

“The story's fine, Elena. I didn't mean to criticize it.”

“It's not just the story.”

“What then?”

“Maybe the way I'm thinking about it. Maybe that's all wrong.”

I touched her hand. “Elena, you shouldn't let anything I said interfere with what you intended. You and Sam have obviously worked it out. It looks like he'll be your publisher. It's between the two of you. And that's the way it should be.”

Elena did not seem convinced.

“It's the narrowness of my taste, Elena,” I insisted, “it's not what you wrote. Believe me.”

Elena shook her head. “William, if you don't mind, I'd just like to talk about something else.”

“All right,” I said weakly.

We ordered dinner and ate almost without speaking. Then I walked Elena to her bus stop and waited with her. She seemed intensely preoccupied, as if her mind were taking stock of itself, figuring the credits and debits of its own ability and measuring them against an ambition that could only be glimpsed at the time. When the bus came she stepped on quickly, took her seat, and waved to me with a faint, halfhearted movement as it pulled away.

A year later, at this same bus stop, Elena would rush out, plunge a manuscript into my hands, then rush back onto the bus, saying only, “This is it, William, the best that I can do.”

T
he year during which Elena wrote
New England Maid
was probably the single most solitary of her life. Still supported by my father's tottering finances, she had the luxury of spending her days holed up in her room at Three Arts. “You heard that little typewriter of hers going day and night,” a former resident of Three Arts is quoted as saying in Martha's biography. “It was a constant clatter on the floor, like the knocking on the pipes when the heat came up, only the typing never stopped.” Martha called New
England Maid
an “obsession,” but I think that only a lazy, dilatory age would label such deep commitment and determined striving with a word that conjures up pathology.

Sam was elated by Elena's determination. “She's working like a demon, William,” he told me over breakfast one morning, “like a demon.” But when I asked him if he had seen any of the results of all this labor, he shook his head glumly. “No,” he said. “And to tell you the truth, it makes me a little jumpy.”

Elena's nervousness about the book increased as the weeks of writing passed. Even Mary, normally so casual in the face of such things, grew concerned. “I would usually dismiss something like this as an affectation,” she told me. “You know, like Tom in his garret, nibbling at moldy Swiss cheese. But with Elena, it's different.”

It was very different, and at times a little grim. Much would be made of it later — those long days she spent alone, that ceaseless typewriter — all of it would finally enter modern literary folklore, another of those tiresome tales which place the artist in a separate realm.

Still, the reality was curious enough. Elena really did go through something very intense during the writing of her book. Jason said that the work “blasted her out of Eden,” but this has always seemed to me grotesquely overstated. The physical evidence of her intensity, however, was perfectly obvious during the late winter and spring of 1932. She neglected herself to an alarming degree, grew thinner and more pale. She often looked as if she never slept, her eyes sometimes tired and watery, at other times almost glazed, as if a thin, diaphanous cover had been placed over them, shielding her from anything but her own inner lights.

During those months, meeting Elena for dinner was a disquieting experience. She would pick at her food while I rambled on about the topics of the day. It was difficult to draw her into anything remotely resembling idle conversation. At times, I found it insufferably self-indulgent, and perhaps even pretentious, given that I thought she was writing nothing more significant than a whimsical treatment of a bizarre New England family.

“Elena, you really should snap out of this,” I told her one evening at my apartment.

She looked up from a magazine she had been scanning. “Out of what?”

“This damned silly mood you're in.”

She closed the magazine and gave me an absolutely withering stare.

“It's really sort of boring, Elena,” I added irritably. “You're not much fun anymore.”

Elena said nothing. She simply held her eyes on mine for a moment. Then she stood up. “I'm tired, William. I'm going home now.”

“Well, it was a splendid evening,” I said.

Elena placed the magazine neatly on the table beside her chair and quietly left the room. I did not see her again for a month.

But Mary did. She became far more devoted to Elena during this period. The poet Horace once said that certain people are “privileged to dare what flights they please,” and Mary understood, as none of the rest of us did at that time, that Elena was one of these. During all of that long spring, she was amazingly solicitous toward Elena. She later explained it rather simply to her daughter. “People have said that Elena was near a breakdown during the time she wrote New
England Maid.
She never was. Elena had sadness, that's all. A very bad case of sadness.”

This “case of sadness” grew less severe later in the spring. Perhaps by then Elena had decided that she would, in fact, write the book that was in her. By May the pall that had darkened fall, winter, and early spring lifted entirely, and Elena finished up her classes in a final burst of vigor. She was able to graduate right on time, in June of 1932.

My father came to New York for the graduation ceremonies, and we sat together in the auditorium and watched the long line of graduating seniors as they marched across the stage. When Elena's name was called, I saw his eyes lift toward the front of the room with a sudden energy, all his weariness and boredom dropping from him like crusted earth.

Outside the hall I took a photograph of the two of them together. Elena stood beside him in her cap and gown. She smiled reservedly, while he beamed proudly at the camera.

After Elena changed clothes at Three Arts, the three of us wandered down Broadway, casually chatting about matters of limited scope. Elena talked about a job she had applied for at the New York Public Library, about Elizabeth's letters, which were hinting at a move to the city, and about the general run of her college life. My father smiled appreciatively at everything she said.

Later that evening, he took us to dinner at a restaurant a good deal less fashionable than was usual for him. There were small wooden tables with checkered tablecloths, and toward the back a myna bird squawked the president's name from a large cage shaped like a pagoda. Nor did my father look as much the dandy as he once had. There was no silk handkerchief peeping up from his breast pocket, and the stud pin that adorned his tie was lusterless and vulgar. He had probably left the gold one sitting on a hotel nightstand or had pressed it into the hand of some woman who had asked for nothing more. He lifted his water glass high above the table. “Here's to Elena's graduation.”

We touched our three glasses together gently. My father drank the water as if it were a fine red wine, rolling it over his tongue in a mocking gesture which he ended with a large, brave smile. “The Democrats will get the booze back again,” he said. Then he folded his hands together and looked soberly at each of us. “I know this is a celebration,” he began, “but since I've got to be in Hartford early tomorrow morning, there's something I have to tell you tonight. There's just no other time to do it.” He looked at Elena. “I hate to spoil the evening, though.”

“What is it?” Elena asked immediately.

My father shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was dressed in a plain brown double-breasted suit which added a note of unaccustomed shabbiness to his appearance. In
Calliope
, Raymond Finch describes a down-and-out hustler as being “plain as a wood shaving, a dapper little man with oily hair who'd gone to seed at the betting tables and had ended up in a shiny suit and cracked calfskin shoes, which he tapped incessantly to some tune playing in his mind.” Except for the betting tables, it could have been our father that evening in the restaurant, his rubber soles beating a muffled cadence under the table as he spoke to us.

“You know how times are now,” he began. “Well, they've finally hit home. I've tried to stay afloat. But what with all the trouble these days, it's been hard.”

I suppose my face must have looked like a blank desert landscape to him. I was, after all, so inexperienced with the world he knew, with the battle for territorial dominance he waged up and down New England, the jungle warfare of the general store.

He glanced from my face to Elena's then back to mine again. “I managed to put you through school, Billy, right?”

I nodded.

He looked at Elena. “And now I've done it for you.”

Elena's eyes softened as he spoke to her, and she lifted her face to him, offering it up, like a prayer on his behalf.

He leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “I made quite a few shrewd investments early on,” he explained, leaving out the details, I suppose, because he suspected that we would never be able to understand them. “Mostly land deals in Florida. I did some selling down there, too. And just at the right time. Before the bust.” He blew a stream of white smoke out of the side of his mouth. “You've been living off those investments for quite some time. They paid for your college.” He crushed the cigarette into the ashtray. “Well, to make a long story short, the money's about gone. And that's what I've come to tell you.”

Elena and I looked at each other. We had no idea what to say to him or what he was asking of us. Did he want pity, gratitude, respect? I suspect he already had them all, in some degree.

Elena leaned forward and touched his hand. “You know I'm already looking for work. You don't have to worry about me.”

My father smiled. “I've never worried about you, Elena, not for one moment.” He looked at me. “And you've been on your own for quite some time, Billy. Having any trouble?”

“I'm getting by.”

My father shook his head. “No, you kids'll do fine. The only reason I'm talking about all this is because the place in Standhope is getting to be a burden for me.”

He was talking about our home, the “place in Standhope” he used like a hotel room — though, I am sure, with less pleasure.

“The fact is, I can't afford to keep it anymore,” he added. He picked up his glass and twirled it in his hands. “It's as simple as that. It just sits vacant most of the time. I hardly ever get back there. When I see you kids, it's in New York, not Standhope.”

“So you want to sell it?” Elena asked.

“That's about it.”

I looked at him questioningly. “And live where?”

He smiled. “Here and there, Billy. There are hotels everywhere.” His face was luminous. That was what he wanted: a life lived entirely on the road, the apotheosis of a nomad. For the rest of his life, he would live in a world of small kingdoms, rooms ten feet square with the toilet down the hall. “Of course, I might be able to rent the house,” he went on. “Keep it that way. Sort of for sentimental reasons, if you kids would prefer it.”

I shook my head. “No need.”

He glanced at Elena for unanimous approval.

“William's right,” she said. “Sell it.”

“Well, I wish I didn't have to spoil things with bad news. I'm really sorry for having to bring it up on your graduation day, Elena.”

I forced a chuckle. “Actually, I'd always wondered how you managed everything, where the money came from.”