Elena (27 page)

“And I wouldn't want her to,” Jack said. He looked at me. “It's the graphic element that's missing, the sense that the life she talks about was lived, not just thought about.”

I nodded toward Elena, who was still seated on her sofa, looking rather stiff and wearied as one person after another joined her there briefly, then departed. “Perhaps you should talk this over with the author herself,” I said.

“I think that's an excellent idea,” Miriam said. She took Jack's arm and tugged him forward. “Come on, let me introduce you.”

The seat beside Elena had just been abandoned by a pudgy reporter from the
Times
, so that she was sitting alone as we approached her.

“Elena,” Miriam said, “I'd like you to meet Jack MacNeill. He's a freelance journalist, and he has some interesting opinions about your book.”

Jack did not wait for Elena to respond. He immediately sat down beside her. “First off,” he said, “I should tell you that I liked your book quite a lot.”

“Thank you,” Elena said demurely.

“But I had some reservations, too,” he added cautiously. “I thought the book was a little too internal, as if everything in it only happened in your mind, not in the real world.”

Elena smiled slightly but said nothing.

“America is missing from the book, I think,” Jack added.

He meant, of course, the America he had seen and documented in report after report as he wandered from his birthplace in Seattle, after his mother's death when he was fifteen, to his present flat in Greenwich Village. He had worked as a migrant, lived as a migrant, and, as he said, thought as a migrant. “I don't have a vision, you see,” he said, “just a fair amount of experience.”

And so when Elena asked him what America he meant, he was able to tell her, speaking softly, his steady voice almost inflectionless, his eyes burrowing into hers.

“Well,” he said, “have you ever seen a room with maybe fifteen living in it, and nothing on the windows to keep out the wind but ripped-up corn flake boxes?”

Elena admitted, somewhat stiffly, I think, that she had not.

And so he presented to her, in brief, America as he had come to know it.

“… And in South Carolina they work from what they call ‘can see,' meaning dawn, to ‘can't see,' meaning dead of night. And down in Oklahoma, when the dust storm comes, people die because they swallow so much dirt, even with masks on. I know a family — interviewed them — that walked from Arkansas to the Rio Grande because they heard that cotton was grown by the river's edge. Have you ever heard of that?”

Elena shook her head, her eyes fixed upon his.

“I've seen shacks made out of soup cans and Kotex boxes, and a good many other things. That's part of the American story, don't you think?”

“But Elena wasn't writing what you call ‘the American story,'” I protested.

Jack looked up at me. “I know that. I'm just trying to suggest what grit is, the little detail that makes you feel something instead of just think about it.” He turned to Elena. “I don't mean to offend you, and I don't think it's my place to tell you how to write. It was just an opinion. You can take it or leave it.”

Elena looked at him pointedly. “Too internal, you said?”

“Yes,” Jack replied. He nodded toward the windows at the front of the room. “There's a lot going on out there.” He tapped the side of his head with his finger. “And there's a lot going on up here. The hard thing is to get those two worlds together.”

Elena continued to watch him, but said nothing.

“You have a lot of talent, Miss Franklin,” Jack said. “That internal world of yours, it's electric. A kind of steady charge runs through your whole book. But the fire keeps dying away.” He stood up. “It was nice meeting you, Miss Franklin,” he said.

And with that, he sauntered away, edging gently through the well-heeled crowd.

Elena's gaze followed him, a very intense look in her eyes. I saw that same look years later, when she and I were walking in the wildly disordered garden surrounding her house on Cape Cod. She had been talking about Jack with immeasurable fondness and affection, her white hair dancing in a small breeze from off the sea. Then that look came in her eyes. “I was growing a eunuch's soul, William,” she said. “Then Jack came along for me.”

A
nd she might have added that same afternoon, just as she turned to watch a line of surf break along the shore — the foam very much, as I remember quite vividly now, the color of her hair — she might have added, “Just as Miriam came along for you.”

I suppose a less lonely man might have given up after Miriam's casual, but repeated, rebuffs. He might have found a less demanding and independent woman, “selfless,” as Raymond Finch says of his working-class girlfriend in
Calliope
, “because she has no self.”

Miriam Gold, on the other hand, had a pronounced self. Her early childhood had been spent in those crowded tenements on the Lower East Side which Mike Gold (no relation) had already immortalized in his novel J
ews without Money.
By the time she was ten, however, Miriam's father had moved to the upper reaches of Manhattan, settling his family into a spacious Harlem apartment and beginning the life of reasonable comfort that had been his waking dream for forty years. Thus Miriam's early poverty had been transformed into miraculous prosperity by the time she came of age. But it had not been forgotten. She would often talk of the smells that had wafted up into her bedroom from the open store windows, of peddlers' carts below, of the incessant noise that had poured into her room from the hawking and bickering of that vast open bazaar which was once Orchard Street. On those same streets, she had listened to tales of an older world, of pogroms and forced migrations, and from these she had gained a sense that for the generation that preceded hers, America had offered itself as a dream of unprecedented dimension, one whose bounty she could not deny and wished, I think, only to extend.

To all of this, Miriam added the experience of moving from an earlier density into the world bought for her by her father's good fortune, so that she could sit in that grotesque parlor he had designed in imitation of David Belasco — all swooping oriental drapes and Middle Eastern water pipes — and dream of the junk markets of Houston Street, its swarming crowds and myriad dialects. From her ornate and luxurious bedroom, she looked back purposefully to those earlier days, to a world of direct and simple toil, presided over by the dictates that had come down from Sinai rather than by the labyrinthine contortions of the New York Civil Code. Her father's good fortune had set her both morally and ethically adrift. It was a complex condition, one which Elena tried to capture in the section of
Quality
that deals with the Jewish novel of immigration. The great accomplishment of that genre, she wrote, “was to give our literature the profound sense of a beached moral order, of reluctant but inescapable abandonment, of the ransom the old exacts from the new, of that deep nostalgia which is unmistakable in the closing passages of
The Rise of David Levinsky
, and which is essentially a form of ethical wistfulness. It is the voice of the cantor heard above the roar of urban traffic, the call of the shofar over the hum of the shirtwaist machines.”

Certainly Miriam felt this wistfulness. As her father's finances became more and more entangled with those of the barons so excoriated by her fellow workers at
New Masses
, she sensed not only the oddity of her circumstances but their cruelty as well. She believed that her father was a victim of his own ambition, that he had forfeited the more intense life of the ghetto for the cold and charmless one of the Jewish middle class, and that this was a betrayal of his heritage far more serious, as she said, than grabbing a hot dog at Yankee Stadium.

For Jack MacNeill, of course, all this was nothing more than a privileged person's romanticization of early poverty, and he told Miriam so more than once during the years we lived so closely together. But I have always thought that there was more to Miriam's conviction than that. Once she told Jack that America was the sort of country in which when you win, you lose, and when you lose, you lose. Jack had laughed quite a lot at that. But I believe that Miriam was talking about the losses that accrue to success in a very subtle way, moral losses of the most delicate sort, as well as about the grace and struggle of communal life, the wealth and strain of tradition, the charm of ancient things.

Thus when Jack called her the most conservative radical he ever knew, he was probably right. To this day, when I think of her, I see her not as a fiery instrument of revolutionary revenge — a popular image in those days, one which numerous female Russian revolutionaries were said to embody — but as a peculiarly willful and competent person, one whose life was ennobled by a memory rather than a dream of justice.

It is surprising to me now how little I actually know of the life she lived before we met. I know about her time on the Lower East Side, but once her father whisked her up to Harlem, things grow vague. I know that for a long time she was on the outs with her family and that the questions in dispute were mainly political. Perhaps on some morning she had marched into breakfast, hurled a few epithets at her father while he sat stunned above his wheat toast, then stormed out onto the street, slamming the door behind her. I know for sure only that there was a break, a series of hapless jobs, during which Miriam attempted, perhaps, to fuse her experience with that of the working class, and then a retreat. For she went back to her family after a time, gave an accounting of her life since she had left them, and asked if they might help her do the thing she had by then decided upon: go to college. Her father said yes immediately, and all of them alternately laughed and cried throughout the entire afternoon, until, as Miriam always said, the carved mahogany elephant on the mantel looked as if it would die of all this unexpected sweetness.

The following year Miriam went to Smith, and she would remember her time there almost as fondly as her childhood in lower Manhattan. Perhaps, in the end, it was simply that for her the past was a sacred thing, that nothing could ever seem wholly ugly through the prism of remembrance, that remembering well, as she once said, is a kind of art. All her life she loved the sort of object that soaked up time — old letters and photographs, discarded magazines and yellowing newspapers. Perhaps it was finally this reverence for things remembered that drew her to
New England Maid
, then to Elena, and, at long last, to me.

She finally agreed to have dinner with me during Christmas week. By then
New England Maid
had been out for almost three months. Reviews poured into Sam's tiny office from all over the country, most of them either very favorable or very hostile. Miriam was coordinating everything for the book — directing the advertising, setting up all the interviews, whisking Elena from one reception to another. The two of them were so exhausted at day's end that Elena would often collapse back in Miriam's room and spend the night on the short, worn sofa by the window.

“Surely Elena's enjoying all this,” I said. “The attention, I mean.”

Miriam took a sip of wine. “She does it well, but I'm not sure she enjoys it.”

“But it must be dazzling,” I insisted.

Miriam shrugged, then glanced away. She was wearing a gray wool suit with notched lapels, and I remember thinking how professional she looked, how completely in control of everything around her. It seemed a kind of miracle that she had consented to this dinner, and in a way it was. Not long before Alexander was born, we sat in the living room of our small apartment and talked about that first night while I pressed my hand to her stomach, searching for some movement, thrilled when it came. “It's all such an accident, William,” she said, smiling quietly. “I was so damned tired that afternoon that I couldn't face the prospect of going home and cooking. Then the phone rang and it was you offering a free meal, and I just thought, Oh, what the hell.”

And so we had ended up in the dining room of the Hotel Lafayette, small and very French though it was only a block or so from the drab façade of New York University.

Miriam turned back toward me. “Elena says you're writing a book.”

“Sort of.”

“On Cowper?”

“I've been plowing through it for quite some time. Since graduate school. I think of it as my doctoral dissertation, not really a book.”

Miriam nodded but said nothing. She seemed preoccupied.

“I suppose you meet a great many dashing men in your profession,” I said.

Miriam closed her eyes wearily. “Dash is not all it's cracked up to be.”

I looked at her intently. “You know, of course, Miriam, that I've been trying to make an impression on you.”

Her face softened a bit. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

“Wit didn't work. I suppose now I'm trying … what, humility?”

Miriam kept her silence. She was watching me with those calculating eyes. She had been “gone over” by the best of them, had batted away the most refined pitches. But not without some loss to herself, for there was something in her that had already been scraped to the bone.

“I don't think I'm a weak man,” I said. “I can live without you. I can live, I think, without anyone. But I don't want to.”

Miriam sipped her wine, her eyes evaluating me over the rim of the glass.

“You don't have to be clairvoyant to see that I'm sort of lonely, sort of tired of being lonely.” I shook my head. “I don't know how to court you, Miriam,” I said feebly. “I wouldn't know where to begin.”

Miriam lowered her glass slowly to the table, her eyes still watching me with either the deepest seriousness or the most blasé indifference.

“I think Elena loves me,” I added. “Might I offer her as a reference?”