Elena (29 page)

“Well, let's hope it's better than that,” I said.

“It's going to be a splendid trip,” Howard assured us. He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. “And it will be such a treat for Elizabeth, such an education.”

Not far from us, a woman in a fur coat flung a spray of confetti into the air and sullenly watched as it floated down. The man beside her quickly drained the last of his champagne, and then the two of them hurried into their waiting car. Across the street, one of the striking seamen hurled a can at their departing limousine, and the men around him laughed and slapped him on the back as he returned to the line.

“Sometimes I think we're getting out of this country just in time,” Howard said.

“You won't find it any better in Europe,” I told him.

Howard laughed, but a bit nervously. “Perhaps we should disguise ourselves, then. As peasants, maybe.” He looked at Elena. “What do you think?”

“I think you look just fine, Howard,” Elena replied dully. She looked at Elizabeth. “How long's the honeymoon?”

“We don't know,” Howard said. He swept Elizabeth under his arm. She nuzzled him delightedly. “We've not decided.”

“How … romantic,” I said.

“You'd probably rather tour the United States, William?” Howard asked.

I shook my head. “Not in these times.”

Howard turned to Elena. “We'll live like kings for a while, you know, live the high life. Then we'll come back and Elizabeth will get on with her work.”

Elena said nothing. She simply turned to the array of passenger ships that lined the harbor, dwarfing the small wooden boathouses along the shore.

“Oh, Elena, I forgot to tell you,” Elizabeth said. “Standhope has a bookstore now. Just a small one, right in the center of the square.”

Elena nodded. She was watching the line of seamen on strike, clearly preoccupied with them, as if the real focus of the day's drama was on them, on the flapping of their placards, their resentful, muttering voices.

“We're going to stay outside Paris for quite a while,” Howard said. “The light in the provinces is supposed to be perfect for painters. I want Elizabeth to try it.” He glanced at his gold watch. “Well, Elizabeth, we'd better be boarding, don't you think?”

Elizabeth drew Elena into her arms. “I hope everything goes well with the book,” she said. She kissed Elena's cheek. “I don't know when I'll be back in the States.”

Elena stepped slowly out of Elizabeth's embrace, then pulled herself back into it again, hugging her fiercely. “I want to hear all about your adventures,” she said. “Promise to write me.”

We both shook hands with Howard, then watched as the two of them made their way up the gangplank, Howard steering Elizabeth from behind, as if she were a pushcart. At the passenger deck they turned and waved to us. Then, very slowly, with a kind of massive deliberation, the ship backed out into the river then made its way southward toward the bay.

I took Elena's arm and we began to move out of the crowd. “Do you want to go home now?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, not yet.”

And so we walked to a small coffee shop not far from the docks and took a table in the back corner. Elena was preoccupied again.

I regarded her closely. “What's bothering you? You should be very happy these days. The book's doing better than anyone could have expected. You have enough money to sit back and relax for a while.”

For a long time, Elena simply sat silently in her chair, her eyes moving from one object to another, focusing on nothing.

The waiter came up and I ordered coffee for us both. Outside, a wet snow had begun to fall, turning the edges of the sidewalk slate gray. I dreaded the slippery walk back to my Village cubicle, to its bad lighting and its sudden drafts and the wooden crate littered with books about a poet who had been dead for over a hundred years.

Elena continued to stare silently about the room until our coffee arrived. Then she took a hesitant sip, the steam rising into her hair. “I'm sorry to have gotten so out of sorts,” she said.

“You're like that, Elena,” I said. “You're moody.”

Elena placed the cup back down on the table. “Am I, really? I've never thought of myself as a moody person.”

I smiled coolly, “Take it from me, you're moody.”

We talked of inconsequential things after that, both of us rather tired of each other's company. When we'd finished our coffee, I walked Elena to her bus.

Later that day, I ended up at Miriam's apartment off MacDougal Street. She greeted me cheerfully and ushered me into her tiny, plant-strewn living room.

“Elena's in one of her bad moods,” I said. “What do you suppose it is?”

She shrugged. “General dissatisfaction, maybe. Don't you ever feel that?”

I shook my head. “No, I always know exactly what's bothering me.”

Miriam sat down beside me. “Well, some people aren't so lucky.”

The phone rang as I was about to add something else. Miriam answered it. She listened for a moment, staring at me pointedly the whole time.

“Yes, I have it,” she said into the receiver. Then she recited a telephone number and hung up. “That was Elena,” she said.

“What did she want?”

“Jack MacNeill's phone number.”

I
suppose she must have rung him up that very night, because the next morning Jack called Miriam at Parnassus and told her that he had had a very interesting conversation with Elena, that she had asked for what he called “a guided tour of the other world,” and that he had agreed to give it.

In her biography, Martha called the period during which Elena and Jack were so closely associated her “social period,” the time during which she seemed to confront, in Martha's words, “the full contradictory thesis of Depression America.”

Of course, for those of us who lived through the thirties, the notion that the Depression had to be “confronted” seems a bit odd. It was simply
there
, a constant presence in our lives, “like living on a fault line,” as Raymond Finch says in
Calliope
, “when the earth begins to tremble.”

I suppose that some people could have avoided the surrounding misery. One did not have to seek it out, as Elena did, with Jack's help, on that Saturday morning when the two of them began what Martha melodramatically refers to as their “odyssey.” Elena did not need to feel her own dissatisfaction so deeply, or to have listened to Jack so attentively when he spoke to her at the Columbia Club, or to have called him up a few weeks later with her peculiar request.

In my mind I have heard Jack's phone ringing a hundred times, the sound of it rattling through his disheveled flat, disturbing that old yellow cat who slept, more or less continuously, in the open suitcase beneath his bed. Now, as I think of it, it seems quite romantic. But in fact, the phone must have been jarring, the disordered room dank and smelly, and Jack's voice when he answered somewhat cold and irritable, since he liked to nap in the afternoon and was probably sound asleep when the phone rang beside his bed.

The miracle, as I once told Martha, was that he picked it up at all, and then, having done so, that he listened to what must have seemed to him the innocent and naive voice of my sister. But he did.

And so it was Jack MacNeill who introduced Elena to that larger world she thought it necessary to explore, who tempered, as he would always claim, her learning with experience, playing Virgil to her Dante. And when there was no more hardship to soak up, Elena turned to the work before her, thinking it would be
The Forty-eight Stars
of Jack's vision. But it became
Calliope
, a curiously medieval book, which begins in a ballroom anointed with champagne and ends in a dream of crucifixion.

She met Jack in the lobby of Three Arts the next Saturday morning. She had telephoned me the day before to break our lunch date.

“You remember Jack MacNeill?” she asked, almost hesitantly.

“Yes, the fellow who had some suggestions about
New England Maid.
”

“That's right,” Elena said. “Well, we're going to sort of tour the city tomorrow, so I don't know if I can make it for lunch.”

“You mean you can't.”

“I can't, yes.”

“Dinner, then?”

She thought about it for a moment. “All right, about seven. Meet me at Three Arts.”

Through most of the next day, I worked on the final draft of my Cowper book. Sam had by then read enough of it to offer a contract. “We need some highbrow stuff,” he explained. “I mean, something for the serious egghead, you know?” Despite his obvious lack of enthusiasm, I leaped at the chance to publish and hauled myself into the heavy labor of rescuing from all those piles of notes one small book about a poet.

Thus as I was going about the last stages of my editorial work, Elena was beginning a relationship that would, for better or worse, last for forty years.

Jack had borrowed a car that morning, a Graham Prosperity Six which a friend of his had bought three years before and which Jack loved because of the irony of the name. He picked Elena up at Three Arts and they set out, driving south down Broadway. Later, over time, Elena would relate her experience to me bit by bit, stitching small anecdotes together, until finally, years later, I had a vivid image of the entire journey.

When they started out, Elena told me, Jack began to talk again about the provincial air of
New England Maid
, reiterating the objections he had voiced before. Then he moved into a more general discussion of the American literary community, which he held in some contempt, calling the literary life “one-half wind and one-half breeze.” At the same time, however, he confessed to a few literary ambitions of his own. He had already published one novel, about a strike in Detroit. It was a bad novel, he said, too narrow in its scope, completely ineffectual in rendering what Jack grandly called “the whole life of the workplace.” He suspected that he lacked the particular talents of the novelist: the ability to make a fictional circumstance genuinely real, the flair for the brilliant image or the galvanizing scene, or even the capacity to tell a story.

For Elena this first conversation alone with Jack would always be precious, and throughout her life she would return to it again and again. “He could have come on as completely worldly and self-assured,” she said in the 1980 interview, “but instead he modestly displayed his failures, so that he seemed almost to be asking me for guidance, just as the day before I had asked him.”

He took her directly to the southern tip of Manhattan, where they watched the Staten Island Ferry chug toward them. Jack spoke quietly about what it was like on the immigrant ships, of the terrible shock of Ellis Island, its grueling and pathetic chaos. “I've seen people walk out of that place,” Jack said, “and not know what sex they were, or even what their names were — their real names, not the one some Irish cop gave them.”

In everything, Elena told Martha Farrell, Jack was kind and generous. And to me she related more than once the almost boyish innocence in the way he spoke to her or touched her arm. “I never felt any effort at what we'd call a seduction,” she said to me one night at my apartment, with Alexander in her lap. “Not the slightest hint of anything like that.” Then she drew her arms more tightly around my little boy, as if it were not a sleeping child she was protectively embracing but Jack MacNeill's reputation.

After leaving Battery Park, Jack and Elena journeyed north to the Lower East Side, and there they walked the crowded streets of the noisy tenement district, glancing at the unplucked chickens that hung in the shop windows along Hester Street. On Delancey, Jack good-naturedly bargained over the price of a lacy tablecloth, which he finally bought and which covered the small dining room table in Elena's house on Cape Cod the day she died. He told her that Walt Whitman had walked these same streets and had learned more about the city from them than he could have learned from a thousand government statisticians. He then launched into a sermonette on the purposes of poetry, hailing Whitman and Vachel Lindsay and dismissing Eliot peremptorily with Floyd Dell's remark about his “beery, bleary pathos.” To this, Elena made feeble objection. “But Jack was really on fire then,” she told me later, “and he bluntly insisted that all of Eliot was just prissy poor-mouthing, and he smiled and did a parody, putting his hand on his heart and reciting loudly, ‘We are the hollow men, whining together.'”

They went to the Bowery after that and had oxtail stew for fifteen cents a bowl at Blossom's Restaurant. The Bowery was as dreadful then as it is now, its brick streets little more than jagged roadways through a landscape of vagrancy and destitution, an alcoholic purgatory. Jack made sure that Elena saw it all, every bit of it, from Houston Street to Cooper Union. Just how powerfully she was affected became clear in the scene in
Calliope
when Finch, after a night of drinking, is tossed from a cab for throwing up in the back seat and is left helplessly sprawled in the gutter, still lucid despite the alcohol:

He left me, that modern Samaritan, in the inch-deep gutter wash. There was something green floating near my ear, and I tried to get my eyes on it, jerking my head to the right. It swam into view — a crumpled package of Lucky Strikes, and a bunch of soggy cigarettes — but I couldn't get my hand up, and so I just lay back, letting the water seep down the collar of my shirt. As I lay there, everything went very dark, then brightened to a kind of heavy, gray fog. I thought I was going out, but the sounds got to me first, a few voices mumbling over me.

I could smell the stink coming from them, that nickel-flophouse smell of rat poison and watered-down disinfectant. They bent toward me and I could smell them perfectly now, smell the shaving lotion on their breath, and the cloying sweetness from the cheap fruit wine. The sores on their faces smelled like over-ripened grapes, kind of sour in its sweetness. I felt them then, their fingers, stubby, bumbling, shaking with the tremor of too little booze. They were in my pockets and unfastening my watch. They were pulling down my socks and tugging at the gold ring on my finger. After awhile they stopped, and I could feel the breeze on me and knew that they had stripped me clean, left me sprawled and soaking in my underwear, and I thought it was over then.