Elena (32 page)

“And that's where she told you, at Port Authority?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was about to leave. But Elena took my arm and pushed me toward the front of the terminal.”

We had stood near the western curve of the building, where a display urged New Yorkers to tour Wisconsin. There was a large board cut in the shape of the state, and Elena's eyes lingered on it while she continued to hold my arm. I knew she was stalling for time.

“What is it?” I asked.

She looked at me. “I've decided to leave New York for a while,” she said.

“And go where?”

“Everywhere.”

“You mean, all over the world?”

“No, just America.”

“I see,” I said.

“I'm going with Jack,” she added quickly.

“With Jack?”

“Yes,” Elena said. “He believes it would help me write my new novel. The title is
The Forty-eight Stars
, and Jack thinks I should see a few of those places the stars represent, the stars in the flag.”

“I know what stars you're talking about, Elena.”

“I've already told Father. While you were in the bathroom, during dinner.”

“And of course he gave his approval.”

There was a hard edge in her voice. “I wasn't asking for his approval, William, and I'm not asking for yours.”

“You want an opinion?”

She drew in her breath slowly, then let it out. “I expected you to have one.”

“Well, I certainly do,” I said firmly.

“What is it, then?”

“That you're making a mistake.”

“I expected you to feel that way,” my sister said.

“Elena, listen to me, I like Jack. He's an intelligent man. But —”

“But not my type?”

“I'm not that stupid, Elena. I have no idea what your ‘type' is.”

“Then what's your objection?”

“I think you should find your own book. You don't need Jack to help you.”

Elena said nothing. I remember thinking that she had been given the world and didn't know it, that she was gifted and financially independent — at least for a while — and that she was now throwing it all away to trail after Jack MacNeill, like the dust behind his battered old sedan.

“Well,” I said after a moment, “what is it that you two plan to do on this little tour of the forty-eight stars?”

“Work. Jack has several assignments. I'll research my book and probably write a few articles.”

“Articles? About what?”

“The state of the country.”

I shook my head, exasperated. “Oh, for God's sake, Elena, every hack in the country is out doing that.”

A bus lumbered into the driveway near us and stalled, the motor rattling feebly while the driver tried to get it going again.

“What does Sam think about this,” I asked. “Does he want his prize scribbler out in the hinterlands when she could be promoting herself and Parnassus all over New York?”

“Sam thinks the trip's a fine idea.”

“To give you the sweep and panorama for your
War and Peace
of the Depression?” I asked sarcastically.

“New York is not America, William,” Elena said.

“You don't have to tell me that. I'm from Connecticut.”

Elena smiled and looked out toward the street.

“It's a pattern with you, Elena,” I told her. “First Dr. Stein, now Jack.”

Elena turned to me, her face rigid with anger. “What are you talking about?”

“You … and men.”

“Dr. Stein was my teacher,” Elena said stiffly. “Jack is something else.”

“I know quite well what Jack is, and I know that you may be following certain … what would you call them — urges; following them instead of your brain.”

Elena was so angry now she was almost trembling, but I didn't care. I thought I was fighting for her life.

“When you get right down to it, William,” Elena said in a measured voice, “what I do is none of your business.”

“No? Well, there's the little matter of your being my sister, Elena,” I said hotly.

Elena's eyes flashed left and right, as if looking for some door through which she could escape. “I am sick and tired of being treated as if I'm still a little girl from Connecticut with a big pink ribbon in my hair.” She glared fiercely. “My life belongs to me!”

I held firm. “Really? Are you sure? I was thinking that perhaps it belonged to Jack.”

Elena stepped back slightly, amazed, I think, by my ferocity, as if the one thing she had not anticipated in my response was its passion.

“I once read a book called
New England Maid
,” I said. “It was written by an artist. I wish the author well. I really do. But I have my fears.”

And with that, I walked away.

I refused to go to the little farewell party the staff of
New Masses
threw for Jack and Elena when they left on their American tour. Nor did I help them pack the car the morning they left. But Miriam did, and she told me that Elena took her hand and squeezed it very hard as she got into the car, and smiled sadly and said, “Tell William that I love him.” As the car pulled away, Jack threw his gray rumpled hat out the window into the air.

She was gone a year and a half, relentlessly touring the low spots of the era, until, from the portrait of wretchedness her letters detailed, it sometimes appeared that she had fallen in love with the nation's misery. Week after week she wrote of almost nothing else, and eventually I came to dread her letters as one fears a phone call in the dead of night.

But Elena's letters were not the only bad tidings of that time. All Europe seemed to be sinking toward a frightening abyss. The belabored businessmen and their snarling wives who were the travel agency's best customers increasingly decided to stay in the United States. As a consequence, I lost my job.

For a while, I had no idea what to do. The prospect of hunger and homelessness became far more real than the sort described in Elena's letters. I had no savings, having squandered my weekly pay on books or on eating out when I should have been cooking at home. Of course, I knew I could always go somewhere, to someone, if I really hit bottom. Harry, at the very least, could find me some kind of job. Because of that, the bottom for me was far above the bottom for a great many other people.

Still, without a job I felt helpless. I wandered the streets, joining that gray army which stood staring at the chalkboards on Sixth Avenue, hoping for something to come my way — a job, any job. I applied for everything from short-order cook to president of a small women's college in the South. But the weeks passed, and my landlord began to eye me warily each time we met in the lobby. I grew more and more depressed. Even the prospect of publishing my Cowper book, which Sam had scheduled for September, could not lift the pall that had come over me. No one knew better than I did that something had to give.

Finally something did: a suggestion from Sam that I apply to the newly created Federal Writers Project in New York. “You can say you're a writer, William,” Sam urged me. “Hell, your book's been bought.”

So I trudged down to the enormous armory at Lexington and Twenty-sixth, where a horde of “writers” gathered each day, chewing their nails and yapping irritably at each other, all hoping to snatch a federal job from the stale, smoky air.

To my astonishment, I was hired as an editor, at a salary of a little over twenty-three dollars a week. And so, on a cold, rainy Monday morning I appeared at the offices of the New York Project. They were located at the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue and were accessible only by freight elevator, which had been designed to lift ten-ton trucks rather than this motley, griping, and insistently political assembly of writers, or people who, on the flimsiest evidence, claimed to be writers.

Once on our floor in the Port Authority building, I discovered that layers of disorganization had been built into both the project and the personnel. The hierarchy of administration was always shifting, the writers almost always moody, sometimes bitter, and often divided in their loyalties, some primarily committed to the project, some to their particular political persuasion. Yet despite the factionalism, the strikes and sit-ins and slowdowns, the drunkenness and sloth and endless political wrangling, especially between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists — despite all of this, a great deal was accomplished during my short tenure there, and I came away after six months with a curiously tender feeling of camaraderie with that intransigent and interminably bickering lot of scribblers who finally turned out a decidedly odd list of publications, everything from the wonderful
New York Guide
to
Who's Who at the Zoo.
Years later, when Elena was working on the section of
Quality
that deals with the radical literary atmosphere of the thirties, she asked me what I had thought of the New York Project. I told her that I had come to think of it as being much like a zebra Marianne Moore had described in one of her poems, “supreme in its abnormality.”

Three months after I'd starting working at the Project, my Cowper book was published. I had delivered the manuscript to Sam several months before, under the title
The Poetry of William Cowper: A New Study.
Sam, sitting at his desk, looked up from the manuscript and asked me if I expected anyone to buy a book with a title as dull as that. I stared at him helplessly. He thought a moment, then scratched out my title and penciled in his own:
Method in Madness: A Study of the Bizarre in William Cowper.
And with that lurid title, the book was published in November of 1935, “to share the highbrow Christmas trade,” Sam said to me with a wink.

The Cowper book — I would always call it simply that — limped along for a few months, selling primarily, as Sam pointed out, “in the sort of shop that sits between an opera house and a museum specializing in medieval artifacts.” Then it disappeared entirely, inhabiting now only the most remote corners of university libraries and brought out only by desperate graduate students in search of an aged thesis for their bright new scholarship to annihilate.

When the book appeared, Sam, indicating the difficulty of the times, said that Parnassus could not afford either a publishing party or a single penny of advertising. Thus it fell to some of my colleagues at the Project to throw me a small party. Miriam provided her cramped apartment, and Harry provided the booze. As a celebration, it was certainly subdued. Sam couldn't make it, nor could Tom, who was busy on a poem he described quickly over the telephone as being a cross between Milton and Whitman. Hearing this, Miriam simply shook her head and walked away, while Harry poured himself another drink.

The party droned on for several hours, though the mirth drained away quickly. There was hardly cause for any to begin with. I was broke; the book was a dud. It was being published as a personal favor, perhaps to me, perhaps to my sister. I never learned Sam's thinking on that matter, but I did discover that Parnassus could not possibly have published my book had not
New England Maid
been such a towering success. This bit of information, which Sam confided rather offhandedly a few days before my book was published, further darkened for me what would have been under any circumstances a drab occasion.

Finally, toward midnight, the last of my weary guests left Miriam's apartment and it was just the two of us, picking up the disordered cups and saucers, snatching floating cigarette butts from glasses before pouring the now-tepid whiskey down the drain.

“I suppose I should have tried to be a better sport about things,” I said.

Miriam smiled and pulled me into her arms. We were standing by the kitchen sink, not the most romantic of settings; yet it was somehow extraordinarily romantic at that moment, suggesting the gentle domesticity we had finally reached.

“Perhaps it's time we got married,” I said.

Miriam looked at me skeptically. “Really?”

“Or maybe we should just hop in a station wagon and head to parts unknown, like Jack and Elena.”

Miriam shook her head. “No, you're not that type, William.”

Half joking, I said, “Bring a cushion from the living room, and I'll get on my knees.”

“Not necessary.”

“Well, will you, Miriam, marry me?”

She said yes, but that she did not want to do it immediately, and that is how we left it.

A month later, Teddy McNaughton's nerves got the best of him. He promptly left New York, and Sam offered his job to me. We were sitting in a bar on lower Broadway. It was snowing heavily outside, and the trolleys were pushing waves of white fluff before them like plows.

“So,” Sam said, “with Teddy gone, the job's open. The money's not great, but it's better than you're getting with the government.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “And you know as well as I do that your salary amounts to a handout. That whole Project business is just a form of being on the dole.”

I rankled a bit at that. “We work quite a lot over there, Sam.”

Sam shook his head. “I don't want to get into that. You have a job offer; not much money, but a lot of opportunity. You can take it or leave it.” Years later, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Sam would claim that in his heart he had been so opposed to what he then called “the Lefty programs of the New Deal” that he had actually offered jobs to Project writers “in order to allow the private sector to generate honest labor for these struggling artists.” One of the names he offered the committee as evidence of this activity was mine.

Sam continued to stare at me. “William, I have a hundred guys would take this job in a minute. You want it or not?”

I took it, gladly. On Monday of the following week, I took my seat behind Teddy's old desk, emptied its drawers of his random notes and curious sketches, and in doing so, I suppose, chased his lingering spirit from the room.