Elena (34 page)

“I know you've read it,” Elena said. “I knew you had the moment you told me you hadn't that day I got back to the city. You said you hadn't read it, but your eyes got sort of distant, and the little finger on your left hand twitched, and you tried to turn away from me but caught yourself in time.” In her short story “Jordan,” Elena would write of a man “whose body kept telling me the truth even though his voice was lying.”

“I don't like being lied to, William,” Elena said fïrmly.

I cleared my throat. “All right, Elena. I have read it.”

“And hated it?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes.”

For a moment the two of us seemed suspended, as if in water. Then Elena simply put her arm in mine and tugged me forward. We continued slowly up the street, the heavy traffic whizzing by us, until finally, under the canopy of Macy's, we stopped.

“I'm going to take a taxi back home,” Elena said. She smiled, but rather wanly. “It's Bargain Monday for the cabs, you know, one-third off.”

I nodded but said nothing. Once again we simply stared at each other.

“Elena, I … I …”

Elena put her finger to my lips, silencing me, then turned and walked to the street, hailed a cab, and disappeared into it.

I did not hear from her for almost a month. I worked steadily on Jack's novel, trying to divest the story, about a strike in the Midwest, of those elements which debased it. Jack was fine on physical detail, deftly rendering the look of corn silk in the air, the playfulness of children as they built a small mud dam outside the factory gates, the chatter of women as they hoisted food into the factory, using broom handles and baskets tied with apron strings. But in describing human beings and the relations between them, Jack often foundered, romanticizing in fiction what he would never have romanticized in his straight reportage, and thus saddling his novel with what Elena later called, in connection with the proletarian fiction of the time, “the unreality of Socialist realism.”

As for Elena, I assumed that she was once again moving into that seclusion she had previously insisted on while writing
New England Maid.
Thus when I found out that in fact she was whirling about the city, primarily with some of Jack's cronies from
New Masses
and the John Reed Club, I was surprised and more than a little dismayed. It was a feeling I could not suppress when she finally called me at my office one dreary Friday afternoon. I was still busy with Jack's book when the phone rang, my red pencil flying over his manuscript like an angry witch.

“William,” she said, “I've decided to move from Three Arts.”

“I see.”

“I need a little help.”

“Like you did when you left Hewett Hall?” I said, unable to keep my sense of being poorly used from my voice.

There was a moment of silence while Elena tried to figure out what she could say to soothe my wounded pride.

“I've not been avoiding you, William,” she said finally. “It's just that I've been very busy.”

“Really? I think it's something else. I think that if you hadn't really wanted to hear what I thought about your book, then you shouldn't have asked me.”

Elena said nothing, so I continued. “Maybe we should just come to an understanding about things like that, about your work. I think that I should not read anything you write, perhaps until after it's published, perhaps never.”

“That would not be a solution, William,” Elena said.

“Why not?”

“Because I will always want your advice.”

“I don't want to be flattered, Elena.”

“Look, William, I want you always to give me your frank opinion. How I deal with that opinion is my business. I've been busy gathering more notes for my book, the one you don't care for. I listen to you William, but I don't follow you blindly.”

“Of course not.”

“Then let's just leave it at that. You tell me what you think is the truth. I will listen with an open mind.”

“And not avoid me for a month?” I asked.

“Not avoid you at all.”

It seemed almost like a contract, but it was the sort of thing upon which Elena tended to insist — clear understandings, the rules stated and agreed upon. It was, perhaps, one of her failures that she could not endure prolonged ambiguity or irresolution. When I said as much to Martha, she looked up from her notebook, her eyes wide with sudden understanding. “So that's what she did that night with Elizabeth,” she said. “She laid down the law.” And all that I could do in response was lower my eyes and mutter my answer. “Yes.”

At Three Arts the day after Elena called me, I waited while a troop of young women helped her move her accumulated possessions down the stairs into the lobby, where, and only where, a man's assistance was allowed. Then we laboriously hauled boxes of books and papers and clothes out onto the street. Several cabs passed us by, but finally one pulled over and agreed to transport the whole works to Brooklyn Heights, where Elena had taken a new apartment.

Once we were in the cab and moving down Broadway, I asked her why she felt the need to move.

She shrugged. “Just something about the atmosphere,” she said. She added nothing else, but in
Calliope
Raymond Finch adds a great deal as he delivers his assessment of a women's residence very similar to Three Arts, where he has just dropped off his date for the evening:

I knew Sherry was heading back into a dream world. I had shown her where the people slept under the bridges, but she'd had other ideas about what constituted a great date. She'd expected the works from a wealthy young plutocrat like myself, the whole works — wine and steak and dancing with the big bands. She wanted the dream, but I'd done my crazy routine and taken her to the sewer. She was pretty huffy after that, and had wasted no time in telling me to take her right back to this little fantasy world on upper Broadway. Here you bought dreams by leaning back on your bed and closing your eyes. It was as simple as that. You buffed your nails and listened to the radio, waiting for the phone to ring in the hall, the call from some producer or publisher, the one with that big break.

But the real world was where I'd taken her, down on the wharves, where men guard their shacks against the rats and throw bricks at the herds of cats howling and scratching and screwing in the alleyway, where they think of the places they left as if those places no longer existed, as if the wind had blown them away, like the harvest. And they lean back in their shacks and wait for a job or a meal or a word that will set them on a new direction, they puff on stubby cigarettes and blow the smoke toward the hole in the roof, and they wait, I suppose the whole damn country waits … for the phone to ring in the hallway with the big break.

By moving into an apartment of her own, Elena had finally broken from an atmosphere that had never agreed with certain aspects of her character, that New England wintriness which is so suspicious of easy enthusiasm. To Elena, too much hope always seemed as deadly as too little, and as the Depression deepened and her commitment to its exploration in
The Forty-eight Stars
continued, Three Arts must have represented the epitome of all that was callow and mindless and self-absorbed in American life.

Her new apartment was on Columbia Heights, not far from Plymouth Church, where, some seventy years before, Henry Ward Beecher had enthralled a packed throng with tales of moral uplift. The church itself was magnificently understated, and Elena often went there during the years that followed. There was something in the irony of its physical somberness — the small windows and dark-hued pews combined with the shuddering rhetoric Beecher had hurled across it — that attracted Elena's attention.

Her apartment, on the other hand, was rather spare. It had a small kitchen, a long, narrow bedroom, and a somewhat larger living room, complete with a modest marble fireplace.

“Well, it looks quite cozy,” I said as I walked in.

Elena nodded, her eyes moving from one window to the next, then over to the hearth. “I should be able to work here.”

Within an hour we were staggering up the stairs to the third floor with the last of Elena's boxes.

“I'd like to offer you something to drink,” Elena said, “but I haven't done any shopping yet.” She smiled. “The cupboard's bare, I'm afraid.”

She walked to the window and glanced out. From the back of the apartment, she could see all of lower Manhattan and, beyond that, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

“Quite a nice view,” I said as I stepped up beside her. “Windows at the back and front, lots of natural light.”

Elena nodded, her eyes randomly scanning the gray waters of the East River and the equally gray skyline that rose above it.

“I'm having a little trouble with the book,” she said.

She was approaching me almost warily, cautiously making a vague inquiry but unwilling to go further than that.

“Well,” I said offhandedly, “it's a difficult thing, writing a novel. You can expect trouble, especially with something as complex as the whole nation at a particular moment.” I smiled. “You are after greatness, aren't you?”

She faced me slowly. “It has a sour sound, doesn't it? To be ‘after' something. It's so predatory.”

I shrugged. “Only a work endures, Elena, not the reason for making it.”

“You make it sound as if all I've seen, all the poverty and misery, are just grist for the mill of my ambition.”

I shook my head. “You're not that callous.”

“No, I'm not. But I can't feel the distress of the times the way Jack does. With him it's all an open wound.”

“It's a simple thing to explain, Elena. You're not Jack.”

“But I believe, honestly believe, William, that his way is superior to mine. I mean, the feeling he has for suffering, that intense feeling — I don't have it.”

“And if you try to fake it, Elena, in your work, I mean, everything about it, every word, will ring false.”

Elena left the window and made her way pensively to the center of the room. “We were outside Seattle once, in a shantytown, a small one, just a tiny village of shacks with a few homeless men in it. They were freezing. The wind was blowing right through those little hovels, and Jack was feeling something terrible for those men, feeling, actually feeling, how cold they were. I could see that in his eyes, I could see
their
pain in
his
eyes.” She looked at me very intently. “I understood intellectually what they were going through, those men. I could understand the cold and their helplessness and their anger, all those things. But to feel the way Jack felt … I couldn't do that.” She smiled sardonically. “You know what I noticed? I noticed how the whole landscape seemed to have been bled of color, so that everything, even the trees, looked like frozen bodies, pale or grayish blue, like cadavers.”

“And that makes you feel what, Elena? As a writer, I mean. Inadequate?”

Elena said nothing. She seemed to be thinking about my question.

I repeated it. “You feel inadequate as a writer?”

She shook her head. “No. As a person.”

“That's ridiculous,” I said. “You're just suffering from that old dichotomy — you know, thinking and feeling.”

Elena nodded. “There is a difference between them, isn't there? It's not just a sophomoric notion. There is a difference.”

All her life, Elena would observe the various implications of this difference. In
Inwardness
she sided with the mind, and in
To Define a Word
, the heart. In
Quality
she would choose
Billy Budd
over
Moby-Dick
because, as she wrote, “In this work alone, Melville walks with perfect balance, and for an extended time — not for the short stroll of a sonnet, but for a breathtakingly intense length of time — on that line which does not so much divide thought from feeling as define the place where they merge.”

But that day, standing in her new apartment, Elena seemed adrift among questions a good deal larger than her experience, and too young to take control of the wheel. Certainly she was not then, as Martha later described her, a woman moving through “passages” but ever in control, steady at the helm, beyond the false steps and misspoken words that, one later learns, give to life a kind of baffled heroism. According to Martha, Elena moved to Brooklyn Heights with the certain knowledge that a great book was in her. Perhaps she did know that; but even if she did, she was still very far from knowing that such a book could actually be written. On the day she moved into her new apartment, I believe that Elena was very close to abandoning not only
The Forty-eight Stars
— that misbegotten work she did, in fact, abandon — but her own sense that there were depths within her, thoughts and sentiments, which were fine and authentic and deserving of expression. A writer, as Jason once told her, can lose a hundred books and be freer for it; but he cannot lose the sense that what he knows is real. Elena, I think, was on the verge of just that sort of loss.

“Your book, the one on Coleridge,” she asked just before I left her. “You're still working on it?”

“Yes.”

“It must be hard, since you have a full-time job.”

“Yes, it's hard.”

Elena simply watched me for a moment, saying nothing.

“Do you want to know why I keep at it?” I asked her.

“Yes, I do.”

“Because there are things about Coleridge that are important. These things, they won't take one man out of that Seattle shantytown of yours. But they are important nonetheless, because there are people who may be warm and full and living in nice places but who are poor because they lack knowledge of these things that are in Coleridge and Marlowe and Shakespeare.”

Elena nodded.

“And so I do this book on Coleridge,” I continued, my voice almost quaking suddenly — so passionately did Cold Bill believe these things. “Maybe it's futile; I don't know. But I have found a value in his work that I know is real, and when I'm exploring that, I feel I am exploring something essential in life.”