Elena (36 page)

“Who knows,” Jack said to her as he stood by the window, watching the rain flatten against the pane, “you might use something about it in your book.”

Elena glanced at me, then at Miriam.

“Not me, Jack,” Miriam said. “I've got my own work to do.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “How about it, William?”

“All right,” I said. “I'll go down with you.”

“Good,” Jack said. “It should be quite interesting. All the workers are women, you know.” He turned to Elena. “You should come with us, too.”

Elena looked up from the magazine though which she had been idly flipping. “Why?” she asked.

“More material for your book, Elena,” Jack said. “Why else?”

Elena nodded wearily. “I doubt it,” she said. “But I don't have anything else to do.”

“Hang around here, then,” Miriam said. “You can help me with the novel I'm working on.”

Elena shook her head and smiled. “I don't think I could be much help to you, Miriam.” She walked to the door and pulled her raincoat from the rack beside it. “All right, let's go.”

And so the three of us made our way over to West Fourteenth Street, silently pushing through the rain. Elena walked determinedly between Jack and me, her face expressionless, as Jack rambled on about the implications of what he now called “the battle of Woolworth's.”

It was completely calm at the store. A single policeman stood guard outside the door, for reasons which, when Jack asked him, he could not explain. “Maybe they just don't want the girls stealing no panties,” he said.

Jack presented his press card and we were immediately allowed inside. The women were milling around, randomly examining the counters of dry goods and cosmetics, as if they were shoppers. A few of them had gathered in the back of the store, and their occasional laughter rang over us as Jack began his interviews.

“We want a union here,” one woman told Jack bluntly. “We want a forty-hour week, and we want a minimum wage of twenty dollars a week.” She grinned at the other women who gathered around her. “When we get that, then F.W. Woolworth can have his store back.” She glanced at Elena. “You a reporter, too?”

“In a way,” Elena said.

“Good,” the woman said. “This is mostly a female thing, here. That's the way it is in all of old F.W.'s stores. He thinks he can get away with paying women less than men, you know?”

Elena nodded, and the other women murmured their agreement.

“Who you with, the
Times?
” one woman asked from the circle that had gathered around.

“
New Masses
,” Jack said.

“That a New Jersey paper?” the woman asked.

Jack shook his head. “Listen, who's been passing all this food and bedding in here?” He tipped the eraser of his pencil toward the heaps of sheets, pillows, and blankets that had been carefully folded and stacked on the top of the counters. “All this stuff, where'd you get it?” He grinned. “None of this belongs to old F.W., does it?”

The women laughed. “Husbands mostly,” one of them said. “They're behind us all the way.”

Jack continued his interview, playfully joking with the women, jotting down their comments, putting a star by any he thought especially quotable. He was a master at eliciting the printable remark, and Elena once said of an interview he conducted with a farm woman in Idaho that when he left her, she looked as if she had been made love to by an expert.

After a time, Elena and I eased our way out of the steadily thickening circle of women who had gathered around Jack. We wandered over to the back corner of the store, where a few sleepy parakeets stood rigidly on their spindly wooden perches.

“Jack's thinking about going to Spain,” Elena said passionlessly.

“Spain?”

She tapped her finger idly against one of the cages. “The situation there. To help the Loyalists.”

“Do you think he'll go?”

“Probably,” Elena said.

The subject seemed closed, so I let the matter drop. I glanced about the store, feeling rather awkward, a reluctant wheel on Jack's bandwagon.

“Well, we're here,” I said. “Now what?”

“Jack will work them himself,” Elena said dryly.

I laughed. “You make him sound like a carnival huckster.”

Elena did not take her eyes from the bird. “I don't mean to.” She turned away from the cage and began walking up the aisles, occasionally fingering whatever rested on the counters.

When we reached the front of the store, she stopped, facing the windows that looked out on the street. The patrolman tipped his cap to her and smiled.

“It's very dark outside,” she said offhandedly. “Like night.”

“Just a stormy day in old New York.”

She nodded and started to turn away, but just then a Pierce-Arrow limousine slowly pulled up to the curb across the street. It was driven by a chauffeur in a black cap, and there was a young man in the back seat. When the car stopped, he rolled down his window and peered out, looking directly into the store, his eyes scanning left and right.

“Pretty expensive car for a company spy,” Elena said.

“Maybe it's old F.W.'s son.”

Elena continued to watch the car as the chauffeur got out, walked to the back door, opened it, and waited as the young man stepped out onto the street. He was in full evening dress — black tuxedo, complete with rosebud boutonniere — as if he were headed for the opera. He could not have looked more out of place among the squat brown shops of Fourteenth Street.

Elena glanced at the women who surrounded Jack, their dresses rumpled from the day's wear, their shoes dull and unpolished. Then she looked at the young man across the street.

“What's he trying to do,” she asked, “start a riot?”

The young man leaned casually against the side of the limousine, withdrew a gold cigarette case from his breast pocket, and lit a cigarette.

“What an odd looking man,” Elena said, her eyes now intently fixed upon him. “What's he up to, William?”

He continued to lean against his car, smoking his cigarette with affected grace. He carried a black cape in the crook of his left elbow, and from time to time he would wipe a crease from its folds. Then he would look up again, staring steadily into the drab interior of the store, as if it were a question to which he expected, after a bit more study, to find a pure and simple answer.

“I'm going to go talk to him,” Elena said finally.

I followed her outside and together we walked slowly across the street toward the young man. He did not move. But his chauffeur, watching us warily, stepped forward to block our path.

“Now, now, Randall,” the young man said quietly, “let the people pass.”

Randall stepped away.

The young man smiled thinly. “My father has hired someone to protect me.”

Elena and I were standing in the middle of the street, neither of us really sure what we were doing. Being blocked by a bodyguard was a new experience. Neither of us knew exactly how to react.

The young man motioned us forward. “Come, if that's what you had in mind.”

Randall followed behind us as we walked up.

“You are employees of Woolworth's?” he asked when we reached him.

“No,” Elena said.

“Friends and supporters? Comrades?”

“We came with a friend,” Elena said. “He's doing a story on the strike.”

“That fellow with the girls around him?”

“Yes.”

The young man nodded, took a puff from his cigarette, then dropped it to the ground and crushed it with the tip of his freshly shined black shoe. “It's been a rather nasty day,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the store. “But then, it's been a nasty age.”

“Where are you from?” Elena asked, moving right into the interrogation, as Jack had no doubt taught her.

“New York, of course.”

“You have a special connection with Woolworth's?”

He smiled. “Do you mean, am I the son and heir?”

“Something like that.”

He shook his head. “No connection at all, except, of course, that my father no doubt owns stock in the company. But he owns stock in everything. He's one of the pillars of capitalism.” He laughed lightly. “No, I'm just down here because it interests me.”

“Strikes interest you?” Elena asked.

“Distress interests me, and contradiction,” he said. “I've lost my taste for other things, theater and literature.” He smiled at her. “And women.”

It was then, I think, that Elena saw it for the first time, his monkish loneliness and intensity. Years later, when she and I were at Mont Saint-Michel, in the solemn monks' dining room there, she said that his soul must have been like this, chill and sober and full of grayish air.

The young man looked back toward the store. It had gotten dark enough for the lights to have been put on, and inside the women were beginning to put down their bedding for the night.

“I come here every evening at this time,” he said. He looked at Elena. “Do you know how they sleep? They huddle together in one aisle near the back of the store, packed tight, like hamsters.” Through the window we could see Jack walking down one of the aisles, his arms loaded with sheets and blankets.

“Your friend,” the young man said, “— I suppose he is sympathetic?”

“I suppose he is,” Elena said.

He took his cigarette case out again and opened it. “Care for a cigarette?”

“No, thank you,” Elena said.

He lifted the open case in my direction. I shook my head. He lit one for himself.

“My father made a speech to one of his boards yesterday,” he said. “In the speech he said, ‘As you all know, I have the deepest sympathy for the lower classes, but …'” He smiled. “That ‘but' — it divides the world, don't you think? Just as surely as it divides a sentence.”

“What side of it are you on?” Elena asked bluntly.

He ran his fingers slowly through his dark hair. “Do you know the line from Ennodius, the one about how difficult it must be to be a saint and yet not have a saintly reputation?”

Elena shook her head.

“You should know more about medieval texts,” he said, with only a touch of condescension. “They define this age, this catastrophe.” He looked at Elena warily. “Of course, someone like yourself, a modern woman, you want new answers. You wouldn't define the present situation as a theological dilemma.” His whole face suddenly darkened, as if lighted with a candle from below. “But I will tell you, our guilt is very old.”

“What guilt is that?” Elena asked.

“Mine. Yours.” He nodded toward the people in the store. “Theirs.” He looked at Elena closely. “You think that's facile, don't you? You think I'm just concocting some romantic notion of myself as dissolute rich boy touring the slums.”

“I've seen a lot of places like this, strikes and sit-ins,” Elena said. “I've never seen anyone who looks like you at one.”

He nodded, glanced at me, then back at Elena. “You know the warning Oscar Wilde gave to Lord Douglas? That he should not fall in love with the things of the gutter. That's good advice, don't you think?”

Elena kept her eyes locked on him, but she said nothing.

“A few weeks ago I saw a group of policemen evict a large family on the Lower East Side,” the young man went on. “An old lady was screaming at them while they dragged her down the concrete steps. The whole neighborhood was screaming, and people were throwing garbage and rotten vegetables down on the cops from the other tenements.” He laughed. “It was quite a sight. A real circus. I watched the policemen and it struck me that they hate the poor. Do you know why? Because they are troublesome, and the police are too simple-minded to understand the philosophical dimensions of trouble, how it acts on our moral sensibility. For them, all the terrors of earth are nothing more than a ‘police problem,' trouble for
them
, aggravation and paperwork. The greater horror would elude them, because their minds cannot engage it.”

Elena studied the young man's face. “Engage it, how?” she asked.

“Clearly, relentlessly,” the young man said, “as if searching for the center of it — that kernel which the Hindus believe generates everything else — and with the absolute certainty that this central thing does not exist.”

Elena's eyes narrowed. “But if it doesn't exist, then why look for it?”

He smiled. “Because looking for something very intensely gives the mind a powerful focus, and the exercise of looking for something it cannot find gives it a sense of humility, so that it must recognize its own processes, and their limitations.”

Elena's voice was soft. “So that by looking outward powerfully, the mind must look inward.”

Behind her eyes, I could see her mind working, as if the young man had lit a hundred fires in her brain. Years later, she would say in an interview that she could not remember any statement of his that had made any particular sense, only that, “in the chaos I was going through with the structure of
The Forty-eight Stars
, his remarks about focusing the mind and about doubting the ability of a panoramic view to yield anything of importance — this spoke to me, and I finally incorporated it in the writing of
Calliope.
”

The young man looked back toward Woolworth's, his eyes following Jack as he moved through the aisles, pad and pencil in hand, questions at the ready.

“What does your friend want from those women?” he asked Elena.

“He's a reporter,” Elena said matter-of-factly.

The young man shook his head. “No, he's more than that. He is their comrade in arms.”

“Is there something wrong with that?” Elena asked.

“Nothing at all,” he said. “That's one side of the story, certainly.”

Elena continued to watch him. “What is?”