Elena (37 page)

“Injustice,” the young man said. “And the struggle against it.” He scanned Elena's face. “That's one story. That's your friend's story.” He laughed gently, and much of his smug exterior seemed to dissolve. “And then there's another story, of course.”

“Which is?” Elena demanded.

“Mine.”

Elena was not buying it. “There are plenty of stories about the rich,” she said bluntly.

The young man nodded. “Oh, of course there are.” He opened the door of his limousine and got in.

Elena stepped around to his open window. “You're a fake,” she said, but with a curious gentleness.

He regarded her steadily. “And you are not as intelligent as you think you are, my dear.”

“It's the rosebud that gives you away,” Elena said, “and that quote from Ennodius.”

He turned toward the driver. “Perhaps we should leave now, Randall.”

“And that slithering speech,” Elena said, this time in a voice that was not gentle at all.

The young man's eyes narrowed. “Step away from the car.”

“The man you pretend to be would be interesting,” Elena said evenly. “But you are a fake.”

Then she stepped back and allowed the car to pull away. She watched it, standing in the middle of the street, until it turned the corner and disappeared. Then she looked at me, her face very thoughtful, as if her mind were reworking everything all at once, setting all her many notes in order, discovering the character who could relate the tale — this young man with the rosebud boutonniere, only thoroughly remolded by the fire in her mind, transformed into Raymond Finch, that “sensibility hanging from a hook,” the voice, at last, of
Calliope.

I
n the winter of 1936, Jack MacNeill left for Spain. The day before his departure, Elena and Miriam and I joined him on what he called, with a wry smile, his “farewell tour of New York.” We took the el down to South Ferry, then made that lovely eastward loop near City Hall, the cars swinging to the left, then curling back so that all of Manhattan came into view. We could see the old circular aquarium resting at the water's edge, and the tower of the Woolworth building, its topmost spire hidden in the clouds. Elena sat quietly between Jack and me, her body rocking left and right as the train made its slow turn.

We got off in lower Manhattan, walked to Battery Park, then turned northward and trudged the long distance to Times Square. Through it all, Jack could hardly have been more boyishly excited. He talked about the adventure before him, the needs of the Loyalist cause, and the vision of unity embodied, he said, in the very idea of the International Brigades. He joked with Elena about that first trip of theirs around Manhattan, and their trek across the country, and about his hopes for
The Forty-eight Stars.
“You'll have it finished by the time I get back,” he said brightly. “I expect you'll be a famous woman by then.”

Miriam and I left them at Times Square, with Elena under his arm. It seemed as though he did not at all suspect how far she had drawn away from him during the last few weeks. Years later, when Elena and Alexander were in the midst of one of their periodic sparring matches, she told him that one of the peculiar burdens of being a woman was having to deal with the obliviousness of men. I have always believed that she was thinking of Jack when she said that.

She saw him off later that evening. He had signed on with one of the ships of the Fabre line. He would work on the ship until it docked in Marseilles, then take another boat to Barcelona.

Elena took a cab to my apartment from the pier. Miriam was safely ensconced in the tiny cubicle beyond the kitchen that had become her inner sanctum, where she intended to write her novel. She spent long hours there, her typewriter clattering away, sometimes almost until dawn.

It was, in fact, clattering when I opened the door to Elena. She was wearing a dark raincoat, and her hair was tightly bound up in a large white scarf.

“He's on his way,” she said.

“To your slight relief?”

“More than slight.”

I stepped out of the doorway and waved her in. “Coffee?”

“Yes, thank you, William,” Elena said. She walked into the living room and took off her scarf and raincoat.

I made the coffee, served her a cup, then sat down opposite her on the little sofa by the window. I could hear the rain patting softly against the glass. It sounded curiously like the muffled tat-tat-tat of Miriam's typewriter.

“Well, I hope Jack gets back safely,” I said.

“So do I,” Elena said. She nodded toward the back room. “Working on her novel?”

“Yes.”

Elena cradled her cup in her hands. “I'm going to be working on mine, soon.”

“I thought you'd already been working at it for quite some time,” I said.

She shook her head. “Not that one. Something new, I think.”

“Not
The Forty-eight Stars?
”

“No.” She took a sip of coffee. “It's still about the Depression, at least in a way. But not like
The Forty-eight Stars.
” She smiled quietly. “I'm going to write this book in the way it seems best for me to write it, William.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” I told her.

“That young man we met,” Elena said, “— the one at Woolworth's that day. Remember him?”

“Very well.”

“He gave me an idea.” Elena set her cup down. “I think that maybe to study a catastrophe like the Depression, you have to know about other catastrophes in history.”

“Why is that?”

“I'm not sure,” Elena said. “Perhaps just to give it dimension. In the mind, I mean, a dimension in the mind. Otherwise it's just suffering and injustice, all those things Jack says it is.”

“Well, it is certainly those things,” I told her.

“But more, too.” Elena was staring at me very intently. “I don't think I can do the ‘Big Picture,' William. It's not the way my mind works. It's like asking a miniaturist to do a mural.”

She finished her coffee and stood up.

“Leaving already?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said. “I don't want this to sound melodramatic, but I have a lot of work to do.”

She began her research immediately. Some days she would work at a small carrel at the Columbia library. Or she would sit hour after hour in the reading room of the New York Public Library, her head bent forward beneath one of those green-shaded lamps which, in row upon row of subdued light, lend to that vast hall a strangely intimate atmosphere.

I was still working at Parnassus, only a few blocks away from the library at that time, and I saw Elena often, usually for lunch. As the months passed, she grew increasingly enthusiastic about her book. Over a hot dog in Bryant Park, she would talk about her latest findings, the terrible etiology of the Black Death, for example, or the exact dimensions of the Iron Virgin. Interspersed with these remarks she offered random news from Elizabeth or Jack. Elizabeth, Elena said, seemed entirely unaware that Europe was on the brink of war. Jack, on the other hand, was already in the thick of it, reporting in one letter after another on the progress of the republic's dreadful collapse. But it was clear that the only thing upon which Elena's mind was powerfully focused was her book.

By the fall of 1937, she had decided to get rid of the old title. We were sitting in a small coffee shop not far from the library, and she had just finished a long exposition on the writings of Gregory of Tours. “I've decided to call the book
Calliope.
”

It seemed a very odd choice. “You mean for that musical contraption they have at the circus?”

“No,” Elena said, “from mythology. The last of the nine sisters, according to Hesiod.”

“Oh yes,” I said, “the muse of epic poetry.”

“That's right,” Elena said. “But I think of her a little differently — as the god, you might say, of empty rhetoric.”

I had not read a word of the manuscript, and so I had no idea to what extent she had transformed her material from the chaotic jumble of
The Forty-eight Stars.
“I'm looking forward to reading it,” I said politely.

Elena smiled, put some money on the table, and stood up. “I've got to get back to work.”

It was finished by the summer of 1938. Miriam found it lying on her desk when she arrived at work one morning. Elena had gotten to Parnassus long before the rest of us so that she would not be asked any questions about the manuscript.

Miriam stared at it for a moment, then she turned to me. “Well, this is Elena's book,” she said. “God, I hope it's good. What can I tell her if it isn't?”

“The truth, Miriam,” I said.

Miriam nodded, took the manuscript into a small room that had been set aside for undisturbed reading, and closed the door behind her.

Almost four hours passed before she came out again. She walked into the outer office where I sat drowsily reviewing yet another unsolicited abomination.

“Step in here, please, William,” she said, retreating back into the reading room.

She was seated behind the desk when I came in.

“Close the door,” she said.

“That bad?” I asked.

“Just close the door,” Miriam said, “and sit down.”

I did as I was told. I could feel the tension building, the terrible feeling that you must now deliver to an unprotected mortal the worst imaginable news.

Miriam drew a single page of the manuscript from the pile. “All right,” she said, “listen to this.” Then she began to read what turned out to be the final paragraph of
Calliope
, an internal monologue in the mind of the narrator, Raymond Finch:

Ah, Markham, what am I to do with such stranded zeal? Betray my father? To what use should I put my moral bafflement? Feed the hungry? Clothe the naked? Inspire the faithless? But with what faith? Where do we stand, those like me — silent, full of doubt, bannerless, beyond all anthems — what can we do but choke on our anger? And after anger, what? You must know that to free the moth suspended in the web I would suffer the lash; to save the deer from a crippling leap, I would bear the weight; to save the infant blistered in the sun, the bushman wounded by a spear, the Bedouin poisoned at the well, I would lie down across the wood, stretch out my arms; to end all this, I would open up my hand, receive the nail.

Miriam looked up. “It's all like this,” she said, “the whole book.”

“Is that bad or good?” I asked.

Miriam reinserted the page. “I'm not quite sure,” she said, “but it is different.” She lifted the manuscript toward me. “Your turn.”

I read it in one sitting, just as Miriam had, though in the comfort of my apartment. I sat in the front room, while Miriam struggled at her typewriter a few yards away, and read the book word by careful word, and with a steadily rising sense of Elena's achievement. For she had managed to take the notes she had brought back with her from the road, those painful details of hunger and distress, and then to strip them almost entirely of their topicality, so that in the end they stood far beyond the scope of anything social or economic theory could embrace. The smug young man whom we had met outside Woolworth's that day had been transformed into Raymond Finch, a man of almost theological grandeur, full of the deepest moral insight and complexity, a character of constantly shifting lights, part infidel, part Jesuit, a man who moves continually between the poles of what love and rage have made him, a medievalist drifting through the modern plague of the Depression, a modernist staring back at the undeniable horrors of the medieval world, at times a Christ who has lost his faith, at times a pagan who has found it.

It was still fairly early when I finished it. For a long time I sat in the living room, rethinking it. It was the voice of the novel, rather than the very simple plot, that remained most powerfully with me, so full as it was of chants and litanies, so different from my sister's. And yet it was quite deeply hers — thoughtful, measured, softly resonant, almost Gregorian; a low, monkish hum.

I was still sitting by the window, the book in my lap, when Miriam came out of her room, wearily rubbing her eyes.

“How's the novel coming?” I asked.

She shrugged, then nodded toward the manuscript in my lap. “What do you think?”

“I think it's remarkable, Miriam,” I said. “I think everyone will like it.”

Miriam gave me a doubtful look. “Not everyone, William,” she said. “Believe me, not everyone.”

I knew instantly whom she meant, but at that moment he seemed so far away.

M
adrid fell in late March of 1939. Jack was there, caught in the dead center of a resistance that had been collapsing for two years. Later, in his autobiography, he wrote of his own panic, of his madness in “trying to book passage on a ship while living in a city that was not only besieged by a large armed force but which could hardly have been more thoroughly landlocked.” He did get out, however, trudging southward for no apparent reason, “except that that appeared to be where other foreign refugees were headed.” He finally reached the southern coast of Cádiz, booked passage to Tangiers, and from there at last managed to sail to New York on a creaky steamer “that listed continually to the right no matter what the wind direction, giving you the distinct impression that the earth was limping.”

He arrived in New York on a steamy July day with nothing but a duffel bag and a few books to his name. He looked wizened, graying at the temples, and much thinner than I had ever seen him. He told me he had contracted pneumonia while crossing the Montes de Toledo. A gypsy family had treated him by making him sleep on mounds of dried peppers. “Didn't do much for the pneumonia,” he said with a wry smile, “but it sure did wonders for my headache.”

He still had an ambling gait, but it was slower now, as if his experience in Spain had used up his youth. And as he stood slumped against Miriam's desk with Sam and me gathered around him, he looked almost old, a body trimmed in white.