Elena (40 page)

Joe Tully stepped onto the stage to thank her briefly once again and then went on to other matters, coming rallies and drives and marches. She was watching Joe quite closely, as if interested in what he was saying, in all the day-to-day details, quite honorable and necessary, with which the political consciousness must engage itself. But she also seemed somehow completely aloof, and as I watched her, I thought that somewhere long ago, while the earth was still reeling from the first blast of creation, a human being had squatted at the entrance of a cave, and while the others had gnawed bits of meat and bone by their humble fire, he had gone outside to watch the shifting veils of the Northern Lights and had experienced, for the first time, those precosities of the heart about which my sister had just spoken. And I thought that more than I was like her, I was like those others squatting in the cave, staring out with inexpressible admiration at that graver being who watched the world from his lone post, the one he accepted now as home.

INWARDNESS

I
n an interview with
Publishers Weekly
which appeared a month or so before her biography, Martha said that she would never forget an afternoon she spent with me at Elena's house on Cape Cod. It was in early December, and she drank tea and I drank brandy while a severe northeastern storm tore at the bay, churning the waters so violently that they looked not just battered but maliciously tormented.

I was living in Elena's house by then, having given up my Cambridge residence entirely. Martha had come out for the day, looking rather predatory, since it had already been established that this interview would be about what she had already half-jokingly dubbed “the dark night of Elena's soul.”

We sat down in the back room of the house, the one with the large window facing the ocean. It had always been Elena's favorite, as it would probably have been anyone's, the view from it was so magnificent, particularly in the fall when the sea grass turned golden. Elena had once referred to the scene that presented itself from that room — the sea and shore, gulls and sailboats — as her favorite cliché.

“From everything I've been able to gather,” Martha began, “Elena had a pretty rough time of it from around 1940 until, say, 1954?”

I shook my head. “That's too long a stretch.”

Martha flipped open her notebook and grabbed her pen. “Well, there were some distressing events in her life during that time.”

“Of course,” I said, “but most of them were over, the events themselves, I mean, by the mid-1940s.”

“So her time in Paris was not distressing?” Martha asked.

“I don't think so.”

Martha glanced at her notebook. “Elena came back to the United States in 1954.” She looked at me. “Because your wife died?”

“That's one of the reasons.” I was about to elaborate on this, give at least a suggestion of that spectral presence who stood across from me the day we buried Miriam, but Martha, wanting to keep things in chronological perspective, lifted her hand to stop me.

“Let's go back to 1939,” she said quickly. “Now, after the speech, what happened?”

“Happened? Nothing very dramatic. Miriam and I took Elena home. Miriam was already pregnant by then, about four months gone, and she tired easily. So, we just drove Elena to her apartment and then went back to ours.”

“Did Elena look shaken?”

“No.”

“How did she look?”

“In control,” I said. Then I smiled. “Jack MacNeill once told somebody that Elena had always lived like a middle-class woman who was slightly suspicious of middle-class life, and that what she wanted most was passion and control. That night, at least, she had control.”

Martha jotted it down. In her biography, she would refer to it as the central contradiction of my sister's life, this war between her need both to release and to control herself. But since Martha's book was not exactly made of a mingled yarn, this contradiction had to be locked up in the straightjacket of a larger one: Elena's fear of being deserted and her need to control that fear. Thus does the quest for the prime mover triumph over an intolerably scattered heaven; the mind, as Elena once said, avoids chaos only by embracing error.

“So Elena wasn't terribly upset when she left you?” Martha asked.

“No. Like I said, she looked completely in control. She had handled herself very well that evening. Even Joe Tully came over to congratulate her.” And I remembered that as I looked over Joe's shoulder, I had seen Jack slink back out the front door and down the stairs.

Martha tapped her pencil lightly against her ear. “When did you see her again?” she asked.

“A week or two later, but it was uneventful. She was the darling of the liberal press by then, practically the patron saint of the anti-Stalinists. The reactionaries loved her, too, and even some of the decidedly Socialist papers had now altered their course a bit, granting her at least the benefit of the doubt.” I took a sip of my brandy. “Of course, the real hard core kept up the attack. The fools simply called her a traitor. The more learned ones said she was sadly mistaken, and that
Calliope
belonged with the worst of
feuilleton
writing — subjective vignettes — and that her book was an imitation of Schnitzler and von Hofmannsthal, that Viennese bunch who, like Freud, had fallen in love with neurosis.”

“How did Elena react to that?”

I smiled. “She started reading Schnitzler and von Hofmannsthal.”

When her pen had caught up with me, Martha looked up. “So it was as if Elena had just spoken her mind and that was it?”

“Yes. She seemed content. There's a certain … what shall I call it? … There's a certain searing glory to having taken a stand.”

Martha nodded. “Did you see much of Elena between that time and when Elizabeth came back to New York?”

“Not as much as I would have liked. Miriam didn't have an easy pregnancy. She was never physically strong, and there were lots of problems.” I remembered the queasiness, the sleepless nights, the poor appetite, the loss of energy, which she never fully regained, and which gave to the years that remained to her after Alexander's birth a kind of wistful insubstantiality, as if in giving birth she had used up the fire that had been her life.

“So you stayed around your own apartment a lot?” Martha asked.

“Yes,” I said, “but Elena was consciously avoiding me, I think.” Even as I said it, I could feel the strain of what now had to come. I had opened the gate, and I knew that Martha would not allow it to be closed again.

“Avoiding you? Why?”

“She was carrying a particular burden, and I suppose that since she knew I was having a little trouble with Miriam, she decided to keep it to herself, at least as long as she could.”

Martha stared at me intently. “What burden?”

I hesitated, watching Martha's face. Such must have been the wanton stare of those who questioned Galileo. I glanced out the window.

“Please go on, William,” Martha insisted.

I looked at her. “All right.”

It had been in mid-December 1939. The Christmas season was everywhere, filled with those common yet relentlessly ironic scenes that only New York can provide — a drunken Santa Claus wobbling down the street, or one of the Wise Men, complete with purple robe and jeweled turban, wildly cursing a taxi driver. I had come to Brooklyn for an editorial session with one of the new authors Sam had assigned me, a slender young man who looked so much the sensitive, tubercular poet that I knew immediately he could be no such thing. We had finished early, and so, rather than return directly to Manhattan, I had decided to drop in on Elena.

I walked from Duffield Street to Columbia Heights, trudged up the three flights of stairs to Elena's apartment, and knocked at her door. I could hear her voice and also a deeper one. After a few seconds, the door opened and my father stepped out into the hallway, carefully closing the door behind him.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, astonished.

“I'm helping Elena over some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“It's none of your business, Billy.”

In one of those comic-opera turns which the mind can sometimes take, I remember thinking to myself that I had already written two books, one of them enthusiastically received, and that
I
would decide what was and was not my business.

“I think I'd like to see Elena,” I said determinedly.

“You heard me, Billy,” he said. “The fact
is
, she's already lost it, and I don't guess she wants a crowd of people around.”

“Lost it? Lost what?”

My father's eyes widened. “You mean she didn't tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Elena's pregnant, Billy. At least she was. She miscarried.”

I'm sure it took me awhile to grasp the news, and during those few seconds I must have appeared stupefied.

“It's that MacNeill guy,” my father said. “He's the one who did it.”

I was about to say something, although I have no idea what, when Elena opened the door. She looked drained of all color, pale and ghostly — a body left from a vampire feast. “Come in, William,” she said softly.

With that, my father briskly stepped aside, following me into the apartment, where the three of us sat down in the living room.

Elena was dressed in a dark blue robe. Her hair looked matted and stringy; her eyes were glazed. More than anything, she seemed completely exhausted. She held a damp cloth in one hand and occasionally wiped her forehead with it.

“It started yesterday,” she said.

“She called me this morning,” my father said, “and I came right over.” He hitched one of his thumbs beneath a suspender strap. “I was staying at the Edison,” he added, as if I might want to verify it.

“I had already told him I was pregnant,” Elena said.

I nodded. “And it's Jack MacNeill's?”

“Yes. He came over after the speech. He brought some roses.”

My father sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “She don't want MacNeill to know, Billy.”

“That's right,” Elena said. “I didn't want anyone to know, at least until I knew what I was going to do.”

“Did it ever cross your mind to marry Jack?” I asked.

Elena shook her head. “No.”

“It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing,” my father said casually. “You're a married man, Billy, you must know about that sort of thing.”

I knew then why she had gone to my father in her trouble and had hidden it from me. The common ground that had always united them suddenly rose before me like the strip of an island as it first breaks out of the surrounding sea.

He understood the passionate quality of her impulsiveness, because it was exactly like his own. Elena's sudden decision to tour the country with Jack, to confront her critics, and then to take Jack to her once again was no different in its origins, or its irresistibility, than the impulse with which my father might pinch some shop girl on the road. She was like him; the same current flowed through her. And I was like my mother, cautious beyond imagining, a wire drawn tight.

I looked at Elena. “I didn't know you were still seeing Jack,” I said lamely.

“I'm not,” Elena said. “It was just that one night.” She shrugged. “He came over after the speech, and that's when it happened. I thought I might keep the baby, but there's no need to think about that anymore now.”

I was too numb to think about anything. “Well, don't you think you should see a doctor?” I asked.

“She saw one last night, Billy,” my father said quickly. “Pal of mine, a guy I know from the Bronx. He came down here, and that was it.”

“I see.”

“We got everything under control, Billy,” he added.

Elena smiled thinly. “Yes, we do,” she said very softly, glancing toward the front window.

I stood up slowly. “Well, Elena, I don't suppose there's anything I can do for you.”