Elena (43 page)

Thus Elena and Elizabeth had a great deal of time alone. They talked of many things, Elena later told me, but rarely about the most crucial thing: Elizabeth's increasing dependence upon the bottles of Scotch she hid in every conceivable nook and cranny of the apartment, and for which Howard continued to pay, telling Elena that no one should take from Elizabeth the only support she had.

But there can also be no doubt that at a certain point Elena determined to put into practice her sense of the necessity of personal will which had developed into a stringent element of her character. Like Dorothea Moore in
Inwardness
, she “shut out mercy as if it were a winter wind.”

It was, in fact, the dead of winter, when she came to her decision. She was at my apartment, seated on the floor, bouncing Alexander playfully about, when suddenly she looked up at me with a thoughtful expression, as if she had been considering what she was about to say for a very long time.

“I think I've been blaming the wrong person for Elizabeth's troubles,” she said. “Blaming Howard, when the real problem is Elizabeth.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“Elizabeth has to get control of her life,” Elena said firmly. “No one can do that for her. She has to do it herself.”

“How?”

“Remember that day I brought you over to her house in Standhope? Remember how strong she was?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“That's the real Elizabeth.”

“I would like to think so.”

“Believe me, it is. We need to remember what she had then, all that intelligence and will. That's what we have to appeal to in her.”

“Instead of what?”

“Instead of letting her drift,” Elena said. I could see her mind working. “And maybe with Howard gone, she's finally vulnerable. We can force the issue, tell her we've had enough.”

“You have to be able to make something like that look absolutely real,” I said.

“It will be real,” Elena said. She stood up. “I'm going to do it now, tonight.”

The night was rather dreary. A cold rain fell on us all the way over to Bank Street. Elena walked very briskly. “If this doesn't work, I don't know if there's any hope left for Elizabeth,” she said.

“She definitely won't — as they say — take the cure?”

Elena shook her head. “No, I suggested that. Any sanitarium in the world. Elizabeth said no.”

We reached Elizabeth's apartment a few minutes later. On the street outside, Elena paused, reconsidering her course of action.

“Elena,” I said, “do you want to wait about this?”

She glanced up toward Elizabeth's apartment. “You haven't seen her in a while. She has deteriorated, William. I don't think we have much time.”

“I don't know how things ever got this twisted, Elena,” I said.

“I don't suppose anyone ever does,” Elena said. Then she began walking up the stairs to the apartment, her pace much slower now than it had been on the street, as if with each step she expected to touch off a mine.

We could hear some rustling inside after we knocked at Elizabeth's door.

“She's hiding the bottles,” Elena said wearily.

Then the door opened a crack, and Elizabeth's face was illuminated by a narrow band of light.

“Hi,” she said weakly.

“William and I thought we'd come over and see how you were doing,” Elena said. There was no false cheerfulness in her voice. It was firm, even cold.

“Oh, okay,” Elizabeth said. She stepped back and opened the door. “Come in.”

The apartment was completely dark except for one lamp standing on a wobbly base by the window, its black cord dangling across the corner.

Elizabeth tried to smile. “Maybe you'd like something to eat?”

“No, thanks,” Elena said.

Elizabeth nodded slowly. She was standing in the shadows, wearing that same gray painter's smock she'd had on the first day we had come here. She was nervously pinching at it, unable to move, waiting for direction.

“Well,” she said finally, “why don't you sit down.”

The apartment was bare except for two spindly wooden chairs which faced the sofa. There were ashtrays strewn everywhere — on the floor, the window ledge, the small table in front of the sofa. The entire place smelled like a cigarette which had been dipped in cheap whiskey.

Elizabeth glanced about the room. “They took the phone out,” she said.

Elena and I sat down on the two chairs.

“William and I have come to talk to you very seriously, Elizabeth,” she said.

Elizabeth looked up expectantly. “You know where Howard is?”

“No, we don't.”

“He said he might come back.”

Elena leaned forward, folding one of her hands in the fist of the other. “Elizabeth, you're in serious trouble. You need help.”

Elizabeth nodded obliviously. “He was going to have the phone put back in.”

“William and I have come to tell you that we will do everything we can to help you, but that you have to help us, too. You have to try to come out of this, Elizabeth.”

“But, Howard …”

“Forget about Howard,” Elena blurted out. “Forget about him.” The anger in her voice was unmistakable, and even Elizabeth heard it.

“But he's … he's …”

“He's gone, Elizabeth,” Elena said. “He's gone and he's not coming back.”

It struck me, even then, that this was a lie, that Elena intended to isolate Elizabeth entirely, to convince her that she was utterly alone, and then hope that from that abyss she would return herself.

“Now listen, Elizabeth,” Elena said. “We can move you someplace. Howard is not coming back. There's no need for you to stay here.”

I sat watching Elena's plot unfold. She intended to make Elizabeth decide once and for all to do something on her own, to leave the apartment forever, and Howard and her bottles with it.

“William and I have a place for you,” Elena said. “But we're not going to force you to go there. You can stay here by yourself if you want to.”

Elizabeth turned toward the lamp, then raised her hand shakily to shield her eyes from its light.

“Howard is through with you, Elizabeth,” Elena said brutally. “And I'll tell you this, if you don't come with William and me, we're through with you, too.”

Elizabeth rubbed her eyes with her fists. “Maybe in the morning, when it's light. It's dark now, you know?”

“No, Elizabeth,” Elena said, her voice as hard as steel on steel. “Now. Or never.”

Tears began rolling down Elizabeth's cheeks. “It's too dark, Elena.”

Elena's eyes grew strangely lifeless. “Now. Or I'm finished with you.”

Elizabeth's head dropped forward and she wiped her eyes with the hem of the smock. She started to speak, but her voice trailed off in a low, repetitive whimper.

Elena stood up. “I've heard enough whining,” she said. Then she turned those terribly remote eyes on me. “Haven't you, William?”

It was all acting of a desperate kind, and I could tell that she was having to use every ounce of strength within her to keep up this awful show. Still, even knowing that, her manner was shocking in its severity.

“Haven't you, William?” she repeated coldly, staring at me with a frightening sternness.

“Yes,” I said weakly. I slowly got to my feet.

“Good-by, Elizabeth,” Elena said. Then she turned and left the room. I followed behind like a stunned puppy, closing the door behind me. We walked down the stairs and out onto the street.

“That was quite a performance,” I said.

Elena looked very shaken.

I draped my arm over her shoulder. “Maybe it'll work, Elena,” I said. “Anyway, let's go back to my apartment. It's getting cold out here.”

I gently began to urge her forward, when I heard a sound from above, a screech, as if a window had been thrown open overhead. Elena heard it, too, and we both turned back toward the apartment and looked up.

“Oh, God!” Elena cried.

Elizabeth was standing on the ledge above us, the wind billowing out her smock. She had stretched out her arms and was calling down to us. “All right,” she screamed. “All right!” For an instant she seemed to hold herself firmly against the wall. Then she tumbled forward, her arms still outstretched, as though she had intended to take flight. She had turned over the lamp while crawling out the window and the cord had wrapped around her ankle. For the briefest moment it held her suspended from the window, and I saw Elena's hand fly up and hold in midair, her fingers stretched out toward Elizabeth as she dangled overhead. Then the cord released her and she fell.

We ran over to her, and Elena gathered her into her arms while I ran for help. She was still alive when the ambulance from St. Vincent's arrived a few minutes later. She was groaning softly, but she never spoke. Both Elena and I rode with her in the ambulance. Elena kneeled by the stretcher, clutching Elizabeth's head to her breast, her face so completely stricken that it seemed almost to lose its human quality, to take on an animal panic. Elizabeth continued to moan softly while the siren blared overhead. Then, only a block or so from St. Vincent's, the groaning stopped and she sank into a coma.

At the hospital she was wheeled quickly into the emergency operating room, while Elena and I continued to stand rigidly beside the ambulance. In the rain, I suppose, we looked like two rusty posts. After that, for what was probably several hours, we wandered about the hospital corridors or down the dark, wet streets of the surrounding neighborhood.

Toward dawn, Elizabeth was brought to a small, cramped room on the third floor. She was being monitored closely, a young doctor told us, and no one could be allowed to see her. Elena asked if she had regained consciousness, and the doctor shook his head in a desultory manner, as if such questions were no longer relevant. Two hours later, she died.

It was late in the afternoon when Martha asked me her question, but the morning storm had not abated. The wind still rocked the large windows, the clouds still hung heavily above.

Martha glanced up from her notebook. “Would you say, William, that Elena was tormented by Elizabeth's death, that she was tormented by guilt?”

“I would say that she was shaken by it,” I told her. “I would say that she was profoundly saddened, of course. But tormented? I don't think so.”

“Could you elaborate on that?” Martha asked immediately.

“Well, Elena felt that in forcing the issue with Elizabeth, she had made a mistake, had misjudged Elizabeth's weakness, and that this misjudgment had, in effect, caused Elizabeth's death.”

“Isn't that guilt?” Martha asked.

“It might have been, if Elena had felt that she had done something wrong. But she didn't. She told me years later that she had done the best she could under the circumstances, that she had trusted her intelligence and that it had failed her. She had, she said, trusted her own perception of what Elizabeth could stand, and that she had misperceived to a tragic degree.”

“It sounds either like guilt, William,” Martha said, “or a neat way to sidestep it.”

I smiled. “My sister felt betrayed, Martha, by her own intelligence.”

Martha narrowed her eyes. “Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You're telling me that Elena blamed her
mind
for what happened to Elizabeth?”

“Blamed herself for trusting it,” I said.

“But that's like saying that her mind was separate from the rest of her,” Martha protested.

“That tired old dualism, yes,” I admitted. “But you have to understand that for Elena it was very important. It wasn't just a matter of looking for the mind's objectivity, it was a matter of looking into its capacity to form reliable moral judgments.” I walked to the bookshelf across the room, took
Inwardness
down from it, and returned to my seat. “Listen to this, Martha,” I said. I opened the book and read a passage from it: “‘I wanted my son to be brave and thought him cowardly, never recognizing that in standing up to me he was using all the courage he had. I wanted him to love the shape of things, but he admired their function, which was to him a shape of the most exquisite beauty. Give him possession of some ancient gold medallion and he would melt it down to make a spoon. He knew that what endures should equally sustain, that Mayan cups were loveliest when they brought water to a human mouth. Timon, your understanding was beautiful not because it was rare, but because it is silently affirmed by every human life.'”

I closed the book and looked up at Martha. “
Inwardness
is the story of a mother who relentlessly drives her son toward intellectual achievement, drives him so hard that, in a sense, she contributes to his death.”

“Which is a little like saying that Dorothea Moore is Elena and that Timon is Elizabeth,” Martha said authoritatively.

“It could be seen like that if the novel were nothing more than the action it presents,” I told her. “But it is really about something else — about a woman's search for the intellectual foundations of moral certainty.”

Martha nodded quickly, then wrote it down. When she had finished she looked up at me. “Go on, William.”

“There's another line that's pretty important, I think,” I said. “‘One must move inward by an outward thrust.'”

Martha looked puzzled.

“It took Elena a long time to realize what she had to do,” I said, “that is, to realize that she had to separate herself from the rest of us for a while.” I glanced up at the portrait of my sister Elizabeth had sketched. Elena had always insisted that it be hung conspicuously, usually in the front room of any place she lived.

Martha held her pencil bolt upright on her page. “You were saying that it took Elena a long time to realize that she had to separate from you, and others,” she said. “Do you mean go to Europe?”