Elena (45 page)

I handed the paper to Martha, who read it slowly several times, then looked up at me.

“Well, I have to say, William,” she said, “that I don't quite get the point.”

“Elena left the United States in order to become like one of those people on the inland road,” I said. “She left in order to become a person of learned judgment. She needed to get away in order to find that close decorum she required in her personal relations and which only distance could give her at that time.”

Martha stared at me, positively stunned. A gust of wind hit the window to her left and she glanced toward it, held her gaze there for several seconds, then turned back to me. “Are you saying, William, that Elena didn't go to Paris because of all the tragedy that had occurred around her during the war?”

“Absolutely.”

She looked at me doubtfully. “How do you know?”

“Because the look on her face the day she left for France was exactly the same look she would get each time she began a new short story or essay or novel.”

Martha readied her pen on the page. “How did she look?”

“She looked like freedom, Martha,” I said. “I can't be more specific than that. She just looked like freedom. Not excited or jubilant or full of mission. Not particularly solemn, and certainly not sad.”

“Freedom,” Martha muttered to herself as she wrote it down.

Elena left for Paris in the fall of 1947. I stood on the dock with Alexander crying in my arms and Miriam to my left and Sam to my right, looking vaguely disgruntled. “She'll become one of those goddamn Frenchified writers,” he said gloomily, “just wait and see.” He looked up at Elena, who was waving down at us from the passenger deck of the De
Grasse.
Four years later, when
Inwardness
arrived on his desk, he read it immediately and found his worst fears realized. “This goddamn thing's too cerebral,” he said, thrusting the manuscript at me. “Too brainy. What's Elena doing over there, chitchatting with those Existentialist creeps at the Coupole?” He shook his head. “She's lost her edge, William. There's no bite in this book. Hell, it reads like one long pout.” He never changed his mind about
Inwardness
, but he published it anyway and was amazed by its success.

But on the day she left, I would not have predicted that she would write anything in France.

“I hope Elena finds what she's looking for,” I said as the ship drew away from us.

She landed at Le Havre, then practically followed the Seine to Paris, arriving there during the first week of November 1947. When Martha asked me whether or not Elena understood much about the political and social atmosphere of France at this time, I answered that I simply did not know. The political turmoil in Paris before the war had diminished during the long sleep of the German occupation. Then, with liberation, there had been a flurry of revenge against those who had collaborated with the Nazi regime. In her letters, Elena spoke with some familiarity of this recent history, commenting on the execution of Brassilach, which had occurred almost two years before, and then of the suicide of Brieu La Rochelle. She wrote of these people as if I should have known who they were, which, at the time, I did not, and her conversant knowledge of such events suggested that she had taken the time to learn about the France in which she now resided and that the moral questions involved in collaboration were of particular interest to her. In
Inwardness
, Dorothea Moore discusses the moral terror of occupied Paris more than once, and I think that the whole issue of principle versus expediency, which was so central to the literary collaboration of the Left Bank, preoccupied my sister and to some extent provided the atmosphere surrounding the more isolated question of Timon's death.

I did not see her for almost two years, although we wrote quite often, an exchange of varying quality. The letters seem to me now somewhat gossipy. Sam was having a torrid love affair during the first of those years, and more than a little space was dedicated to it. There was a bit of the travelogue, too, with Elena expounding on the various beauties of Paris. She visited Normandy and the Loire Valley, and there were chatty letters on these excursions. Once Elena saw Malraux at Deux Magots, and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir seemed forever holed up in the basement bar of the Pont-Royal Hotel. Elena duly reported these auspicious sightings, but she never approached any of the literary lights of Paris, even though all her work had by then been translated into French and she had probably gained a small following of her own.

In the fall of 1949,I published
The Crossbow and the Lyre
, subtitled
The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon.
It was well received, attracting even sufficient notice to garner an invitation to a symposium on European literature which was to be held at the Sorbonne in Paris. I accepted, of course, and so in April 1950 I came to Europe for the first time and met my sister within the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe.

For some women, I suppose, the moment of supreme command comes while they are still in their teens, when their bodies shine with that incandescent beauty which only older eyes know to be almost instantly disappearing. For others, like Miriam, it comes when they are in their mid-twenties, when the last girlish effect flows imperceptibly into the flourish of completed womanhood. But for my sister, it came when she reached forty, and that glory, coming late, seemed all the more miraculous. She was dressed in a black skirt which fell almost to her ankles, and a white blouse, plain except for a ruffle of lace at the collar and the ends of the sleeves. A short black jacket with padded shoulders covered the blouse, and at her throat she wore a small cameo held by a black velvet band. She was carrying a burgundy handbag with a long strap. She smiled when she saw me, her eyes shining brightly under a pair of slender gold-rimmed glasses.

“Ah, William,” she said softly as she pulled me into her arms.

For a moment we stood there, unable to separate, two strangely clinging figures holding to each other in the Tuileries Gardens, Elena's back to the Louvre, mine to the grandeur of the Place de la Concorde.

“I can't believe it's been three years,” I said finally.

Elena pushed back a wayward strand of hair. ‘Too long,” she said. Then she smiled and offered me her hand. “Come, let's stroll in the Tuileries.”

“I like the glasses,” I said as we began to walk together. “They make you look —”

“I know,” Elena interrupted, “like a man. Distinguished.”

I shook my head. “No, like a woman.” I smiled. “Nobly planned, to warn, to comfort, and command.”

“And that's from?”

“Wordsworth.”

Elena squeezed my hand. “Would you like to see where I live?”

“If we can walk there,” I said. “I want to see the city.”

That afternoon she took me along one of the world's most scenic routes, and on those days now when I sit out on Elena's small porch and watch the sailboats glide along the bay and try to remember Elena at a moment of particular pleasure, I remember, along with others, that afternoon we strolled out of the Tuileries, down the quai du Louvre, and then along the Seine until we reached the great white façade of the Hôtel de Ville.

“I live in that direction,” she said pointing to the right, toward an island in the middle of the river. “The spires you see just over the buildings, that's Notre-Dame.”

We walked across the Pont d'Arcole and over to Notre-Dame, then into the garden behind it and across the small bridge to the Île Saint-Louis. Elena had an apartment on the quai d'Anjou.

“They say you live here,” she told me, “if you can't decide between the Left Bank and the Right.”

It was a small apartment, but adequate, with a tiny kitchenette and a separate narrow bedroom. It was stuffed with books, some of them in French, but most in English, most of them by Americans. Perhaps, even then,
Quality
was formulating itself in my sister's mind.

She had a small wooden desk where she kept her typewriter. From the window beside it, one could see the Seine flowing slowly by and beyond it the wall of graceful buildings that made up the Right Bank.

“It's very beautiful here,” I said.

“Very different from New York.”

“It's not as gray,” I said casually. “It seems smaller. It doesn't have New York's … what would you call it? New York's monumentality.”

Elena nodded.

“You don't feel as dwarfed,” I added. “Paris doesn't look as if it's all about to fall on top of you, the way New York does.”

Elena nodded again, rather listlessly, no more than polite under the barrage of my tourist's patter.

Finally I ran out of things to say. I could not hold back any longer. “Elena,” I said, “when are you coming home?”

Elena removed her glasses and placed them on the desk beside the typewriter. “I don't know, William.”

“You're not thinking of becoming a French national, are you?”

Elena shook her head. “No. One does not become French the way one becomes American. You can't just have some bureaucrat sign a paper, any more than you could become Jewish that way.”

“So you will be coming back to the United States at some time?” I asked tentatively.

“I really don't know, William,” Elena said. Then she stood up and went into the kitchen. She returned with a bottle of wine. “Shall we make a toast?”

“I don't mean to press you on this.” I smiled. “It's just that we miss you, Elena. Especially me. I miss you.”

“I feel the same way,” Elena said. “But I still have some thinking to do.” She uncorked the wine and poured each of us a glass. Then she lifted hers. “To a precious reunion,” she said.

I touched my glass to hers. “Yes.”

More than any place she had ever lived, Elena's Paris apartment seemed fully to represent her. The walls were bare except for a few paintings, which she probably had purchased from some sidewalk exhibition. A radio sat precariously on a small table in one corner, and near the fireplace was a large wing chair, clearly too large for taste but just right for comfort. A lamp stood beside it, the bulb shielded by a plain white shade. Beside the chair was a square wooden box filled almost to the top with manuscript pages.

I nodded toward it. “The new book?”

“Something I'm working on. A novel.”

“Set in Paris?”

Elena shook her head. “Only partly.” She took a sip from her glass, glanced out the window, her eyes following a barge as it made its way down the Seine, then turned back to me. “There's a darker side to nostalgia,” she said. “Remembering the unrightable wrong.”

I had no doubt that she was referring to Elizabeth. Her face was not drawn or strained; nor did she seem particularly distressed by this sudden allusion to the unfortunate circumstances that had finally culminated in Elizabeth's fall from the window.

“Do you think about her often?” I asked, almost casually.

Elena nodded. “I think about the situation, more than anything else. I don't just think about Elizabeth, and I certainly don't see that night over and over again in my mind. It's not like that.” For a moment she searched for the words. “I think about the proper way something like this should be thought about. I'm curious about how the mind reacts to such circumstances. We tend to call such a response either guilt or indifference. But there's a great deal in between those two.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” I said. I took another sip from my glass, a gesture that seemed almost whimsical compared to the somberness that had overtaken my sister.

She looked at me seriously. “How about you, William? Do you think about Elizabeth very much?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “I'm not overcome by it. I suppose I feel, well, just a kind of general sadness, perhaps a sense of waste.”

Elena was watching me steadily. It was the sort of gaze that had always made me uncomfortable, as if my sister expected more than I could give and felt a kind of sober regret that I was both so limited, which was one thing, and so unconcerned by those limits, which was quite another. Elena did not expect you to answer her questions, as Jason wrote in his memoir, but she expected you to share them. When you did not, she could not wholly conceal her disappointment — the marathoner's regret for the short-distance runner.

I took another sip of wine, dodging behind my glass like a thief around a corner. “Well, so you're writing about Elizabeth, then?”

“Not exactly,” Elena said. She seemed reluctant to go further. Finally she added, “But I think it has to do with Elizabeth, with certain questions her death brings to mind.”

“Like what?”

Again Elena hesitated. She glanced once more toward the window, but this time her eyes did not linger there. “Do you believe in God, William?”

“No.”

“When did you stop believing in Him?”

‘‘I don't know.” I shrugged. “Our household was not exactly what you would call religious.”

“But the atmosphere in Standhope was somewhat religious. Everyone believed in God.”

“I guess they did. What are you getting at?”

“Well, there must have been a moment when you suddenly said to yourself, as I did somewhere along the way, all right, there is no God.”

“There probably was such a moment.”

“Now, suppose something happened and you also came to say something else, if only inwardly, if only to yourself.”

“Say what?”

“Say, all right, there is no meaning.”

I shook my head. “You'd have to turn away from that sort of conclusion, Elena.”

“Because you couldn't live with it?”

“Not happily.”

“I'm not talking about living happily. I am talking about living at all.”

“Are you asking me if I think there
is
any meaning in life, Elena?” I asked. Then I laughed. “That question is so grand that it is juvenile, the sort of thing one hears in freshman philosophy classes.”