Elena (46 page)

“Yes, that's true,” Elena said. “But suppose you confronted a situation in which you had to be reborn morally, had to construct a moral world from the ground up. What would you rely upon to tell you what to do?”

“Experience. Learning. Who knows?”

Elena nodded. “All those things, of course,” she said. “But how would they be put together? What would be emphasized? Which perceptions could be trusted as being objective? Where, in the end, does the mind meet the conscience?”

I wagged my finger at her. “You know, Sam warned me that the French air would get to you,” I said, “that you'd end up in some cloudy philosophical mist and never write another word an American could understand.”

The lightness of my remark seemed to pull Elena up short, almost as if she had taken it as a form of gentle scolding, the old professor warning his bright young undergraduate student away from mighty themes. She straightened herself slightly in her chair and crossed her legs.

“How is Sam, anyway?” she asked.

“He's so busy running the business of publishing that he hardly ever reads a book,” I said. “Miriam's the senior editor now, and Sam even tacked a vice-presidency to her title.”

Elena stared at me silently. Her eyes had a way of moving over you, as if molding your features as she looked at them, like a sculptor's fingers structuring the clay.

“Elena,” I said, “I didn't mean to be dismissive about the things you were discussing.”

“That's all right,” Elena said. She smiled. “Where would you like to eat tonight?”

She never returned to the larger questions that were uppermost in her mind that afternoon and probably had been uppermost for quite some time. Instead we talked of Miriam and Alexander, Mary and Sam and Jack MacNeill. She even asked about Joe Tully. She did not mention her book again, and before we left for dinner that evening she gathered up the little box with its manuscript and tucked it into a drawer beneath her desk. I would hear no more of it until it arrived on Miriam's desk almost two years later.

We walked from Elena's apartment to the Left Bank, and in the Paris twilight, she pointed out the sights: the offices of Gallimard, her French publisher; the cafés Hemingway had made famous, the apartment of André Gide, Rodin's
Balzac
, standing in the open on a little island in the boulevard Raspail, as if it were of no more importance than a public fountain.

“I think I love Paris,” I said.

Elena smiled. “Julien says that all men love Paris but the Scots.”

I turned to her instantly. “Julien?”

“You will meet him,” Elena said, and added nothing else.

She didn't have to, for in only a few minutes we were all sitting in the small restaurant Elena had selected near the Odéon. He was tall and rather somber, one of Elena's perennial older men, the only sort to whom, I think, she was ever really attracted after she had grown too old for Jack and for all his kind. He was wearing a plain dark suit to which he added absolutely nothing, not so much as a tip of handkerchief peeping from his pocket. He was almost entirely gray, but his face seemed somewhat younger, though plainly weathered, a bit by time, and as it turned out, a great deal by circumstance. To say the very least, he was charming, modest, soft spoken, his voice always whispery, as if insisting that no great importance should be attached to the things he said. He had a very slight French accent, but otherwise his English was impeccable. He even used the subjunctive correctly and was quite careful, even in conversation, that his infinitives not be split.

His full name was Julien Tavernier, and he had been a journalist before the war. After the Occupation, his newspaper had come under the editorial control of the Germans. Under such conditions, he had refused to continue in its employment. A rival at the paper had been discreetly informed on him, and he had been picked up by the police. Though not particularly political, he had been suspected of Communist sympathies, and during the first few days of his detention he had been tortured.

“It is an odd thing, torture,” he said, rather matter-of-factly, later in the evening. “You're in a room, you see, and things are being done to you that are illegal. But since the mind is slow in understanding sudden changes in reality, you wait for some officer to enter the interrogation room. You know this will happen. You even know what this person will look like. He will be in uniform, with many medals. He will look about, scowling, and he will say; ‘What is this? This is an outrage! This is not Turkey, gentlemen, this is France! Release this man at once.'” He smiled and took a draw on his cigarette. “And do you know, this does happen. This man of dreams comes into the room; he is in uniform with the medals. He does look about, and he is scowling, and he says, ‘You are going too slowly. You must step up the procedure. We must have an answer from this pig by nightfall.'” He crushed his cigarette into the small glass ashtray on the table and laughed.

Still later he spoke of his first marriage, which had been a disaster. “My wife and I did not care for one another,” he said, smiling delicately at Elena. “This made divorce thinkable. We did not have children, which made it relatively harmless. And we were not Catholics, which made it possible.”

Through it all, Elena listened quietly, sometimes adding a comment of some sort, to which Julien usually gave immediate assent. Once she spoke at some length on the particular difficulties of expatriation, and Julien listened attentively, at times adding an opposing view, with the patience of the native before the alien's distress. “Your complaints are quite subtle, Elena,” he said finally. “Usually Americans are most bitterly affronted by the harsh flavor of our cigarettes.”

After dinner we found a sidewalk café and sat sipping drinks, while the traffic whirled down boulevard Montparnasse. Julien mentioned those more distant attractions which the fearful, nervous tourist might miss: Balzac's house in Passy, the tombs of the distinguished dead at Père Lachaise. “You should not spend all your time in the Louvre,” he said. “It's a great palace, but a poor museum.” He waved his hand. “And forget about Napoleon's tomb. All that dark marble. It is appropriate for an megalomaniac but most unsuitable for a man.” He shook his head. “Walk the streets. There, you will find Paris.”

It was almost midnight before we left the café. I expected to take a taxi back to my hotel, but Julien put his hand on my shoulder as we walked down the boulevard and brought the three of us to a halt. He looked at Elena.

“Perhaps we should drive up to Montmartre,” he said. “See the lights of Paris from the steps of Sacré-Coeur.” He turned to me. “Would that please you, William?”

“Very much.”

“Then it shall be done.”

It took only a few minutes to traverse the city. I sat in the back seat of the car and listened as Julien and Elena pointed out various attractions. Then we made our ascent up the highest hill of Paris and parked under the dome of the basilica.

“You can see the entire city from here,” Julien said as he got out of the car.

For a time the three of us stood staring down at the Paris lights. It was very quiet and it was very beautiful.

“I once thought of Paris as changeless, as immortal,” Julien said softly, gazing out over the sea of rooftops. “And then the Germans came, and it was transformed into an evil city.” He looked at Elena. “It cannot be reclaimed now. Not after the deportations. It has lost its virtue. Even the light is different. The silver's gone.”

Then he turned quickly and walked back to the car. Elena and I remained on the steps of the cathedral.

“He is an interesting man, Elena,” I said.

Elena glanced anxiously toward the car. “I'm afraid for him.”

I took her arm. “Come, let's go back.”

Julien smiled as we joined him. “Forgive my mood,” he said. “I don't mean to be so dramatic.” He shrugged. “It's just that coming over to the restaurant this evening I passed the Hôtel de Ville and all the flags were waving, the Tricolor, you know? It seemed so hollow. Everyone has forgotten what we did, we, the French, here and in Vichy. They have forgotten the collaboration, the roundups, the informants.” He shook his head. “We are a forgetful people, we French, don't you think?”

“Like everyone else,” I said. “The French are part of a forgetful species.”

I glanced at Elena, then back at Julien. It could not have been more clear that they needed to be alone.

“I think I'll go back to my hotel now,” I said. I faked a yawn. “I'm not used to these late Parisian nights.”

My symposium had provided accommodations at the Grand Hotel. Julien and Elena let me off in front, and Julien got out and shook my hand, while Elena remained in the car. “Your dear sister has kept me from brooding too much,” he said with a slight smile. “For this, I am grateful, you see?”

I nodded.

He placed his hand on my shoulder. “You Americans are better than I thought.” He continued to watch me seriously, his hand gripping my shoulder more tightly. “You are in Paris only a few days. That is too bad. I must go to Stockholm tomorrow. But perhaps you shall return to France one day, and I shall see you then, yes?”

“I hope so, Julien.”

He nodded. “Well,
bonsoir.
”

I never saw Julien again. A year later, Elena provided the details in a letter designed to convey the minimum of emotion:

I'm afraid this letter brings bad news. Julien died in his apartment a week ago. It appears to have been a suicide. The gas jets were opened. It was quick and painless, and I think it is very much what he wanted. He was so appalled by events surrounding the war that he found it difficult to separate himself from them. He entered what I would call a metaphysical loneliness. He called it “brooding” and liked to dismiss it as self-pity. But it was actually despair of the deepest sort, the kind in which there is no remedy by means of personal life. He lived in this dark cocoon. More and more in the past months, he could not get outside it. I tried to be of service. Possibly, I did not want to repeat any of the mistakes I made regarding Elizabeth. But I could not remake his country's past, which is, I think, what would have been required if he were to have been saved. I know your impulse will be to rush to Paris to comfort me. That is not necessary. Julien's death is very sad, but we had seen little of each other in the past few months. He had become increasingly remote, his isolation almost absolute. I can only think of his death as inevitable. I do not believe that death follows me wherever I go, or that everyone I touch turns suicidal. Such ideas are romantic and in the end suggest a grotesque sense of one's own power and importance. I am well, and working steadily.

In her biography, Martha reprinted this letter in its entirety. She saw it as emblematic of the icy state into which Elena had fallen since Elizabeth's death. As Jason once told me, this makes good reading but poor analysis, and I think that if Elena's letter can be said to suggest anything, it is the strength of character she had achieved at this point in her life. The letter reflects the meditative tone of a mind that had by then become infinitely enlarged by the act of meditation, a consciousness as repulsed by the melodrama of grief as it was, by nature, attracted to the sober contemplation of it. “When I think of Timon's grave,” Dorothea Moore says in the final passages of
Inwardness
, “I do not think of its particularity. I do not think, There, below me, is my son, Timon, his features grotesquely altered by the opera of their decay. I allow no outward show to parody my inward grief, nor claim uniqueness for my loss, nor sound a trumpet to my guilt. Neither do I ask that all the world be reconvened into its primordial mass so that, beginning once again with the first light of that first explosive day, all that has come before could rearrange itself, twist and turn and wheel, and so at last, through lost millennia, deliver to my door this day a living son. Oh, Timon, I am sorry; but not alone for you.”

My brief first visit to Paris ended only a week after I arrived. I saw Elena quite often during those few days, and on the last day of my visit we met at the rue Auguste Comte entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens, walked toward the palace through a profusion of mediocre statuary, and finally sat down at the edge of the Medici fountain. Elena appeared subdued. The unseasonable warmth that hung over Paris that first week in October had come to an abrupt end, and both of us could feel the first chill of winter as the wind swept through the trees.

“I should have brought a jacket,” Elena said. She wrapped her arms around herself.

“Do you like the winters here?” I asked idly.

Elena nodded. “I'll miss you, William,” she said. She reached over and took my hand.

I placed my other hand on top of hers and squeezed gently. “Come home.”

Elena shook her head.

“You can bring Julien with you,” I said.

“We're not thinking in those terms.”

I did not press the issue, either about her returning to America or marrying Julien. She was forty. She would be childless in any event, and I suspected, beyond this, that she had also elected to live her life wholly free of those complex encumbrances which other people impose. At that time, I could not possibly have imagined the autumn loveliness that Jason Findley would bring into her life, changing it so radically, lending it that music which would finally rise from the pages of her last book.

I glanced about the gardens. Behind me, Delacroix's dastardly Polyphemus was about to crush Acis and Galatea, who hugged each other in pastoral calm, oblivious to the Cyclops's gaze.

“It's the only decent piece of sculpture in the whole garden,” I said.

Elena did not seem in the least interested in my aesthetic judgment. She looked down at the water, then gently dipped her fingers into it.

“What are you thinking about, Elena?” I asked.