Elena (50 page)

I was seated with her on a sofa in one of the more remote corners of Sam's cavernous apartment. It was as far away as we could get from both the string quartet and the smell of hot hors d'oeuvres. Elena was already getting fidgety, but she seemed to calm down as Jason came up to her.

“Good evening, William,” he said, bowing slightly. “And to you, Miss Franklin.” He smiled. “May I call you Elena?”

“Of course,” Elena said. “Would you like to join us?”

“I would, yes,” Jason said. He took a chair from a few feet away and brought it over to us, sitting opposite the sofa, his legs crossed and pulled under the chair to keep them from looking, as he said, like a raised drawbridge.

“Rather crowded, isn't it?” he said. He was fifty-seven but always appeared somewhat older, or perhaps simply more experienced. It was as if by writing his history books he had lived more lives and now looked back at you not through his own life alone but through vast distances in time.

“I feel as though I know you, Elena,” he said. “I've read all your books and learned quite a lot from them. I remember the whole episode with
Calliope.
They bounced you around a bit on that one, didn't they?”

“Yes,” Elena said.

“You had one thing on your side, however,” Jason added. “Your detractors were fools.”

“Not all of them,” Elena said.

“No, not all,” Jason admitted. “Of course, one's enemies never are entirely foolish.” He smiled. “That's one of the more disturbing elements of life.” He took a sip from the glass of wine he had brought with him. “Are you working on anything now?” he asked her.

“Nothing in particular,” Elena said. “Just some research. And you?”

“Just finished a book on John Randolph. Parnassus has it now. I suppose it's in good hands.”

“Yes, I'm sure it is,” Elena said.

“You were just back from France when I saw you last,” Jason said. “I'm happy to see you've decided to stay with us. As I said to you before, I believe, exile's not all it's cracked up to be.”

“No, it isn't,” Elena said.

“Of course, I'm a bit of one myself. Southerner, you know.”

Elena nodded. “How did you happen to come north?”

Jason laughed. “Well, I was born in the Mississippi Delta, like Basil Ransom in
The Bostonians
— both of us beached and forlorn in the North.”

“Do you feel that way?” Elena asked immediately. “Beached and forlorn?”

“Well, maybe that's a bit too strong,” Jason said. “The fact of the matter is, no one made me come up here, it was all my doing. I fled the South like it was a house on fire.”

“Rather like you did Standhope,” I said to Elena.

Jason nodded. “Yes, like that. I hated it down there. All I thought about was escaping.” He cleared his throat softly, then went on. “I was the only son in an old family that had gone entirely to seed. We lived in a crumbling mansion. A family of sparrows was nesting in a hole in my bedroom wall.” He laughed. “You wouldn't have seen that at Tara. Anyway, we'd lost everything in the war. The Civil War, I mean. We'd deserved to lose it, but we'd never have admitted that.”

“Why not?” Elena asked.

“Pride,” Jason said. “Pride's a big thing, especially down there.” He shifted in his chair to release the tension in his legs. “You know, in the Salem witch trials there was a man named Barrows who'd falsely accused his wife. Well, as it turns out, he was convicted of witchcraft not long after his wife was executed for it, largely, I might add, on his own testimony. Anyway, he was sentenced to being pressed to death, and when it was almost over somebody came over to him and said, ‘Well, George, is there anything you want?' And Barrows said, taking all his guilt, you know, admitting it, he said, ‘More weight.'” Jason leaned back in his seat. “Now that's the way my family should have acted. They should have said that they deserved their destruction. Instead, they just became bitter about it.”

“And that's why you left?” Elena asked.

“Well, that was certainly part of it,” Jason said. “Of course, I was only fifteen at the time, so I had the general adolescent heat that most boys do.” He smiled. “I was certainly touched by that current, you may be sure.” He looked at Elena almost impishly. “But only at the fuse, if you know what I mean.”

Elena laughed, and so did I.

“I don't suppose that was part of the reason you left Standhope, Elena,” Jason said.

“You might be surprised,” Elena said.

“You know, when I was growing up, young men never suspected that young women might feel as … shall we say, turbulent as they.”

“They did in medieval times,” Elena said. “There was a word for it.
Furor uterinus
, fire in the womb.”

Jason looked at her intently. “And was that considered a pathology?”

“Not exactly,” Elena told him, “only an appetite, but singularly difficult to control.”

Jason nodded. “Well, that it certainly was with me. I was in a terrible rage, or frustration — whatever. I'm sure that that was part of my need to leave the South. I felt completely smothered, physically smothered, like when I was a boy I used to go out to the corn crib and jump in, sinking all the way down in the shucks and husks, so far down it felt like drowning.”

“Yes, that was like Standhope,” Elena said.

“At the time, of course, I never would have guessed that New England had such prisons, too.”

Elena looked at him in disbelief. “Really?”

“We all think that ours is the only cell,” Jason said. “Or at least, I did. My God, I felt that any place on earth would be freer than the South. But, to my adolescent mind, New England seemed the best place on earth to run to. When I decided to get the hell out of the South, all I could think of was the North. Never the West or the Midwest; always the North. I yearned for snow and ice and bitter winds — anything but that sweltering basin I'd lived in all my life.” He shrugged. “So one night I just up and did it. I walked out and looked up at the stars to see where the North was, exactly, then jumped on the first train that came by going in that direction. It took me all the way to Washington, DC., without a stop.” He placed his glass down on the table beside his chair, took out his pipe, and began filling it, watching Elena as he did so. “Do you and William still have family in Standhope?”

Elena shook her head. “No. Except for William's son, we're the last of the Franklins.”

I looked at her and smiled. “Well, there may be one or two left somewhere in Rhode Island.”

“Not in touch with them at all?” Jason asked.

“Never,” I said.

“Are you in touch with your family?” Elena asked Jason.

“I do keep in contact with some of them,” Jason said. He tamped the tobacco down tightly into the bowl of his pipe. “Cousins here and there, scattered over Dixie.” He smiled. “They're all probably pretty busy these days keeping the Negroes down.” He lit the pipe, took a few short puffs, then lowered it from his mouth. “I got the impression from
New England Maid
that your home life was rather unusual, Elena.”

“It was,” Elena said.

“Mine too,” Jason said. “They had suffered a malaise for what seemed like generations.” He then described the nature of it in a somewhat comical fashion. But despite the joking manner in which Jason portrayed the deep sleep of his progenitors, something of the sorrow of their plight rose from it and moved deeply into Elena's mind, to emerge finally once again in a passage on William Faulkner in
Quality:
“One detects in so many of these strangely moving tales, as well as in the general sensibility of Quentin Compson, a tidal dissipation, an atrophy of will welded to a galvanizing passion, a heart at once broken and rebellious. The voice is unique in American letters, full of the rage of its retreat. It is the whimper, one might say, of a volcano.”

“So they just mostly sat out life,” Jason concluded with a quiet chuckle. “You know, listlessly, like it was one long advertisement for something they couldn't afford.”

Elena was watching him very closely, taking in the entire man, everything from the look of his body, so very erect in his chair, to the sound of his voice, soft and unassuming, to the gentle humor of his mind, its kindly self-deprecation combined with an absolute authority.

He shrugged. “You'd have thought nothing could rouse them, my family. But when I left home, being the only son, you know, this desertion hit my family like chain lightning. My father simply would not stand for it. He came raging North like some crazed Paul Bunyan, striding across the hills, knocking over buildings, scattering the terrorized populations of countless Northern towns.” He laughed. “He wanted his son back, you see. I was the only thing on earth for which he could generate any passion whatsoever.” He took a puff from the pipe. “Hell, he even hired a bunch of gumshoes to find me. They tracked me like a pack of Shawnee scouts. Why, sometimes they'd show up at some flophouse I was staying in and give everybody the third degree, rough up the bums and derelicts, you know. Nobody to stop them.”

A waiter passed and Jason took a glass of wine from the tray and took a sip. “Good stuff. Sam spares no expense. You have to hand it to him. I guess we're all lucky to be at Parnassus. That the way you feel, Elena?”

“Did he find you?” Elena asked. “Your father?”

Jason nodded. “Yes, he did. Can you believe it? He found me in a little hotel in the Village. I'd been living there for a month, working as a sweeper in a bathhouse. I didn't care. Just to be in the Village was all that mattered.” He smiled, remembering it. “I saw Floyd Dell one time, and a portly fellow who looked a whole lot like Henry James.” He grinned boyishly. “Friend of mine punched me one day and said, ‘Look there, it's Isadora Duncan,' but it was just some stripper he knew from a burlesque show.”

“You said your father found you,” Elena said, coaxing him back to his narrative.

“Yes, and we had a talk in my room,” Jason said. “We made an agreement. Sort of a strange one, but it worked for us. He agreed to live without me, if I'd agree to come back before he died.” He looked down at his hands, his mind now captured by that distant moment in his life. He was silent for several seconds, then he glanced back up at Elena. “Well, I did go back. About two months before I left for the war.”

He stopped then and stared into his glass.

Elena smiled. “I'd like to have the whole life in one telling, if you don't mind,” she said.

Jason smiled back at her. “Well, I had the usual experiences in the war. Took a bullet in the thigh, but I was never gassed. I got back to New York in 1919.” He chuckled. “Fancied myself an actor. I married a young actress named Jill Thornton, who had a stage name that was truly ridiculous: Eureka Patterson. Can you imagine the credits? ‘And Eureka Patterson as Ophelia.'” He laughed and shook his head. “But, my God, I loved that girl. She decided to go to Hollywood. She was tired of bumming around Broadway. We got divorced over that. I didn't want to go to California.” He mused a minute, and then his eyes brightened. “And you know, once in a while I'd see her in a movie — just an extra — I'd see that face staring back at me from a crowd in a Roman coliseum or the streets of some dusty cowboy town … poor Jill, in a toga or with a bonnet strapped to her head.” He shrugged. “I have no idea what happened to her.” He stopped again and looked at Elena. “Do you really want the whole life?”

“Certainly,” Elena said lightly.

“It's interesting.” “If I give you mine this evening,” Jason said, “will you promise to give me yours over dinner next Saturday night?”

Elena did not pause a moment in her reply. “Yes.”

“Good, then it's a deal,” Jason said. “Now, where was I in the great epic that is my story? Ah, yes, divorced. I still thought I wanted to be an actor, but it was a crazy idea. I didn't like the rehearsals, or learning the lines, or the tension of opening night, or the party after it. I didn't like the people who liked these things. So in the end truth dawned and I left the stage. I was never much more than a spear carrier anyway.”

“So what the stage lost, the historians gained,” I said.

“Well, not straight away,” Jason told me. He turned back to Elena. “The divorce hit me very hard. I was raised a strict Southern Protestant, which is a whole lot, believe me — like being raised a Catholic. You have God's eye watching you every minute, and sin is like polluted blood running through your veins, and in everything you do, everything you are, there is not so much God's love as his disappointment.” He shrugged. “It becomes your disappointment, too, and I took my divorce very hard because of that, a real spiritual failure.” His eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to peer directly into my sister's mind. “Fact is, I had a couple of fantasies. Not the usual kind, though, nothing to do with beautiful women, or spike-heeled shoes, or anything like that.” He smiled. “I had a fantasy, you see, that I would live my whole life with the woman I loved, that I would have children, and that they would be able to say of me that I was the one who never left them.

“Of course, that didn't pan out. So if you want to know the truth about it, well, I sort of hit bottom after that. I took a little room off Sullivan Street and started drinking. It really wasn't even a room; it was a dank, stinking cellar I paid maybe ten cents a month for. There was a boiler in it and a single lamp, but the plug for the lamp was a long way from the boiler, so in the winter I had to choose between keeping warm and using the light to read by.” He laughed to himself. “I chose heat every time, Elena, every time. And I think that proved that nature opts for a thick coat of fur rather than intelligence, for comfort rather than knowledge … and so, if you follow me, the origin of illusion is in our very genes and chromosomes.”