Elena (53 page)

He stopped at the large double doors of the reception room and turned to Elena.

“Happy birthday, my dear,” he said.

Elena smiled. “Thank you.”

Sam kissed her. “We've worked well together, don't you think?”

“Yes.”

“Take this little party as a token of my esteem,” Sam said. Then he swung open the doors.

There must have been two hundred people milling about, and for the next hour or so Elena strolled among them with Jason at her side, not at all discontent in that role.

“She looks very happy these days,” Alexander said as he walked up to me. Saundra was with him, looking a bit intimidated by the scale of the occasion. She was still a shy young woman, and she appeared almost to tremble in Elena's presence.

“I think she is happy,” I told him.

Alexander took a sip of wine. “Do you think that'll harm her work?”

“I don't think happiness ever harmed anything, Alexander,” I said. I looked at Saundra. “Do you?”

Saundra shook her head. She had one of those highly animated faces, the sort in which every emotional nuance displays itself, no matter how simple or complex.

“They look very beautiful together,” she said as she glanced at Elena and Jason. She tucked her arm playfully in Alexander's and smiled at me. “Do you suppose Alexander and I will ever look like that?”

“If you're very lucky,” I said. Then I edged away, leaving them their illusions.

Mary Farrell came plowing through the great doors only a few minutes later, wrapped in vast loops of brown fur.

“My God, William,” she said as she rushed up to me, “Elena is fifty and I am fifty-five, and look at this, will you.” She drew a photograph from her handbag. It showed her daughter, Martha, standing in robe and mortarboard, a proud graduate of Hollywood High. “I have a daughter who is practically a woman.” Her hair was streaked with more than a little gray now, but otherwise she looked somewhat less parched than before and her mood seemed less acrid, as if her body and her mind had finally come to some agreement as to their future course.

“Is your husband with you?” I asked.

Mary smiled. “Why no, William. Should we have an affair?”

I laughed, but a bit self-consciously, unsure of whether or not she meant it, and certain only that I would have gone with her in an instant if she had.

“Speaking of affairs,” Mary said, “this thing with Jason has been going on for a while.”

“Yes, it has.”

“All smooth to the naked eye?”

“I think so.”

“He's not blinded by her light?”

“He has one of his own.”

“Not pulling a MacNeill and trying to get her to do things he can't do?”

“No.”

Mary looked suspicious. “Sounds a bit idyllic for my taste.”

“Well, you always did like tragic endings, Mary,” I told her.

She glanced across the room. Elena had seen her and was coming quickly toward her, with Jason at her arm.

“Do you like him?” Mary asked me quickly in a whisper.

“Very much.”

“I had no idea you were coming, Mary,” Elena said delightedly as she drew Mary into her arms.

“All the way from California,” Mary said. “Just me and my minks.” She stepped out of Elena's embrace and looked at Jason.

“Hello,” Jason said, somewhat shyly.

Mary looked him up and down. Then she looked at Elena. “Looks stable enough, Elena,” she said. “Does he have good teeth?”

“Reasonably good,” Elena said.

Mary was about to reply, when suddenly the lights went out. Then the doors opened and a huge cake was wheeled in, glowing brilliantly with fifty candles. At a signal from Sam, the crowd began singing “Happy Birthday,” and Jason bent forward and kissed her.

“I think a short speech is in order,” Sam said once the singing had stopped and the lights had come back on. “What about it, Elena?”

Elena walked to the front of the room, briefly surveyed the large crowd that had gathered to honor her, and for one of the few times in her life spoke extemporaneously.

“Long ago, when I was a little girl,” she began, “I wrote a poem, which one of my teachers didn't like. Her name was Mrs. Nichols, and a few years after we had our little conflict, she left Standhope. It was evidently quite a show at the railway station that day. Mrs. Nichols was screaming at her husband, causing quite a commotion. Then the train pulled up and she disappeared into it and was never seen again.” She smiled quietly. “From time to time when I leaf through my yearbook, I always pause at the picture of Mrs. Nichols. It's one of those pictures you can't forget, one that, as you look at it, you want to come to life. You want those gray features to take on human colors, you want to hear her speak: ‘Remember me. I am Mrs. Nichols, who left in such a huff one day and was never seen again. Listen now, this is what I did. This is what happened to me.'

“In the end, I think, every life is like that, a story. Some are more interesting than others, but all of them can be regarded as tales of some kind. When we do that, see our lives as if they were the creations of someone else, as if we were figures in a novel, then I think we can get some perspective on ourselves. Am I really a hero or a villain, a wise man or a fool?” She laughed softly. “At fifty I can look back on my own life in that way, as a story which began in 1910 and which has lasted until now.” She lifted her gaze toward the rear of the room where her oldest friends had arrayed themselves. “I can't come to any judgment about it, however, except to say that, from this place, from this moment, it seems to have been enough. And I could say this, that it has been enough, even if it ended before dawn, even if there were nothing more.”

She stepped into the crowd and began making her way slowly toward the rest of us, shaking hands as she edged her way through. She seemed quite content, and from the perspective of that moment — and even as I now remember it — it would have been impossible to imagine that only a few years later Manfred Owen would declare in a voice that was clearly Elena's that of all human states, serenity is the least admirable, and that at fifty he had looked back upon his life and seen only charred or burning fields.

But the fields were burning, as I told Martha that same afternoon, even if only in my sister's mind.

Martha cleared her throat pointedly. “But wouldn't you say that Jason and Elena were still happy together the day of the party?” she asked.

“Relatively, yes,” I said.

“Why only relatively?”

“Because despite what Elena said that day,” I told her, “despite the fact that she no doubt believed it herself when she said it — despite all that, Martha, it was not enough.”

“You mean Jason was not enough?”

“I mean that whatever it was she had in her life, whatever Jason was to her, it wasn't enough.”

“Was that obvious at the party?”

“No.”

“When did it become obvious?”

“There were little signs.”

“Like what?”

“Well, once when we were at dinner,” I told her, “Jason began a long story about the last hours of John C. Calhoun. It seems that Calhoun was completely lucid until the exact second of his death. The doctor, Jason said, even told Calhoun when his pulse had stopped, and Calhoun had simply nodded and waited for his life to end, quite calmly waited.” I could see Elena's face before me, staring oddly at Jason as he wound his story to an end. “Anyway,” I said, “Jason told this anecdote in his usual style, very full of drama. He was relishing the tale himself, completely captivated by it. But when he finished, there was a short silence, and then Elena said crisply, ‘What's the point, Jason?'”

Martha nodded. “I see.”

“Do you?”

“She meant that he was too verbose, too florid in his style,” Martha said confidently. “That he was always losing his place, getting all tied up in his language.”

I shook my head. “No. She meant that his stories had no point, that they related to nothing, that they were only connected to his own sense of the dramatic, and that beyond this very subjective sort of appreciation, there was nothing.”

“Well, what did Jason say?” Martha asked.

“Nothing much. He just shrugged it off. He laughed and said that he wasn't sure there was a point at all. He didn't seem bothered by it.”

Martha jotted something in her notebook, then looked back up at me. “That's it? The only sign of what was happening, just that question, ‘What's the point?'”

“No, there were others,” I said. “For example, Alexander and Saundra were married not long after Elena's party, and within a year my grandson, David, was born. Elena began to spend a great deal of time with the three of them and a great deal less time with Jason.”

“Did he resent that?”

“I don't think so. He had his own work. Whatever else may be said about Jason, he didn't need Elena to complete himself. He had his life, his work. He never gave them up to my sister.”

“I see,” Martha said.

“Of course, at that time, the worst hadn't happened,” I added quickly. “But later Elena began to work on that section of
Quality
which dealt with America's vision of itself. And that brought her, at last, to
The American Experience.
”

Martha nodded. “Ah, so that's where the conflict really began, over
The American Experience.
That's when she found it necessary to desert him.”

“Well, perhaps,” I said dully.

Martha looked at me very pointedly. “I know you disagree with my approach, William,” she said, “this theme of mine, about desertion. I know you disagree with that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“It's too convenient, I think. But more than that, I think it may be basically false.”

“But people deserted Elena, didn't they?”

“Yes.”

“Doesn't that matter?”

“It matters, perhaps, but it did not make her an artist.”

“Then when she deserted Jason, that was not a kind of subconscious revenge?” Martha asked.

I shook my head. “I don't think so.”

“Then why did she leave him?”

“Because she came to see him more clearly. Is that wrong?”

“What did she see?”

“The clouds within his mind.”

Martha quickly scribbled the phrase in her notebook. “And that caused her a great deal of trouble, that insight?”

“Yes, it did.”

“And for Jason?”

“Oh, yes,” I said immediately. “Very much for Jason.”

I could recall the first time his distress became apparent. The three of us, Elena, Jason, and I, had planned to have dinner together at a restaurant in the Village. I had arrived around seven and was seated in the lounge with my wine, nibbling at a bowl of peanuts, when I saw Jason come in. It was autumn, and I remember that a very hard rain had been falling all day. Jason was drenched. He shook his umbrella vigorously, then hung his sodden overcoat on a rack by the door.

I waved to him and he came trudging heavily toward me, as if slogging through a field of mud.

“You look as though you could use one of these, old boy,” I said, lifting my brandy. I was in a very cheerful mood. I had spent the entire day with my grandson and the afterglow was still upon me.

“Yes, I think so,” Jason said wearily. He slumped down in the chair across from mine and shifted about in it, trying to find a comfortable position. There was a creakiness in him that I had not noticed before. He looked rather like an old house, chipped and peeling. One could almost see the places where the wind came through.

“Elena's not coming,” he said. “She called me this afternoon to let me know.” He glanced about irritably. “She's gotten caught up in some research and doesn't want to leave it.”

I smiled. “Ah, so that's it. The Great Book. She's getting to be something of a caricature of the obsessed scholar, isn't she?”

“Yes, she is,” Jason said crisply. “I've gotten used to it over the past few years, of course, but it gets worse and worse.” He glanced quickly about the bar. His edginess was unusual. It was as if a little animal were clawing at the basic calm of his temperament.

“You seem a bit distracted, Jason,” I said.

He turned toward me. “You've never written on anything American, have you?” he asked.

“No. It's strictly English literature for me, except for an occasional review.”

“Has Elena ever commented on your work?”

“From time to time,” I said. “Sometimes favorable, sometimes unfavorable.”

“How many books have you written?”

“Five.”

Jason nodded. “You're like me, sort of a plodder. You're not like Elena.”

“I have never been like Elena.”

“She doesn't work like a scholar at all, William. She works like a revolutionary, with fanatical purpose. If she built bridges, there'd be no river on earth without one.”

I remember thinking at that moment that he looked curiously emaciated. Even his language sounded pared down.

I leaned across the table toward him. “What's the matter, Jason?”

“Your sister is obsessed.”

“You should be able to understand that.”

“It's not just the incessant work, William,” Jason said, “it's the way she goes at it. In the beginning, she would ask me something, and I'd give her an answer. She knew I was very learned in the field. She took the answer. Now my opinions seem to mean very little to her.”

I forced myself to smile. “Well, Jason, you know your Plato: opinion is, after all, the lowest form of knowledge.”

Jason's face darkened. “There is such a thing as informed judgment, isn't there?”

“Of course.”

“And shouldn't it be trusted?”

“Well, that depends.”