Elena (54 page)

Jason looked at me irritably. “On what, may I ask?”

“On just how learned it actually is.”

Jason's eyes narrowed. “Well, what about my judgment? Does that mean anything?”

“Of course it does.”

He seemed on the verge of explosion, an attitude alarmingly out of character.

“Look, Jason,” I said, “I've been through this sort of thing with Elena before. There's a rising passion as the work progresses, then it crests and everything goes back to normal.”

Jason looked utterly unconvinced. “And what is normal? Is respect normal?”

“For Elena? Yes.”

“Perhaps for you, William,” he said with sudden, deep bitterness.

“Are you saying that Elena has lost respect for you, Jason?” I asked.

He actually laughed. “My God, how stupid I can be.” He was about to add something else when the barmaid stepped up. Jason ordered a Scotch. Then he turned back to me.

“You know, William, a man can go through his entire life thinking that he is one sort of person, and then discover that he is quite another.” He shook his head. “That's me, you know. I've done that.”

“In what way?”

He shrugged. “Well, I've always been a rather vain man, I suppose. But I've always thought that this part of me was offset by a certain generosity, a certain kindliness.”

“Isn't it?”

He shook his head again, and his eyes closed slowly. “No, I don't think so.”

The barmaid brought the Scotch and Jason drank it down quickly.

“I've become a victim of my own charm, William,” he said. “I've used it like a pose. I've filed down my rough edges with it, filed them down so well that they've almost disappeared.”

“I don't follow.”

He smiled. “I'm not surprised. I'm talking to myself, you see. It's an interior monologue.” He motioned for the barmaid and ordered another Scotch. “Do you know what Goethe's last words were, William?”

“Yes,” I said. “It's a well-known anecdote.
‘Mehr Licht,
' more light.”

“Have you brought more light into the world, William?”

The question was so grand that only a modest reply was possible. “Perhaps a little,” I said.

“And your work,” Jason said. “Does it ever look like a sham, a deception?”

“No.”

“Good for you,” Jason said. He smiled quietly as the barmaid brought his second drink. He lifted the glass. “To the truth of the work, then,” he said, and tossed off his Scotch.

“Perhaps we should order dinner,” I suggested.

Jason laughed. “You don't have to worry about my getting drunk in a public place and making a fool of myself, William. I haven't done that since I was a very young man with a wife in Hollywood.”

I continued to watch him closely but said nothing.

“You don't believe me, do you?” Jason asked.

“Of course I do.”

Jason looked at me very gravely. “I never willingly lied, William,” he said, almost pleadingly. “I never willingly distorted.”

I leaned toward him. “What is this all about?”

Jason shook his head. “It's just too embarrassing,” he said with a mocking smile. “Just too embarrassing.”

“What?”

For a moment he seemed determined to tell me. I could see the resolve clearly in his face, and an instant later I saw it just as clearly disappear.

“It's not your problem,” he said as he slowly got to his feet. “It's not even Elena's problem. It's mine.”

I stood up, too. “I'm totally at sea in all this, Jason,” I told him.

Jason nodded quickly as he laid a ten-dollar bill on the table. “I'm not surprised,” he said dryly. “Sorry I can't stay for dinner.”

I took hold of his arm. “I'm your friend, Jason.”

“Yes, of course,” Jason said, almost sharply, as if such indulgence offended him. He hesitated, and then regarded me intently. “You wouldn't think of me as a violent man, would you, William?”

“No.”

Jason looked at me as if I were the shallowest person on earth. Then he turned and walked away.

I
suppose that had Jason been a less understated man I would have let the matter drop, simply gone home and slept off my concern. But his agitation was so contradictory to his usual calm that my alarm increased after he had left the restaurant. I sat nursing a second brandy and replaying our conversation. The mystery only deepened, however, and before long I had to find the answer.

I went first to Jason's apartment, but he was not in. So I went to Elena's in Brooklyn Heights.

She opened the door immediately. She was dressed in a long skirt and bulky sweater. She tugged her glasses from around her ears and look at me quizzically.

“Didn't Jason tell you that I couldn't make it to dinner?” she asked.

“Yes, he did,” I told her. “He seemed out of sorts.”

Elena nodded. “He probably was.” She opened the door and stepped back to let me in.

I walked through the short hallway and into Elena's combination living room and office. Her desk was at the side of the room, near the window. It was covered with papers, and her old typewriter, the one my father had given her so long ago, sat open on it. The manuscript of
Quality
was sitting on the wide windowsill beside the desk. It was perhaps six inches thick.

Elena was entirely calm, quite different in her mood from Jason. ‘This afternoon Jason and I fought like a couple of teenagers,” she said, shaking her head. “It was ridiculous, really. I think we're both ashamed of ourselves. Sit down, William.”

I remained standing.

Elena walked to the fireplace and leaned against the mantel. “I'm too old for this sort of thing, and I won't put up with it.”

“I don't mean to pry,” I began, “but could you —”

“Of course you mean to pry, William,” Elena said firmly. “Every life is a soap opera but our own.” There was a harshness in her voice that I had never heard before.

“I could leave now, if that's what you want,” I said.

Elena waved her arm dismissively. “Oh, for God's sake, sit down, William. I don't need another display of wounded pride today.”

I sat down on the sofa.

“We had a fight,” Elena said. “It's just that simple. I happened to mention some doubts I had about some of the things he'd written in
The American Experience.
” She glanced angrily toward the window. “His response was hysterical.”

“That doesn't sound like Jason,” I said.

Elena remained on her feet. She glared down at me. “I don't care how it sounds, that's what happened.”

“Well, what exactly did you say?” I asked cautiously.

She was about to answer when there was a knock at the door.

“That's probably Jason,” Elena said. “He called a few minutes ago.” She did not move.

“Should I leave?” I asked.

“No,” she said. She walked slowly to the door and opened it. From the living room I could see Jason standing in the doorway.

“William's here,” Elena told him. “Do you still want to come in?”

“Yes, I do,” Jason said. His voice was very soft. She stepped out of the doorway and allowed h m to pass in front of her.

Jason nodded to me as he walked into the living room, then he turned to Elena.

“I've come to apologize,” he said.

“I accept,” Elena said coolly. “Now you can go, if you like.”

“No, Elena, I can't,” Jason said. “Now I have apologized to you, and I think we both know that I am not the only villain of the piece.”

Elena walked across the room and took up her position by the fireplace again.

“You expect an apology from me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“For hasty judgments, Elena.”

“About what?”

Jason shook his head despairingly. “You know exactly what I'm talking about.” He looked at me. “She believes that
The American Experience
is — how did she put it? A work of rhetoric, not of history.” He looked at Elena. “Isn't that about right?”

“Yes,” Elena said firmly.

Jason glanced at me helplessly, then he turned back to my sister.

“You've learned a great deal since you started your book, Elena,” he said, “but you shouldn't believe that you've learned everything.”

“I don't.”

“Not about American intellectual history,” Jason added, “and not about me.” He turned to me. “She thinks I glorify war and violence in my books.”

“Wittingly or unwittingly,” Elena added.

“She says this about a pacifist,” Jason said, still looking at me.

Elena rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Jason, there's no need to go over this again.”

Jason continued to stare into my eyes. “How can she believe such a thing?”

I looked into Jason's face, and I realized that what my sister had discovered was the truth. There was a violence in his soul which he had spent a long, heroic life suppressing. It had been born, no doubt, in the rage he had known in his youth, the rage to escape from the heavy wool of family and regional loyalty, which only the force of a violent temperament could have overthrown. But the violence had remained, in the long passages of cathartic battle and massive destruction that flared up in his work — the almost loving portrait, for example, of the burning of Atlanta. Elena had seen this, had seen how his early hatred and the need to control it had “continually shifted his work,” as she wrote in
Quality
, “between roseate romanticism and a terrible swift sword.”

When I made no response at all to Jason's question, he turned back to Elena.

“Do you think my whole life is a charade?” he asked. “Just one long hypocrisy?”

“No, Jason,” Elena said. She glanced toward the window. “Perhaps you'd better go.”

“No!” Jason said. He walked over to the window and picked up the manuscript of
Quality.
“Do you think there are no errors in this goddamn thing?”

Elena turned toward him. “Put it down, Jason.”

Jason waved the pages in the air. A few slipped from the stack and scattered across the floor in front of him. “Your mind is a knife, Elena,” he shouted. “Just a knife to slash things with!”

“Put that down,” Elena said firmly. She took a step toward him.

Jason continued to wave the manuscript. “What if I were to throw it in the goddamn fire,” he threatened.

I stood up. “For God's sake, this is not a scene from Ibsen,” I told him. “Put it down.”

Jason glared lethally at Elena. Then, in what must have been for him a gesture as uncontrollable as the movement of a planet, he hurled the manuscript at my sister. The pages flew into the air all around us, then fell to the floor.

Elena did not move. Nor did I. We simply stood silently and watched as Jason walked slowly to the door. When he reached it, he turned around.

“Elena,” he said softly.

She walked over to him and opened the door.

“Good night, Jason,” she said.

Jason stepped into the hallway. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“So am I,” Elena said. Then she closed the door.

She walked back into the living room and without a word began gathering up the pages of her book. She was trying very hard not to cry.

“Maybe this can all be forgotten,” I said lamely.

Elena did not look up from the floor.

“Maybe you could indulge him a little,” I suggested.

“No,” Elena said sternly.

“Just a little,” I said. “Why not?”

“Because that is not my function in life, William,” Elena said. She picked up the last pages, took the ones I had gathered up from me, and laid them all in a stack on the mantel. Standing there in her long black skirt, the marble mantelpiece behind her, a fire at her feet, she looked very much, as she had once jokingly described herself, “like an English murderess.”

“Would you like a drink, William?” she asked.

“If you're having one.”

She walked into the adjoining kitchen, and from my seat in the living room I could hear her drawing the glasses down from their shelf. Years later, she would tell me that those few moments alone in the kitchen had been among the most terrible of her life, that she had thought of nothing but Jason, and that she had had to fight every impulse within her not to rush down the stairs and bring him back.

“Brandy for you, of course,” she said as she walked back into the living room and handed me my glass.

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

“You know, Miriam and I used to have some pretty bad rows,” I said, almost lightly, “and we always got over them.”

Elena sipped her wine slowly, watching the fire.

“We just simmered down after a while,” I continued. “By the end of the day, we always loved each other again.”

Elena nodded in that desultory fashion of hers, an indication of neither argument nor agreement but only that her ear had received my voice.

“And of course, after a particularly bad squabble —”

Elena lifted her hand. “Enough, William.”

“Sorry,” I said quickly.

She took another sip of wine. “I wish I could just forget about it,” she said after a moment. “Forget about his books, his contradictions.” She looked at me. “But I can't.”

I leaned toward her. “Why not, Elena?”

She smiled, but very sadly. “Because I know them too well,” she said. As she sipped her wine and watched the fire, she seemed to possess rather painfully that form of surgical understanding which in
Quality
she ascribed to Henry James, “the peculiar human cost of a great intelligence.”

F
or the next three years, Elena worked more or less continually on
The Quality of Thought in American Letters.
She and Jason resumed contact, walking cautiously together along what Jason romantically called “
a
delta made of old erosions.” They would sometimes have dinner together, usually in Brooklyn Heights so that Elena could return to her work immediately after. Occasionally he would lure her out of the city — a day at the Danbury Fair, for example, or a trip to the Hamptons — but they never shared the house on Cape Cod again. Elena would sometimes go alone, sometimes with me, sometimes with Alexander and his family. In Martha's biography, my son is quoted as saying that even on the Cape Elena seemed preoccupied with
Quality
, and this is quite correct.