Elena (57 page)

Elena suddenly moved forward and drew Martha into her arms. “I loved your mother very much,” she said.

Martha smiled sadly. “Yes, I know.” She drew back, then took both Elena's hands in hers. “You know, Mother and I weren't that close, in some ways,” she said. “I always thought she could have been so much more.”

Elena drew her hands slowly from Martha's grasp and sank them into the pockets of her coat. “We can never know what is possible for someone else, Martha.”

Martha's face tightened. She understood that she had been gently scolded. “Well, I suppose we should go to the chapel now,” she said, avoiding any further discussion of her mother.

It was a small stone church. Mary's coffin had been placed at the front, below the raised pulpit. It was covered with roses. There were no other flowers. Long before, Mary had decreed that her coffin be closed, since even in death she did not want her wrinkles to show.

The chapel was almost completely full. Even so, it was a small assembly. A few people had flown in from California. They were quiet and well-dressed, and in their manner appeared more to have been the friends of Mary's husband than herself.

The ceremony began with a song played on a beat-up piano by an old woman Martha had hired for the occasion. Mary herself had selected the song, however. It was “Hail to the Chief,” and when it began, a round of quiet, nervous laughter swept the crowd.

Martha was smiling as she stepped up behind the lectern when the music stopped. “My mother was not high on ceremony,” she said. “She planned this funeral to be a simple affair. She only wanted one person to speak, Elena Franklin.” She glanced back at us.

The crowd shifted uneasily as Elena rose and walked to the front of the chapel. When she reached the altar, she turned slowly and lowered her hands into the pockets of her coat.

“I suppose that if I asked any one of you to describe Mary Farrell,” she began, “at least part of that description would include her wit. She made it that part of her we remember most. Yet I think she knew how cynical and blind wit can be if it is not joined to other virtues.”

She stopped and glanced quickly at Martha, who sat in the first row, then back up at the rest of us. “Thought is the greatest achievement of the mind, hope the greatest achievement of the heart, and goodness the greatest achievement of the will. When wit diminishes any of these, it reduces our humanity. This was sometimes the case with our friend, as it is the case, to more or less degree, with all of us. The point, however, is that Mary used her wit to reveal herself, not to conceal. She had the peace that comes from being exactly what she seemed. She accepted her limits and ignored her possibilities. Her knowledge of herself was very deep, and she possessed what Emily Dickinson called ‘apocalyptic wisdom,' the sort that will not be diverted from the terrifying implications of its understanding. She had stared down into that abyss from which so many turn their eyes, and in the face of that knowledge, her wit became her means of survival. It did not relieve her of her pain, but it kept her from imposing it on us.

“It has been said that a book can never be both great and angry, and the same can be said of a life. Anyone who knew Mary knew there was anger in her. Part of it flowed from the simple fact that she was a woman who understood the peculiar contradictions of that estate. She knew that the man's world in which her life was imbedded would praise her dutifulness, then allow her only trifling duties; extol her intuitiveness, then bar her from the harder world of fact by sneering at her illogic; exalt her sense of service, then feed upon it. Particularly in her youth, Mary felt the constriction of her womanhood. But she also felt the larger human failure from which it came: the casual abandonment of that principle of moral thought which requires consistency between the admiration of a virtue and the treatment of it. And I think that she saw this as part of a larger debility: an indifference to suffering that is not your own. ‘Every man is an island,' Mary used to say, laughing as she did so, ‘so make sure you check for whom the bell tolls, because if you're lucky, it may not be for you.''

There was a smattering of subdued laughter, and Elena waited for it to subside. Then she continued.

“This distrust of human nature was as deep as Mary's cynicism ever went, but it was deep enough to hold her in its grasp. It drove her into a life that could only look apathetic to those who viewed it from a distance. She married, as she always said, ‘quite often and quite well'; and to her oldest friends, this seemed emblematic of a larger self-indulgence. But there must be a place in the world for the unbeliever who cannot hide his unbelief or act against it, for the one who loves nature but cannot be a pantheist, who dreams of human community but cannot be a Communist, stands in awe of creation, but cannot leap from bafflement to God. Mary was one of these, and she paid the price of all those like her. She never knew the glory of fighting for a great idea, nor the pain of abandoning it. Such is the penalty of disengagement, and none greater should be asked of anyone.”

Elena glanced about the chapel, then drew her hands from the pockets of her coat and grasped the sides of the lectern. “The essential quality of goodness,” she said, leaning forward, “is its sense of preservation. Because of that, it must have already seemed an ancient value to the first human being who consciously possessed it. It seems to me that we must judge a life not by what it spent but by what it saved. This is no easy task. It is our duty to know as much as we can of what the mind and heart can teach us. To accomplish this, of course, we have only those powers of thought and feeling which have been given us imperfectly and which remain, as Mary surely knew, at once both crippled and supreme. I will leave the question of the goodness of Mary's life to you, and I think that you could not more honor her — and certainly not more please her — than by attempting quite seriously to answer it.”

She nodded slightly to the crowd as she stepped down. Then she returned to her seat and sat silently beside me while the final stages of the funeral were concluded. And I suppose I should have known then what I only learned years later, as I sat in the darkness with
Quality
on my lap and the memory of Elena's remarks at Mary's funeral in my mind. I should have known that for all her outward calm as she sat beside me, her features almost melding with the frozen beauty of the New England countryside that surrounded her, I should have known that her mind was on the road again, that it had turned onto another path, one which had led her to the most difficult of our questions, the one least accessible to our methods of approach: How can our knowledge make us good? In its own way, this was the only question my sister had ever asked, and now she was asking it again, not by going forward, but by returning, first, as a human being, to the rudiments of life, and then, as a writer, to the simplest of all tasks.

TO DEFINE A WORD

I
did not see Elena for almost a month after Mary's funeral. Nor did I call her or make any attempt whatsoever to contact her. If I had learned anything at all about my sister, it was that she sometimes needed to be alone. All my life, it seemed to me, I had offered unnecessary aid. There would be no more of it.

Still, I remained keenly interested in her next step. I knew there would be one, but I had no idea what it might be.

Then one afternoon when I met Sam for a drink after my classes at Columbia, a little light broke on the matter.

“By the way, William,” Sam said, “I got a call from Elena yesterday.”

“Really?”

“Have you talked to her since we got back from Maine?”

“No.”

Sam looked at me suspiciously. “You two didn't have some kind of argument, did you?”

I laughed. “Not at our age, Sam. What did she want?”

“She was asking about that house of mine on the Cape,” Sam said. “She said she might want to buy it.” He took a sip from his drink. “Sort of surprised me, since she hasn't been up there all that much since she broke off with Jason.”

“Do you want to sell it?”

“I told her I'd just let her have it for the summer, if that's what she wanted, a brief vacation out of the city.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said no, that she wanted something, you know, permanent.”

“You mean, leave New York?” I asked. I shook my head. “She'd never do that.”

Sam smiled that old sly smile of his. “Why not, William, you are.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That Harvard offer. You'll take it.”

“How'd you know about that?”

“I have my sources,” Sam said. He gave me a cunning wink. “You'll take it, William. I know you will. Because you can't turn it down. Not Harvard. Teaching there will finally legitimate your career, all your work.”

I waved my hand dismissively. “Ridiculous.”

Sam watched me knowingly. “You're still basically a little boy from Connecticut with a traveling salesman for a father and no prospects of your own,” he said. In the twilight years you need a little affirmation. Harvard will give you that. It's bullshit, but it's gold plated.”

“Maybe it's not that at all, Sam,” I said, weakly defending myself. “Maybe I just need a change.”

Sam took another sip from his drink. “I need a change myself,” he said. “I'm seventy-two, William, but I can still get it up.”

“Congratulations.”

“I still have some life, but I'm tired of Parnassus. I'm going to turn it over to Christina.” He scratched his chin. “I'm going to grow a beard, a big white one, just like Santa Claus, and then I'm going to give some things away. Like that little house of mine on Cape Cod.”

“She would never take it,” I told him.

“Not free, she wouldn't,” Sam said. “But — how shall I put it — she'll get a bargain, you know?”

I nodded.

“You know why I'm doing this?” Sam asked. “Because you're going to Cambridge, and I will not have Elena living alone.”

“Maybe that's what she wants.”

“It's just a two-hour drive from Boston to Cape Cod,” Sam said. “I'm sure you'll make it often, am I right?”

“I smiled. ‘I'll try.”

He slapped the table with his great open hand. “Good.”

“It's funny, Sam,” I told him, “I never figured you for early retirement, and certainly not for divestiture.”

“I'm going to Israel,” Sam said. “I'm going to plant a tree and give away some money and live on a kibbutz and tend the children while their parents farm.”

“You're
not
serious,” I blurted. “For God's sake, you're a native New Yorker. What the hell are you going to do in a desert village?”

“They ship in movies,” Sam said.

“Do they ship in nightclubs?”

Sam leaned toward me. “You've always thought me a vulgarian, William. And you're probably right, at least in some ways. But there's another side to every coin. I'm going to Israel — that's a fact. And you're going to Cambridge and Elena is going to Cape Cod.”

He left for Israel three months later. A huge party was thrown for him at Parnassus, during which he formally turned over control of the house to his daughter.

“I think Christina may not put up with some of the old guard,” I said to Elena as we stood together in the crowd.

Elena looked up at me. “I will miss Sam.” She smiled slightly. “And I will miss you, William.”

I had already accepted the post at Harvard and taken a small apartment on the Charles. Sam had been right about me, but he had been wrong about Elena. She had decided not to move to Cape Cod.

“Well,” I said, “I have another full week before I move. We should paint the town.”

Elena surprised me by liking the idea of a farewell celebration. “It could just be the remnants, William, just you and me and Sam,” she said.