Elena (58 page)

A week later we all met outside Parnassus. Sam was dressed to kill in a black tuxedo. I wore my standard dark gray suit, and Elena wore a long dark dress and black cape. She spun around for us, there on the street, the hem of her cape lifting to the air.

We began with dinner at Le Pavillon, an extravagance I had not expected, even from Sam. Then there was a round of dancing at the Waldorf, and I remember that Elena seemed almost girlish, the way she dipped and whirled in Sam's arms. We ended the evening with drinks in the Palm Court at the Plaza, while the pianist played the full list of songs that Sam had previously selected. By midnight we were exhausted as we struggled down an all-but-deserted Fifth Avenue. Sam had loosened his necktie, and its separate strands blew gently in the chill night breeze. Elena had slung her cape over her shoulder and was holding it with the peg of a single finger.

“What I can't get over,” Sam said, stopping to gaze down the wide, empty boulevard, “is how quiet New York can get on a night like this.” He looked at Elena. “It's the world's largest ghost town.”

“You'll miss it,” Elena said.

Sam smiled and draped one enormous arm over her shoulder. “Barney said something a little disturbing to me, Elena.”

“What was that?”

“He said you weren't working on anything.”

Elena smiled. “Well, that's Christina's worry now.”

“I'm not talking about making more money off you, my dear,” Sam said, “I've made enough.” He looked at her very intently. “I'm talking about your health, Elena, your mental health.”

Elena's face suddenly darkened. “Let's not spoil the night, Sam.”

“I leave tomorrow,” Sam said. “Do you think I should leave without saying a few important words to a friend?”

“I'm fine,” Elena assured him. She looked at me, as if for aid.

I stepped forward. “Come on, Sam, let's not get maudlin.”

Sam's eyes widened. “Maudlin? I'm talking about Elena's life.” He squeezed her shoulder. “You don't travel in a very big circle, Elena. Who do you have in the world? Just me and William. Now I'm going to Israel and William's off to Cambridge. Where does that leave you?”

“Please, Sam, I'd really like for you to stop now,” Elena said firmly.

Sam straightened himself, then pulled an envelope from his coat pocket. “This is a contract, all made out,” he said. He handed it to Elena. “It just needs your signature.”

Elena glanced at the envelope but said nothing.

“It gives you that house of mine on Cape Cod,” Sam said, “the one you asked me about. It gives you that, Elena, in exchange for the right to publish your next book. Any book. I don't care what.”

Elena smiled softly. “There may not be a next book, Sam.”

Sam shrugged. “Well, I may be dead, shot by some goddamn terrorist, by the time you find that out.”

Elena shook her head and held out the envelope. “No thanks.”

Sam did not take the envelope from her hand. ‘There is a custom among the Jews, Elena, called the Year of Jubilee. During that time, all debts are forgiven.” He placed his hand softly on the side of my sister's face. “I owe you a great deal. You helped to make Parnassus.” He smiled. “But you also owe me, because Parnassus helped to make you.” He nodded toward the envelope which Elena continued to hold out toward him. “You sign that contract, and we'll call it even.” He drew Elena into his arms. His eyes were glistening. “Tonight is our Year of Jubilee, Elena,” he said. “I want to leave with all my debts paid.”

Sam Waterman was dead by the time
To Define a Word
was published, but in at least one passage within that book, he lives. “Perhaps I could have had a perfect friend,” Manfred Owen says of the painter Kramer, “someone the crooked had by force or guile made straight, someone made good by unquestioned zealotries — a voice lost in anthems, a hand lost in salutes; but I had this floating You, Kramer, a beam more strong because composed of scattered light.”

Elena signed the contract then and there, with a pen I handed to her. She used Sam's back for a table, and she kissed him when she was through.

We took him to the airport a week later. He was in a jovial mood. He talked about how he was looking forward to the life he imagined lay ahead. He seemed oblivious to what it implied — the boredom and routine, the heat and dust, the petty squabbling of the kibbutz council — everything so trivial, it would seem, compared to the enterprises in which he had been so long engaged. I laughed and quoted Byron as the plane taxied away: “Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.”

Elena turned toward me. “You
have
grown cynical, William.”

“Mark my words, Elena, Sam will be back in New York within a year.”

She nodded. “Maybe.”

“Where else can he get really first-rate Châteaubriand?”

Elena laughed and took my arm. “When are you leaving for Cambridge?”

“First of the month,” I said. “Care to come along?”

“No.”

“May I leave you with a little advice then?” I asked, keeping the lightness in my voice.

“Please do.”

“Find something to work on. Start a new book, a new short story. Start a new essay. Start something, anything.”

She looked at me and smiled. “Is speed everything, William?”

“Elena, at our age, to hesitate is to die.”

She shook her head. “I'm not sure that's true. At our age, or any other.”

“You haven't written a word that I know of since you finished
Quality,
” I said.

“No, I haven't.”

“May I ask, as a brother, why that is?”

“Because I haven't found anything I particularly want to write.”

“Are you looking?”

“Yes, I am,” Elena said. “But not quickly. Not anymore.” It was clear that she did not intend now or ever again to be rushed ahead. Not by me; not by anyone. Later, she would make this explicit in chosing a line from Chaucer as the epigraph for
To Define a Word:
“He hasteth well that wisely can abide.”

I
t was in the dead of winter when Martha came to Cape Cod for her last interview with me. I picked her up at the airport in Hyannis, then drove her back to Elena's house in Brewster, the house I owned now, since she had left it to me.

Martha was bundled up in a host of coats and scarves and sweaters. She had flown in from California, and the East Coast seemed all the colder to her. “How do you stand this weather?” she asked as soon as I came through the doors of the terminal. She was bobbing on her feet and slapping at her shoulders with her gloved hands. “The cold and the isolation,” she went on. “Did Elena really want this?”

I nodded. “In her last years, I think she did.”

Martha quickly grabbed her two bags. “Well, let's go.”

There was a thick fog that day, gray and persistent, the sort that, after a time, makes you feel that the earth you stand on has somehow been torn out of the planet and that you are now suspended eternally in a ball of clouds.

Martha peered out the window as we drove slowly down Route 6A. “I've run into a blind spot,” she said.

“What kind?”

“Eight years in Elena's life. The time between when you left for Cambridge and she spent her first winter up here.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know what you mean.”

Martha turned toward me. “She didn't decide to live on the Cape year round until she … she … how should I put it?”

“Until she began to die.”

Martha nodded delicately. “That winter she spent here — that would have been the winter of 1975 — that's when she began
To Define a Word
, right?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Well, I've found out a lot about that time,” Martha said, “but the eight years immediately before it, they elude me, William.” She looked worried. “I really hope you can help me. After all, we're approaching the finish line now, aren't we?”

It did not seem the most felicitous of terms, finish line, but I suppose it had to do. “If you're looking for tragedy in the end, Martha,” I said, “disillusionment and hopelessness and all that sort of thing, then I'm afraid you've studied the wrong life.”

Martha shook her head. “I'm not looking for anything except the truth.”

We rode on silently for quite some time. In my mind I could see Elena standing on the curb outside my apartment on the day I left for Cambridge. It was in the fall, and she was wearing one of those heavy sweaters she always preferred, the ones with the deep pockets and thick collars. This particular one was buttonless, with a belt tied at the waist, and I remember that it seemed better suited to a younger woman than my sister. Her hair was almost completely white by then, though her skin remained very soft and smooth. She always looked very much as David once described her, like a young actress trying for the part of an older woman.

I glanced over at Martha. “Those years you're talking about,” I said, “I think Elena wanted them entirely to herself.”

Martha instantly snatched a pen and notebook from her coat pocket. “Go on.”

I shrugged. “Go on to what?”

“With your story.”

I tightened my grip on the wheel, steadying the car as we headed into a pocket of denser fog. “I'm not sure I have a story.”

“Well, you said that Elena wanted those years,” Martha said, coaxing me on. “What did she want them for?”

I could feel my mind pushing backward again. Elena was there on the curb, wrapped in her enormous sweater. David was bustling about the car, strapping boxes to the top. Elena smiled and said that we looked like a couple of refugees, and then David stepped over to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and said to Elena, “You'll miss this scholarly old buzzard, won't you?” And I remember that Elena's eyes moved slowly toward me, her face very calm and thoughtful as it silently answered my grandson's question: no.

I relaxed my grip on the wheel as we came out of the fog. “I think she wanted to be entirely alone,” I said. “She wanted to think, Martha, just to think deeply and for a long, long time.”

Martha wrote it down. “But that was sort of a pattern with her, wasn't it?”

I shook my head. “Not really,” I said.

Martha looked surprised by my answer. “But what about all those other times, her reclusiveness when she was writing
New England Maid
, and then later, the year or two just before she finished up
Quality?
”

“I suppose that can look like a pattern,” I admitted, “but this time it was different, I think, because Elena wasn't working on anything, on any book, I mean.” Again I could see her standing near the car as we pulled away. She raised her hand slowly and waved. A swirl of leaves rushed toward her, blown by a sudden gust of wind. She stared intently down at them and did not look up again before we had turned the corner and she was no longer in view. “She was not working on a book,” I said to Martha, very certain now that I was right. “She was working on her mind.”

And that is what she did for the next eight years: she thought about how to think. She continued to live in Brooklyn Heights, in her small, well-furnished apartment on Columbia Heights. Jason sometimes visited her there, but aside from him very few people saw her. Barney Nesbitt complained, grew disgruntled, accused Elena of wasting away. He wrote me letter after letter warning me that she was going crazy all alone. But I had by then learned not to be alarmed by such things. His portrait of her walking in solitary preoccupation on the Promenade, with all of lower Manhattan staring gloomily down at her from across the river, did not disturb me at all. She had what she needed, she had herself.

Which is precisely what I told Martha as we pulled up in front of Elena's house.

Martha smiled, a bit indulgently. “That's just a little glib, don't you think, William?”

I put the car in gear and turned toward her. “Does it matter that it's true?”

Martha looked skeptical. “Surely you're not saying that it was only very late in life that Elena learned to like herself.”

“Of course not. I think my sister was one of those very fortunate people who like themselves from the beginning and never stop liking themselves.”

Martha drew the collar of her coat more tightly over her throat. “Can we go in the house now? It's really dreary out here.”

I built a fire in the front room, and Martha and I sat down together. There was a small table between our two chairs, and I had placed a bottle of brandy on it. I poured a snifter for each of us.

“Take this, Martha,” I said. “This is the sort of drink that warms the blood and mellows the spirit.”

Martha smiled, took the glass from my hand, and downed it in one gulp. “Yes, very good.”

“I didn't realize you were such a longshoreman when it came to booze,” I told her.

“A woman has to learn to drink, William,” Martha said. “It pulls men up short, makes them realize you're not to be screwed around with.”

I see.

Martha nodded firmly. “Once you realize that people think in symbols, you have to get your symbols straight, and make sure everyone else does, too.”

I smiled. “I never doubted that you were a formidable person, Martha.”

Martha poured herself another brandy. “Good.” She took a small sip and laughed. “You didn't think I was going to down it like the first one, did you?”

“I'm only an observer here,” I said.

Martha laughed lightly. “I'll miss you, William. I'll miss these interviews.” She put down her glass. “This is the last one, I'm afraid.”

“Really?”

She nodded mournfully. “I've spent the advance, or most of it. I simply can't afford another plane fare back to the East Coast.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”