Elena (62 page)

“Good,” Elena said matter-of-factly. “I wrote to you last night, and to Jason and Jack. I'll mail theirs this morning.” She glanced out toward the sea, held her gaze there a moment, then continued. “I've only known for a few weeks myself.” She turned back to me. “I have about three months.”

I felt a shudder pass over me, but quickly suppressed any outward sign. “You plan to stay here on the Cape?”

“Yes.” She got up quickly, walked to the cupboard near the sink, and brought out a box of blueberry muffins. “Would you like one?”

“No,” I said. “Look, Elena, what is it, exactly, that you have?”

“It's a problem of the heart,” she said. She opened the box of muffins, then closed it immediately and looked up at me. “Congestive heart failure. That's the technical name.” She shrugged. “A very advanced case of it, evidently.”

“How long have you known?” I asked.

“Not very long at all,” she said almost casually, but with a strain in her voice that quite audibly betrayed her fear. “I had noticed a certain weakness for quite some time. Well over a year, at least. I thought it was a part of getting older. But it was this disease.” She held her eyes very directly upon my face as she continued, as if by focusing on my emotions she could control her own. “It's a problem in the left ventricle of the heart, Dr. Lawson says, and in many cases it can be helped.” She shook her head. “But not in mine.”

“How about surgery?” I asked.

“Too late.”

“Well, what can be done, then?”

“Not much,” Elena said. “I should rest as much as possible. I should stay calm, which is not easy to do. Little things like not eating salt.” She stood up, returned the box of muffins to the cupboard, and then sat back down. “One thing, William. I don't want to spend my last days in a hospital, or in a drugged stupor.” She reached over and took my hand. “There's relatively little pain. I'll have more and more trouble breathing.” She shrugged. “Then I'll die.”

She looked calm, matter-of-factly relating what she took to be the routine etiology of her disease as if the life it threatened were that of some distant relative or long-lost friend.

“So, there you have it,” she said.

I nodded slowly, then started to speak.

Elena lifted her hand to stop me. “I know. You're sorry about all this. So am I, believe me. But there are other things to think about, now. Some of them are sentimental. Some of them are vain.”

“I've come to help in any way I can,” I told her.

“I've arranged to give a full interview to the
Saturday Review,
” Elena said. “I'd like for you to sit in on it so that you can correct any misstatements I might make.”

“All right.”

“Also, Martha Farrell is coming to do another interview for the biography. I'd rather she not know about my illness.”

“I won't tell her.”

“Good,” Elena said. “Finally, to the sentimental things. I've told both Jason and Jack I'd like to see them. I'd like you to help make sure that these visits don't become overly mournful.”

“That will be hard to do,” I told her.

“William, I don't want to get more and more unhappy before I die, do you understand? Certainly these next few months won't be pleasant. But I don't think they have to be morbid.”

“So, you're going to a adopt the laugh-death-in-the-face attitude?” I asked.

Elena shook her head. “No, of course not. I'm very glad you're going to be here with me, William,” she said, her eyes growing moist. “I know I'm going to be afraid.”

E
lena was still vigorous a month later when the reporter from the
Saturday Review
showed up on a chilly Thursday morning. He was a trim young man, who had already written a number of articles on my sister and who came with a mind well equipped to probe her.

He looked surprised when I opened the door, though he recognized me almost immediately. “You're William Franklin, I believe?” he said.

“I'm staying a few days with Elena,” I explained. “She'll be out in a minute. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

He declined.

“Elena usually likes to sit in the back room by the fire,” I said. I motioned toward the rear of the house. “Back here. Come on in.”

He followed me into the back room, glancing about, taking it all in — the few pictures Elena had bought, the book on this table or that. It was obvious that the smallest object grew magical because of its association with my sister, and that the young man, whose name was Michael Peterson, as he later told me, intended to soak up the aura.

“Quite modestly furnished,” he said as he took a seat in the back room.

“It's just a cottage with heat,” I told him. “There's not much room for display.”

“But the place in New York, Miss Franklin's apartment, I suppose it's more elaborate?”

I shook my head. “Not elaborate, but well appointed, I'd say. Elena has almost always lived comfortably. In Paris she lived on the Île Saint-Louis.”

Peterson nodded quickly. “Yes, I know.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I understand a biography is being written?”

“Yes.”

He looked disappointed. “Someone from California, I'm told.”

“Martha Farrell, the daughter of one of Elena's old friends.”

He sat back. “Too bad for me,” he said with a slight smile. “I'd hoped to do one myself. I've always admired her work.”

“Well, there's probably room for more than one book about Elena.”

“Yes, certainly,” Peterson said. He stared out the large window. “Nice view of the sea.”

“Yes,” I said. “Very nice.”

“Why has Miss Franklin suddenly decided to give a long interview?” he asked me.

“Maybe because she wants to make things clear.”

“Why now, in particular?”

“One gets to a certain age, you know.”

Peterson watched me suspiciously. “I'm not a hack journalist, Mr. Franklin,” he said. “I'm here because I respect your sister's work. There's no need for you or her to feel cautious with me.”

“I don't feel cautious, Mr. Peterson,” I told him. “I feel protective of my sister's privacy.”

Peterson smiled very gently. “I think I understand.”

“Good.”

Elena came in a few minutes later. She was wearing a plain dark dress, and her hair was drawn into a bun behind her head. She took off her reading glasses as she sat down opposite Mr. Peterson.

“It's a great pleasure to meet you,” he said.

Elena nodded. “Thank you.” She seemed unusually tired that morning, and there was a slight trembling in her right hand. During the night she had wandered about the house more or less incessantly. Once I had offered to sit up with her, but she had declined and shuffled back into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

“I really fought for this assignment,” Peterson said.

Elena smiled but said nothing.

“Mr. Franklin tells me that you consented to this interview in order to clear up a few things,” Peterson said.

“Yes,” Elena said, “and my brother has agreed to sit in on the interview, so that our collective memory might keep matters straight.”

She seemed stiff at the beginning, as if determined to maintain a certain distance from the matters she would be discussing, that is to say, the matter of her life. Peterson caught this nuance, and in his introduction to the interview he stated it rather well: “She answered the most intimate questions about her life as if they dealt with someone else's, a person of some renown whom she had known for some time. By pulling away from her life slightly, Elena Franklin entered it more deeply, and for me this transformed an ordinary interview into a uniquely personal experience.”

Peterson began with questions about her childhood, and as I sat quietly listening to Elena's replies, Standhope swam back into my memory. I saw the dusty square, heard the Italian cobblers shouting at each other from their upstairs shop, saw McCarthy Pond glittering in the midsummer sun and the large oak that towered over our house on Wilmot Street. It seemed not so long ago that I had lived there.

“There is a sense in much of your writing,” Peterson said, “a sense of paternalism, if you will. Was your father a great influence on you?”

Elena answered by describing our father in a way that struck me as surprisingly realistic. It was an honest portrait, warts and all, and yet it was also very affectionate.

“My father was too selective in the things he loved,” she said, “and dismissive toward the things he didn't. He loved the road, which could not love him back, and was indifferent to my mother, who loved him all her life.” She did not add that he had also loved her, though she was strong enough not to need it, but had not loved me, his son, who had felt at times that he could hardly live without it. “He was faithful to himself,” she added in conclusion, “but to almost nothing else. There was rakish courage in his independence, but there was moral failure in it, too.” Her eyes moved slowly toward me. “My father had great energy, but it was mostly appetite. He insisted on his freedom but used it chiefly to serve himself. When he touched ground, he destroyed things that did not deserve to be blown apart.”

Peterson asked about our mother, her insanity. He wondered if Elena had ever feared that she herself was going mad, and she replied that she hadn't. “Others have found me reclusive from time to time,” she said, “and they may have worried about me. But I have never worried about myself in that regard, nor have I ever thought the reclusive impulse to be anything but sane.”

Peterson then turned to her life in Standhope, her relationship to the town. Predictably, Elena's attitude had softened with time, a change Peterson noted. “You seem to have grown almost wistful about your hometown,” he said lightly.

“Wistful?” Elena said. “No, I don't think I've grown wistful.”

“Well, you're certainly not as angry about it as you once were.”

“No, perhaps not,” Elena said, “but anger is not a sustaining emotion.”

“There was anger in
Calliope
,” Peterson said.

“That was outrage, not personal anger. There is a difference.”

“Which is?”

Elena shifted in her seat. “Outrage is propelled by a sense of justice,” she said, “but personal anger is propelled by a sense of personal insult, something like that.” She shifted again, and I saw her wince with pain. “I was glad to be angry with Standhope. The anger made me determined to leave it behind.”

Peterson nodded. “But what about all those people who feel the same kind of resentment but can't leave it behind, who just smolder.”

Elena shrugged. “I would hope that if they come across a copy of
New England Maid
, reading it will help them to turn their phosphorescence into flame.”

Peterson then asked my sister about the time she had lived alone in Standhope with our mother. Elena explained that too much had been made of that period of her life, particularly in certain essays about her early work. For the first time, she spoke in some detail about her life on the road with our father. It turned out to have been less sordid than I had imagined, my father ever alert to her protection, steering her away from what he called “low types who just want one thing,” men, that is, not very different from himself. Her trips with him were also more rare than I had previously thought, and so for the greater part of those years she had, in fact, remained closeted in the house on Wilmot Street.

“And what about loneliness?” Peterson asked. “Were you lonely during this period?”

“Perhaps.”

“There is a persistent loneliness in your work.”

“If there were no loneliness in an artist's work, then it would not be true,” Elena said. “But again, there is a difference between personal loneliness, which is debilitating, even pathetic, and metaphysical loneliness, the loneliness one feels as one who shares the human fate.” She stopped and took a drink from the glass of water beside her. “This second loneliness is something I feel all the time. The first I feel only on occasion, but never with such depth as to make me very knowledgeable on the subject.”

Peterson seemed to take this as a final pronouncement and moved on, this time to Elena's early years in New York. Here she seemed almost to glow as she related her arrival, her years at Barnard, the gift she had received from Dr. Stein. “For Dr. Stein, learning was a mission,” she told Peterson, “a task of moral passion, something that had to be done not because it was fun, or even because it was noble, but because it was a mitzvah, a requirement of the highest order.” She smiled. “Once he said, ‘Elena, remember this, when Adam took a bite of fruit from the tree of knowledge, he did the right thing.'”

Peterson continued to question Elena about her life in New York for almost another hour before finally going on to the publication of
New England Maid.

Elena was surprisingly dismissive about her first book. “It's very dated, now,” she said.

“It's still in print,” Peterson reminded her. “And very popular on college campuses.”

“For me it is dated,” Elena said. “And I don't mean simply because many of the things it protested against no longer exist. It is dated as a part of my own development. It seems to me little more than a portrait of a girl resentful of her past and struggling to escape it. As such, it may be useful to people in the same predicament. But as a document of intellectual worth, it is more or less useless. It is filled with passionate attitudes and responses, some of which are legitimate, some of which are not.”

It took a moment for Peterson to get into the mood necessary to defend a book to its author. “Well,” he said at last, “it seems to be a book that at least suggests some early gifts, literary gifts, that sort of thing. The language is very beautiful in parts.”