Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  After leaving Battery Park, Jack and Elena journeyed north to the Lower East Side, and there they walked the crowded streets of the noisy tenement district, glancing at the unplucked chickens that hung in the shop windows along Hester Street. On Delancey, Jack good-naturedly bargained over the price of a lacy tablecloth, which he finally bought and which covered the small dining room table in Elena’s house on Cape Cod the day she died. He told her that Walt Whitman had walked these same streets and had learned more about the city from them than he could have learned from a thousand government statisticians. He then launched into a sermonette on the purposes of poetry, hailing Whitman and Vachel Lindsay and dismissing Eliot peremptorily with Floyd Dell’s remark about his “beery, bleary pathos.” To this, Elena made feeble objection. “But Jack was really on fire then,” she told me later, “and he bluntly insisted that all of Eliot was just prissy poor-mouthing, and he smiled and did a parody, putting his hand on his heart and reciting loudly, ‘We are the hollow men, whining together.’”

  They went to the Bowery after that and had oxtail stew for fifteen cents a bowl at Blossom’s Restaurant. The Bowery was as dreadful then as it is now, its brick streets little more than jagged roadways through a landscape of vagrancy and destitution, an alcoholic purgatory. Jack made sure that Elena saw it all, every bit of it, from Houston Street to Cooper Union. Just how powerfully she was affected became clear in the scene in Calliope when Finch, after a night of drinking, is tossed from a cab for throwing up in the back seat and is left helplessly sprawled in the gutter, still lucid despite the alcohol:

  He left me, that modern Samaritan, in the inch-deep gutter wash. There was something green floating near my ear, and I tried to get my eyes on it, jerking my head to the right. It swam into view — a crumpled package of Lucky Strikes, and a bunch of soggy cigarettes — but I couldn’t get my hand up, and so I just lay back, letting the water seep down the collar of my shirt. As I lay there, everything went very dark, then brightened to a kind of heavy, gray fog. I thought I was going out, but the sounds got to me first, a few voices mumbling over me.

  I could smell the stink coming from them, that nickel-flophouse smell of rat poison and watered-down disinfectant. They bent toward me and I could smell them perfectly now, smell the shaving lotion on their breath, and the cloying sweetness from the cheap fruit wine. The sores on their faces smelled like over-ripened grapes, kind of sour in its sweetness. I felt them then, their fingers, stubby, bumbling, shaking with the tremor of too little booze. They were in my pockets and unfastening my watch. They were pulling down my socks and tugging at the gold ring on my finger. After awhile they stopped, and I could feel the breeze on me and knew that they had stripped me clean, left me sprawled and soaking in my underwear, and I thought it was over then.

  Time passed, hazy time, while the sweet smell lingered, and then I saw something else, a face, staring down, getting closer. I was clear enough by then to see how haggard it was, a crone’s face, with shaggy hair and dark creases that would scare children, and I thought, almost laughing, This person must know about Saint Jude. This person knows there’s a saint whose special province is such desperate cases. I heard myself laugh a little, just under my breath, and the face heard it too and stiffened a little and reared back, the eyes narrowing. A shadow passed over my face and then I felt something hot on my cheek and I realized that she had slapped me, had slapped my grinning face with all her drunken might.

  After the Bowery, Jack took Elena to the watchman’s shack on Coenties Slip, on the East River, and for the next hour or so she listened as Jack and the watchman discussed the life of the waterfront. Then they crossed Manhattan once again, stopping at the enormous Hooverville that stretched out to the river from the west-side wharves. Jack told her that the police were wary of entering such places, that they called the crime there “shanty trouble” and let it go. He said that there were similar places from Maine to California, and that in St. Louis he had seen a row of makeshift houses made from nothing but old barrels and tarpaper, and that it stretched for a full mile along the riverbank.

  The rest of the afternoon was a hopscotch tour of various quarters of the city. They went to the municipal incinerators and saw the men sleeping beside them to keep warm. He showed her bread lines and soup kitchens. In the Bronx, he told her how coal was smuggled into New York by unemployed miners from Pennsylvania. On Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, they stood among the sea of unemployed gazing up at the chalkboard displays of the employment agencies lining the avenue from Forty-second to Thirty-fourth Street. Jack marveled at their passivity and the mild hum of their conversation. In the West, he said, things were different. There men set forest fires in order to be hired to put them out. He took her to the sweatshops of the garment district and the near-empty hiring halls of the trade unions. And over everything, as Elena later said, he cast his own peculiar shadow, carefully guiding her away from mere shock, mere pity. “He showed me the underbelly of a great city,” she said in the 1980 interview, “and I must tell you that I had lived in New York for quite some time by then, but that much of this had been invisible to me. For Jack, it was important that I see it. He believed that experience was instructive in the making of a life — not an artist’s life particularly, but any life. He took me on that trip because I was a person, not, God forbid, because I was a writer.”

  The trip ended at around seven, when Jack finally dropped Elena off at Three Arts. I was waiting in the lobby when the two of them came in. Jack was walking behind my sister in that ambling gait of his, which Mary was sure he had borrowed from Jack London. He glanced about the room as he trailed behind, taking in everything, the neatness and enforced femininity of the place, its detachment from any of the things he had seen that day.

  “Ah, William,” Elena said as she came over to me, “I’m glad you’re here.” She turned toward Jack. “You’ve met my brother, I think.”

  Jack nodded, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his flannel pants. “Yes. You’re seeing Miriam Gold quite a lot now. She’s a very interesting woman.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  An awkward silence followed while the three of us stared mutely at each other.

  “Well,” I said finally, “I was thinking of taking Elena out to dinner.”

  Elena glanced quickly at Jack. It was obvious that she had entirely forgotten about our previous arrangement. “Well, actually,” she said hesitantly, “Jack and I were thinking of eating in.”

  “At my apartment,” Jack said. He smiled at Elena. “But we don’t have to do that. Especially since William’s come all this way.” He turned to me. “Why don’t we all go to this little hole-in-the-wall place I know over on Eighty-ninth?”

  I felt a bit awkward at the suggestion. One did not have to be very perceptive to see that a great deal had already transpired between Elena and Jack, that their tour of the city had opened up new wonders, at least for my sister, and that one of them was Jack himself.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to interfere,” I said halfheartedly.

  “With what, William?” Jack asked.

  “With whatever you two had already planned.”

  “Nonsense,” Jack said cheerfully. “It’d give me an opportunity to learn more about you. Please, come along with us.”

  I glanced at Elena, trying to read what she might want, ready to go along with it. She was standing silently beside Jack, and her face gave not the slightest hint of what she wanted me to do. Even in such small matters, she was always careful to let one’s choice be truly one’s own. Perhaps she later abandoned this attitude, especially after what happened to Elizabeth. In her last novel there is a scene in which Manfred Owen’s daughter finds a small deer trapped in the underbrush. When Owen moves to free it, his daughter tries to stop him, portentously declaring that “all things have a fate, and for some deer, it is the bramble.” But Owen pulls it free, blurting angrily at his daughter, “You wouldn’t accept such a ‘fate’ for yourself. Why should you accept it fo
r another?”

  But that small scene was written years after the one currently transpiring in the busy lobby of Three Arts, and at that time, when Elena was only twenty-four, she was a good deal more quietly rigid than she later became. When I think of her that afternoon, carefully withholding any gesture of guidance, I see the small child that New England and our strained and secretive household had finally bred. Her silence seems to me at one with the stony reserve of those New England oddities about whom she read in her youth, but from whose fatalism she ultimately escaped, so that in her last book Manfred Owen could, at last, set free a deer.

  “Oh, come on, William,” Jack said. “You don’t want to go all the way back down to the Village.”

  “Well,” I said, like a reluctant old gentleman who doesn’t wish to be a bother, “if you’re sure you don’t mind.”

  The restaurant was small and dingy, with pocked tables and squeaky, unstable wooden chairs. But the food was cheap, and in those days that was everything.

  “This place used to be quite a hangout,” Jack said after we had taken our seats. “I remember when I got back from Seattle in twenty-nine, it was jumping like a bedbug.”

  The waiter stepped up immediately and we all ordered sandwiches and beer. Then Jack began to talk in his animated fashion, fingers always plucking at the air, head bobbing and weaving like a fighter under attack.

  “I remember I was here one night in March of twenty-nine,” he said. “I’d just gotten back from the West Coast. I was working on one of those ‘ten-years-after’ stories. This one was about going back to Seattle ten years after the general strike of 1919. The editor figured I was the best man to cover it since I’d actually been in Seattle in 1919.” He laughed. “I was just a teenager at the time the strike began, and I remember the things Mayor Johnson said about the strikers. My God, he painted them as devils. I thought it was the end of the world.”

  “You weren’t at the barricades in those days?” I asked.

  Jack shook his head. “I wasn’t anywhere at all. Just a kid on the corner with nothing in his head.” He looked at Elena. “I needed experience.”

  “Yes, I suppose we all need experience,” I said lamely.

  Jack’s eyes darted toward me. “I’ve been talking to Elena about a book,” he said.

  “Your book?” I asked.

  Jack chuckled and shook his head as his gaze drifted back to Elena. “No. Elena’s new book.”

  “I didn’t know she had one.”

  “I don’t,” Elena said. “But Jack was telling me that he thought it was about time for someone to attempt an important novel about the Depression.”

  “Then why doesn’t Jack write it?”

  “Because I don’t have the talent,” Jack said bluntly. He looked at Elena. “But you do. That’s clear from New England Maid.” He turned back to me. “If Elena can combine the intensity of New England Maid with the scope of, say, Dos Passos’s Nineteen-Nineteen, then I think she might end up writing the great novel about America at this time in its history.”

  “I told Jack that I’ve only written one piece of fiction in my life, that short story, ‘Manhattan,’” Elena said.

  “What she’s done before doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “The point is to release the talent that’s already in you. Once you do that, everything falls into place.”

  It was certainly the oddest theory of artistic creativity I had ever heard, but I let it pass. Try as I might that night, I really could not bring myself to dislike Jack, and I think that it was true, what Mary used to say, that even his enemies adored him. One could almost picture a blindfolded J. P. Morgan standing against a brick wall, a victim of Jack’s triumphant revolution, saying, because he simply couldn’t help himself, “Ah hell, Jack, no hard feelings. Go ahead and tell the boys to shoot.”

  “Of course,” Jack added, almost as an aside, “you need more experience. Experience is the key to everything.” He looked at me. “Don’t you think so, William?”

  “It depends on the experience,” I said cautiously.

  “What you need is a great deal of simple, human experience,” Jack said. He looked pointedly at Elena. “Why live like a stone?”

  Elena was watching Jack as intently as she had ever watched anyone in her life. There was, I noticed then, a palpable yearning in her eyes, along with something that was growing soft and pliant within her. Even the sort of feeble, bantering resistance she sometimes offered to Dr. Stein had been swept away.

  “One thing experience can’t teach you, though,” he said as he continued to gaze at her, “it can’t teach you how to be free. That’s an act of will.”

  I cleared my throat loudly, hoping by this crude gesture to break his spell. “Well, that sounds a bit romantic, don’t you think, Jack?”

  Jack turned slowly toward me. “The world acts like a fist on us, William. Haven’t you ever noticed that?”

  “Maybe some people just feel the grip more intensely than others.”

  Jack looked at me doubtfully. “Are you saying you don’t feel it?”

  Before I could begin my answer, I heard Elena’s voice, very soft, but determined. “I do,” she said, “I feel it.”

  Jack smiled at her. “I know you do. Maybe we feel the same things. Like that line from Verlaine: ‘You burn, and I catch fire.’” He added nothing else. He did not have to, and he knew it.

  The waiter arrived with our long-delayed orders, and we sat munching our sandwiches and sipping our beer while a light rain began to fall outside. The conversation was light as well, and almost immediately after we’d finished eating I excused myself.

  “So early?” Jack asked. “I thought we might go for a walk, all of us.”

  I nodded toward the window. “It’s a little damp for that.”

  Jack waved his hand. “Oh, don’t be silly, William. A brisk walk in the rain is good for you.”

  I glanced at Elena. Her face had changed a bit. It was telling me to leave.

  “No,” I said, “I think I’ll head on back down to the Village. I have some last-minute work to do on my Cowper book.”

  Jack nodded. “I understand.” He stood up and shook my hand. He was a very perceptive man, and each of us knew what the other was thinking, and that the subject of our thoughts — though from very different perspectives — was Elena.

  I released Jack’s hand and turned to my sister. “Good night, Elena.”

  At the door, I glanced back at them. Jack had moved his seat closer to my sister, and his hand was very gently covering one of hers. I turned and walked out into the street. The rain had stopped, but the glare of light on the wet pavement gave it an oddly surreal appearance. I crossed the street, waited for the trolley, and climbed onto it quickly when it finally came. Elena and Jack were just coming out of the restaurant as it pulled away. They did not turn south toward Three Arts but walked toward the subway to the Village, where Jack lived in that little disheveled room with the yellow cat snoozing in the open traveling case. I watched them until they became so small that I had to squint in order to see them. Then at last they disappeared.

  There are places where I cannot take you, doors that have been closed to me and so now must be closed to you. I know that Elena spent the night with Jack because she told me so, but then she fell silent at precisely that place where I must now fall silent, too.

  About a month after my dinner with Elena and Jack, Mary Longford — out of work for almost two months and threatened with a return to her Indiana farm, where, she said, the last thing her family needed was an educated mouth to feed — married Philip Newman, a general practitioner. The ceremony took place at Riverside Church, that monument to Rockefeller’s piety, as Jack called it, which had been completed only a few years before.

  After the wedding, a reception was held at the Newman home, a spacious estate in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. From the back deck one could see the Hudson River hideaway that had once belonged to Mark Hanna, McKinley’s cunning campaign manager, about who
m Jack had more than a few unkind words to say that afternoon.

  But if Jack could hardly conceal his contempt for the wealthy old New York family into which Mary had just married, Philip Newman, the groom, was the soul of charm. He was a chubby man, with a jowled face and light blue eyes. Even in his youth he had looked just a bit over the hill: in the sepia baby pictures his mother insisted upon showing to us all that afternoon, he looked rather like a bald middle-aged man dressed up to be a baby. Mary claimed that he had contracted gout while still in prep school, and that while on the Grand Tour, in his twenties, a Parisian whore had rejected him on the grounds that he was already too far gone to take the strain. He had, as Mary said, been born in money, swaddled in money, bathed and powdered in money, so that he assumed money came to him as naturally as air to other men. His medical practice had thrived almost immediately. His office was filled with so many New York luminaries that the limousines parked outside his building often obstructed the flow of traffic down Fifth Avenue. According to Mary, he read almost nothing, spoke only in the most vacuous generalities, and disliked argument of any kind. He took a mistress three years after his wedding day, set his paramour up in one of New York’s most fashionable hotels, slipped off with her — for his health — to Martinique, and in general behaved in so doggedly flippant a manner that in 1938 Mary was able to get what she called “the best divorce settlement ever handed down by a nonecclesiastical court.”

  I brought Miriam to the reception and Elena came with Jack. Harry arrived late with his new bride. He had gained some weight, which he contrived to hide beneath the ample folds of a black double-breasted suit. Sam came a bit later with the first of those thin, sharp-nosed, and waspish blondes to whom he seemed ever after addicted, and Tom, cool and scornful, came alone.