Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  We all sat together at one of the large tables that had been brought into the cavernous dining room of the Newman house. There was a nine-piece band at the far end of the hall, and throughout the afternoon the strains of the latest melodies — “Paper Moon” and “Stormy Weather” — wafted lazily over us while we ate lobster Newburg and drank white wine.

  “Well,” Harry said, “I’ve been out of the country for a few months. How’s New England Maid doing?” He addressed this question to Sam rather than Elena.

  Sam leaned back in his seat. “Great, Harry. For a book like that, it’s a real hit.”

  Harry nodded. “Of course, you’ve got some new competition. Reynal and Hitchcock. They’ve got a hit, too. Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf.”

  Sam’s eyes narrowed. “They can publish that schmuck if they want to, Harry. I’ll stick with good red-blooded American authors.”

  “Pink-blooded, you mean,” Harry said coldly.

  Jack looked up from his plate and started to speak, but Elena stopped him with a glance. Then she turned to Harry. “Why are you behaving this way, Harry?”

  Harry looked at her innocently. “What way?”

  “Like an ass,” Mary blurted out.

  Harry stiffened. “What’s the matter? We used to joke about everything.”

  There was a strained silence, then Elena lifted her glass. “Come on,” she said quietly, “let’s just toast old times.”

  Rather reluctantly, each of us raised a glass toward the center of the table. The band drifted into “Lazybones,” and a few couples got up to dance, but all of that seemed very far away. For it was clear that something had finally gone sour between us, that the old energy had turned into a poisonous tension that gathered around us like a noxious cloud. It was a scene Elena would always remember, rendering it finally in the voice of Raymond Finch in the first chapter of Calliope: “Teddy was there, and Ralph, who helped to win the regatta the year we all graduated, and Hugo, who went out west to write and came back with a drinking problem, and Todd, with his new wife and job and car, and together we were the rowing team again — at least, we had been once before; but now, looking at each other, we could not recall the surge of the boat when we all pulled back upon our oars, for we had scattered to little boats now, each still powered by some of our old undergraduate dreams, but growing strained, because for some of us those dreams were fading, and this separated us further from the others, the ones who’d had the dreams, too, only theirs were coming true.”

  We touched our glasses. Another short silence followed while we shifted uncomfortably in our seats, each trying, I suppose, to find some common ground upon which we could all stand casually once again.

  Tom cleared his throat. “So, Sam, you say Elena’s book is doing fine?”

  “That’s what I said,” Sam said dully.

  “I guess the public wants that kind of thing, then.”

  Sam looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “You know, small-town stories.”

  Jack’s eyes flashed. “Is that what you think New England Maid is?”

  Tom glanced around uneasily. “Well, sort of. Don’t you?”

  Mary laughed. “For God’s sake, Tom, have you read it?”

  “Sure I have,” Tom said. He stared about plaintively from one face to the next.

  “I’m working on something a lot different now,” Elena said. “It’s about the times, the Depression.”

  “I’m writing a lot of new poetry about that,” Tom blurted out, but when no one asked him to comment further, he sank back into his chair and nervously folded his arms over his chest.

  “Go on, Elena,” Harry said.

  “I don’t have much more to say,” Elena said. “Jack has been very helpful in trying to bring some structure to the idea.”

  “Yes, of course,” Harry said. “But what is the idea?”

  “To do a great novel about the Depression,” Jack said, “a panoramic novel about the entire country as it is right now.”

  Sam smiled happily. It was the kind of idea he loved, a huge canvas of teeming characters and incidents. All his life Sam was a dupe of great display. “Sort of the War and Peace of the American Depression,” he said eagerly.

  Elena flinched at the comparison, but, to my amazement, Jack suggested that it might be apt.

  “No novel has really caught the complexity of this whole period,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of novels about poverty and strikes and that sort of thing, but no great book about the whole life of the nation.”

  Sam nodded energetically. “That’s right. No one has really caught the whole thing.” He smiled at Elena. “But you will. I know it. You’ve got the eye for it, and the pen.”

  Elena smiled faintly in response, then let her hands drop softly into her lap, fully accepting the way Sam and Jack discussed her work, with what appeared to me then as an alarming passivity.

  “A doorstop is what the literary world needs right now,” Sam said determinedly. “A big son-of-a-bitch, maybe a thousand pages long, with a thick binding — a volume, by God. He glanced at the blonde who sat beside him, staring up at him with vapid but adoring eyes. “You can’t get this New York crowd’s attention with some limping little book. They’re like the farmer’s mule: you’ve got to get their attention by whacking a hefty tome right between their eyes. Otherwise, the critics just glance at it, sniff the binding, sneeze, and throw it in the garbage.”

  Tom shook his head despairingly, a gesture Sam caught. “What’s the matter, Tom?” he asked.

  “You can’t write a thousand pages of poetry,” Tom answered. “You can’t get the critics’ attention that way.”

  “Who said anything about poetry?”

  “Well, I’ve got this poem that deals with the way things are in California — the Pacific swell forever sweeping the people in and out, you know? Rolling them in the foam, making them newly born each day. That’s what I mean.”

  Sam and Jack exchanged glances, then both of them stared at Tom.

  “Have you ever been to California?” Jack asked.

  Tom shook his head. “No.”

  For a moment, Jack looked as though he were about to say something. I suppose that some image of California’s distress must have passed through his mind. All his life Jack had the great gift, and perhaps the curse, of being able to call up scenes of the most devastating misfortune as if they were personal memories. In Calliope, Elena has Finch describe Markham, a journalist of his acquaintance, in words that could refer only to Jack: “In his mind he staged a continual horror show. Mention Johnstown, and he would describe the flood; Chicago, and he would bring the fire to life. And in these and a thousand other ways, he reviewed the old despair of man, the failure and venality and misfortune that was his lot. He knew the deeds of the Duke of Padua, could recite the daily course of the Children’s Crusade, and over a light dinner he might recount the slaughter at Drogheda or the rape of the Highlands that followed the disaster at Culloden. None of this was ever done for effect, it was simply the globe that revolved in his mind’s eye. Before this horror, everything appeared as little more than cruel irony: all laughter was heard beneath a symphony of screams, all warmth felt below the chill of frozen bodies, all happiness seen against a panoply of ancient misery and misery to come.” This was surely a portrait of Jack in extremis. It might have been more aptly said that while eating lobster Newburg, Jack could smell the beans cooking in some hobo jungle he had flopped down in years before.

  I leaned forward to get the attention of my sister. “Is that what you’re planning, Elena, a big book?”

  “Perhaps,” she said quietly.

  “You object to that, William?” Jack asked.

  I shook my head. “No, not that in itself.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m just curious as to what Elena actually has in mind.”

  All eyes turned toward her, and even Philip stopped munching at his dessert long enough to look up at my sister. Her hands we
re still folded in her lap, her food still untouched on the white china plate. She was only twenty-four years old, but she no longer looked entirely young. The first shadows were, however lightly, already upon her face, the first creases already finding their way into the corners of her eyes. It was a pentimento effect, the older Elena glimpsed almost as a vision beneath the younger one.

  “I don’t know how to experience the times,” she said, glancing first at Miriam, then at Jack. “I have to find out how to experience them before I can have any idea about how to write about them.”

  Jack’s brows drew together. “Experience the times? Well, Elena, the times are what they are. You only have to walk out into the streets to experience them.” He looked at Sam, who nodded approvingly.

  Elena sat back and lowered her arms to the table. Jack watched her, almost warily, as if he had just discovered some part of her that had been concealed before, some artistic overelaboration, a tendency toward endless tenuity in the manner of Henry James.

  He laughed. “The times are kicking you in the face, Elena.”

  Elena regarded him steadily. “Maybe they are, but I don’t know how to think about them.”

  Jack looked quizzical. “You don’t? Well, you just sink into them. You drop down on your hands and knees and press your cheek against the pavement and watch the shoeless feet march by.” There was already a kind of anger in his voice, a frustrated edge. For him, personal experience was absolutely everything, and at the drop of a hat he would give you the details of his own.

  Which, at that moment, was exactly what he did, ticking off all the possibilities, artistic and otherwise, that the beleaguered times offered to the artist, the revolutionary, the man of conscience, or anyone else ready to seize the times by the throat, as, he said, they must be seized. In this mood, Jack was wondrous to behold, a real Roman candle of a man, as Miriam once called him.

  For Jack was a fountain of passionate needs and sympathies, as he would later prove in Spain and during the fifties. He believed, as Elena once said in an interview, that there could be no distinction between “what the mind thought and the hand attempted.” But, as she added, he also held unswervingly to the notion that whatever he believed was absolutely true. It was this fanatical aspect of his character that Elena drew upon in her portrait of Markham in Calliope, to whom Finch intends to turn over his father’s financial papers, a record of corruption for which the zealous reporter so single-mindedly yearns: “Markham was standing under a streetlight on Montague Street, with his tweed overcoat and rumpled hat, looking like the sword of justice he imagined himself to be, gnawing at his cigarette as if it were the bent, rusty spoon he’d been fed with as a child. Looking at him under that waterfall of foggy light, that holy cloud of mist and vapor, I thought of Godric, crouched and bleeding by the river Wear, his skin torn open by self-flagellation. I could feel Markham’s rage. It was his whip and pincer. The smoke from his cigarette smelled of a thousand immolations. I felt the envelope of papers like a greased torch beneath my arm and saw my father strapped to the post with faggots piled beneath his feet, and then Markham, hooded in his monkish zeal, waiting for me to pass him the torch. I turned before he saw me and sank back into the darkness, saving, as I supposed, my father from the flame and Markham from the fatal presumption of his holiness.”

  When Jack finished what amounted to a speech, the rest of us glanced at each other in silent surprise that such a peroration could be carried off amid the trivialities of a wedding reception. Jack instantly sensed the disparity and looked as if he were afraid that he had made a fool of himself.

  “As you can see,” he said, laughing self-consciously, “Elena’s book is a passionate subject for me.”

  “Well, I’ll say this much,” Harry said, “I think that you, Jack, would be a perfect editor for Parnassus Press.” He smiled. “And I don’t mean that statement to be a red flag.”

  For a moment the atmosphere lightened. Philip talked about the rigors of medical school, Harry, some of his business dealings, Sam, his upcoming titles, and Tom, when anyone would give him the least opening, his poetry.

  By late afternoon, all of us had grown tired, from both too much eating and, I think, too much time together. The old affection of our circle had dwindled, and we all knew that this was the last time we were likely to be together.

  As we lingered on the front porch of the Newman house, I suggested that I take a picture.

  “Picture?” Harry said, “I didn’t know you were interested in taking pictures, William.”

  “It’s a new interest of mine,” I told him. “Stay right there, everybody. I’ll be right back.”

  I trotted to the car Miriam had borrowed from Teddy McNaughton and retrieved my camera. Then I carefully posed my oldest and dearest acquaintances as I wished most to remember them, huddled closely together, as if against the cold.

  When did she tell you?” Martha asked.

  It was only the second time Martha had interviewed me, and we were still awkward with one another, Martha cautious in her questions, while I remained cautious in my answers.

  “About a month after your mother’s wedding,” I said. “We’d spent the evening with my father. He’d taken us to dinner, as he always did when he came to New York. But he no longer wanted to stay overnight in the city, so Elena and I had accompanied him to Port Authority, where he got a bus to Bridgeport.”

  “And that’s where she told you, at Port Authority?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was about to leave. But Elena took my arm and pushed me toward the front of the terminal.”

  We had stood near the western curve of the building, where a display urged New Yorkers to tour Wisconsin. There was a large board cut in the shape of the state, and Elena’s eyes lingered on it while she continued to hold my arm. I knew she was stalling for time.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  She looked at me. “I’ve decided to leave New York for a while,” she said.

  “And go where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  “You mean, all over the world?”

  “No, just America.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I’m going with Jack,” she added quickly.

  “With Jack?”

  “Yes,” Elena said. “He believes it would help me write my new novel. The title is The Forty-eight Stars, and Jack thinks I should see a few of those places the stars represent, the stars in the flag.”

  “I know what stars you’re talking about, Elena.”

  “I’ve already told Father. While you were in the bathroom, during dinner.”

  “And of course he gave his approval.”

  There was a hard edge in her voice. “I wasn’t asking for his approval, William, and I’m not asking for yours.”

  “You want an opinion?”

  She drew in her breath slowly, then let it out. “I expected you to have one.”

  “Well, I certainly do,” I said firmly.

  “What is it, then?”

  “That you’re making a mistake.”

  “I expected you to feel that way,” my sister said.

  “Elena, listen to me, I like Jack. He’s an intelligent man. But —”

  “But not my type?”

  “I’m not that stupid, Elena. I have no idea what your ‘type’ is.”

  “Then what’s your objection?”

  “I think you should find your own book. You don’t need Jack to help you.”

  Elena said nothing. I remember thinking that she had been given the world and didn’t know it, that she was gifted and financially independent — at least for a while — and that she was now throwing it all away to trail after Jack MacNeill, like the dust behind his battered old sedan.

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “what is it that you two plan to do on this little tour of the forty-eight stars?”

  “Work. Jack has several assignments. I’ll research my book and probably write a few articles.”

  “Articles? About w
hat?”

  “The state of the country.”

  I shook my head, exasperated. “Oh, for God’s sake, Elena, every hack in the country is out doing that.”

  A bus lumbered into the driveway near us and stalled, the motor rattling feebly while the driver tried to get it going again.

  “What does Sam think about this,” I asked. “Does he want his prize scribbler out in the hinterlands when she could be promoting herself and Parnassus all over New York?”

  “Sam thinks the trip’s a fine idea.”

  “To give you the sweep and panorama for your War and Peace of the Depression?” I asked sarcastically.

  “New York is not America, William,” Elena said.

  “You don’t have to tell me that. I’m from Connecticut.”

  Elena smiled and looked out toward the street.

  “It’s a pattern with you, Elena,” I told her. “First Dr. Stein, now Jack.”

  Elena turned to me, her face rigid with anger. “What are you talking about?”

  “You … and men.”

  “Dr. Stein was my teacher,” Elena said stiffly. “Jack is something else.”

  “I know quite well what Jack is, and I know that you may be following certain … what would you call them — urges; following them instead of your brain.”

  Elena was so angry now she was almost trembling, but I didn’t care. I thought I was fighting for her life.

  “When you get right down to it, William,” Elena said in a measured voice, “what I do is none of your business.”

  “No? Well, there’s the little matter of your being my sister, Elena,” I said hotly.

  Elena’s eyes flashed left and right, as if looking for some door through which she could escape. “I am sick and tired of being treated as if I’m still a little girl from Connecticut with a big pink ribbon in my hair.” She glared fiercely. “My life belongs to me!”

  I held firm. “Really? Are you sure? I was thinking that perhaps it belonged to Jack.”

  Elena stepped back slightly, amazed, I think, by my ferocity, as if the one thing she had not anticipated in my response was its passion.