Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  My brief first visit to Paris ended only a week after I arrived. I saw Elena quite often during those few days, and on the last day of my visit we met at the rue Auguste Comte entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens, walked toward the palace through a profusion of mediocre statuary, and finally sat down at the edge of the Medici fountain. Elena appeared subdued. The unseasonable warmth that hung over Paris that first week in October had come to an abrupt end, and both of us could feel the first chill of winter as the wind swept through the trees.

  “I should have brought a jacket,” Elena said. She wrapped her arms around herself.

  “Do you like the winters here?” I asked idly.

  Elena nodded. “I’ll miss you, William,” she said. She reached over and took my hand.

  I placed my other hand on top of hers and squeezed gently. “Come home.”

  Elena shook her head.

  “You can bring Julien with you,” I said.

  “We’re not thinking in those terms.”

  I did not press the issue, either about her returning to America or marrying Julien. She was forty. She would be childless in any event, and I suspected, beyond this, that she had also elected to live her life wholly free of those complex encumbrances which other people impose. At that time, I could not possibly have imagined the autumn loveliness that Jason Findley would bring into her life, changing it so radically, lending it that music which would finally rise from the pages of her last book.

  I glanced about the gardens. Behind me, Delacroix’s dastardly Polyphemus was about to crush Acis and Galatea, who hugged each other in pastoral calm, oblivious to the Cyclops’s gaze.

  “It’s the only decent piece of sculpture in the whole garden,” I said.

  Elena did not seem in the least interested in my aesthetic judgment. She looked down at the water, then gently dipped her fingers into it.

  “What are you thinking about, Elena?” I asked.

  She looked up at me, hesitating a moment. “I’m thinking about what I’ve missed,” she said.

  “Missed?”

  “Yes, missed,” she said. “Family, children, that sort of thing.” She smiled. “And I think it’s probably worth it.”

  I took one of her hands and held it. “I hope so, Elena.”

  “My mind is alive, William,” she said, her eyes shining with the joy of that good fortune, “and if I paid a price for that, I don’t care.”

  In her face there was the oddest combination of newfound hope and past regret, loss and recovery, that I had ever seen. A fully developed consciousness is an awesome thing, and watching Elena at that moment in her life, one could almost feel the power of its tides.

  THE QUALITY OF THOUGHT IN AMERICAN LETTERS

  The usual revelers were on the pier the day Elena returned from France, vacationers and businessmen, along with a few reporters, the last surviving remnants of the ship news desk, who slouched about, chewing on cigarettes and looking bored yet dutiful.

  Elena came briskly down the gangway of the Flandre, carrying only a single brown suitcase. She was wearing a black toque hat with a small feather at the side. She had come from a wintry France and looked rather like a bundle of moving woolens.

  “There was a storm at sea,” she said as she stepped up to me. “Everyone got sick.” She put down her bag and drew me into her arms. “I’m so sorry about Miriam.”

  “She’s gotten quite a bit worse since I wrote you,” I told her.

  She nodded, her face very grim. There was now a hint of silver in her hair, but surrounding the youth of her face it looked somehow impermanent, as if it had been spun there overnight and would be gone by evening.

  “They’re sure it’s leukemia?” she asked.

  “Yes, and a very rapid kind, evidently,” I said. I bent down and grabbed her suitcase. “She’ll be happy to see you, Elena.”

  Elena took my arm and we walked toward a row of taxis parked fifty feet away.

  “Sorry about the storm,” I said absently. “Would you like to go to my apartment first, freshen up?”

  Elena shook her head. “No, I want to see Miriam, if you don’t mind.”

  We were almost at the taxis when one of the reporters came charging up to us, firing questions as he trotted along.

  “You’re Elena Franklin, aren’t you? Are you aware that Jack MacNeill is leaving the United States? Were you ever a member of the Communist party, Miss Franklin? Is it true that you wrote Calliope as an assignment from the Comintern?”

  Elena looked at me aghast.

  I stopped and turned to the reporter. He had a name tag on his coat. It said his name was Slattery.

  “Mr. … Slattery,” I said, “my sister has returned to the United States because of an illness in the family. I would appreciate it if you would leave her alone.”

  Slattery grinned moronically. “Well, you know what they say, people’s right to know, and all that.”

  Over his shoulder, I could see the other reporters laughing at him, at his youth and inexperience, that immaturity which they had long ago left behind but were still inclined to indulge. Elena, on the other hand, was not inclined to indulge it. She stepped forward and faced him.

  “I had heard that Jack MacNeill was leaving the country,” she said bluntly. “And if this is the way he has been treated, then I don’t blame him in the least.”

  Slattery laughed. “Well, maybe he’s got something to hide,” he said. “Hell, maybe you do, too, Miss Franklin.”

  Elena looked at him as if he were a being from a more malicious world, one of those mischievous sprites who so bedeviled the Elizabethan mind. She had been away for so long that the terrible oppression of the early fifties had not in any real way touched her. It was now the spring of 1954, and the last wave of the decade’s early madness was passing over us like a cloud going out to sea, retreating, but with a grumbling, quarrelsome thunder.

  “Well, what do you say, Miss Franklin,” Slattery asked in a mocking tone. “You work for the Comintern, or what?”

  Elena did not answer. She turned quickly, walked a few paces to the taxi nearest us, and got in. I followed her immediately, of course, and within a few seconds we were riding across town toward Mount Sinai Hospital.

  “You’re lucky to have been in Europe for the past few years,” I said.

  “I read about it, of course,” Elena said, “but it’s different when you’re suddenly attacked like that, accused of ridiculous things.” She grimaced. “The Comintern. My God, how absurd.”

  I nodded. “Being accused is nothing. Joe Tully went to jail for eighteen months. You know what Sam did.” I smiled. “Of course, Jack just told them to go to hell.”

  “And you?”

  I shrugged. “Well, I was never political. I just had friends who were, and a sister.”

  “What about Miriam?”

  “Oh, God, she was out in the thick of it again,” I said wearily, remembering all the meetings and rallies and proclamations, that sense of heavy battle in which she had been engaged. “But not me.” I shrugged. “Maybe Jack was right in what he said to me one night. He said that writing about dead poets makes you dead.”

  Elena glanced out the window at the line of storefronts and offices sweeping by. “I should have come home,” she said quietly. There was more than a little self-accusation in her voice, more than a little moral doubt, the sort that remains like an ache in the mind. In Elena it surfaced oddly from time to time, in a line despairing of Mary Farrell’s disengagement, for example, or still later, when she declared not long before she died that Jack MacNeill, for all his error and false hope, had won the championship of life.

  Elena continued to stare out the car window a moment longer, then she turned back to me. “Tell me about Miriam,” she said.

  “Well, there’s not much to add to what I’ve already written you,” I said. “It’s leukemia. They keep calling it ‘cancer of the blood.’ How terrible that sounds, like the blood stream is foul.”

  “What can be done?
” Elena asked.

  “Nothing at all, really,” I admitted. “About six months ago she would get tired quickly. She didn’t look healthy, but then Miriam always has a sort of pale look, despite her energy. That’s what she lost first, the energy. Then other things began to happen. Loss of appetite, dizziness, that sort of thing.” I glanced away from her, latching my eyes on the upper floors of Mount Sinai as they rose down the avenue. “It could have been a thousand little things, but it was leukemia.” I looked at Elena. “She’s sinking very fast now.”

  Even as I said this, I found something utterly unbelievable in it. That Miriam could go so quickly was inconceivable. I could not grasp that her enormous energy would desert her, that she would then be flesh alone, then void and without form entirely, as if uncreated.

  “She’s not in very much pain,” I added. “They keep her sedated.”

  She was awake, however, when Elena and I came into her room a few minutes later. Her face was pale, waxy. When asleep, she looked like a carved white candle.

  “Look who’s come from Europe,” I said as Elena stepped into the room behind me.

  Miriam glanced up weakly and tried to smile. “Come to the death vigil?” she asked.

  Elena said nothing. She walked over to the bed, bent forward, and gathered Miriam into her arms.

  “I’m not taking it very well, Elena,” Miriam whispered. “It’s too slow, too slow. They should have put me in the oven, like the ones in Europe.”

  I turned away from her reflexively. “Oh, for God’s sake, Miriam,” I blurted.

  Miriam kept her eyes on Elena. “William wants me to be strong,” she said in a low, raspy voice. “But I’ve lost my strength, Elena, lost my spirit.”

  Elena took a white cloth from the stand beside the bed and gently wiped Miriam’s forehead.

  “Don’t tell me that I’m going to be fine, Elena,” Miriam said, almost bitterly. “Don’t feed me that bullshit.”

  “I won’t,” Elena said firmly.

  “William tried that for a while. So did these frigging doctors.”

  Elena continued to wipe her head but said nothing.

  Miriam glanced about the room angrily. “Look at this goddamn place,” she said vehemently. She glared at me. “I don’t want to die here, goddammit!” she screamed.

  “For God’s sake, Miriam,” I said again. I walked to the window and stared down at the roofs of the stubby surrounding buildings.

  “Where do you want to go?” Elena asked quietly.

  “Home,” Miriam said. Then she closed her eyes and allowed her head to drop slowly onto Elena’s shoulder. “Just let them give me something for the pain,” she said almost in a whisper. “Just something for the frigging pain, then let me go home.”

  I turned back toward them. Elena had Miriam’s head cradled in her arms. She was stroking her hair.

  “Such a long way to come for a vigil,” Miriam repeated. “One of those stupid Cunard liners with all the odd characters on it, right, Elena?”

  Elena smiled slightly. “There were a few oddities.”

  Miriam nodded. “Rich old crones playing bridge, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And in the lounge, some moron singing ‘Besame Mucho’ in a German accent.”

  “Exactly,” Elena said. She drew her arms more tightly around Miriam’s shoulders.

  Miriam shook her head very slowly, already tiring, exhausted by her anger. “I scream at the nurses and at William and Alexander,” she whispered, her eyes half closing. “I wanted to be strong, but I’m just a bitch, Elena, a frigging bitch.” She began to cry gently. “No goddamn guts.”

  Elena wiped her face with the towel, then lay her carefully back down on the bed. Miriam’s whisper was trailing off into silence as her eyes closed.

  “She’ll sleep for a while now,” I said. “She always does.”

  Elena eased herself from the bed. “Is there some way we could get Miriam home?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No. It would be too hard on Alexander.”

  “Alexander is not the one who’s dying,” Elena said sternly.

  I stepped to the door. “Come, let’s talk about this somewhere else.”

  We walked down the hospital corridor to a small lounge. I bought us each a cup of coffee, and we sat down at a dreary metal table with a hard, formica top, the sort that makes the cold world of the hospital all the more cold.

  “She’s been this way for a while now,” I said. “Very angry.”

  Elena stared down at her coffee.

  “I’ve always loved her,” I said. “I always will. But since she’s gotten sick it’s been hard to deal with her, hard even to like her.”

  Elena looked up slowly. “Perhaps they should have put her in an oven, then.”

  I was so shocked by Elena’s remark that my mouth actually dropped open. I leaned toward her. “I know how I must look to you. Cold, indifferent, selfish. But the fact is, Miriam has been very difficult. Especially with Alexander. She’s constantly after him. It’s as if she thinks she has to lay down all the laws before she dies.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Well, it doesn’t leave Alexander with very pleasant memories of his mother.”

  “Then Alexander is a shallow boy,” Elena said, retreating not one inch. “What would he prefer, to have a mother who, with her dying breath, tells him a joke, or listens to his schoolroom gossip as if she gives a damn? Let him remember this: in the last days of his mother’s life, she tried to teach him how to live.”

  I started to speak again but stopped, unable to explain myself, or Miriam, or, for that matter, anything at all.

  “I don’t mean to dismiss the problems you’ve had, William,” Elena said.

  “When someone like Miriam gets sick,” I told her, “someone as strong as Miriam, you don’t expect her to change so much, become so difficult.”

  “Miriam isn’t just sick. She’s dying.”

  “That doesn’t change the way you feel.”

  Elena regarded me very seriously. “Miriam isn’t dealing only with her own death, William, but with the death of her expectations. She didn’t want just to live, she wanted to accomplish something. And now she sees herself dying. But she also sees the books she’ll never write. She sees that sort of oblivion, too.”

  I pictured Miriam’s unfinished manuscripts scattered about the tiny room she maintained as an office, all that work and ambition now come down to nothing.

  “You have to make allowance for how much of a burden her hopes add to her dying, William,” Elena said emphatically.

  “All right, I can see what you mean, of course,” I said. “But does that make any real difference in terms of bringing her home?”

  “No,” Elena said. “But still I think we might be able to manage it.”

  “She needs constant care,” I said. “She’s not even like our mother was. At least Mother was off in her own world. Miriam is very much aware of everything.”

  Elena said nothing.

  “And I have a job, you know,” I added. “I have to be at Parnassus all day.”

  “I will stay with Miriam during the day,” Elena said.

  “That could be a very difficult job.”

  “Maybe not so difficult,” Elena replied. “I remember what it was like caring for Mother. It’s not a bad experience to have again.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Let’s go to the apartment while Miriam’s resting. I’m sure Alexander’s home from school by now. He’ll be anxious to see you.”

  He was fourteen years old, a tall, graceful boy, with an elongated face and watery eyes, which gave him a look of perpetual longing and disappointment, though his manner suggested none of these.

  “Aunt Elena,” he said as he swept her into his arms. “It’s good to have you back again.”

  He had prepared a light dinner for us, and as we sat together in the dining room he questioned Elena relentlessly about Paris, of which he had, of course, a roman
tically effusive view; about certain ideas in New England Maid, the only book of hers he had read, Calliope having been a bit too thick for his young mind, while Inwardness had had too little plot to keep his action-oriented reading needs alive; and finally about a host of less pointed topics.

  They were still going at it when the phone rang an hour later, just as we were preparing to return to the hospital. It was Dr. Bergman. His voice was very calm as he brought the news to me. Miriam was dead.

  I realized that the room was absolutely silent as I put down the phone. They were both staring at me, Elena and Alexander, their eyes recording the stricken expression on my face.

  I nodded to them. “Yes,” I said. “Just a few minutes ago. In her sleep.”

  I can remember only the most obvious details of the following two days. I remember Elena’s taking long walks by the river with Alexander while I remained in the apartment, going through all the procedural matters that must be attended to on such occasions and which finally serve to delay by quite some time the full expression of one’s grief.

  She was buried in Hoboken, New Jersey, in a public cemetery there which she had seen only once, years before, but which had appealed to her far more than the packed burial grounds of New York. The service was brief, as she had requested. She had only a brother left, her parents having died some years before. She always referred to him rather dismissively as “the engineer,” but he was quite intelligent, though somewhat lusterless. At Miriam’s grave site, he told a few quiet stories about their childhood together, then disappeared into the surrounding circle of her friends. Elena also said a few words, as did Sam Waterman. But quite privately Miriam had asked her favorite author, the one with whom she had most enjoyed working, to deliver what amounted to a eulogy. This was Jason Findley, a displaced Southerner, in whom Miriam, perhaps, saw a kindred spirit, another exile from a distant world. Each was imbedded in a cultural inheritance that seemed very remote indeed from that of modern America. Where Jason looked back to the imagined beauties of what he jokingly referred to as a “jonquiled and be-juleped South,” Miriam, ever the idealistic communitarian, dreamed of the idyllic peace that must have flourished in the valleys of Judea.