Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Put that down,” Elena said firmly. She took a step toward him.

  Jason continued to wave the manuscript. “What if I were to throw it in the goddamn fire,” he threatened.

  I stood up. “For God’s sake, this is not a scene from Ibsen,” I told him. “Put it down.”

  Jason glared lethally at Elena. Then, in what must have been for him a gesture as uncontrollable as the movement of a planet, he hurled the manuscript at my sister. The pages flew into the air all around us, then fell to the floor.

  Elena did not move. Nor did I. We simply stood silently and watched as Jason walked slowly to the door. When he reached it, he turned around.

  “Elena,” he said softly.

  She walked over to him and opened the door.

  “Good night, Jason,” she said.

  Jason stepped into the hallway. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “So am I,” Elena said. Then she closed the door.

  She walked back into the living room and without a word began gathering up the pages of her book. She was trying very hard not to cry.

  “Maybe this can all be forgotten,” I said lamely.

  Elena did not look up from the floor.

  “Maybe you could indulge him a little,” I suggested.

  “No,” Elena said sternly.

  “Just a little,” I said. “Why not?”

  “Because that is not my function in life, William,” Elena said. She picked up the last pages, took the ones I had gathered up from me, and laid them all in a stack on the mantel. Standing there in her long black skirt, the marble mantelpiece behind her, a fire at her feet, she looked very much, as she had once jokingly described herself, “like an English murderess.”

  “Would you like a drink, William?” she asked.

  “If you’re having one.”

  She walked into the adjoining kitchen, and from my seat in the living room I could hear her drawing the glasses down from their shelf. Years later, she would tell me that those few moments alone in the kitchen had been among the most terrible of her life, that she had thought of nothing but Jason, and that she had had to fight every impulse within her not to rush down the stairs and bring him back.

  “Brandy for you, of course,” she said as she walked back into the living room and handed me my glass.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  “You know, Miriam and I used to have some pretty bad rows,” I said, almost lightly, “and we always got over them.”

  Elena sipped her wine slowly, watching the fire.

  “We just simmered down after a while,” I continued. “By the end of the day, we always loved each other again.”

  Elena nodded in that desultory fashion of hers, an indication of neither argument nor agreement but only that her ear had received my voice.

  “And of course, after a particularly bad squabble —”

  Elena lifted her hand. “Enough, William.”

  “Sorry,” I said quickly.

  She took another sip of wine. “I wish I could just forget about it,” she said after a moment. “Forget about his books, his contradictions.” She looked at me. “But I can’t.”

  I leaned toward her. “Why not, Elena?”

  She smiled, but very sadly. “Because I know them too well,” she said. As she sipped her wine and watched the fire, she seemed to possess rather painfully that form of surgical understanding which in Quality she ascribed to Henry James, “the peculiar human cost of a great intelligence.”

  For the next three years, Elena worked more or less continually on The Quality of Thought in American Letters. She and Jason resumed contact, walking cautiously together along what Jason romantically called “a delta made of old erosions.” They would sometimes have dinner together, usually in Brooklyn Heights so that Elena could return to her work immediately after. Occasionally he would lure her out of the city — a day at the Danbury Fair, for example, or a trip to the Hamptons — but they never shared the house on Cape Cod again. Elena would sometimes go alone, sometimes with me, sometimes with Alexander and his family. In Martha’s biography, my son is quoted as saying that even on the Cape Elena seemed preoccupied with Quality, and this is quite correct.

  Still, she maintained a determinedly routine existence, working her usual full day and having dinner in at night. There was a reclusive aspect to her personality during this time, an obsession with her research that lent at least an inner passion to her life. “There is a power in his dislocation,” Manfred Owen says of the painter, Kramer, in Elena’s last book. “His brush strokes are raised veins.”

  There was a power in my sister’s dislocation, too, but it exacted a price. I remember that on the day Jack MacNeill returned to New York, he and I arranged to meet Elena in Bryant Park. It was a beautiful spring day in 1965, and even the derelicts who drifted along the shaded walkways appeared to enjoy the warmth and greenery. Jack looked quite refreshed after his long exile, and he was talking in a very animated way about the Welsh coal miners, when he looked up and saw my sister moving in our direction, in that erect posture of hers. We both stood up at her approach. As she came nearer, she held back for just an instant, then rushed into Jack’s arms and burst into tears. At first I thought this no more than a tearfully joyous reunion. But Jack knew otherwise. He caressed the back of her head with his hand and pressed his mouth to her ear. “All that thought and concentration, Elena,” he whispered. “It will kill you in the end.”

  For the most part, however, she had held up under the stress, and at every stage of the work she kept herself in check by a few simple rules. “My one guiding notion,” she said in the 1980 interview, “was that I would refuse to create a situation in which thought could not triumph over information. If I had one general rule of a technical nature, that was it. As for aesthetic principles, I was guided by my belief that in the perception of things human there is an inescapable sympathy, which the French call pitié and the Jews call rakhmones, whose absence will weaken even works of the highest technical craft, and whose presence will ennoble the humblest platitude.”

  For Elena, I think, the writing of Quality became that legendary city of sanctuary which is everywhere a part of our ancient lore. She went to her labors for the safe harbor they provided, and even the most tiresome and painstaking of her researches — the long slog through the historian John Fiske, for example — were in fact less arduous because of that. Thus, year after year, she moved into what she later called in Quality that “disciplina arcani through which all serious thought must pass as it moves between the shifting fluctuations of the temperament and the grave and stable greatness of the mind.” Great scholarship was what she wanted, but with a human face.

  Her own face changed markedly during this period, though it retained its singular grace. Her eyes lost some of their earlier glow, deepening into an opalescent blue, but the creases about them merely gave her a more forceful aspect. She kept her hair in a bun, and it turned increasingly gray, first along the sides of her head, then everywhere. She wore her glasses more often — the sort called “granny glasses” by young people at that time — and kept two identical pairs with her at all times. She began to favor calf-length dresses almost exclusively, and always dark, one might almost say matronly, colors.

  She was dressed in just this way on the day Jack MacNeill returned to Wales, in the autumn of 1967. He had been able, as he said, to endure America for only two years. Elena thought differently, however. It was not America that drove him away, she said, it was just Jack’s need to go somewhere again, anywhere, even back to Wales, which, as it turned out, he only used as a sort of home base for excursions to the Continent.

  As he stood on the curb outside Elena’s apartment, a single suitcase in his hand, the door of the cab already flung open, he looked very much the Jack of old, talking energetically about the explosive situation in France at one moment, his unabashed need to see Paris again at the next. As he shifted about arbitrarily from politics to wanderlust, he reminded me of the twi
n hills of Mount Parnassus, the one devoted to heedlessness, and the other to solemnity.

  “Too bad you can’t come along, Elena,” he said with a boyish wink. “But of course, we’ve played this scene before.”

  Elena nodded silently. Her hands were folded in front of her, and a long shawl hung from her shoulders. In such a pose, and with her face so somber, she looked as Jason once described her, “like one who might at any moment turn into allegory.”

  “Don’t guess you’ll change your mind?” Jack asked.

  Elena shook her head. “No.”

  Jack shrugged. “Well, I may come back soon. A little college in Connecticut wants me.” He laughed. “I’ve become something of a historical figure, you know. They revere me now for the things they hated me for ten years ago.” He reached over and took my hand. “So long, Bill.”

  “Take care of yourself, Jack,” I told him.

  He drew Elena into his arms and kissed her.

  “Good luck with the book,” he said.

  Elena smiled. “Enjoy the barricades, Jack.”

  Jack laughed, then disappeared into the cab. Just for old times’ sake, he threw his hat out the window and into the air as the car pulled away.

  I picked it up, and Elena and I walked back into her apartment. Stacks of her manuscripts were scattered about, and for some reason they reminded me of the way Miriam’s office had often looked, disheveled to her eye, no doubt, but ordered to her mind.

  I casually picked up a few pages from one of the stacks. “Funny how this makes me think of Miriam,” I said. Elena was busily packing one of her suitcases for the drive we were about to make to Cape Cod. “Miriam comes to mind quite a bit now. She disappeared entirely for a few years, but she comes back to me quite often.” I smiled. “As if resurrected, somehow, or maybe now that I’m getting old I can just feel her waiting in the wings.”

  Elena said nothing. She continued her packing.

  I walked over to her suitcase and dropped my camera into it. I had just taken a photograph of Elena and Jack as they stood beside the cab.

  “I think that’ll be a good picture, Elena,” I said casually, “the one I just took of you and Jack.”

  “Good,” Elena said indifferently.

  I looked at her closely. “Anything wrong?”

  She dropped a folded sweater into the suitcase, then closed it. “The book is finished, William,” she said. “I’d like you to take it up to the Cape this week and read it.”

  “All right.”

  Elena snapped the latches shut. Then she straightened herself and looked at me. “No holds barred in your criticism,” she said.

  “As always, Elena,” I told her.

  It took me the next three days to read it. Elena was walking on the beach below the house when I finished. I glanced up from the last page and saw her there, wrapped in a sweater, her skirt falling almost to the sand. She was facing the bay, and the water was flat and gray before her. It struck me then that she was rather like her latest book, a creature of disparate cords which had been wound into a sturdy cloth, and that she would remain so always, regardless of all that would swirl around her, like a stone held firm, rather than dislodged, by the tumult of the stream.

  As Martha scribbled something in her notebook, I glanced up at the bay. A single sailboat could be seen between the beach and the distant shores of Provincetown. The wind was buffeting it badly.

  “It must be cold out there,” I said quietly.

  Martha looked up. She had not heard me. It was late in the afternoon and she had arranged to take a plane back to New York that evening. Because of that, she was eager to get as far as she could during the last few hours of our next-to-last interview.

  “How would you describe Elena’s mood after finishing Quality?” she asked.

  “She was tired, of course,” I told her, “but she was not in any sense depressed.”

  “Was she apprehensive?”

  “Of course. What writer isn’t?”

  “About the book’s reception?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She knew that there were things in it that could, and probably would, draw a great deal of fire.”

  “Like what?” Martha asked, as if she thought Quality a perfect book, beyond all criticism, which, of course, it wasn’t.

  “Well, her inability to resist a quip from time to time, for one thing,” I smiled. “Of course, your mother would have understood it.” I stood up and took a copy of Quality from the bookshelf, then sat back down and began to flip through it. “Here’s something, for example.”

  Martha brought her pencil to the ready.

  “There’s a section on Hemingway,” I said, “and in it Elena says this.” I began to read: “‘In certain works, Hemingway’s power to convey the grit of experience becomes his weakness. He offers minute detail at the expense of a broader generality, so that one comes to suspect an eye that sees everything but a mind that senses nothing.’” I closed the book. “She came to think of lines like that as petty and probably wrong-headed.”

  “I see,” Martha said.

  “And then there were others that erred in another direction, like when she wrote that Edgar Lee Masters ‘sensed the waste within the plenitude.’” I shrugged. “Maybe he did, but Elena later thought such phrases stupid.”

  Martha looked shocked. “Stupid?”

  “Yes, stupid,” I repeated.

  Martha stared at me, aghast. “It’s difficult to think of that word in connection with Elena.”

  I laughed. “You can think of that word in connection with anyone, Martha.”

  She nodded quickly, then glanced down at her notes. “So how would you describe her mood generally then?” she asked. “I mean, after she finished Quality?”

  “Well, she seemed pleased that I had liked the book,” I told her, “and she was pleased that Sam had liked it, too. Of course, Quality was way over his head, but Sam had a canny editorial sense. He didn’t have to understand a book, and he certainly didn’t have to like it, to sense when he had an extraordinary work before him.”

  “How strange,” Martha said.

  “Yes. Of course, he wasn’t always right — just often enough, as Elena once said, to make it eerie.”

  Martha quickly wrote down Elena’s remark. Then she looked up at me again, hungry for the salient fact. “So, in general, you’d say that Elena was happy with what she had accomplished in Quality?”

  “Yes, I think she was.”

  “Quite content with herself?”

  I started to nod reflexively, but something held me back, and I instantly remembered something Manfred Owen tells his daughter: “There is a form of serenity,” he says, “that is nothing more than the highest level of despair.”

  I looked at Martha quizzically. “Content with herself, did you say?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I could go that far.”

  “Why not?” Martha asked. “She’d just completed a great book. You had liked it, and so had Sam Waterman. It was due to be published the next year. Why would she not be content?”

  “You know, Martha, that is a very good question,” I said. And I meant it.

  Martha looked pleased. “Well, do you have an answer?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “But I just can’t say to you that Elena was, as you put it, content with herself.”

  Martha tried to offer me a way out. “Well, you’ve already said that she had qualms about some of the things she’d written in Quality.”

  “Yes, but it was more than that,” I said. “Every writer realizes how much he would change a book the day after it’s published.”

  “So her — what would you call it? — her discontent was not about Quality?”

  “No, I don’t think it was,” I said. I glanced down at the copy of Quality in my lap and saw the Parnassus logo staring up at me: a mountain shrouded in clouds, a single bolt of lightning striking down toward a plain. I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t the
book.” I stood up, walked to the bookshelf, and replaced it there. Then I returned to my seat, still preoccupied with Martha’s question. It was only then that a particular incident occurred to me. It had never seemed inordinately telling before, and so I had more or less forgotten it. But now, with Martha staring at me as if I were slightly cracked, it drifted back, in that whispering voice the mind uses from time to time when it is helping you along, and the minute I heard it, I could sense an enormous shifting in my perception of my sister.

  I glanced toward the bay, then quickly back to Martha. Her face was very serious, and I suppose she could tell that a great deal was going on in my mind.

  “Yes, William?” she said.

  I shrugged, “It was just a remark Elena made not long before Quality was published,” I said. “Just a remark made at dinner, which got buried under all the activity that followed the publication of the book, all that incredible hoopla which Sam did everything he could to create.”

  “And what remark was that?” Martha asked quickly.

  “Well, I was having dinner with Elena and my son,” I began. “He’d just passed the New York bar and was working on Wall Street, something which both Elena and I thought rather disreputable but had the good sense to keep our mouths shut about.”

  Martha nodded quickly. She did not care for introductory remarks. She wanted the heart of the matter, and it was obvious from the tension in her face that she wanted it without delay.

  “Anyway, he was very full of himself,” I continued, “and he’d just read Quality and was going on about it, praise on praise.” I could see the entire scene clearly in my mind, the three of us seated around a table in a restaurant, waiting for Saundra to arrive, and Alexander relentlessly showering my sister with praise that was unnecessarily effusive but certainly sincere. “For her part,” I said, “Elena sat casually in her seat, one arm slung over the back of her chair, listening politely but with a certain aloofness.”

  “Aloofness?” Martha asked.