Elena (41 page)

“Been taken care of,” my father said.

Elena looked up at me. “I do prefer that you keep this to yourself, William.”

I nodded.

“Jack might feel … obligations.”

“Perhaps he should.”

“He should if I want him to,” Elena said, “but I don't.”

My father stood up and actually slapped me on the back. “Thanks for coming over, Billy,” he said, as if he were ushering one of his better customers to the door.

I walked partway out of the room, then turned back to Elena.

“If you need anything, anything at all, I hope you'll let me know,” I said.

She nodded. Then suddenly she stood up and rushed into my arms. I could not remember ever having been so powerfully embraced.

“I love you, Elena,” I said softly.

After a moment she pushed herself slowly from my arms. My father stood behind her, as if ready to catch her should she stumble. She did appear to totter slightly as she stepped back, but regained her balance. She rubbed her eyes with her hands, then sank her hands into the pockets of her robe.

“Don't worry about me,” she said. “The worst of it is over.”

I touched her face. “Let me help you, if I can.”

“If I need anything, I'll call,” she said. Then she gently drew my hand from her face.

She never called me, at least about anything having to do with the miscarriage. I checked in on her several times during the next few days, and within a week Miriam and I had dinner with her. But the call for aid, pure and exact in its intent, never came. I suppose, as I told Martha that afternoon, that it was during the following weeks that Elena adopted that rigid sense of self-reliance which would finally sustain her through so much of what was to come.

“I am without spirit, soul, or any foreign anima,” Dorothea Moore says in
Inwardness.
“I have only the bulk of a bulky thing, and pneuma is the hard bread I chew into a sodden mass, and God is the wine with which I wash it down.” This is, of course, a terrible materialism, unacceptable to the faint of heart, but for Elena it was part of a larger contract she was in the process of making between her mind and reality, one which required her to cast off any but the hardest data and to shun even the most comforting of illusions. “The need to believe a thing,” Dorothea continues, “is the least acceptable reason for believing it.” These “things” constituted for Elena all manner of conjecture, faith, and an enormous assortment of ideas, which she dismissed with that word she often used in her later years, “etherealism.”

Etherealism. The word caught Martha's interest immediately.

“That's a judgment on ideas, isn't it?” she asked.

“I would say so, yes.”

“But what about people? What you seem to be saying, William, is that Elena was getting rather hard in the way she thought about things, rather rigid.”

“I would say her standards were getting higher.”

“Was she getting more judgmental?”

“Yes. Why shouldn't she? Would you rather she had settled for Jack MacNeill?”

Martha smiled. “Why didn't she? He would have married her, wouldn't he?”

“Yes,” I said. “But of course, Elena wouldn't marry him.” I smiled. “Once, long after the miscarriage, the two of them were having an argument, and Elena told Jack that he had applied everything he had to politics but his mind.”

“How did he react to that?”

“He let it pass,” I told her. “Jack could never be intimidated by Elena. His own experience was too authentic, and he always considered Elena's too cerebral to be respected beyond all bounds.”

Martha looked doubtful. “Then why did he make love to her that night after the speech? And why did she let him?”

“Because she wanted to,” I said. “She said they both needed it, and that more than anything it was like a good cry.”

Martha quickly jotted it down. Then she looked up at me. “Did she ever talk about that evening?”

“Yes,” I said.

Elena had already gone to bed when he arrived, drenched by the predicted rain. She had not in the least expected him, as she told me later, and for a moment she had had the impulse to slam the door in his face like some dejected heroine in a movie melodrama. But she had caught herself in time and stepped back from the door to let him in. It was then she saw the roses, soaked and crumpled beneath his arm. “I never gave you flowers,” he said as he handed them to her. “Too bourgeois.” Then he told her that he had seen her at the meeting but had sneaked out of the room before it ended.

She left him in the living room, slumped in the chair by the window, as she made coffee in the kitchen. From there he related his trials in Spain. When she walked back into the living room, he told her what must have seemed to him at that moment the central secret of his life.

“I know that review must have hurt you a great deal, Elena,” he said, “and I suppose that's exactly what I wanted it to do. You see, while I was in Spain, I couldn't think of anything but you. I felt like a dupe, you know? A sap. While Franco was taking Catalonia and the Loyalists were giving it to the
Deutschland
, I was completely preoccupied with a woman in New York.”

Martha's pencil was flying across the page. I stopped to let her catch up. When she had, she looked up at me with a quizzical expression on her face. “Do you think — this may sound silly — but do you think that Jack hated Elena because he loved her?” she asked tentatively.

“Not exactly,” I said. “But there is the line from Pope about one's becoming the thing one most abhors. Well, maybe when Jack found himself thinking about Elena when he should have been thinking about nothing but the Loyalist cause, maybe he resented that — resented the fact that he'd become something of a bourgeois romantic.”

“Ah, yes,” Martha said, as if a light had just gone on in her brain. “So Elena's speech must have really gotten to him, all that talk about nonmaterial needs.”

I nodded. “It probably did,” I said. “But you should be careful to remember that Jack MacNeill always believed in his own ideas. He knew that he could be turned aside by a romantic notion, but only for a little while.”

“So he didn't come back to Elena in order to apologize or anything like that?”

“Apologize for what?”

“For his review.”

I shook my head. “He never believed
Calliope
was anything but a piece of obscure, breast-thumping nonsense, Martha, and he never took back one word of that review.”

Martha nodded, wrote something down in her notebook, and looked back up at me. “So that review — it was not a subconscious effort to destroy Elena as a person?”

I shook my head. “No. It was an attack upon a book Jack felt to be utterly wrong-headed. He felt Elena had betrayed what he no doubt saw as her social duty. He felt that he had spent valuable time in Spain mooning over such a person.”

“So he didn't spend his whole life loving Elena?” Martha asked.

“Absolutely not,” I told her. “Jack was a very committed man, and when Elena took her interests away from matters of immediate political importance, Jack simply stepped aside.” I glanced down at her notes. “Put down in your notebook that Jack MacNeill was as much his own man as Elena was her own woman and you'll be closer to the truth than you would be with any portrait of either one of them pining away for the other.” I laughed. “Believe me, they didn't do that.”

“Yes, all right,” Martha said, accepting my judgment. “But did either one of them learn anything from this — what would you call it — this romance?”

“Elena learned something,” I said. “She felt very stupid for getting pregnant, and I think because of that she began to think of her impulsiveness as something dangerous, something that could seriously mislead her.”

“But how can you control your own impulsiveness?” Martha asked.

“By using your will,” I told her. “And I think that for a while in Elena's life, she believed only in the will.”

Even as I said this, however, it seemed to me that there was more to it than that, more to it than simply Elena's severe sense of self-reliance combined, as it was in her, with a deep distrust of her own impulsiveness. No doubt she felt very much alone after Jack left her, and no doubt that loneliness grew as she realized that she was carrying his child. But I also think that for a time she saw the baby as a way out of her dilemma, saw it as the one thing in life she might feel free to love with absolute heedlessness. In her short story “Work of Art,” which was written only a week or so before her miscarriage, a connoisseur bestows just this kind of adoration upon an ancient urn because “it is complete in its beauty, flawless beyond particularities, so perfect that it seems unmade. Conceived without reservation, such a work can be loved the more for being mightier than our thought.”

I will not say that when the baby died something in my sister died as well. But I do believe that with its loss Elena firmly turned away from those pursuits we term ordinary, and that she never sought them out again.

Thus when Elizabeth returned to New York, as I told Martha that afternoon, she found a friend less pliant than the one she left behind, less indulgent toward weaknesses she did not share, and thus less inclined to abide them patiently.

“Why did Elizabeth come back to the United States?” Martha asked. She was looking at me pointedly, as if there were some darker motivation than the most obvious. There wasn't, and I told her so.

“France fell,” I said. “It's as simple as that.” I shook my head. “I suppose it's hard now for anyone to imagine how dreadful the collapse of France seemed to us at the time.” The very mention of it evoked once again the powerful dread that had seized us with the news. At the time, of course, the most grotesque German abominations had yet to be committed. Still, the fall of France cast a pall over our lives, heralding an unparalleled disaster. The shock was compounded by the images that swept over us, that appalling newsreel footage of Hitler standing on the esplanade of the Palais de Chaillot, leering toward the Left Bank at an Eiffel Tower which seemed, beneath his gaze, terribly naked and vulnerable. This vision of the unspeakable barbarian grinning maliciously within the heart of European culture offended even Harry, who in the beginning had espoused the standard defense of his class, that at least the Nazis had stopped the Communists in their tracks. For the rest of us, however, the invasion of France was merely the latest in a long series of German depredations, and I suppose that even Howard Carlton, standing utterly confused as German troops marched stiffly down the boulevard Saint-Germain, could feel the German noose tightening around him.

“And so they left Paris,” I told Martha. “They packed their bags, took a train to Le Havre, and sailed back to New York.”

“You met them at the dock?” Martha asked.

“No. They didn't tell us they were in the city right away. I suppose they were busy setting up their new apartment on Bank Street in the Village. Then one afternoon in mid-November Elena's phone rang and it was Elizabeth.”

“Was Elena happy to hear from her?”

“Of course. We hadn't received a letter in quite some time. The Germans had entered Paris in June, and Elena hadn't heard a word from Elizabeth. It was a great relief to us all, but especially to Elena. You could hear it in her voice.”

Martha looked up from her notebook. “Did she sense anything about Elizabeth?”

“I think she did,” I said. “When I asked her how Elizabeth had sounded on the phone, she said that she had sounded just fine. But there was a tension in her voice, as if she were withholding judgment, or maybe just hoping for the best.” I shook my head. “Of course, Elena was still rather out of sorts, herself. She had not been able to write anything but short stories since the miscarriage, and almost all of them had to do with some sense of loss or other. I suppose that those short stories are as spiritually autobiographical as anything she ever wrote, other than
New England Maid.
Not one of them is about a miscarriage, but that doesn't matter. The loss is everywhere.”

“When did Elena actually see Elizabeth?” Martha asked.

“That same night,” I told her.

It was already evening when Elena and I walked across the Village to the Bank Street address Elizabeth had given us. Alexander had been born only six months before, and I remember being preoccupied with various paternal concerns. Completely oblivious to how Elena might feel, I went on and on about my son, detailing his eating and sleeping habits. Still, she seemed to take a certain delight in my fatherhood, and I think that in the end she thought of Alexander as a good deal more than her nephew, particularly after Miriam died. But that evening, of course, it was Elizabeth who was most on her mind.

It was a four-story walkup, and I was winded by the time we reached Elizabeth's apartment on the top floor. Elena was visibly excited as she knocked on the door.

Howard opened it almost immediately. He was dressed in dark flannel pants, a white shirt, and a black suit vest. A cigarette dangled precariously from the corner of his mouth. He took it out by the tips of his fingers, a gesture that was as determinedly Continental as the thin mustache he had grown since we last saw him.

“Oh, it's Thursday,” he said. “Elizabeth said you'd be coming on Thursday.”

“Yes, it's Thursday, Howard,” I told him.

He nodded slowly. He looked as remote as he ever had, his eyes full of the bafflement that pervaded his every mood, no matter how cheerful or downcast.

Elena peeped inside the door. “Is Elizabeth here?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Howard said as he stepped back into the tiny foyer. “Please, come in.”

The apartment was small and somewhat cramped, filled with unpacked cartons and scores of canvases wrapped securely in brown paper and twine. There was a large sofa between the two front windows and a few small chairs scattered about. A lamp rested on the windowsill, the bulb beneath the shade shining into the room like a yellow eye.