Elena. Part 17

And Elena, on a summer day, fled into the embracing chaos of Broadway traffic.

"I feel good about this, about the move," she said as we drove to her new quarters.

"It's the best thing you could do, Elena," I said lightly.

"Yes, I think so, too."

Her spirits lifted the farther we drove away from Dr. Stein's old building, but I could sense that much of what she had felt in that place was now permanently situated in her mind.

After a moment she spoke again. "How's the work on Cowper coming?"

"Ploddingly, I'm afraid."

"He believed you had a great deal of promise, did you know that?"

"Who?"

"Dr. Stein."

"Oh, did he really?"

"Yes. He often mentioned it to me," Elena said. She shook her head. "I'm going to stop talking about him." She sounded determined.

I smiled delicately. "Why, Elena?"

"I think I have to," Elena said. "Really have to." She turned away, her hands poised above the small typewriter resting on her lap in its battered brown case. Not long ago I received a letter from the Smithsonian asking for it: "Because your sister, Elena Franklin, was an esteemed American author ..." and so forth. They have it now, no doubt locked away in one of their dark vaults, so that it has its small place in the vast attic of our history.

It must be noted now, in our own more liberal time, that in the late twenties and early thirties young single women very rarely lived alone. Instead, they tended to congregate in large boarding houses known as "clubs." The era of the rogue female was yet to come, and even those women who preferred to have their own apartments, as I suspect Elena did, could do so only with much difficulty.

The Three Arts Club was presided over by a formidable woman named Mrs. Frederick Markloff. It was a large brick building on upper Broadway some distance below Columbia. Once in the lobby, one had the sense of being in an entirely female world. There were about a hundred young women then living at Three Arts. They were mostly aspiring dancers, actresses, writers, and painters. In a letter to Elizabeth a few days later, Elena noted that all the women around her had glorious ambitions, and that they expected them all to be fulfilled. "It's as if the Depression is a play they're watching," she wrote, "not the world they're living in."

This contradiction would finally make its way into Elena's Depression novel, Calliope. In that book, the narrator, Raymond Finch, picks up his date at a club very like Three Arts. Growing impatient as he paces in the lobby, Finch muses on the building and its inhabitants: It was no more than a few stories high, a stunted little building with a brick facade looking down on the bustle of upper Broadway. Every form of human delusion flourished there, flourished wildly, a hothouse plant of teeming vines. But down by the wharves where the s.h.i.+ps were docked and the jute lay out in the rain, down there, in that Hooverville which stretched out forever along the oily Hudson, down where the wharf rats grew to abnormal size and it was famously told that in the night they sneaked into the tiny hovels of the exhausted poor and took their babies from their cardboard cradles, nothing endured but the will to put something in your mouth and chew it. Compared to that, the Pittman Club was carved out of moonbeams, and the girls giggled in a topsy-turvy world, full of crazy hope, sunk in a vast illogic, casting all their dreams upward as if to hook an anchor on a cloud.

By the time Elena wrote that, she had experienced some of the trauma of Depression America for herself. The isolation of Three Arts was by then a part of her personal history, an early fragment from a longer tale. But in the spring of 1931, still supported by my father's agile maneuvers to ward off the engulfing catastrophe, she remained securely a part of a small and very privileged stratum. It was a part of her good fortune that often rose to haunt her, and she always felt vulnerable because of it. Once during an argument with Jack MacNeill, she asked him to list the elements of human experience she did not comprehend, and when he replied that she had missed only the most universal ones - hunger, cold, and homelessness - she seemed almost physically to shrink away from him, as if, against this, she could make no argument save the most blatantly defensive and absurd.

In her biography, Martha placed much emphasis upon Elena's life at Three Arts. She wrote that Elena "probably found her vocation there, among all those other exuberant young women, artists of one sort or another, who, simply by existing in proximity to Elena, allowed her to recover from Dr. Stein."

And yet, from the first moment we entered the building that afternoon in the spring of 1932, I realized that Elena would never feel altogether at home there. The circle of young women who flooded toward her, laughing lightly, joking, filling the air with their own electric ambitions, were already captured in a mood of unreserved brightness, which seemed utterly different from Elena's mood, from the essential somberness that characterized her from this time onward.

Still, she was smiling quite happily when she came back down the stairs after dropping her bags in her room.

"Do you have time for a walk, William?" she asked.

"I suppose."

"Let's go down by the river, then."

The Hudson was ice blue that day and a small breeze blew up from it, lifting the fledgling leaves of that early spring.

"What do you think of Three Arts?" Elena asked.

"It seems fine. You'll probably prefer it to living with Mrs. Connolly."

Elena nodded. She had drawn her hair into a bun behind her head. From a certain angle, she looked almost matronly. "How's your job in the Village going?" she asked casually.

"Well enough."

She kicked at a small stone as she walked. "I'll be graduating soon." She stopped and looked at me. "What then?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

"Graduation is like a wall. I don't know what's on the other side."

I smiled. "The rest of your life, Elena."

She took my arm and tugged me forward. "That's a bit glib, don't you think?"

"I suppose so."

"When Dr. Stein was alive, I could always think of working with him, doing books together, that sort of thing."

"And now?"

"I feel cut off," Elena said. She stopped and pulled me toward her. "It's very strange, but sometimes I even resent him for dying."

"You need to find yourself a project," I said, "something to keep you busy." It was pedestrian advice, but all I had.

"I'm busy with school, but there are times when I think I'd like to do something different ... something of my own, like you have with Cowper."

I moved forward, nudging Elena along with me. Her mention of Cowper reminded me of all the work I had yet to do. It made me impatient with the pace, the talk, even the slowly rolling river. "Well, if there's something you want to do, some project, you just have to roll up the old sleeves and do it, right?"

Elena nodded quickly and released my arm. She had caught my impatience. "You've been taken from your work too long, William. Please, go on home now."

"No, Elena, I -"

"Please, William, you go on. I'd just like a stroll. Really. You go ahead."

I left her there overlooking the river, standing by a small rock wall, staring out toward the Jersey sh.o.r.e. "One learns solitude," Dorothea Moore says in Inwardness, "through the open field and the silent room, by knowing that sunset will not bring you home nor sunrise set you on the road again, by seeing well the finite path, by watching as your shadow is erased before a cloud."

When I left Elena standing by the Hudson that afternoon in the spring of 1931, I had no idea what that "something of my own" which she spoke of might be. But six months later, Scribner's magazine published a satirical short story called "Manhattan." Its author was Elena Mayhew Franklin.

Other than New England Maid, of course, nothing Elena ever wrote was more strictly autobiographical. It was a breezy little story that revolved around a group of Columbia students who spend their time sitting in a speakeasy, discussing themselves and the world, all of them "very cheerful in their cheerlessness." I am there, puffing a pipe, and my sister describes me as "very severe, though given to a grudging smile, thorough and precise. His face would not stop a clock, but it might remind you to wind one." Harry is sitting with us, disguised as an anthropologist forever espousing "doctrines having to do with primitive populations." For pa.s.sion, Mary sits puffing her cigarette and casting barbs here and there, but most particularly at the tweed-coated anthropologist. Tom Cameron wanders in, recites a lugubrious poem, then bows his head in a seizure of romantic weeping. The entire a.s.sembly is served by an irritable young waiter, whose exaggerated solicitousness to these well-heeled undergraduates has "the precise but edgy manner of a ticking bomb." This, of course, is Sam Waterman.

In the 1980 interview, Elena described "Manhattan" as "perhaps not the worst thing I have ever done but certainly the silliest." One critic in a larger study of Elena's work called it "perfectly forgettable and not in the least representative of her later work." For her part, Martha dismissed it as a false start and tactfully dropped the matter.

From all of these dismissive remarks, one could never guess that the publication of "Manhattan" was an occasion of terrific joy for my sister. Certainly the modesty of the story's achievement was entirely overshadowed by the work that was to come. And yet I remember the phone ringing in my apartment late one afternoon, and the wonderful excitement in Elena's voice when she told me about it.

"I'm standing at the hall phone at Three Arts, William," she said breathlessly. "I can't sit down."

"Elena, what are you talking about?"

"I haven't told you that I wrote a little story, have I?"

"Story? No."

"Well, I did. A short story. I called it 'Manhattan,'" Elena said frantically. "And the thing is, William, the thing is, somebody's going to publish it."

I laughed. "Are you serious?"

"Yes. Scribner's is going to publish it, William. I just sent it in to them. Sort of on a whim. And they're going to publish it. I wrote it my first year in New York. Set it aside. Found it. Sent it in."

I could hardly believe it. "That's wonderful!"

"I feel silly being this excited."

"You have a perfect right to be excited," I said. "Listen, we're going to have to have a party. It's mandatory on such occasions. Okay with you?"

"Sure."

And so a week later, we all went to celebrate at a Village restaurant. Elena had taken the trouble to type several copies of the story, and for the first few minutes we sat reading it, chuckling delightedly to ourselves. It was as close as some of us would ever come to immortality, Characters in a Story.

"Well, you've certainly got me down correctly," Harry said after a moment. By then he had pretty much given up on Elena and had begun seeing the lovely young socialite he would later marry, but whom he had the good taste not to bring along that night. He had also grown a full mustache, which aged him ten years, frightening us all with its physical suggestion of our own middle age.

"It's supposed to be a satirical portrait, Harry," Mary said, laughing. "You're being made fun of, don't you see that?" She glanced at Elena and smiled.

Sam sat across from me, reading slowly, finis.h.i.+ng after everyone else. Then he looked at Elena with a thoughtful, calculating stare. "Tell me, Elena, do you have anything longer than this? A novel, say? Something like that?"

"My G.o.d, Elena," Mary howled, "I think you've found yourself a publisher."

Sam looked at Mary scornfully. "Don't be so sure she hasn't. My backers are lining up for the shooting match. We're going to build this house."

Harry ran his index finger across his mustache. "Are you really going to start a publis.h.i.+ng concern in these times, Sam?"

"Yep."

"It seems a rather fanciful ambition."

"Well, personal ambition is something you silver-spoon types don't have to worry about, right, Harry?"

I tapped my fork on the rim of my gla.s.s. "Now, gentlemen, let's remember this is a festive occasion."

Harry did not seem to hear me. "Tell me, Sam, have you joined the Communist party yet?"

"Just edging in that direction, Harry," Sam said. "Sort of the left-wing version of the old school tie."

"And your backers - are they equally committed to the overthrow of capitalism?"

"They're split on that question," Sam said, turning his eyes wearily toward Elena.

"Split?" Harry said. "Well, shouldn't you apply the thumbscrew of democratic centralism?"

Sam looked back at Harry. "How do you know all that jargon, Harry? Are you a government agent? Do you run off to the local fascist headquarters and report our conversations?"

"One must know one's antagonist, right?" Harry said, arching one eyebrow.

"Well, I'll tell you what, Harry," Sam said. "When I join the Communist party, I'll let you know, okay?"

Sam did join the Communist party, very quietly, the following December. He sent a Christmas card to Harry with a hammer and sickle emblazoned on the front. They never spoke warmly to each other again.

"We're supposed to be celebrating Elena's short story," Mary said emphatically.

Tom had sat glumly during all of the political discussion. Now he came to life. "Sam, are you really going to have a publis.h.i.+ng house?" he asked.

"I think so."

"Well, do you mind if I ask you a question? Are you by any chance thinking of publis.h.i.+ng poetry?"

Sam stared coldly into Tom's eyes. They had never really cared for each other, and Sam was particularly contemptuous of Tom. "He writes like a deranged schoolgirl, William," he once told me. "All that idiocy about uniting with the forces of the universe. He'd be lucky if he could unite with a paying job."

"The thing is, Sam," Tom went on, heedless of Sam's lethal gaze, "the thing is, I've got some poems that I think are really good."

"I'm sure you do ... think they're good," Sam said in a very measured tone.

"Well, if you'd like to see ..."

Sam's eyes slid over to Elena. "About that longer piece, a novel, that sort of thing. What do you say, Elena?"

Elena shrugged. "I don't really have anything, Sam."

"Well, if you think of anything, a story idea, something like that," Sam said casually, "just anything that comes to mind, I'd like to hear about it."

Years later, at a c.o.c.ktail party launching a new young author, Sam staggered over to me, somehow moved by his own past, his own success, and began a story about Elena. "So Elena's ma.n.u.script came in, William," he said, "this book she'd called New England Maid. We'd discussed what it was going to be about. Then I started to read it. I read the first paragraph and I thought, Oh, G.o.d, this is a disaster, this is not anything like we talked about. But I kept on reading, William, and when I was halfway through the ma.n.u.script, I picked it up and waved it in the air and I said to Teddy McNaughton, who was the only other editor we had at Parna.s.sus at that time, I said, "Teddy, this book will be in print for a hundred years." Sam was old by then, gray and full of too many leisurely meals. He lifted his gla.s.s in the air. "I knew what she was, William. I knew it from that first moment." He touched his gla.s.s to mine. There were tears in his eyes.

Harry flipped through "Manhattan" once again, then dropped the pages on the table. "When is Scribner's going to publish it, Elena?"

"Next month."

Harry nodded quietly. When he looked at Elena, the romantic longing in his eyes seemed a relic from an older time, like the s.h.i.+eld of Lancelot. "Well, I'm sure we all wish you the very best," he said.

"Thank you, Harry."

"I've been submitting a few poems here and there," Tom said, "but so far I haven't gotten any responses." He looked at Elena as if she were suddenly the expert on such matters. "Do you think that means they're being read carefully, that they're under consideration?"

"I really don't know," Elena said. Several years later, when Tom's first poem was published in an obscure journal, Elena wrote him a congratulatory letter, which he probably took as the height of saintly condescension and to which he never made reply.

"We're planning to publish a wide range of fiction," Sam said to Elena. "Keep that in mind. Serious stuff, but also quality satire, humor, that sort of thing." He lifted his copy of the story. "Like this, Elena. Longer, and with a plot, but more or less like this in tone."

"I see," Elena said.