Elena. Part 21

Miriam lowered her gla.s.s slowly to the table, her eyes still watching me with either the deepest seriousness or the most blase indifference.

"I think Elena loves me," I added. "Might I offer her as a reference?"

Miriam smiled. "Elena says you have the heart of a little boy trapped in a man's body. She says that's your great gift, William."

"I want you to agree to have dinner with me again, agree right now. No matter how this evening turns out, I want to know that there will be another one."

She thought about it for a moment. "All right," she said at last.

As it turned out, the rest of the evening was very nice indeed. Miriam grew increasingly relaxed, talking almost exclusively about herself. She recalled her days at Smith, of long walks about the campus, of the girls gathering in their rooms to smoke with delicious malice while the matronly house mother patrolled the hallway outside with warlike rect.i.tude.

"She was very, very proper," Miriam said, laughing, "the sort whose parents came to America a few months behind the Mayflower, and who never really felt quite right about herself because of that." She took a sip of wine. "I suppose your family's old New England stock?"

"Perhaps," I said. "I really don't know."

"You're indifferent to your family history, then?"

"Yes, indifferent."

Miriam looked at me strangely. "That's very American, isn't it? The notion that everyone starts his own life when he's born."

"I suppose it is. It doesn't seem such a bad thing."

"No one uplifted or brought down by their family's past," Miriam said. "It's a myth, though, one of our illusions."

"Except that no one really believes it," I said. "Certainly the rich know better, and the poor know better still."

This launched us into a political discussion, which was mercifully ended after several minutes when the waiter stepped up with the check.

A few minutes later, Miriam and I walked out onto Ninth Street. We drifted toward Fifth Avenue, then down toward Was.h.i.+ngton Square.

Miriam drew her scarf more tightly around her throat as we walked. A steady rain had been falling, soaking the densely packed leaves, which gathered at our feet so thickly you could imagine yourself walking through a drenched New Hamps.h.i.+re wood.

"Well, tell me, Miriam," I said, quickly avoiding any return to politics, "is it true that editors are all failed novelists?"

"Maybe not all," she said, "but I am."

"Really?"

"Oh yes," Miriam said. She glanced up at the spires of the Church of the Ascension, then back at me. "I've probably a thousand ma.n.u.script pages in boxes around my apartment. Terrible stuff. Really terrible. It's the rage and self-pity that get you."

"Has Sam seen any of it?"

Miriam laughed. "Sam? My G.o.d, no. If he saw that junk, he'd fire me."

"Oh, it can't be that bad."

Miriam stopped and gave me a serious look. "It's terrible. It really is." Years later she let me read a little of it, a page or two, no more. She was right; it was terrible. A kind of awful moan rose from every page, then disappeared into a little hiss of bitterness and resentment. I could hardly imagine that she had written it, that so much anger and disappointment rolled about within her, like the floating uterus posited by ancient medicine as the final locus of all female woe.

"Now, Elena - she's a different story," Miriam said, walking on once again.

"In what way?"

"Talented, William. I think that the words must flow directly from her mind into the typewriter. There doesn't seem to be a jerk anywhere, just that amazing fluidity. A natural writer."

"Very little work for an editor, then," I said lightly.

"Fortunately, yes."

We stopped to watch a group of young people struggling to maneuver a large canvas up the stairs of the Salmagundi Club. I started forward to offer my help, but Miriam caught my arm. "They're artists," she said. "They know how to move a painting."

Within a few minutes we were walking on MacDougal Street, not far from Miriam's apartment. The street was alive with tearooms and nightclubs in those days, and there was a constant flow of taxis and private cars. But just around the corner, at the entrance to Miriam's building, the welter suddenly subsided and we were once again on one of those New York streets which, in its serenity, resembles nothing so much as a country lane.

"Well, just to make us even," I said as Miriam turned to say good night, "I'm no novelist either. I'd probably be embarra.s.sed if I were."

"Why?"

"Well, because my book would probably be so old-fas.h.i.+oned, full of medieval virtue and romantic fire."

"The cloister and the hearth."

"Exactly."

Then, just at that moment, the year's first snow began to fall lightly, each flake silver in the glow of the streetlight. Now, a symbol may be, as Elena wrote in Quality, "as blatant as a trumpet or as maudlin as a tear of dew trembling at the leafy edge," but I will always insist that the snow began to fall just as we parted, that the light did, in fact, turn each flake to silver.

"I enjoyed the evening very much, William," Miriam said.

"So did I."

She put out her hand, and as I reached out and took it, she pulled herself forward and kissed me, drawing her arms around me tightly.

She has been gone now for over thirty years. But there are times, particularly late at night, when the rain is heavy or the snow rests in waist-high drifts beside the wall, when I wrap my own arms around my body and pretend that they are hers.

Mr. Brennan died in January of 1934, delivering Elizabeth from her long vigil at last. Two months later, Howard married her in a quiet ceremony in the Congregational church. Elena acted as bridesmaid and I was the best man.

They planned to go to Europe on their honeymoon, a decision that surprised me, given Howard's agoraphobic tendencies. And yet that April, Elena and I found ourselves on a bus heading down to the west-side piers to see them off.

A taxi strike had been going on for quite a while by then, and the previous evening a small riot had taken place near the docks. As Elena and I rode toward the towering stacks of the Rochambeau, we pa.s.sed a disturbing array of cars turned over on their sides, some of them little more than burned-out husks, a black smoke still rising from their charred interiors.

"Sign of the times," I said.

Elena glanced out the window as the bus moved down Eleventh Avenue. There were scores of mounted police still patroling the littered streets, eyeing the line of strikers picketing the garages of the Parmelee, Radio, and Terminal cab companies. At Twenty-third Street, the avenue turned almost blue with police uniforms, while across from the Parmelee garage, silent, disgruntled cabbies broke slats to feed a huge bonfire.

"It's getting worse, you know," I said. It had been getting worse for at least two years, but the rich had maintained their taste for travel and I had managed to hang on to my job at the travel agency. Still, the times intruded even upon my modest security, and I remember the dread that always washed over me as I pa.s.sed a soup kitchen or a stack of men sleeping in a doorway. There was a tone of rising tension in the atmosphere more tangible than the sight of hurling bricks or the sound of scattered gunfire, a disquieting concern, as Evelyn Waugh once put it, that the train from the capital might never arrive.

Elena continued to watch the streets. She had remained rather remote and preoccupied since Mr. Brennan's death, and even Miriam had noticed a flagging of energy, a drawn quality in her face.

"I suppose you'll miss Elizabeth," I said.

"I suppose," Elena said. She glanced to the right at a group of shabby vagrants sprawled along a stretch of hurricane fence not far from the river.

'Times are out of joint, aren't they?' I said.

Elena turned back toward the front of the bus and stared straight down the avenue. Later, in Calliope, using the hard, almost mordant voice of Raymond Finch, she would describe what she saw: Some of us had decided to head down to the pier and see Harvey off on the Normandie, so we motored down the west side by the river. The whole avenue was littered with smoking cabs, some overturned and smoldering, huge metal insects helpless on their backs. Davey said it had been "great fun" the night before, the mounted cops galloping down the street while the cabbies dove out of the way of the horses, scattering, he said, like ants across an anthill. That was the way he thought about them, the way he'd been taught to think about them, the way we'd all been taught, all of us in that sleek black car, which cost plenty and which, we all thought, could never be turned over and set on fire by a bunch of crazy hacks. But I looked up ahead and got a little twinge of, well, anxiety, I suppose, because of the Hooverville stretching out into the water like the raft of the Medusa, and then down below that, the international piers where the great luxury liners sat heavily in the water, their gangplanks pulled up like the drawbridges of besieged medieval fortresses, and below them a line of striking seamen filing about, muttering to themselves, while a heavy breeze from off the river slapped at the placards they juggled above their heads. And I guess, just for a moment, all the sorry dislocations of the time swept in on me from that long, gray avenue, as if everything about the current troubles had become concentrated on either side of the street, that one desolate stretch of protest and ruin which lined the avenue from Times Square to the squat little boathouses of the Cunard line.

We got off the bus a few minutes later and began walking southward toward the huge fleet of ocean liners we could see in the distance.

"You should be on top of the world, Elena," I said cheerfully. "The book is a raging success. And you certainly have your youth."

She continued to walk silently beside me.

I shrugged playfully. "Of course, you know that line of Samuel Butler's, that youth is like spring - an overpraised season."

Elena glanced away from me. She looked curiously baffled, as if her recent success had only served to increase the vague distress which, it seemed to me, had dogged her almost all her life. I guessed that my sister was one of those about whom the Buddha wrote, the sort who seeks only fulfillment, and finding that, seeks only the renewal of desire.

For a time we continued to walk silently together, both of us looking needlessly forlorn, I suppose, to the army of striking dock workers and longsh.o.r.emen who lined the wharves. To them we must have seemed impossibly self-absorbed.

"I feel enclosed, William," Elena said after a moment.

"What do you mean?"

"Captured. Locked up."

"I still don't understand what you're talking about."

Elena nodded apprehensively to one of the strikers as he pa.s.sed. "Morning, ma'am," he said softly.

"You're in a kind of postpartum depression, Elena," I said. "Miriam says that most writers feel that way in between books. They think they've poured everything into the last book, that they have nothing left to say."

Elena looked at me, almost coming to a halt as she did so. "But I really don't have anything else to say."

I laughed. "You'll think of something. You're only twenty-four years old." I pulled her gently over to a street vendor and bought two ears of roasted corn. "Here, take this," I said. "This'll give you a bit of energy. You shouldn't look so run down when you see Elizabeth."

Elena took the corn and we walked on toward the pier. I decided to change the subject.

"It's too bad Howard and Elizabeth couldn't have stayed in New York before leaving," I said.

"Howard wanted to leave right away," Elena said without the slightest interest.

I let her keep her own counsel after that. She was never one to be lightly extracted from a mood.

We found Howard and Elizabeth only a few minutes later, both of them looking quite elegant as they waited near the gangplank of their s.h.i.+p. Elizabeth was dressed in a fas.h.i.+onable velvet coat with a fur collar. Howard held to his characteristically conservative attire: tan cashmere coat and Homburg.

"Well, I'm awfully glad you two could make it to see us off," he said cheerfully as we approached.

There was a round of handshakes and embraces, and then Howard, as usual, antic.i.p.ated the question he no doubt thought foremost in every human mind. "I suppose you think it odd that I can run off to Europe now," he said with a laugh. "Poor Howard Carlton, who couldn't stay a single night in New York."

When no one ventured to remark upon this, he began again, monotonously going over the nature of his disorder. He reminded me of that character in Stendhal, the one who greatly loves music, but only three songs.

"The fact is, I'm doing it for Elizabeth's career," he said. "Her painting, you know."

Elizabeth smiled happily. "Howard thinks that all painters should live in Paris for a while."

Howard patted her hand. "Yes, that's right. And so, despite my condition, I've decided to take her there."

"For the good of my career," Elizabeth repeated. She looked affectionately at Elena. "Speaking of careers, I read New England Maid, Elena. I'm Jennifer, aren't I?"

Elena nodded. "Of course."

"And Dr. Houston's in it, and Mrs. Nichols," Elizabeth said excitedly. "I think I knew most everyone in it."

Elena smiled. "Well, you probably did. Most of them still lived in Standhope when you moved there." For a moment the darker tones of Elena's mood, that film of worried preoccupation, seemed to vanish in her delight at seeing Elizabeth on the eve of a great adventure. "I've never been on one of these liners," she said.

"They're quite wonderful," Howard told her, "but, you might as well know, quite expensive, too."

"They have restaurants and libraries - just like a small town," Elizabeth added. She giggled. "Just like a floating Standhope."

"Well, let's hope it's better than that," I said.

"It's going to be a splendid trip," Howard a.s.sured us. He sounded as if he were trying to convince himself. "And it will be such a treat for Elizabeth, such an education."

Not far from us, a woman in a fur coat flung a spray of confetti into the air and sullenly watched as it floated down. The man beside her quickly drained the last of his champagne, and then the two of them hurried into their waiting car. Across the street, one of the striking seamen hurled a can at their departing limousine, and the men around him laughed and slapped him on the back as he returned to the line.

"Sometimes I think we're getting out of this country just in time," Howard said.

"You won't find it any better in Europe," I told him.

Howard laughed, but a bit nervously. "Perhaps we should disguise ourselves, then. As peasants, maybe." He looked at Elena. "What do you think?"

"I think you look just fine, Howard," Elena replied dully. She looked at Elizabeth. "How long's the honeymoon?"

"We don't know," Howard said. He swept Elizabeth under his arm. She nuzzled him delightedly. "We've not decided."

"How ... romantic," I said.

"You'd probably rather tour the United States, William?" Howard asked.

I shook my head. "Not in these times."

Howard turned to Elena. "We'll live like kings for a while, you know, live the high life. Then we'll come back and Elizabeth will get on with her work."

Elena said nothing. She simply turned to the array of pa.s.senger s.h.i.+ps that lined the harbor, dwarfing the small wooden boathouses along the sh.o.r.e.

"Oh, Elena, I forgot to tell you," Elizabeth said. "Standhope has a bookstore now. Just a small one, right in the center of the square."

Elena nodded. She was watching the line of seamen on strike, clearly preoccupied with them, as if the real focus of the day's drama was on them, on the flapping of their placards, their resentful, muttering voices.

"We're going to stay outside Paris for quite a while," Howard said. "The light in the provinces is supposed to be perfect for painters. I want Elizabeth to try it." He glanced at his gold watch. "Well, Elizabeth, we'd better be boarding, don't you think?"