Elena. Part 22

Elizabeth drew Elena into her arms. "I hope everything goes well with the book," she said. She kissed Elena's cheek. "I don't know when I'll be back in the States."

Elena stepped slowly out of Elizabeth's embrace, then pulled herself back into it again, hugging her fiercely. "I want to hear all about your adventures," she said. "Promise to write me."

We both shook hands with Howard, then watched as the two of them made their way up the gangplank, Howard steering Elizabeth from behind, as if she were a pushcart. At the pa.s.senger deck they turned and waved to us. Then, very slowly, with a kind of ma.s.sive deliberation, the s.h.i.+p backed out into the river then made its way southward toward the bay.

I took Elena's arm and we began to move out of the crowd. "Do you want to go home now?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No, not yet."

And so we walked to a small coffee shop not far from the docks and took a table in the back corner. Elena was preoccupied again.

I regarded her closely. "What's bothering you? You should be very happy these days. The book's doing better than anyone could have expected. You have enough money to sit back and relax for a while."

For a long time, Elena simply sat silently in her chair, her eyes moving from one object to another, focusing on nothing.

The waiter came up and I ordered coffee for us both. Outside, a wet snow had begun to fall, turning the edges of the sidewalk slate gray. I dreaded the slippery walk back to my Village cubicle, to its bad lighting and its sudden drafts and the wooden crate littered with books about a poet who had been dead for over a hundred years.

Elena continued to stare silently about the room until our coffee arrived. Then she took a hesitant sip, the steam rising into her hair. "I'm sorry to have gotten so out of sorts," she said.

"You're like that, Elena," I said. "You're moody."

Elena placed the cup back down on the table. "Am I, really? I've never thought of myself as a moody person."

I smiled coolly, "Take it from me, you're moody."

We talked of inconsequential things after that, both of us rather tired of each other's company. When we'd finished our coffee, I walked Elena to her bus.

Later that day, I ended up at Miriam's apartment off MacDougal Street. She greeted me cheerfully and ushered me into her tiny, plant-strewn living room.

"Elena's in one of her bad moods," I said. "What do you suppose it is?"

She shrugged. "General dissatisfaction, maybe. Don't you ever feel that?"

I shook my head. "No, I always know exactly what's bothering me."

Miriam sat down beside me. "Well, some people aren't so lucky."

The phone rang as I was about to add something else. Miriam answered it. She listened for a moment, staring at me pointedly the whole time.

"Yes, I have it," she said into the receiver. Then she recited a telephone number and hung up. "That was Elena," she said.

"What did she want?"

"Jack MacNeill's phone number."

I suppose she must have rung him up that very night, because the next morning Jack called Miriam at Parna.s.sus and told her that he had had a very interesting conversation with Elena, that she had asked for what he called "a guided tour of the other world," and that he had agreed to give it.

In her biography, Martha called the period during which Elena and Jack were so closely a.s.sociated her "social period," the time during which she seemed to confront, in Martha's words, "the full contradictory thesis of Depression America."

Of course, for those of us who lived through the thirties, the notion that the Depression had to be "confronted" seems a bit odd. It was simply there, a constant presence in our lives, "like living on a fault line," as Raymond Finch says in Calliope, "when the earth begins to tremble."

I suppose that some people could have avoided the surrounding misery. One did not have to seek it out, as Elena did, with Jack's help, on that Sat.u.r.day morning when the two of them began what Martha melodramatically refers to as their "odyssey." Elena did not need to feel her own dissatisfaction so deeply, or to have listened to Jack so attentively when he spoke to her at the Columbia Club, or to have called him up a few weeks later with her peculiar request.

In my mind I have heard Jack's phone ringing a hundred times, the sound of it rattling through his disheveled flat, disturbing that old yellow cat who slept, more or less continuously, in the open suitcase beneath his bed. Now, as I think of it, it seems quite romantic. But in fact, the phone must have been jarring, the disordered room dank and smelly, and Jack's voice when he answered somewhat cold and irritable, since he liked to nap in the afternoon and was probably sound asleep when the phone rang beside his bed.

The miracle, as I once told Martha, was that he picked it up at all, and then, having done so, that he listened to what must have seemed to him the innocent and naive voice of my sister. But he did.

And so it was Jack MacNeill who introduced Elena to that larger world she thought it necessary to explore, who tempered, as he would always claim, her learning with experience, playing Virgil to her Dante. And when there was no more hards.h.i.+p to soak up, Elena turned to the work before her, thinking it would be The Forty-eight Stars of Jack's vision. But it became Calliope, a curiously medieval book, which begins in a ballroom anointed with champagne and ends in a dream of crucifixion.

She met Jack in the lobby of Three Arts the next Sat.u.r.day morning. She had telephoned me the day before to break our lunch date.

"You remember Jack MacNeill?" she asked, almost hesitantly.

"Yes, the fellow who had some suggestions about New England Maid."

"That's right," Elena said. "Well, we're going to sort of tour the city tomorrow, so I don't know if I can make it for lunch."

"You mean you can't."

"I can't, yes."

"Dinner, then?"

She thought about it for a moment. "All right, about seven. Meet me at Three Arts."

Through most of the next day, I worked on the final draft of my Cowper book. Sam had by then read enough of it to offer a contract. "We need some highbrow stuff," he explained. "I mean, something for the serious egghead, you know?" Despite his obvious lack of enthusiasm, I leaped at the chance to publish and hauled myself into the heavy labor of rescuing from all those piles of notes one small book about a poet.

Thus as I was going about the last stages of my editorial work, Elena was beginning a relations.h.i.+p that would, for better or worse, last for forty years.

Jack had borrowed a car that morning, a Graham Prosperity Six which a friend of his had bought three years before and which Jack loved because of the irony of the name. He picked Elena up at Three Arts and they set out, driving south down Broadway. Later, over time, Elena would relate her experience to me bit by bit, st.i.tching small anecdotes together, until finally, years later, I had a vivid image of the entire journey.

When they started out, Elena told me, Jack began to talk again about the provincial air of New England Maid, reiterating the objections he had voiced before. Then he moved into a more general discussion of the American literary community, which he held in some contempt, calling the literary life "one-half wind and one-half breeze." At the same time, however, he confessed to a few literary ambitions of his own. He had already published one novel, about a strike in Detroit. It was a bad novel, he said, too narrow in its scope, completely ineffectual in rendering what Jack grandly called "the whole life of the workplace." He suspected that he lacked the particular talents of the novelist: the ability to make a fictional circ.u.mstance genuinely real, the flair for the brilliant image or the galvanizing scene, or even the capacity to tell a story.

For Elena this first conversation alone with Jack would always be precious, and throughout her life she would return to it again and again. "He could have come on as completely worldly and self-a.s.sured," she said in the 1980 interview, "but instead he modestly displayed his failures, so that he seemed almost to be asking me for guidance, just as the day before I had asked him."

He took her directly to the southern tip of Manhattan, where they watched the Staten Island Ferry chug toward them. Jack spoke quietly about what it was like on the immigrant s.h.i.+ps, of the terrible shock of Ellis Island, its grueling and pathetic chaos. "I've seen people walk out of that place," Jack said, "and not know what s.e.x they were, or even what their names were - their real names, not the one some Irish cop gave them."

In everything, Elena told Martha Farrell, Jack was kind and generous. And to me she related more than once the almost boyish innocence in the way he spoke to her or touched her arm. "I never felt any effort at what we'd call a seduction," she said to me one night at my apartment, with Alexander in her lap. "Not the slightest hint of anything like that." Then she drew her arms more tightly around my little boy, as if it were not a sleeping child she was protectively embracing but Jack MacNeill's reputation.

After leaving Battery Park, Jack and Elena journeyed north to the Lower East Side, and there they walked the crowded streets of the noisy tenement district, glancing at the unplucked chickens that hung in the shop windows along Hester Street. On Delancey, Jack good-naturedly bargained over the price of a lacy tablecloth, which he finally bought and which covered the small dining room table in Elena's house on Cape Cod the day she died. He told her that Walt Whitman had walked these same streets and had learned more about the city from them than he could have learned from a thousand government statisticians. He then launched into a sermonette on the purposes of poetry, hailing Whitman and Vachel Lindsay and dismissing Eliot peremptorily with Floyd Dell's remark about his "beery, bleary pathos." To this, Elena made feeble objection. "But Jack was really on fire then," she told me later, "and he bluntly insisted that all of Eliot was just prissy poor-mouthing, and he smiled and did a parody, putting his hand on his heart and reciting loudly, 'We are the hollow men, whining together.'"

They went to the Bowery after that and had oxtail stew for fifteen cents a bowl at Blossom's Restaurant. The Bowery was as dreadful then as it is now, its brick streets little more than jagged roadways through a landscape of vagrancy and dest.i.tution, an alcoholic purgatory. Jack made sure that Elena saw it all, every bit of it, from Houston Street to Cooper Union. Just how powerfully she was affected became clear in the scene in Calliope when Finch, after a night of drinking, is tossed from a cab for throwing up in the back seat and is left helplessly sprawled in the gutter, still lucid despite the alcohol: He left me, that modern Samaritan, in the inch-deep gutter wash. There was something green floating near my ear, and I tried to get my eyes on it, jerking my head to the right. It swam into view - a crumpled package of Lucky Strikes, and a bunch of soggy cigarettes - but I couldn't get my hand up, and so I just lay back, letting the water seep down the collar of my s.h.i.+rt. As I lay there, everything went very dark, then brightened to a kind of heavy, gray fog. I thought I was going out, but the sounds got to me first, a few voices mumbling over me.

I could smell the stink coming from them, that nickel-flophouse smell of rat poison and watered-down disinfectant. They bent toward me and I could smell them perfectly now, smell the shaving lotion on their breath, and the cloying sweetness from the cheap fruit wine. The sores on their faces smelled like over-ripened grapes, kind of sour in its sweetness. I felt them then, their fingers, stubby, b.u.mbling, shaking with the tremor of too little booze. They were in my pockets and unfastening my watch. They were pulling down my socks and tugging at the gold ring on my finger. After awhile they stopped, and I could feel the breeze on me and knew that they had stripped me clean, left me sprawled and soaking in my underwear, and I thought it was over then.

Time pa.s.sed, hazy time, while the sweet smell lingered, and then I saw something else, a face, staring down, getting closer. I was clear enough by then to see how haggard it was, a crone's face, with s.h.a.ggy hair and dark creases that would scare children, and I thought, almost laughing, This person must know about Saint Jude. This person knows there's a saint whose special province is such desperate cases. I heard myself laugh a little, just under my breath, and the face heard it too and stiffened a little and reared back, the eyes narrowing. A shadow pa.s.sed over my face and then I felt something hot on my cheek and I realized that she had slapped me, had slapped my grinning face with all her drunken might.

After the Bowery, Jack took Elena to the watchman's shack on Coenties Slip, on the East River, and for the next hour or so she listened as Jack and the watchman discussed the life of the waterfront. Then they crossed Manhattan once again, stopping at the enormous Hooverville that stretched out to the river from the west-side wharves. Jack told her that the police were wary of entering such places, that they called the crime there "shanty trouble" and let it go. He said that there were similar places from Maine to California, and that in St. Louis he had seen a row of makes.h.i.+ft houses made from nothing but old barrels and tarpaper, and that it stretched for a full mile along the riverbank.

The rest of the afternoon was a hopscotch tour of various quarters of the city. They went to the munic.i.p.al incinerators and saw the men sleeping beside them to keep warm. He showed her bread lines and soup kitchens. In the Bronx, he told her how coal was smuggled into New York by unemployed miners from Pennsylvania. On Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, they stood among the sea of unemployed gazing up at the chalkboard displays of the employment agencies lining the avenue from Forty-second to Thirty-fourth Street. Jack marveled at their pa.s.sivity and the mild hum of their conversation. In the West, he said, things were different. There men set forest fires in order to be hired to put them out. He took her to the sweatshops of the garment district and the near-empty hiring halls of the trade unions. And over everything, as Elena later said, he cast his own peculiar shadow, carefully guiding her away from mere shock, mere pity. "He showed me the underbelly of a great city," she said in the 1980 interview, "and I must tell you that I had lived in New York for quite some time by then, but that much of this had been invisible to me. For Jack, it was important that I see it. He believed that experience was instructive in the making of a life - not an artist's life particularly, but any life. He took me on that trip because I was a person, not, G.o.d forbid, because I was a writer."

The trip ended at around seven, when Jack finally dropped Elena off at Three Arts. I was waiting in the lobby when the two of them came in. Jack was walking behind my sister in that ambling gait of his, which Mary was sure he had borrowed from Jack London. He glanced about the room as he trailed behind, taking in everything, the neatness and enforced femininity of the place, its detachment from any of the things he had seen that day.

"Ah, William," Elena said as she came over to me, "I'm glad you're here." She turned toward Jack. "You've met my brother, I think."

Jack nodded, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his flannel pants. "Yes. You're seeing Miriam Gold quite a lot now. She's a very interesting woman."

"Yes, she is."

An awkward silence followed while the three of us stared mutely at each other.

"Well," I said finally, "I was thinking of taking Elena out to dinner."

Elena glanced quickly at Jack. It was obvious that she had entirely forgotten about our previous arrangement. "Well, actually," she said hesitantly, "Jack and I were thinking of eating in."

"At my apartment," Jack said. He smiled at Elena. "But we don't have to do that. Especially since William's come all this way." He turned to me. "Why don't we all go to this little hole-in-the-wall place I know over on Eighty-ninth?"

I felt a bit awkward at the suggestion. One did not have to be very perceptive to see that a great deal had already transpired between Elena and Jack, that their tour of the city had opened up new wonders, at least for my sister, and that one of them was Jack himself.

"Well, I wouldn't want to interfere," I said halfheartedly.

"With what, William?" Jack asked.

"With whatever you two had already planned."

"Nonsense," Jack said cheerfully. "It'd give me an opportunity to learn more about you. Please, come along with us."

I glanced at Elena, trying to read what she might want, ready to go along with it. She was standing silently beside Jack, and her face gave not the slightest hint of what she wanted me to do. Even in such small matters, she was always careful to let one's choice be truly one's own. Perhaps she later abandoned this att.i.tude, especially after what happened to Elizabeth. In her last novel there is a scene in which Manfred Owen's daughter finds a small deer trapped in the underbrush. When Owen moves to free it, his daughter tries to stop him, portentously declaring that "all things have a fate, and for some deer, it is the bramble." But Owen pulls it free, blurting angrily at his daughter, "You wouldn't accept such a 'fate' for yourself. Why should you accept it for another?"

But that small scene was written years after the one currently transpiring in the busy lobby of Three Arts, and at that time, when Elena was only twenty-four, she was a good deal more quietly rigid than she later became. When I think of her that afternoon, carefully withholding any gesture of guidance, I see the small child that New England and our strained and secretive household had finally bred. Her silence seems to me at one with the stony reserve of those New England oddities about whom she read in her youth, but from whose fatalism she ultimately escaped, so that in her last book Manfred Owen could, at last, set free a deer.

"Oh, come on, William," Jack said. "You don't want to go all the way back down to the Village."

"Well," I said, like a reluctant old gentleman who doesn't wish to be a bother, "if you're sure you don't mind."

The restaurant was small and dingy, with pocked tables and squeaky, unstable wooden chairs. But the food was cheap, and in those days that was everything.

"This place used to be quite a hangout," Jack said after we had taken our seats. "I remember when I got back from Seattle in twenty-nine, it was jumping like a bedbug."

The waiter stepped up immediately and we all ordered sandwiches and beer. Then Jack began to talk in his animated fas.h.i.+on, fingers always plucking at the air, head bobbing and weaving like a fighter under attack.

"I remember I was here one night in March of twenty-nine," he said. "I'd just gotten back from the West Coast. I was working on one of those 'ten-years-after' stories. This one was about going back to Seattle ten years after the general strike of 1919. The editor figured I was the best man to cover it since I'd actually been in Seattle in 1919." He laughed. "I was just a teenager at the time the strike began, and I remember the things Mayor Johnson said about the strikers. My G.o.d, he painted them as devils. I thought it was the end of the world."

"You weren't at the barricades in those days?" I asked.

Jack shook his head. "I wasn't anywhere at all. Just a kid on the corner with nothing in his head." He looked at Elena. "I needed experience."

"Yes, I suppose we all need experience," I said lamely.

Jack's eyes darted toward me. "I've been talking to Elena about a book," he said.

"Your book?" I asked.

Jack chuckled and shook his head as his gaze drifted back to Elena. "No. Elena's new book."

"I didn't know she had one."

"I don't," Elena said. "But Jack was telling me that he thought it was about time for someone to attempt an important novel about the Depression."

"Then why doesn't Jack write it?"

"Because I don't have the talent," Jack said bluntly. He looked at Elena. "But you do. That's clear from New England Maid." He turned back to me. "If Elena can combine the intensity of New England Maid with the scope of, say, Dos Pa.s.sos's Nineteen-Nineteen, then I think she might end up writing the great novel about America at this time in its history."

"I told Jack that I've only written one piece of fiction in my life, that short story, 'Manhattan,'" Elena said.

"What she's done before doesn't matter," Jack said. "The point is to release the talent that's already in you. Once you do that, everything falls into place."

It was certainly the oddest theory of artistic creativity I had ever heard, but I let it pa.s.s. Try as I might that night, I really could not bring myself to dislike Jack, and I think that it was true, what Mary used to say, that even his enemies adored him. One could almost picture a blindfolded J. P. Morgan standing against a brick wall, a victim of Jack's triumphant revolution, saying, because he simply couldn't help himself, "Ah h.e.l.l, Jack, no hard feelings. Go ahead and tell the boys to shoot."

"Of course," Jack added, almost as an aside, "you need more experience. Experience is the key to everything." He looked at me. "Don't you think so, William?"

"It depends on the experience," I said cautiously.

"What you need is a great deal of simple, human experience," Jack said. He looked pointedly at Elena. "Why live like a stone?"

Elena was watching Jack as intently as she had ever watched anyone in her life. There was, I noticed then, a palpable yearning in her eyes, along with something that was growing soft and pliant within her. Even the sort of feeble, bantering resistance she sometimes offered to Dr. Stein had been swept away.

"One thing experience can't teach you, though," he said as he continued to gaze at her, "it can't teach you how to be free. That's an act of will."

I cleared my throat loudly, hoping by this crude gesture to break his spell. "Well, that sounds a bit romantic, don't you think, Jack?"

Jack turned slowly toward me. "The world acts like a fist on us, William. Haven't you ever noticed that?"

"Maybe some people just feel the grip more intensely than others."

Jack looked at me doubtfully. "Are you saying you don't feel it?"

Before I could begin my answer, I heard Elena's voice, very soft, but determined. "I do," she said, "I feel it."

Jack smiled at her. "I know you do. Maybe we feel the same things. Like that line from Verlaine: 'You burn, and I catch fire.'" He added nothing else. He did not have to, and he knew it.

The waiter arrived with our long-delayed orders, and we sat munching our sandwiches and sipping our beer while a light rain began to fall outside. The conversation was light as well, and almost immediately after we'd finished eating I excused myself.

"So early?" Jack asked. "I thought we might go for a walk, all of us."

I nodded toward the window. "It's a little damp for that."

Jack waved his hand. "Oh, don't be silly, William. A brisk walk in the rain is good for you."