Elena. Part 25

"Do you have any idea what she thinks about it?"

"No, I don't, Elena," I said, which in a way, at least, was true.

Jack slapped his leg. "Wait until you read it, Bill. It's amazingly imaginative. Not that old Socialist realism stuff at all. It's like a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, a word painting, you might say." He took a quick sip from his cup. "Oh, and by the way, congratulations."

"For what?"

"Engagement to Miriam," Jack said. "You're a lucky man."

"I think so," I said. I turned to Elena. "So, now you're back for a while?"

"Yes," Elena said. "More or less indefinitely."

"Not me, though," Jack said. "I've got a piece to write for New Ma.s.ses, then I'm going down South. Got a h.e.l.l of a lot going on down there."

I looked at Elena. "You're not going with him?"

Jack shook his head. "No, she needs to finish the book. That's the most important thing. And you can't write the Great American Novel from the back of a Model A."

"No," I said quietly, "I suppose not."

"I guess you've been following the events in Spain?" Jack asked.

"I read the papers," I said, "that's about all. There's a lot of talk about it around the city."

"Really?" Jack seemed surprised. "Who's talking, the liberals?"

"Communists, mostly," I told him. "A lot of my old colleagues at the Project."

Jack nodded. Then, without being asked, he launched into a lengthy discussion of the issues involved, predicting the civil war that would break out only a few months later. When he had finished, the conversation turned to subjects closer to home. Elena mentioned that she had managed to keep in touch with Elizabeth while on the road and that all seemed well with her in France. She had also gotten several letters from our father, mostly having to do with his itinerary.

All of this clearly bored Jack to death. He fiddled impatiently with the little doily on his chair or allowed his hands to flop about randomly, never suspecting that this might prove a distraction to anyone but himself.

Finally the conversation wound its way back to Parna.s.sus Press and the fate of my Cowper book. Elena was sorry to hear about the poor sales but argued that the book was not yet dead.

"Oh, yes it is," I said. "As a doornail."

"I think the trouble may be Cowper himself," Jack said, unsuccessfully concealing a yawn. "He's not modern enough to attract attention."

"He attracted William's," Elena said, defending me.

Jack laughed. "Well, you must admit that William is a special case."

I smiled. "Jack's right. Cowper is slow going, even for the most plodding scholar. I've been thinking about another book though, about Coleridge."

"That's better," Jack said. He stood up, stretched, walked to the window, and stared out idly.

"I've been thinking about a full-scale biography," I told Elena.

"Yes, William, that might be -"

"Used to be a soup kitchen down on the corner," Jack said, still gazing out the window. He turned to me. "Did that dry up?"

"It moved over to Twenty-third Street," I told him. "Every Thursday."

Jack nodded dully, then turned back toward the window.

"Anyway," I said to Elena, "the Coleridge book would have more natural interest if only because Coleridge is so much more famous than our dear friend Mr. Cowper."

Jack abruptly left the window and took a seat across from me. "Coleridge sounds fine to me, Bill." He glanced back at the window, drowsily watching as the curtains drifted back together, leaving only a slant of light on the living room floor. "I'm working on a migrant-labor piece." Jack smiled at me knowingly. "I guess that sounds terribly topical to you."

"The world is wide, Jack," I said. "There's room in it for both my Coleridge and your migrants."

"Certainly is, Bill." Jack looked at Elena. "And by G.o.d, there's sure going to be room for Elena's book."

"I'm sure there will be," I said. But I concealed my steadily growing fear that my sister would prove to be only a flash in the literary pan, the sort about whom she herself later wrote in a pa.s.sage on Delmore Schwartz in Quality, mourning "that early incandescence which precedes nothing but the slow and steady dying of the light."

Jack left for the South only a few weeks after he and Elena returned to New York. New Ma.s.ses was interested in knowing the latest on the cla.s.s struggle in rural America and dispatched Jack to the most intransigently reactionary region of the country. Even Jack failed to romanticize it in the reports he later wrote, essays as austere as James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men would later prove grandiloquent. But in Jack, as Elena once said, Twain was always at war with Howells. It was a contradiction that even found its way into his dress, and I remember thinking, as Elena and I said good-by to him at the bus station the afternoon he left for North Carolina, that Jack's floppy hat was all gallant vagabond, while the leather briefcase he carried and the carefully arranged notes spoke of a perfectly ordered bourgeois professionalism.

"Take care of yourself, Jack," I said, offering my hand.

Jack slapped it away and embraced me instead. "You'll never change, Bill," he said. "Don't you know that I don't shake hands with friends?"

Elena smiled as she watched us. In a letter to Elizabeth, which Martha published, she wrote that "William sometimes seems to think that an embrace impinges upon his rect.i.tude."

If this was true of me at that time, it certainly was not true of Elena. She almost dove into Jack's arms as the bus drew up beside the ramp. They held each other for a long time, Elena clinging to him with a desperate physical urgency.

"I'll miss you, Elena," Jack said as he drew himself from her arms.

He turned to me and held out a stack of papers he had been carrying. It was loosely bundled in brown paper and ragged twine. "Sam said I should give you this. My novel, for what it's worth. You're to be my editor."

I glanced down at the bundle. "I see."

"Sort of puts you on the spot, I guess," Jack said. He placed his large hand on my shoulder. "But remember this, William, whatever you think about the book, I won't hold it against you."

"I'll do the best I can on it, Jack."

"Good," Jack said. Then he turned and pulled Elena into his arms again.

"Take care of yourself," he said. "And don't run off with any sweet-talking medicine man. I've hired a private eye to keep tabs on you, so you'd better keep straight with me."

Elena smiled weakly.

Jack bent forward and kissed her. Then he disappeared into the bus, purposefully sitting on the side away from us so that Elena could not see him.

Elena and I lingered for a time after the bus had pulled away. Elena was preoccupied with Jack's departure, no doubt meditating upon all the particular joys that had departed with him. Finally we made our way slowly down Thirty-fourth Street.

I lifted the bundle of papers. "Have you read this?"

"No," Elena said. "Jack prefers to keep his work to himself before it's finished, then he likes an editor's opinion before any other."

I shook my head. "I'm not sure I'll be a very good editor for Jack. I'm not very political."

"You're worse than that, William," Elena said, "you're a little smug about politics in general."

This a.s.sessment was not news. "Maybe I am," I said casually.

"But does it ever bother you, this business of not being really committed to anything?"

"I'm committed to a great many things, Elena," I said. "I'm committed to you and to Miriam. I'm committed to Jack, I suppose, at least as far as doing a good job on his book is concerned."

"But do you think you can be fair to a book like his?" Elena asked. "Do you think you can judge it properly?"

"Yes, I do," I said. Elena's questions were beginning to annoy me, simply because they hinted at something else, something that did not concern Jack, or even politics.

Finally it came out. Elena stopped and turned toward me. "You've read The Forty-eight Stars, haven't you?"

"No," I said immediately.

Elena stared at me steadily.

"Don't lie to me, William," she said. "Don't do it to protect me. And, by the way, don't do it to protect yourself."

Once again I denied knowing anything about The Forty-eight Stars. I even added a little laugh for effect. "What makes you think I've read it?"

"I know you've read it," Elena said. "I knew you had the moment you told me you hadn't that day I got back to the city. You said you hadn't read it, but your eyes got sort of distant, and the little finger on your left hand twitched, and you tried to turn away from me but caught yourself in time." In her short story "Jordan," Elena would write of a man "whose body kept telling me the truth even though his voice was lying."

"I don't like being lied to, William," Elena said firmly.

I cleared my throat. "All right, Elena. I have read it."

"And hated it?"

I took a deep breath. "Yes."

For a moment the two of us seemed suspended, as if in water. Then Elena simply put her arm in mine and tugged me forward. We continued slowly up the street, the heavy traffic whizzing by us, until finally, under the canopy of Macy's, we stopped.

"I'm going to take a taxi back home," Elena said. She smiled, but rather wanly. "It's Bargain Monday for the cabs, you know, one-third off."

I nodded but said nothing. Once again we simply stared at each other.

"Elena, I ... I ..."

Elena put her finger to my lips, silencing me, then turned and walked to the street, hailed a cab, and disappeared into it.

I did not hear from her for almost a month. I worked steadily on Jack's novel, trying to divest the story, about a strike in the Midwest, of those elements which debased it. Jack was fine on physical detail, deftly rendering the look of corn silk in the air, the playfulness of children as they built a small mud dam outside the factory gates, the chatter of women as they hoisted food into the factory, using broom handles and baskets tied with ap.r.o.n strings. But in describing human beings and the relations between them, Jack often foundered, romanticizing in fiction what he would never have romanticized in his straight reportage, and thus saddling his novel with what Elena later called, in connection with the proletarian fiction of the time, "the unreality of Socialist realism."

As for Elena, I a.s.sumed that she was once again moving into that seclusion she had previously insisted on while writing New England Maid. Thus when I found out that in fact she was whirling about the city, primarily with some of Jack's cronies from New Ma.s.ses and the John Reed Club, I was surprised and more than a little dismayed. It was a feeling I could not suppress when she finally called me at my office one dreary Friday afternoon. I was still busy with Jack's book when the phone rang, my red pencil flying over his ma.n.u.script like an angry witch.

"William," she said, "I've decided to move from Three Arts."

"I see."

"I need a little help."

"Like you did when you left Hewett Hall?" I said, unable to keep my sense of being poorly used from my voice.

There was a moment of silence while Elena tried to figure out what she could say to soothe my wounded pride.

"I've not been avoiding you, William," she said finally. "It's just that I've been very busy."

"Really? I think it's something else. I think that if you hadn't really wanted to hear what I thought about your book, then you shouldn't have asked me."

Elena said nothing, so I continued. "Maybe we should just come to an understanding about things like that, about your work. I think that I should not read anything you write, perhaps until after it's published, perhaps never."

"That would not be a solution, William," Elena said.

"Why not?"

"Because I will always want your advice."

"I don't want to be flattered, Elena."

"Look, William, I want you always to give me your frank opinion. How I deal with that opinion is my business. I've been busy gathering more notes for my book, the one you don't care for. I listen to you William, but I don't follow you blindly."

"Of course not."

"Then let's just leave it at that. You tell me what you think is the truth. I will listen with an open mind."

"And not avoid me for a month?" I asked.

"Not avoid you at all."

It seemed almost like a contract, but it was the sort of thing upon which Elena tended to insist - clear understandings, the rules stated and agreed upon. It was, perhaps, one of her failures that she could not endure prolonged ambiguity or irresolution. When I said as much to Martha, she looked up from her notebook, her eyes wide with sudden understanding. "So that's what she did that night with Elizabeth," she said. "She laid down the law." And all that I could do in response was lower my eyes and mutter my answer. "Yes."

At Three Arts the day after Elena called me, I waited while a troop of young women helped her move her acc.u.mulated possessions down the stairs into the lobby, where, and only where, a man's a.s.sistance was allowed. Then we laboriously hauled boxes of books and papers and clothes out onto the street. Several cabs pa.s.sed us by, but finally one pulled over and agreed to transport the whole works to Brooklyn Heights, where Elena had taken a new apartment.

Once we were in the cab and moving down Broadway, I asked her why she felt the need to move.

She shrugged. "Just something about the atmosphere," she said. She added nothing else, but in Calliope Raymond Finch adds a great deal as he delivers his a.s.sessment of a women's residence very similar to Three Arts, where he has just dropped off his date for the evening: I knew Sherry was heading back into a dream world. I had shown her where the people slept under the bridges, but she'd had other ideas about what const.i.tuted a great date. She'd expected the works from a wealthy young plutocrat like myself, the whole works - wine and steak and dancing with the big bands. She wanted the dream, but I'd done my crazy routine and taken her to the sewer. She was pretty huffy after that, and had wasted no time in telling me to take her right back to this little fantasy world on upper Broadway. Here you bought dreams by leaning back on your bed and closing your eyes. It was as simple as that. You buffed your nails and listened to the radio, waiting for the phone to ring in the hall, the call from some producer or publisher, the one with that big break.

But the real world was where I'd taken her, down on the wharves, where men guard their shacks against the rats and throw bricks at the herds of cats howling and scratching and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g in the alleyway, where they think of the places they left as if those places no longer existed, as if the wind had blown them away, like the harvest. And they lean back in their shacks and wait for a job or a meal or a word that will set them on a new direction, they puff on stubby cigarettes and blow the smoke toward the hole in the roof, and they wait, I suppose the whole d.a.m.n country waits ... for the phone to ring in the hallway with the big break.

By moving into an apartment of her own, Elena had finally broken from an atmosphere that had never agreed with certain aspects of her character, that New England wintriness which is so suspicious of easy enthusiasm. To Elena, too much hope always seemed as deadly as too little, and as the Depression deepened and her commitment to its exploration in The Forty-eight Stars continued, Three Arts must have represented the epitome of all that was callow and mindless and self-absorbed in American life.

Her new apartment was on Columbia Heights, not far from Plymouth Church, where, some seventy years before, Henry Ward Beecher had enthralled a packed throng with tales of moral uplift. The church itself was magnificently understated, and Elena often went there during the years that followed. There was something in the irony of its physical somberness - the small windows and dark-hued pews combined with the shuddering rhetoric Beecher had hurled across it - that attracted Elena's attention.

Her apartment, on the other hand, was rather spare. It had a small kitchen, a long, narrow bedroom, and a somewhat larger living room, complete with a modest marble fireplace.