Elena. Part 28

It was, in fact, clattering when I opened the door to Elena. She was wearing a dark raincoat, and her hair was tightly bound up in a large white scarf.

"He's on his way," she said.

"To your slight relief?"

"More than slight."

I stepped out of the doorway and waved her in. "Coffee?"

"Yes, thank you, William," Elena said. She walked into the living room and took off her scarf and raincoat.

I made the coffee, served her a cup, then sat down opposite her on the little sofa by the window. I could hear the rain patting softly against the gla.s.s. It sounded curiously like the m.u.f.fled tat-tat-tat of Miriam's typewriter.

"Well, I hope Jack gets back safely," I said.

"So do I," Elena said. She nodded toward the back room. "Working on her novel?"

"Yes."

Elena cradled her cup in her hands. "I'm going to be working on mine, soon."

"I thought you'd already been working at it for quite some time," I said.

She shook her head. "Not that one. Something new, I think."

"Not The Forty-eight Stars?"

"No." She took a sip of coffee. "It's still about the Depression, at least in a way. But not like The Forty-eight Stars." She smiled quietly. "I'm going to write this book in the way it seems best for me to write it, William."

"I'm glad to hear it," I told her.

"That young man we met," Elena said, "- the one at Woolworth's that day. Remember him?"

"Very well."

"He gave me an idea." Elena set her cup down. "I think that maybe to study a catastrophe like the Depression, you have to know about other catastrophes in history."

"Why is that?"

"I'm not sure," Elena said. "Perhaps just to give it dimension. In the mind, I mean, a dimension in the mind. Otherwise it's just suffering and injustice, all those things Jack says it is."

"Well, it is certainly those things," I told her.

"But more, too." Elena was staring at me very intently. "I don't think I can do the 'Big Picture,' William. It's not the way my mind works. It's like asking a miniaturist to do a mural."

She finished her coffee and stood up.

"Leaving already?" I asked.

"I think so," she said. "I don't want this to sound melodramatic, but I have a lot of work to do."

She began her research immediately. Some days she would work at a small carrel at the Columbia library. Or she would sit hour after hour in the reading room of the New York Public Library, her head bent forward beneath one of those green-shaded lamps which, in row upon row of subdued light, lend to that vast hall a strangely intimate atmosphere.

I was still working at Parna.s.sus, only a few blocks away from the library at that time, and I saw Elena often, usually for lunch. As the months pa.s.sed, she grew increasingly enthusiastic about her book. Over a hot dog in Bryant Park, she would talk about her latest findings, the terrible etiology of the Black Death, for example, or the exact dimensions of the Iron Virgin. Interspersed with these remarks she offered random news from Elizabeth or Jack. Elizabeth, Elena said, seemed entirely unaware that Europe was on the brink of war. Jack, on the other hand, was already in the thick of it, reporting in one letter after another on the progress of the republic's dreadful collapse. But it was clear that the only thing upon which Elena's mind was powerfully focused was her book.

By the fall of 1937, she had decided to get rid of the old t.i.tle. We were sitting in a small coffee shop not far from the library, and she had just finished a long exposition on the writings of Gregory of Tours. "I've decided to call the book Calliope."

It seemed a very odd choice. "You mean for that musical contraption they have at the circus?"

"No," Elena said, "from mythology. The last of the nine sisters, according to Hesiod."

"Oh yes," I said, "the muse of epic poetry."

"That's right," Elena said. "But I think of her a little differently - as the G.o.d, you might say, of empty rhetoric."

I had not read a word of the ma.n.u.script, and so I had no idea to what extent she had transformed her material from the chaotic jumble of The Forty-eight Stars. "I'm looking forward to reading it," I said politely.

Elena smiled, put some money on the table, and stood up. "I've got to get back to work."

It was finished by the summer of 1938. Miriam found it lying on her desk when she arrived at work one morning. Elena had gotten to Parna.s.sus long before the rest of us so that she would not be asked any questions about the ma.n.u.script.

Miriam stared at it for a moment, then she turned to me. "Well, this is Elena's book," she said. "G.o.d, I hope it's good. What can I tell her if it isn't?"

"The truth, Miriam," I said.

Miriam nodded, took the ma.n.u.script into a small room that had been set aside for undisturbed reading, and closed the door behind her.

Almost four hours pa.s.sed before she came out again. She walked into the outer office where I sat drowsily reviewing yet another unsolicited abomination.

"Step in here, please, William," she said, retreating back into the reading room.

She was seated behind the desk when I came in.

"Close the door," she said.

"That bad?" I asked.

"Just close the door," Miriam said, "and sit down."

I did as I was told. I could feel the tension building, the terrible feeling that you must now deliver to an unprotected mortal the worst imaginable news.

Miriam drew a single page of the ma.n.u.script from the pile. "All right," she said, "listen to this." Then she began to read what turned out to be the final paragraph of Calliope, an internal monologue in the mind of the narrator, Raymond Finch: Ah, Markham, what am I to do with such stranded zeal? Betray my father? To what use should I put my moral bafflement? Feed the hungry? Clothe the naked? Inspire the faithless? But with what faith? Where do we stand, those like me - silent, full of doubt, bannerless, beyond all anthems - what can we do but choke on our anger? And after anger, what? You must know that to free the moth suspended in the web I would suffer the lash; to save the deer from a crippling leap, I would bear the weight; to save the infant blistered in the sun, the bushman wounded by a spear, the Bedouin poisoned at the well, I would lie down across the wood, stretch out my arms; to end all this, I would open up my hand, receive the nail.

Miriam looked up. "It's all like this," she said, "the whole book."

"Is that bad or good?" I asked.

Miriam reinserted the page. "I'm not quite sure," she said, "but it is different." She lifted the ma.n.u.script toward me. "Your turn."

I read it in one sitting, just as Miriam had, though in the comfort of my apartment. I sat in the front room, while Miriam struggled at her typewriter a few yards away, and read the book word by careful word, and with a steadily rising sense of Elena's achievement. For she had managed to take the notes she had brought back with her from the road, those painful details of hunger and distress, and then to strip them almost entirely of their topicality, so that in the end they stood far beyond the scope of anything social or economic theory could embrace. The smug young man whom we had met outside Woolworth's that day had been transformed into Raymond Finch, a man of almost theological grandeur, full of the deepest moral insight and complexity, a character of constantly s.h.i.+fting lights, part infidel, part Jesuit, a man who moves continually between the poles of what love and rage have made him, a medievalist drifting through the modern plague of the Depression, a modernist staring back at the undeniable horrors of the medieval world, at times a Christ who has lost his faith, at times a pagan who has found it.

It was still fairly early when I finished it. For a long time I sat in the living room, rethinking it. It was the voice of the novel, rather than the very simple plot, that remained most powerfully with me, so full as it was of chants and litanies, so different from my sister's. And yet it was quite deeply hers - thoughtful, measured, softly resonant, almost Gregorian; a low, monkish hum.

I was still sitting by the window, the book in my lap, when Miriam came out of her room, wearily rubbing her eyes.

"How's the novel coming?" I asked.

She shrugged, then nodded toward the ma.n.u.script in my lap. "What do you think?"

"I think it's remarkable, Miriam," I said. "I think everyone will like it."

Miriam gave me a doubtful look. "Not everyone, William," she said. "Believe me, not everyone."

I knew instantly whom she meant, but at that moment he seemed so far away.

Madrid fell in late March of 1939. Jack was there, caught in the dead center of a resistance that had been collapsing for two years. Later, in his autobiography, he wrote of his own panic, of his madness in "trying to book pa.s.sage on a s.h.i.+p while living in a city that was not only besieged by a large armed force but which could hardly have been more thoroughly landlocked." He did get out, however, trudging southward for no apparent reason, "except that that appeared to be where other foreign refugees were headed." He finally reached the southern coast of Cadiz, booked pa.s.sage to Tangiers, and from there at last managed to sail to New York on a creaky steamer "that listed continually to the right no matter what the wind direction, giving you the distinct impression that the earth was limping."

He arrived in New York on a steamy July day with nothing but a duffel bag and a few books to his name. He looked wizened, graying at the temples, and much thinner than I had ever seen him. He told me he had contracted pneumonia while crossing the Montes de Toledo. A gypsy family had treated him by making him sleep on mounds of dried peppers. "Didn't do much for the pneumonia," he said with a wry smile, "but it sure did wonders for my headache."

He still had an ambling gait, but it was slower now, as if his experience in Spain had used up his youth. And as he stood slumped against Miriam's desk with Sam and me gathered around him, he looked almost old, a body trimmed in white.

"Thanks for sending me a book once in a while, Sam," he said.

Sam nodded. "Like any of them?"

"Oh, sure," Jack said. "I thought Carla Weatherwax's novel was pretty good." He looked at me. "Sorry about The Strike." He was referring to the poor reception of his own novel. Sales had sagged badly. The reviews had not been enthusiastic.

"We can't always have a hit, Jack," I said.

Jack shook his head. "Aw, h.e.l.l, I'm no novelist. I'm barely a journalist. Christ, it was hard covering that war." He looked at Sam. "Man, if you think we've got factional problems over here, you should have seen the situation in Barcelona when they expelled the POUM." He turned back to me and smiled.

"Did Elena publish her book yet?" he asked.

"Yes. It's called Calliope. Haven't you seen her?"

"It's my vanity, William. I look like a tramp. Worse. A sick tramp."

"I'm sure she wouldn't mind."

"No, but I would," he said. "When did the book come out?"

"Last month."

"Doing well?"

"It's a little early to tell."

Jack scratched at his face. Even clean-shaven now, he looked somehow scraggly. "You got a copy of it?"

"Of course."

"Could I borrow it?"

I walked over to the bookshelf behind my desk and pulled one down. "I'm sure she'll autograph it for you."

"Do me a favor, William. Don't tell her I'm in town, yet."

I agreed, and he walked out, waving to Sam, then to Miriam and me.

"This is not a vanis.h.i.+ng act," he said, trying, I think, with all his will, to bring some lightness to his voice. "I just need a little rest."

Then he was gone, leaving Miriam and me standing in the foyer outside Sam's office.

Three weeks later a review of Calliope appeared in New Ma.s.ses. It was facetiously ent.i.tled "Oh Woe Is Me," and it had been written by Jack MacNeill: Let's get this much down from the start: this is a book that has us look at the terrible reality of our times through the eyes of a tipsy upper-cla.s.s Augustine, the sort who wants to be saved from his iniquity, but not, O Lord, quite yet.

We are supposed to believe that this plutocrat can actually comprehend the misery around him better than the poor fellows who have to live in it, which is a little like saying that the housewife who lays the trap knows it better than the mouse.

The book begins at a wedding. It doesn't matter who is getting married, it only matters that they're rich. All looks well. But then a waiter stumbles. This is enough to change the life of the book's hero, Raymond Finch. He discovers that some people don't have it so good in These United States and decides to investigate. If this were all that was needed to bring a sense of justice to the wealthy cla.s.ses, then I'd say let's hire stumbling waiters by the thousands.

So off Raymond trots. He pops in at the local labor hall and muses about the nature of labor. Then it's off to the docks, where he muses about the soiled world of international trade. He takes chow at a tumbledown greasy spoon, and here he muses about the way people eat.

By now Raymond is moved. Only one problem: he can't seem to get off the dime, and he doesn't know why. But I do. For all his thundering avowals, Raymond's conscience is as thin as a pancake.

Raymond keeps on sniffing around the slum side of life wondering what he can do about all this. Then it happens. Raymond discovers that his father the capitalist is rottenly corrupt.

But what to do? Raymond doesn't know. I can tell him. Turn the money-grubbing b.a.s.t.a.r.d in! But Raymond is more subtle. He needs to think. A nasty investigative reporter tries to persuade him to turn over the papers that will destroy his father. But all he can do is more of what he's good at. He thinks.

Then, at last, the vision comes, the ultimate death wish. Raymond wishes to be crucified, dreams that he is crucified - one or the other. It's hard to tell. The prose is unclear. Anyway, Raymond is crucified. Or maybe he isn't. Maybe only Raymond knows. He's more subtle.

My phone rang early on the Sunday morning that Jack's review appeared. It was Elena. Her voice was flat.

"Did you know that Jack was back in New York?"

"Yes," I said drowsily, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. "He looked pretty bad. He wanted to get fixed up before he saw you. He said he'd let me know when he was ready to contact you."

"Have you seen the latest issue of New Ma.s.ses?"

"No."

"Go down and get it. I think Jack has made contact."

I went out immediately, bought the issue, brought it back up to my apartment, and with Miriam staring wide-eyed over my shoulder read Jack's review with ever-deepening consternation.

When I had finished, I looked up at Miriam. She looked thunderstruck.

"I can't believe he'd do that," she said.

I folded the paper and let it slide to the floor. "I didn't think he'd agree with all of it, but I'm surprised that he would be so vitriolic, that he'd be so blind to the merit in it."