Elena. Part 30

"I'm sorry we don't have low-cla.s.s ways of talking about art and literature and things like that," she said, "but I suppose we don't. So when you talk about these things, you sound very grand. Maybe that's because these things are in themselves so grand, that when we talk about them, we take on some of that grandeur, or at least our language does."

She stopped and took a step forward, peering out toward the man who had called to her, squinting to bring his face into focus. "When I talk about the needs of the soul, I'm not talking about anything religious, about a soul that floats on a cloud, like you have me floating on that poster. I mean that part of our life which requires a special warmth or understanding or consciousness, something like that. I mean all the things that we would still need after we'd been fed and clothed and housed and all that. Surely you don't for one minute suggest that you don't have such needs." She looked him up and down. "You look pretty well fed and clothed. You must have made that poster somewhere. Was it in your own apartment? Was the heat on in that place? Was there a roof to keep the rain out? I think there probably was."

"Of course there was," the man called to her. Then he laughed. "I don't live under a G.o.dd.a.m.n bridge."

"So you have food and clothing and a warm place to live," Elena said. "All your immediate needs fulfilled. So why are you here?"

"Because there's plenty of people in this country who don't have those things, Miss Franklin," the man shouted back at her.

"Yes, that's right," Elena said. "And you are here to help them get those things. You have a need for them to have those things. And that need is not in your belly. It is in your heart. One of those needs of the soul I spoke about." She turned her attention to the entire audience before her. "The last thing I expected was that my book would offend anyone in this room. I still don't know why it did." She stopped, waiting for the next question. There wasn't one, and after a moment she stepped off the stage, walked to her seat next to Miriam, and sat down.

Joe Tully stepped onto the stage to thank her briefly once again and then went on to other matters, coming rallies and drives and marches. She was watching Joe quite closely, as if interested in what he was saying, in all the day-to-day details, quite honorable and necessary, with which the political consciousness must engage itself. But she also seemed somehow completely aloof, and as I watched her, I thought that somewhere long ago, while the earth was still reeling from the first blast of creation, a human being had squatted at the entrance of a cave, and while the others had gnawed bits of meat and bone by their humble fire, he had gone outside to watch the s.h.i.+fting veils of the Northern Lights and had experienced, for the first time, those precosities of the heart about which my sister had just spoken. And I thought that more than I was like her, I was like those others squatting in the cave, staring out with inexpressible admiration at that graver being who watched the world from his lone post, the one he accepted now as home.

INWARDNESS.

In an interview with Publishers Weekly which appeared a month or so before her biography, Martha said that she would never forget an afternoon she spent with me at Elena's house on Cape Cod. It was in early December, and she drank tea and I drank brandy while a severe northeastern storm tore at the bay, churning the waters so violently that they looked not just battered but maliciously tormented.

I was living in Elena's house by then, having given up my Cambridge residence entirely. Martha had come out for the day, looking rather predatory, since it had already been established that this interview would be about what she had already half-jokingly dubbed "the dark night of Elena's soul."

We sat down in the back room of the house, the one with the large window facing the ocean. It had always been Elena's favorite, as it would probably have been anyone's, the view from it was so magnificent, particularly in the fall when the sea gra.s.s turned golden. Elena had once referred to the scene that presented itself from that room - the sea and sh.o.r.e, gulls and sailboats - as her favorite cliche.

"From everything I've been able to gather," Martha began, "Elena had a pretty rough time of it from around 1940 until, say, 1954?"

I shook my head. "That's too long a stretch."

Martha flipped open her notebook and grabbed her pen. "Well, there were some distressing events in her life during that time."

"Of course," I said, "but most of them were over, the events themselves, I mean, by the mid-1940s."

"So her time in Paris was not distressing?" Martha asked.

"I don't think so."

Martha glanced at her notebook. "Elena came back to the United States in 1954." She looked at me. "Because your wife died?"

"That's one of the reasons." I was about to elaborate on this, give at least a suggestion of that spectral presence who stood across from me the day we buried Miriam, but Martha, wanting to keep things in chronological perspective, lifted her hand to stop me.

"Let's go back to 1939," she said quickly. "Now, after the speech, what happened?"

"Happened? Nothing very dramatic. Miriam and I took Elena home. Miriam was already pregnant by then, about four months gone, and she tired easily. So, we just drove Elena to her apartment and then went back to ours."

"Did Elena look shaken?"

"No."

"How did she look?"

"In control," I said. Then I smiled. "Jack MacNeill once told somebody that Elena had always lived like a middle-cla.s.s woman who was slightly suspicious of middle-cla.s.s life, and that what she wanted most was pa.s.sion and control. That night, at least, she had control."

Martha jotted it down. In her biography, she would refer to it as the central contradiction of my sister's life, this war between her need both to release and to control herself. But since Martha's book was not exactly made of a mingled yarn, this contradiction had to be locked up in the straightjacket of a larger one: Elena's fear of being deserted and her need to control that fear. Thus does the quest for the prime mover triumph over an intolerably scattered heaven; the mind, as Elena once said, avoids chaos only by embracing error.

"So Elena wasn't terribly upset when she left you?" Martha asked.

"No. Like I said, she looked completely in control. She had handled herself very well that evening. Even Joe Tully came over to congratulate her." And I remembered that as I looked over Joe's shoulder, I had seen Jack slink back out the front door and down the stairs.

Martha tapped her pencil lightly against her ear. "When did you see her again?" she asked.

"A week or two later, but it was uneventful. She was the darling of the liberal press by then, practically the patron saint of the anti-Stalinists. The reactionaries loved her, too, and even some of the decidedly Socialist papers had now altered their course a bit, granting her at least the benefit of the doubt." I took a sip of my brandy. "Of course, the real hard core kept up the attack. The fools simply called her a traitor. The more learned ones said she was sadly mistaken, and that Calliope belonged with the worst of feuilleton writing - subjective vignettes - and that her book was an imitation of Schnitzler and von Hofmannsthal, that Viennese bunch who, like Freud, had fallen in love with neurosis."

"How did Elena react to that?"

I smiled. "She started reading Schnitzler and von Hofmannsthal."

When her pen had caught up with me, Martha looked up. "So it was as if Elena had just spoken her mind and that was it?"

"Yes. She seemed content. There's a certain ... what shall I call it? ... There's a certain searing glory to having taken a stand."

Martha nodded. "Did you see much of Elena between that time and when Elizabeth came back to New York?"

"Not as much as I would have liked. Miriam didn't have an easy pregnancy. She was never physically strong, and there were lots of problems." I remembered the queasiness, the sleepless nights, the poor appet.i.te, the loss of energy, which she never fully regained, and which gave to the years that remained to her after Alexander's birth a kind of wistful insubstantiality, as if in giving birth she had used up the fire that had been her life.

"So you stayed around your own apartment a lot?" Martha asked.

"Yes," I said, "but Elena was consciously avoiding me, I think." Even as I said it, I could feel the strain of what now had to come. I had opened the gate, and I knew that Martha would not allow it to be closed again.

"Avoiding you? Why?"

"She was carrying a particular burden, and I suppose that since she knew I was having a little trouble with Miriam, she decided to keep it to herself, at least as long as she could."

Martha stared at me intently. "What burden?"

I hesitated, watching Martha's face. Such must have been the wanton stare of those who questioned Galileo. I glanced out the window.

"Please go on, William," Martha insisted.

I looked at her. "All right."

It had been in mid-December 1939. The Christmas season was everywhere, filled with those common yet relentlessly ironic scenes that only New York can provide - a drunken Santa Claus wobbling down the street, or one of the Wise Men, complete with purple robe and jeweled turban, wildly cursing a taxi driver. I had come to Brooklyn for an editorial session with one of the new authors Sam had a.s.signed me, a slender young man who looked so much the sensitive, tubercular poet that I knew immediately he could be no such thing. We had finished early, and so, rather than return directly to Manhattan, I had decided to drop in on Elena.

I walked from Duffield Street to Columbia Heights, trudged up the three flights of stairs to Elena's apartment, and knocked at her door. I could hear her voice and also a deeper one. After a few seconds, the door opened and my father stepped out into the hallway, carefully closing the door behind him.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, astonished.

"I'm helping Elena over some trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"It's none of your business, Billy."

In one of those comic-opera turns which the mind can sometimes take, I remember thinking to myself that I had already written two books, one of them enthusiastically received, and that I would decide what was and was not my business.

"I think I'd like to see Elena," I said determinedly.

"You heard me, Billy," he said. "The fact is, she's already lost it, and I don't guess she wants a crowd of people around."

"Lost it? Lost what?"

My father's eyes widened. "You mean she didn't tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"Elena's pregnant, Billy. At least she was. She miscarried."

I'm sure it took me awhile to grasp the news, and during those few seconds I must have appeared stupefied.

"It's that MacNeill guy," my father said. "He's the one who did it."

I was about to say something, although I have no idea what, when Elena opened the door. She looked drained of all color, pale and ghostly - a body left from a vampire feast. "Come in, William," she said softly.

With that, my father briskly stepped aside, following me into the apartment, where the three of us sat down in the living room.

Elena was dressed in a dark blue robe. Her hair looked matted and stringy; her eyes were glazed. More than anything, she seemed completely exhausted. She held a damp cloth in one hand and occasionally wiped her forehead with it.

"It started yesterday," she said.

"She called me this morning," my father said, "and I came right over." He hitched one of his thumbs beneath a suspender strap. "I was staying at the Edison," he added, as if I might want to verify it.

"I had already told him I was pregnant," Elena said.

I nodded. "And it's Jack MacNeill's?"

"Yes. He came over after the speech. He brought some roses."

My father sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. "She don't want MacNeill to know, Billy."

"That's right," Elena said. "I didn't want anyone to know, at least until I knew what I was going to do."

"Did it ever cross your mind to marry Jack?" I asked.

Elena shook her head. "No."

"It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing," my father said casually. "You're a married man, Billy, you must know about that sort of thing."

I knew then why she had gone to my father in her trouble and had hidden it from me. The common ground that had always united them suddenly rose before me like the strip of an island as it first breaks out of the surrounding sea.

He understood the pa.s.sionate quality of her impulsiveness, because it was exactly like his own. Elena's sudden decision to tour the country with Jack, to confront her critics, and then to take Jack to her once again was no different in its origins, or its irresistibility, than the impulse with which my father might pinch some shop girl on the road. She was like him; the same current flowed through her. And I was like my mother, cautious beyond imagining, a wire drawn tight.

I looked at Elena. "I didn't know you were still seeing Jack," I said lamely.

"I'm not," Elena said. "It was just that one night." She shrugged. "He came over after the speech, and that's when it happened. I thought I might keep the baby, but there's no need to think about that anymore now."

I was too numb to think about anything. "Well, don't you think you should see a doctor?" I asked.

"She saw one last night, Billy," my father said quickly. "Pal of mine, a guy I know from the Bronx. He came down here, and that was it."

"I see."

"We got everything under control, Billy," he added.

Elena smiled thinly. "Yes, we do," she said very softly, glancing toward the front window.

I stood up slowly. "Well, Elena, I don't suppose there's anything I can do for you."

"Been taken care of," my father said.

Elena looked up at me. "I do prefer that you keep this to yourself, William."

I nodded.

"Jack might feel ... obligations."

"Perhaps he should."

"He should if I want him to," Elena said, "but I don't."

My father stood up and actually slapped me on the back. "Thanks for coming over, Billy," he said, as if he were ushering one of his better customers to the door.

I walked partway out of the room, then turned back to Elena.

"If you need anything, anything at all, I hope you'll let me know," I said.

She nodded. Then suddenly she stood up and rushed into my arms. I could not remember ever having been so powerfully embraced.

"I love you, Elena," I said softly.

After a moment she pushed herself slowly from my arms. My father stood behind her, as if ready to catch her should she stumble. She did appear to totter slightly as she stepped back, but regained her balance. She rubbed her eyes with her hands, then sank her hands into the pockets of her robe.

"Don't worry about me," she said. "The worst of it is over."

I touched her face. "Let me help you, if I can."

"If I need anything, I'll call," she said. Then she gently drew my hand from her face.

She never called me, at least about anything having to do with the miscarriage. I checked in on her several times during the next few days, and within a week Miriam and I had dinner with her. But the call for aid, pure and exact in its intent, never came. I suppose, as I told Martha that afternoon, that it was during the following weeks that Elena adopted that rigid sense of self-reliance which would finally sustain her through so much of what was to come.

"I am without spirit, soul, or any foreign anima," Dorothea Moore says in Inwardness. "I have only the bulk of a bulky thing, and pneuma is the hard bread I chew into a sodden ma.s.s, and G.o.d is the wine with which I wash it down." This is, of course, a terrible materialism, unacceptable to the faint of heart, but for Elena it was part of a larger contract she was in the process of making between her mind and reality, one which required her to cast off any but the hardest data and to shun even the most comforting of illusions. "The need to believe a thing," Dorothea continues, "is the least acceptable reason for believing it." These "things" const.i.tuted for Elena all manner of conjecture, faith, and an enormous a.s.sortment of ideas, which she dismissed with that word she often used in her later years, "etherealism."

Etherealism. The word caught Martha's interest immediately.