Elena. Part 37

"Have you decided when you'll be going back?" I asked.

"No."

Elena looked at me. "Americans want so much to be good, William," she said. "Have you ever noticed that?"

"It's part of their naivete," I said.

"It's not naivete, William, it's desire."

Whether this interpretation was true or not, she never abandoned it. It surfaced once again in the opening chapter of The Quality of Thought in American Letters. For there she chose John Woolman, that gentle Quaker parson of endless moral striving, as the figure with whom to begin her exploration: "All his life, Woolman acted against the currents of his age, defending those without defenders, asking questions that prudence would have silenced, making of our mortal clay at least a dream of paradise. He extolled the subtler acquisitions of the soul over the grosser ones of the hand. He turned resolutely away from the imperial politics of Winthrop and the closed theology of Edwards, fighting their fires of conquest and judgment with the cool water he presumed to flow from a righteous stream. In doing so, he came to voice, in the early morning of our history, those questions of justice and equality which Jefferson would later raise so powerfully, and in the raising, as Frost wrote, set our minds ablaze for a thousand years."

Do you think that when Elena came back to the United States in 1954, she intended to stay here?" Martha asked.

"Yes, I do," I told her. "But I'm not sure she had Quality in mind at that time. She certainly didn't mention it."

She leaned back in her chair. It was one of our last interviews. Elena had been gone now for almost a year. Her small flower garden looked lonely and untended under the spring sun. From where I sat in the back yard, I could see Elena's day lilies tossing in the breeze that swept in off the bay. She had insisted on planting them, even though Jason had dismissed them as "cotillion flowers." Elena always got her way with Jason. "She was the volcano," he wrote in his memoir, "and I was falling ash."

Martha touched the tip of her pencil to the note pad in her lap. She would come here for a final interview only six months later, looking very proud of herself, convinced that her biography of my sister was a true literary triumph, a book almost as great as its subject. On her last visit she said it needed only "a few loose ends tied up, you know, scholars.h.i.+p-wise."

"How would you describe Elena's mood as she began Quality?" she asked. She slowly tapped her pencil against her ear and waited for my answer. She had developed several such donnish mannerisms since beginning her research. I half expected her to bring a goose quill and inkwell to our final rendezvous.

"I would say that Elena was full of energy," I told her. And I suppose it could be said that it was the energy of Quality that I found most striking when I read the ma.n.u.script for the first time. I remember looking up from the pages from time to time just to take a breather from the relentlessness of its prose, at once so alive with raging admiration and yet so expressive of bottomless disappointment, simultaneously floral and coolly a.n.a.lytic, centerless, yet deeply centered within the s.h.i.+fting lights and mingled textures of my sister's mind.

"Yes, I would say that she was very full of energy," I repeated as Martha looked up from her pad.

"When did you first realize that Elena had embarked upon a new book?" Martha asked.

"In the spring of 1956."

We were sitting with Sam in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Park. Perhaps she had already been thinking about the book for some time by then. There were, after all, those stacks of books in her Paris apartment, almost all of them American, and looking rather like expatriates themselves as they rested beneath her window. Elena herself did not seem to know when the idea struck her. "Somewhere along the way," she said in the 1980 interview, "I recognized that taken as a whole America's tendency to encourage endless striving const.i.tuted a form of moral intelligence which was genuinely great, both in its drift, to use a phrase from Walter Lippmann, and in its mastery, and that American failure contained within it an element of poignancy which flowed more than anything else from the predicament of an early dream."

Thus on that spring day in 1956, my sister had perhaps no more than the vaguest notion of the sort of book toward which her mind was tending, and to which she subtly introduced Sam and me as we rested in the park that afternoon.

It had been over a year and a half since Miriam's death, and a great deal had transpired. Sam had finally ended his long bachelorhood by marrying the young woman with whom he had been tempestuously involved for six or seven years. She had all too promptly borne him a daughter, Christina. Elena had taken an apartment in Brooklyn Heights and had published several essays and short stories but had begun no larger work. Alexander and I had learned to adjust to Miriam's absence and, despite the tremors of his adolescence, maintained a respectful congeniality toward one another. I had left Parna.s.sus and was teaching at Columbia.

And so the year following Miriam's death had been a rather peaceful one for our circle of friends. The heavy sediment of middle age was drifting down upon us. We would all continue now along a graceful road, so I supposed, each of us mindful of our own good fortune as we drifted into a gentle elderliness, the sort, as Horace says, "not unbefriended by the lyre."

Sam and I had walked quite a way down Fifth Avenue to meet Elena that morning. It was a Sunday, and the avenue was almost deserted. Sam placed Christina on his shoulders and bounced her playfully.

"I suppose Elena's going to stay in New York for good now," he said. He took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and swabbed his head, which was almost completely bald now.

"I think so," I told him.

Sam nodded. "Good. Inwardness was a mordant French concoction, the type they love over there - sour in a sweet kind of way."

I had no idea of what he was talking about. But long ago he had predicted what Inwardness would be, and he did not intend to alter his opinion of the book merely because he had been wrong. The book would alter. It would be what he had said it would be. That was that.

"Have you seen her new place?" I asked him.

He shook his head. "Too busy. Kids are a lot of work, William, even when you have a nanny."

We pa.s.sed under the Was.h.i.+ngton Square arch a few minutes later and took a bench alongside one of the walkways. Through the drooping limbs of the oaks, elms, and yellow locusts, we could see Garibaldi standing proudly to the east, not in the least unnerved by the drab facade of NYU.

Sam put Christina down on a plot of gra.s.s and watched as she tumbled about. Street musicians were playing here and there, but it was an amateur juggler who caught her eye, mainly by continually dropping his pins.

"The Village has changed, William," Sam said as he leaned back into the bench.

"Everything does," I said.

"It was something back when they were publis.h.i.+ng The Quill," he added. "And n.o.body ever thought of moving to Connecticut." He pulled down his tie and flung one arm casually over the back of the bench. "Now it's rock and roll, and gangs roaming around like tribes of savages." He shook his head. "Maybe it is time to leave New York."

I smiled knowingly. "Are you leaving, Sam?"

"Not for good," Sam said. "But I've bought a little place up on Cape Cod."

I laughed. "That's even farther away than Connecticut."

Sam shrugged. "What the h.e.l.l." He stared out across the park. "I guess I'm satisfied." He glanced down at Christina and grinned. "I made a pretty one, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did."

He looked at me thoughtfully. "When you have children, you realize what a wilderness it all is, William, what a wilderness they must go through."

"We got through it," I said. "So will they."

"I suppose so," Sam said. He reached down to stroke Christina's hair, then straightened himself up again. "There's Elena," he said.

She was walking toward us, weighted down with a large shopping bag. She lowered it heavily to the ground when she reached us.

"I made a stop at the library," she said breathlessly as she sat down. "Sorry if I'm late."

"Howells, Twain, Van Wyck Brooks," I said as I fumbled through her bag. I picked up another volume and held its spine up to get a better light. "The d.a.m.nation of Theron Ware." I dropped the book back into the bag and picked through the rest. Some were famous t.i.tles, others less well known, and still others obscure, at least to me.

"Are you reading for anything in particular?" Sam asked Elena.

"Just reading," she said.

Sam was already smelling a purpose in her labor. "For no reason at all? No ulterior motive?"

"Not one I fully understand."

Sam watched her suspiciously. "Not a foray into nonfiction, I hope."

"Possibly," Elena said.

Sam shook his head. "You're a novelist, Elena. Why do other things?"

Elena said nothing.

Sam cleared his throat, a gesture of paternal disapproval he often used with writers. He had once expressed so much inarticulate disapproval at something Jason Findley was telling him that Jason had actually risen, walked to the pharmacy down the street from Parna.s.sus, and returned with a throat spray.

"Well, as your publisher, Elena," Sam said, "I think I have some right to be given an idea of what you're up to."

"A book on American writing," Elena said.

Sam shook his head. "That's been done about a thousand times," he said, as if such information would be news to my sister. "Ever heard of Vernon Parrington, Moses Tyler?"

Elena smiled. "Is there something you're trying to tell me, Sam?"

"Just that those guys can't write novels" Sam said, "but you can. Why mess with this other stuff? It'll just confuse you."

"I don't think so," Elena said.

Sam doubted it. "Well, why will your work be any different from the others?"

Elena did not skip a beat in her reply. "Because it will be mine."

Sam nodded wearily, s.n.a.t.c.hed Christina up, and began bouncing her on his knee. There was really nothing more to say to Elena on the subject, and so rather than continue in a direction that could only end in dispute, he quickly opted to engage his daughter, who was, at least at that point in her life, the sort of female he could handle.

While Sam played with Christina, Elena and I chatted casually. I mentioned a teaching offer I'd received from a Midwestern university. "I thought about taking it," I told her, "but I decided against it."

Elena smiled. "You're the complete New Yorker now," she said. "You couldn't live anywhere else." Years later, when she visited me for the first time in my new apartment in Cambridge, she brought a huge poster showing the Empire State Building at night. "So you don't forget your roots," she said as she taped it to the wall.

After a time, Christina became cranky, and Sam fled across the park in search of a taxi.

"He's quite the incompetent father," I said, watching him. "Panics at the slightest thing."

Elena nodded. "Well, he's used to having a lot of help. I'm not sure he could get along without it anymore."

I laughed. "He wanted a kid, now he's got one," I said. "Why he wanted one, I'll never know."

Elena looked at me as if she found my remark quite unusual. "He was lonely, William."

I shook my head. "You learn many things when you have children, Elena, and one of them is that they are no solution to the problem of loneliness."

"So when Alexander grows up and leaves, that won't bother you?" she asked.

"I'll miss him," I said, "but I won't be lonely without him, because I won't be any more or less alone." I stood up and stretched my arms out. "Let's take a walk."

Elena grabbed her bag of books. "Where to?"

"Oh, just around," I said, taking the bag from her as I started off toward the opposite side of the park. "How about you? Do you need a companion? Husband? Lover?"

"Something of that sort," Elena said. She smiled. "Does that seem so shocking?"

I shook my head. "Of course not."

We reached the southern edge of the park, and up ahead I could see a long line of paintings displayed on a wrought iron fence, the sort of art the universal tourist buys, whether munching a hot dog on MacDougal Street or a croissant in Montmartre.

"My G.o.d, Sam's right," I said. "The Village has changed." I took Elena by the arm and steered her eastward toward Fourth Avenue. "Perhaps you have, too, Elena. I remember sitting with you in the Luxembourg Gardens only a few years ago and you said that you'd missed a few things in life, but that you could get along without them."

"I have, and I can," Elena said. "But I don't want to." She stopped suddenly and there was an unexpected fierceness in her face. "I'm forty-four years old, William. I'm not ready for my dotage." She glared at me. "I intend to enjoy what I can. Why should my work defeat everything?"

It was only three months after our walk in the Village that Elena met Jason Findley again. In the meantime, she had been actively pursuing those invitations and gatherings which would most likely have put her in touch with interesting men, "the intellectual equivalent of occupying bar stools," as Mary so bluntly put it in a letter to her at that time.

Still, for all this effort, she had had little success, and by the fall some of her energy had clearly dissipated. The need remained, however, and because of that, she showed up at a party at Sam's penthouse apartment in the fall of 1956.

It appeared that everyone else on earth had shown up at Sam's party as well. There were crowds around the buffet tables and the makes.h.i.+ft bars, crowds roaming through the tiny art gallery and somewhat larger library, crowds milling about in the foyer, and probably in the laundry room as well. Somewhere in all that teeming ma.s.s was Jason Findley, and by some act of either accident or design he spotted Elena and immediately approached her.

I was seated with her on a sofa in one of the more remote corners of Sam's cavernous apartment. It was as far away as we could get from both the string quartet and the smell of hot hors d'oeuvres. Elena was already getting fidgety, but she seemed to calm down as Jason came up to her.

"Good evening, William," he said, bowing slightly. "And to you, Miss Franklin." He smiled. "May I call you Elena?"

"Of course," Elena said. "Would you like to join us?"

"I would, yes," Jason said. He took a chair from a few feet away and brought it over to us, sitting opposite the sofa, his legs crossed and pulled under the chair to keep them from looking, as he said, like a raised drawbridge.

"Rather crowded, isn't it?" he said. He was fifty-seven but always appeared somewhat older, or perhaps simply more experienced. It was as if by writing his history books he had lived more lives and now looked back at you not through his own life alone but through vast distances in time.

"I feel as though I know you, Elena," he said. "I've read all your books and learned quite a lot from them. I remember the whole episode with Calliope. They bounced you around a bit on that one, didn't they?"

"Yes," Elena said.

"You had one thing on your side, however," Jason added. "Your detractors were fools."

"Not all of them," Elena said.

"No, not all," Jason admitted. "Of course, one's enemies never are entirely foolish." He smiled. "That's one of the more disturbing elements of life." He took a sip from the gla.s.s of wine he had brought with him. "Are you working on anything now?" he asked her.

"Nothing in particular," Elena said. "Just some research. And you?"

"Just finished a book on John Randolph. Parna.s.sus has it now. I suppose it's in good hands."

"Yes, I'm sure it is," Elena said.

"You were just back from France when I saw you last," Jason said. "I'm happy to see you've decided to stay with us. As I said to you before, I believe, exile's not all it's cracked up to be."

"No, it isn't," Elena said.

"Of course, I'm a bit of one myself. Southerner, you know."

Elena nodded. "How did you happen to come north?"

Jason laughed. "Well, I was born in the Mississippi Delta, like Basil Ransom in The Bostonians - both of us beached and forlorn in the North."

"Do you feel that way?" Elena asked immediately. "Beached and forlorn?"

"Well, maybe that's a bit too strong," Jason said. "The fact of the matter is, no one made me come up here, it was all my doing. I fled the South like it was a house on fire."