Elena by Thomas H. Cook

Elena simply watched me for a moment, saying nothing.

  “Do you want to know why I keep at it?” I asked her.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Because there are things about Coleridge that are important. These things, they won’t take one man out of that Seattle shantytown of yours. But they are important nonetheless, because there are people who may be warm and full and living in nice places but who are poor because they lack knowledge of these things that are in Coleridge and Marlowe and Shakespeare.”

  Elena nodded.

  “And so I do this book on Coleridge,” I continued, my voice almost quaking suddenly — so passionately did Cold Bill believe these things. “Maybe it’s futile; I don’t know. But I have found a value in his work that I know is real, and when I’m exploring that, I feel I am exploring something essential in life.”

  Elena stood quietly, facing me. Her body was framed by the large windows at the rear of the house.

  “I don’t know what else I can tell you about it,” I said. My own words were still echoing grandly in my mind. It seemed to me that I had sounded quite touchingly Ciceronian. I smiled. “Jack would no doubt laugh at such obscure motives.”

  I could not tell from Elena’s face whether she took me for a wise man or a fool.

  “Thanks for helping me move again, William,” she said finally.

  I let myself out and walked down the stairs. On the street, I looked back up to Elena’s apartment. The windows were curtainless, and at that moment they seemed forlorn in their nakedness. In the fading light, I could see my sister setting her papers in order, shelving her books, ordering those piles of notes from which she was drawing her extravagant novel. I envied her the courage of her purpose, and in doing that, I suppose, I envied my own — all those scattered sheets cluttering my desk at home, from which I intended to bring forth Coleridge. And it struck me suddenly that I had entered upon a new way of thinking about him. I had broken through the stately academic portrait that might have made my book no different from the one I had written about Cowper. In my sister’s struggles I had recognized something true of others like herself: a relentless preoccupation with that which cannot be defined. She and Coleridge and a host of others great and small were involved in exploring, not the heights of experience, nor its depths, but only that which it is reasonable for one to desire. In that recognition, my work and Elena’s and even Jack’s came together in a true fraternity. This thought rather grandly lifted my spirits, and as I walked down Columbia Heights I actually smiled to all who passed my way.

  Elena worked continually while Jack was away. At times she was quite full of energy, and at other times exhausted. Her mood became the steady gauge of her work, bright and exuberant when it was going well, tired and dejected when it was not.

  According to Miriam, Elena was unable to find a satisfactory way to reshape the raw material she had collected. She tried repeatedly to forge a tale out of the heartbreaking data she had gathered on the road, but each time the material stubbornly resisted. She tried an epistolary structure, then a documentary one, then one of small vignettes told by different characters. Nothing worked.

  Jack, of course, continued to encourage her. His letters, several of which Martha published in her biography, came at the rate of two or three a week. But although they were written with the best intentions, they were very stern indeed in what they required of my sister. They reminded her that the main purpose of her book was the portrayal of the “Big Picture.” “Anyone can write a sad little book about the widow who’s forced out into the snow by the mean old landlord,” he wrote, “but you are one of the very few who can write a book that deals with the whole story.” They encouraged her to rely on her notes: “Forget about the idea of a central story. The notes are the story. Start with hunger, the hunger we saw across the country. Just start with that and see if maybe the whole nation can be portrayed by this metaphor of starvation.”

  Elena’s replies to these letters, some of which Martha also published, reveal a young woman who is trying to come to terms with another person’s vision of what her work should be. She asks for advice as to proposed story lines and narrative techniques. She introduces characters who might serve as the voice of the novel: a reporter, a labor organizer, a Communist party functionary, a derelict, even a “bourgeois politician.” Each letter grows more desperate than the last, and in the final one, written only two weeks before Jack’s return to New York, there is an obvious exasperation with the material itself, all those thousands of gloomy notes, “which keep watching me from every corner of the room.”

  Jack came home just in time to make it to my wedding. It was held in the courthouse, a very simple affair, with Miriam in a plain blue dress and me in one of my two black suits. We had decided upon a completely secular ceremony, conducted by a magistrate who was paid a set fee, and who read the official words rather quickly before hurrying on to more pressing business.

  We had a small reception in Miriam’s apartment. Mr. Gold had insisted upon hiring a catering service, which set out an elaborate spread on Miriam’s small kitchen table. There were even two waiters in bolero jackets, who found it rather difficult to maneuver in the space of Miriam’s living room and spent the afternoon muscling through the crowd and bumping their large silver trays against the walls.

  It was altogether a happy occasion. Sam was there with another blonde, and Harry came with Felice, his new bride. Mary strolled about, smoking a cigarette, eyeing every man as if already on the lookout for another husband. Philip did not come at all, nor Tom, with whom all of us had more or less lost contact by then.

  The somber note, however, was Elena. She stood alone by a small table in front of one of Miriam’s many mismatched bookshelves. She looked perplexed, which was the way she had looked almost continually during Jack’s absence. I had expected this attitude to change upon his return, but it hadn’t. Perhaps it had even deepened, so that her face now suggested the profound bafflement that no doubt plagued her. Watching Jack as he and Sam laughed and joked and talked politics a few feet away, she seemed almost like the Elena of years before, the little girl reading in the broken-down shack which creaked and moaned with every breeze that swept through our back yard.

  I walked across the room, a glass of champagne in my hand, and stood beside her.

  “You’re looking rather at odds with things, Elena,” I said.

  She smiled slightly. “You know me, William, full of moods.”

  I took a sip from the glass. Across the room, my father was talking animatedly to Mr. Gold.

  “The old man seems to be having a good time.”

  “I suppose,” Elena said. “He came over to my apartment last night. Jack was there. We all talked for a while. Jack was going on about the situation in the South, about how he expected the Negroes and the whites down there to make an alliance and overthrow the plantation owners.”

  I smiled. “That must have been inspiring for Father.”

  “Actually, he listened quite carefully,” Elena said. “He asked Jack a few questions. Jack answered them. Then, after a while, Jack had to leave.” She stopped and watched our father for a moment. “After Jack left, he said to me, ‘Elena, I’ve always let you go your own way. But just one word of caution from an old toiletries salesman: Your boyfriend is a fool.’”

  I shook my head. “Oh, for God’s sake, Elena, you shouldn’t let that bother you. He’s just an ignorant old man.”

  Elena’s face was very grim, and she spoke slowly. “Sometimes your mind just thinks something, William, thinks it independently, before you have a chance to stop it.” She looked back at our father. “The moment he finished that sentence about Jack, the next second, I heard my own mind as if it were a separate voice, and it said, Yes, Jack is a fool.’”

  I stepped around in front of her, blocking my father from her view, trying, by this gesture, to capture her complete attention.

  “Now you listen to me,” I said. “I’ve been married about three hours, so I k
now everything there is to know about romance. And I know that couples have their ups and downs. Right now, you and Jack are in a down. That’s all, Elena. Nothing to go crazy about.”

  Elena shook her head. “No, it’s more than that. It’s more than a difference of opinions or attitudes or anything like that. It’s a difference in the way we think, and not about any particular thing, William. It’s a difference in the process.”

  “Are you talking about your book?” I asked pointedly.

  “Only in part,” Elena said. “What I’m really talking about is sort of hazy to me.” She glanced randomly about the room, then she looked at me. “I love Jack, but that has very little to do with the way I think about him.” She shook her head, exasperated. “I know it’s a strange distinction,” she said.

  It was, as Elena said, a strange distinction. But in its early suggestion of the mind as a kind of separate entity, a willful creature struggling to be free of the complex sentiments which deflect its power, it was extraordinarily characteristic of my sister in the last years of her life, when it was just herself and the beach and the bay, living, as she said, “with that other person, the one who thinks.”

  By late afternoon most of the guests had left, and Elena, Jack, and I sat down on the sofa by the window while a few other people continued to stand about, idly drinking the last of the champagne. Jack stretched himself out comfortably, his long legs almost spanning Miriam’s small living room.

  “Well, Bill,” he said, “I think the time has come for you to tell me what you think of my novel.”

  “Well, I think it needs a little work,” I told him, keeping as much jollity in my voice as possible.

  “You want me to make it more highbrow, right?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But you know as well as I do that the audience for this book is not the working class. Middle-class leftists will read it, maybe some students, most of the past and present members of the John Reed Club.”

  Jack smiled. “I can go along with that, Bill, I really can. But I’m mostly a naturalist, you know. Strictly out of Stephen Crane.” He glanced at Elena. “I’m not like Elena, I can’t pull off something sweeping. Hell, she’s writing an epic, an American classic.” He swept his arm over her shoulder. She seemed to stiffen at his touch. “The way I see it,” Jack added, “The Forty-eight Stars is practically an American Aeneid.” Jack’s eye, of course, was anything but clear when it came to Elena or his own ambitions for her. “The Strike is a book for the average, intelligent, maybe sympathetic reader,” he said. “I’m shooting for that person. But Elena, she can get the real elite.” He grinned. “So, Bill, you should save the highbrow editing for Elena and just let me muddle through with a few split infinitives and not a single reference to Shakespeare or Dante or any of the big boys.”

  I was about to give Jack some details of how I expected him to improve his novel, when one of the waiters stumbled forward from across the room, balancing his tray precariously for an instant, then losing control altogether, so that it slid from his hand and crashed to the floor, spewing out a spray of broken glass and champagne.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Jack cried. He leaped up and began helping the waiter clean up the mess. Miriam started helping too, then Mary and Sam and the rest of us pitched in with bathroom towels and toilet paper.

  It was, I suppose, a rather comic scene, certainly not a momentous one. Jack never mentioned it again, and Elena wrote no notes on it. And yet it was with a scene very much like this one that she finally chose to open Calliope:

  In the beginning was the Word. That’s what they say. That’s what they were all saying at Tim’s wedding: “Did you get the word? Have you got the word?” They meant tips on Consolidated Oil. The “word” was, it was going up, way up, a ticker tape cathedral. In the corner, holding my glass, smiling at Patricia in her gown and Tim in his tuxedo, I thought the word would come to me, come dressed in purple robes, pointing a jagged finger at a single dot on a line of dots strung out on an endless scroll. “There, there you are, that dot, that is you on the Chain of Being.” Then I would know, then I would have the word. I was grinning, a little feebly, very pleased with my meditations, though Father was scowling at me, his white eyebrows inching together, almost speaking, like two furry lips: “For God’s sake, Raymond, act your age. I have interests to protect.” And so I wiped the smile from my mouth like a residue of heavy cream and turned and saw it, like a vision. The waiter, dressed in a little red jacket with winking gold buttons, had begun to lose his footing. He was trying to get it back, but his legs were crossed and he was sinking toward the floor. The tray, huge and filled with champagne glasses, was slanting downward, then moving, sweeping, hurling itself from his hand until it crashed nose down across the polished floor, and a terrible noise of shattering glass filled the hall, while we jerked around frantically to avoid the wave of spilled champagne, flipping and flopping about as a snake coils and uncoils after the shovel has taken off its head.

  When I reread that passage now, I am struck by how certain the voice is, how true to the story it will tell, and how far my sister was from it on my wedding day, and yet not far at all.

  She never learned his name, that young man in the black tuxedo who did so much to shape the final structure of Calliope. Perhaps if she had learned it during their short conversation across from Woolworth’s that afternoon, she might have dedicated the book to him, rather than to Jack MacNeill. But she didn’t, and so he remains a nameless figure in her life, buried so deeply now that not even the tireless excavations of Martha Farrell could unearth him. Thus he lives only as “the pale, blue-eyed young man” Martha describes in her biography, who came along at precisely the right time in Elena’s life.

  It was the early fall of 1936, only a few weeks after Miriam and I were married. Elena was still at work on The Forty-eight Stars, reworking yet another draft. Her relationship with Jack had been continually cooling since his return, and she was making very little effort to rekindle it.

  “I have stopped talking to him about my book,” she told Miriam and me one afternoon not long after our wedding, “and soon I will stop talking to him about my life.”

  And yet she could still be persuaded by him, coaxed into doing things that no longer really appealed to her. One of them, I am sure, was the suggestion he made that rainy afternoon when we were all together, to go down to the Fourteenth Street Woolworth’s, where the shop girls had taken over the store.

  “Who knows,” Jack said to her as he stood by the window, watching the rain flatten against the pane, “you might use something about it in your book.”

  Elena glanced at me, then at Miriam.

  “Not me, Jack,” Miriam said. “I’ve got my own work to do.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “How about it, William?”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go down with you.”

  “Good,” Jack said. “It should be quite interesting. All the workers are women, you know.” He turned to Elena. “You should come with us, too.”

  Elena looked up from the magazine though which she had been idly flipping. “Why?” she asked.

  “More material for your book, Elena,” Jack said. “Why else?”

  Elena nodded wearily. “I doubt it,” she said. “But I don’t have anything else to do.”

  “Hang around here, then,” Miriam said. “You can help me with the novel I’m working on.”

  Elena shook her head and smiled. “I don’t think I could be much help to you, Miriam.” She walked to the door and pulled her raincoat from the rack beside it. “All right, let’s go.”

  And so the three of us made our way over to West Fourteenth Street, silently pushing through the rain. Elena walked determinedly between Jack and me, her face expressionless, as Jack rambled on about the implications of what he now called “the battle of Woolworth’s.”

  It was completely calm at the store. A single policeman stood guard outside the door, for reasons which, when Jack asked him, he could not explain. ??
?Maybe they just don’t want the girls stealing no panties,” he said.

  Jack presented his press card and we were immediately allowed inside. The women were milling around, randomly examining the counters of dry goods and cosmetics, as if they were shoppers. A few of them had gathered in the back of the store, and their occasional laughter rang over us as Jack began his interviews.

  “We want a union here,” one woman told Jack bluntly. “We want a forty-hour week, and we want a minimum wage of twenty dollars a week.” She grinned at the other women who gathered around her. “When we get that, then F.W. Woolworth can have his store back.” She glanced at Elena. “You a reporter, too?”

  “In a way,” Elena said.

  “Good,” the woman said. “This is mostly a female thing, here. That’s the way it is in all of old F.W.’s stores. He thinks he can get away with paying women less than men, you know?”

  Elena nodded, and the other women murmured their agreement.

  “Who you with, the Times?” one woman asked from the circle that had gathered around.

  “New Masses,” Jack said.

  “That a New Jersey paper?” the woman asked.

  Jack shook his head. “Listen, who’s been passing all this food and bedding in here?” He tipped the eraser of his pencil toward the heaps of sheets, pillows, and blankets that had been carefully folded and stacked on the top of the counters. “All this stuff, where’d you get it?” He grinned. “None of this belongs to old F.W., does it?”

  The women laughed. “Husbands mostly,” one of them said. “They’re behind us all the way.”

  Jack continued his interview, playfully joking with the women, jotting down their comments, putting a star by any he thought especially quotable. He was a master at eliciting the printable remark, and Elena once said of an interview he conducted with a farm woman in Idaho that when he left her, she looked as if she had been made love to by an expert.

  After a time, Elena and I eased our way out of the steadily thickening circle of women who had gathered around Jack. We wandered over to the back corner of the store, where a few sleepy parakeets stood rigidly on their spindly wooden perches.