I plucked one of the leaves from the fern. It was so dry it practically turned to powder in my hand. I smiled lamely. “You have to water these things, Elena.”
She had taken a seat in one of those beach chairs which Jack had given her long ago and which she had placed in the living room as if it were a chaise longue. She was pulling at her lower lip, her face calm and thoughtful.
I shrugged. “I can’t pretend that he meant as much to me as he did to you.”
Elena looked at me closely, as if studying my expression.
“You never cared for him at all, did you?” she asked.
“No.”
“You begrudged him his life.”
“I begrudged him his selfishness, Elena. Does that strike you as cruel?”
“It strikes me as banal.”
I looked away. “I don’t think there’s any need to go into what I thought about our father.”
Elena nodded. “All right, William,” she said wearily. “What do you want to do?”
“Bury him, of course,” I said dryly. “But where?”
“He wanted to be buried at the Mystic seaport, in Connecticut,” Elena said.
“All right.”
“Somewhere near Route One,” she added.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud. “Are you serious?”
“That’s what he told me,” Elena said quietly. “He meant it seriously.” She took a deep breath, then got to her feet. “Well, there’s no need to wait around here discussing things. We have to go up to Mystic.”
We borrowed a car from Joe Tully, one of those Chevy Blackout Coupés with a wooden bumper and no chrome at all. It was the late fall of 1942. We were at war, of course, and the signs of it were all about. Huge posters everywhere proclaimed the vigor of our patriotism. There were always knots of men hanging around the recruiting stations, and Fifth Avenue looked like an enormous hall of flags. Harry had already shipped out for the Pacific, and in the densely packed Selective Service station on lower Broadway it had been discovered that I had a precariously beating heart.
None of the trappings of such momentous times seemed very important the morning Elena and I left for Mystic, however. Miriam waved good-by from the stoop of our apartment, my ailing son perched on her hip. Then it was just Elena and me, heading out of the city and then up through Connecticut on that same road our father had driven so many times. It was a long drive, and for the most part a silent one. Elena sat quietly in the passenger seat, glancing at a hill or inlet from time to time.
We arrived late in the afternoon. The sun was already going down over the bay. It could hardly have been more beautiful: a swath of bright red, rising as if from the sea itself, spread out across the entire sky in seamlessly fading tones.
“Not a bad place to die, Elena,” I said quietly as we began walking toward the hotel.
It was a small wooden structure with a porch that dropped to the right. It was painted light blue with a lavender trim, but despite the relatively gay colors, it looked worn and frazzled, much like the old people who sat listlessly in its tiny lobby. In such a weary galaxy my father must have been a blazing meteor. It became clear that he was beloved by the other residents as a lively, sporting figure, ribald as an old artillery officer, yet cultured, as one of them said, “like a retired actor, or something like that.” He had told them whopping lies and they had adored him for it.
His body was still stretched out on the bed, but the owner, a small, bespeckled man whom the tenants called Mouse, had had the decency to cover it with a simple white sheet from which protruded at one end my father’s neatly polished shoes and at the other his neatly polished hair.
I could hear Elena catch her breath when she saw him.
“I’ll leave you two with him,” Mouse said delicately as he shrank out the door.
“Well, there’s the end of the tale,” I said, glancing at my father wearily.
Elena looked at me coldly. “Why don’t you try to respect him just a little, William.”
I nodded. “Sorry.”
She walked to the window and stared out at the port. A small sea breeze rustled her hair.
“Well, what do we do now?” I asked.
She did not turn around. “Go down and see if the owner has contacted a local funeral director.”
“He has.”
“Then why didn’t they pick up the body?”
“He thought we might want them to wait. I think he’s scared out of his mind that he’s going to get sued for all this somehow. He’s being very cautious.”
Elena was still facing the water, half her body outlined by its dark blue background. “Have them come and pick him up, then,” she said.
I walked downstairs and made the call. Within a few minutes they had come and bundled my father’s body into a small station wagon which had been done over to resemble a hearse. As the car pulled away, I asked Mouse if there was a cemetery nearby from which the deceased could at least hear the traffic along Route 1. He looked at me as if I were an escapee from a madhouse. “There’s one just up the road,” he said, then retreated quickly into his quarters, no doubt carefully locking the door behind him.
Elena and I drove to it. It was a typical old New England cemetery, with a certain dignified modesty, the stones rather small and appropriately gray. From a distance, the cars along Route I could be heard as they swept north and south, headed for Boston or New York.
“It will do,” Elena said. Then she walked slowly back to the car.
We made the arrangement the next morning, and on the following afternoon Elena and I buried our father after a quiet chapel ceremony which most of the people from his hotel attended. They sat soberly, staring at his coffin, and disappeared immediately after it was put into the ground.
For a time after they had left, Elena and I continued to linger by the grave. Elena leaned against a tree and stared gently at the freshly turned earth. I walked about at some distance, anxious to return to New York.
“Are you ready to leave now?” I asked finally.
Elena nodded but said nothing. Her grief was like black netting over her face. I could not share it. My father had always seemed to me a kind of clown, his life a parody of the person he should have been.
“You know, Elena,” I said as we made our way back to the car, “he may have run up some debts around here. Perhaps we should check on that.”
Elena continued to walk stiffly beside me. “He paid his bills, William.”
“Outside the hotel, I mean. He could have stiffed the local grocer, something like that.”
Suddenly Elena wheeled around and slapped my face with such extraordinary force that I stumbled backward.
“You have no right to talk about him like that!” she screamed.
I was thunderstruck. “For God’s sake, Elena!”
She swung at me again. I dodged out of the way and stepped around her. “Stop it!”
“He didn’t love you, William,” she shouted. “So what? He didn’t have to!” She lunged at me again, although with much less force than before, a kind of half swing, meant more to demonstrate her fury than to complete a blow.
“Now stop this!” I shouted. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?”
She made a final swipe, her face red and her eyes filling with tears. I stepped forward and pulled her to me, holding her tightly while she sobbed.
“I’m sorry, Elena,” I said softly. “Forgive me.”
I felt her nod slowly against my shoulder.
Then I started crying, too, and the two of us slumped to the ground, gathered in each other’s arms.
I don’t know how long we stayed there. It might have been a half hour, it might have been much less. We finally struggled to our feet, however, and walked to the car, still clutching at each other as if afraid to let go.
Elena was very subdued on the drive home. She had been that way since Elizabeth’s death. I suppose I hoped that her sudden outburst might have relieved her somewh
at, washed away a portion of her accumulated grief, as if memory were a film of dust.
But such was not the case, and for the few years that remained until the end of the war, Elena held to her solemn mood. She visited Miriam and me often, of course, and she took great delight in watching Alexander develop from an infant into a child. But for all this, she remained steadfastly inward, wholly apart from the enthusiasms of the home front. She helped Joe Tully in his various antifascist activities and on two occasions spoke on the same platform with Jack MacNeill. Under Miriam’s urging, she even wrote an anti-Nazi screenplay, but it was so talky and convoluted no producer would touch it.
In 1944, and after many false starts, Elena began another novel. Over dinner at my apartment, she stated her intention to write “something very quiet.”
She worked steadily during the next year, and from time to time, while having a drink or taking a walk, she would detail certain aspects of what she called “the project.” Bit by bit it emerged as a Utopian novel of very curious intent. Rather than dealing with social and economic issues, Elena’s novel would attempt to portray a world in which the mind had come to its perfection. Matters of material importance — the distribution of goods, for example, or questions having to do with the division of labor — would have no place in this work at all. Nor would there be any discussion of such ordinary concerns as family structure or sexual relations. “What I want to do,” she told Miriam one afternoon as she sat across from her desk at Parnassus, “is describe a people who have, in fact, brought their minds to completion.”
By February 1946 Elena had found a title, The Inland Road, but it was also clear that by that time she had found little else. In draft after draft, the book eluded her. Ideas came and went, and those which seemed firm at the point of inquiry dissolved under the flimsiest examination. Still, she kept at it, endlessly rethinking and rewriting until the book itself began to resemble, as she said in a 1975 interview, “a black funnel which simply whirled about in my head with no real substance whatsoever, just voices and shadows, nothing more.” In the end she saved only a line or two from the entire manuscript, and these she typed out on a single piece of paper which she put in her desk and which remained there, in a plain Manila envelope, until the day she died.
I pulled that envelope out and brought it back to my chair while Martha looked at me warily, her face framed by the storm which continued to beat at the large window behind her.
“I think this may give you an insight or two, Martha,” I told her.
“Into what?” Martha asked.
“Well, you’re curious about Elena’s leaving the country,” I said. “I think, in part, this supplies an answer.”
“But I already have an answer,” Martha said. “You, yourself, have talked about all the sad things that happened to her from 1939 to 1946. I mean, Elizabeth’s death primarily, but also your father’s.”
“But there’s also this.” I pulled the single sheet of paper from the envelope and read for the first time in almost forty years those two lines Elena had saved. They expressed, as clearly as she could state it, her final sense of what the people who lived along the inland road were like:
Close decorum they called love;
And learned judgment they called God.
I handed the paper to Martha, who read it slowly several times, then looked up at me.
“Well, I have to say, William,” she said, “that I don’t quite get the point.”
“Elena left the United States in order to become like one of those people on the inland road,” I said. “She left in order to become a person of learned judgment. She needed to get away in order to find that close decorum she required in her personal relations and which only distance could give her at that time.”
Martha stared at me, positively stunned. A gust of wind hit the window to her left and she glanced toward it, held her gaze there for several seconds, then turned back to me. “Are you saying, William, that Elena didn’t go to Paris because of all the tragedy that had occurred around her during the war?”
“Absolutely.”
She looked at me doubtfully. “How do you know?”
“Because the look on her face the day she left for France was exactly the same look she would get each time she began a new short story or essay or novel.”
Martha readied her pen on the page. “How did she look?”
“She looked like freedom, Martha,” I said. “I can’t be more specific than that. She just looked like freedom. Not excited or jubilant or full of mission. Not particularly solemn, and certainly not sad.”
“Freedom,” Martha muttered to herself as she wrote it down.
Elena left for Paris in the fall of 1947. I stood on the dock with Alexander crying in my arms and Miriam to my left and Sam to my right, looking vaguely disgruntled. “She’ll become one of those goddamn Frenchified writers,” he said gloomily, “just wait and see.” He looked up at Elena, who was waving down at us from the passenger deck of the De Grasse. Four years later, when Inwardness arrived on his desk, he read it immediately and found his worst fears realized. “This goddamn thing’s too cerebral,” he said, thrusting the manuscript at me. “Too brainy. What’s Elena doing over there, chitchatting with those Existentialist creeps at the Coupole?” He shook his head. “She’s lost her edge, William. There’s no bite in this book. Hell, it reads like one long pout.” He never changed his mind about Inwardness, but he published it anyway and was amazed by its success.
But on the day she left, I would not have predicted that she would write anything in France.
“I hope Elena finds what she’s looking for,” I said as the ship drew away from us.
She landed at Le Havre, then practically followed the Seine to Paris, arriving there during the first week of November 1947. When Martha asked me whether or not Elena understood much about the political and social atmosphere of France at this time, I answered that I simply did not know. The political turmoil in Paris before the war had diminished during the long sleep of the German occupation. Then, with liberation, there had been a flurry of revenge against those who had collaborated with the Nazi regime. In her letters, Elena spoke with some familiarity of this recent history, commenting on the execution of Brassilach, which had occurred almost two years before, and then of the suicide of Brieu La Rochelle. She wrote of these people as if I should have known who they were, which, at the time, I did not, and her conversant knowledge of such events suggested that she had taken the time to learn about the France in which she now resided and that the moral questions involved in collaboration were of particular interest to her. In Inwardness, Dorothea Moore discusses the moral terror of occupied Paris more than once, and I think that the whole issue of principle versus expediency, which was so central to the literary collaboration of the Left Bank, preoccupied my sister and to some extent provided the atmosphere surrounding the more isolated question of Timon’s death.
I did not see her for almost two years, although we wrote quite often, an exchange of varying quality. The letters seem to me now somewhat gossipy. Sam was having a torrid love affair during the first of those years, and more than a little space was dedicated to it. There was a bit of the travelogue, too, with Elena expounding on the various beauties of Paris. She visited Normandy and the Loire Valley, and there were chatty letters on these excursions. Once Elena saw Malraux at Deux Magots, and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir seemed forever holed up in the basement bar of the Pont-Royal Hotel. Elena duly reported these auspicious sightings, but she never approached any of the literary lights of Paris, even though all her work had by then been translated into French and she had probably gained a small following of her own.
In the fall of 1949,I published The Crossbow and the Lyre, subtitled The Romance of the Anglo-Saxon. It was well received, attracting even sufficient notice to garner an invitation to a symposium on European literature which was to be held at the Sorbonne in Paris. I accepted, of course, and so in April 1950 I came to Europe for the first
time and met my sister within the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe.
For some women, I suppose, the moment of supreme command comes while they are still in their teens, when their bodies shine with that incandescent beauty which only older eyes know to be almost instantly disappearing. For others, like Miriam, it comes when they are in their mid-twenties, when the last girlish effect flows imperceptibly into the flourish of completed womanhood. But for my sister, it came when she reached forty, and that glory, coming late, seemed all the more miraculous. She was dressed in a black skirt which fell almost to her ankles, and a white blouse, plain except for a ruffle of lace at the collar and the ends of the sleeves. A short black jacket with padded shoulders covered the blouse, and at her throat she wore a small cameo held by a black velvet band. She was carrying a burgundy handbag with a long strap. She smiled when she saw me, her eyes shining brightly under a pair of slender gold-rimmed glasses.
“Ah, William,” she said softly as she pulled me into her arms.
For a moment we stood there, unable to separate, two strangely clinging figures holding to each other in the Tuileries Gardens, Elena’s back to the Louvre, mine to the grandeur of the Place de la Concorde.
“I can’t believe it’s been three years,” I said finally.
Elena pushed back a wayward strand of hair. ‘Too long,” she said. Then she smiled and offered me her hand. “Come, let’s stroll in the Tuileries.”
“I like the glasses,” I said as we began to walk together. “They make you look —”
“I know,” Elena interrupted, “like a man. Distinguished.”
I shook my head. “No, like a woman.” I smiled. “Nobly planned, to warn, to comfort, and command.”
“And that’s from?”
“Wordsworth.”
Elena squeezed my hand. “Would you like to see where I live?”
“If we can walk there,” I said. “I want to see the city.”
That afternoon she took me along one of the world’s most scenic routes, and on those days now when I sit out on Elena’s small porch and watch the sailboats glide along the bay and try to remember Elena at a moment of particular pleasure, I remember, along with others, that afternoon we strolled out of the Tuileries, down the quai du Louvre, and then along the Seine until we reached the great white façade of the Hôtel de Ville.