Martha wrote it down. “But that was sort of a pattern with her, wasn’t it?”
I shook my head. “Not really,” I said.
Martha looked surprised by my answer. “But what about all those other times, her reclusiveness when she was writing New England Maid, and then later, the year or two just before she finished up Quality?”
“I suppose that can look like a pattern,” I admitted, “but this time it was different, I think, because Elena wasn’t working on anything, on any book, I mean.” Again I could see her standing near the car as we pulled away. She raised her hand slowly and waved. A swirl of leaves rushed toward her, blown by a sudden gust of wind. She stared intently down at them and did not look up again before we had turned the corner and she was no longer in view. “She was not working on a book,” I said to Martha, very certain now that I was right. “She was working on her mind.”
And that is what she did for the next eight years: she thought about how to think. She continued to live in Brooklyn Heights, in her small, well-furnished apartment on Columbia Heights. Jason sometimes visited her there, but aside from him very few people saw her. Barney Nesbitt complained, grew disgruntled, accused Elena of wasting away. He wrote me letter after letter warning me that she was going crazy all alone. But I had by then learned not to be alarmed by such things. His portrait of her walking in solitary preoccupation on the Promenade, with all of lower Manhattan staring gloomily down at her from across the river, did not disturb me at all. She had what she needed, she had herself.
Which is precisely what I told Martha as we pulled up in front of Elena’s house.
Martha smiled, a bit indulgently. “That’s just a little glib, don’t you think, William?”
I put the car in gear and turned toward her. “Does it matter that it’s true?”
Martha looked skeptical. “Surely you’re not saying that it was only very late in life that Elena learned to like herself.”
“Of course not. I think my sister was one of those very fortunate people who like themselves from the beginning and never stop liking themselves.”
Martha drew the collar of her coat more tightly over her throat. “Can we go in the house now? It’s really dreary out here.”
I built a fire in the front room, and Martha and I sat down together. There was a small table between our two chairs, and I had placed a bottle of brandy on it. I poured a snifter for each of us.
“Take this, Martha,” I said. “This is the sort of drink that warms the blood and mellows the spirit.”
Martha smiled, took the glass from my hand, and downed it in one gulp. “Yes, very good.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a longshoreman when it came to booze,” I told her.
“A woman has to learn to drink, William,” Martha said. “It pulls men up short, makes them realize you’re not to be screwed around with.”
I see.
Martha nodded firmly. “Once you realize that people think in symbols, you have to get your symbols straight, and make sure everyone else does, too.”
I smiled. “I never doubted that you were a formidable person, Martha.”
Martha poured herself another brandy. “Good.” She took a small sip and laughed. “You didn’t think I was going to down it like the first one, did you?”
“I’m only an observer here,” I said.
Martha laughed lightly. “I’ll miss you, William. I’ll miss these interviews.” She put down her glass. “This is the last one, I’m afraid.”
“Really?”
She nodded mournfully. “I’ve spent the advance, or most of it. I simply can’t afford another plane fare back to the East Coast.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Well, it has to be. We’ll correspond, of course. I still have many questions. But for now, it’s those mysterious eight years.”
“Which are not very mysterious,” I said. “They’re really not. Sorry.”
Martha shifted uneasily in her chair. “I’m not altogether convinced of that, William.” She glanced down at her notes. “After you left New York for Cambridge, when was the next time you saw her?”
“Perhaps a month later,” I told her. “She came to my apartment. She brought a poster of the Empire State Building and taped it to the wall.”
“How did she look?”
“She looked quite well,” I said.
“Not distressed in any way?”
“Why should she have been distressed?”
“Well, for one thing, she was suffering from a pretty severe case of writer’s block, wasn’t she?”
“Not that I know of.”
Martha’s eyes widened. “William, Elena hadn’t written a word since Quality. What would you call that, if not writer’s block?”
I leaned forward, jostling the table a bit as I did so. “Martha, my sister was not interested in writing anything.”
“How do you know that?”
“By her manner,” I said. It was a vague answer, of course, yet, her manner was the only thing I had to go on.
Martha blinked rapidly. “Manner? You mean her behavior?”
“I mean the sort of grace she had at that time in her life,” I said. “All that frenetic need to be engaged in something had simply disappeared.” I smiled. “It struck people as very odd, no doubt. Jason thought Elena suicidal.”
“And you didn’t find that alarming?”
“No. I knew it wasn’t true,” I said. “And so did good old Jack MacNeill.” I remembered the telegram he had sent to me shortly after Elena had visited him in Wales: “Know how you must feel re Elena STOP. Keep in mind STOP. In order to open again a flower must sometimes close STOP.” I stood up, walked to Elena’s old desk, and took the telegram out of the top drawer. “Here, look at this,” I said as I handed it to Martha.
Martha read it, then looked up and smiled. “Well, the image is hackneyed,” she said, “but the sentiment is lovely.”
I nodded and drew the telegram from her hand. “True, too.”
“All right, then,” Martha said, “what were those years all about, William?”
“I told you. They were about the mind,” I said flatly. “My sister’s mind — not a small or simple thing, as you already know.”
“So she was thinking? Just thinking?”
I smiled. “Well, as Sam used to say, that ain’t chopped liver.”
Martha laughed. “No, I guess not.” She reached for the brandy and poured herself another drink. “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
She took a sip from the glass, then placed it back on the table and took up her pencil. “Now, what were you saying about chopped liver?” she asked with a grin. “I mean about Elena’s mind. She was working to expand it?”
I shook my head. “To reorient it.”
“Seek its limits?”
“No, Martha,” I said, shaking my head again. “One thing is certain about Elena. She had her politics, her much-talked-about feminism, and a host of other ideas. But more than anything else, my sister believed in a considered life.”
Martha raced to get it down. Then she looked up at me. “Well, that’s not a new idea, is it?”
“Not at all. But it is a very powerful one when, more than any other single notion, it informs a life.”
Martha smiled rather sweetly and took another sip from her glass. “This goes down very smoothly.”
“Yes, it realizes its function that way.”
“How Aristotelian, William.”
I looked at her closely. “How will you realize yours, Martha?”
Martha lowered the glass. “What?”
“That’s the question To Define a Word asks more often than any other,” I said. “How may I be a human being?”
“Well, by just living, right?”
I shook my head. “No, by thinking about life.”
Martha was going to reply, but I turned away and looked out toward the road that passed in front of the house. The fog was lifting
now, and I could see the gray shingles of the cottage across the street, dark and wet, even through the haze. I remembered that one morning, early on, when Elena was still able to get around, we drove to the Brewster Ladies’ Library, where she had been asked to deliver a brief address. It was foggy, and very chill and damp. Elena watched out the window as we drove along.
I turned back toward Martha. “Do you remember that essay Elena wrote about Sam Waterman when he died, the one about the bitterness of old age?”
Martha nodded. “Yes, I do.”
“Elena never felt that, the bitterness,” I said. “And the reason is that she had taken those seven years to decide her course.” And at the end of that time, she had given away almost her entire library, quite a few of her records, and even that violin she plucked at sometimes but never really learned to play. “You know what Manfred Owen says to his daughter in To Define a Word,” I asked Martha. “‘You have lived your life like a pinball, knocking left and right, banging into walls, ringing pointless bells.’ Remember that?”
“Yes.”
“We all do that, to some extent,” I said. “Elena believed that she had lived that way for quite some time. She intended to stop.”
Martha smiled cunningly. “So she chose at last.”
“Chose what?”
“Between passion and control, she chose control.”
I poured Martha another drink. “Why does that sound so terrible, when you say it?”
“But that’s what she chose, isn’t it?”
I handed Martha her glass and poured one for myself. “Not long before Elena died,” I said, “I walked into the back room, the one you and I have sat in so often, the one that looks out on the water. She was lying down on a small bed I had moved in there. Her breathing was becoming difficult. I wanted to lighten things up a bit, so I slapped my hands together and said — in a mocking voice, you understand — I said, ‘So, Elena, what have you learned from life, aye?’ And I remember that she turned to me slowly, her face very serious indeed, and she said, ‘I have learned how difficult it is to live an intelligent life.’”
Martha lowered her glass. “So that’s what she came here to discover? How does one live an intelligent life? That’s the question she answers in To Define a Word?”
“No, that’s one of the question she asks,” I said. “Look at it this way, Martha. New England Maid was a reaction to her youth. Calliope was a way of dealing with human catastrophe and its moral implications. Inwardness examined what moral responsibility is. Quality was about the actual, reducible intelligence of our literature. And then, after all that, To Define a Word asks about the nature of a moral life.” I took a sip of brandy while Martha pondered my assertion. “If you are looking for a pattern in Elena,” I added after a moment, “look for the pattern in her mind.”
Martha winced. “Going after my desertion theme again, right, William?”
I let that pass and pressed on toward my point. “Don’t you see, Martha?” I asked. “She demanded two things of herself, and of everyone else for that matter: knowledge and goodness.”
“Did she think that there was a contradiction between the two?” Martha asked.
“She knew that they were not the same,” I said.
“So this passion and control duality, which Jack talked about, that was nothing?”
“It may have been true in terms of certain elements of my sister’s personality,” I said, “but it had little to do with her mind.”
Martha raised a finger in protest. “Yes, but William —”
“I know what you’re going to say, Martha,” I interrupted, “and I can only tell you what I believe to be true of Elena: that the story of her life is the story of her work, and that the story of her work is the story of her mind.” I smiled. “Can you follow that?”
Martha grinned impishly and actually winked. The brandy was clearly getting to her. “Only with difficulty, old fellow, only with difficulty,” she said.
I poured myself another drink. “Look Martha …” I began, then stopped. How could I explain to Martha something I only dimly perceived myself.
“Yes, William, go on,” Martha said, lifting her glass slightly as she eased herself backward in her seat.
I shook my head. “I can’t.” Suddenly I saw Elena looking back at me from the jetty again, wrapped in a huge scarf, her white hair in a bun behind her head, quoting Jason with a small, sad smile: “‘Death completes no circle save the most banal.’”
“William,” Martha said, “you were saying.”
I shook my head. “No, nothing.”
“But it was quite interesting and I’d like to get it down.”
And Elena had eased herself down from the rocks, offering me her hand. It had seemed very cold when I took it.
“This duality,” Martha sputtered, “this business of — what would you call it — the mind and the heart.”
I could not stop my head from shaking as I continued to answer Martha. “No, nothing. Nothing at all. No. No.” My voice was like a bell tolling in the background, and I saw Elena at that moment when I lifted her from the jetty and put her down again on the sand. She had taken her hand from mine and lifted it toward me and touched my face. “Ah William, my noble knight.”
“No, nothing, Martha, nothing,” I said, very quickly. And then suddenly I began to cry.
Martha shot forward and took me into her arms. “Oh, William, I’m sorry,” she said, hugging me gently, playing kind Cordelia to my wailing Lear. “I didn’t mean to press you. I’m sorry. I won’t ever do that again.”
For the next two days, we tiptoed around each other, Martha asking only the most trivial questions, carefully keeping the floodgates tightly closed.
She left on Monday, insisting on a cab. She hugged me tightly before she left and waved from the window, a huge smile pasted to her worried face. She looked back as the cab pulled away. Her face was gray behind the glass, but I could see the kindness in her eyes. I could also see myself in her mind, an old man smitten with God knows what depths of belated passion and remorse, living now in a lonely house, waiting only to die as Thomas de Quincey had, whispering desperately into the night, “Sister, sister, sister,” his last words.
I suppose it was Sam Waterman’s death that finally determined Elena to take up residence on Cape Cod. It was something he had always wanted her to do, and so she did it for him. But what began as a gesture of remembrance and respect ended in a deep commitment to the little house Sam gave her, and to the particular loveliness of Cape Cod in winter, bleak as Hardy’s Egdon Heath, and as beautiful.
Only three months after leaving the United States, Sam began to get edgy. He fired off letters to his spies at Parnassus, and, like good lieutenants, they told him what he both wished and dreaded to hear: that Christina was recklessly dismantling the empire he had so laboriously created, that she was arrogant, headstrong, and domineering (as if their former master had not been), that she was idiosyncratic in her editorial choices, that she was lavishly supportive of minor talents and niggling in her treatment of established ones (never mind that Sam had resplendently supported a talentless poet because he had a blind daughter, but at the same time refused to consider the work of a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist because he dressed “like a deranged gigolo”), and finally that she was promoting personal causes, particularly feminism, at the expense of sane business practice (it need hardly be added that Sam had consistently committed the same offense during the thirty years he controlled Parnassus, moving from the socialism of his youth to the vitamin fads of his old age).
Thus, while Sam considered his own faults as mere extravagances of nature, these same failings in his daughter were seen as unspeakable perversities. The letters began, and once begun, never stopped. It is a dreadful correspondence, the anger of the one continually feeding the anger of the other. As in all such cases, the lawyers were ultimately brought in to cool boiling tempers, but succeeded only in turning up the heat. Finally, Sam launched his ill-
fated lawsuit, floundered as it floundered, and grew exhausted with a battle he could not give up.
He died in the spring of 1975, a bunch of legal papers crushed in his hand. He had gone for a walk on one of the dusty roads that surrounded his kibbutz. A routine army patrol found him, loaded his body into their jeep, and drove him back to their encampment. A young UPI reporter there took one look at the craggy face and knew he had a story on his hands. Only a few hours later those people to whom it mattered knew that Sam Waterman was dead.
He was, of course, brought back to New York. There was a large public ceremony, then a much smaller one at Parnassus — small at least by Sam’s standards, perhaps five hundred people. Some of the greatest names in literature were there, bumping into each other at the enormous buffet Sam had insisted on in his will.
Most of them even had the decency to show up at the cemetery sometime later. When I arrived, Christina shoved me toward a group of men who stood just beyond the grave site. “You’ll be part of the minyan,” she said authoritatively. I shook my head. “Christina, I’m not Jewish.” Christina smiled. “That’s okay, William,” she said. “We fudge a little on this issue, especially when it’s an old friend.”
So I stood on that warm summer day with my hands folded in front of me, and listened to the ancient rhythms of the Kaddish, and said good-by to my old friend. Elena watched me from across the way, with Jason standing to her right and Jack to her left — a romantic circumstance about which Martha made far too much in her biography, but which had a certain poignancy even so.
After the funeral, Jack and Elena and I went out to dinner. Jason had work to do, he said, but no one really believed that, especially Elena. He was still, even after all this, edgy around her. He was writing the part of his memoirs in which she played a prominent part, and I suppose he found it painful to be near her.
So it was just the three of us. We went to a small restaurant on the Upper West Side. The neighborhood was growing chic by then, filling up with cheese stores and boutiques, a kind of half-baked boulevard Saint-Germain, as Jack called it.