Elena

  When we had ordered dinner, Jack chuckled softly. His hand trembled at his mouth, the aftermath of a second stroke. “Sam was the most restless guy I ever knew,” he said. “Did he rest even in Israel?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Rest would have killed him.”

  “Rest did kill him,” Elena said.

  Jack regarded her quietly. “Well, you’d better be careful then, Elena, because I hear you’ve been resting a lot.” He smiled. “Have you retired from life?”

  “No.”

  “Well, look at me. I was out there in that godforsaken little hole in Wales,” Jack said, “— you know it, Elena, you came there — and while I was there, I got in five newspapers and seventeen periodicals a week. Did you know that?”

  Elena glanced down and unnecessarily smoothed her napkin. “No, I didn’t, Jack.”

  Jack turned to me. “That’s — let me see — that’s twenty-two different publications a week. I was not retired from life.” He looked at Elena. “You understand my point?”

  Elena smiled affectionately. “Better than you know.”

  “The fact is,” Jack went on, “the world still has to be saved. You know why we fought so hard in the thirties? You know why we wanted to save the world then?”

  Neither of us answered him.

  “Because we knew that if we didn’t,” Jack said vehemently, “we’d have to grow old in this one.” He rocked back in his seat, squinting at me fiercely. Then he laughed and turned to Elena. “There’s no fury like an old fury, right, Elena?”

  “No, there isn’t, Jack,” she said gently. “None at all.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her. “I’m back in the USA for good, now. Hell, I’m going to kick some more ass before I die.” He wrapped his arm around Elena and squeezed her. “Would you like to join me, my dear?”

  I think she surprised him with her answer. “No,” she said, quite firmly.

  Jack smiled and gently drew away. “Well, I’ve grown more tolerant with time,” he said to her. “You have to find your own way.” He looked over at me. “I don’t know where our life comes from, but it has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  He turned back to Elena. “Quick answer from Cold Bill. He makes it sound like such a simple truth.”

  But of course it wasn’t simple at all, as any freshman philosophy student would have known. And I remember thinking as I watched Elena and Jack through the rest of the evening that there was something in their lives that transcended mine, that they looked down on me from a higher shelf. To Jack I would always be Cold Bill, someone who, for all his accomplishment, remained a man of missing parts. And for Elena I would forever be cast in the role of sidekick brother, an intimate in certain parts of her life and an alien to others. I had grown old among these unhappy truths, grown so accustomed to their ache that they ached no more, and I was at last at home with my enfeeblements, warmed by their long companionship, as one might grow kindly toward his limp, or listen with affection to the murmur in his heart.

  It was still fairly early when we finished dinner, but Jack was already tired. “The sap is drying up, William,” he said to me as I held his coat for him at the door. Then he turned to Elena. “It’s good there’s a few people left who remember when it wasn’t.”

  Traffic on the street was at a monstrous roar, and Jack’s rather shaky voice could hardly be heard above it. He tried to shout, but the effort exhausted him and he finally shrugged helplessly, and walked to the curb to flag a taxi.

  In a moment he was gone. Elena and I stood together on the sidewalk.

  “Are you going back to Cambridge tonight?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you may be seeing more of me in the future.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I’ve decided to take that house of Sam’s on the Cape,” Elena said. “Not for good, of course, only for the winters.”

  I could not have been more pleased. “Well, we’ll be neighbors of a sort then, won’t we?”

  “I suppose so,” Elena said. She glanced away from me. “I only made this decision just now. I’m not used to it yet. And of course, this should not be thought of as retirement.”

  “The last eight years have been your retirement,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You’re wrong, they haven’t been.”

  “What was it then, a search? How romantic.”

  Elena laughed. “A search? How banal. No, just a reorientation.”

  “Not of your personality, I hope.”

  “No, of my consciousness.”

  I smiled. “That sounds a little grand.”

  “Well, I can’t help that. It’s all we have, William, our consciousness. We should keep it tuned, don’t you think?”

  “And now you think something’s clicked and you’re ready for winter on the Cape?” I said brightly.

  “Yes.”

  “When do you intend to move?”

  “Perhaps within a month,” Elena said. “I have some things to settle.”

  “Well, call me when you’re ready,” I told her. “I’ll come down and drive you up there. I always welcome an opportunity to come back to New York for a day or so, and the drive up to the Cape should be pleasant, considering the company.”

  Elena smiled. “That would be nice, William, the two of us driving up together.”

  She called during the first week of September, and over Labor Day weekend I drove down to New York, checked in with Barney Nesbitt, who was editing my new book, a collection of essays on the English Romantics, and then drove Elena up to the Cape. It was a brilliant fall, almost as radiant as that other one, long ago, when we had stood in the Standhope railway station, waiting for a New York train.

  Elena turned from the window and smiled when I reminded her of that. “My God,” she said, “how could anyone have ever been that young?” She glanced toward the rear seat. There were only two suitcases there, along with her typewriter and those two reams of plain white bond upon which during the next year she would write the first draft of To Define a Word. “Traveling light again, I suppose,” she said.

  “Well, you’ve not accumulated much, Elena,” I told her, “just a noble reputation.”

  “That sounds rather final,” Elena said.

  “It’s too late to blow it now, my dear.”

  “I could write a foolish book.”

  “You’d be forgiven for it,” I said. “People would scratch their heads and ask what happened, but in the end they’d let it pass.”

  “Chalk it up to my senility.”

  “Or to the weepy sentimentality that comes with old age,” I said. “That’s what I’m most in danger of, I can tell you.” I shook my head. “Barney said that my essay on Byron was breathless as a schoolgirl.”

  Elena did not seem worried. “Barney is witty but he’s shallow, William.”

  In this mood, Elena seemed extraordinarily alive. She talked on about Barney Nesbitt for a while, speculating on the differences between learning and wisdom. She talked about David, about how she hoped that he would remain in New York, perhaps go to Columbia. After that, she simply wandered through any topic that struck her as worthwhile.

  We arrived at the house late in the afternoon. I had made an early morning appointment with a student for the next day and so had to return to Cambridge. Still, I wanted to see Elena safely installed. I helped her with the two bags and the typewriter, then joined her for a quick cup of coffee.

  “I could linger a bit longer if you like,” I offered.

  Elena shook her head vigorously. “No need at all, William,” she said. “This place is like a second home to me. I’m perfectly fine.”

  “I wouldn’t mind staying, just to make sure everything’s in working order,” I said.

  “No, that’s all right,” Elena said. “You go ahead back to Cambridge now.”

  It was evident that she was anxious for me to leave. She wanted to enjoy the solitude the house
offered her, that “awayness” which Manfred Owen requires in To Define a Word.

  I left just as the sun was beginning to set. Elena stood on her porch and waved to me as I got into the car. Once behind the wheel I leaned to the side, expecting to see her still there, her hand in the air, with the sky like a golden bowl behind her. But she was gone.

  Elena was already at work on To Define a Word when I saw her again. About a month after moving in, she called to invite me out for the weekend. I drove down from Cambridge on a Saturday morning, and as I walked up to her door, I heard the sound of her typewriter clattering away from within. It was a heartening sound. The recognition that she was at work again lifted my spirits, and I remember bouncing jauntily up the flight of wooden stairs that led to her house.

  She opened the door almost immediately. She was wearing a long robe, and the light flooding in from the windows behind made her look as if part of her already belonged to another world.

  “I heard your typewriter as I pulled up,” I told her.

  She smiled. “Well, you can notify our mutual acquaintances in New York. I’m sure they’ll be relieved.”

  She stepped back and allowed me to enter. She had bought a few paintings from local artists, replacing some of the more dubious ones Sam had purchased years before. But otherwise, very little had changed.

  She led me into the back room. “I use this for my office.”

  She had moved in a small desk from one of the bedrooms. Her typewriter rested upon it, and beside the typewriter, a manuscript perhaps an inch thick.

  ‘The new book?”

  “Yes.”

  “You seem to be progressing nicely.”

  “It’s only a first draft. But I thought about it for a long time before I began to write,” she said. She glanced at the pile of neatly stacked white paper on the desk. “It’s a very simple story, really,” she said. “Full of what amounts to homey advice.” She looked back at me. “Do you want me to tell you about it?”

  I must have looked surprised. “Are you willing to?”

  Elena smiled. “For some reason, I’m getting rather talkative these days. There’s a Mr. Richardson a few doors down who comes over from time to time. He’s a widower. He helps me with things. When I need to go somewhere, he drives me.” She shrugged. “Well, to make a long story short, William, I find that I talk to him like a magpie, really, just chat and chat.”

  “Well, you stayed sort of secluded before you moved here,” I said lightly. “It’s natural for you to burst out a little.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” Elena said. She glanced back toward the manuscript. “I like the book. I’m not sure anyone else will.” She looked back at me. “It’s called To Define a Word.”

  “I’d like to hear about it.”

  She made coffee and we sat down in the living room. Then, for almost two hours, Elena described her novel to me, with considerably more grace and affection than I had ever heard her speak of any of her other works.

  “It begins simply,” she said. “A father, living alone, waits for his daughter to return home. She is fleeing from a bad marriage and a generally disordered life. She has come home to be refreshed.” Elena smiled and took a sip from her cup. “She arrives, the daughter, Andrea. She is mixed-up, confused, and she asks her father — his name is Manfred Owen — she asks him to tell her about his own life. Which is what he does.”

  I nodded. “Interesting,” I said. “So it’s the story of the father, not the daughter?”

  Elena shook her head. “No. It’s the story of how a man chooses to tell his life, of what he draws from it.” She sat back and thought a moment. “It’s about what can and cannot be taught.”

  “I see.”

  Elena then went on to describe the dialogue that develops between Owen and his daughter, the shifting perspectives each of them brings to this long and intense conversation. As she spoke she seemed physically drawn into that ornate, book-lined living room in which she imagined the two of them to sit. I could see the glow from the fire in Owen’s hearth light my sister’s face. She seemed completely alive, her eyes full of light, her voice firm yet gently passionate. She looked much as Manfred Owen describes his wife on the day she gave birth, “as if she knew where power was.”

  “More than anything else,” Elena said, “Owen wants to give his daughter the benefit of his own experience. Everyone wants that, don’t you think, not just every father?”

  “Yes.”

  “At first he fumbles about, spouting homilies and platitudes,” Elena continued, leaning forward, her hands squeezed together in her lap. “Andrea thinks all of this just nonsense, that it all boils down to a simple notion that you should think about what you’re doing, that sort of thing. Owen becomes frustrated as Andrea continues to dismiss his comments. Finally she asks him bluntly why anyone should bother to think about anything. And it’s here that Owen grasps it himself. He looks her in the eye and tells her: ‘Because thinking, Andrea, is an act of love.’”

  I smiled. “Obscure, Elena, but still interesting.”

  Elena sat back slightly and looked at me intently. “It’s true, William, it really is true.” She rose and walked into the kitchen, returning with another cup of coffee. She sat down, glanced out the window, then turned back to me. “I like it here,” she said. “I like it here very much.”

  “You look very … I don’t know, very uncomplicated, Elena,” I told her.

  She smiled. “Do I?”

  “For you, yes.”

  “Perhaps it’s the ocean.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “What then?”

  “Just a feeling that you’ve settled in,” I said. “That this place is sort of home. At least more than New York.”

  She took a sip from her cup, then lowered it to her lap. “Jason sent me a copy of his memoirs, a first draft.”

  “And?”

  “He’s very complimentary to me,” she said. “Self-effacing in everything.” She shook her head. “I never meant to hurt him.”

  For a minute Elena seemed very distant, as if she were going through her life with Jason once again, trying to sort it out. In To Define a Word, Manfred Owen advises his daughter to do precisely that, to engage and reengage the past.

  “I’d really like to hear more about the book,” I said after a moment. “I’m rather captivated by it.”

  Elena turned toward me. “I’m not much of a quoter, William,” she said, “but a few days ago I was reading randomly and came upon a poem by Mark Van Doren.” She walked to a small bookshelf near her desk and drew out a thin volume. She opened it, sat down again, and read:

  “Slowly, slowly wisdom gathers:

  Golden dust in the afternoon.

  Somewhere between the sun and me,

  Sometimes so near that I can see,

  Yet never setting, late or soon.”

  She closed the book and looked up at me. “I read that yesterday, William, and I began to cry.” She turned away and looked out over the bay. “It was very cinematic, yesterday,” she said with a small laugh. “The sun was going down, the water golden.” She looked back at me. “I was overwhelmed.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “I don’t mind it at all,” Elena said firmly, “this lack of serenity.”

  Then she continued her guided tour of the new novel. She described very carefully how she wished the tone of the book to follow the mood of the twenty-four hours during which it takes place. She called it a “sunset-to-sunset narrative” and asked if I thought that sounded pretentious. I told her that it seemed to me just the opposite, gracefully modulated. By the time she had finished, I was certain that my sister had in her mind, though not yet on paper, a very remarkable book, one to which she would apply all that she had learned about the process of thought and the difficult craft through which it is offered as a gift to another.

  She looked tired when she finished. She removed her glasses and placed them carefully on the desk beside her. Then she
closed her eyes and rubbed them softly. Something in her weariness rushed toward me powerfully, and I realized once again what it was to be an artist, to have the talent necessary to bring to life your care.

  She went to bed a few minutes later. I read for a while, then went to the adjoining room and lay down as well. Throughout the night I could hear her shifting restlessly. At times she got up, walked around a bit, then returned to bed. I remember admiring her ceaseless agitation. I had sunk into the peace of the elderly, the kind that almost inevitably falls upon those who have achieved a modest reputation, one which the most Herculean efforts could increase but little. Elena, on the other hand, was committed once again to a substantial labor. In my mind, I saw her moving into old age full of relentless energy. It gave me pleasure to think of her sleeplessness in this way, and so I thought of it in no other.

  The next morning I left shortly after breakfast. Elena seemed refreshed, though still a bit lethargic. She talked of her book again, though with less animation. Then she walked me to the door, stood at the top of those gray, uneven wooden stairs, and waved good-by as I pulled away.

  Two winters later, she sent Christina the completed manuscript of To Define a Word. Not long after that, she returned briefly to New York, stayed a few days with Alexander and his family, then packed her things in David’s battered Volvo and drove with him back up to Cape Cod. In a letter to me at that time, she wrote that she was “closing down the franchise operation in New York, and now intend to invest my dwindling capital on the Cape.” The lightness in her tone was deceptive. I fell for it entirely.

  Another year passed, and I found myself sitting with my grandson in Earl Hall. “She’s dying,” I said, and David’s eyes fell toward his cup, while mine fled toward the window and the snow.

  For a long time we maintained a delicate silence, the type that turns everything frail and unapproachable. I continued to watch the snow engulfing the ivy-covered walls of St. Paul’s Chapel.

  He touched my arm and I turned back toward him. He seemed very beautiful to me at that moment. Great care does that to a face.