Elena

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Well, I haven’t spoken to her doctor, if that’s what you mean,” I told him, “but there was something in her voice, or her eyes. There was that quote from Jason’s memoirs.”

  David did not doubt my judgment. “She seemed very pensive when I visited her last month,” he said. “Of course, To Define a Word hadn’t been out very long, so I thought maybe she was having some sort of delayed postpartum depression.”

  “Not Elena,” I told him.

  David shook his head. “No, you’re right. Not Elena.” He stared into his cup again. His hair was dark and curly. His skin was very smooth and white. “We’re really helpless in a situation like this, aren’t we?” he asked as he looked back up at me.

  “Yes.”

  “You know, of course, that if there’s anything I can do …” he began.

  “Yes, I know, David,” I said hastily. Then I got to my feet, surprising him with the suddenness of my movement. “I’m going now.”

  David quickly stood up. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just to walk around a bit.”

  “But there’s a blizzard.”

  I shrugged and began to walk away from him. “Don’t worry about me. This is Manhattan, not the Rockies.”

  “But you shouldn’t be out in weather like this,” David said. He grabbed my arm. “Wait, at least let me go with you.”

  I shook my head. “No. I really need to be by myself for a little while.”

  I suppose he read the determination in my face. I felt his grip loosen.

  “I understand,” he said softly.

  I took him into my arms, hugged him tightly. “I’ll let you know about things, David, about whatever happens.” I pushed him away from me and looked him straight in the eyes. “What else can I say?”

  I turned and walked back out into the swirling snow. I trudged across Columbia Walk, then, for no particular reason, took the subway to the Village. I got off at Fourteenth Street and made my way down to Washington Square. It was a field of perfect white, with huge drifts piled waist high against the arch. I felt unearthed and thrown into the air, tumbling through space. I was staggering, as if suddenly wounded by a rifle shot. It was a curious feeling that even for me there might be such a thing as an unendurable event. I had seen a few deaths, of course, and as I walked across the park they came to mind: Harry in the Burmese jungle, Elizabeth from her Bank Street window, Miriam, going silently at last after so much tumult. But Elena seemed different from all of these. Not because I loved her more, but because I loved her differently. She was the one great book I had been reading all my life, only to find out with grave alarm and vast surprise that it was coming to an end.

  I walked farther south, turned onto MacDougal Street, walked a block or so, then made the old right turn which once led to Miriam’s apartment. It was no longer there, that small brick building with the plaster window boxes. It had been replaced by something more sleek and streamlined, a thin glass tower perfect in both execution and design and which therefore failed to engage either the inner or the outer eye. Miriam would have hissed, but the most I could muster was an ancient grouchiness, which I quickly shirked off as I walked away. There is nothing new in despising modern architecture.

  What was new was the sense that soon I might be despising it alone, that everyone was fading now — Jason with his creaky bones, Jack with his strokes, and now Elena with something dreadful eating at her life — all of them moving toward their ends, “with death forever snatching pieces from the puzzle,” as Kramer envisions it in To Define a Word.

  I turned around and walked north to a large bookstore on Broadway. Elena and I had rambled through it many times, and as I elbowed my way down aisle after aisle, I half expected to see her darting past, her eyes glimmering with some treasured find. I remembered a day years before when she had stumbled upon The Landscape Painter, Henry James’s earliest work, a book which, as she would later write in Quality, “suggested all his faults but none of his greatness.” But on that afternoon it was merely an object of delight. I had snatched it from her and pretended to run away. She had chased me halfheartedly. To the people around us, we must have seemed two ludicrous poseurs, full of bookish vanities. But for us, I think, it was a moment not only of shared amusement but of that understanding at which we had both arrived: that no matter what our separate paths, the world of letters would always exist as the common ground upon which we could stand together, that though our relationship might fall victim to small hostilities, still in the most important matters we would remain as one.

  For a long time I wandered through the store. I knew that I was looking for something that I would never find on these shelves. I thought of my sister, and I could feel the enormity of her impending death growing in my mind beyond all reason, a death that signaled a universe of dying. I thought of her language, her insight, her books, and the approaching unconsciousness of so conscious a mind struck me as an epic calamity. How could milk be delivered the next day, babies blandly fed? For a moment, I entered a state of monstrous unreason, as if beside my sister’s death there were no other deaths, as if the world had not been from the beginning the spherical depository of all our endless hope and fear and failure.

  Standing rigidly in a book-lined aisle, I opened up unheard-of chambers of exaggeration. I reinvented mankind, reimagined human destiny, in such ways and according to such priorities as would sustain my sister. I remolded the laws of biology, drained chemistry of its impurities, placed all science at the disposal of my sister’s life. I turned evolution upside-down so that the mind alone had dominion over every other thing, over age and decrepitude and riotous cells, over the hardening of the lungs and the sluggishness of the heart. Over every infirmity I imagined her triumphant, equal to the new law I inscribed as the central maxim of all nature: that while the mind lives, no lower function shall be allowed to die.

  I walked out of the store, slogged my way toward Union Square, then took a cab uptown. I had planned to spend the weekend with David, but that seemed burdensome under the circumstances, so I made arrangements to return to Boston. The plane was delayed at La Guardia for several hours until the snow lifted, so I sat in the lounge and drank a brandy and tried to read a biography of Thomas Gray. It would have been slow going under the best of conditions, but my preoccupation with Elena made it more or less impossible to pay any attention at all to the book, and Gray was left to fend for himself while I searched through my sister’s life, looking for the key to all this pain, to the peculiar depth of my grief.

  It was almost midnight by the time I got home. I unpacked my bags, hoping that weariness would finally overtake me and I could move into a sound sleep. It didn’t, so I decided to work awhile in the darkroom I had set up in a tiny room off the kitchen. I took the film out of my camera and began developing the pictures I had taken during the preceding days. Most of them were of sights around Harvard. One was of a young poet whose work I admired and who at my request had delivered a reading to one of my classes. The rest were mundane shots of buildings and bridges. Except for the last on the roll. It was of Elena. I had taken it while she stood on her porch, wrapped in that enormous scarf. The photograph was very stark in its lines but somehow luminous in its composition. I lifted it from the fixative and placed it under a light. I could feel my breath stop as I looked at it. At that instant I knew the source of all my grief, the element that went beyond my love for Elena and into the love we bear, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes with the highest passion, for all humanity. She stood for those moments of supreme consciousness and understanding when our mercy suddenly overcomes our rancor, and all our sorrow and our jubilation merge into a single sweeping tenderness toward mankind.

  She must have been surprised to see me pull up the following Monday morning, the back seat of my car filled with suitcases and pasteboard boxes, but she did not pretend to be surprised as to the reason for my coming. She opened the door and waited until I had gathe
red up a few of my things and walked up the short span of wooden stairs that led to her house.

  “I’ve come to stay with you awhile, Elena,” I said.

  She stood behind the screen, watching me carefully. “Is this something you really want to do, William?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded, then opened the screen and stepped back to let me in. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  I said yes and put down my bundles. Then I followed Elena into the small kitchen at the back of the house. She was still moving easily at that time, and one would have had to look closely to see any sign of illness or distress.

  She sat down opposite me at the table and folded her hands together in front of her. “How much do you know?”

  “Only the one basic detail.”

  “No detective work? No tracking down the physician?”

  I shook my head, then took a quick sip of coffee. “Did you think you could keep it a secret indefinitely?”

  “Who have you told?”

  “Only David. He’ll tell Alexander.”

  “Good,” Elena said matter-of-factly. “I wrote to you last night, and to Jason and Jack. I’ll mail theirs this morning.” She glanced out toward the sea, held her gaze there a moment, then continued. “I’ve only known for a few weeks myself.” She turned back to me. “I have about three months.”

  I felt a shudder pass over me, but quickly suppressed any outward sign. “You plan to stay here on the Cape?”

  “Yes.” She got up quickly, walked to the cupboard near the sink, and brought out a box of blueberry muffins. “Would you like one?”

  “No,” I said. “Look, Elena, what is it, exactly, that you have?”

  “It’s a problem of the heart,” she said. She opened the box of muffins, then closed it immediately and looked up at me. “Congestive heart failure. That’s the technical name.” She shrugged. “A very advanced case of it, evidently.”

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  “Not very long at all,” she said almost casually, but with a strain in her voice that quite audibly betrayed her fear. “I had noticed a certain weakness for quite some time. Well over a year, at least. I thought it was a part of getting older. But it was this disease.” She held her eyes very directly upon my face as she continued, as if by focusing on my emotions she could control her own. “It’s a problem in the left ventricle of the heart, Dr. Lawson says, and in many cases it can be helped.” She shook her head. “But not in mine.”

  “How about surgery?” I asked.

  “Too late.”

  “Well, what can be done, then?”

  “Not much,” Elena said. “I should rest as much as possible. I should stay calm, which is not easy to do. Little things like not eating salt.” She stood up, returned the box of muffins to the cupboard, and then sat back down. “One thing, William. I don’t want to spend my last days in a hospital, or in a drugged stupor.” She reached over and took my hand. “There’s relatively little pain. I’ll have more and more trouble breathing.” She shrugged. “Then I’ll die.”

  She looked calm, matter-of-factly relating what she took to be the routine etiology of her disease as if the life it threatened were that of some distant relative or long-lost friend.

  “So, there you have it,” she said.

  I nodded slowly, then started to speak.

  Elena lifted her hand to stop me. “I know. You’re sorry about all this. So am I, believe me. But there are other things to think about, now. Some of them are sentimental. Some of them are vain.”

  “I’ve come to help in any way I can,” I told her.

  “I’ve arranged to give a full interview to the Saturday Review,” Elena said. “I’d like for you to sit in on it so that you can correct any misstatements I might make.”

  “All right.”

  “Also, Martha Farrell is coming to do another interview for the biography. I’d rather she not know about my illness.”

  “I won’t tell her.”

  “Good,” Elena said. “Finally, to the sentimental things. I’ve told both Jason and Jack I’d like to see them. I’d like you to help make sure that these visits don’t become overly mournful.”

  “That will be hard to do,” I told her.

  “William, I don’t want to get more and more unhappy before I die, do you understand? Certainly these next few months won’t be pleasant. But I don’t think they have to be morbid.”

  “So, you’re going to a adopt the laugh-death-in-the-face attitude?” I asked.

  Elena shook her head. “No, of course not. I’m very glad you’re going to be here with me, William,” she said, her eyes growing moist. “I know I’m going to be afraid.”

  Elena was still vigorous a month later when the reporter from the Saturday Review showed up on a chilly Thursday morning. He was a trim young man, who had already written a number of articles on my sister and who came with a mind well equipped to probe her.

  He looked surprised when I opened the door, though he recognized me almost immediately. “You’re William Franklin, I believe?” he said.

  “I’m staying a few days with Elena,” I explained. “She’ll be out in a minute. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  He declined.

  “Elena usually likes to sit in the back room by the fire,” I said. I motioned toward the rear of the house. “Back here. Come on in.”

  He followed me into the back room, glancing about, taking it all in — the few pictures Elena had bought, the book on this table or that. It was obvious that the smallest object grew magical because of its association with my sister, and that the young man, whose name was Michael Peterson, as he later told me, intended to soak up the aura.

  “Quite modestly furnished,” he said as he took a seat in the back room.

  “It’s just a cottage with heat,” I told him. “There’s not much room for display.”

  “But the place in New York, Miss Franklin’s apartment, I suppose it’s more elaborate?”

  I shook my head. “Not elaborate, but well appointed, I’d say. Elena has almost always lived comfortably. In Paris she lived on the Île Saint-Louis.”

  Peterson nodded quickly. “Yes, I know.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I understand a biography is being written?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked disappointed. “Someone from California, I’m told.”

  “Martha Farrell, the daughter of one of Elena’s old friends.”

  He sat back. “Too bad for me,” he said with a slight smile. “I’d hoped to do one myself. I’ve always admired her work.”

  “Well, there’s probably room for more than one book about Elena.”

  “Yes, certainly,” Peterson said. He stared out the large window. “Nice view of the sea.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very nice.”

  “Why has Miss Franklin suddenly decided to give a long interview?” he asked me.

  “Maybe because she wants to make things clear.”

  “Why now, in particular?”

  “One gets to a certain age, you know.”

  Peterson watched me suspiciously. “I’m not a hack journalist, Mr. Franklin,” he said. “I’m here because I respect your sister’s work. There’s no need for you or her to feel cautious with me.”

  “I don’t feel cautious, Mr. Peterson,” I told him. “I feel protective of my sister’s privacy.”

  Peterson smiled very gently. “I think I understand.”

  “Good.”

  Elena came in a few minutes later. She was wearing a plain dark dress, and her hair was drawn into a bun behind her head. She took off her reading glasses as she sat down opposite Mr. Peterson.

  “It’s a great pleasure to meet you,” he said.

  Elena nodded. “Thank you.” She seemed unusually tired that morning, and there was a slight trembling in her right hand. During the night she had wandered about the house more or less incessantly. Once I had offered to sit up with her, but sh
e had declined and shuffled back into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.

  “I really fought for this assignment,” Peterson said.

  Elena smiled but said nothing.

  “Mr. Franklin tells me that you consented to this interview in order to clear up a few things,” Peterson said.

  “Yes,” Elena said, “and my brother has agreed to sit in on the interview, so that our collective memory might keep matters straight.”

  She seemed stiff at the beginning, as if determined to maintain a certain distance from the matters she would be discussing, that is to say, the matter of her life. Peterson caught this nuance, and in his introduction to the interview he stated it rather well: “She answered the most intimate questions about her life as if they dealt with someone else’s, a person of some renown whom she had known for some time. By pulling away from her life slightly, Elena Franklin entered it more deeply, and for me this transformed an ordinary interview into a uniquely personal experience.”

  Peterson began with questions about her childhood, and as I sat quietly listening to Elena’s replies, Standhope swam back into my memory. I saw the dusty square, heard the Italian cobblers shouting at each other from their upstairs shop, saw McCarthy Pond glittering in the midsummer sun and the large oak that towered over our house on Wilmot Street. It seemed not so long ago that I had lived there.

  “There is a sense in much of your writing,” Peterson said, “a sense of paternalism, if you will. Was your father a great influence on you?”

  Elena answered by describing our father in a way that struck me as surprisingly realistic. It was an honest portrait, warts and all, and yet it was also very affectionate.

  “My father was too selective in the things he loved,” she said, “and dismissive toward the things he didn’t. He loved the road, which could not love him back, and was indifferent to my mother, who loved him all her life.” She did not add that he had also loved her, though she was strong enough not to need it, but had not loved me, his son, who had felt at times that he could hardly live without it. “He was faithful to himself,” she added in conclusion, “but to almost nothing else. There was rakish courage in his independence, but there was moral failure in it, too.” Her eyes moved slowly toward me. “My father had great energy, but it was mostly appetite. He insisted on his freedom but used it chiefly to serve himself. When he touched ground, he destroyed things that did not deserve to be blown apart.”