Elena

  I got up and walked out into the front room. She was sitting on the small sofa by the window, her body brightly lit by the reading lamp which glowed brilliantly above her. She looked up as I came in, then took off her reading glasses.

  “Is there something you want, William?” she asked pointedly.

  “Just to make sure you’re all right.”

  “I am fine.”

  I must have looked as though I did not believe her, because she repeated it. “I am fine, William.”

  “Well, it’s just that you looked so tired at dinner.”

  “I was tired at dinner, but I am not tired now.”

  I suddenly felt a powerful desire to rush to her and hold her tightly, but I knew that she would not have liked that. Whatever else may be said of Elena, she demanded that there be a little steel even in another’s love.

  And so I simply smiled. “You look very lovely under that light, with that open book,” I said.

  Elena gave me a quick, desultory nod. “Thank you, William.”

  I went back to my room but could not sleep. Instead, I continued to watch this image I retained of my sister in the other room. Perhaps under other circumstances I would have turned this image into grief, but somehow the vision of Elena so fully illuminated, so resolute beneath the light, filled me with a quiet joy.

  In June Elena’s interview was published in the Saturday Review, and when Jason saw it he telephoned her immediately. Although she had been writing him regularly, they had not spoken to each other in quite some time, and the weakness in Elena’s voice must have alarmed him. He flew up from his home in Virginia a week later and I picked him up at the Hyannis airport. He was dressed immaculately as ever, in a dark suit, white shirt, and broad gray tie. He looked like an aging movie actor, the sort who always played the suave sophisticate.

  When he saw me, he did not smile. His face was as grave as his tone.

  “How is she, William?”

  “She is herself,” I told him, “but not well.”

  “How long did she intend to keep her health a secret?”

  “I don’t know, Jason.”

  “Well, I can tell you this, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know there’s something very wrong with her. I have never believed in that sort of charade.”

  “I doubt that she would have expected that,” I said. “She knows how changed she is, how tired.”

  I suppose he wanted some sort of denial from me, that she was just out of sorts, that it was just a cold. When I offered no such thing, he looked more shaken than alarmed.

  “William,” he said, his voice full of disbelief, “my God, is she dying, William?”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at me in silence. Then, in a very odd gesture, he slowly took off his hat. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I’m afraid it is,” I said. “Come, let’s go. I don’t like to leave her for very long.”

  We drove back to the house in a warm summer rain. Jason was still allowing the news to soak in, and I could tell that it was almost too dreadful to accept.

  “She is really looking forward to seeing you,” I told him. “She has missed you.”

  “We should have stayed together.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I don’t know what happened to us. Was it just my vanity?”

  “Only partly, Jason.”

  “Yes, you’re right. There was something missing between us, but it took me some time to discover what it was.”

  “But now you’ve discovered it?”

  Jason nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes. It was generosity, William. That’s what was missing. She never understood how vulnerable I was.”

  “When she read your memoirs, she did,” I said. “I remember watching her while she read them. She was very moved … by your generosity.”

  “Really?” Jason asked. “That’s odd.” He thought for a moment. “You know, from the time that I wrote The American Experience, I was considered brilliant by many people. I never believed them, though I tried to live up to their expectations. I knew there was an empty space where all my genius was supposed to be. I covered it up pretty well. After all, I am a very clever man. But Elena saw through it. Then, rather brutally, she exposed it.”

  “She wrote about a book, Jason, not about a person.”

  Jason actually laughed. “You’ve known too many writers to believe that. She attacked my book as if the person who wrote it were no longer alive to read her attacks. But I was alive, William.” He smiled. “Listen to me, how shameful. Elena’s dying and I’m still nursing my wounded pride.”

  It struck me then how difficult it must have been for Jason to have written with such beauty and grace about my sister. So much of him had been devastated by what she had written in Quality and by the final rejection implied by her leaving him, that it was hard to imagine so kindly a recovery.

  “I want to say again, Jason,” I told him, “that when Elena read your memoirs, she was moved, not only by the way you treated her, but by the book itself. She believes it to be an enduring work.”

  He looked at me. “She said that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And as you know, she has always said that Quality is partly due to you.”

  Jason gave a sly nod. “A fair exchange, then.”

  “A fair exchange,” I said. He seemed amenable to this judgment, though not exactly satisfied by it.

  She was waiting for us in the back room when we arrived, sitting in her chair, facing the bay. Her cane was propped up against the chair and it was the first thing Jason saw. Still, as he stepped around to face her, he put up a determined front.

  “I want you to know, dear lady,” he said, “that I resent not being told of your ill health. I was your lover until you abandoned me, and I have remained your obedient servant since then. And I resent not being told.”

  For a moment they simply stared at one another. Elena seemed too weak to offer even the lightest rejoinder.

  “William told you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose it would have been obvious in any event,” Elena said. She smiled and held out her hand to Jason. “I’m glad you came.”

  For the next week the three of us spent all our time together. Neither Elena nor Jason seemed in the least interested in being alone together. It was as if both knew that the real intimacy of their relationship had passed and that any attempt to renew it would prove awkward. Often they seemed like two old soldiers discussing a well-remembered campaign, careful to avoid its grimmer aspects.

  Elena was still able to walk on the beach. With some help she could even manage the treacherous path of the jetty. But she also tired very easily and would often return to the house after we had strolled no more than a few yards. She would doze off in the middle of a conversation, leaving Jason and me staring mutely at one another, neither of us able to go on without her.

  Yet when she was fully awake, she was very much the Elena of the past, tart and uncompromising. As always, she made little allowance for misplaced sentiment or thoughtless judgment, and she remained as stern as ever in her evaluation and analysis.

  One evening, Jason tentatively mentioned that he was thinking of becoming a Catholic, and Elena, who had seemed especially fatigued, suddenly sprang to life.

  “For what possible reason would you do that?” she demanded, squinting pointedly. “Is it an old man’s panic? Is that what it is? You think you’ve found a loophole in oblivion?”

  Jason shook his head. “I’ve never been much on immortality.”

  “So why this sudden religiosity?”

  Jason shrugged. “I’m not really sure.”

  “Don’t you think you should be?”

  “Some motives, Elena, will always remain mysterious.”

  “Well, surely you don’t believe in the actual tenets.”

  “You mean the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, things like that?”

  “Well, they do play a rather important part in the faith, do
n’t they?”

  “Of course, for some.”

  “But not for you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s the point of your conversion?” Elena asked.

  “The spirit of the faith,” Jason answered.

  Elena shook her head. “Not enough, Jason.”

  “It is for me,” he said firmly. “I love the beauty of the story. Surely you of all people should be able to understand that.”

  “Then say it’s a beautiful story, and leave it at that,” Elena said. “Myth is all right, as long as it’s kept in its proper place.”

  “And where is that?”

  “The imagination, or as part of a symbolic structure. But to believe in it as a reality, I’d say that’s making myth carry too much weight.”

  “But what about faith, Elena? Is there really no room for that in your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “It would take up useful space,” Elena said.

  Jason laughed. “So you have no sympathy for my Christian impulses, then?”

  Elena shook her head. “None whatsoever, I’m afraid.”

  And yet, in a sense, she did, although but marginally. In a letter to Jason a few weeks later, she wished him well on his decision, whatever it might be. “This much I will allow,” she wrote, “that Christian irony is very beautiful, especially that humble and glorious idea that he who is most distant from redemption might offer to the saint a true deliverance.”

  By midweek of Jason’s visit, Elena seemed entirely comfortable with his presence in the house. They talked continually, and finally even broached the most sensitive subject between them, what Elena had written about The American Experience in Quality.

  “I can’t say it wasn’t devastating,” Jason admitted, “both to the book and to me.”

  Elena watched him guardedly. “Well, perhaps it was too severe.”

  “But you’ve not changed your mind, have you?” Jason asked.

  “No, not on any particular judgment. But I think I should have allowed a bit more for temperament.”

  Jason smiled. “Mine or yours?”

  “Yours in the way you wrote the book,” Elena said, “and mine in the way I read it.”

  “So you still think it’s romantic hogwash?” Jason asked.

  “I never thought that, and you know it.”

  “You said as much.”

  “I said it was a story, rather than an analysis, of the American experience.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  “Not to me.”

  For a minute, Jason seemed to want to let the subject drop. He glanced away from her, resting his eyes on a vase of flowers by the window. Then he turned back to her. “What do you think, really?”

  “I never said The American Experience was a bad book,” Elena told him, “and I never said that you were a bad writer.”

  “But what did you actually think?” Jason insisted.

  Elena watched him a moment, then answered. “I thought it should have been a poem rather than a history, and that had it been a poem it would have been a great one.”

  When she said that, Jason’s face filled with a grateful peace, as though he had received, at least in part, what he had come for.

  Jason left a few days later, on a very warm, sunny day. We had a late breakfast, then Elena sat in the front room and watched him pack. He talked idly about his new home in Virginia, but I knew that his mind was very far from that place. For her part, Elena pretended an interest in her flower garden beside the house. She absently discussed hyacinths and beach plums, while Jason countered with kudzu and boll weevils.

  Elena had elected not to drive with Jason and me back to Hyannis. She was tired, certainly, but I think she knew that that short drive would have been pointlessly grueling for us all had she come along. And so she stood at the door, leaning on her cane, as we prepared to leave.

  “It was good of you to come, Jason,” she said as he stepped up to her and lowered his suitcase to the floor.

  He smiled. “I wouldn’t have missed it.”

  They embraced briefly, then parted.

  On the way to the airport, Jason talked about an essay he was working on, but it could hardly have been more obvious that his mind was not on it. Finally, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped and looked directly at me.

  “Shouldn’t we have had just one good cry together, William?” he asked.

  “Elena is not too much in favor of that sort of thing,” I told him.

  “She would think it embarrassing?”

  “No,” I said, “she would think it redundant.”

  “So it’s still very much as I wrote in my memoirs. Elena is her own best shield.”

  “Yes, I think that’s true,” I said. I imagined Elena as she must have been at that very moment, while Jason and I were driving toward Hyannis. I saw her sitting in her back room, the window slightly open, a warm sea breeze ruffling the pages of the book in her hand, and I thought of all the times that Elena and I might have wept unrestrainedly together, and suddenly it seemed to me at least an arguably worthy thing that we had not.

  Elena had weakened considerably by the end of summer. She could only rarely manage a short walk on the beach, and she never risked the jetty again. Instead, we would walk to where the first stone rose from the beach, and I would hold her tightly while she peered out, searching the bay as if something might be written there.

  It was at this time, in late August, that Elena moved into the quiet, inward seclusion from which she never fully emerged again. It was a kind of gravitational pull that drew her toward the central quarter of her mind. At times she seemed unable to bear any intrusion upon this ultimate privacy. More and more she required complete silence. She found it difficult to listen to music and could not endure the sound of the television at all. Even the whisper of passing traffic disturbed her.

  She also fell asleep more often and slept for a longer time when she did. She very much resented these periods of what she called “enforced unconsciousness.” “If only I could stay awake until the end,” she wrote to Jason a few weeks before she died, “and not be plagued by tiny deaths and petty resurrections.”

  As her weakness increased, she began to fear what she insisted on calling her “return to infancy.” She was especially concerned with the added duties this would impose on me.

  “It’s all going to get considerably more difficult for you,” she told me one evening.

  We were sitting in the front room, and she had been watching me silently for quite some time.

  I nodded and continued to leaf idly through a magazine.

  “Very difficult, William,” she said, “I mean physically.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I told her.

  “I can still get around a bit, but soon …”

  I looked at her sternly. “Not another word, Elena.”

  “You’re not a young man.”

  “I’m young enough to take care of my sister.”

  Elena shook her head. “I’m not so sure. I was thinking, perhaps a nurse …”

  “No.”

  “Someone to help you, William.”

  “I said no.”

  “Be sensible,” Elena said emphatically. “This is not a matter of pride. This is a matter of physical difficulty.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I told her, “but I am also not at all interested in having a stranger in this house.” I leaned forward. “Please, Elena, you and I will go through this ourselves.”

  Elena persisted. “I think you are being stubborn. You are old enough to know that sometimes the cause may not be worth the stand.”

  “This one is,” I said.

  “You’d better be certain of that,” Elena warned.

  “I am.”

  There were times during the next few weeks when I had more than a few doubts about the wisdom of my choice. But although some burdens are merely burdensome, others remain works of love. In the days that f
ollowed, Elena’s condition worsened almost by the hour, and many unsightly duties inevitably accompanied her increasing debility. Despite all that, I still believe — and quite sincerely, without romanticizing the physical ordeal, both hers and mine — that I never learned more about my life than during those weeks I cared for my sister while she died.

  By the beginning of September, Elena could no longer go outside, and within a few days of her last halting walk on the beach — no more than a few paces, which totally exhausted her — she found it difficult either to feed or clothe herself. She now spent most of her time propped up in a chair in the back room or lying on a day bed I had moved into it. She no longer wanted to sleep in her bedroom, insisting that the sound of the surf helped her to rest. She slept a great deal, but when awake she remained quite lucid. She continued to work, at least in her mind, on her poem, and from time to time she would dictate some lines to me. Her voice was as strong as ever. She did not slur her words, but on occasion she would rush her sentences forward, as if she thought them written on her breath.

  “Dying is full of contradictions,” she told me once when I had taken down a stanza or two.

  “How so?”

  “You feel the need to complete things, so you wish to rush them out,” she said. “But at the same time, you want what will surely be your last work to be as perfect as possible, so you do not wish to rush it.”

  She smiled slightly and closed her eyes. “You will know how that feels one day, William.”

  I shook my head. “No, I intend to live forever.”

  “Of course,” Elena said drowsily. And then she went to sleep.

  David, who had already visited Elena once with Alexander and Saundra, came alone in mid-September. He found Elena’s condition so disturbing that he stayed only a single afternoon. Elena sensed his anxiety and tried to soothe it as best she could by talking about his work rather than about herself.

  “You must let your research widen continually,” she told him. “You must think of it as something boundless, David, so that the investigation of an acre becomes a study of the world.” She looked at me. “You remember, Dr. Stein used to talk like this.”

  “I remember.”

  She turned back to David. “He was a great scholar, David. Do you know why?”