Elena (61 page)

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.

A
nother 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.

“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 gathered 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.”