Elena. Part 32

It is difficult to imagine now how shocking such a declaration could seem in 1940. I was staggered by it.

"Elizabeth had to know, of course," Howard added, his finger nervously patting against the top of the refrigerator. "She had to know, you see. She'd already been drinking more than she should have, what with the reception of her work and all, and I guess, well, I guess it just tipped the balance."

I only nodded.

"But I won't leave her, William," he added quickly. "I won't do that." He took another deep breath, then let it out in a quick rush. "I suppose I've always known this ... my ... problem." He shook his head. "I don't understand it, William. I never have."

Every impulse in my heart urged me to gather Howard into my arms, but I could not do it. Instead, still aghast at what he had just told me, I abandoned him there in that little kitchen with the chugging refrigerator and strode back into the living room.

Elena glanced up at me as I came in. She forced a smile to her lips. "I've asked Elizabeth to do my portrait," she said.

"I don't do portraits," Elizabeth said, almost coldly.

Elena turned back to her. "What if I begged you," she said, using all her power to keep some lightness in her voice.

Elizabeth said nothing.

"I could come over some afternoon," Elena added quickly.

Howard drifted back into the room, his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, his face filled with a longing to explain himself once and for all.

It was not an opportunity I felt inclined to give him. "We'd better go now, Elena," I said.

Elena slowly stood up. "All right," she said. Then she looked back at Elizabeth. "Promise me a portrait, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth nodded. "All right, I will," she said quietly.

Two weeks later Elena sat on a small stool as Elizabeth made one attempt after another to sketch her. Elena would later tell Miriam that that afternoon had been one of the saddest of her life. Elizabeth smoked so much that the cramped little studio seemed itself to smolder, and as Elizabeth dismissed one attempt after another a kind of desperation seized her. Her pencil strokes would become more and more violent, until finally she would rush to the bathroom and there, as Elena must have known, take a few quick gulps at the bottle she had hidden beneath the sink.

It was not until late afternoon that the portrait was finished, or at least declared so by Elizabeth, who, Elena said, appeared completely exhausted by the effort. "Her hands were trembling uncontrollably," Elena told me when she came by my apartment that same evening. "She slumped on the sofa and dropped her head into her hands. Her face was covered with sweat, and she mopped it with her smock. Her hair was wet and matted. She just said, 'There, there, it's finished, take it' and went back to the bathroom again."

Then Elena showed the portrait to Miriam and me. I will never forget the shock of it or the awful emptiness in Elena's face when she displayed it. It was a portrait neither representative nor expressionist, only a hodgepodge of disconnected borrowings chaotically and randomly applied. But as a portrait of Elizabeth's terror, it was powerful enough. The background was a flat gray surface, with Elena's disembodied face floating in it like a ball on grimy water. Her eyebrows were done in bold black strokes and looked more than anything like the crows over van Gogh's field of corn. The eyes seemed lifted almost entirely from Munch's Evening in Karl Johann Street, while the surrounding face appeared as little more than strips of color ripped from those sides of beef which obsessed Soutine.

"She's at the very edge, William," Elena said. "What can we do?"

I found that I was as much at a loss as Howard had been two weeks before. "I don't know."

"I'm afraid for her, William," Elena said. "Very afraid."

But as the weeks pa.s.sed and Elena made more and more attempts to break through to Elizabeth, that fear began to turn to anger. And as surely as Elizabeth had revealed her labyrinthine misery in her portrait of Elena, Elena came to portray her rage and indignation in the short stories she wrote during the long weeks before Elizabeth finally ended all speculation as to her redemption. They are singularly explosive tales of steadily accelerating disintegration and of the frustration of being caught in a situation that is not specific but cosmic and engulfing. In "The Lessons of the Road," a father becomes so indignant at his son's inability to master the rudiments of driving a car that he swerves it off the road, then collapses over the wheel in a fit of weeping while his son looks on, aghast. In "The Deadly Current," a lifeguard warns a young man of a lethal undertow and then finds that he cannot act to save him when the boy heedlessly moves into the deadly waters. And in Elena's most anthologized story, "Our Life Is Lived on Air," a good but deeply wounded doctor so relentlessly attempts to save a patient, and by that means, his honor, that the patient herself becomes exhausted by the treatment and finally dies from a weakness the doctor's tireless therapies have engendered.

By this time, of course, I had long ago told Elena what Howard had confessed to me in the kitchen that first day on Bank Street. She had received the news somewhat less rigidly than I but with the same sense that it had probably had a devastating effect on Elizabeth. But for my sister, the real problem remained Elizabeth's recovery. She intended to make sure that Elizabeth survived. "No one should be destroyed by one relations.h.i.+p," she told me one evening as she sat in my apartment, Alexander cradled gently in her arms. "Not even one that ends so strangely." And I remember that she looked down at Alexander briefly, then slowly raised her eyes to me. She had a look of great willfulness in her face, as if nothing were beyond her power, as if Elizabeth could be brought back by Elena's effort alone. "I have to find the best way to help her," she said, "and I will."

There can be no doubt, of course, that Elena did try everything in her power to help Elizabeth. For months after Elizabeth's return from France, Elena made it her business to spend as much time as possible with her. Howard was becoming a less visible presence in the Bank Street apartment, and we later learned that he had already taken up with a composer who kept a kind of drug-crazed salon on Sullivan Street.

Thus Elena and Elizabeth had a great deal of time alone. They talked of many things, Elena later told me, but rarely about the most crucial thing: Elizabeth's increasing dependence upon the bottles of Scotch she hid in every conceivable nook and cranny of the apartment, and for which Howard continued to pay, telling Elena that no one should take from Elizabeth the only support she had.

But there can also be no doubt that at a certain point Elena determined to put into practice her sense of the necessity of personal will which had developed into a stringent element of her character. Like Dorothea Moore in Inwardness, she "shut out mercy as if it were a winter wind."

It was, in fact, the dead of winter, when she came to her decision. She was at my apartment, seated on the floor, bouncing Alexander playfully about, when suddenly she looked up at me with a thoughtful expression, as if she had been considering what she was about to say for a very long time.

"I think I've been blaming the wrong person for Elizabeth's troubles," she said. "Blaming Howard, when the real problem is Elizabeth."

"In what way?" I asked.

"Elizabeth has to get control of her life," Elena said firmly. "No one can do that for her. She has to do it herself."

"How?"

"Remember that day I brought you over to her house in Standhope? Remember how strong she was?"

"Yes, I remember."

"That's the real Elizabeth."

"I would like to think so."

"Believe me, it is. We need to remember what she had then, all that intelligence and will. That's what we have to appeal to in her."

"Instead of what?"

"Instead of letting her drift," Elena said. I could see her mind working. "And maybe with Howard gone, she's finally vulnerable. We can force the issue, tell her we've had enough."

"You have to be able to make something like that look absolutely real," I said.

"It will be real," Elena said. She stood up. "I'm going to do it now, tonight."

The night was rather dreary. A cold rain fell on us all the way over to Bank Street. Elena walked very briskly. "If this doesn't work, I don't know if there's any hope left for Elizabeth," she said.

"She definitely won't - as they say - take the cure?"

Elena shook her head. "No, I suggested that. Any sanitarium in the world. Elizabeth said no."

We reached Elizabeth's apartment a few minutes later. On the street outside, Elena paused, reconsidering her course of action.

"Elena," I said, "do you want to wait about this?"

She glanced up toward Elizabeth's apartment. "You haven't seen her in a while. She has deteriorated, William. I don't think we have much time."

"I don't know how things ever got this twisted, Elena," I said.

"I don't suppose anyone ever does," Elena said. Then she began walking up the stairs to the apartment, her pace much slower now than it had been on the street, as if with each step she expected to touch off a mine.

We could hear some rustling inside after we knocked at Elizabeth's door.

"She's hiding the bottles," Elena said wearily.

Then the door opened a crack, and Elizabeth's face was illuminated by a narrow band of light.

"Hi," she said weakly.

"William and I thought we'd come over and see how you were doing," Elena said. There was no false cheerfulness in her voice. It was firm, even cold.

"Oh, okay," Elizabeth said. She stepped back and opened the door. "Come in."

The apartment was completely dark except for one lamp standing on a wobbly base by the window, its black cord dangling across the corner.

Elizabeth tried to smile. "Maybe you'd like something to eat?"

"No, thanks," Elena said.

Elizabeth nodded slowly. She was standing in the shadows, wearing that same gray painter's smock she'd had on the first day we had come here. She was nervously pinching at it, unable to move, waiting for direction.

"Well," she said finally, "why don't you sit down."

The apartment was bare except for two spindly wooden chairs which faced the sofa. There were ashtrays strewn everywhere - on the floor, the window ledge, the small table in front of the sofa. The entire place smelled like a cigarette which had been dipped in cheap whiskey.

Elizabeth glanced about the room. "They took the phone out," she said.

Elena and I sat down on the two chairs.

"William and I have come to talk to you very seriously, Elizabeth," she said.

Elizabeth looked up expectantly. "You know where Howard is?"

"No, we don't."

"He said he might come back."

Elena leaned forward, folding one of her hands in the fist of the other. "Elizabeth, you're in serious trouble. You need help."

Elizabeth nodded obliviously. "He was going to have the phone put back in."

"William and I have come to tell you that we will do everything we can to help you, but that you have to help us, too. You have to try to come out of this, Elizabeth."

"But, Howard ..."

"Forget about Howard," Elena blurted out. "Forget about him." The anger in her voice was unmistakable, and even Elizabeth heard it.

"But he's ... he's ..."

"He's gone, Elizabeth," Elena said. "He's gone and he's not coming back."

It struck me, even then, that this was a lie, that Elena intended to isolate Elizabeth entirely, to convince her that she was utterly alone, and then hope that from that abyss she would return herself.

"Now listen, Elizabeth," Elena said. "We can move you someplace. Howard is not coming back. There's no need for you to stay here."

I sat watching Elena's plot unfold. She intended to make Elizabeth decide once and for all to do something on her own, to leave the apartment forever, and Howard and her bottles with it.

"William and I have a place for you," Elena said. "But we're not going to force you to go there. You can stay here by yourself if you want to."

Elizabeth turned toward the lamp, then raised her hand shakily to s.h.i.+eld her eyes from its light.

"Howard is through with you, Elizabeth," Elena said brutally. "And I'll tell you this, if you don't come with William and me, we're through with you, too."

Elizabeth rubbed her eyes with her fists. "Maybe in the morning, when it's light. It's dark now, you know?"

"No, Elizabeth," Elena said, her voice as hard as steel on steel. "Now. Or never."

Tears began rolling down Elizabeth's cheeks. "It's too dark, Elena."

Elena's eyes grew strangely lifeless. "Now. Or I'm finished with you."

Elizabeth's head dropped forward and she wiped her eyes with the hem of the smock. She started to speak, but her voice trailed off in a low, repet.i.tive whimper.

Elena stood up. "I've heard enough whining," she said. Then she turned those terribly remote eyes on me. "Haven't you, William?"

It was all acting of a desperate kind, and I could tell that she was having to use every ounce of strength within her to keep up this awful show. Still, even knowing that, her manner was shocking in its severity.

"Haven't you, William?" she repeated coldly, staring at me with a frightening sternness.

"Yes," I said weakly. I slowly got to my feet.

"Good-by, Elizabeth," Elena said. Then she turned and left the room. I followed behind like a stunned puppy, closing the door behind me. We walked down the stairs and out onto the street.

"That was quite a performance," I said.

Elena looked very shaken.

I draped my arm over her shoulder. "Maybe it'll work, Elena," I said. "Anyway, let's go back to my apartment. It's getting cold out here."

I gently began to urge her forward, when I heard a sound from above, a screech, as if a window had been thrown open overhead. Elena heard it, too, and we both turned back toward the apartment and looked up.

"Oh, G.o.d!" Elena cried.

Elizabeth was standing on the ledge above us, the wind billowing out her smock. She had stretched out her arms and was calling down to us. "All right," she screamed. "All right!" For an instant she seemed to hold herself firmly against the wall. Then she tumbled forward, her arms still outstretched, as though she had intended to take flight. She had turned over the lamp while crawling out the window and the cord had wrapped around her ankle. For the briefest moment it held her suspended from the window, and I saw Elena's hand fly up and hold in midair, her fingers stretched out toward Elizabeth as she dangled overhead. Then the cord released her and she fell.

We ran over to her, and Elena gathered her into her arms while I ran for help. She was still alive when the ambulance from St. Vincent's arrived a few minutes later. She was groaning softly, but she never spoke. Both Elena and I rode with her in the ambulance. Elena kneeled by the stretcher, clutching Elizabeth's head to her breast, her face so completely stricken that it seemed almost to lose its human quality, to take on an animal panic. Elizabeth continued to moan softly while the siren blared overhead. Then, only a block or so from St. Vincent's, the groaning stopped and she sank into a coma.

At the hospital she was wheeled quickly into the emergency operating room, while Elena and I continued to stand rigidly beside the ambulance. In the rain, I suppose, we looked like two rusty posts. After that, for what was probably several hours, we wandered about the hospital corridors or down the dark, wet streets of the surrounding neighborhood.

Toward dawn, Elizabeth was brought to a small, cramped room on the third floor. She was being monitored closely, a young doctor told us, and no one could be allowed to see her. Elena asked if she had regained consciousness, and the doctor shook his head in a desultory manner, as if such questions were no longer relevant. Two hours later, she died.

It was late in the afternoon when Martha asked me her question, but the morning storm had not abated. The wind still rocked the large windows, the clouds still hung heavily above.

Martha glanced up from her notebook. "Would you say, William, that Elena was tormented by Elizabeth's death, that she was tormented by guilt?"

"I would say that she was shaken by it," I told her. "I would say that she was profoundly saddened, of course. But tormented? I don't think so."