Elena. Part 35

"It is an odd thing, torture," he said, rather matter-of-factly, later in the evening. "You're in a room, you see, and things are being done to you that are illegal. But since the mind is slow in understanding sudden changes in reality, you wait for some officer to enter the interrogation room. You know this will happen. You even know what this person will look like. He will be in uniform, with many medals. He will look about, scowling, and he will say; 'What is this? This is an outrage! This is not Turkey, gentlemen, this is France! Release this man at once.'" He smiled and took a draw on his cigarette. "And do you know, this does happen. This man of dreams comes into the room; he is in uniform with the medals. He does look about, and he is scowling, and he says, 'You are going too slowly. You must step up the procedure. We must have an answer from this pig by nightfall.'" He crushed his cigarette into the small gla.s.s ashtray on the table and laughed.

Still later he spoke of his first marriage, which had been a disaster. "My wife and I did not care for one another," he said, smiling delicately at Elena. "This made divorce thinkable. We did not have children, which made it relatively harmless. And we were not Catholics, which made it possible."

Through it all, Elena listened quietly, sometimes adding a comment of some sort, to which Julien usually gave immediate a.s.sent. Once she spoke at some length on the particular difficulties of expatriation, and Julien listened attentively, at times adding an opposing view, with the patience of the native before the alien's distress. "Your complaints are quite subtle, Elena," he said finally. "Usually Americans are most bitterly affronted by the harsh flavor of our cigarettes."

After dinner we found a sidewalk cafe and sat sipping drinks, while the traffic whirled down boulevard Montparna.s.se. Julien mentioned those more distant attractions which the fearful, nervous tourist might miss: Balzac's house in Pa.s.sy, the tombs of the distinguished dead at Pere Lachaise. "You should not spend all your time in the Louvre," he said. "It's a great palace, but a poor museum." He waved his hand. "And forget about Napoleon's tomb. All that dark marble. It is appropriate for an megalomaniac but most unsuitable for a man." He shook his head. "Walk the streets. There, you will find Paris."

It was almost midnight before we left the cafe. I expected to take a taxi back to my hotel, but Julien put his hand on my shoulder as we walked down the boulevard and brought the three of us to a halt. He looked at Elena.

"Perhaps we should drive up to Montmartre," he said. "See the lights of Paris from the steps of Sacre-Coeur." He turned to me. "Would that please you, William?"

"Very much."

"Then it shall be done."

It took only a few minutes to traverse the city. I sat in the back seat of the car and listened as Julien and Elena pointed out various attractions. Then we made our ascent up the highest hill of Paris and parked under the dome of the basilica.

"You can see the entire city from here," Julien said as he got out of the car.

For a time the three of us stood staring down at the Paris lights. It was very quiet and it was very beautiful.

"I once thought of Paris as changeless, as immortal," Julien said softly, gazing out over the sea of rooftops. "And then the Germans came, and it was transformed into an evil city." He looked at Elena. "It cannot be reclaimed now. Not after the deportations. It has lost its virtue. Even the light is different. The silver's gone."

Then he turned quickly and walked back to the car. Elena and I remained on the steps of the cathedral.

"He is an interesting man, Elena," I said.

Elena glanced anxiously toward the car. "I'm afraid for him."

I took her arm. "Come, let's go back."

Julien smiled as we joined him. "Forgive my mood," he said. "I don't mean to be so dramatic." He shrugged. "It's just that coming over to the restaurant this evening I pa.s.sed the Hotel de Ville and all the flags were waving, the Tricolor, you know? It seemed so hollow. Everyone has forgotten what we did, we, the French, here and in Vichy. They have forgotten the collaboration, the roundups, the informants." He shook his head. "We are a forgetful people, we French, don't you think?"

"Like everyone else," I said. "The French are part of a forgetful species."

I glanced at Elena, then back at Julien. It could not have been more clear that they needed to be alone.

"I think I'll go back to my hotel now," I said. I faked a yawn. "I'm not used to these late Parisian nights."

My symposium had provided accommodations at the Grand Hotel. Julien and Elena let me off in front, and Julien got out and shook my hand, while Elena remained in the car. "Your dear sister has kept me from brooding too much," he said with a slight smile. "For this, I am grateful, you see?"

I nodded.

He placed his hand on my shoulder. "You Americans are better than I thought." He continued to watch me seriously, his hand gripping my shoulder more tightly. "You are in Paris only a few days. That is too bad. I must go to Stockholm tomorrow. But perhaps you shall return to France one day, and I shall see you then, yes?"

"I hope so, Julien."

He nodded. "Well, bonsoir."

I never saw Julien again. A year later, Elena provided the details in a letter designed to convey the minimum of emotion: I'm afraid this letter brings bad news. Julien died in his apartment a week ago. It appears to have been a suicide. The gas jets were opened. It was quick and painless, and I think it is very much what he wanted. He was so appalled by events surrounding the war that he found it difficult to separate himself from them. He entered what I would call a metaphysical loneliness. He called it "brooding" and liked to dismiss it as self-pity. But it was actually despair of the deepest sort, the kind in which there is no remedy by means of personal life. He lived in this dark coc.o.o.n. More and more in the past months, he could not get outside it. I tried to be of service. Possibly, I did not want to repeat any of the mistakes I made regarding Elizabeth. But I could not remake his country's past, which is, I think, what would have been required if he were to have been saved. I know your impulse will be to rush to Paris to comfort me. That is not necessary. Julien's death is very sad, but we had seen little of each other in the past few months. He had become increasingly remote, his isolation almost absolute. I can only think of his death as inevitable. I do not believe that death follows me wherever I go, or that everyone I touch turns suicidal. Such ideas are romantic and in the end suggest a grotesque sense of one's own power and importance. I am well, and working steadily.

In her biography, Martha reprinted this letter in its entirety. She saw it as emblematic of the icy state into which Elena had fallen since Elizabeth's death. As Jason once told me, this makes good reading but poor a.n.a.lysis, and I think that if Elena's letter can be said to suggest anything, it is the strength of character she had achieved at this point in her life. The letter reflects the meditative tone of a mind that had by then become infinitely enlarged by the act of meditation, a consciousness as repulsed by the melodrama of grief as it was, by nature, attracted to the sober contemplation of it. "When I think of Timon's grave," Dorothea Moore says in the final pa.s.sages of Inwardness, "I do not think of its particularity. I do not think, There, below me, is my son, Timon, his features grotesquely altered by the opera of their decay. I allow no outward show to parody my inward grief, nor claim uniqueness for my loss, nor sound a trumpet to my guilt. Neither do I ask that all the world be reconvened into its primordial ma.s.s so that, beginning once again with the first light of that first explosive day, all that has come before could rearrange itself, twist and turn and wheel, and so at last, through lost millennia, deliver to my door this day a living son. Oh, Timon, I am sorry; but not alone for you."

My brief first visit to Paris ended only a week after I arrived. I saw Elena quite often during those few days, and on the last day of my visit we met at the rue Auguste Comte entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens, walked toward the palace through a profusion of mediocre statuary, and finally sat down at the edge of the Medici fountain. Elena appeared subdued. The unseasonable warmth that hung over Paris that first week in October had come to an abrupt end, and both of us could feel the first chill of winter as the wind swept through the trees.

"I should have brought a jacket," Elena said. She wrapped her arms around herself.

"Do you like the winters here?" I asked idly.

Elena nodded. "I'll miss you, William," she said. She reached over and took my hand.

I placed my other hand on top of hers and squeezed gently. "Come home."

Elena shook her head.

"You can bring Julien with you," I said.

"We're not thinking in those terms."

I did not press the issue, either about her returning to America or marrying Julien. She was forty. She would be childless in any event, and I suspected, beyond this, that she had also elected to live her life wholly free of those complex enc.u.mbrances which other people impose. At that time, I could not possibly have imagined the autumn loveliness that Jason Findley would bring into her life, changing it so radically, lending it that music which would finally rise from the pages of her last book.

I glanced about the gardens. Behind me, Delacroix's dastardly Polyphemus was about to crush Acis and Galatea, who hugged each other in pastoral calm, oblivious to the Cyclops's gaze.

"It's the only decent piece of sculpture in the whole garden," I said.

Elena did not seem in the least interested in my aesthetic judgment. She looked down at the water, then gently dipped her fingers into it.

"What are you thinking about, Elena?" I asked.

She looked up at me, hesitating a moment. "I'm thinking about what I've missed," she said.

"Missed?"

"Yes, missed," she said. "Family, children, that sort of thing." She smiled. "And I think it's probably worth it."

I took one of her hands and held it. "I hope so, Elena."

"My mind is alive, William," she said, her eyes s.h.i.+ning with the joy of that good fortune, "and if I paid a price for that, I don't care."

In her face there was the oddest combination of newfound hope and past regret, loss and recovery, that I had ever seen. A fully developed consciousness is an awesome thing, and watching Elena at that moment in her life, one could almost feel the power of its tides.

THE QUALITY OF THOUGHT IN AMERICAN LETTERS.

The usual revelers were on the pier the day Elena returned from France, vacationers and businessmen, along with a few reporters, the last surviving remnants of the s.h.i.+p news desk, who slouched about, chewing on cigarettes and looking bored yet dutiful.

Elena came briskly down the gangway of the Flandre, carrying only a single brown suitcase. She was wearing a black toque hat with a small feather at the side. She had come from a wintry France and looked rather like a bundle of moving woolens.

"There was a storm at sea," she said as she stepped up to me. "Everyone got sick." She put down her bag and drew me into her arms. "I'm so sorry about Miriam."

"She's gotten quite a bit worse since I wrote you," I told her.

She nodded, her face very grim. There was now a hint of silver in her hair, but surrounding the youth of her face it looked somehow impermanent, as if it had been spun there overnight and would be gone by evening.

"They're sure it's leukemia?" she asked.

"Yes, and a very rapid kind, evidently," I said. I bent down and grabbed her suitcase. "She'll be happy to see you, Elena."

Elena took my arm and we walked toward a row of taxis parked fifty feet away.

"Sorry about the storm," I said absently. "Would you like to go to my apartment first, freshen up?"

Elena shook her head. "No, I want to see Miriam, if you don't mind."

We were almost at the taxis when one of the reporters came charging up to us, firing questions as he trotted along.

"You're Elena Franklin, aren't you? Are you aware that Jack MacNeill is leaving the United States? Were you ever a member of the Communist party, Miss Franklin? Is it true that you wrote Calliope as an a.s.signment from the Comintern?"

Elena looked at me aghast.

I stopped and turned to the reporter. He had a name tag on his coat. It said his name was Slattery.

"Mr. ... Slattery," I said, "my sister has returned to the United States because of an illness in the family. I would appreciate it if you would leave her alone."

Slattery grinned moronically. "Well, you know what they say, people's right to know, and all that."

Over his shoulder, I could see the other reporters laughing at him, at his youth and inexperience, that immaturity which they had long ago left behind but were still inclined to indulge. Elena, on the other hand, was not inclined to indulge it. She stepped forward and faced him.

"I had heard that Jack MacNeill was leaving the country," she said bluntly. "And if this is the way he has been treated, then I don't blame him in the least."

Slattery laughed. "Well, maybe he's got something to hide," he said. "h.e.l.l, maybe you do, too, Miss Franklin."

Elena looked at him as if he were a being from a more malicious world, one of those mischievous sprites who so bedeviled the Elizabethan mind. She had been away for so long that the terrible oppression of the early fifties had not in any real way touched her. It was now the spring of 1954, and the last wave of the decade's early madness was pa.s.sing over us like a cloud going out to sea, retreating, but with a grumbling, quarrelsome thunder.

"Well, what do you say, Miss Franklin," Slattery asked in a mocking tone. "You work for the Comintern, or what?"

Elena did not answer. She turned quickly, walked a few paces to the taxi nearest us, and got in. I followed her immediately, of course, and within a few seconds we were riding across town toward Mount Sinai Hospital.

"You're lucky to have been in Europe for the past few years," I said.

"I read about it, of course," Elena said, "but it's different when you're suddenly attacked like that, accused of ridiculous things." She grimaced. "The Comintern. My G.o.d, how absurd."

I nodded. "Being accused is nothing. Joe Tully went to jail for eighteen months. You know what Sam did." I smiled. "Of course, Jack just told them to go to h.e.l.l."

"And you?"

I shrugged. "Well, I was never political. I just had friends who were, and a sister."

"What about Miriam?"

"Oh, G.o.d, she was out in the thick of it again," I said wearily, remembering all the meetings and rallies and proclamations, that sense of heavy battle in which she had been engaged. "But not me." I shrugged. "Maybe Jack was right in what he said to me one night. He said that writing about dead poets makes you dead."

Elena glanced out the window at the line of storefronts and offices sweeping by. "I should have come home," she said quietly. There was more than a little self-accusation in her voice, more than a little moral doubt, the sort that remains like an ache in the mind. In Elena it surfaced oddly from time to time, in a line despairing of Mary Farrell's disengagement, for example, or still later, when she declared not long before she died that Jack MacNeill, for all his error and false hope, had won the champions.h.i.+p of life.

Elena continued to stare out the car window a moment longer, then she turned back to me. "Tell me about Miriam," she said.

"Well, there's not much to add to what I've already written you," I said. "It's leukemia. They keep calling it 'cancer of the blood.' How terrible that sounds, like the blood stream is foul."

"What can be done?" Elena asked.

"Nothing at all, really," I admitted. "About six months ago she would get tired quickly. She didn't look healthy, but then Miriam always has a sort of pale look, despite her energy. That's what she lost first, the energy. Then other things began to happen. Loss of appet.i.te, dizziness, that sort of thing." I glanced away from her, latching my eyes on the upper floors of Mount Sinai as they rose down the avenue. "It could have been a thousand little things, but it was leukemia." I looked at Elena. "She's sinking very fast now."

Even as I said this, I found something utterly unbelievable in it. That Miriam could go so quickly was inconceivable. I could not grasp that her enormous energy would desert her, that she would then be flesh alone, then void and without form entirely, as if uncreated.

"She's not in very much pain," I added. "They keep her sedated."

She was awake, however, when Elena and I came into her room a few minutes later. Her face was pale, waxy. When asleep, she looked like a carved white candle.

"Look who's come from Europe," I said as Elena stepped into the room behind me.

Miriam glanced up weakly and tried to smile. "Come to the death vigil?" she asked.

Elena said nothing. She walked over to the bed, bent forward, and gathered Miriam into her arms.

"I'm not taking it very well, Elena," Miriam whispered. "It's too slow, too slow. They should have put me in the oven, like the ones in Europe."

I turned away from her reflexively. "Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Miriam," I blurted.

Miriam kept her eyes on Elena. "William wants me to be strong," she said in a low, raspy voice. "But I've lost my strength, Elena, lost my spirit."

Elena took a white cloth from the stand beside the bed and gently wiped Miriam's forehead.

"Don't tell me that I'm going to be fine, Elena," Miriam said, almost bitterly. "Don't feed me that bulls.h.i.+t."

"I won't," Elena said firmly.

"William tried that for a while. So did these frigging doctors."

Elena continued to wipe her head but said nothing.

Miriam glanced about the room angrily. "Look at this G.o.dd.a.m.n place," she said vehemently. She glared at me. "I don't want to die here, G.o.ddammit!" she screamed.

"For G.o.d's sake, Miriam," I said again. I walked to the window and stared down at the roofs of the stubby surrounding buildings.

"Where do you want to go?" Elena asked quietly.

"Home," Miriam said. Then she closed her eyes and allowed her head to drop slowly onto Elena's shoulder. "Just let them give me something for the pain," she said almost in a whisper. "Just something for the frigging pain, then let me go home."

I turned back toward them. Elena had Miriam's head cradled in her arms. She was stroking her hair.