Elena. Part 16

"I am," Elena whispered.

"Do you plan to do anything about it?"

Elena turned to me. "Do? Do what? Marry him?"

"I'm reasonably certain that's what he has in mind."

"He hasn't asked me."

"And if he did?"

"I'd say no."

Someone began playing an accordion inside the ferry cabin.

"He loves you, Elena," I said. "He would marry you in a minute. Yet you seem to belong to Dr. Stein."

Elena was listening to the music. "Belong is a bit much, William."

"What is it, then? Enchantment?"

Elena looked back out over the river. A large white ship could be seen far downstream.

"I learn from Dr. Stein," she said crisply.

I shook my head. "That's not enough. For G.o.d's sake, you're twenty years old. And he's near - what, eighty?"

Elena nodded. "That's not the point."

"What is?"

Elena straightened herself. "I've decided to leave the residence hall. I'm going to move into Dr. Stein's building."

I was astonished. "You're what? You're going to move in with him?"

Elena shook her head. "Of course not, William. I'm simply going to move down the hall from his apartment. There's a woman, a Mrs. Connolly, a widow whose two sons now have families of their own, she has a room. I'll be able to come and go more or less as I please."

"And be near the good doctor?" I asked sarcastically.

Elena said nothing, but I could see the heat rising in her.

"Remember that night with Howard and Elizabeth?" I reminded her. "Remember Ariadne's voice?"

Elena turned toward me. "I am following Ariadne's voice."

I smiled thinly. "And it's old and has a German accent?"

"Yes, it does," Elena said firmly. "He is teaching me to be wise, and I am going to stay with him, William, until he dies." She waited for me to digest this new set of circ.u.mstances, then she smiled tentatively. "I'll be living down the hall from him, but he needs me quite a bit, so I'll be at his apartment much of the time. You may visit me there, if you like."

Two weeks later I did just that. It was early in the evening, and I had first gone to Mrs. Connolly's. As expected, Elena was with Dr. Stein, and so I walked down the corridor and knocked at his door.

Elena answered it.

"h.e.l.lo, William," she said. Her voice was flat, but her eyes were questioning. She was trying to guess my mood.

"I've just come to pay you that visit," I said softly as I removed my hat.

Her face brightened. "Good," she said. "Come in."

It was a lovely room, lined with mahogany bookshelves, an enormous desk by the window, and in the corner, a cello resting upright in its stand.

"Can't play the cello anymore, William," Dr. Stein said as he came into the room. He thrust out his hand. "Good to see you."

I nodded. "And you, sir."

"Sit down, won't you?"

I took a seat opposite a small sofa. Dr. Stein lowered himself onto the sofa, Elena's arm under his, carefully helping him.

"Now you sit, my dear," Dr. Stein said.

Elena sat down beside him.

"Would you like a drink, my boy?" Dr. Stein asked immediately.

"Yes, perhaps a brandy, if you have it."

"Of course," Dr. Stein said casually. He turned to Elena. "Would you mind?"

Elena went to the kitchen. I could hear her tinkling gla.s.ses together.

Dr. Stein seemed to take my measure for a moment, then he spoke. "I understand you disapprove of Elena living down the hall."

"I'm surprised she told you that," I said.

"Why shouldn't she?" Dr. Stein said. "Is it true still, my boy?"

"I have a sister ..."

"Whose reputation you must protect?"

"Yes."

Dr. Stein laughed and shook his head. "I am dying, William. How could I possibly commit an offense against your sister?"

"It's just that it seems odd, sir," I said cautiously.

"To whom?"

"I'm told that some people talk about it at the university," I said, repeating a rumor whose only source was Harry Morton.

"Idiots," Dr. Stein said emphatically. "You must ignore such foolishness, otherwise your life may be crushed by it." He leaned back into the sofa and smiled. "Let that be an end to it, then."

Elena came out with the gla.s.ses of brandy, distributed them, then returned to her place on the sofa.

Dr. Stein lifted his gla.s.s in the air. "What shall we toast?"

I shrugged. "I really don't know."

Dr. Stein regarded me pointedly. "To dutifulness, then," he said.

And so we toasted this virtue, then went on to discuss many things. Dr. Stein talked about Calderon and Elena about Pindar. She sometimes took exception to one of Dr. Stein's remarks, and he would listen very carefully to her, though he rarely recanted.

Toward six, Dr. Stein invited me to dinner. I immediately agreed, and for the next hour the three of us worked in his small kitchen, which Dr. Stein had stocked with a copious a.s.sortment of Old World spices and delicacies. He was not able to move about with much ease by then, but he could shout orders with terrific energy, while Elena and I worked at the cutting board and the stove.

At eight we dined on the meal we had prepared - lentil soup and beef Stroganoff, with a Riesling that a friend of Dr. Stein's had managed to smuggle into the country a year or so before.

"To all that keeps the heart uplifted, then," Dr. Stein said, his gla.s.s raised high. "And to you, Elena," he added, glancing at her with a smile.

After dinner, we talked mostly about the work they had been doing together, a conversation I found somewhat tedious since I knew little of the subject.

Dr. Stein noticed this after a time, and he stood up, walked to his desk, and pulled out a large typed ma.n.u.script. "Here, William. Better just to read it."

I took the book from his hand and absently flipped over the t.i.tle page. He had dedicated it to my sister.

"A university press is set to publish it," he said, returning to the sofa, "so it won't be advertised in The American Mercury, if you know what I mean."

I looked up from the ma.n.u.script and smiled.

"No tall stacks of them in the window of Scribner's downtown, either," Dr. Stein added with a wink at Elena. "There is only one genuine elite, that of great intelligence." He chuckled. "A sn.o.b? Yes, perhaps I am, but only in a small sense. I am pleased that Mr. Brand has given the world Destry Rides Again this year." He leaned back in his seat and swept his right arm out, indicating the tall line of bookshelves at the far end of the room. "But I am also pleased that Thomas Hardy did not choose to write about cowboys." He looked at me questioningly. "Is anything deeply wrong with such an att.i.tude?"

"I don't think so, Dr. Stein," I said.

He nodded. "Good."

Then he talked on for a while about those ideas which had meant most to him, his voice turning almost nostalgic. At one point Elena brought him another brandy.

At around ten, I decided that I had stayed long enough. I stood up and shook Dr. Stein's hand.

"Thank you very much for having me," I said.

Dr. Stein did not get up. "Very pleased, William," he said. "I wonder, would you do me a favor?"

"Of course."

"Would you take a picture, William, of Elena and me?"

"Now?"

Dr. Stein nodded. "Yes, now. Just as we are, quite casual, nothing posed, just the two of us on the sofa."

Elena stood up. "I'll get the camera," she said and went into an adjoining room.

Dr. Stein smiled quietly. "I trust your mind is at ease, William?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good."

Elena walked back into the room and handed me the camera. I stepped back, indicating to Elena that she should move closer to Dr. Stein, then snapped the picture.

In the photograph they are seated quite close together on that weathered floral sofa, which later became Elena's and which now rests in the front room of her house on Cape Cod. She is wearing a white blouse and long dark skirt, her "girls' school uniform," as she came to call it. Her hair is long, parted at the middle, the strands of the right side held back from her face by a tortoise sh.e.l.l barrette. Dr. Stein appears rather ponderous beside her, dressed in his black three-piece suit, the gold watch chain dangling from his vest. It is a grainy photograph, taken with a flash in indoor light, but one can sense that patina of dust which forever marred the good doctor's shoes and the flecks of lint which clung to him like tiny flakes of unmelted snow. He has placed one hand beneath his coat, European style, and his head is thrust back, almost c.o.c.kily, as if captured in a moment of transcendent pride. He seems - how shall I put it? - most deeply pleased to be alive.

Franz Jacob Stein died three weeks later on December 12, 1931. I never spoke to him again after that night with Elena in his apartment. I remember that he walked me to the door, though with some difficulty, and together, standing side by side, he and Elena waved to me as I made my way down the hallway to the stairs. I waved back cheerily.

On the street outside their building, as I waited for a bus to take me downtown, I thought how often prudery triumphs over sense, convention over the innovations of the heart, and thus how easy it is for someone like myself - the "Cold Bill" that Jack MacNeill later called me - to grow pa.s.sionate about matters of trifling pa.s.sion, careworn with petty care, dry and bloodless as that soulless critic Pope despised, "bold in the practice of mistaken rules."

For about three months after Dr. Stein's death, Elena kept very much to herself, moving, I think, into the region of quietude and reflection she would later write about in her novel Inwardness. Dr. Stein's death had created an empty s.p.a.ce, which, as it turned out, she could only fill with some formerly uncreated part of herself. The guidance he had given her never served her better than in the way it directed her through those months of silent mourning. "I think of him often," she told me one evening a few weeks after his death, "and it's strange, William, but I don't feel drained or lonely or anything like that." Then she smiled. "I feel invigorated. Isn't that odd?"

Odd, yes, and a bit too easy. For there is no doubt that Elena was not always able to a.s.sume so serene an att.i.tude. From time to time, Mrs. Connolly would call to tell me that Elena had not been out of her room for a day or so and that she was worried about her. I can never know what happened to my sister during those long hours she spent enclosed in her small room at the end of the hall, while Mrs. Connolly tiptoed back and forth to listen at the door. Perhaps she wept like a brokenhearted schoolgirl, or sat by the window like one of those mute, abandoned heroines so beloved by our mother. But if during that time she almost died of pain, she gave absolutely no sign of it, outside those reclusive hours.

Then it ended, her withdrawal, and Elena emerged with what amounted to a happy buoyancy. It was like the break of day after a long, disgruntled night. The phone rang in my apartment late one afternoon almost three months after Dr. Stein's death. It was Elena, and her voice sounded more fully commanding and vital than I had heard it in quite some time.

"I've decided to move out of this building, William," she said. "I've found a new place."

"A new place?"

"Yes. Further down Broadway. Do you think you might help me move? It would only be a couple of trunks."

"Of course," I said. "But why this sudden urge to move?"

There was a brief silence, as if she were considering her answer. "I just think it's time," she said at last.

I arrived at Mrs. Connolly's apartment two days later. She pointed to the room at the end of the hall.

"Down there," she said. "And you take care of your sister once she's out of my sight." She shook her head disapprovingly. "She wouldn't go back to Hewett like she should have. Wants a place of her own. You keep watch on her, Mr. Franklin. That's my word to the wise." And with that, she strode out into the kitchen.

When I walked into Elena's room, I found her seated at her desk, her head resting on her arm.

"How are you, Elena?" I asked.

"Well, I think," she said. She stood up and nodded toward two large trunks that rested at the foot of her bed. "I hope we can manage all that."

We managed very well, and within a few minutes Elena and I were in a taxi heading for her new lodgings, a women's residence called Three Arts.

"Mrs. Connolly seemed a bit cranky," I said.

"I would never tell Mrs. Connolly," Elena said as the taxi edged into Broadway, "but, for one thing, I really didn't want to live with her anymore." She looked at me. "I don't intend to submit to that." Later, in Quality, she would write with fierce anger about the mother of Emily d.i.c.kinson, "that sleepless creature who bestowed on her daughter the dreadful opposite of neglect, that wary maternal care, which, despite its tenderness, remains intrusive, watchful, relentlessly abiding, and from which one evening when it was 'amazin' raw,' Emily fled into the embracing chaos of the snow."