Elena. Part 20

I have sometimes wondered why, of all people on earth, I chose to pursue Miriam Gold. I was twenty-seven years old, and by that time I had had a few inconsequential romances. But I was also old enough to have grown tired of mirthless, solitary meals, of the silence that swept over me when I turned out the light above my bed, the same one that greeted me next morning.

I took one look at Miriam's lambent eyes and instantly sensed as if it were a revelation that the oldest commandments were perhaps the best ones, closest to our most basic needs, and that the first mandate of an ancient creed had long ago declared that a man should not live alone.

"I'm sure Sam's delighted to have you at the press," I added lamely, feeling, under her stringent gaze, witless as a toad.

"Well, it was nice to have met you, Mr. Franklin," she said. "And please tell your sister that I look forward to meeting her very soon."

And with that Miriam walked quickly out of Sam's office and took her seat in the adjoining room. I could hear her typewriter clattering away as Sam began another summation of his plan for Elena's book, and the sound of it, of those long brown fingers dallying upon the keys, was curiously thrilling.

I did not see Miriam again for several months. By that time, Elena's book was, as they say, between the boards, and Sam had arranged a press party to introduce it to the New York literary world. Harry had offered to provide a hall at the New York Athletic Club, but Sam had refused. "Jesus," he told me irritably, "up there on Central Park South with that cold, formal exterior and G.o.d knows what kind of stuffiness inside. h.e.l.l, William, that place is an island of anti-Semitism surrounded by a sea of anti-Semitism."

And so the New York Athletic Club lost the distinction of having Elena Franklin's first book introduced there. Instead, Sam chose the somewhat less imposing atmosphere of the Columbia Club, and it was there, on an afternoon in the fall of 1933, that Elena, her friends, and a varied a.s.sortment of "book people" gathered for the occasion.

Typically, Elena herself arrived early. She was dressed plainly, as always, in a dark skirt and white blouse. She had had her hair trimmed, however, and there was a hint of rouge on her cheeks.

"I have no idea how to behave today," she said.

"Just be charming," I told her. "That's what's expected, isn't it? Charm and wit and intelligence."

Sam quickly shuttled her away from me, and from across the room I watched as he instructed her for a few minutes, drilling his advice into her with many nervous gestures. Then he escorted her to a sofa near the back of the room, one so large she looked lost as she sat upon it, her hands folded neatly in her lap, as if she were posing for a photograph much too formal for her nature. Still, she did not seem entirely ill at ease, and I think that her apprehension that day may have come from a feeling that she had to appear more unsophisticated than in fact she was. It was a pose that she maintained a good deal longer than I expected and did not entirely abandon until she returned from France with the idea for Quality already in her mind, not completely realized but powerfully imagined.

The guests soon began to filter in, and Elena nodded to each of them. Everyone received a copy of New England Maid upon arriving. Thus, at the age of twenty-three, Elena was treated to the sight of her own eight-year-old face - for one of her childhood photographs adorned the cover - staring back at her from beneath the arms of countless, gossipy strangers.

Mary came rushing in not long after the hall was half-filled. She was carrying a copy of the World.

"Look at this," she said excitedly as she thrust the paper in front of me.

I glanced down at the photograph of a group of baggy-pantsed farmers dumping milk on the highway outside Sioux City, Iowa, while their fiery leader, Milo Reno, looked on approvingly.

Mary tapped her finger beside the photograph. "That's my uncle Bill," she said with delight. "Never would have figured him for a Red." At that time, Mary still retained her satirical edge; but during the coming months, as the lines around soup kitchens steadily lengthened and small, brooding cities grew up along the wharves or out from under the bridges, she fell victim to a crazy panic, avoiding shadowy streets, slinking away from yawning alleyways, talking in mordant tones of what she called "uncontrolled events." And of course it was not long after this that she sought out and married her first doctor, a man named Philip Newman.

But on this happy day, Mary was spritely as ever. "Tom's not coming to the party," she said. "To tell you the truth, William, I think Elena's success has got his goat a little." She smiled at me impishly. "Are you sure you don't understand his feeling?"

"Not enough to resent Elena's success, Mary," I said. "If I were as good a writer, it would be my book being launched today. But I'm not. How can I blame Elena for that?"

Mary looked at me seriously, then reached over and squeezed my arm. "I think Elena has a very good brother," she said softly. "I think I'll go over and tell her so."

Then she released my arm and I watched as she walked over and joined Elena on her voluminous couch. Elena listened quietly a moment as Mary talked to her. Then she looked up at me and nodded very delicately.

Harry came in a few minutes later, his fiancee on his arm. Her name was Felice, and she was as flighty a child as I had ever had occasion to meet. Harry nonetheless seemed very proud of her, making a great show of what was, without doubt, her very considerable beauty. Still, her conversation was entirely vapid, and I remember thinking of her later as the most singularly trivial being I had ever met. Thus it was with profound surprise that I learned, years later, that she had taken charge of Harry's daunting empire after his death in the war and had run that disparate kingdom with what was said to be both a firm hand and a foul mouth. Until then, it seemed to me, I had never guessed the depths of woman's masquerade. When I related this to Elena, however, thinking it a rather cunning insight, she merely laughed and said she suspected there were plenty of beautiful young socialites who were every bit as empty as they seemed.

Harry was still sweeping Felice gracefully about the hall when Miriam came through the door. Teddy was with her, looking ghostly, but Sam quickly tugged him away, leaving Miriam standing alone near the center of the room.

"Remember me?" I said as I came up behind her.

"Oh, yes," she said dryly. "h.e.l.lo."

I glanced about at the elaborate festivities. "I always thought that a book might sell merely on the basis of its quality. I suppose that's naive?"

"Yes, I think it is," Miriam said. "Very naive."

I was about to serve another ball into her court when a large and very handsome man stepped up beside her.

"h.e.l.lo, Miriam," he said.

Miriam smiled. "Oh, h.e.l.lo, Jack. Are you enjoying the party?"

He nodded almost shyly and withdrew a copy of New England Maid from under his arm. "I already had a copy of this, but someone shoved it at me as I came through the door."

"Have you read it?" Miriam asked.

"Yes."

"What did you think?"

"That it was very interesting. I'll write a favorable review."

"Good," Miriam said. "I'm sure Elena will be pleased." She seemed suddenly to remember that I was standing beside her. "By the way, this is Elena's brother, ah ..."

"William," I said and thrust out my hand.

"Happy to meet you, William," Jack said.

'This is Jack MacNeill," Miriam told me. "He's a freelance journalist. I met him when I was working at New Ma.s.ses. "

"Yes, New Ma.s.ses," Jack said. "Funny how that already seems like the good old days." He was wearing a brown suit, with a light blue open-collared shirt and no tie. His shoes were scruffy brown brogans, and his belt looked as if it had survived several near-fatal encounters. He was about thirty years old, with an angular face and tangled, rust-colored hair. In that elegantly appointed room, he looked shockingly out of place, like a jagged piece of metal sculpture set down by mistake in a gallery of Dutch masters.

Elena was still seated across the room, and I noticed that Jack's eyes often drifted toward her as he spoke. "Your sister is really very gifted," he said. His voice was low, almost gentle, and it seemed curiously contradictory to his roughhewn facade. Of course, at that time I did not know Jack MacNeill, did not know that native tenderness which was deep within him but which he himself felt inconsistent with the tough, two-fisted reportage he was laboring to construct. It would be quite some time before he would abandon that tiresome duplicity and become the simple, kindly man he always was. But it was also one of his glories that in the end he did abandon it, so that, by the fifties, when he was hounded from the university and finally driven to England, he had embraced the gentler qualities of his own nature. And I remember that on the way up the gangway of the ship that would take him into exile, with reporters shouting baiting questions and flash bulbs popping all around him, he was able to turn toward them, pull the rose Elena had given him from his lapel, and toss it to that mean and gloating crowd. "This is for America," he said. "It needs all the beauty it can bear."

But in the fall of 1933, Jack was cultivating a somewhat more brawny image, one which his every gesture enhanced, even down to the way he gripped his wine gla.s.s in a tight, white-knuckled fist.

"I suppose I could find only one real fault with the book," he said, glancing first at Miriam, then at me. "It seemed a bit interior to me."

"Well, it is an autobiography, of sorts," I said.

Jack nodded. "Oh, of course. But something beyond that. There is an interior quality, a distance, as if the whole story wasn't really told by a person, but by a ghost." He looked at Miriam. "I mean, the larger world is shut outside - never intrudes upon the book, as if it didn't really exist. You have the town and the family, and that's all. You hardly know the war happened, except for that boy who comes back to Standhope and shoots himself."

"Well, she wasn't writing a history book, Jack," Miriam said.

"And I wouldn't want her to," Jack said. He looked at me. "It's the graphic element that's missing, the sense that the life she talks about was lived, not just thought about."

I nodded toward Elena, who was still seated on her sofa, looking rather stiff and wearied as one person after another joined her there briefly, then departed. "Perhaps you should talk this over with the author herself," I said.

"I think that's an excellent idea," Miriam said. She took Jack's arm and tugged him forward. "Come on, let me introduce you."

The seat beside Elena had just been abandoned by a pudgy reporter from the Times, so that she was sitting alone as we approached her.

"Elena," Miriam said, "I'd like you to meet Jack MacNeill. He's a freelance journalist, and he has some interesting opinions about your book."

Jack did not wait for Elena to respond. He immediately sat down beside her. "First off," he said, "I should tell you that I liked your book quite a lot."

"Thank you," Elena said demurely.

"But I had some reservations, too," he added cautiously. "I thought the book was a little too internal, as if everything in it only happened in your mind, not in the real world."

Elena smiled slightly but said nothing.

"America is missing from the book, I think," Jack added.

He meant, of course, the America he had seen and doc.u.mented in report after report as he wandered from his birthplace in Seattle, after his mother's death when he was fifteen, to his present flat in Greenwich Village. He had worked as a migrant, lived as a migrant, and, as he said, thought as a migrant. "I don't have a vision, you see," he said, "just a fair amount of experience."

And so when Elena asked him what America he meant, he was able to tell her, speaking softly, his steady voice almost inflectionless, his eyes burrowing into hers.

"Well," he said, "have you ever seen a room with maybe fifteen living in it, and nothing on the windows to keep out the wind but ripped-up corn flake boxes?"

Elena admitted, somewhat stiffly, I think, that she had not.

And so he presented to her, in brief, America as he had come to know it.

"... And in South Carolina they work from what they call 'can see,' meaning dawn, to 'can't see,' meaning dead of night. And down in Oklahoma, when the dust storm comes, people die because they swallow so much dirt, even with masks on. I know a family - interviewed them - that walked from Arkansas to the Rio Grande because they heard that cotton was grown by the river's edge. Have you ever heard of that?"

Elena shook her head, her eyes fixed upon his.

"I've seen shacks made out of soup cans and Kotex boxes, and a good many other things. That's part of the American story, don't you think?"

"But Elena wasn't writing what you call 'the American story,'" I protested.

Jack looked up at me. "I know that. I'm just trying to suggest what grit is, the little detail that makes you feel something instead of just think about it." He turned to Elena. "I don't mean to offend you, and I don't think it's my place to tell you how to write. It was just an opinion. You can take it or leave it."

Elena looked at him pointedly. "Too internal, you said?"

"Yes," Jack replied. He nodded toward the windows at the front of the room. "There's a lot going on out there." He tapped the side of his head with his finger. "And there's a lot going on up here. The hard thing is to get those two worlds together."

Elena continued to watch him, but said nothing.

"You have a lot of talent, Miss Franklin," Jack said. "That internal world of yours, it's electric. A kind of steady charge runs through your whole book. But the fire keeps dying away." He stood up. "It was nice meeting you, Miss Franklin," he said.

And with that, he sauntered away, edging gently through the well-heeled crowd.

Elena's gaze followed him, a very intense look in her eyes. I saw that same look years later, when she and I were walking in the wildly disordered garden surrounding her house on Cape Cod. She had been talking about Jack with immeasurable fondness and affection, her white hair dancing in a small breeze from off the sea. Then that look came in her eyes. "I was growing a eunuch's soul, William," she said. "Then Jack came along for me."

And she might have added that same afternoon, just as she turned to watch a line of surf break along the sh.o.r.e - the foam very much, as I remember quite vividly now, the color of her hair - she might have added, "Just as Miriam came along for you."

I suppose a less lonely man might have given up after Miriam's casual, but repeated, rebuffs. He might have found a less demanding and independent woman, "selfless," as Raymond Finch says of his working-cla.s.s girlfriend in Calliope, "because she has no self."

Miriam Gold, on the other hand, had a p.r.o.nounced self. Her early childhood had been spent in those crowded tenements on the Lower East Side which Mike Gold (no relation) had already immortalized in his novel Jews without Money. By the time she was ten, however, Miriam's father had moved to the upper reaches of Manhattan, settling his family into a s.p.a.cious Harlem apartment and beginning the life of reasonable comfort that had been his waking dream for forty years. Thus Miriam's early poverty had been transformed into miraculous prosperity by the time she came of age. But it had not been forgotten. She would often talk of the smells that had wafted up into her bedroom from the open store windows, of peddlers' carts below, of the incessant noise that had poured into her room from the hawking and bickering of that vast open bazaar which was once Orchard Street. On those same streets, she had listened to tales of an older world, of pogroms and forced migrations, and from these she had gained a sense that for the generation that preceded hers, America had offered itself as a dream of unprecedented dimension, one whose bounty she could not deny and wished, I think, only to extend.

To all of this, Miriam added the experience of moving from an earlier density into the world bought for her by her father's good fortune, so that she could sit in that grotesque parlor he had designed in imitation of David Belasco - all swooping oriental drapes and Middle Eastern water pipes - and dream of the junk markets of Houston Street, its swarming crowds and myriad dialects. From her ornate and luxurious bedroom, she looked back purposefully to those earlier days, to a world of direct and simple toil, presided over by the dictates that had come down from Sinai rather than by the labyrinthine contortions of the New York Civil Code. Her father's good fortune had set her both morally and ethically adrift. It was a complex condition, one which Elena tried to capture in the section of Quality that deals with the Jewish novel of immigration. The great accomplishment of that genre, she wrote, "was to give our literature the profound sense of a beached moral order, of reluctant but inescapable abandonment, of the ransom the old exacts from the new, of that deep nostalgia which is unmistakable in the closing pa.s.sages of The Rise of David Levinsky, and which is essentially a form of ethical wistfulness. It is the voice of the cantor heard above the roar of urban traffic, the call of the shofar over the hum of the shirtwaist machines."

Certainly Miriam felt this wistfulness. As her father's finances became more and more entangled with those of the barons so excoriated by her fellow workers at New Ma.s.ses, she sensed not only the oddity of her circ.u.mstances but their cruelty as well. She believed that her father was a victim of his own ambition, that he had forfeited the more intense life of the ghetto for the cold and charmless one of the Jewish middle cla.s.s, and that this was a betrayal of his heritage far more serious, as she said, than grabbing a hot dog at Yankee Stadium.

For Jack MacNeill, of course, all this was nothing more than a privileged person's romanticization of early poverty, and he told Miriam so more than once during the years we lived so closely together. But I have always thought that there was more to Miriam's conviction than that. Once she told Jack that America was the sort of country in which when you win, you lose, and when you lose, you lose. Jack had laughed quite a lot at that. But I believe that Miriam was talking about the losses that accrue to success in a very subtle way, moral losses of the most delicate sort, as well as about the grace and struggle of communal life, the wealth and strain of tradition, the charm of ancient things.

Thus when Jack called her the most conservative radical he ever knew, he was probably right. To this day, when I think of her, I see her not as a fiery instrument of revolutionary revenge - a popular image in those days, one which numerous female Russian revolutionaries were said to embody - but as a peculiarly willful and competent person, one whose life was enn.o.bled by a memory rather than a dream of justice.

It is surprising to me now how little I actually know of the life she lived before we met. I know about her time on the Lower East Side, but once her father whisked her up to Harlem, things grow vague. I know that for a long time she was on the outs with her family and that the questions in dispute were mainly political. Perhaps on some morning she had marched into breakfast, hurled a few epithets at her father while he sat stunned above his wheat toast, then stormed out onto the street, slamming the door behind her. I know for sure only that there was a break, a series of hapless jobs, during which Miriam attempted, perhaps, to fuse her experience with that of the working cla.s.s, and then a retreat. For she went back to her family after a time, gave an accounting of her life since she had left them, and asked if they might help her do the thing she had by then decided upon: go to college. Her father said yes immediately, and all of them alternately laughed and cried throughout the entire afternoon, until, as Miriam always said, the carved mahogany elephant on the mantel looked as if it would die of all this unexpected sweetness.

The following year Miriam went to Smith, and she would remember her time there almost as fondly as her childhood in lower Manhattan. Perhaps, in the end, it was simply that for her the past was a sacred thing, that nothing could ever seem wholly ugly through the prism of remembrance, that remembering well, as she once said, is a kind of art. All her life she loved the sort of object that soaked up time - old letters and photographs, discarded magazines and yellowing newspapers. Perhaps it was finally this reverence for things remembered that drew her to New England Maid, then to Elena, and, at long last, to me.

She finally agreed to have dinner with me during Christmas week. By then New England Maid had been out for almost three months. Reviews poured into Sam's tiny office from all over the country, most of them either very favorable or very hostile. Miriam was coordinating everything for the book - directing the advertising, setting up all the interviews, whisking Elena from one reception to another. The two of them were so exhausted at day's end that Elena would often collapse back in Miriam's room and spend the night on the short, worn sofa by the window.

"Surely Elena's enjoying all this," I said. "The attention, I mean."

Miriam took a sip of wine. "She does it well, but I'm not sure she enjoys it."

"But it must be dazzling," I insisted.

Miriam shrugged, then glanced away. She was wearing a gray wool suit with notched lapels, and I remember thinking how professional she looked, how completely in control of everything around her. It seemed a kind of miracle that she had consented to this dinner, and in a way it was. Not long before Alexander was born, we sat in the living room of our small apartment and talked about that first night while I pressed my hand to her stomach, searching for some movement, thrilled when it came. "It's all such an accident, William," she said, smiling quietly. "I was so d.a.m.ned tired that afternoon that I couldn't face the prospect of going home and cooking. Then the phone rang and it was you offering a free meal, and I just thought, Oh, what the h.e.l.l."

And so we had ended up in the dining room of the Hotel Lafayette, small and very French though it was only a block or so from the drab facade of New York University.

Miriam turned back toward me. "Elena says you're writing a book."

"Sort of."

"On Cowper?"

"I've been plowing through it for quite some time. Since graduate school. I think of it as my doctoral dissertation, not really a book."

Miriam nodded but said nothing. She seemed preoccupied.

"I suppose you meet a great many dashing men in your profession," I said.

Miriam closed her eyes wearily. "Dash is not all it's cracked up to be."

I looked at her intently. "You know, of course, Miriam, that I've been trying to make an impression on you."

Her face softened a bit. "Yes, I suppose I do."

"Wit didn't work. I suppose now I'm trying ... what, humility?"

Miriam kept her silence. She was watching me with those calculating eyes. She had been "gone over" by the best of them, had batted away the most refined pitches. But not without some loss to herself, for there was something in her that had already been sc.r.a.ped to the bone.

"I don't think I'm a weak man," I said. "I can live without you. I can live, I think, without anyone. But I don't want to."

Miriam sipped her wine, her eyes evaluating me over the rim of the gla.s.s.

"You don't have to be clairvoyant to see that I'm sort of lonely, sort of tired of being lonely." I shook my head. "I don't know how to court you, Miriam," I said feebly. "I wouldn't know where to begin."