Elena. Part 36

"Such a long way to come for a vigil," Miriam repeated. "One of those stupid Cunard liners with all the odd characters on it, right, Elena?"

Elena smiled slightly. "There were a few oddities."

Miriam nodded. "Rich old crones playing bridge, right?"

"Right."

"And in the lounge, some moron singing 'Besame Mucho' in a German accent."

"Exactly," Elena said. She drew her arms more tightly around Miriam's shoulders.

Miriam shook her head very slowly, already tiring, exhausted by her anger. "I scream at the nurses and at William and Alexander," she whispered, her eyes half closing. "I wanted to be strong, but I'm just a b.i.t.c.h, Elena, a frigging b.i.t.c.h." She began to cry gently. "No G.o.dd.a.m.n guts."

Elena wiped her face with the towel, then lay her carefully back down on the bed. Miriam's whisper was trailing off into silence as her eyes closed.

"She'll sleep for a while now," I said. "She always does."

Elena eased herself from the bed. "Is there some way we could get Miriam home?" she asked.

I shook my head. "No. It would be too hard on Alexander."

"Alexander is not the one who's dying," Elena said sternly.

I stepped to the door. "Come, let's talk about this somewhere else."

We walked down the hospital corridor to a small lounge. I bought us each a cup of coffee, and we sat down at a dreary metal table with a hard, formica top, the sort that makes the cold world of the hospital all the more cold.

"She's been this way for a while now," I said. "Very angry."

Elena stared down at her coffee.

"I've always loved her," I said. "I always will. But since she's gotten sick it's been hard to deal with her, hard even to like her."

Elena looked up slowly. "Perhaps they should have put her in an oven, then."

I was so shocked by Elena's remark that my mouth actually dropped open. I leaned toward her. "I know how I must look to you. Cold, indifferent, selfish. But the fact is, Miriam has been very difficult. Especially with Alexander. She's constantly after him. It's as if she thinks she has to lay down all the laws before she dies."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Well, it doesn't leave Alexander with very pleasant memories of his mother."

"Then Alexander is a shallow boy," Elena said, retreating not one inch. "What would he prefer, to have a mother who, with her dying breath, tells him a joke, or listens to his schoolroom gossip as if she gives a d.a.m.n? Let him remember this: in the last days of his mother's life, she tried to teach him how to live."

I started to speak again but stopped, unable to explain myself, or Miriam, or, for that matter, anything at all.

"I don't mean to dismiss the problems you've had, William," Elena said.

"When someone like Miriam gets sick," I told her, "someone as strong as Miriam, you don't expect her to change so much, become so difficult."

"Miriam isn't just sick. She's dying."

"That doesn't change the way you feel."

Elena regarded me very seriously. "Miriam isn't dealing only with her own death, William, but with the death of her expectations. She didn't want just to live, she wanted to accomplish something. And now she sees herself dying. But she also sees the books she'll never write. She sees that sort of oblivion, too."

I pictured Miriam's unfinished ma.n.u.scripts scattered about the tiny room she maintained as an office, all that work and ambition now come down to nothing.

"You have to make allowance for how much of a burden her hopes add to her dying, William," Elena said emphatically.

"All right, I can see what you mean, of course," I said. "But does that make any real difference in terms of bringing her home?"

"No," Elena said. "But still I think we might be able to manage it."

"She needs constant care," I said. "She's not even like our mother was. At least Mother was off in her own world. Miriam is very much aware of everything."

Elena said nothing.

"And I have a job, you know," I added. "I have to be at Parna.s.sus all day."

"I will stay with Miriam during the day," Elena said.

"That could be a very difficult job."

"Maybe not so difficult," Elena replied. "I remember what it was like caring for Mother. It's not a bad experience to have again."

I glanced at my watch. "Let's go to the apartment while Miriam's resting. I'm sure Alexander's home from school by now. He'll be anxious to see you."

He was fourteen years old, a tall, graceful boy, with an elongated face and watery eyes, which gave him a look of perpetual longing and disappointment, though his manner suggested none of these.

"Aunt Elena," he said as he swept her into his arms. "It's good to have you back again."

He had prepared a light dinner for us, and as we sat together in the dining room he questioned Elena relentlessly about Paris, of which he had, of course, a romantically effusive view; about certain ideas in New England Maid, the only book of hers he had read, Calliope having been a bit too thick for his young mind, while Inwardness had had too little plot to keep his action-oriented reading needs alive; and finally about a host of less pointed topics.

They were still going at it when the phone rang an hour later, just as we were preparing to return to the hospital. It was Dr. Bergman. His voice was very calm as he brought the news to me. Miriam was dead.

I realized that the room was absolutely silent as I put down the phone. They were both staring at me, Elena and Alexander, their eyes recording the stricken expression on my face.

I nodded to them. "Yes," I said. "Just a few minutes ago. In her sleep."

I can remember only the most obvious details of the following two days. I remember Elena's taking long walks by the river with Alexander while I remained in the apartment, going through all the procedural matters that must be attended to on such occasions and which finally serve to delay by quite some time the full expression of one's grief.

She was buried in Hoboken, New Jersey, in a public cemetery there which she had seen only once, years before, but which had appealed to her far more than the packed burial grounds of New York. The service was brief, as she had requested. She had only a brother left, her parents having died some years before. She always referred to him rather dismissively as "the engineer," but he was quite intelligent, though somewhat l.u.s.terless. At Miriam's grave site, he told a few quiet stories about their childhood together, then disappeared into the surrounding circle of her friends. Elena also said a few words, as did Sam Waterman. But quite privately Miriam had asked her favorite author, the one with whom she had most enjoyed working, to deliver what amounted to a eulogy. This was Jason Findley, a displaced Southerner, in whom Miriam, perhaps, saw a kindred spirit, another exile from a distant world. Each was imbedded in a cultural inheritance that seemed very remote indeed from that of modern America. Where Jason looked back to the imagined beauties of what he jokingly referred to as a "jonquiled and be-juleped South," Miriam, ever the idealistic communitarian, dreamed of the idyllic peace that must have flourished in the valleys of Judea.

Jason was the last to speak. He wore an elegant black suit, cut perfectly to his tall, slender figure, and stood beside Miriam's grave with his hands folded primly in front of him. His voice was soft but sure, and when he spoke he seemed to look everyone around him directly in the eye.

"Miriam was a very strong woman, as I'm sure all of you know," he said, "and so I won't tell you how gentle she was. Miriam wasn't gentle. She was hard as nails. She worked at everything obsessively, like Saint Therese on her Histoire d'une ame. She was a kind of Jewish Jesuit when it came to commitment." He smiled. "I won't tell you she was tolerant, either. She was intolerant, especially of laziness, shoddiness, inept.i.tude. She didn't have the kind of moral waffling that poses as understanding and so forgives everything. She would say of an evil thing, 'This thing is evil.'"

He glanced around at all of us, the look on his face somber but somehow uplifting, as if he felt good about the world because he felt good about Miriam.

"This woman had opinions, and she wouldn't shut her mouth. She thought religion was a carnival oddity and most of what the world talked about, sheer nonsense. She was very political, but even in this she had a literary bent. One evening when I was at her apartment along with her husband, William, something was said about that occasion some years before when one of Franco's brigands had given a speech with the great Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno sitting mutely right behind him. It seemed that this commander had had an eye patch and had lost one arm, and I remember that Miriam noted just how physically he represented, as she put it that night, 'all that is blind and crippled in the fascist heart.'"

I remembered that evening very well as he spoke of it, and for the first time since her death, I felt my loss completely.

"That's the sort of thing Miriam would say," Jason continued, "the sort of thing she would feel."

He stepped aside with solemn deliberateness, as if this gesture of taking one long step away from Miriam was his way of saying, finally now, good-by.

Within a few minutes it was over, and we all straggled down the hill to our cars. Mary walked beside me, with her four-year-old daughter, Martha, in tow. Elena walked with Jack MacNeill, her hand tucked beneath his elbow. Sam and Jason strolled along together, talking quietly. Besides these, there were a few others, mostly a smattering of Miriam's authors, all of them fittingly subdued in the presence of what they must have thought of as the powerful publisher, Sam Waterman, the radical novelist, Jack MacNeill, and the legendary expatriate, Elena Franklin. One of them later wrote a poem about the funeral, a very bad one, as it turned out, but published anyway. It was ent.i.tled "Luminaries in their Mourning," and it stretched its feeble ironies to the bone. Still, I saved it through the years, then finally added it to that huge collection of Miriam's unpublished ma.n.u.scripts, an award, perhaps, for all the sleeplessness and anxiety and hard labor that had gone into creating them.

After the funeral, we "luminaries" returned to my apartment. It felt terribly empty without Miriam pacing through it, whispering bits of dialogue to herself. And yet, her death had also liberated the s.p.a.ce within the rooms, opened it up to an uncomplicated light, as if her long dying were no more than clutter, an episode of disarray in the long pax et ordo of my life.

For a time we all sat around the dining room table, drinking coffee and talking quietly, as people do on such occasions, as if we do not wish the dead to know that we have gone on living.

Jack sat to my right. His hair was now completely white and very beautiful, the crowning touch to a handsomeness that had graced him all his life. Jason sat next to him, and directly across from Elena. From time to time he would glance at her.

Only Sam was unb.u.t.toned. He played on the living room floor with Martha Farrell, grinning delightedly as he rolled her right and left across the carpet or slapped gently at her hands in a game of pitty-pat. It was a relief for Mary, who'd been at her wit's end with Martha all day. She was clearly tired of motherhood by then and looked dry as a pretzel; but her tongue was as sharp as ever.

"I'll sell you that kid for a good price, Sam," she called to him from the dining room.

Sam shook his head. "I got plenty of time to make one of my own, dearie."

Mary turned to Elena. "How about you? I'm talking a bargain here."

Elena smiled faintly but said nothing. She appeared a somewhat more reserved person than she had been in Paris, one who increasingly kept her counsel - something I have no doubt that Jason saw that afternoon, and instantly admired.

Still, he always directed his attention to someone else, Mary or Jack or me, while guiding them away from Elena in a movement which was, I think, essentially a feint.

"When are you leaving for Europe, Jack?" he asked.

"Two weeks," Jack said. "I have a little place in Wales. A cottage by a lake. Perfect for thinking and writing. A friend owns it."

Jason nodded. "Sounds very good indeed."

Jack shrugged. "Well, what do I have to hang around here for? The reactionaries are in the saddle."

"Wait them out," Mary said. "What the h.e.l.l, this'll blow over in a few months. We're in the tail end of it."

"I'm not so sure," Jack said.

"Christ, Jack," Mary said, "they'll make a hero out of you before long. That's the way things are, fickle." She turned to Elena. "How about you? You going back to France?"

"I'm not sure," Elena said.

Jack smiled at her. "Well, you could always live with me in my little cottage in Wales. We could walk by the lake. Even resume old pa.s.sions, perhaps."

Elena shook her head. "Too rainy."

Jack nodded quickly, then turned away.

"She's a European now," Mary said. "One of those literary ladies."

Jason leaned toward her slightly, and for the first time that afternoon addressed her directly. "Are you tired of Europe?" he asked.

"Yes," Elena said.

He smiled softly. "Curious how modern man has forgotten that in ancient times exile was considered the most severe of punishments."

Mary laughed. "Well, that was before they started serving meals in the air."

Jason laughed at that, but only politely. He kept his eyes on my sister. "So you are going to stay in New York?"

"For a while, I think," Elena said.

Jason sat back in his seat. "Good," he said. He stood up slowly. "Well, I'd better be going now." He shook hands with each of us, last of all with Elena. Then he left.

For a time the rest of us continued our conversation, though we were all so busy shuffling around Miriam's death that talk became a kind of dodge.

Finally a certain weariness overtook us all, and we trooped down to Sam's car. He drove Mary and Martha to the airport, leaving Jack and Elena and me standing on the sidewalk, waving at them. Mary hoisted her daughter up to the back window, grabbed her wrist and waved it for the little girl. Martha grinned and pushed her nose up against the gla.s.s, making a pug-nosed face as the car pulled away.

"Well, I'd better be going, too," Jack said to Elena.

"It was good seeing you, Jack," Elena said.

Jack took her hand. "You know, you could come and stay with me in Wales sometime," he said. "No one would think the worse of it." He looked at me. "Right, William?"

"Not in the least."

Elena gently pulled her hand from his grasp. "I'd better stay here for a while."

"Are you sure?" Jack said with a slight smile. "Think how we could liven up poor Wales."

Elena shook her head. "I'm sure."

"All right," Jack said, "I won't press you. But I hope you'll come and see me off. I'm leaving on the twentieth."

Elena smiled. "You didn't want me to see you off when you left for Spain," she reminded him.

"I've changed," Jack said. There was still a kind of yearning for her in his eyes, the sort that seems not so much a matter of pa.s.sion as of stubborn pursuit. There was no doubt that he still loved my sister, though not with an unbearable need. Instead, I think, she continued to possess the powerful allure of something we have lost. "Anyway," he said, "I'm off to Wales on the twentieth."

"I hope you like it there," Elena said softly.

"I suppose I will," Jack said. "I would very much like it if you would come and see me off."

"All right," Elena said, "I will."

I went with her the day she did. At the pier Elena gave Jack a single long-stem rose, which he flung back at the reporters hounding him as he went up the gangway. "Here," he said, "America needs all the beauty it can bear." The remark made minor literary history. When I read it now in yet another chronicle of the period, I no longer see Jack as the singularly resilient person he was but just as a figure made famous by a single dramatic moment in his life, reduced to cliche by a gesture he thought far less significant than even the least significant of his works. "I have become a single line," he told Elena not long before he died.

After the ship pulled away, Elena and I took a train uptown, got off at Columbus Circle, then walked for a while in Central Park. We sat down at a bench near the Sheep's Meadow, perhaps on the very bench we had taken so many years ago when I told her that she need not be ashamed of a single line in New England Maid.