Elena. Part 43

After a time I took down Elena's copy of Quality once again, reading at random but searching for a clue, as some deranged Christian mystic might roam through the Bible, turning over verses, looking for the guidepost from the hand of G.o.d. Only one pa.s.sage struck me, the final one of the book: When one searches through the letters of our nation, its thought as written, spoken, or in law decreed, one finds no single strand of steady and precise reflection. Rather, the mind that presents itself to our concentration is one of shifts and undulations, full of praise and squabbling, duty and resistance, a consciousness vaguely groping for half-imagined answers to the questions of freedom, fulfillment, and existence. To these timeless questions, our men of thought have attached issues of justice and retribution, privilege and equality, labor and creation, community and individuality - these and scores of others, which are little different from the common thought of man. The study of our letters, therefore, suggests the weaknesses of our probing, both singly and as a people. For on this abundant continent, all things have been emboldened except the mind, and thus we have remained no more intellectually enriched than the far less privileged body of mankind. We have learned how to possess, but not how to nurture; how to acquire, but not how to cast aside; how to calculate, but not how to think.

I closed the book, alarmed by how stern that pa.s.sage was, how severe and unforgiving. I opened the book again a few moments later and reread the paragraph. I looked carefully at each phrase, foolishly convinced that somewhere in the words was the key to her life. Here was the Rosetta stone lying open in my lap. I read it again and again, each time more slowly, pausing after each sentence as if waiting for an echo.

Suddenly, I saw Elena as she appeared on the cold, bl.u.s.tery day we buried Mary Farrell. The service was held in a chapel near the coast of Maine. I had an image of Elena rising and walking to the altar. I could feel the hush of the crowd as she moved forward. At the altar, she set her eyes firmly on the people who waited before her, her hands plunged deeply into the pockets of her black wool coat. And even as I sat in the back room of her house on the Cape, I could feel myself leaning forward to hear her, just as I had done that day in the freezing chapel. I knew that I was approaching what she must have meant, first in Quality, when she wrote of a material abundance which had done nothing to enrich the mind, and then, later, with Alexander, when she had alluded to the limits she had discovered in her own scholarship. It was clear that she was after larger game now. But I could not exactly name it. In my mind I saw her once again as she stood behind the altar. She took a deep breath before beginning. Then she spoke, and I knew it, the secret of my sister's mind.

The Quality of Thought in American Letters was published by Parna.s.sus Press in the fall of 1968. It could hardly have been issued at a better time. The nation was reveling in an orgy of self-immolation over poverty and racism and the war in Vietnam. Elena's book could only be seen as another log on that fire. It was snapped up by student and teacher alike, quoted continually by the new wave of young historians, sociologists, and literary critics, hailed as a monumental attack upon the very foundations of American intellectual achievement, and generally regarded as a sweeping work of literary, historical, and intellectual criticism, a work of enormous insight and deep disaffection.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that Elena found any of this a surprise. Certainly she knew what was in her book, and certainly she had by then had enough experience as a writer to know, as she said in the 1980 interview, that "that which is written is not necessarily that which is read." But I believe the extent of the notoriety the book achieved did genuinely astonish her. She was deluged with requests for her attendance at various rallies, forums, symposia, and conferences. She received teaching offers from fourteen universities, was written about in the popular press (Time called her "the femme fatale of American letters" but at least buried the story in the back of the magazine; Newsweek, on the other hand, put her face on its cover), she even appeared on television one Sunday afternoon, looking very pale and edgy under the white lights.

For a time the enormity of all this seemed to distract her. She took a certain delight in the book's success. She began work on a two-volume edition of her essays and short stories, a project Sam rushed into print, hoping to capitalize on Quality's extraordinary success. She spoke to most of the groups that asked her, at least attempted to reply to her steadily increasing mail, and in general worked feverishly to measure up to what seemed expected of her.

Inevitably, however, the wave subsided, and as it did those concerns which had risen in the last pa.s.sage of Quality, but which had been buried under the flurry of public acclaim that followed its publication, began to emerge again in Elena. She talked insistently about methods of literary and historical a.n.a.lysis. Epistemology became a pa.s.sionate interest. She discussed the cla.s.sics of moral philosophy as if she had only recently discovered them. As a mind, she was very much alive.

But she also grew more aloof. The early energy she had poured into the essay and short story collections quickly dissipated, and Barney Nesbitt, her latest editor, began to complain that Elena was intentionally avoiding him. Once, during a luncheon, he suggested that she might have caught what he called the "star syndrome."

"Maybe she thinks she's too big for Parna.s.sus now, William," Barney said.

I shook my head. "I don't think so."

"Really? Well, she doesn't return my calls," Barney said. "I'm her editor, William, not some starry-eyed groupie, you know what I mean?"

"Of course."

He smiled, leaned across the table, and patted me on the shoulder. "Do what you can with her, will you, old boy? She shouldn't let fame go to her head. Like the Romans say, it's fleeting."

I nodded. "I'll talk to her."

But when I next saw my sister, I found that it was almost impossible to talk to her about anything even remotely touching on her career. Instead, over an extended dinner, she talked about Elizabeth and Julien Tavernier, about fatality and moral choice. She mentioned that she had written Jack MacNeill and was planning to visit him in Wales and that Mary had written her. But they seemed no more than distant references to her now.

Finally, I had had enough. I interrupted her in mid-sentence, actually grabbing her hand as I did so. "What are you looking for, Elena?" I asked.

To her credit, she did not pretend that the question surprised her; she simply answered it. "I don't know," she said.

"You must have some idea."

She thought about it for a moment but came to no conclusion. "Maybe you just go through times when what's killing you, William -" She stopped, as if she had grasped it. "When what's killing you is your life."

She flew to Wales a few weeks later and spent almost two weeks with Jack MacNeill. But when she came back to New York, she looked anything but refreshed. As it turned out, Jack had had a slight stroke only a month or so before her arrival. It had not permanently damaged him, but Elena could see other distressing effects - a certain weariness and dread, as she described it, a premonition of the end.

"He looked a great deal older," Elena told me on the evening she returned. She looked at me as if hoping I might have some answer for all our inevitable decay. "He got very maudlin one evening," she went on. "He said he was just a flicker now, not a flame, just part of the effluvia left in the wake of a revolution that never happened." She shook her head. "It should not end this way."

Elena remained in this somber mood for almost two years. There were no fits of uncontrollable depression, no excessive reclusiveness, and certainly no sudden explosions of rage or resentment, but her work grew darker, and the stories she wrote during this period are filled with a straining after an impossible exact.i.tude. In "The Treatise," an old professor spends his last days perfecting an essay begun in his youth; it remains unfinished when he dies. In "Attorney's Fees," a brilliant lawyer searches for that one precedent which on its own will win his case, rejecting all others because, as he says, "I am sick to death of standing on the trap door of ambiguity." And in "Just a Line or Two," a college student attempts to explain his decision to leave school to his father with such complete precision that it cannot possibly be misunderstood, but finds after reading the final draft of his letter that "there was nothing in it at all, except maybe a dreadful opacity resulting from my yearning to be clear."

Elena was probably at work on the final version of "Just a Line or Two," in March of 1971, when Mary Farrell died in San Francisco.

It was Martha who telephoned to let me know. I was sitting in my apartment, chuckling over the schoolboy gossip in a letter from David, when the phone rang. I suppose there was still an edge of amus.e.m.e.nt in my voice when I answered it.

"Mr. Franklin, this is Martha Farrell, Mary's daughter," Martha said. It was typical of Martha to introduce herself this way. I had met her many times, of course, but until she got her doctorate, she always addressed me with much formality.

"Well of course, Martha," I said cheerfully. "How are you?"

"I wanted to let you know that mother died yesterday," Martha said calmly.

All the world seemed to grow silent for the second or two I stood with the phone pressed to my ear.

"I was at Berkeley when it happened," Martha added matter-of-factly.

I finally found my voice. "I can't tell you how sorry I am, Martha."

"You know, she had this small farm in Maine," Martha said. "It was my father's old place, or his father's, or something like that. It goes back for generations. Anyway, there's a little chapel on it, evidently. Unless somebody's torn it down or something. Well, my mother visited it once. I guess she fell in love with the place. She's put it in her will that she wanted to be buried there."

"I see."

"It's not far from Portland."

"So, you're going to bring the body back East?"

"Yes," Martha said crisply. "I think we can have the funeral a week from today. I suppose some of you would like to come."

"Of course."

"Well, just let everybody know about my mother," Martha said. "I'll send you all the details about the place in Maine. And I guess I'll see you in a week."

"Yes, you will," I told her.

"And by the way," Martha added quickly, "I think that my mother would have liked your sister to speak at the ceremony. There's no minister, or anything like that. You know how Mother felt about religious things. But I do believe that she'd have liked for Elena to say something."

"I'll tell her."

"Good," Martha said. Then she hung up.

I called Elena right away. She received the news of Mary's death quite calmly. Her voice remained cool, measured, betraying nothing excessive in her grief. "Is she going to be buried in California?"

"No. A little chapel not far from Portland, Maine."

"Oh yes, she once told me about that place," Elena said.

"We'll fly up. Sam will probably want to go with us."

"Yes, of course," Elena said. In my mind I could see her standing by the window, the phone trembling slightly in her hand, using all her strength to steady her voice.

"Martha would like for you to speak, deliver the eulogy," I told her.

"All right," Elena said.

I started to tell her more, explain that Mary had simply died in the park while staring out toward the bay, but I heard the receiver click down on the other side. Clearly Elena had already heard enough.

We all flew up to Maine the next week, Sam and Elena and me. Elena sat silently beside me on the plane. Several times she drew a few pages of lined paper from her purse and read them over to herself, making small changes with her pen. It was clear that she had given these remarks a good deal of thought.

Martha met us at the airport. She seemed pleased to see us, particularly Elena. I suppose that by then she thought herself rather a fan of my sister. She had read all her books and could discuss them with considerable knowledge. But she was not fawning in the least. Martha was far too much like her mother ever to play the sycophant. "Everything's arranged," she said, "and I hope it all goes off with a minimum of confusion." I almost smiled at the directness of her manner. Mary would have understood it, perhaps even admired it, in anyone but her daughter.

Elena suddenly moved forward and drew Martha into her arms. "I loved your mother very much," she said.

Martha smiled sadly. "Yes, I know." She drew back, then took both Elena's hands in hers. "You know, Mother and I weren't that close, in some ways," she said. "I always thought she could have been so much more."

Elena drew her hands slowly from Martha's grasp and sank them into the pockets of her coat. "We can never know what is possible for someone else, Martha."

Martha's face tightened. She understood that she had been gently scolded. "Well, I suppose we should go to the chapel now," she said, avoiding any further discussion of her mother.

It was a small stone church. Mary's coffin had been placed at the front, below the raised pulpit. It was covered with roses. There were no other flowers. Long before, Mary had decreed that her coffin be closed, since even in death she did not want her wrinkles to show.

The chapel was almost completely full. Even so, it was a small a.s.sembly. A few people had flown in from California. They were quiet and well-dressed, and in their manner appeared more to have been the friends of Mary's husband than herself.

The ceremony began with a song played on a beat-up piano by an old woman Martha had hired for the occasion. Mary herself had selected the song, however. It was "Hail to the Chief," and when it began, a round of quiet, nervous laughter swept the crowd.

Martha was smiling as she stepped up behind the lectern when the music stopped. "My mother was not high on ceremony," she said. "She planned this funeral to be a simple affair. She only wanted one person to speak, Elena Franklin." She glanced back at us.

The crowd shifted uneasily as Elena rose and walked to the front of the chapel. When she reached the altar, she turned slowly and lowered her hands into the pockets of her coat.

"I suppose that if I asked any one of you to describe Mary Farrell," she began, "at least part of that description would include her wit. She made it that part of her we remember most. Yet I think she knew how cynical and blind wit can be if it is not joined to other virtues."

She stopped and glanced quickly at Martha, who sat in the first row, then back up at the rest of us. "Thought is the greatest achievement of the mind, hope the greatest achievement of the heart, and goodness the greatest achievement of the will. When wit diminishes any of these, it reduces our humanity. This was sometimes the case with our friend, as it is the case, to more or less degree, with all of us. The point, however, is that Mary used her wit to reveal herself, not to conceal. She had the peace that comes from being exactly what she seemed. She accepted her limits and ignored her possibilities. Her knowledge of herself was very deep, and she possessed what Emily d.i.c.kinson called 'apocalyptic wisdom,' the sort that will not be diverted from the terrifying implications of its understanding. She had stared down into that abyss from which so many turn their eyes, and in the face of that knowledge, her wit became her means of survival. It did not relieve her of her pain, but it kept her from imposing it on us.

"It has been said that a book can never be both great and angry, and the same can be said of a life. Anyone who knew Mary knew there was anger in her. Part of it flowed from the simple fact that she was a woman who understood the peculiar contradictions of that estate. She knew that the man's world in which her life was imbedded would praise her dutifulness, then allow her only trifling duties; extol her intuitiveness, then bar her from the harder world of fact by sneering at her illogic; exalt her sense of service, then feed upon it. Particularly in her youth, Mary felt the constriction of her womanhood. But she also felt the larger human failure from which it came: the casual abandonment of that principle of moral thought which requires consistency between the admiration of a virtue and the treatment of it. And I think that she saw this as part of a larger debility: an indifference to suffering that is not your own. 'Every man is an island,' Mary used to say, laughing as she did so, 'so make sure you check for whom the bell tolls, because if you're lucky, it may not be for you.''

There was a smattering of subdued laughter, and Elena waited for it to subside. Then she continued.

"This distrust of human nature was as deep as Mary's cynicism ever went, but it was deep enough to hold her in its grasp. It drove her into a life that could only look apathetic to those who viewed it from a distance. She married, as she always said, 'quite often and quite well'; and to her oldest friends, this seemed emblematic of a larger self-indulgence. But there must be a place in the world for the unbeliever who cannot hide his unbelief or act against it, for the one who loves nature but cannot be a pantheist, who dreams of human community but cannot be a Communist, stands in awe of creation, but cannot leap from bafflement to G.o.d. Mary was one of these, and she paid the price of all those like her. She never knew the glory of fighting for a great idea, nor the pain of abandoning it. Such is the penalty of disengagement, and none greater should be asked of anyone."

Elena glanced about the chapel, then drew her hands from the pockets of her coat and grasped the sides of the lectern. "The essential quality of goodness," she said, leaning forward, "is its sense of preservation. Because of that, it must have already seemed an ancient value to the first human being who consciously possessed it. It seems to me that we must judge a life not by what it spent but by what it saved. This is no easy task. It is our duty to know as much as we can of what the mind and heart can teach us. To accomplish this, of course, we have only those powers of thought and feeling which have been given us imperfectly and which remain, as Mary surely knew, at once both crippled and supreme. I will leave the question of the goodness of Mary's life to you, and I think that you could not more honor her - and certainly not more please her - than by attempting quite seriously to answer it."

She nodded slightly to the crowd as she stepped down. Then she returned to her seat and sat silently beside me while the final stages of the funeral were concluded. And I suppose I should have known then what I only learned years later, as I sat in the darkness with Quality on my lap and the memory of Elena's remarks at Mary's funeral in my mind. I should have known that for all her outward calm as she sat beside me, her features almost melding with the frozen beauty of the New England countryside that surrounded her, I should have known that her mind was on the road again, that it had turned onto another path, one which had led her to the most difficult of our questions, the one least accessible to our methods of approach: How can our knowledge make us good? In its own way, this was the only question my sister had ever asked, and now she was asking it again, not by going forward, but by returning, first, as a human being, to the rudiments of life, and then, as a writer, to the simplest of all tasks.

TO DEFINE A WORD.

I did not see Elena for almost a month after Mary's funeral. Nor did I call her or make any attempt whatsoever to contact her. If I had learned anything at all about my sister, it was that she sometimes needed to be alone. All my life, it seemed to me, I had offered unnecessary aid. There would be no more of it.

Still, I remained keenly interested in her next step. I knew there would be one, but I had no idea what it might be.

Then one afternoon when I met Sam for a drink after my cla.s.ses at Columbia, a little light broke on the matter.

"By the way, William," Sam said, "I got a call from Elena yesterday."

"Really?"

"Have you talked to her since we got back from Maine?"

"No."

Sam looked at me suspiciously. "You two didn't have some kind of argument, did you?"

I laughed. "Not at our age, Sam. What did she want?"

"She was asking about that house of mine on the Cape," Sam said. "She said she might want to buy it." He took a sip from his drink. "Sort of surprised me, since she hasn't been up there all that much since she broke off with Jason."

"Do you want to sell it?"

"I told her I'd just let her have it for the summer, if that's what she wanted, a brief vacation out of the city."

"And what did she say?"

"She said no, that she wanted something, you know, permanent."

"You mean, leave New York?" I asked. I shook my head. "She'd never do that."

Sam smiled that old sly smile of his. "Why not, William, you are."

"What are you talking about?"

"That Harvard offer. You'll take it."

"How'd you know about that?"

"I have my sources," Sam said. He gave me a cunning wink. "You'll take it, William. I know you will. Because you can't turn it down. Not Harvard. Teaching there will finally legitimate your career, all your work."

I waved my hand dismissively. "Ridiculous."

Sam watched me knowingly. "You're still basically a little boy from Connecticut with a traveling salesman for a father and no prospects of your own," he said. In the twilight years you need a little affirmation. Harvard will give you that. It's bulls.h.i.t, but it's gold plated."

"Maybe it's not that at all, Sam," I said, weakly defending myself. "Maybe I just need a change."

Sam took another sip from his drink. "I need a change myself," he said. "I'm seventy-two, William, but I can still get it up."

"Congratulations."

"I still have some life, but I'm tired of Parna.s.sus. I'm going to turn it over to Christina." He scratched his chin. "I'm going to grow a beard, a big white one, just like Santa Claus, and then I'm going to give some things away. Like that little house of mine on Cape Cod."

"She would never take it," I told him.

"Not free, she wouldn't," Sam said. "But - how shall I put it - she'll get a bargain, you know?"

I nodded.

"You know why I'm doing this?" Sam asked. "Because you're going to Cambridge, and I will not have Elena living alone."

"Maybe that's what she wants."

"It's just a two-hour drive from Boston to Cape Cod," Sam said. "I'm sure you'll make it often, am I right?"