Elena Page 12

  Harry shook his head disapprovingly. “So passé. The Algonquin is all tourists now,” Harry said to Elena. “Everyone coming in from Indiana to see where Dorothy Parker sat. The literary wits aren’t there anymore, Mary.”

  “Well, at least it has the memory of wit,” Mary said testily. “Not like this place — palm fronds and curtains. It looks like a mortuary.”

  Elena smiled thinly.

  “Where is everyone?” Harry asked Mary.

  “Sam can’t make it,” she said crisply. “He’s got some kind of meeting with backers for that publishing company scheme of his.”

  Harry sighed. “What an absurd idea,” he said. “Poor Sam presumes that the literacy rate in this country is increasing.” He smiled at Elena. “That’s the first of his many mistakes, I fear.”

  We were still standing by the table, the waiters edging around us laden with enormous silver trays.

  “Mary, I’d like you to meet William’s sister, Elena,” Harry said at last.

  “Oh, I know who she is,” Mary said. She forced herself to smile.

  “Welcome to New York.” She stared impatiently at the three of us. “Well, don’t just stand there, for God’s sake. Please, sit, sit, sit.”

  When we had all taken our seats, Mary turned to Harry. “Tom can’t make it either,” she said. “Working on one of his great poetry projects.” She looked at Elena. “Has William told you about Tom?”

  “Very little,” Elena said.

  “Fancies himself a poet,” Mary said. “Of course, the stuff he writes, a seed catalogue wouldn’t publish.”

  “I wouldn’t be so harsh,” Harry said mildly.

  Mary’s eyes widened. “You wouldn’t? Why not?”

  “Well, he’s just beginning. He has a lot to learn.”

  Mary turned to Elena. “He doesn’t hang around with the rest of us much anymore. That’s romantic, don’t you think? The lone poet, tormented in his isolation but learning the dark path of inner vision.” She laughed. “I don’t suppose you have such grand ideas, Elena?”

  Elena shook her head. “I don’t suppose so.”

  “Good,” Mary said. “With a little luck, you may never be a fool.” She took a long draw on her cigarette. “I’d like to get fried in the hat tonight.”

  “Mary, please,” Harry said.

  Mary glared at the little teacup that rested by her ashtray. “The hooch hounds are ruining the world,” she muttered. She crushed her cigarette into the ashtray and promptly lit another.

  “William tells me that you’re going to study literature at Barnard,” Harry said gently to Elena.

  “Yes,” Elena said. She continued to watch Mary warily, as if she thought Mary’s frenetic display was little more than a parody of the Modern City Woman.

  “I’m just drifting, myself,” Mary said. “No graduate school for me. I’ll leave that for William. No family business to take over, like Harry.” She smiled. “No, I’m just a woman on the prowl.”

  We ordered dinner a few minutes later. Elena ordered trout amandine because, I suppose, it was the only familiar thing on the menu.

  “I’m sure you’ll do fine at Barnard,” Harry told her. “Of course, with William at Columbia, you’ll have a little help available.”

  “Is that why you came here, Elena,” Mary asked, “for William’s help?”

  Elena looked pointedly at Mary. “No, it isn’t,” she said. “I came to New York when I was a little girl. I always wanted to come back.”

  Harry stroked his chin and nodded sagely. “You seem to have a serious nature, Elena.”

  Mary laughed dismissively. “Serious! What is seriousness, anyway?”

  It appeared for a moment that Elena might actually try to answer Mary’s question: her lips parted briefly, then closed again.

  “Tom, for example,” Mary went on, “thinks of himself as a serious poet. But he is living in a mist. He’s never really faced himself. He thinks he’s a tragic figure, but actually he’s just a pathetic one.”

  “Please, Mary,” Harry said, “could we talk about something else? Elena doesn’t even know Tom.”

  “Oh, sorry. Yes, you’re right. Sorry, Elena. It’s very rude.”

  Elena smiled politely. “Not really. I’m very interested.”

  In my memory I can see her clearly at that moment in her life, suddenly surrounded by a group of young moderns who know so little of the world they think they know it all, a tiny circle of poseurs, harmless and ineffectual as we surely were, slightly snide but basically generous, the sort who could with a nudge in one direction or the other either enrich the world a bit or draw it more deeply into poverty.

  “Interesting? Is that what you’re finding all this?” Mary asked with a grin.

  Elena nodded. “I really am. I’m like the country mouse in the story.”

  “But that was the wise one, wasn’t it?” Mary asked. She smiled, then looked at me knowingly. “Your sister’s all right, William.” She glanced back at Elena. “Quite all right, I think.” She took out another cigarette and lit it. “So you’ve come to New York to experience things, is that right, Elena?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  Mary nodded. “Well, would you like to begin this very night?”

  Harry leaned forward. “What are you talking about, Mary?”

  “I’m proposing, my dear Harry, that we all go have a drink to celebrate Elena’s arrival in New York.”

  Harry eyed her in disbelief. “I’m not sure it’s the best way for Elena to spend her first night in the city.”

  “Oh, stop being so pompous, Harry,” Mary said. She looked at me. “Have you ever noticed the way Harry pours cold water on everything? My God, the minute Harry shows up the whole damn world turns gray. Even Tom, the wild poet, even he gets stuffy around Harry.” She frowned impatiently. “Haven’t you ever noticed the way we act? Like a bunch of elderly ladies having tea in Cornwall.” She looked determinedly at Elena. “I’m off for a drink, Elena, and I would love your company.”

  “Sit down, Mary,” Harry said firmly.

  Mary continued to watch Elena. “Stuff it, Harry.”

  Elena got to her feet. “I’d like to see a speakeasy.”

  “Perhaps we’d better go with them,” I said to Harry.

  “Absolutely,” Harry said. He glared at Mary. “I presume you have time to permit me to get the check?”

  Mary laughed. “Harry loves to get the check. Do you know why? He doesn’t want all his friends grappling for it over the table like a gang of hairy Goths.”

  Harry paid the check and we walked out to find a cab. On the way downtown, Mary suggested we sing together and was good enough to wave her finger back and forth, counting out the rhythm, as if she were directing a disorganized choir through a classical arrangement. Her voice often rose painfully above the others, then broke up in laughter. In a letter fired off to me from the seclusion of her old age, she described herself as “a gray old thing with rouged cheeks and puffy eyes and ostrich legs who sits in the park, barely moving, a vulgar piece of sculpture called Decrepitude.” But I have her finger waving in the air that night in 1928, and the sound of her voice belting random lyrics from The Pirates of Penzance.

  The speakeasy was very much like the one painted by Ben Shahn. It had a short bar with a brass rail along the bottom. There were a few wooden tables with unmatching but comfortable chairs. There was no music, not so much as a lone saxophone player, but couples swayed slowly before the radio that rested on the corner of the bar. It was smoky, and the conversation tended to be rather hushed, al though the crowd was young and spiffily dressed.

  “What’ll you have?” The bartender did not bother to come to the table but simply called to us from behind the bar.

  “Gin and tonic for me,” Mary said immediately.

  I ordered a Scotch and Harry ordered a brandy. Then he turned to Elena. “And the young lady will have a White Rock, please.”

  “White Rock?” Mary said loudly. “She won’
t have a White Rock, Harry. She’ll have a drink like the rest of us.”

  Harry glared resentfully at Mary. “Perhaps Elena would not like to get — as you put it, Mary — ‘fried in the hat’ on her first night in the city.”

  “Well, why not let her decide,” Mary said hotly.

  All eyes turned to my sister.

  She smiled. “Do they have sherry?”

  “Of course,” Harry said.

  “Then I will have a sherry,” Elena said. Then she looked at the bartender. “A sherry, please.”

  “I’ve never understood the appeal of these places,” Harry said, glancing about. A couple was now dancing slowly a few feet from the radio. “Quite an interesting experience for you, I suppose,” he said to Elena.

  Elena nodded but she did not look at him. She was watching the couple at the bar, the boredom of their embrace.

  “Perhaps you’d like to dance, Elena,” Harry said.

  Elena shook her head. “I don’t dance very well.”

  It was news to me, of course, that she danced at all.

  “Neither do I,” Harry said, “but we could give it a try.”

  “Go ahead, Elena,” Mary said. “I’ve never seen Harry dance, or do anything heedless.”

  Harry laughed and stretched out his hand. “Shall we?”

  Elena took his hand and followed him to the small makeshift dance floor. I took a sip of my drink and watched them out of the corner of my eye.

  “She’s really quite an interesting girl, William,” Mary said. “How well do you know her?”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “You might be surprised how little that tells me,” Mary said. “I have four brothers, all of them idiots.” She looked at me intently. “None of them know the foggiest thing about me.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “Well, what is it you want to know about Elena?”

  Mary shook her head. “Nothing specific. But let me tell you some thing. I’ve caught on to this already. Your sister sees through us, William, sees right through us like we were made of glass.”

  I laughed. “How do you know that?”

  “When Harry asked her to dance, did you see her face, just that quick little shadow that passed over her face?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You have a brother’s blindness, my dear.”

  “What shadow are you talking about?”

  “The one that told me quite plainly, William, that she was going to dance with Harry because she felt sorry for him.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Mary,” I said. “Harry’s wealthy, and almost debonair. He might even be able to sweep Elena off her feet.”

  I glanced back toward the front of the room. The melody on the radio was drawing to a close, and as it did, Harry said something to Elena, and she tossed her head backward, her hair turning almost black beneath the light.

  In Elena’s story “Manhattan,” a dour young man tritely muses that every individual should have one delightful year. I am relatively sure that Elena did have hers, and that it took place during the time between her arrival in New York and the beginning of her brief but profoundly important relationship with Dr. Stein.

  Since I was very busy in my first year of graduate school at that time, I saw relatively little of my sister. But not long after her death, I found a kind of diary she kept of that first year in the city. It was entitled “What I Saw,” and it is the only available record of her life during the period that Martha, at least, thought so important — “the critical plunge,” as she called it, “into the literary and geo graphical landscape that would hold her all her life.”

  The problem with the observations in “What I Saw,” however, is that they are not very critical. Martha herself pronounced the journal trivial and used it very little in her own book. But for me it is evidence of my sister’s happiness at this time in her life, and given the rather somber tones that shaded most of what came after, it seems important to relate its spirit, if not its details.

  In part, “What I Saw” is the description of Elena’s early friendship with Mary Longford. Time after time they meet at Hewett Hall, the tall pink-brick dormitory where Elena lived during her first year at Barnard. From that central point, they move in all directions around the campus, Mary smoking everywhere, even in the old Milbank buildings, as Elena reports, the only place on campus where it was forbidden.

  They attend various political rallies, and in the fall of 1928, with the presidential election in full swing, there were plenty of them: “Mary and I went to meetings of the Democratic, Republican and Socialist clubs,” Elena writes in her journal, “and Mary was equally offended by them all.” The campus was covered with banners and posters: “At noon in the Jungle, stump speakers come from everywhere and hold forth about everything from Coolidge to Kropotkin.” In November, as the election drew near, the women of Barnard staged a huge parade in which various political factions participated: “It was like a sort of toast to the madness and energy of it all,” Elena writes, “with everybody laughing and cheering and singing disrespectful songs. Two girls even dressed themselves up as a donkey and wandered the campus braying at the top of their voices.”

  After the election, political life on campus subsided, and Elena’s journal turns to other aspects of her life on Morningside Heights. She writes of her daily routine, of trudging up to the laundry on the top floor of Hewett Hall, of entertaining a male or two in those rooms especially provided for that purpose: “I talked to Harry for a while in one of the manholes on the first floor. He said he thought the ten-dollar-a-pointtuition at Barnard was absurdly high. He kept going on about it, figuring up the cost of a twenty-eight-point major with fourteen points in three other areas, which the college requires. When he got the grand total, he shook his head over it and talked as if it were an impossible amount of money. He’s always going on about the HCL, as if he could be affected by it.”

  In December Elena decides to investigate campus clubs. She attends meetings of the Botanical Club, the Wigs and Cues, the Politics Club, and even the Deutscher Kreis, but she does not join any of them, although she does audition for the Glee Club, which rejects her: “They were very nice in the way they told me that I sounded rather like the banging of a pan.”

  But Elena also leaves the campus quite often, wandering the city with Mary. They take a bus down Fifth Avenue from Central Park to Washington Square, riding on the top of a double-decker. “For this one experience,” Elena writes, “I am eternally grateful to the Fifth Avenue Coach Company.”

  For New Year’s Eve, 1928, Elena records the frenzy of Times Square:

  We all went in Harry’s car and sat in it passing the flask while the pandemonium continued outside. The revelers were everywhere, and even the mounted police were full of spirit. One of them took a swig from a bottle of bonded that someone from the crowd had handed him, laughed, and passed it back. Harry predicted that 1929 would be a good year, “businesswise,” as he always says. Mary made a New Year’s resolution that if she weren’t married within twelve months, she’d hire herself out to Texas Guinan down in the Village and specialize in men “with a college-girl fetish.” William looked rather out of sorts, forever mumbling about his Cowper paper, about how much trouble he was having with it. Tom commiserated with him, said he’d like to write a poem about Times Square on New Year’s Eve, but since language has structure, it can’t portray chaos. Later that night, in a speakeasy downtown, Harry gave the waiter a huge tip. I told him that in light of his conservative politics, such behavior could be called “noblesse oblique,” and Mary laughed and leaned over to me and whispered, “You know, Elena, my dear, you’re almost smart enough to be a man.”

  The winter months that follow constrict Elena’s movements, and her response is to sink deeply into her studies. She records classes in Roman history, organic chemistry, and eighteenth-century literature. As often as possible, she rejected the so-called instrument courses, hygiene and physical education, in favor of classes in hi
story and literature. She makes reference to the authors she is reading — Austen, the Brontës, Scott, Tennyson. “I am more excited than ever about literature,” she writes, “and Mary thinks this preoccupation unnatural. Yesterday she said that she spotted me trotting down Columbia Walk toward the library, and that I looked like a Hottentot heading for a wadi.”

  It is at this time that she becomes somewhat more aggressive in the classroom: “Dr. H. treated my statement on Emma with what seemed to me pure condescension. He kept nodding and muttering, ‘Interesting, Miss Franklin, yes, yes, interesting,’ but it was clear that he thought me more or less unworthy of his time. He is a Columbia professor, and Ann Dodd told me that they don’t like teaching the girls at Barnard, that they consider Barnard a weak stepchild of the great Columbia, a ‘little girls’ school,’ nothing more.” Tension builds between Elena and Dr. H. until, in March, there is a confrontation: “I finally stood up and told Dr. H. that I wished to be excused from his class. He seemed a bit nonplused but still tried to keep the upper hand, telling me that although my contributions would be greatly missed he nonetheless expected to be able to conduct his class without them.”

  But there were victories as well. Later that same month, Elena wrote: “Professor B. asked me to stay after class and talked for a while about my paper on Walter Scott. He said another professor was working in Scottish mythology and might be interested in taking on a student assistant. He asked if he might show the paper to this professor, and I said yes.”

  I actually saw Elena in class only once during that year. I was on my way to one of my own professor’s offices, when I glanced into one of the classrooms and saw her sitting quietly in her seat, her eyes fixed on the instructor, her hand tightly gripping a pencil poised above her note pad. Frozen by the artist’s brush, that scene might have been a painting entitled Young Scholar. For all the elements were there: the open, receptive expression on her face, the pencil held in suspension like a conductor’s baton at that instant before the symphony begins, the sense of thoughtfulness that should precede, I think, the ultimate devotion.

  In late April, a dazzling spring swept over New York, and Elena’s journal records scores of long walks through the city: “I told Mary that when winter finally ends it seems that New York must be discovered all over again.” For sheer entertainment, she joins Mary in a tour of Columbus Circle: “It was a fool’s paradise, in a way. Countless people were milling about, listening to the soapbox orators who gather on the Circle. You could get just about any idea you wanted — socialism, anarchism, any form of religion — everything was there. I mentioned a quotation from Samuel Johnson to Mary, the one in which he said that the library was the depository of all the great variety of human hope, and I said that Columbus Circle with all these speakers was like that.”