Elena Read online

  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 passionate about matters of trifling passion, 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 space, 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 assume so serene an attitude. 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 Dickinson, “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.”

  And Elena, on a summer day, fled into the embracing chaos of Broadway traffic.

  “I feel good about this, about the move,” she said as we drove to her new quarters.

  “It’s the best thing you could do, Elena,” I said lightly.

  “Yes, I think so, too.”

  Her spirits lifted the farther we drove away from Dr. Stein’s old building, but I could sense that much of what she had felt in that place was now permanently situated in her mind.

  After a moment she spoke again. “How’s the work on Cowper coming?”

  “Ploddingly, I’m afraid.”

  “He believed you had a great deal of promise, did you know that?”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Stein.”

  “Oh, did he really?”

  “Yes. He often mentioned it to me,” Elena said. She shook her head. “I’m going to stop talking about him.” She sounded determined.

  I smiled delicately. “Why, Elena?”

  “I think I have to,” Elena said. “Really have to.” She turned away, her hands poised above the small typewriter resting on her lap in its battered brown case. Not long ago I received a letter from the Smithsonian asking for it: “Because your sister, Elena Franklin, was an esteemed American author …” and so forth. They have it now, no doubt locked away in one of their dark vaults, so that it has its small place in the vast attic of our history.

  It must be noted now, in our own more liberal time, that in the late twenties and early thirties young single women very rarely lived alone. Instead, they tended to congregate in large boarding houses known as “clubs.” The era of the rogue female was yet to come, and even those women who preferred to have their own apartments, as I suspect Elena did, could do so only with much difficulty.

  The Three Arts Club was presided over by a formidable woman named Mrs. Frederick Markloff. It was a large brick building on upper Broadway some distance below Columbia. Once in the lobby, one had the sense of being in an entirely female world. There were about a hundred young women then living at Three Arts. They were mostly aspiring dancers, actresses, writers, and painters. In a letter to Elizabeth a few days later, Elena noted that all the women around her had glorious ambitions, and that they expected them all to be fulfilled. “It’s as if the Depression is a play they’re watching,” she wrote, “not the world they’re living in.”

  This contradiction would finally make its way into Elena’s Depression novel, Calliope. In that book, the narrator, Raymond Finch, picks up his date at a club very like Three Arts. Growing impatient as he paces in the lobby, Finch muses on the building and its inhabitants:

  It was no more than a few stories high, a stunted little building with a brick façade looking down on the bustle of upper Broadway. Every form of human delusion flourished there, flourished wildly, a hothouse plant of teeming vines. But down by the wharves where the ships were docked and the jute lay out in the rain, down there, in that Hooverville which stretched out forever along the oily Hudson, down where the wharf rats grew to abnormal size and it was famously told that in the night they sneaked into the tiny hovels of the exhausted poor and took their babies from their cardboard cradles, nothing endured but the will to put something in your mouth and chew it. Compared to that, the Pittman Club was carved out of moonbeams, and the girls giggled in a topsy-turvy world, full of crazy hope, sunk in a vast illogic, casting all their dreams upward as if to hook an anchor on a cloud.

  By the time Elena wrote that, she had experienced some of the trauma of Depression America for herself. The isolation of Three Arts was by then a part of her personal history, an early fragment from a longer tale. But in the spring of 1931
, still supported by my father’s agile maneuvers to ward off the engulfing catastrophe, she remained securely a part of a small and very privileged stratum. It was a part of her good fortune that often rose to haunt her, and she always felt vulnerable because of it. Once during an argument with Jack MacNeill, she asked him to list the elements of human experience she did not comprehend, and when he replied that she had missed only the most universal ones — hunger, cold, and homelessness — she seemed almost physically to shrink away from him, as if, against this, she could make no argument save the most blatantly defensive and absurd.

  In her biography, Martha placed much emphasis upon Elena’s life at Three Arts. She wrote that Elena “probably found her vocation there, among all those other exuberant young women, artists of one sort or another, who, simply by existing in proximity to Elena, allowed her to recover from Dr. Stein.”

  And yet, from the first moment we entered the building that afternoon in the spring of 1932, I realized that Elena would never feel altogether at home there. The circle of young women who flooded toward her, laughing lightly, joking, filling the air with their own electric ambitions, were already captured in a mood of unreserved brightness, which seemed utterly different from Elena’s mood, from the essential somberness that characterized her from this time onward.

  Still, she was smiling quite happily when she came back down the stairs after dropping her bags in her room.

  “Do you have time for a walk, William?” she asked.

  “I suppose.”

  “Let’s go down by the river, then.”

  The Hudson was ice blue that day and a small breeze blew up from it, lifting the fledgling leaves of that early spring.

  “What do you think of Three Arts?” Elena asked.

  “It seems fine. You’ll probably prefer it to living with Mrs. Connolly.”

  Elena nodded. She had drawn her hair into a bun behind her head. From a certain angle, she looked almost matronly. “How’s your job in the Village going?” she asked casually.

  “Well enough.”

  She kicked at a small stone as she walked. “I’ll be graduating soon.” She stopped and looked at me. “What then?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “Graduation is like a wall. I don’t know what’s on the other side.”

  I smiled. “The rest of your life, Elena.”

  She took my arm and tugged me forward. “That’s a bit glib, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “When Dr. Stein was alive, I could always think of working with him, doing books together, that sort of thing.”

  “And now?”

  “I feel cut off,” Elena said. She stopped and pulled me toward her. “It’s very strange, but sometimes I even resent him for dying.”

  “You need to find yourself a project,” I said, “something to keep you busy.” It was pedestrian advice, but all I had.

  “I’m busy with school, but there are times when I think I’d like to do something different … something of my own, like you have with Cowper.”

  I moved forward, nudging Elena along with me. Her mention of Cowper reminded me of all the work I had yet to do. It made me impatient with the pace, the talk, even the slowly rolling river. “Well, if there’s something you want to do, some project, you just have to roll up the old sleeves and do it, right?”

  Elena nodded quickly and released my arm. She had caught my impatience. “You’ve been taken from your work too long, William. Please, go on home now.”

  “No, Elena, I —”

  “Please, William, you go on. I’d just like a stroll. Really. You go ahead.”

  I left her there overlooking the river, standing by a small rock wall, staring out toward the Jersey shore. “One learns solitude,” Dorothea Moore says in Inwardness, “through the open field and the silent room, by knowing that sunset will not bring you home nor sunrise set you on the road again, by seeing well the finite path, by watching as your shadow is erased before a cloud.”

  When I left Elena standing by the Hudson that afternoon in the spring of 1931, I had no idea what that “something of my own” which she spoke of might be. But six months later, Scribner’s magazine published a satirical short story called “Manhattan.” Its author was Elena Mayhew Franklin.

  Other than New England Maid, of course, nothing Elena ever wrote was more strictly autobiographical. It was a breezy little story that revolved around a group of Columbia students who spend their time sitting in a speakeasy, discussing themselves and the world, all of them “very cheerful in their cheerlessness.” I am there, puffing a pipe, and my sister describes me as “very severe, though given to a grudging smile, thorough and precise. His face would not stop a clock, but it might remind you to wind one.” Harry is sitting with us, disguised as an anthropologist forever espousing “doctrines having to do with primitive populations.” For passion, Mary sits puffing her cigarette and casting barbs here and there, but most particularly at the tweed-coated anthropologist. Tom Cameron wanders in, recites a lugubrious poem, then bows his head in a seizure of romantic weeping. The entire assembly is served by an irritable young waiter, whose exaggerated solicitousness to these well-heeled undergraduates has “the precise but edgy manner of a ticking bomb.” This, of course, is Sam Waterman.

  In the 1980 interview, Elena described “Manhattan” as “perhaps not the worst thing I have ever done but certainly the silliest.” One critic in a larger study of Elena’s work called it “perfectly forgettable and not in the least representative of her later work.” For her part, Martha dismissed it as a false start and tactfully dropped the matter.

  From all of these dismissive remarks, one could never guess that the publication of “Manhattan” was an occasion of terrific joy for my sister. Certainly the modesty of the story’s achievement was entirely overshadowed by the work that was to come. And yet I remember the phone ringing in my apartment late one afternoon, and the wonderful excitement in Elena’s voice when she told me about it.

  “I’m standing at the hall phone at Three Arts, William,” she said breathlessly. “I can’t sit down.”

  “Elena, what are you talking about?”

  “I haven’t told you that I wrote a little story, have I?”

  “Story? No.”

  “Well, I did. A short story. I called it ‘Manhattan,’” Elena said frantically. “And the thing is, William, the thing is, somebody’s going to publish it.”

  I laughed. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. Scribner’s is going to publish it, William. I just sent it in to them. Sort of on a whim. And they’re going to publish it. I wrote it my first year in New York. Set it aside. Found it. Sent it in.”

  I could hardly believe it. “That’s wonderful!”

  “I feel silly being this excited.”

  “You have a perfect right to be excited,” I said. “Listen, we’re going to have to have a party. It’s mandatory on such occasions. Okay with you?”

  “Sure.”

  And so a week later, we all went to celebrate at a Village restaurant. Elena had taken the trouble to type several copies of the story, and for the first few minutes we sat reading it, chuckling delightedly to ourselves. It was as close as some of us would ever come to immortality, Characters in a Story.

  “Well, you’ve certainly got me down correctly,” Harry said after a moment. By then he had pretty much given up on Elena and had begun seeing the lovely young socialite he would later marry, but whom he had the good taste not to bring along that night. He had also grown a full mustache, which aged him ten years, frightening us all with its physical suggestion of our own middle age.

  “It’s supposed to be a satirical portrait, Harry,” Mary said, laughing. “You’re being made fun of, don’t you see that?” She glanced at Elena and smiled.

  Sam sat across from me, reading slowly, finishing after everyone else. Then he looked at Elena with a thoughtful, calculating stare. “Tell me, Elena, do you have anything
longer than this? A novel, say? Something like that?”

  “My God, Elena,” Mary howled, “I think you’ve found yourself a publisher.”

  Sam looked at Mary scornfully. “Don’t be so sure she hasn’t. My backers are lining up for the shooting match. We’re going to build this house.”

  Harry ran his index finger across his mustache. “Are you really going to start a publishing concern in these times, Sam?”

  “Yep.”

  “It seems a rather fanciful ambition.”

  “Well, personal ambition is something you silver-spoon types don’t have to worry about, right, Harry?”

  I tapped my fork on the rim of my glass. “Now, gentlemen, let’s remember this is a festive occasion.”

  Harry did not seem to hear me. “Tell me, Sam, have you joined the Communist party yet?”

  “Just edging in that direction, Harry,” Sam said. “Sort of the left-wing version of the old school tie.”

  “And your backers — are they equally committed to the overthrow of capitalism?”

  “They’re split on that question,” Sam said, turning his eyes wearily toward Elena.

  “Split?” Harry said. “Well, shouldn’t you apply the thumbscrew of democratic centralism?”

  Sam looked back at Harry. “How do you know all that jargon, Harry? Are you a government agent? Do you run off to the local fascist headquarters and report our conversations?”

  “One must know one’s antagonist, right?” Harry said, arching one eyebrow.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what, Harry,” Sam said. “When I join the Communist party, I’ll let you know, okay?”

  Sam did join the Communist party, very quietly, the following December. He sent a Christmas card to Harry with a hammer and sickle emblazoned on the front. They never spoke warmly to each other again.