Elena Page 9

  I left for New York in September of 1924. Elena waited for the train with me.

  “You’re doing the right thing, William,” she said.

  The whistle of the incoming train blew loudly some distance away. “It’s funny, I’ve been looking forward to this for I don’t know how long,” I said, “but now, now that the time has come … well, I’m frightened, Elena.”

  Elena squeezed my arm. “You’re going to do just fine. That’s what Father says.”

  “He does?”

  “That’s what he told me. He said, ‘Billy’ll do just fine.’”

  I know now that he’d said no such thing. Elena had made it up.

  “I’ll do my best,” I told her.

  The train pulled in a few seconds later, part of the old New Haven line, a real wheezer. I hoisted myself onto the first step, then turned to Elena.

  “Well, any last words?”

  She smiled, but very delicately, and her eyes seemed to look directly into the center of everything I feared and wanted, everything that had been denied and that now offered itself as a promise.

  “Whatever you do, William,” she said, “stay away from large black traveling cases.”

  I knew it then, and I’ve never entirely forgotten it. I looked down at her, at the sober care in her face, and I knew that that strange boy I had dreamed of for so long, the one who would know me well and love me for myself alone, was my sister.

  In the photograph there are five of us. We are posing with mock seriousness before the doors of St. Paul’s Chapel. In the background, down a slight incline, a few anonymous students can be seen strolling Columbia Walk. We had just come from some sort of senior gathering at Earl Hall. There had been quite a few of us milling about that august parlor, and a platoon of professors’ wives had diligently served us hot tea in small bone-white cups. I remember that it was a formal occasion and that the women were dressed in their best Episcopalian attire. It was 1928. Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed a full six months before, but I heard their names mentioned more than once that afternoon, mostly by a knot of earnest young radicals who positioned themselves in one corner of the hall and eyed the rest of us with unmistakable contempt.

  Still, despite the sober clothes, the china cups, and the aura of disgruntled politics, the afternoon had been a rather light affair. There was a good deal of talk about O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. It had opened in January of that year, the curtain rising at 5:30, then coming down for dinner at 7:00, then rising again to a full-bellied audience at 8:20. Everyone wondered how Lynn Fontanne did it and whether the spiritual message was worth the physical ordeal.

  After an hour or two, the gathering was over and most of the students began to filter out of Earl Hall. I wandered out with the people who had become my closest friends during the last four years.

  And so there are five of us in the photograph. We do not look very formal. There is an impishness in our eyes, a casualness in our stance, an attitude of gentle mockery. We look as idle youth has always looked, hopelessly adrift, careless of ideas, cheerfully ignorant of the fate that will overwhelm us.

  Harry Morton looks the least frivolous. He is standing at the far left, back straight, eyes aimed directly ahead, his shirt collar buttoned primly at his throat. Sam Waterman is next, leaning his crooked elbow on Harry’s shoulder, a briefcase dangling from his other hand. Tom Cameron stands beside him, one hand curling around the lapel of his blazer, the other pressed deep into the pocket of his Oxford pants. Mary Longford has her arm in Tom’s. She is wearing a long dark dress and cloche hat. I am standing next to her at the far right of the photograph. The picture was taken by a Columbia grounds keeper, who tried very hard not to shake the camera. Harry rewarded him with a ten-cent piece of pure gold.

  It is odd now to think of it, but at the time I did not feel in the least privileged. If anything, I felt like an intruder in the temple, a peddler’s son from rural Connecticut who had bluffed his way into an elite institution. For the first year, I had the uneasiness of the impostor. I half expected to get a letter from the administrators informing me that my acceptance at Columbia had been the result of a clerical error and that arrangements had been made for me to continue my education at some other institution more suitable to my gifts, a cow college in California, perhaps. The letter never came, of course, and as the months passed I began to relax. Still, the sense of inferiority remained, one of the more subtle injuries of my class background. I overcompensated by working furiously at my studies. “You worked at learning like a sweaty shipping clerk who dreams of owning his own line,” Sam Waterman once told me. He was right. I dreamed of excelling in everything, of besting all the rich boys who had come to Columbia with their pockets full of their fathers’ money. And yet at the same time, I felt that no matter what I did, I would always be beneath them, always lack what had come to them unasked for and undeserved. “You always wanted to have been born to some thing, William,” Elena said one evening in 1936. “You could never be proud of making it on your own. You always thought there was something grubby about that. You inverted the American dream.”

  Certainly in those early years, I did precisely that. Consequently, when Harry Morton, the scion of an old moneyed family if there ever was one, approached me after an English class and complimented me on some now-forgotten remark I had made about Edmund Spenser, I fairly swooned with joy.

  Harry Morton was the first friend I made at Columbia. He was a tall young man, very erect in stature. His face was angular, with strong, resolute features. He looked as though he had been carved from Puritan stone. “I would have gone to Harvard,” he told me not long after we met, “but my family broke with that institution over some theological matter in 1804.” He was careful in his speech, a stickler for gram mar. His dress was equally proper. “He knows what an aristocrat should look like,” Sam Waterman once said, “and so he makes it his business to look like one.”

  But that was not the whole of it. For academically ambitious though I was, and very insecure, I was not a fool. And if Harry Morton had been nothing more than some witless dandy out of a Ronald Firbank novel, I would have had no use for him. But there was a good deal more to Harry than his exaggerated courtliness. There was a grace and selflessness that money alone could not buy. Elena once said that he lived within the comfort of a few great ideas, and I think that this was true. He was the kind of doleful Platonist who believes that ideas are far too noble to win the day with man. In this, he was hopelessly old-fashioned, and I suppose that his characteristic abstraction, his wealth, and his basic gentleness and charity would be perceived in certain quarters and with a certain justification as a vacuous paternalism. It would be very easy to see Harry’s dropping that gold dime into the grounds keeper’s hand as a monstrous gesture, utterly blind to the social relationship that produced it. This is how Sam Waterman saw it, and he told the story more than once during his brief flirtation with communism in the thirties. He always ended it with the same aphorism. I heard it first at a rally for the unemployed at Sheridan Square in 1932. Sam was standing at the top of the pedestal, practically swinging from the good general’s stone sword: “And so, gentlemen, don’t listen to those damned apologists who tell you that capitalism makes charity possible. Just remember, it also makes it necessary.”

  Of course, Sam did not see Harry Morton in the Burmese jungles ten years later, when he gave his small rations to the weakest men under his command after their plane had gone down miles from where Stilwell’s troops were hacking out the Ledo Road. He did not see him stagger forward hour after hour, refusing to let his men give up, walking point himself, dropping only after he could hear the hatchets of Stilwell’s coolies in the distance and knew that his men were safe.

  That I met other people during my early years in New York is largely due to the dinners Harry gave from time to time and to which he invited a small number of acquaintances. The Morton family had owned a brownstone in Greenwich Village for years, and after Mr. Morton retired
and moved back to Massachusetts, he turned it over to Harry, along with two steadfast servants and an Irish setter of extremely limited intelligence.

  Harry lived as I might have imagined, in quietly elegant rooms, which he thought rather modest compared to the palatial Massachusetts estate. Sam said that you could live forever in that Village brown-stone and never smell the anthracite or see the gutted earth or feel the heat of the Bessemer furnaces that had made it possible. And of course, he was right.

  A paunchy man opened the door at Harry’s brownstone on that night in October. I gave my name, and he escorted me into a large living room, where Harry and a few others were already sitting around an enormous marble hearth.

  That evening I met two of the other people who were to pose with me in the photograph the grounds keeper took almost four years later. Tom Cameron was sitting across from Harry in an identical leather chair. They both stood up when I was brought into the room. Harry made the introductions. Then we all took our seats.

  “Tom wants to be a poet,” Harry said, and let the matter drop.

  And yet, that word, “poet,” was so powerful to me at the time that it seemed to alter the very atmosphere surrounding a person. In the present era, when the most vacuous expressions are said to be poetic, the word has lost its fullness, its sense of arcane and special understanding, the awe that inevitably surrounds a work of supreme and private force.

  Tom came from the latest generation of a long line of well-heeled New York merchants. Like Harry Morton, he had gone to the best schools. Unlike Harry, he had applied to Harvard but had been rejected on the basis, as he always liked to say, of ideological incompatibility. He drank a bit too much, part of the signature of the time, the image of the world-weary alcoholic being for the twenties what the depressed suburbanite was for a later generation. Predictably, he also pretended to be able to play the violin, though he remained at best a mildly proficient amateur. His hero was Christopher Marlowe. “He would like to have been Faustus,” Mary once said, “but learning never meant that much to him, although he might have sold his soul for a good review.”

  Unlike many aspiring poets of his time, “people who say nothing in verse better than they say nothing in prose,” as Mary called them, Tom was a very hard worker. Or at least he gave that appearance, diligently writing through the night, his wastebasket filled with reams of discarded poetry. In the morning, he would emerge looking weary and bedraggled, as if his muse were a wrestler. Mary, of course, saw all of this as an intolerable affectation. “Tom has a gift for the expected appurtenance,” she said. “It’s the substance that gives him trouble.”

  No doubt Tom did have his affectations. He would often allow his eyes to wander soulfully during a conversation, as if he were deep in concentration. At other times, he assumed a rather stooped posture, as if the world’s weight were entirely upon his shoulders. Once Sam remarked that he would have made a good actor. Mary replied that he already was one.

  I saw Tom for the last time in 1948. By then he had been published enough by small presses or in obscure poetry journals to have gained a coterie of admirers. I had heard that he had gone to California with a group of such people to found some sort of poetry collective.

  And so I was a bit surprised when I caught a glimpse of him striding across Washington Square late one August afternoon when the fountain was in full glory. He was in his middle forties, and his belly drooped over his wrinkled khaki pants, but it was unmistakably Tom. I followed him for a time, somewhat cautious about calling out to him. So much time had passed; I was not sure how he would receive me. So I simply trailed behind him, until he ambled over to Eighth Street, turned right, and walked into a small tavern. It was the sort that had a sawdust floor and rickety tables. There were pictures of deceased writers hanging all about, a rather ecumenical group, stretching from Jane Austen to James Joyce. Tom seemed very much at home. He smiled and shook hands with the young people who gathered around him, probably undergraduates from nearby NYU. He was wearing a T-shirt and a corduroy vest, upon which he had pinned a “Henry Wallace for President” button.

  After a few introductory remarks, Tom began to read his verses. They sounded almost identical to those he had written while still an undergraduate at Columbia. They were in the same singsong, Burnsian style, far too musical for the current taste, which preferred the starkness of Eliot, the murkiness of Jeffers, the vast complexity of Pound.

  I remember feeling that I should perhaps go over and say hello to Tom. There was a great deal of news about our old comrades: Harry had died on the Ledo Road; Sam was now richer than all his tribe, Mary was going through husbands like canapés; and Elena was working on her third book. There was news to report, certainly, but it struck me that Tom might not want to hear it. He had constructed his own world, and it was very frail, based upon the uncritical appreciation that only his new friends could genuinely offer. And here I was, the somber Iceman standing by the door, full of tidings that, at this point in his life, could only strike Tom as vaguely noisome. And so I simply slunk out the door, leaving him comfortably within the atmosphere his battered but resourceful vanity had created to hold the line against defeat.

  Mary Longford sat on one of those outsize floral sofas so fashionable at the time but which now appear to resemble nothing so much as the living room version of an aircraft carrier. She was wearing a long black dress. Her hair was short, but not bobbed, and she was puffing a cigarette entirely without the sense of barely concealed furtiveness with which women often smoked in those days.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said after Harry had introduced her to me. There was something far too chilly in her manner to generate any real attraction, even though she was a relatively pretty woman. Sam once referred to her as “a rather handsome man,” but the masculine quality we sensed in her was probably related to our own idea of what masculinity meant: strength, determination, the capacity to hold forceful opinions and express them unhesitatingly. Mary certainly possessed all these qualities, but she added to them the most firmly antiromantic turn of mind I had ever encountered. She believed that all things turned sour in their time, that the world was a web of self-deception, that virtue was not only fleeting but barely present to begin with. Her favorite author, predictably, was La Rochefoucauld, and I think that she admired him for the sardonic intelligence that she herself possessed, an unflinching belief in widespread human de linquency. And although this attitude was in vogue at the time, Mary probably would have possessed it just as forcefully in Ionia or Rome. Predictably, she often appeared insufferably smug. “You could destroy a world with your attitude, Mary,” Sam once said angrily, “but you couldn’t build a goddamn outhouse with it.” To which Mary replied: “In that case, Sam, I’ll leave the goddamn outhouses to you.”

  By the time I met her, Mary had already hardened into a devout suspiciousness toward almost everything, an attitude basic to what she eventually became — a drifter through countless lives, who never made a real life of her own.

  In 1968 she returned to New York with the body of her last husband, Martin Farrell, a cardiologist. We were all standing outside St. Patrick’s, Mary wrapped in one of her full-length furs, the collar turned up against the blustery wind that was sweeping down Fifth Avenue that day. Her daughter, Martha, was standing beside her, the very image of sixties’ chic, dressed in a long black coat with brass buttons and epaulettes which looked as if it might have been designed by a Marxist Coco Chanel. Elena urged them both to stay at her apartment rather than return immediately to California. Mary was adamant, however. She insisted upon going back to the West Coast that night. And so a few hours later, Elena and I watched mother and daughter trudge down the ramp at La Guardia, Mary dragging Martha behind her, slinging quips and insults, the two of them returning to a Berkeley that was practically in flames. I never saw Mary again.

  So there were four of us that night in Harry Morton’s brownstone. But in the photograph at St. Paul’s Chapel, there are five.

 
; Sam Waterman had not been invited, though Harry knew him well. Sam always believed that Harry was anti-Semitic, a Brahmin who saw Jews as grubby peddlers, even when they peddled art. Elena thought differently. “It was a conflict in styles between those two,” she once told me. “Harry just couldn’t abide Sam’s general sloppiness, his huggability, that frenetic pace.” For Elena, that was a kind way of saying that Harry thought Sam vulgar, which he undoubtedly did. “You simply can’t imagine Waterman sitting down and reading a poem,” Harry told me, “unless somewhere in the background a phone is ringing off the hook.”

  True enough, and all of us marveled at Sam’s incredible energy, at the almost destroying force with which he went at everything. “The only way to get a better literature,” he said in 1926, “is to find someone to publish a better literature.” And with that he set about becoming a publisher himself, a feat he accomplished only four years later.

  He dedicated his publishing house to what he called “the modern novel,” a phrase that was already out of date, and then began issuing works that he thought experimental but that were for the most part little more than pale imitations of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whose works themselves already looked rather conservative compared to the wild innovations of Faulkner and Joyce.

  Elena once introduced Sam to a distinguished gathering as “the only successful publisher in America who has never read a book.” Sam grinned impishly at that, knowing that it was true, but also confident that no one would believe it.