Elena (12 page)

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.

In her essay on Sinclair Lewis's most famous novel, Elena wrote: “For all his bourgeois shallowness, Babbitt never says that his wealth is the rightful product of his virtue or, conversely, that he wishes to be rich in order to be good. In this, there is at least a denial of that cant which propped up an older world, and perhaps even, for better or worse, a slight innovation in the moral philosophy of the West.” In a sense, I think, Elena was also talking about Sam Waterman, his openness and lack of pretense. For her, Sam was always the member of a class that began and ended with himself. “He was like the medieval definition of God,” she wrote in her obituary of him, “pure act.” It was his energy she loved, his ceaseless activity, his yearning for achievement, all of which flowed, as she said, “not from his thought but from his central nervous system.”

Sam retired in 1971, turning over his publishing house to Christina. During the next two years, she made editorial decisions that so in flamed him that he tried to regain control of the house. A court battle ensued, one so vitriolic that even the tabloid press began to follow it. Then suddenly, in the midst of the fray, Sam died. Had Mary been alive, she would no doubt have attributed the cause of death to excessive litigation.

In her remembrance of Sam Waterman, which appeared in the
Saturday Review
, Elena wrote: “Sam Waterman died of retirement, of too many strolls in the afternoon, too many aimless games of chess in the park, of too much idle chatter, too many dead companions. He died of forgone power and wasted zeal, of a lethargy of bone and eye and muscle, of feeling dead before one dies, worthless after a history of worth.”

But in the photograph he is still alive, along with the rest of us. It is 1928, and Elena has not yet come to New York. But the web is nonetheless in place, the system of connections that makes so much of life hinge on mere fortuity. Sam Waterman, desperate for his new publishing house to publish something, will read the manuscript of
New England Maid
and decide to issue it as his premier volume. Mary's daughter, Martha, will write the first biography of my sister. Elena will fully cooperate in the writing of it, because of what Martha's mother meant to her. These are the bonds by which ability becomes achievement, and they are, as Elena called them, “ambrosia to the fortunate, but to the luckless, bitter herbs.” Certainly no one has ever argued that they are fair, only that they powerfully exist.

E
lena spoke only once of the four years she lived alone with my mother in Standhope while I lived at Columbia. We were walking on the beach near her home in Brewster, on Cape Cod. She was using a cane by then, though only for occasional support, and she had wrapped a long gray shawl around her shoulders. I remember thinking how beautiful she remained, even though her body was growing lean and frail, the understudy of a ghost.

I had driven down to the Cape from Cambridge, where I had been living for the last few years. She had written me a month before, telling me that she intended to reside on Cape Cod “from now on” and that she would not be returning to New York. My grandson, David, had helped her with the arrangements. She had gotten rid of everything she owned other than a few books, her letters, and her phonograph and record collection.

I arrived at Elena's house in the middle of the morning and found her sitting alone on her glass-enclosed side porch, the shawl wrapped around her, a vision of Dickensian gravity, with the gray sea behind her and the white light of the morning sun slanting across the wooden floor in front.