Elena (42 page)

“We've not really done much to settle in, yet,” Howard explained. He glanced down the hallway to the left. “Elizabeth, come out. William and Elena are here.”

I could see her coming toward us through the dark hallway. She was dressed in a gray artist's smock, and she looked generally disheveled and somewhat overweight. And yet her face was still quite lovely, though now it possessed only the kind of beauty that Swinburne gave to Faustine, the sort that in hell would be called human.

Elena rushed over to her and drew her into her arms.

“I was so worried about you, Elizabeth,” she said. “We didn't know what had happened to you.”

Elizabeth nodded. Her skin had a bluish pallor and her eyes were watery. At first I thought she might have had a bout of seasickness on the voyage over, but there was something almost broken in her manner, a distance and withdrawal. As Elena would later describe it to Jason, it was “the look of someone whose soul had drowned.”

“I meant to call you before this,” Elizabeth said weakly, “but I've been ill.”

Elena gathered around her friend like a winter blanket and urged her gently toward the sofa, then eased her down onto it.

“It wasn't good over there, Elena,” Elizabeth said. “It wasn't good at all.”

“She means her painting,” Howard said quickly. He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and crushed it into the glass ashtray in his other hand. “She had an exhibition, you know. At a little gallery in Montmartre.” He looked at me. “It didn't go very well. It was really quite depressing for Elizabeth.” He shrugged. “The reviews, you know. Very unfortunate.”

Elena nestled in closely to Elizabeth and draped one of her arms lightly over her shoulder. “Don't worry about that sort of thing, Elizabeth.” She offered a smile. “You're back in New York now. That's all that matters.”

Elizabeth nodded tentatively, then stared down at her hands. They were trembling slightly.

“Actually, I'd like to see some of your work, Elizabeth,” I said.

She looked up at me languidly, as if she were drugged. “See them? Why?”

“Because they're yours,” I told her.

“Yes, good idea,” Howard said. He walked over to a stack of paintings leaning against the far wall and began unwrapping them. Elizabeth looked on indifferently.

Howard quickly unveiled several canvases. Elena and I watched as he lifted one after another toward the light. Some were winter scenes. Some were of Paris street life. I recognized one as the gardens of Versailles. All the pictures appeared terribly gray and dreary, as if painted through filmy glass. The faces of the people suggested a kind of stricken panic, rather like those of Edvard Munch, their eyes crazed and sunken, their mouths open in gasps or screams or closed tight in mute horror. Had they been painted by anyone else, I would have dismissed them as too overtly advertising a fashionable despair — the grays too tedious, the black pure melodrama. But they were Elizabeth's, and because of that I marveled at their strangeness, as I'm sure Elena did. For after Howard had finished she turned to Elizabeth and asked her a series of routine questions about color and composition, avoiding the subject of her paintings' leaden mood.

Elizabeth answered quietly but with a shrug, as if her words were no more than table scraps thrown on some alley garbage heap.

“I'm not a painter,” she said finally, dismissing any further discussion of her work, her voice rising once again with that older energy she had once possessed in Standhope. It was the last time either Elena or I would hear it.

“Actually,” Elena said after a moment, “I was hoping to pry you away from Howard for a while so that just the two of us could spend some time together.”

Elizabeth stared down at her hands again and said nothing.

“Not a bad idea, Elizabeth,” Howard said. He turned to me. “We had a bright flat in Paris. Not far from the boulevard Raspail. Do you know it?”

I shook my head. “No. I've never been lucky enough to go to Paris.”

Howard nodded, almost sadly, as if my misfortune were his own.

Elena continued to watch Elizabeth. “Why don't you come stay with me a few days,” she asked urgently. “It would be wonderful to be alone together, just for a while.”

Elizabeth looked up at Elena, her eyes listless, her head drifting to the left as if she could not hold it steady. “No. I wouldn't leave Howard alone.”

Elena did not press the issue. She simply let it drop, one of those sins of omission which Dorothea Moore, in
Inwardness
, would later come so deeply to regret after her son's death: “Not long after Timon's death, I walked to the Louvre and sat and stared at the
Winged Victory
and thought how contradictory it was, this image of headless triumph, frozen in its broken arrogance, made accidentally great by its absurdity. And it seemed to me that what I had demanded of my son was not unlike this strange piece of sculpture, embodying both the idea and the reality, the dream of ascension and the earthly fall. Might my son have lived, had I brought him here, sat with him under my arm, inspected this shattered stone with him? I know now what I should have said: Timon, remain a man of earth, though your mother dreams you heavens.'”

They talked on for a time, Elena trying as much as possible to draw Elizabeth into a lighter mood. She even talked about
Calliope
a bit, describing the furor it had created in various circles. Elizabeth listened quietly but from a certain distance, as if she were listening to a radio report rather than to a friend she had not seen for years.

Elena continued on, however, as if she thought that the sustained sound of her voice might bring back the Elizabeth we both remembered. As she talked, her eyes turned down to Elizabeth's hands, to the trembling that occasionally seized them. And I suppose that it was then that Elena first understood that Elizabeth had sunk into the same disease as her father. There was no brown mug dangling from her hand, nor an assortment of empty bottles. But the physical evidence was in almost everything else about her — the stupor in her eyes, the slow measure of her voice, the swollen quality of her body, its alcoholic bloat.

Elena was still talking, stopping only to ask an occasional question of Elizabeth, when I walked into the kitchen, discreetly tugging Howard along with me. When we were out of earshot, I put the question to him directly.

“What's happened to Elizabeth?” I asked.

Howard's face was a blank page, utterly emotionless. “You might as well know,” he said. “She's become something of a drunk.”

“Yes, that's quite clear, Howard,” I told him. “But why?”

Howard blinked slowly, then bit his lower lip. His voice was dry and flat. “She had this exhibition. She took it hard. They called her names. They said she had no talent.”

I looked at him suspiciously. “That's not enough to change Elizabeth into what she is now, Howard.”

He shrugged. “There were other things.”

“Like what?”

Howard glanced about nervously, then slowly moved his eyes over to me. “I will stay with her, William,” he said. “I will not desert her.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

Howard drew in a deep breath and leaned against the small refrigerator that chugged ludicrously beside him. He had never looked more agitated.

“In Paris there was no place to get away from it. It was like New York, not Standhope. There was no way to get away from it.”

“What are you talking about, Howard?” I asked.

He glanced away. “I took a lover.”

It seemed so pedestrian a sin that I actually felt some relief.

Then Howard slowly turned toward me again. “This lover … It was a man.”

It is difficult to imagine now how shocking such a declaration could seem in 1940. I was staggered by it.

“Elizabeth had to know, of course,” Howard added, his finger nervously patting against the top of the refrigerator. “She had to know, you see. She'd already been drinking more than she should have, what with the reception of her work and all, and I guess, well, I guess it just tipped the balance.”

I only nodded.

“But I won't leave her, William,” he added quickly. “I won't do that.” He took another deep breath, then let it out in a quick rush. “I suppose I've always known this … my … problem.” He shook his head. “I don't understand it, William. I never have.”

Every impulse in my heart urged me to gather Howard into my arms, but I could not do it. Instead, still aghast at what he had just told me, I abandoned him there in that little kitchen with the chugging refrigerator and strode back into the living room.

Elena glanced up at me as I came in. She forced a smile to her lips. “I've asked Elizabeth to do my portrait,” she said.

“I don't do portraits,” Elizabeth said, almost coldly.

Elena turned back to her. “What if I begged you,” she said, using all her power to keep some lightness in her voice.

Elizabeth said nothing.

“I could come over some afternoon,” Elena added quickly.

Howard drifted back into the room, his hands deep in the pockets of his trousers, his face filled with a longing to explain himself once and for all.

It was not an opportunity I felt inclined to give him. “We'd better go now, Elena,” I said.

Elena slowly stood up. “All right,” she said. Then she looked back at Elizabeth. “Promise me a portrait, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth nodded. “All right, I will,” she said quietly.

Two weeks later Elena sat on a small stool as Elizabeth made one attempt after another to sketch her. Elena would later tell Miriam that that afternoon had been one of the saddest of her life. Elizabeth smoked so much that the cramped little studio seemed itself to smolder, and as Elizabeth dismissed one attempt after another a kind of desperation seized her. Her pencil strokes would become more and more violent, until finally she would rush to the bathroom and there, as Elena must have known, take a few quick gulps at the bottle she had hidden beneath the sink.

It was not until late afternoon that the portrait was finished, or at least declared so by Elizabeth, who, Elena said, appeared completely exhausted by the effort. “Her hands were trembling uncontrollably,” Elena told me when she came by my apartment that same evening. “She slumped on the sofa and dropped her head into her hands. Her face was covered with sweat, and she mopped it with her smock. Her hair was wet and matted. She just said, ‘There, there, it's finished, take it' and went back to the bathroom again.”

Then Elena showed the portrait to Miriam and me. I will never forget the shock of it or the awful emptiness in Elena's face when she displayed it. It was a portrait neither representative nor expressionist, only a hodgepodge of disconnected borrowings chaotically and randomly applied. But as a portrait of Elizabeth's terror, it was powerful enough. The background was a flat gray surface, with Elena's disembodied face floating in it like a ball on grimy water. Her eyebrows were done in bold black strokes and looked more than anything like the crows over van Gogh's field of corn. The eyes seemed lifted almost entirely from Munch's
Evening in Karl Johann Street
, while the surrounding face appeared as little more than strips of color ripped from those sides of beef which obsessed Soutine.

“She's at the very edge, William,” Elena said. “What can we do?”

I found that I was as much at a loss as Howard had been two weeks before. “I don't know.”

“I'm afraid for her, William,” Elena said. “Very afraid.”

But as the weeks passed and Elena made more and more attempts to break through to Elizabeth, that fear began to turn to anger. And as surely as Elizabeth had revealed her labyrinthine misery in her portrait of Elena, Elena came to portray her rage and indignation in the short stories she wrote during the long weeks before Elizabeth finally ended all speculation as to her redemption. They are singularly explosive tales of steadily accelerating disintegration and of the frustration of being caught in a situation that is not specific but cosmic and engulfing. In “The Lessons of the Road,” a father becomes so indignant at his son's inability to master the rudiments of driving a car that he swerves it off the road, then collapses over the wheel in a fit of weeping while his son looks on, aghast. In “The Deadly Current,” a lifeguard warns a young man of a lethal undertow and then finds that he cannot act to save him when the boy heedlessly moves into the deadly waters. And in Elena's most anthologized story, “Our Life Is Lived on Air,” a good but deeply wounded doctor so relentlessly attempts to save a patient, and by that means, his honor, that the patient herself becomes exhausted by the treatment and finally dies from a weakness the doctor's tireless therapies have engendered.

By this time, of course, I had long ago told Elena what Howard had confessed to me in the kitchen that first day on Bank Street. She had received the news somewhat less rigidly than I but with the same sense that it had probably had a devastating effect on Elizabeth. But for my sister, the real problem remained Elizabeth's recovery. She intended to make sure that Elizabeth survived. “No one should be destroyed by one relationship,” she told me one evening as she sat in my apartment, Alexander cradled gently in her arms. “Not even one that ends so strangely.” And I remember that she looked down at Alexander briefly, then slowly raised her eyes to me. She had a look of great willfulness in her face, as if nothing were beyond her power, as if Elizabeth could be brought back by Elena's effort alone. “I have to find the best way to help her,” she said, “and I will.”

There can be no doubt, of course, that Elena did try everything in her power to help Elizabeth. For months after Elizabeth's return from France, Elena made it her business to spend as much time as possible with her. Howard was becoming a less visible presence in the Bank Street apartment, and we later learned that he had already taken up with a composer who kept a kind of drug-crazed salon on Sullivan Street.