"No, not on any particular judgment. But I think I should have allowed a bit more for temperament."

Jason smiled. "Mine or yours?"

"Yours in the way you wrote the book," Elena said, "and mine in the way I read it."

"So you still think it's romantic hogwash?" Jason asked.

"I never thought that, and you know it."

"You said as much."

"I said it was a story, rather than an a.n.a.lysis, of the American experience."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"Not to me."

For a minute, Jason seemed to want to let the subject drop. He glanced away from her, resting his eyes on a vase of flowers by the window. Then he turned back to her. "What do you think, really?"

"I never said The American Experience was a bad book," Elena told him, "and I never said that you were a bad writer."

"But what did you actually think?" Jason insisted.

Elena watched him a moment, then answered. "I thought it should have been a poem rather than a history, and that had it been a poem it would have been a great one."

When she said that, Jason's face filled with a grateful peace, as though he had received, at least in part, what he had come for.

Jason left a few days later, on a very warm, sunny day. We had a late breakfast, then Elena sat in the front room and watched him pack. He talked idly about his new home in Virginia, but I knew that his mind was very far from that place. For her part, Elena pretended an interest in her flower garden beside the house. She absently discussed hyacinths and beach plums, while Jason countered with kudzu and boll weevils.

Elena had elected not to drive with Jason and me back to Hyannis. She was tired, certainly, but I think she knew that that short drive would have been pointlessly grueling for us all had she come along. And so she stood at the door, leaning on her cane, as we prepared to leave.

"It was good of you to come, Jason," she said as he stepped up to her and lowered his suitcase to the floor.

He smiled. "I wouldn't have missed it."

They embraced briefly, then parted.

On the way to the airport, Jason talked about an essay he was working on, but it could hardly have been more obvious that his mind was not on it. Finally, in the middle of a sentence, he stopped and looked directly at me.

"Shouldn't we have had just one good cry together, William?" he asked.

"Elena is not too much in favor of that sort of thing," I told him.

"She would think it embarra.s.sing?"

"No," I said, "she would think it redundant."

"So it's still very much as I wrote in my memoirs. Elena is her own best shield."

"Yes, I think that's true," I said. I imagined Elena as she must have been at that very moment, while Jason and I were driving toward Hyannis. I saw her sitting in her back room, the window slightly open, a warm sea breeze ruffling the pages of the book in her hand, and I thought of all the times that Elena and I might have wept unrestrainedly together, and suddenly it seemed to me at least an arguably worthy thing that we had not.

Elena had weakened considerably by the end of summer. She could only rarely manage a short walk on the beach, and she never risked the jetty again. Instead, we would walk to where the first stone rose from the beach, and I would hold her tightly while she peered out, searching the bay as if something might be written there.

It was at this time, in late August, that Elena moved into the quiet, inward seclusion from which she never fully emerged again. It was a kind of gravitational pull that drew her toward the central quarter of her mind. At times she seemed unable to bear any intrusion upon this ultimate privacy. More and more she required complete silence. She found it difficult to listen to music and could not endure the sound of the television at all. Even the whisper of pa.s.sing traffic disturbed her.

She also fell asleep more often and slept for a longer time when she did. She very much resented these periods of what she called "enforced unconsciousness." "If only I could stay awake until the end," she wrote to Jason a few weeks before she died, "and not be plagued by tiny deaths and petty resurrections."

As her weakness increased, she began to fear what she insisted on calling her "return to infancy." She was especially concerned with the added duties this would impose on me.

"It's all going to get considerably more difficult for you," she told me one evening.

We were sitting in the front room, and she had been watching me silently for quite some time.

I nodded and continued to leaf idly through a magazine.

"Very difficult, William," she said, "I mean physically."

"Don't worry about that," I told her.

"I can still get around a bit, but soon ..."

I looked at her sternly. "Not another word, Elena."

"You're not a young man."

"I'm young enough to take care of my sister."

Elena shook her head. "I'm not so sure. I was thinking, perhaps a nurse ..."

"No."

"Someone to help you, William."

"I said no."

"Be sensible," Elena said emphatically. "This is not a matter of pride. This is a matter of physical difficulty."

"I'm aware of that," I told her, "but I am also not at all interested in having a stranger in this house." I leaned forward. "Please, Elena, you and I will go through this ourselves."

Elena persisted. "I think you are being stubborn. You are old enough to know that sometimes the cause may not be worth the stand."

"This one is," I said.

"You'd better be certain of that," Elena warned.

"I am."

There were times during the next few weeks when I had more than a few doubts about the wisdom of my choice. But although some burdens are merely burdensome, others remain works of love. In the days that followed, Elena's condition worsened almost by the hour, and many unsightly duties inevitably accompanied her increasing debility. Despite all that, I still believe - and quite sincerely, without romanticizing the physical ordeal, both hers and mine - that I never learned more about my life than during those weeks I cared for my sister while she died.

By the beginning of September, Elena could no longer go outside, and within a few days of her last halting walk on the beach - no more than a few paces, which totally exhausted her - she found it difficult either to feed or clothe herself. She now spent most of her time propped up in a chair in the back room or lying on a day bed I had moved into it. She no longer wanted to sleep in her bedroom, insisting that the sound of the surf helped her to rest. She slept a great deal, but when awake she remained quite lucid. She continued to work, at least in her mind, on her poem, and from time to time she would dictate some lines to me. Her voice was as strong as ever. She did not slur her words, but on occasion she would rush her sentences forward, as if she thought them written on her breath.

"Dying is full of contradictions," she told me once when I had taken down a stanza or two.

"How so?"

"You feel the need to complete things, so you wish to rush them out," she said. "But at the same time, you want what will surely be your last work to be as perfect as possible, so you do not wish to rush it."

She smiled slightly and closed her eyes. "You will know how that feels one day, William."

I shook my head. "No, I intend to live forever."

"Of course," Elena said drowsily. And then she went to sleep.

David, who had already visited Elena once with Alexander and Saundra, came alone in mid-September. He found Elena's condition so disturbing that he stayed only a single afternoon. Elena sensed his anxiety and tried to soothe it as best she could by talking about his work rather than about herself.

"You must let your research widen continually," she told him. "You must think of it as something boundless, David, so that the investigation of an acre becomes a study of the world." She looked at me. "You remember, Dr. Stein used to talk like this."

"I remember."

She turned back to David. "He was a great scholar, David. Do you know why?"

"No," David said softly.

"Because he never believed that any question could be small."

David left an hour later. When I walked him outside, he begged me to seek emergency treatment for her.

"She decided against that a long time ago, David," I told him.

"But surely something, some experimental drug, something like that ..."he said desperately.

"Elena is going to die," I told him. "Perhaps within only a week or so."

"But there must be something we can do."

"Yes, there is. And you are doing what is expected of you. And I am doing what is expected of me."

"But, surely there is ..."

I put my hand gently to the side of his face. "David," I said, "go home."

Elena was strangely invigorated when I walked back into her room. She was sitting up straight in her chair and her eyes were bright, almost cheerful.

"I've written a few more lines of that poem in my head," she said. "I'd like for you to take them down, if you have a minute."

I sat down in the chair opposite her and took up a small notebook. "All right, go ahead."

Elena did not speak. I could tell she was going over the lines again, that she was not satisfied with them. "No," she said finally. "No, I don't like them. Forget it, William. Another time."

With one exception, Elena continued to work at her poem, however weakly, every day from then on. The one exception was the day Jack MacNeill died at his home in Connecticut.

I learned of it early on a rainy morning. Barney Nesbitt called from New York. Elena was still asleep. By then she was so weak that she could no longer feed herself, and I remember thinking as I sat in the front room after Barney's call that this news would surely kill her.

For several hours after she woke up, I kept it from her. I fed her breakfast, then set her up in her chair, as I did each day. She was in fairly good spirits and even commented upon a group of gulls that was swooping up and down along the bay. I busied myself with the morning ch.o.r.es, hoping to conceal my own distress, but something in my manner alerted her. I could feel her eyes studying me as I came in and out of the room.

"What is it, William?" she finally asked.

"Nothing."

"I'm not strong enough to repeat a question endlessly. Now please, what is it?"

I sat down and folded my hands in my lap. "Jack died last night."

Her eyes glistened and she lowered her head slowly so that two long strands of white hair fell forward across her shoulders.

"I'm so sorry to tell you this, Elena," I said.

She remained with her head bowed for a moment, then slowly looked up.

"Wipe my eyes, please," she said.

I took out my handkerchief and did as she asked. She seemed composed by the time I had finished, but her lower lip trembled slightly.

"Give me the details," she said in a very low voice.

"Barney called this morning, while you were sleeping. Apparently Jack died in his bed, during the night. It was a stroke or heart attack, I suppose."

She glanced away from me, out the large window. A sailboat was gliding across the bay. Her eyes followed it. "I'd like to write something about Jack," she said, "but it's too late."

We talked on about him for a few minutes, then Elena asked me to open some wine. I poured each of us a gla.s.s, then lifted Elena's to her lips so that together we could toast our old friend.

"I'd like a bath now, if you don't mind, William," Elena said when we had finished.

"Not at all," I told her.

She was very light, no more than a bouquet of flowers in my arms. She seemed almost to dissolve into the water.

"Not too warm, I hope?" I asked as I lowered her into her bath.

"No, not too warm, thank you."

When it was done, I wrapped her up once again in her large blue robe and returned her to her chair. She seemed almost to shrink before my eyes.

"Would you like something to eat, Elena?" I asked.

"No."

"Are you comfortable?"