Meeting Elias
1906
She found him waiting in front of the massive entrance to the Alte Pinakothek with its arched windows repeating themselves endlessly on each side. Helen knew him immediately, though they’d never met—an American informality, a concentration of energy, in contrast to the leisurely burghers of Munich and their wives in their decorous Sunday clothes.
Elias Loew evidently recognized her as well and bounded toward her, hands outstretched.
“The clever Miss Porter!” he said, smiling broadly. His handshake was warm and forthright. “Your sister spoke so much of you.” He seemed very young, like a boy dressed up as a professor in shabby black and wire-rimmed glasses.
“Well...clever!” she responded clumsily. “I believe you’re the clever one.”
From her sister Elizabeth’s letters Helen had imagined a taller man. Elizabeth had described Elias’s air of confidence, his brown eyes, his black wavy hair, his formidable intelligence. Helen had looked forward to meeting this interesting person once Elizabeth had come home and it was finally her own turn to sail to Europe.
Helen followed Elias into the museum’s cool interior with its marble floors and high ceilings, their carved detail lost in the dimness. A young child’s shrill voice echoed in the vast space before he was hushed by his parents. People clustered in front of paintings in heavy gilt frames, gazing contemplatively or conferring in whispers. I’m in Munich, she thought, in Europe. To learn everything about everything. Since she had stepped off the
ship in Hamburg she had felt her senses opening wide; even her skin felt translucent and porous.
“Come!” Elias said over his shoulder, striding into one of the galleries. He led her to one masterpiece after another—she recognized the names but not the paintings. Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer. In a trance she followed Elias’s short black-clad figure, the murmuring voices washing over her, the paintings rising up like the pages of art books leaping into life, enormous and vivid, the paint thick and glistening as though the painter had just left the room, brushes in hand. She would give this experience to Ruth, the heroine of the novel she was writing: the provincial American artist face to face with the Old Masters. Her little notebook was tucked into her purse as always but she was too self-conscious in the presence of her new acquaintance to reach for it.
Elias stopped in front of a painting of a naked young woman holding a fur around her body, happy enough, judging from her mischievous gaze, to display her round breasts.
“One of my favorites,” whispered Elias. “What do you think?” He stood with his arms folded, contemplating the painting.
Helen stepped closer to peer at it. She found it embarrassing but did not want to say so. “Her arms seem unusually long, don’t they?”
Elias laughed. “Rubens wasn't the greatest of draftsmen, it’s true.” He talked about the painting’s unashamed sensuality: the breasts pushed up by the woman’s arms, the suggestiveness of the fur against her belly. “I suspect that fur was on the floor the minute Rubens put down his brush.”
She braced herself a bit, as though his frankness held some danger for her, knowing at the same time that the idea of danger was absurd. This is what I want, she reminded herself, this kind of bold conversation. I want to speak this language. I want to get fluent in it. Why should I not enjoy imagining this young woman in the studio and the man looking at her?
But she couldn’t yet find a response to Elias’s comment. “Beauty is very important to me,” he said. He turned and
looked at Helen appraisingly, to her acute discomfort.
Helen returned to her pension flushed and stirred by the encounter, by the roomfuls of brilliant paintings, by the novel sense of being plunged into a world she had imagined and yearned for all her life. I won’t hear from Elias Loew again, she told herself. I’m not sophisticated enough for him, nor beautiful enough. Then reprimanded herself: I am not here to become acquainted with young men.
But the next day there was a note: “Dear Miss Porter, won’t you join me for a walk? I would love to show you Munich.” They met under the Rathaus glockenspiel, this time falling easily into conversation as though they were already old friends. After the bells had finished their recital and the bright-painted figures paused to rest, Elias took her arm and guided her around the Old Town, pointing out landmarks in his quick way. When they parted it seemed natural to plan to meet again soon.
“There’s a concert on Friday,” he said. “Mahler and Wagner.
Shall we go?”
In the warm darkness Helen sat beside Elias, washed in the lush harmonies, transported by the woodwinds’ melodies. Mahler himself conducted, his dark hair flying.
They met often after that, drinking coffee together between her language classes and the lectures that he was already giving at the university though still a student himself.
“You sprechen very well,” Elias said, after listening to Helen slip comfortably into German with his friend Willi, who’d appeared unexpectedly at their table by the lake in the Englischer Garten. “Could you help me with a translation that I’m working on? If you can stand it––a paleographic paper, dry as old bones.” He’d been told, he confided to her, that as soon as he had his doctorate he would be offered teaching posts at more than one
university. “I’ve had my eye on Oxford ever since I can remember,” he said. “Can you imagine? From the shtetl to the dreaming spires!”
Helen was curious about his origins, which he rarely referred to. “What was it like—the shtetl?” she asked. She knew no one else from that world and had never said the word aloud before.
“I don’t remember much,” he said. “You can ask me about growing up in New York.” So she did, and he told her about being befriended by the children’s librarian at the settlement house when he was still new to America. “An extraordinary woman, Hal, and she took a great interest in me. It’s thanks to Miss Evans that I’m here. Miss Evans and the people she introduced me to.” He looked at her earnestly. “I don’t want to sound boastful. But they recognized something in me, different from other boys.”
Helen believed him. It was easy to imagine Elias as a bright, charming, immigrant child, eager to be taught, inspiring pride and optimism in his idealistic benefactors.
He looked out at the lake beyond the café terrace where they were sitting. Yellowing willow branches trailed in the water. A family of ducks paddled by, the mother circling back to herd a wayward duckling who was heading for shore. “I’ve been extremely fortunate, always,” he said.
Elias wore a blue scarf wrapped around his neck, a fetching contrast with his brown eyes, Helen thought. In spite of herself she had indulged in a flicker of a romantic dream before they met. Perhaps after all she was not too old to find a soulmate, and this Elias Loew...But the fantasy receded quickly once she was in Munich and observed Elias’s appetite for curvaceous “Blondkopfen” as he liked to say.
He touched her hand on the table for a second. “What about you, Hal? What is your dream? Love and marriage, like your sister?”
Helen winced inwardly at the nickname he’d endowed her with. “I won’t marry, Elias,” she said, wishing she’d never
mentioned the young man who’d briefly courted her during her last year of college. “I told you. I’m going to write. And you?” she went on, wanting to poke him a little in return. “Are you going to sweep some lovely Bavarian lady off her feet?” She was pleased with herself for producing this worldly banter.
“Oh,” Elias said, winking, “I already have. More than one, actually. The frolicking Fräuleins of München.” He shaped an exaggerated hourglass figure with his hands, his eyes dancing. Again he seemed like a boy, not an almost-professor.
He leaned forward and squeezed both her hands. “See, that’s what I like so much about you, Hal. I can say anything to you, as though you were another lad.”
He’d already told her how much he relished her mind—like a man’s mind, he said. She knew he meant it as a compliment to her intelligence and was flattered.
Helen had not yet told Elias about the novel that she worked on each morning before classes began. Being far away from home had unleashed imagination and momentum, instead of the opposite, as she’d feared.
“Traveling will most certainly make you a better writer,” Aunt Charlotte had assured her when Helen visited her in Boston to say goodbye. “It will bring great richness to your work. But”—poking Helen’s shoulder for emphasis—“only if you absolutely insist on writing every day while you’re away. Otherwise your novel will retreat into the shadows and may never emerge again.”
Charlotte’s unkempt living room was the headquarters of the poetry magazine she and her partner had founded and still edited, bringing European writers to American readers, sometimes in Helen’s translations. Piles of copies rose from the floor like stalagmites. A solemn portrait of Shakespeare oversaw all operations.
Now, dear girl, I want you to write to me every Friday describing to me what you are seeing, what you are doing, whom you are meeting, and how the writing is coming along. And let the German soak into your skin. I’m counting on more translation from you.”
In the heady whirl of European life Helen was grateful for Aunt Charlotte’s demand. The assignment sharpened her eyes and ears and her pen. She barely mentioned Elias in her letters, knowing that hinting at his place in the foreground of her Munich experience would trigger a suspicious interrogation. Charlotte, alone among her relatives, did not smile on friendships with eligible young men.
“Companionship, by all means, my dear,” she’d once said, wrapping her arm around her partner—Helen’s namesake––who shared her home and every facet of her life. “Marriage and children, I’m sorry, no. Unless of course you’re not really serious about your writing, which would be a waste of ability, not to mention education. Anything is within your grasp, Helen. All you have to do is decide.”
In her Munich pension, fresh from her dreaming self, Helen summoned the spirit of her heroine Ruth, an ambitious young artist of twenty-five who intends to make her mark on the new century with her art. Ruth has studied with a master––his only female student––but she’s left his cautious brushstrokes far behind. Ruth paints muscular women with strong teeth and splayed toes: modern paintings, not entirely realistic. She herself has a dazzling smile, a flexible and powerful body, a confident stride. Her auburn hair flows down her back in a loose braid, sometimes crowned by a floppy green velvet cap. She attracts young men in spite of her scorn of womanly wiles. The men tell her that she would grace their parlors, their bedrooms. They tell her, believing that they are flattering her, that her artistic talents will be an asset as a wife and a mother. But Ruth despises the
domestic arts: flower arranging, choosing tasteful silks for a new dress, gestating and doting on beautiful children who will pose wide-eyed in their frothy christening gowns. Her own parents have accepted with reluctance that their wild girl will not marry. Ruth’s younger sister Nellie is to be married in four months.
Ruth loves and admires her but she shudders to imagine stepping through that weighty matrimonial door and pulling it shut behind her. Slam! Ruth is determined to say nothing to Nellie about her revulsion. Let Nellie thrive in wifehood, or make her own disappointed discoveries, at which point Ruth will give her every support.
Ruth will encounter troubles of a different kind in the future, her creator thinks. A problem with alcohol. A crushing and scandalous love affair that tests her resilience to the limit. Perhaps a child out of wedlock, forcing a terrible choice. How the story will end is unknown.
The daily revelations of life in an unfamiliar city jostled Helen’s mind. New ideas and insights flew out like birds flushed from cover. Helen found herself suddenly sure of the next steps in Ruth’s life. Her heroine would spend a year, two years, in Europe, and meet people who were nothing like the inhabitants of her provincial hometown or her women’s college. On the threshold of the Old World, so new to her, Ruth would discover a different scope of existence. She would haunt the museums. Her own painting would transform. She would move further away from realism, immersing herself in pure color and design, striving to close the tantalizing gap between the visions in her mind’s eye and the images on her canvas. As any artist does, thought Helen. As I do myself, only with words instead of paint. That maddening gulf between what I want to say and what I am able to say.
She read over the last ten pages that she’d written, struck by their sureness and flow—pleased to have gone a little further
than she’d thought toward bridging that impossible gulf. But it was probably an illusion, a self-serving illusion, which would dissipate next time she looked at it. She could ask Elias to read a chapter. Or not. The idea of his piercing eye on her work attracted and scared her.
Excerpted from MRS. LOWE-PORTER by Jo Salas, © 2024 by Jo Salas, used with permission from JackLeg Press.
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