Elaine Cowell: How much a smile can say

REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK

By John Tredrea
   It seems so impossible to overstate how nice a person Elaine Cowell was. Once, years ago, I nearly said to her: "You know, you really are one of the nicest people I ever met anywhere. What’s your secret?"
   But I didn’t say those words, I guess because doing so seemed too forward. After all, we only knew each other in the most semi-anonymous sort of way. I suppose I must have noticed her name on the name tag she wore while working in the Pennington Market, the only place I remember seeing her. And I suppose she must have noticed my name on the many checks she cashed for me at the market’s courtesy counter, where I went to get cash at night back in the days before I had the ATM card that can get it for you at the bank after closing time. But neither of us ever addressed the other by name.
   Talk about a perfect individual to work at a courtesy counter, Elaine Cowell was it. She was the operative definition of courtesy. She raised courtesy to an art form. That is to say, she was so nice that you couldn’t understand it. Really! All you could do was marvel at it, and appreciate it, and be thankful for it and learn from it.
   I’ve never worked at a courtesy counter, but it doesn’t look like the easiest job in the world to me. People who are harried, hurried, confused, bemused and maybe mad come your way. And having to wait on line, even for less than a minute, has a way of intensifying the frame of mind in which some people happen to be.
   When I’d go to the market to cash a check, often there’d be a few people ahead of me. I confess that I watched Ms. Cowell deal with all of them, simply because it was such a pleasure to see someone unfailingly treat people — all kinds of people in all kinds of states of mind — just the way they should be treated.
   Yes, I wanted to ask her what her secret was. Because, really, the most amazing thing was that she seemed just as happy as she was nice. They don’t always go together, do they? Not only that, she seemed very aware of how things are in the world. What I mean to say is that if you kidded around with her a little, the way she’d kid back made you think she had an acute sensibility and perceptiveness to go with her niceness and happiness. To combine these qualities seems, to me, sort of a miracle. So often, they seem mutually exclusive. But she made it look easy.
   I don’t know. Maybe it’s because check-cashing can be a bit of a minor (or major!) anxiety-provoking experience that I sometimes was in sort of a negative mood as I journeyed to the market to get cash back in those days. I guess I was worried because I needed to leave the money in the bank and I needed to take it out of the bank, too. You know how it is.
   It was a blessing that she was the one who cashed my checks for me. I remember, clearly, walking out of that store in a completely different — much improved! — frame of mind as a result of my encounter, which might have lasted as little as 20 seconds, with that fine young woman.
   When someone as special as Elaine Cowell dies in a way as unkind as the way she died, you feel like words are no good to you anymore, because you can’t use them to say, even to yourself, what’s going on inside you. At such times you may tend to remember sayings of people who are, or were, great with words, who could take them to a very high level of understanding and expression.
   The other day, I was remembering Elaine Cowell’s smile. Now, that smile was something. True, she was very pretty and had great long blonde hair and the smile definitely put her way over into the knockout category, but the main thing about her smile was that it fit perfectly with everything else you noticed about her.
   Thinking about this reminded me of one of my favorite passages of writing, which I haven’t looked at, or thought of, in years, until today, when I dug it up and read it again and wrote it down. It’s in the early section of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel "The Great Gatsby."
   This is how the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, described the smile of Jay Gatsby, the enigmatic, star-crossed multimillionaire who, except for his smile, admittedly seemed to have little or nothing in common with Elaine Cowell: "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as would like to believe in yourself and assured you that that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."
   Indeed. The smile of absolute, unqualified generosity. That’s how I always saw Elaine Cowell. Such consistency at such a height was a wondrous thing to witness, really. A privilege.