Elena (11 page)

“Mother has a problem,” she told him as he sauntered up the porch steps.

He stopped and looked at her. “Problem? What kind of problem?”

“She's gone off her head,” I said flatly.

My father continued to look at Elena. “Where is she?”

“In her bedroom,” Elena said.

“Sleeping?”

“More or less.”

My father nodded. “Same way with all those goddamn Mayhews, a nest of loons, all of them.” He scratched his chin. “Howlong's she been like this?”

“Almost a month,” Elena said.

My father continued up the stairs. “Well, let's have a look.”

He followed us into the bedroom, stared down at my mother's rigid body for a minute, then walked back into the living room and flopped down in the chair by the window.

“You got any ice water, Billy?” he asked, swabbing his neck again with his handkerchief. “Get me a glass, will you?” He looked at Elena. “Sit down, Princess, we're all going to have to talk about this.”

From the kitchen, I could hear the two of them talking quietly. It was mostly Elena's voice, describing the onset of our mother's illness very matter-of-factly and in great detail.

My father was lighting up a cigar when I brought him the water. He took it quickly and gulped it down. “Look at this, Billy,” he said, handing me back the glass.

“What?”

“This right here,” my father said, fumbling inside his jacket pocket. He pulled out a piece of paper.

“Sit down and look at that,” he said. He turned back to Elena. “Now, tell me, Princess, what do you make of your mother? Think she'll get better, or what?”

While Elena attempted to answer my father's question, I looked at the paper he had given me. It was some sort of advertisement for land in Florida, a place called Davis Islands.

“What's this?” I asked.

My father turned to me. “Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Well, it says they've sold eighteen million dollars worth of land in thirty-one hours.”

My father nodded sagely. “That's right. Land around Tampa Bay. Davis Islands. And what does it say at the top, Billy?”

I glanced down at the ad. “It says, ‘Sold out.'”

My father smiled. “That's right, Billy-boy. Sold out. And guess who got a piece of it before that happened?”

“You?”

“Damn right,” he said with a wink. “That's what'll be putting you through Columbia, kid.” He leaned forward and gave me a lethal stare. “Money don't grow on trees, Billy. You need to know where it comes from.”

“Well … I …”

Before I could finish, he'd turned back to Elena.

“It seems to me your mother has about had it, as far as the real world is concerned,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean living out here with the rest of us,” my father said. “You know what happened to your grandmother Mayhew? Had to lock her up in the back of the house.” He shook his head. “We can't do that here. That's why we got Whitman House.”

I stood up slowly. “Are you thinking about Whitman House for Mother?”

“Unless you want to tie her to a tree in the front yard,” my father said.

I glanced at Elena. She was sitting quite calmly on the piano stool at the end of the room. She said nothing.

“Well, don't you think that's sort of a quick decision?” I asked, turning my attention once again to my father.

He shook his head. “Why should I? Christ, Billy, those Mayhews don't get better, they just get older. Instead of a middle-aged crazy woman, you get an old crazy woman.” He looked at Elena. “You know how old your grandmother Mayhew was when they locked her up? Thirty-seven.” He turned back to me. “Your mother is forty-two. It's surprising she lasted as long as she did.”

For a moment no one spoke. My father sat back in the chair and puffed on his cigar. Then he crushed it into the ashtray by the window. “Of course, we'll have to make some other plans, too.”

Elena looked at him. “What plans?”

“Well, the way I see it, Billy can go ahead to New York,” my father said. “But what about you, Elena? What would you do?”

“I'd live here, at least for a while,” Elena said. “Someone would need to check in on Mother.”

My father shook his head. “A young girl like you, living alone in this town? You're only fourteen, Elena. It's one thing you being here with Billy. It's another story when it comes to living here by yourself.”

“It would not be a problem for me,” Elena said firmly.

“Well, for me it would,” my father said. “No, we have to make other arrangements. You'll probably need to go live with my sister in Pawtucket.”

Elena said nothing, but I could see that a great deal was going on in her mind.

“Hattie would love to have you, Elena,” my father went on. “Got that big house with nobody to live in it with her, just poor old Hattie and all those pictures of her dead husband.” He smiled. “Why, she'd treat you like a queen, Elena.”

Elena turned away from him, her eyes riveted on the elm in the front yard.

“And I get up to that part of Rhode Island all the time,” my father continued. “We could go into Providence once in a while. Maybe even into Boston. You've never been to Boston.”

Elena leaned forward slowly and dropped her hands into her lap. “I don't want Mother put in Whitman House,” she said.

“What?” my father asked. “Why not?”

“I can live with her here,” Elena said evenly. “William can go on to Columbia. Nothing should stand in his way. But I don't want Mother put in Whitman House.”

“Elena,” I said hesitantly, “maybe you should just think about it, putting her in Whitman House, I mean. Look, she may never get any better, she might —”

“I don't care if she doesn't get any better,” Elena said. There was an edge of anger in her voice. “I will not go along with putting her in the asylum. We can live here together.”

“Well, what if you had trouble?” my father asked. “I mean real trouble of some kind. Something you couldn't handle.”

“I have Elizabeth to help me,” Elena said. “And Mr. Brennan.”

My father nodded, then looked very pointedly at me. He knew what I should have done at that moment: at least volunteer to delay my entrance into Columbia. And he knew that I would not do it.

“What do you think, Billy?” he asked.

“I don't know.”

“Think Elena can handle her?”

“Maybe.”

He looked at Elena. “Are you sure, Princess?”

“Yes.”

My father left the next morning, dragging his big black traveling cases behind him. Elena and I watched from the window.

I remained in Standhope for another two months. During that time, Elena and I carried on all the work of the household. Mother began to improve, though only slightly. She never became truly sane again, though from time to time she was able to care for most of her needs, feed and dress and bathe herself. “The relationship of a wedge of lemon to a cup of tea, a slice of cheese to a soda cracker,” Elena wrote in
New England Maid
, “these were the connections of which my mother was aware. She had the simple view that the visible is real and the real visible. That her own fate might have been connected to that of millions in their turn, to vast structures into which she had not inquired, secular and religious authorities in whose enormous web she dully slept — that such complexity might touch the texture of her life, this was beyond my mother's will to learn and understand.”

I left for New York in September of 1924. Elena waited for the train with me.

“You're doing the right thing, William,” she said.

The whistle of the incoming train blew loudly some distance away. “It's funny, I've been looking forward to this for I don't know how long,” I said, “but now, now that the time has come … well, I'm frightened, Elena.”

Elena squeezed my arm. “You're going to do just fine. That's what Father says.”

“He does?”

“That's what he told me. He said, ‘Billy'll do just fine.'”

I know now that he'd said no such thing. Elena had made it up.

“I'll do my best,” I told her.

The train pulled in a few seconds later, part of the old New Haven line, a real wheezer. I hoisted myself onto the first step, then turned to Elena.

“Well, any last words?”

She smiled, but very delicately, and her eyes seemed to look directly into the center of everything I feared and wanted, everything that had been denied and that now offered itself as a promise.

“Whatever you do, William,” she said, “stay away from large black traveling cases.”

I knew it then, and I've never entirely forgotten it. I looked down at her, at the sober care in her face, and I knew that that strange boy I had dreamed of for so long, the one who would know me well and love me for myself alone, was my sister.

I
n the photograph there are five of us. We are posing with mock seriousness before the doors of St. Paul's Chapel. In the background, down a slight incline, a few anonymous students can be seen strolling Columbia Walk. We had just come from some sort of senior gathering at Earl Hall. There had been quite a few of us milling about that august parlor, and a platoon of professors' wives had diligently served us hot tea in small bone-white cups. I remember that it was a formal occasion and that the women were dressed in their best Episcopalian attire. It was 1928. Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed a full six months before, but I heard their names mentioned more than once that afternoon, mostly by a knot of earnest young radicals who positioned themselves in one corner of the hall and eyed the rest of us with unmistakable contempt.

Still, despite the sober clothes, the china cups, and the aura of disgruntled politics, the afternoon had been a rather light affair. There was a good deal of talk about O'Neill's
Strange Interlude.
It had opened in January of that year, the curtain rising at 5:30, then coming down for dinner at 7:00, then rising again to a full-bellied audience at 8:20. Everyone wondered how Lynn Fontanne did it and whether the spiritual message was worth the physical ordeal.

After an hour or two, the gathering was over and most of the students began to filter out of Earl Hall. I wandered out with the people who had become my closest friends during the last four years.

And so there are five of us in the photograph. We do not look very formal. There is an impishness in our eyes, a casualness in our stance, an attitude of gentle mockery. We look as idle youth has always looked, hopelessly adrift, careless of ideas, cheerfully ignorant of the fate that will overwhelm us.

Harry Morton looks the least frivolous. He is standing at the far left, back straight, eyes aimed directly ahead, his shirt collar buttoned primly at his throat. Sam Waterman is next, leaning his crooked elbow on Harry's shoulder, a briefcase dangling from his other hand. Tom Cameron stands beside him, one hand curling around the lapel of his blazer, the other pressed deep into the pocket of his Oxford pants. Mary Longford has her arm in Tom's. She is wearing a long dark dress and cloche hat. I am standing next to her at the far right of the photograph. The picture was taken by a Columbia grounds keeper, who tried very hard not to shake the camera. Harry rewarded him with a ten-cent piece of pure gold.

It is odd now to think of it, but at the time I did not feel in the least privileged. If anything, I felt like an intruder in the temple, a peddler's son from rural Connecticut who had bluffed his way into an elite institution. For the first year, I had the uneasiness of the impostor. I half expected to get a letter from the administrators informing me that my acceptance at Columbia had been the result of a clerical error and that arrangements had been made for me to continue my education at some other institution more suitable to my gifts, a cow college in California, perhaps. The letter never came, of course, and as the months passed I began to relax. Still, the sense of inferiority remained, one of the more subtle injuries of my class background. I overcompensated by working furiously at my studies. “You worked at learning like a sweaty shipping clerk who dreams of owning his own line,” Sam Waterman once told me. He was right. I dreamed of excelling in everything, of besting all the rich boys who had come to Columbia with their pockets full of their fathers' money. And yet at the same time, I felt that no matter what I did, I would always be beneath them, always lack what had come to them unasked for and undeserved. “You always wanted to have been born to some thing, William,” Elena said one evening in 1936. “You could never be proud of making it on your own. You always thought there was something grubby about that. You inverted the American dream.”

Certainly in those early years, I did precisely that. Consequently, when Harry Morton, the scion of an old moneyed family if there ever was one, approached me after an English class and complimented me on some now-forgotten remark I had made about Edmund Spenser, I fairly swooned with joy.

Harry Morton was the first friend I made at Columbia. He was a tall young man, very erect in stature. His face was angular, with strong, resolute features. He looked as though he had been carved from Puritan stone. “I would have gone to Harvard,” he told me not long after we met, “but my family broke with that institution over some theological matter in 1804.” He was careful in his speech, a stickler for gram mar. His dress was equally proper. “He knows what an aristocrat should look like,” Sam Waterman once said, “and so he makes it his business to look like one.”

But that was not the whole of it. For academically ambitious though I was, and very insecure, I was not a fool. And if Harry Morton had been nothing more than some witless dandy out of a Ronald Firbank novel, I would have had no use for him. But there was a good deal more to Harry than his exaggerated courtliness. There was a grace and selflessness that money alone could not buy. Elena once said that he lived within the comfort of a few great ideas, and I think that this was true. He was the kind of doleful Platonist who believes that ideas are far too noble to win the day with man. In this, he was hopelessly old-fashioned, and I suppose that his characteristic abstraction, his wealth, and his basic gentleness and charity would be perceived in certain quarters and with a certain justification as a vacuous paternalism. It would be very easy to see Harry's dropping that gold dime into the grounds keeper's hand as a monstrous gesture, utterly blind to the social relationship that produced it. This is how Sam Waterman saw it, and he told the story more than once during his brief flirtation with communism in the thirties. He always ended it with the same aphorism. I heard it first at a rally for the unemployed at Sheridan Square in 1932. Sam was standing at the top of the pedestal, practically swinging from the good general's stone sword: “And so, gentlemen, don't listen to those damned apologists who tell you that capitalism makes charity possible. Just remember, it also makes it necessary.”