Elena (20 page)

“I'm glad I was here in Standhope when the news came about your mother,” he said to us as we stepped off the train. There was a hint of liquor about him, or perhaps cheap perfume.

I shook my father's outstretched hand. “What happened exactly?”

“You mean cause of death, Billy? Well, nobody seems to know. She just died in her sleep, that's all.” He moved away from me and embraced Elena. “Just died in her sleep, Princess.”

Elena looked at him steadily. “Where is she?”

My father seemed puzzled. “You mean the body?”

“Yes.”

“Still at the asylum.”

“I want to see her,” Elena said firmly.

“The body's not ready yet,” my father said. He gave me a helpless look, then turned back to Elena. “It's got to go to the funeral parlor.”

“I want to see her before then,” Elena said.

“They won't let us do that, will they, Princess?”

Elena smiled thinly. “How can they stop us?”

A few minutes later, we were standing before Whitman House as my father struggled to explain to its director that his daughter wanted to see her mother's body before any further preparations had been done.

The director listened patiently, then spoke to Elena. “This is normally done after embalming, you understand.”

“Yes, I do,” Elena said.

With that, the director ushered Elena and me into the building and down a flight of stairs to the basement. My father had decided not to accompany us.

“This is not the most graceful way to view a body, I'm afraid,” the director said as he switched on the light and pointed to a metal table. “Mrs. Franklin is under that sheet,” he said. “I'll leave you alone for a few minutes, of course.”

The room was very musty, but it was cool. There was a battered sink in the corner and a jungle of piping overhead. Metal shelves lined the far wall, stacked with assorted supplies — trays and light bulbs, rolls of toilet tissue.

Elena walked quietly to the table and turned back to me. “Do you want to see her?”

I shook my head. “Not really, Elena. Why do you want to?”

Elena did not reply. She drew the sheet from our mother's face and looked at her. In New
England Maid
, she described what she saw: “My mother was resting on her back, her face pointing directly toward the ceiling. Her eyes were closed, but her lower lip drooped slightly downward, so that the tips of her bottom teeth were visible. The light fell across her face from the left, throwing the right side into shadow. There were deep creases beneath her eyes and two vertical ones on either side of her face. Her skin looked parched and leathery, as if already fossilized, but unconsciously enduring, joined at last to earth.”

Elena drew the sheet back over our mother's face. “All right,” she said, “we can go now.”

The two of us walked quickly up the stairs and out of the asylum. My father was standing casually in front of his Whippet 4, looking for all the world like a cab driver waiting for a fare.

Once we had returned to the house on Wilmot Street, he informed Elena and me of the funeral plans he'd already made. They were spare, to say the least.

“I'm not having any visiting hours at the house, either,” he said in conclusion. “I don't want all the neighbors trailing through here staring at me. I know what they think. Believe me, I know.”

Determining what my father did or did not know of this world might have occupied the lifetime of more than one researcher. But as the evening progressed and he drew deeper into the whiskey, he hinted of certain disappointments. While Elena read quietly in her chair by the window, he spoke to me of dingy hotel rooms, bad investments, missed chances. It was the litany of a little man, the droning complaint of a tiny soul, and after a time even Elena could stand no more of it.

“Perhaps you should get some sleep,” she said, cutting him off.

My father glanced up. “What's that?”

“I said you should get some sleep. There's a lot to do tomorrow.”

Father nodded slowly. “Putting your mother in the ground.”

Elena closed her book. “Go to bed, Father.”

He struggled to his feet, his head weaving right and left. “Didn't mean to get sloshed, Elena. Not nice, what with the funeral. You'll forgive my bad manners, please.”

“Go to bed,” Elena repeated.

He obeyed immediately, with a groggy nod to me, and passed down the hall, propping himself against the wall. He closed the door softly behind him.

“He's sleeping in her room,” I said. “Been a long time since he's slept in there.”

Elena returned to her book.

“I'll never understand the power you have over him,” I said, “the way he obeys you.”

Elena did not look up. “We understand each other,” she said crisply.

The next afternoon, under the weepy auspices of a slight drizzle and to the muttered incantations of a young Congregational minister who had never met her, my mother was buried in Standhope's town cemetery. Elizabeth and Howard were there, standing respectfully at Elena's side, my father and I across from them. The minister was beginning his brief commentary on my mother's life, when Mr. Brennan came trudging up the hill, hat already in his hand, the wind tugging at his enormously baggy pants.

“Sorry I'm late, boy,” he hissed into my ear. He seemed thinner than I remembered, but his eyes remained red rimmed and glistening so that he looked, as he always did, either on the verge of a seizure of weeping or as if he had just completed one.

After the funeral, we all made our way down the hillside. At the bottom, Mr. Brennan rushed over to Elena, embraced her, muttered, “Sorry, so sorry,” then rushed away.

“He's got to get back to the drink,” Elizabeth explained apologetically to my father.

“Oh well, I can certainly understand that,” my father replied.

The rest of us went back to Wilmot Street, where we sat gloomily at the dining room table. Elena made coffee and my father produced some sort of cake to go with it. After a while Elizabeth and Howard excused themselves.

“I loved your mother,” Elizabeth said as she embraced Elena at the door, “I really did.”

Elena smiled faintly. “I'll write when I get back to New York.”

Elena disappeared not long after Elizabeth and Howard left our house. She simply eased out and left me sitting in the living room watching father snooze.

At first I thought she had merely gone for a short stroll, but as the hours passed it became clear that she had done a good deal more than that. At a certain point, my imagination got the better of me and I began to construct lurid notions of what might have happened to her.

“I'm going out to look for Elena,” I told my father.

He had roused himself just a minute before. “Where?”

“I don't know.”

“She just wants to be alone, Billy,” my father said. “She's got that in her blood. I've known that since she was a child.”

“It'll be night soon.”

My father smiled. “She can walk in the dark.”

I shook my head. “No. I'm going after her.”

Evening had already begun to fall by the time I found her. I had gone to the town square, now so much more brightly lit and bustling than it had been in my boyhood. I peeped in at Thompson's Drugstore and saw old man Thompson himself, ancient as ever behind the counter, shakily moving mortar and pestle. I passed through the park, edging near that bandstand where Wilson had spoken so firmly in his Presbyterian black suit. Then it struck me where she was, and I found her there, sitting on the bench across from Whitman House.

“I thought you might be here,” I said as I neared her.

She looked at me. “I'm glad you came, William.”

“Really? Father thought you just wanted to be alone.”

“I did. But that's lasted long enough.” She patted the bench beside her. “Come, sit down. You've walked quite a long ways.”

I sat down beside her on the bench. The light rain had stopped hours before and now the clouds were breaking up entirely, silver lines shooting out above the horizon.

“Have you been here a long time?” I asked.

“About an hour,” Elena said. “We'll go back home in a little while. I just want to stay here a bit longer.” She turned to face the gate of Whitman House. In his memoir of her, Jason wrote that thought moved across Elena's face in a very physical manner, like a cloud passing over a field. I remember very clearly that at this particular moment it did.

“What are you thinking, Elena?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Just things in general.” She glanced about the park. “It's very peaceful here.”

Elena would take that sense of peace back with her to New York, the sense, perhaps but half-remembered, of the lines of silver after the long grayness of the day, of the tall, firm gate and the little road that curved gently beyond it. She would take these things back with her, and they would lend a curious calm to the final page of
New England Maid
, ending that often angry work with a respectful quiet: “And so I sat in a small park across from the madhouse in which my mother died and thought about those things which are a part of all our thinking, from the most common to the most grand: our own youth, the childhood of our children, the old age of our parents … all that lingers but does not abide.”

E
lena plunged ever more deeply into her studies after her return to New York. Martha called this a “compensatory act, one involving the release of cathartic effort, transferable from mourning to labor.” There may, in fact, be some truth in this; but it should also be remembered that, at the same time, Dr. Stein was beginning his final assault upon Ossian, and that much of the labor involved fell directly on Elena as his support.

I was attending graduate classes regularly during 1930, and I often ran into the two of them as they made their way down the steps of the library, Elena carrying the books, Dr. Stein barely carrying himself.

Despite evidence of decline, Dr. Stein always appeared quite relaxed and congenial on those occasions. “So good to see you, William,” he'd say. Then we would chat awhile, one or the other of us pursuing some willowy thread through Cowper or Gaelic mythology, while Elena stood silently on the steps, clutching a stack of books to her chest. Looking back on those encounters now, I realize that Elena must have felt somewhat left out as Dr. Stein and I, old professor and ambitious graduate student, grandly elaborated some literary notion or plowed through a complex exegesis of doubtful interest to anyone but ourselves.

At the time, of course, Elena gave no hint of this. But once, years later, when I was late for an appointment and full of involved apology, she cut me off quickly with a single cryptic retort: “Never mind, William, I know how to wait.” There was an edge of personal affront in her voice, and I think it came from all the times she had been made to feel invisible by Dr. Stein and me and countless others. In
Quality
, she finally expressed this sense of what she called “female waiting” in a passage that deals, at least tangentially, with Kate Chopin's
The Awakening:

In those idle moments on the verandah, while the heroine waits amid the lingering smell of departed cigars, there is all we shall ever need to know of that part of woman which ceaselessly petitions for a wider life, which waits through time, from Sappho on the rock of Leucadia, to Virginia Woolf staring down into the canal, still living in that ghostly pose she thought her only true and living self. Thus is female life stranded in the outer chamber, beneath the arched hallway, while behind the tightly closed, exclusionary door the delegates convene, the generals confer. And then, beyond the great hall and into the streets and houses of ordinary life, this waiting persists endlessly, until it becomes more than manners, custom, law, becomes more than what one does and forms a part of what one is, a silence at the center of the self, one which can no longer contemplate its own release. Until on a sweltering summer afternoon, while the rest of the party watches the regatta from another shore, the summons comes to wait no more, and later there is found only a parasol rammed into the wet sand, and beyond that, nothing at all but the open sea.

If my sister's resentment was this powerful in 1930, she kept it very much to herself. She did not permit it to spoil the relationship which had grown between herself and Dr. Stein.

This relationship kept our little group buzzing for a time. Tom called it Elena's “May/December thing,” and Sam said that the problem between my sister and Dr. Stein was mainly aesthetic. “You don't put a pretty young thing like Elena next to a withered old crone like Stein and come out with a balanced portrait,” he said. Mary was not in the least bothered by it, however. The real worrier was Harry.

“You really should do something about this situation, William,” he said to me as we sat in my apartment one afternoon. “It's unnatural.”

I laughed. “Unnatural? Really, Harry, don't you think that's going a bit far?”

Harry nodded self-consciously. “Well, maybe you're right. But she's just a young woman, and a person like that, innocent, you know, she …”

“I think Elena can take care of herself, Harry,” I said.

“You don't know that old Agrippa, William,” Harry said. “The mind — and he has a powerful one — the mind can do strange things.”

I smiled. “Are you suggesting she's been hypnotized, Harry?”

“Of course not. But have you seen her lately?”

“Not for a few weeks.”

Harry shook his head. “She looks very bad, William. Sort of frumpy, if you want to know the truth. Old clothes — wrinkled ones, at that. She looks pale, unhealthy, as if she never sees the sun.”

“For God's sake, Harry, she's very busy. She has all her own work, then she has this other stuff she has to do for Dr. Stein. She can't run about looking like a debutante all the time.”