Elena (5 page)

There are times now when I gaze at all those many photographs I have of Elena, and in each of her changing faces this basic seriousness remains, as if it were the single line she threw out to the world, her determined gravity.

Martha ends her chapter on Elena's birthday party with a dramatic interpretation of it, describing Elena's refusal to blow out the candles as “a gesture of resistance and refusal in its initial childhood phase.” She says that in the end my sister was made whole, at least as an artist, “by various episodes of psychological disjunction, which, added together, argue for the general diagnosis of periodic childhood depression.”

But something of my sister's life is already missing in Martha Farrell's report: her ordinary needs, the ones that bind her to the rest of us. She needed to leap into McCarthy Pond, dress up like a witch on Halloween, take a hay ride to MacDougall's farm, sing all those boring childhood songs. And then, of course, there was that one further need, which rose in her at this time, one that did not so much darken her childhood as give it greater ardency. It was unmistakable. It lived in everything she did: in the way she hesitated before entering the shed or kept the door to her room slightly ajar. It stared outward through her eyes, and was, I suppose, most simply embodied in that lock of Lewis Carroll's creation, that creature of tightened bolt and unbending steel who beats about tirelessly, searching, searching, as it says, for someone with the key to me.

H
er hair was almost the color of strawberries, and her name was Elizabeth Brennan. Her eyes were green, and they moved continually. Elena described her in New
England Maid:
“She was sitting in the school yard, cross-legged on a bench, methodically chewing a piece of Wrigley's. She was wearing a blue dress with a white lace hem and black shoes, dusty from the playing field. Her hair was red and hung freely to her shoulders. She had taken out the bow and now twirled the ribbon through her fingers with a strange, unchildlike dalliance. Her eyes never came to rest, and everything they fell upon, they singed a little.”

It was Elizabeth who first had the key to my sister. She moved to Wilmot Street not long after Bobby Taylor's death and lived there with her father, a large, heavyset man, who spent most of his time sitting morosely on the front porch of their house, a mug — not a glass or cup, but a mug — of whiskey in his hand. He drank in this fashion all the time, publicly, his legs sprawled out in front of him, his head drooping down, the mug balanced so uneasily in his hand that the whiskey sometimes sloshed onto the unpainted wooden floor.

In 1919 few people referred to alcoholism as a disease. It was a moral failure, a willful dissoluteness. “Your father is a sot,” Dr. Houston told Elizabeth bluntly the afternoon she finally dragged her father to his office after a bout of coughing blood. “He's a drunk,” Dr. Houston went on, the voice of his time, “and he will remain a drunk until he makes up his mind to stop drinking.”

But Mr. Brennan couldn't stop, and so for endless hours he sat out on his porch, outrageously shirtless even in the fall, and sipped at his great brown mug until his eyes finally closed and the mug slipped from his fingers. Then Elizabeth would rush out to him, clean up the mess, rouse him into semiconsciousness, and with great effort maneuver his large hulking body back into the house.

They had moved from Boston, where Mr. Brennan had worked on the docks for many years. No doubt he had pilfered enough un guarded goods there to ease himself into a sodden retirement. “There was an air of lost criminality about him,” Elena wrote in
New England Maid
, “of small virtues abandoned for the larger one of survival. It was as if life itself had gnawed at him ceaselessly, stripping off the flesh, leaving only bare and shattered bone.” But along with these remains, there was a bit of spirit, too, and when Pastor James came around one morning in a reforming mood and asked him if he believed in hell, Mr. Brennan had the strength of character to reply, “You mean, after this one?”

The house they moved into was only a few blocks down Wilmot Street from our own. It was of modest size, though certainly large enough for two people. It had weathered gray shingles, white clapboard siding, and a dormered roof with one window for each of the two upstairs bedrooms. Mr. Brennan never bothered to furnish it with anything beyond the bare minimum required for human habitation. The living room had one hardwood-and-rattan occasional chair, one press-back armchair, and a single worn settee of more or less Shaker austerity. In his own room upstairs there was a simple metal bed and, oddly out of place, an enormous hall mirror chair upon which Mr. Brennan piled his clothes, leaving the tiny closet empty. There was a wooden half-bed in Elizabeth's room. It was painted light blue, and some sort of Polynesian jungle scene was carved into the headboard and painted in florid reds and greens. Several short barrister bookshelves stood against the walls, the volumes arranged neatly and catalogued by subject. The floors remained rugless, the windows curtainless. “That house was Mr. Brennan's monastery,” Elena once said, “and his god was gloom.”

All the work of this disordered household fell to Elizabeth, and she performed it with tireless dedication. She made the meals, dusted, mopped, poured the water from the ice chest, and swept the porch. And despite all this drudgery, she never appeared unhappy. Elena called her Jennifer in
New England Maid
, and said that for her “life was the grand rich uncle of whom one is never to ask a favor.”

Elizabeth's one great pleasure was reading, and in this her father fully indulged her. I would often see the two of them making their way to the Standhope Library, Elizabeth skipping ahead while her father trudged heavily behind in his baggy gray pants. He would wait for her outside the library, slumped on the steps, smoking a cigar or wiping his sweaty pink face with a dark blue handkerchief. He would wait for as long as necessary, listlessly staring down the street as if waiting for some signal to begin his life again. Then when Elizabeth finally came through the door, he would grasp the bannister and pull himself to his feet, sweep the large stack of books from Elizabeth's arms, and walk her safely home.

As might be imagined, Elizabeth's reading served her very well indeed. Most children in Standhope had little interest in learning more than was minimally required for progressing to the next grade, and so from the first day of her arrival at school, Elizabeth stood out from the rest. For her mind was not only quick but filled with a curious assortment of information that no one else seemed to have.

“She knows everything,” Elena told me excitedly after their first meeting.

I was aimlessly sitting on the front lawn. I looked up and saw that Elena was smiling very brightly.

“She knows the names of all the trees,” she added quickly, “and she knows about strange animals, too. Did you know there's a fish that lives in a cave and it's so dark that the fish don't have eyes?”

“Of course I knew that,” I said, lying through my teeth.

“You never told me about them,” Elena said. She looked offended, as if I had purposefully kept something from her.

I shrugged. “Why should I? They're just fish.”

“You should talk to Elizabeth sometime, William,” Elena insisted. “You really should. You'd like her a lot.”

I grunted doubtfully, then waved my hand, dismissing the idea.

“You could meet her this afternoon,” Elena said happily.

“Some other time,” I said. I began fiddling with a pair of goggles I had brought out into the yard. Recently I had become obsessed with the idea of becoming an aviator. I was thirteen years old, and while other boys my age were beginning to plan realistic futures for themselves, I was still locked in a childhood fantasy of airborne adventure. I dreamed of soaring over snow-capped Alpine heights or the steaming jungles of the Amazon, the wings of my plane banking left and right in the brilliant silver air. In 1934 Elena sent me a copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's
Night Flight
with a little note inside: “We should always remember, William, the obsessions of our youth.”

“I'm going over to visit Elizabeth right now,” Elena declared. “She invited me.”

“Go ahead,” I said as I continued to toy with the goggles.

“But you should come, too,” Elena said. “You should meet her. She's really nice.”

I placed the goggles on my head and pulled them down over my eyes.

“I don't need to meet her right this second,” I said. What, after all, could a little girl know about the complexities of that infant science, aerodynamics. “I don't need to talk to her. She's just a little girl.”

Elena gave me an accusing glare. “You don't even know her.”

“So what?”

“Please, William,” she said, grasping my arm.

I eased out of her grip. “Go yourself. You don't need me.”

“But I want you to meet her.”

Finally I relented, pulling the goggles from my eyes. “All right, but I don't want to stay very long.”

And so in the spring of 1919, I met Elizabeth Brennan for the first time. She was sitting in her yard with a notebook in her lap, sketching the trees across the way, though not very clearly — a haze of gray smudges over a few jagged black lines.

“This is my brother, William,” Elena said.

I nodded but said nothing.

Elizabeth did not look up immediately. First she scratched a few more lines onto the pad, then tilted her head back to get a broad view of her drawing. Her lips curled down. Then she glanced at me.

“You're tall,” she said.

I smiled manfully. “Yes, I am.”

Elizabeth eyed the goggles. “What are those for?”

“Aviator goggles. For a pilot.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “No they're not. Those are welders' goggles. Mechanics use them when they're welding.”

I could have kicked her. “Pilots use them too,” I declared.

Elizabeth shook her head again. “No they don't. They use a special kind. Those are just for welders, people like that.” She turned away from me, patted the grass beside her, and spoke directly — and exclusively — to Elena.

“Sit down,” she said.

Elena quickly dropped to the ground beside Elizabeth.

I remained standing, mortified.

“Aren't you going to sit down?” Elizabeth asked.

“I can't stay long,” I said stiffly.

“Sit down, William,” Elena said. “You don't have to go
right now.
”

I lowered myself to the ground opposite them and looked at Eliza beth. Just to make conversation I said, “Is your mother home?”

“My mother's dead,” Elizabeth replied in a voice as featureless as if she had told me nothing at all of consequence.

“Oh,” I sputtered. “I'm sorry.”

“She's been dead for about a year,” Elizabeth said.

“Well, I …”

She turned briskly to my sister. “That's a pretty blouse.”

“Thank you,” Elena said, beaming.

“What's it made of?”

Elena shrugged. “I don't know.”

Elizabeth touched the upper sleeve of Elena's blouse, rubbing a portion of it between her fingers.

“Do you know how to sew?” she asked.

Elena shook her head, her eyes downcast. “No.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I didn't think so. Want me to teach you?”

Elena's eyes brightened. “Would you?”

“Sure,” Elizabeth said easily. “Do you have a sewing machine?”

“My mother has one.”

Elizabeth smiled, then slowly brought her hand up to Elena's cheek.

“You're very pretty,” she said. “You have such a pretty face.”

In her short story “Desire,” Elena described this moment in her life, using the voice of an old woman remembering: “She leaned forward and I could see her hand rising. The fingers stretched out toward my face, tips raised, and pressed against my cheek delicately, as one might touch the canvas of a painting one has grown to love, the fingers sliding tenderly over the brush strokes, seeking the small rills and valleys within the structure of the whole.” Later the old woman walks out into the fields behind her estate and sees the face of the girl in the clouds: “As children, we could find figures in the sky by making the clouds roll and press inward to the shape that we desired. But the face I saw now was not fashioned by a cloud, did not merely occupy some small corner of the sky. It was an elemental force which drew the clouds into itself, shifting light and shadow until the portrait was fully drawn. And it was as if the face had taken the sky as but a canvas upon which to display itself, carving its own wild features with the brush strokes of the wind.”

When, after a moment, Elizabeth withdrew her touch, it was as if a line had been cut between them, a current shut off, and Elena seemed almost physically to slump backward.

I stood up immediately. “We'd better go,” I said to Elena.

Elena's eyes remained fixed on Elizabeth.

“You go ahead,” she said.

“You should come, too,” I insisted.

“No, you go on. I'll come later,” Elena said, still staring into Eliza beth's face.

Elizabeth stood up slowly, brushing bits of grass from her skirt.

“You'd better go with your brother,” she said to Elena. “I have to begin dinner, anyway.”

“But I can stay a little longer,” Elena said.

“Come back tomorrow,” Elizabeth said gently. She looked at me. “You can come back, too, if you want.”

She was not in the least contemptuous of me, but I felt contemptible in her eyes. The power she had over Elena was drawn from a strength that seemed mysterious, and therefore terrifying, something that had the force and authority of an older world. Suddenly the absurd goggles dangling from my hand struck me as being wholly infantile, as repulsive as a soiled diaper.