Elena (6 page)

Elizabeth glanced at Mr. Brennan, slumped in his chair on the porch. He had fallen asleep and the brown mug had tipped in his hand, spilling whiskey across his thighs.

“I'd better go in now,” Elizabeth said.

Elena stood up. “I'll see you in school tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” Elizabeth said. Then she walked toward the house.

Elena's eyes followed Elizabeth's retreating figure. Watching her as she watched Elizabeth, I felt as if something of great value was seeping from my life. I bent down quickly and took Elena's hand. She turned toward me, surprised.

“Let's go home now,” I said.

Elena nodded. “All right.”

We walked together for a time, neither of us saying anything, Elena entirely absorbed in her newfound friend. Then, suddenly, she skipped away from me, and I was left shuffling along behind her, preoccupied now with a new sensation, that of being utterly alone.

A
dolescent loneliness is difficult for an adult to remember or imagine. I do recall, however, that for a time I had not the slightest notion of who I was, or what, in the end, I might become. There was only a sense of aimless floating to which was added an intense and bottomless desire, which, for all its feverishness, had no specific object, person or idea. It was just desire, naked and dimensionless, a need that coiled in the pit of my stomach and pulsed there like a second heart.

In this painful state I frequently took long walks, perhaps believing that I might finally pass through the border of my desire, leave it behind me like a road sign. Almost invariably, these treks ended at the gates of Whitman House, a mental institution where vast numbers of insane people were said to reside.

From the outside, Whitman House appeared tame enough. It was a graceful structure with a large portico supported by four high Doric columns. The road beyond the dark wrought iron gate was bordered with azaleas, and huge oak trees rose above it, shading the drive and lending it a peaceful, gentle aspect. Many years later I was reminded of Whitman House by the movie
Gone with the Wind
, when the camera rises above a rounded hill revealing Tara in the distance, cradled in a grove of trees. Elena was sitting beside me in the theater. She turned to face me, neither smiling nor frowning. “That's where Mother died,” she said.

There was a small park across from Whitman House, and at the end of my walks I used to sit down on one of the benches there and watch the people come and go. During visiting hours, the imposing gate was swung open and a steady stream of traffic moved in and out. Beyond the gate, visitors sometimes strolled casually with an inmate friend or relative, who always appeared vaguely baffled, as if still trying to discover that open window through which derangement had entered, soiling the carpet and leaving the carefully appointed room in disarray.

I still don't know what drew me to Whitman House, or why, of all the places in and around Standhope, I invariably retreated there. Certainly there was a morbid quality to my interest, the craven curiosity one feels outside the door of a brothel and which only fear or prudence can control. Perhaps I have always been attracted to the freakish and disordered because it is so powerful a counterpoint to my own life, rooted as it is, so utterly predictable. And yet I also feared Whit man House as a place where all the sturdy rules by which men live had somehow been set aside, that one abode on earth where, in Cowper's phrase, “Bacchanalian Madness has its charms.”

Consequently my dismay when one afternoon I saw Elena and Elizabeth making their way toward the open gate of the asylum.

I leaped up and bounded across the street, calling to them, my arm raised in frantic warning.

“Elena! Elizabeth! Where are you going?”

They looked at me without the slightest sense of anything unusual.

“We're going inside,” Elizabeth said matter-of-factly.

“You can't go in there,” I told them, “that's a nuthouse.”

Elena shot me a vicious look. “Elizabeth knows somebody in there,” she said hotly.

“My grandmother lives in that … what did you call it … nut house?” Elizabeth said.

My mouth dropped open. “Oh, sorry, Elizabeth.”

“That is why we moved to Standhope,” she added. “So we can visit her.”

“So, your grandmother, she's …”

“Old,” Elizabeth declared. “Very old. She can't look after herself. Once she set her house on fire in Boston. After that, we brought her down here.”

“She's just old, William,” Elena said. “That's the only thing that's the matter with her. Her mind is old.”

I was unaware of the varieties of madness. To me insanity simply meant explosive moods and terrible violence. I knew about mental retardation. Standhope even had one such person, the thirty-year-old son of Luther Coggins, whose nocturnal wanderings had been the subject of more than one town meeting. On one occasion, Dr. Houston, using the medical language of his time, had referred to him as “the Coggins imbecile.” I also knew that old people went “soft in the head.” But that they might also wind up in Whitman House was news to me. The “nursing home,” of course, had not been invented.

“She's senile,” Elizabeth said flatly. “But she's very nice and she doesn't hurt anybody.”

Listening to Elizabeth's quick defense of her grandmother made me feel like one of those irate and benighted villagers who, torch and rope in hand, demanded the gentle creature of Dr. Frankenstein's.

“I'm sure she is,” I said immediately.

“I come here once a week,” Elizabeth went on. “My grandmother likes to see me. I usually bring her something.” She lifted a beribboned box. “Chocolates.”

“Very nice,” I said.

“You want to come with us?” Elena asked.

“What? Me?”

“She likes to see new faces,” Elizabeth explained. “Elena's coming with me.”

I shook my head. “I'll wait for you out here.”

“What are you doing here, anyway, William?” Elena asked.

“I just sit around here sometimes,” I said.

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“To watch the insane people,” Elizabeth said.

“Like animals in a zoo,” Elena added in an accusatory tone.

“It's a nice little park, that's all,” I said.

Elizabeth's eyes bore into me. “If you're so interested in insane people, why don't you come in with us?”

It was an outright challenge, and with Elena standing there I had no choice but to take it up.

“All right,” I said boldly.

“You don't have to be afraid,” Elizabeth added.

“I said all right, didn't I?”

I stepped in front of them, gallantly leading the way. Whitman House loomed ahead but I kept a steady pace. There was, of course, nothing at all to fear, but I did not know that at the time and in my mind I saw the interior of Whitman House as a dark labyrinth of seamy hallways down which inhuman cries echoed continually, a world where muscular orderlies brutally wrestled murderous, popeyed lunatics to the floor.

“I guess your grandmother has her own room,” I said hesitantly.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. She was walking jauntily beside me, the box of chocolates nestled in her arms.

“Is her room near the front door?”

“No. Second floor.”

I could feel my skin tightening around my bones. What in the name of God had I gotten myself into?

At the entrance I stepped back, opened the door, and allowed Elizabeth and Elena to pass in front of me. They strode briskly into the building and trooped directly up to the receptionist's desk.

“Hello, Elizabeth,” the receptionist said. She appeared to be a nurse, dressed all in white, with a little peaked cap emblazoned with a red cross.

“Hello,” Elizabeth said. “I brought something for my grandmother.”

The woman behind the desk smiled benignly. “Well, you may go on up and give it to her, then.” She looked at Elena. “Who's your friend?”

“Elena Franklin. She lives down the block.”

The woman's eyes lifted toward me. “And the gentleman?”

“That's Elena's brother, William,” Elizabeth said.

I brought a stiff smile to my lips.

“Well, your grandmother is waiting,” the woman said. “I'm sure she'll enjoy seeing you.”

Elizabeth led Elena and me up a wide spiral staircase to the second floor, then down the hall, mercifully empty and silent, to her grandmother's room.

“Hello, Grandma,” Elizabeth said as she opened the door.

Elena and I followed in behind her and watched as she stepped up to her grandmother's bed.

The old woman was sitting upright, propped against two enormous pillows. Her eyes twinkled when she saw Elizabeth.

“Did Mama take you to the castle?” she asked.

Elizabeth nodded. “I brought you something.” She pulled the rib bon from the box and held it out. “Chocolates.”

Her grandmother took the box, lowered it to her lap, and stared at it a moment. The box was pale yellow and trails of small red rosebuds adorned the four sides. I still see chocolates adorned this way from time to time, part of the grace we have not lost.

“You can open it, if you want to,” Elizabeth said quietly.

The old woman wiped her mouth with her hand and glanced out the window.

“You can have a piece of candy now,” Elizabeth said.

A look of alarm suddenly passed over her grandmother's face. “Dogs'll get you if you don't watch out,” she said.

Elizabeth's eyes closed briefly, then opened. “I brought some people to see you,” she said, forcing a smile.

Suddenly her grandmother snatched the ribbon from Elizabeth's hand. “Gimme that,” she snapped. “I want it!”

“Yes, take it,” Elizabeth said quickly.

I felt Elena draw back toward me.

The old woman peered back down at the box of chocolates.

Elizabeth took a small white cloth from the table next to the bed and pressed it tenderly at the side of her grandmother's mouth.

Instantly she slapped Elizabeth's hand away. “Lily took it,” she said. “I don't have none.”

Elizabeth replaced the cloth on the table and looked at us.

“Sometimes she's better than this,” she said.

“It's all right,” I told her.

Then Elena stepped toward the bed. “I'm Elena,” she said.

The old woman glared at her irritably. “Lily took it, not you.”

“Lily was her younger sister,” Elizabeth told Elena in a whisper.

Elena's hand swept out in my direction. “This is my brother, William.”

I stepped forward haltingly. “Glad to meet you.”

She did not look at me. Her gaze fell back down toward the box.

“Want me to open it for you, Grandma?” Elizabeth asked. “It's chocolates. You like chocolates.”

“Teddy,” her grandmother muttered. She was still looking at the box, her fingers moving shakily along the line of rosebuds. “Teddy died. Daddy doesn't know.” She moved her hands over the edges of the box, then stopped, her eyes dwelling on her fingers. “Lily took the whole thing. I seen it.”

Elizabeth gently tugged the box from her grandmother's hands and opened it.

“Look, Grandma,” she said, lowering the box back into the old woman's lap. “Chocolates.”

Her grandmother stared aimlessly at the small, rounded candies. Her head slumped forward slightly.

Elena stepped back to my side and smiled sadly.

Elizabeth took one of the chocolates and delicately placed it near her grandmother's lips. The mouth opened and Elizabeth slid the candy in.

“It's good, Grandma,” she said.

The old woman munched slowly, her eyes still fixed on the box.

Elizabeth raised her hand and began gently stroking her grandmother's hair, her fingers gliding slowly up and down the long, wiry strands.

I glanced down at Elena, and something in her face held my gaze. She was watching Elizabeth and her grandmother intently, but it seemed to me that she was also watching the room — the texture of the drapery, the picture of a seascape that hung slightly askew above the bed, the iron railing of the bed itself, the quality of the light as it flowed through the window, silvering the air — all those small, almost invisible details that, as she would later write in
Quality
, “render unto some imagined space the wry and subtle poignancy of earth.”

W
hen it was over, they called it, rather romantically, “The Plague of the Spanish Lady.” It was the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19. It killed a half-million Americans, and various places responded to it in various ways. They closed the schools in New York, held court in the open air in San Francisco, distributed medicated masks to the entire population in Seattle.

In Standhope, however, we only waited, though with surprisingly little dread. I can remember Elena and myself standing in the school yard listening to a group of children singing the verses to a song that everyone thought extremely funny:

“I had a little bird and his name was Enza.

I opened the window and

In-flu-enza.”

For quite some time, the flu epidemic was something that only existed in the newspapers. The slumber of Standhope continued undisturbed. In the small schoolhouse only a few blocks from Wilmot Street, Elena worked at her multiplication tables or relentlessly practiced her penmanship, monotonously drawing the interlacing circles and parallel lines required by the Palmer method, while only a few doors away I struggled through Poor
Richard's Almanac
or marveled at the stately prose of the
Leather-Stocking Tales.

Then, rather suddenly, Jeremy Blake died. The effect of his death on Standhope was surprisingly severe. The war had ended only a short time before, and some people in Standhope were still wearing “To H–ll with the Kaiser” buttons when the Spanish flu struck. It seemed an unbearable affront, as if from now on we were destined to endure one mortal trial after another. I remember that Mrs. Farrington, the first-grade teacher, wept openly when she announced Jeremy's death to the class, and that even the mayor, surely one of the last men in Standhope to sport a handlebar mustache, looked broken and desolate at his funeral.