Elena. Part 6

"She likes Longfellow," Elena said casually. "'The Song of Hiawatha.' That's what she reads to us in cla.s.s." She lowered her voice, imitating Mrs. Nichols's stentorian style of recitation. "Forth upon the Gitche Gumee. On the s.h.i.+ning Big-Sea-Water. With his fis.h.i.+ng ..."

"It's not funny, Elena," I said sternly. "She came over here to speak with mother."

"About the poem?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"She said it was bad, disturbing," I told her. "She said there were a lot of strange things in it."

Elena looked entirely puzzled. "Strange? She said strange?"

"That's right. It was so bad she came all the way over here to talk to mother. She looked pretty upset, too. Mrs. Nichols, I mean."

Elena watched me quizzically but said nothing.

"You'd better be careful what you write, Elena," I said. "Mrs. Nichols has her eye on you."

"But it's just a poem," Elena said.

"Mrs. Nichols doesn't think so," I said emphatically. "She thinks you shouldn't write - about black forests, creepy things like that."

For a moment, Elena seemed unsure of what to do. She took the poem from me and read it. Then she looked up. "All right," she said wearily. "I'll write something else next time." Then she walked into the house.

I went for one of my long walks, then returned home around sundown. Elena was still in her room. I knocked on her door.

"Come in," she called.

Elena was sitting on her bed, a pad in her lap, a pencil in her hand. She held out the pad to me. "Maybe this is better."

There was a poem written on it: I like vacations very much.

I like to feel and smell and touch The flowers that grow straight and still At the top of some old hill.

I think that they are best in spring.

That's when vacations are the thing.

"Do you like it?" Elena asked.

"It's fine."

Elena s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper from me, crushed it in her hands, and threw it violently across the room.

"It's stupid!" she blurted vehemently.

I shrugged. "It's just a poem. What difference does it make?"

Elena shook her head. "Go away, William," she said. Then she pointed to the door. "Go away."

Martha nodded appreciatively after I had finished my story.

"Ah, so Elena was suppressed," she said.

"Suppressed?"

"Her creativity. It was suppressed," Martha explained. She took a sip from her gla.s.s. "That's the trouble with bureaucratic education. It's incapable of dealing with exceptional children, so it suppresses them.

I nodded. "Perhaps."

"Have you read Katz's critique of nineteenth-century school reform?"

"No."

Martha shook her head. "Terrible what that system was designed to do. Not to educate at all." She smiled. "I can deal with that in Elena's biography. The school she attended was based on a nineteenth-century model."

"I see."

"A school system like that simply can't deal with a gifted child."

"What system can, Martha?" I asked quietly.

She tried to answer, tried conscientiously to answer, calling forth a wealth of learning I could not help but admire. But in the end I was left with Elena, the image of a piece of paper crushed in her hand, of her arm flinging it through s.p.a.ce, and it seemed to me that Mrs. Nichols mattered no more to Elena than the school system Martha was excoriating; that there exists a kind of person who cannot be stopped so easily in his course, the sort for whom pa.s.sion is not so much an energy as a fate.

I suppose Elena felt betrayed in what we later referred to as "the affair of the poem." I had joined the other camp, that chorus of voices cheering for a scrubbed and polished world. She was left with only one ally: Elizabeth.

They spent almost all their time together now, the two of them shrinking from my approach. I often heard their voices in the shed out back, or behind the bedroom door, which Elena now kept closed to me.

Of course, I was not the only victim of their exclusiveness. Poor Mrs. Nichols suffered far more than I. Elena and Elizabeth launched a conspicuous campaign of silence against her. They sat at the back of her cla.s.sroom, arms folded over their chests, eyes staring straight to the front of the room, never speaking unless called upon directly. They did the standard exercises well enough and always read what was a.s.signed them. But when asked to produce a poem or a short story or an essay - something, that is, of their own creation - the two of them would conspire to produce works of frightening ba.n.a.lity, singsong verses about bluebirds, for example, which went on for page after ludicrous page. Sitting morosely in the front room, I would hear them giggling uncontrollably over their latest creation, and often, when they finally emerged from Elena's room, they would quickly pa.s.s out into the yard without so much as a glance in my direction. I was fifteen years old and should have had a life of my own. But I didn't, and so their scorn stung me. Tall, lanky, inhumanly shy, I was plagued by an awkwardness that accompanied me everywhere, an invisible demon forever tripping me in public places or turning over water gla.s.ses.

All of this - the loneliness, the sense of being hopelessly awkward and unattractive, the unmistakable scorn of my sister and Elizabeth - produced in me a self-loathing I could not escape except in fantasy. And so I dreamed of friends.h.i.+p and communion, of some wild boy from a distant land. I imagined him as having a dark complexion and fiery black eyes, telling tales of Krishnapur in a voice accented with that exotic place. Together we would discover a world of dark, vaguely sensual adventure. He would summon forth my self-confidence, dismiss my self-hatred, laugh all my pain away.

This wild boy never came for me, but from time to time I can still see him, dancing at the edge of McCarthy Pond or swinging from the limbs of the enormous elm that shaded our front lawn. He was the piece still missing, as Elena once described it, from the puzzle of my life.

Which is not to say, of course, that my childhood offered no adventures. The first one, I suppose, the very first, was a trip to New York.

I was sitting on the front steps when my father pulled into our driveway in a new car. Elena instantly came out of the house, with that look of eagerness she always had when she saw him in those days.

The car was a Wills Sainte Claire, a long, sleek convertible with a silver eagle hood ornament. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life, and it seemed to me that my father had somehow found the secret to happiness: a life of high-cla.s.s vagabondage.

I quickly got to my feet and raced toward him. Elena leaped off the porch behind. My father's arms spread out to her.

"How ya doing, Princess?" he said happily as he swept her up. "Missed you." He kissed her, then returned her to the ground.

"It's a great-looking car," I said excitedly.

My father smiled. "You bet it is, Billy," he said. He s.h.i.+fted his straw boater to the right. "d.a.m.n thing's got sixty-eight horse in the engine." He stepped proudly to the front of the car and slapped the hood. "It's got a two-hundred-sixty-seven-cubic-inch displacement. Spitting to go, every inch of her. Salesman said it was modeled after a Spanish power plant."

My mother walked out onto the porch and eyed us warily. The very sight of her seemed to dampen my father's mood.

"Wanna come out and give her a look?" he asked lamely.

My mother ma.s.saged her hands under her wet dishcloth, then walked back into the house.

My father smiled at Elena. "What do you think of her, Princess?"

"It's wonderful," Elena said. "It's so s.h.i.+ny."

"I'll tell you what's wonderful," my father said, "New York is wonderful. And that's where we're going. This car and you, Elena, and you, too, Billy, and me to do the fancy driving."

Elena and I stared at each other, stupefied.

"Well, you want to go, don't you?" my father asked grandly.

"Sure!" I said excitedly.

"Good," my father said. "I'll just step inside and clear things with your mother."

He dashed into the house and emerged a few minutes later with a single overnight bag.

"Got all your stuff in here," he said. "Okay, let's go."

"What about Mother?" Elena asked.

My father tossed the bag into the rumble seat, then looked at her. "You coming or not, Princess?"

Without the least hesitation, Elena leaped into the car. I walked around to the other side and took a seat in the front next to my father.

"Ain't this buggy swell?" he crooned. He glanced toward the house. My mother stood at the window, her fingers tugging gently at her lower lip. He frowned slightly, then glanced back at Elena. "You got to give a little something to life," he muttered, "if you wanna get something back."

Once on the road, my father grew extraordinarily expansive. He prattled on about trips he had made in the past, and it was quite a few years before Elena and I realized how much of what he told us was untrue. He spoke of Paris, London, Rome, compared their food and traffic. His descriptive information came from the travel brochures we often found nestled among the clothes in his open travel bag. Thus London was "a foggy town." Paris was "a city of lights." Rome had seven hills, which, he said, made the traffic problem there "a real bottleneck." Amsterdam was aglow with tulips, but you had to watch yourself walking around Venice, because the streets were filled with water, and who would want to tumble in. "A work of the imagination," Elena would later write in Quality, "first requires the discipline of fancy." My father never learned that discipline.

We reached New York in about two hours, approaching it from the Connecticut sh.o.r.e, old U.S. 1, the back door of the city, winding first through Yonkers and the Bronx, then finally across the Harlem River to Manhattan.

"We'll take the Broadway route downtown," my father said a bit boastfully, demonstrating how well he knew what was to us a mythic city. Elena, sitting wide-eyed and awestruck in the back seat, took it all in, and she described it later in New England Maid: "We entered Manhattan by way of the old settlement the Dutch called Haarlem, but which, by 1920, when I first saw it, was a sprawling Negro reservation, a sweeping grid of dense, noisy streets, which to white eyes must have looked very gay indeed, gay and eccentric with its conk parlors and skin-bleaching emporiums, the blinking lights of the Apollo and the Savoy, the knot of Negro children 'street fis.h.i.+ng' with pole and string, trying to retrieve a lost coin from the sewer." Such startling juxtaposition of the frivolous and grim runs throughout Elena's description of our journey through Manhattan that morning. But none of this darker appreciation was visible in her face then. She simply looked like a child whose mind was fiercely engaged in a.s.similating a rush of foreign data.

"And that's Columbia," my father announced, pointing to the left as we cruised down Broadway. I looked up and saw the rounded dome of Low Library.

"Maybe we should stop around here, have a highball, something like that," my father said.

We parked near a small soda shop only a few yards from the bustle of the Broadway trolleys. My father ordered three egg creams, a drink he said we must try, and we found seats at a table near the front window. I remember that the place was very cramped, that an advertis.e.m.e.nt for Alois Swoboda's conscious evolution system was taped to the wall, and that at a nearby table two earnest Columbia students were discussing the regatta with Cornell, which was soon to be run on Lake Cayuga.

"Ain't this a h.e.l.luva town?" my father asked with an enormous smile.

Elena nodded and sipped her egg cream. "I like it here," she said. To the very end she would insist that her decision to leave Standhope and move to New York had been the single greatest one of her life. "Otherwise I might have remained - and in more ways than geographical - exactly where I was put down," she wrote in a letter to Martha Farrell, "another coin resting at the bottom of the pool."

After our brief refreshment, we continued on our way. My father drove us past St. John the Divine, which was still under construction, then swung west to Riverside Drive and took a short detour past Grant's Tomb, and below it, in the river, Fulton's s.h.i.+p, the Clermont, which served as a fas.h.i.+onable tavern in those days.

"He shot himself, didn't he?" my father asked me tentatively. "In the jaw? President Grant, I mean."

I shook my head. "No, Father."

My father fixed his eyes on the road. "Facts aren't everything, Billy," he muttered, somewhat irritably.

We moved southward along the western edge of Manhattan until, at Fifty-ninth Street, my father turned left and we headed across town. Elena, still in the back seat, gazed about hypnotically. In New England Maid, she wrote: "The effect was kaleidoscopic, beautiful and amazing, especially to a mind as untutored and isolated as mine. For if all of this existed but two hours from Standhope, then what wonders lay four hours from it, ten, sixteen, twenty? If this wonder were New York, then what sights might strike us blind in Istanbul, how much gold on its towering spires, how long the lines around its public wards?"

At the southeastern corner of Central Park, my father grandly wheeled the Wills Sainte Claire up to the entrance of the Plaza Hotel.

"We'll stay here tonight," he said. Then he smiled and nodded to an enormous mansion just across the street. "You know, next door to old Connie Vanderbilt."

I looked over at the mansion, so very beautiful and remote behind the great iron gate and the circular drive.

"You mean people live there?" Elena asked. "That's a house?"

"Sure is," my father said. "And we're staying right next door."

Within a few minutes, my father had completed all the business of registering us. Elena and I had waited near the tea garden, too stunned to speak, watching the elegant men and women drift in and out of the lobby, carried, as they seemed, on air.

"Well, how about a walk," my father said as he came up from behind. He dropped his arm onto Elena's shoulder. "Feel up to it, Princess?"

"Sure."

"Well, let's give the legs a little work, then. And maybe after dinner we'll give them a rest, maybe take a victoria through the park like all the newlyweds do."

We walked out onto the street. It was late in the afternoon but people were everywhere, strolling along the sidewalk or sitting idly along the rim of the Pulitzer fountain.

"Let's head downtown," my father said. "Maybe find a restaurant, have an early dinner." He glanced at his watch. "I want to get back early, you know?"

"And so it was the good fortune of my brother and myself," Elena later wrote, "to stroll down a Fifth Avenue that would disappear within a decade, an avenue of stately, doomed mansions: Vanderbilt's Renaissance chateau, the Florentine palazzo of Collis Huntington, and last of all, that curious reproduction of Fontainebleau, whose wrought iron palisade was ordered sunk into the sea and thus preserved from man's vulgar desecration, though not from that of the sea snake and the shark."

We walked all the way to the library at Forty-second Street that afternoon, pa.s.sed the great churches, St. Patrick's and the Collegiate, the few fas.h.i.+onable men's clubs that still dotted the avenue in those days, and that enormous array of expensive shops, one of which, I recall, was offering a rather risque item, an "overnight case" for women.

Still, for all the elegance of the avenue, as Elena later wrote, it was the people who most fascinated, for they were unlike anything my sister or I had ever seen. Especially the women, who were entirely different from those in Standhope, their hair cut short and tucked under those tight-fitting toque hats so popular at the time, their eyebrows plucked into sleek thin lines, then penciled in for even more striking effect, their shoulders draped in mink or silver fox, their bodies made straight by dresses designed specifically to conceal their waists. "They did not, in 1920, appear precisely as those flappers on Easter Eve painted by John Sloan," Elena wrote in New England Maid, "but the spirit of that later rebellion was already rising as surely as the hemline of their skirts."

My father looked rather tired by the time we made it to Forty-second Street. Evening was falling over the city by then, though the frantic activity along the avenue had not in the least diminished.

"You know, that little snack uptown didn't quite do the trick," my father said, patting his belly. "Why don't we get a bite between here and the hotel."

As it turned out, we "got a bite" at a small but rather elegant restaurant a block or so from the Plaza. The atmosphere was very gracious: round tables with white tablecloths, cut flowers in crystal 59 vases, a pianist at the back of the room gracefully offering selections from his lightly cla.s.sical repertoire.

I suppose we looked rather odd, seated around that table. My father's stud pin, winking under the chandelier, must have been a disquieting touch for the waiter, as was Elena's wrinkled blue dress and my scruffy shoes. Still, he treated us with great politeness, conveniently looking away as my father poured a bit of whiskey from his hip flask into the teacup.

My father ordered a steak. I followed his lead. Elena asked about trout amandine, however, and after the waiter had explained it to her, she ordered it.

My father smiled. "That'll be a new experience for you, won't it," he said to her. "Fish with nuts." She said that it would. And then something very somber swam into his face, and he leaned toward her, and he said, "I love you, Elena. I always have." He did not look at me, did not give me the slightest glance.

We finished dinner quickly. My father was never one to linger in a place. He offered dessert, but we could tell that he really didn't want to be taken up on it. He wanted to leave, to get back to the hotel.