Elena. Part 7

Our room was at the front on the third floor, facing the esplanade. There were only two beds, but a cot had been wheeled in for Elena.

"Well, I'm bushed," my father said as he slumped down on one of the beds, still entirely dressed, even down to his shoes.

"You're going to sleep now?" I asked.

"You got an objection to that, Billy?"

I shrugged. "I guess not."

"Good," he said. Then he closed his eyes.

For the next hour or so, Elena and I sat and talked about the day. She talked about street signs and shop windows. She was astonished by how many accents she'd heard on Fifth Avenue. We could hardly imagine the deep foreignness that must preside in those more exotic quarters our father had described, Little Italy and Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

Finally, at around nine, we were both exhausted. Elena took to the cot and I pulled myself into the bed across from my father. He was still lying on his back, snoozing peacefully, the hip flask resting on his chest.

I don't know exactly how long I slept, perhaps an hour, perhaps four or five. I remember hearing my father as he walked out of the adjoining bathroom, slapping cologne onto his face and neck. Then he put his jacket on and quietly walked out of the room, gently closing the door behind him.

For a while I continued to lie on the bed, my eyes closed, my mind once more going through the adventure of the day. But my father's cologne gave the room a cloying, musty smell, so after a moment I got up, walked to the window, and opened it. It was then that I saw him. He was standing beside the fountain, his hands thrust deeply into his trouser pockets, as if searching for a coin. From time to time he would weave right or left, then lean back on his heel. He was in constant motion, either tugging at the cuffs of his jacket, glancing down to check the s.h.i.+ne of his shoes, fiddling with his tie, or checking his watch. He looked like a man who was waiting for something important. I could not imagine what it was.

She was wearing one of those fur-trimmed coat-dresses so fas.h.i.+onable at the time, and a felt hat. She was tall and walked very gracefully, with her head tilted upward. She approached him from behind, and when she reached him, she gathered her arms around his waist and threw her head back, laughing. He turned around, surprised, then threw his arms about her and lifted her off the ground. For an instant they only stared at each other. Then he kissed her.

I turned away, stricken, and then I realized that Elena was standing beside me, her eyes locked on the same unbelievable scene.

"Go back to bed," I told her sternly.

She shook her head. "No." She stepped closer to the window and stared down at the street. My father had drawn the woman under his arm and the two of them were walking away from the hotel.

"Where are they going?" Elena asked.

"I don't know."

We continued to watch them from the window. They were walking very slowly, arm in arm. Then, suddenly, my father spun around to face the fountain and tossed a coin into it. The two of them laughed and walked on, finally turning onto Fifth Avenue, where they disappeared around a corner.

In Elena's short story "The Tryst," two teenage girls hide a p.o.r.nographic magazine, and as the story progresses, this sordid act and their mutual involvement in it corrodes and finally destroys their friends.h.i.+p. In "The Keepers of the Flame," two hunters stumble upon the body of a woman both have known and of whose murder both might be accused. Together they burn the body, bury the ashes, and leave the woods. But from that time onward, they speak to each other only in dark corners, only in whispers. "No novelist of her generation," one critic wrote of Elena in 1975, "has so intensely explored the corrosive quality of a single lie."

On the trip back to Standhope, Elena and I sat together in the back seat, locked in silent collusion. My father must have been mystified by the dark mood that had come over his two children, a fifteen-year-old boy who watched him sourly and refused to join him in the front seat, and his daughter, only ten, who stared at him silently but with neither anger nor resentment. For Martha, the incident at the Plaza became the central thread by which she traced Elena's psychological development. She found the secret of my sister's character in that moment by the window: "It can perhaps be stated that Elena Franklin's intellectual honesty flowed from this first experience of moral corruption, her directness from an early experience of extreme deviousness." Thus does a saint sire a prodigal and a prodigal a saint.

But I remember that Elena's response to what she must have known about our father, though perhaps a bit more vaguely than Martha suggests, was very muted. For a time, she took her cues from me and remained chilly toward him. Certainly she knew that something was amiss, but perhaps she also sensed a more general disarray. In her short story "A Summer Trail," a young woman blithely strolls through a pastoral wood until she begins to feel something dreadful around her, a rustling in the brush, which "was not made by wind or falling twigs but which came from the core of the forest. I gazed down at a tangle of vines, which seemed to have lain there through the millennia, silent victims of some early s.h.i.+ftlessness and disorder. And it seemed to me that along this summer trail I had found my way to the center from which all else goes out and then goes wrong, this first garden, our unkempt Eden."

Part of that "unkempt Eden" was my father's infidelity. But to Elena it was only a small part. She forgave him almost immediately, and never took her forgiveness back. For all the criticism of him in New England Maid, this particular incident is left out. Martha explained this by praising Elena's reserve. But I think she left it out because it meant so little to her, and because by then she understood that her needs were not much different from her father's. "He didn't need a woman," she said to me once, "he needed pa.s.sion, and the only place he found it was in bed." She was living in Paris by then, writing Inwardness, and pa.s.sion must have been at the forefront of her mind, since at that time she was trying so pa.s.sionately to exclude it from her life.

For my part, however, I never forgave him. My father's shadow pursued me everywhere: to the town square where we had sometimes gone with Elena to listen to the band; to Thompson's Drugstore, where he had bought us ice cream and told us riddles; to McCarthy Pond where, at least occasionally, he had taken us to swim. Standhope became the stage upon which my father had acted out the parody of his familial love. I despised it.

There is little to be done with such tumultuous feelings. And although in time their extremity declined, a little ache of unforgiven insult remained in me, one that did not leave entirely until my father died.

Still, there was a positive element as well. For since I hated Standhope, I also became determined to leave it. The only question was how this might be done. For me, the only answer was college. Since I was anxious to prove myself, I thought of Yale, in New Haven, which was not too far away, and of Columbia, in New York, which I had at least glimpsed from my father's car. I could vaguely recall the look of the campus, its sense of a walled-in city, a configuration that, in my insecure state, powerfully appealed to me. And so, in the fall of 1923, nearly a year before I could actually have entered the college, I wrote to Columbia. Within a week or two, I received a letter politely instructing me in the correct procedures for application. I showed it to my sister immediately.

She was sitting in the little shed in the back yard, her feet drawn up under her, a book in her lap.

"I got a letter from Columbia College," I said excitedly as I stepped up to the door.

Elena glanced up from her book. She was thirteen years old but already looked more like a woman than a child. She was wearing a burgundy skirt and white pullover sweater, and I remember thinking that in only a little time she would no longer be the object of purely innocent attention.

"Let me see the letter," she said.

I handed it to her and leaned against the door while she read it.

"I guess you'll be going soon, then," she said matter-of-factly as she handed me back the letter.

"I guess so," I said, playing down my elation.

Elena smiled slightly. "You want to leave very much, don't you?"

"Maybe," I said. I stepped into the shed and sat down beside her. "It's probably a good idea to go away to college. You want to leave Standhope?"

"I don't know, William," Elena said. She closed the book and wrapped both her hands around it. "I don't know about me, about leaving Standhope. But I know about you. You'll go as soon as you can." She scanned my face as if, in some premature way, she was guessing at my destiny.

"I wish you could come with me," I said, though not truthfully. I was ready to strike out on my own now, tired of everything that reminded me of the last few years, even my sister.

Elena glanced down at the book. Her hair was longer than it would ever be again, the strands falling almost to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "In books things are always moving, people and time," she said, "but really, things are stuck sometimes, completely stuck."

I shrugged. "You can get stuck anywhere, even at Columbia College." I draped my arm over her shoulder and began to draw her close. But she pulled away, almost sharply, and walked back into the house. She never told me the cause of that sudden brittleness, and so I didn't understand until she wrote about it in New England Maid: "My brother had taken the first steps out of a life that had so long engulfed us both in its timelessness and tedium. He was leaving all that was flat and pale, moving into a mult.i.tude of colors, into a city where the sky lit up at night and the earth trembled beneath your feet as if on the edge of a new creation. So good-by to the elm and the willow, the stream and the pond, the peace that is like death. Good-by to a desert outpost on the New Haven line, to blowing dust and crackling leaves, to monotones and monochromes and me."

I think Elena must have hated me at that instant when she jerked herself from my embrace. I hope it was the only time she did.

In the late spring of 1924, I was accepted by Columbia College and told to present myself on Morningside Heights in September. I expected things to go smoothly from then on. I would drift through the summer in Standhope, then head for New York in the fall. But in June, my mother experienced an emotional crisis from which she never fully recovered. She had always been jittery, living as if she were standing on a high ledge, staring down at the traffic below, sometimes leaning toward it, but always drawing herself back in time. Elena described her in New England Maid: "She was a tall, thin woman, high-waisted and erect, her hair pulled tightly behind her head and bound in a bun. She favored long print dresses, hemlines to the ankle, and never in her life wore a petticoat of either silk or crepe de Chine. She had the body of a farm woman, tawny about the face and arms, thick necked and heavy footed, graceless but not plodding. For there was a contradictory quickness in her, one which spoke to other energies held deep within. Her eyes flashed within the oval of her slack and weary face, and her head sometimes jerked about, birdlike and anxious, distrustful of the crumbs held out to her."

Beyond all this, there was a certain sensuousness about her, which I never noticed until Elena graphically described it in what became a celebrated pa.s.sage of her memoir: In the heat of summer it became visible; never in the winter or the fall. It rose to the surface of her face like a layer of warm, moist air. Suddenly the brown, weathered face took on a kind of tropical intensity, a lushness about the mouth and eyes. She would stretch out beneath the grape arbor upon a sheet she had taken from the line, kick off her shoes, and lie back, her arms spread out from her body as if floating on the gra.s.s, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. This was the only luxury she knew - the shade beneath the arbor, the sweetness of the grapes, the coolness of the gra.s.s, the crispness of the sheet beneath her. She would rest in this dreamy state for hours, languidly accepting a gift her husband had refused, the sense not of pa.s.sion building but of pa.s.sion spent.

Predictably, this pa.s.sage came under close scrutiny when New England Maid was published in 1933. That a daughter could think of her mother in such overtly s.e.xual terms was distressing to more than a few provincial critics: "Miss Franklin has in one particular pa.s.sage of unprecedented tastelessness transformed her mother from the hardworking and thrifty lady she no doubt was into the lolling figure of a sultan's concubine," was one response. "New England Maid should only be read behind the green shades of the p.o.r.nographer's shop," declared another. Still another was somewhat more temperate: "It is one thing for Mr. Freud to deal with intimate matters as a matter of science, and even for Mr. Lawrence and Miss Radclyffe Hall to deal with them in literature. But surely to allow such unwholesome preoccupations to besmirch the n.o.ble tradition of the memoir tests the limits of our liberal age." In this, of course, the critic recalled the reticence of Montaigne but conveniently forgot the candor of Augustine.

For my own part, I was somewhat disturbed by the pa.s.sage when I first read it in 1932. I had always seen my mother as something of a drudge, helplessly tied to a wandering husband and two children whose characters and ambitions were entirely different from her own. As she declined further and further, I saw her madness as inevitable. After all, my grandmother had ended her days more or less locked in the back room of a New Hamps.h.i.+re farmhouse. Madness was something to which the Mayhews had always been disposed. Even so, I could not have predicted that my mother's long-standing nervousness and befuddlement would reach such severity.

It began rather subtly. Sometimes, for example, my mother would suddenly stop her st.i.tching, glance toward the window, and absently allow her embroidery to slip to the floor. At other times she would stand at the sink, her fingers poised above the water, and watch the back yard as if it were about to move. By early summer, her daydreaming had worsened into what Martha calls "acute withdrawal." In the middle of the afternoon, my mother would unexpectedly walk to her room, close the door, and remain there until the next morning. Left to ourselves, Elena and I would fix dinner, and Elena would leave a plate for my mother in her room. Normally the food would be eaten by the next morning, when Mother would emerge casually from the bedroom with the empty plate in her hand.

By summer's end, however, even the most routine elements of life no longer existed for her. She neglected all her household duties. She would not wash herself and sometimes wore the same filthy dress for days. She began to mutter to herself, though never loudly enough for either Elena or me to understand a word of it. She was clearly edgy, irritable, but for the most part she remained silent, spending her days in her dark bedroom, where she felt, I imagine, some sense of peace and safety.

The question, of course, was what to do about all this. Elena and I discussed it quite often during those early days of our mother's illness. No solution emerged, however. At least, not until our father returned home in the middle of June. He had been gone for almost six weeks, our only contact with him those checks which were always in the mailbox each Wednesday, "the little love notes from Father," as Elena once called them.

It was a sweltering day, that Tuesday in June, when he pulled into the driveway. He bounced out of the car, then wiped his neck with a dark blue silk handkerchief.

"How you kids doing?" he asked brightly as Elena and I walked out onto the front porch to greet him. "Hot enough for ya?" He dug his fists into his sides and pivoted slowly, belly thrust out - a little potentate surveying his tiny estate. "Place looks good. Keep the lawn mowed real good, Billy."

I nodded. "I'm surprised you noticed."

He knew very well this was a dig, but he never allowed me the satisfaction of acknowledging it. "Let me tell you something, Billy," he said loudly, "these old eyes see all."

Well, those old eyes had not seen one thing: our mother prostrate on her bed in the middle of the afternoon. Elena, however, intended for him to see, and she got to the point immediately.

"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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s.

"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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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?"

"d.a.m.n 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 n.o.body 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.