Elena by Thomas H. Cook
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 passion, and the only place he found it was in bed.” She was living in Paris by then, writing Inwardness, and passion must have been at the forefront of her mind, since at that time she was trying so passionately 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 breasts. “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 multitude 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 crêpe 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 passage 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 grass, 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 grass, 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 passion building but of passion spent.
Predictably, this passage came under close scrutiny when New England Maid was published in 1933. That a daughter could think of her mother in such overtly sexual terms was distressing to more than a few provincial critics: “Miss Franklin has in one particular passage 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 pornographer’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 noble 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 passage 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 Hampshire farm
It began rather subtly. Sometimes, for example, my mother would suddenly stop her stitching, 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 goddamn 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 glass, 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 glass.
“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 advertisement 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?”
“Damn 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 nobody 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
Elena leaned forward slowly and dropped her hands into her lap. “I don’t want Mother put in Whitman House,” she said.
“What?” my father asked. “Why not?”
“I can live with her here,” Elena said evenly. “William can go on to Columbia. Nothing should stand in his way. But I don’t want Mother put in Whitman House.”
“Elena,” I said hesitantly, “maybe you should just think about it, putting her in Whitman House, I mean. Look, she may never get any better, she might —”
“I don’t care if she doesn’t get any better,” Elena said. There was an edge of anger in her voice. “I will not go along with putting her in the asylum. We can live here together.”
“Well, what if you had trouble?” my father asked. “I mean real trouble of some kind. Something you couldn’t handle.”
“I have Elizabeth to help me,” Elena said. “And Mr. Brennan.”
My father nodded, then looked very pointedly at me. He knew what I should have done at that moment: at least volunteer to delay my entrance into Columbia. And he knew that I would not do it.
“What do you think, Billy?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Think Elena can handle her?”
“Maybe.”
He looked at Elena. “Are you sure, Princess?”
“Yes.”
My father left the next morning, dragging his big black traveling cases behind him. Elena and I watched from the window.
I remained in Standhope for another two months. During that time, Elena and I carried on all the work of the household. Mother began to improve, though only slightly. She never became truly sane again, though from time to time she was able to care for most of her needs, feed and dress and bathe herself. “The relationship of a wedge of lemon to a cup of tea, a slice of cheese to a soda cracker,” Elena wrote in New England Maid, “these were the connections of which my mother was aware. She had the simple view that the visible is real and the real visible. That her own fate might have been connected to that of millions in their turn, to vast structures into which she had not inquired, secular and religious authorities in whose enormous web she dully slept — that such complexity might touch the texture of her life, this was beyond my mother’s will to learn and understand.”