Elena (14 page)

I stepped back. “What do you mean?”

“You think being alone with Mother was a terrible burden for me?” Elena asked. “It wasn't. It was a great release. Mother's insanity gave me all the freedom I could have wished for in Standhope.”

“You're joking.”

Elena shook her head. “No.”

“But all the work, all that daily drudgery. What about that?”

“The freedom was worth it,” Elena said firmly.

Suddenly I remembered that in one of Elena's poems, “Nocturne,” a young owl realizes with infinite delight that it is released, rather than constricted, by the night.

“But all the work fell to you,” I insisted. “Just living in that house all the time, it must have been dreadful.”

“I didn't live there all the time.”

“You didn't?”

“No.”

“Where on earth did you live?” I asked, astonished.

“I went traveling.”

My mouth dropped open. “Traveling? With whom?”

“With Father.”

“Traveling with Father? And what, if I may ask, did you two musketeers do with Our Lady of the Blank Stare during this time?”

Elena turned and began walking down the beach again. To her left a horseshoe crab glided along in the shallow water, looking like nothing so much as a discarded implement of medieval war.

“What did you do with Mother?” I repeated.

“Father knew a man named Bishop,” Elena said quietly. “Bishop stayed with her. Never for more than a few days at a time of course, but I think he brightened her life a little.”

“And so you and Father went on the road together.”

Elena nodded. “Yes, for a few days at a time.”

“And stayed at all the best places, I suppose?”

Elena shook her head. “We stayed in pretty seedy places, William. He had to save all his money. Columbia wasn't cheap, for you or me. He paid for us both. It wasn't easy.”

“Don't try to make him out a saint.”

“I never would,” Elena said determinedly. “But we're both too near the end to keep up any sort of charade. You've always believed that I had an awful time of it while you were at Columbia. I just wanted you to know that quite the opposite was the case.”

“You were the Isadora Duncan of the toiletries trade, aye?” I asked with a laugh.

Elena's face remained very serious, as did her voice. “I saw a little of the world, more than you thought I'd seen by the time I left Standhope,” she said. “A great deal goes on in those little roadside cafés and honky-tonks, William. People drink and dance and gamble. They take what they can out of life.”

I looked at her knowingly. “He was a gambler, wasn't he. That's where those sudden bursts of money came from.”

Elena nodded. “Yes,” she said. “And when we were on the road together, I'd sit at the table with him. I was his Lady Luck.”

“A tinhorn Gatsby, my father. The mystery man.”

“He lived in a free state, William.”

“And you were out there, taking it all in,” I said.

“He never put pink ribbons in my hair,” Elena said. “He was a good father to me because he treated me like a son.” In her short story “Stigmata,” a daughter is mysteriously aware of each time her father bleeds.

I laughed, though a bit self-consciously. “And what about you, Elena, were you a roadside tart?”

Elena laughed too, finally, and shook her head. “Hardly.” Then, very suddenly, her face grew almost wistful. “There was a young man named Fletcher. He had slick hair and was a terrific mimic. He could even do Father. You know, the way he throws his head back after he tells one of those salesman jokes. Fletcher could mimic that perfectly. He made me laugh. He was very kind. He told me that he knew he'd never do for me, that there'd be someone else in the end, someone very different from himself, that he was just an escapade.”

“Which is what he was?”

“Yes, I suppose,” Elena said. “But I can still remember him very well, just as I can remember the sound of roadsters skidding along and beef patties hitting an open grill, that sort of thing.”

We walked on for several yards, neither of us speaking.

“The really good part,” Elena said finally, “was that after a few days on the road, I'd be back in Standhope with Mother. I would have this solitude after the road. I could just think about all that had happened, relive it, but a step removed.”

We walked the rest of the way to the jetty in silence. Then Elena climbed up on the first stone.

“Surely you're not going to walk out on this thing,” I protested.

“Yes, I am,” Elena said. She took a few more steps, the great shawl blowing slightly.

“Be careful, Elena,” I said. “I don't want to lose you to the tide.”

Elena eased herself around to face me. “When are you leaving for New York?”

“Very soon,” I said. “We barely have time to walk back to your house.”

“Give my regards to David.”

“I will.”

“Good,” she said softly.

“You could come with me, if you like,” I said.

Elena shook her head. “No. I'll stay here for now.” She raised her arms, cradling herself with them, looking rather young despite the shimmering white hair. “I hear there's snow coming up the coast,” she said, turning toward the bay.

She remained a moment with her back to me, then eased herself around once again. “Do you remember that line in Jason's autobiography? The last one, I think.”

“No.”

“I've always liked it. It's so honest.” Then she quoted it: “Death completes no circle save the most banal.”

I left her about an hour later, flew to New York, and by afternoon I was at Columbia, making my way toward Earl Hall, where David was to meet me. It was snowing quite hard by then and the wind was tossing it about in a powdery extravagance. I stopped for a moment, looked about, and it struck me with curious urgency that I was old now, that most of it was over, and that to be old was to feel that you, yourself, were disappearing, becoming mist, shadowy and insubstantial, that with but a little effort you could pass through walls. I glanced up at the dome of Low Library, then down to the right at Butler, which had long ago replaced it, at all those names carved across that building's face, Sophocles and Cicero and the rest, and I thought, This much we have saved in our passing. And I was overcome by so intense a joy that the modern age would no doubt call it sexual, but which was only the deepest gravity and care.

A few minutes later, I entered Earl Hall and found David sitting in the corner, sipping tea from one of those china cups. He asked if I had had a pleasant flight and I told him that I had. Then he asked how Elena was, and suddenly all of it came together, the embrace on her porch, the way she had held it a beat longer than in the past, the long walk by the bay, that last reference to Jason's memoir. “She's dying,” I said, and David's eyes fell toward his cup, while mine fled toward the window and the snow.

NEW ENGLAND MAID

E
lena came to New York in September of 1928. I sat beside her on the train from Standhope. She was elegantly dressed in clothes my father had bought her, a lovely black dress with a velvet collar. She spoke very little during the journey in, and only rarely glanced up from the story she was reading, “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

I didn't try to engage her in idle chitchat. I knew she was subdued. I also knew why. Only a week before, she had finally agreed to have our mother installed in Whitman House.

It took almost the entire morning to get Mother ready for the short ride to the asylum. The task had fallen entirely to Elena, and in
New England Maid
she called it “the woman's work of my mother's commitment.”

For our part, my father and I stood staunchly outside these female labors. My father smoked absently as he slouched in the chair by the living room window. I watched him coldly from the swing on the front porch.

Just before we left, and with Father already calling impatiently from the front porch, I walked to Mother's room and opened the door.

“Are you nearly ready, Elena?” I asked.

Elena was standing behind our mother, both of them facing the mirror that hung from the door of the armoire.

“Almost ready,” Elena said. She was combing my mother's hair, her face nearly expressionless, except for the gentleness in her eyes. “Look at her,” she said. “She's still beautiful isn't she, William?” I nodded my head and looked away, then walked distractedly down the hallway. But Elena must have remained for a time, must have turned back to the mirror. For in
New England Maid
she wrote: “As we were about to leave, I sat down beside my mother, both our faces held in the oval womb of her looking glass. We were two women, one older, one younger, one declining toward a final nakedness, stripped of everything but a pulse and the small, unconscious will that commands it; and the other, with all her life before her, and yet made strangely old by this scene of helpless and belated care, made aware, as if by symbol sprung to life, of that most wintry of all human themes: that all our goodness comes to us too late.”

We drove to Whitman House in my father's sedan, the autumn leaves rushing before the car while he whistled the Marine Hymn, his arm flung jauntily out the window, as if he were doing no more than dropping off a package at the post office. “Your mother'll have a nice room here,” he said. That was his first and last word on the subject of my mother's welfare. From then on, he paid the bills involved with her commitment, but he never really spoke of her again.

Elena sat in the back seat, her hands enfolding my mother's, as if they were the only remaining part of her to which she could still offer a kind of mute protection.

The actual business of my mother's commitment was over in only a few minutes. My father completed that task by writing a check and handing it to the nurse at the front desk. “That'll do until next month, right?” he asked. The nurse nodded slowly, and my father briskly pranced out of the building. Elena always believed that that quick exit was something in him finally breaking, a little wave of remembered love washing him out the front door before anyone could see it but himself.

Elena and I lingered in the building for a while after my father had left. We stood like two helpless bystanders as a rather stout orderly gently guided our mother down the hallway. “She went passively,” Elena wrote in
New England Maid.
“Dressed in a dark skirt and a neat gray jacket, the orderly's hand politely clasping her elbow, she looked like a sturdy professional woman who had come to inspect the madhouse for the Ladies' Aid Society.”

But she was more than that to my sister, and in the final passage on her in
New England Maid
, Elena attempted a summation, however fumbling, of our mother's life: “She was one whose mind had become the shadow play of all that she had lost, her womanhood so hollowed out that not even the sense of nurturing remained, only a wifery that was no more than habit turned to stone. Wounded early, and never quite restored, she lived as one made luckless by her sex, her station, and her blood. In this, she rose beyond all easy designations to plead the wider passion of her case.”

Elena could always love you more, as Jason Findley said, once she loved what you stood for in her mind.

Only a week after our mother's commitment, Elena and I stood in the railway station in Standhope, waiting for the New York train. She was wearing a long blue coat, and her hands were tucked into a fur muffler.

“Sort of dingy in here, isn't it,” I said.

Elena glanced about the station. There was dust on the windows and some of them were cracked. A large gray cat, bloated with unborn kittens, twisted about on a soiled cloth near the charred but empty hearth. It was early fall, and the colors of the leaves beyond the station house were extravagantly bright, so that Elena's face, as she stood by the window, was framed by a brilliant canvas, fiery as the reds of Delacroix.