Elena

  In New England Maid, Elena wrote: “During the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, Standhope became a world in which every infirmity, even the slightest, most inconsequential cough, held the possibility of unparalleled ruin, in which life betrayed itself in death, leaving in its wake the shocked and helpless anger of unanticipated grief. Surely within the history of disease there is an unexplored human terrain that is made up almost entirely of rage.”

  During the next forty-eight hours, I moved in and out of the world with each beat of my heart. I can remember feeling that my body was being pressed down by huge weights, my lungs aching with each breath. “My brother drew life in with each inhalation,” Elena wrote, “and with each exhalation tried to drive it out again.”

  On the third morning of my illness, I awoke in a bed literally soaked with my own sweat. There was a terrific pounding behind my eyes and my head felt as if it were about to blow apart. I looked up and saw Elena sitting quietly beside my bed, her hands curled into her lap.

  “Hello, William,” she said. Her face was drawn, pale, terribly weakened, as if she had gone through the same illness I had.

  I lifted my hand to wave to her, and as I did so, a spurt of blood suddenly shot out of my nose, spilling across my bedclothes.

  Elena jumped to her feet and ran for my mother.

  Seconds later my mother dashed into the room, stared at the blood as if transfixed by it, and then shouted, “Clean it up, Elena! Clean it up!”

  Elena pulled the nightshirt from my body, and wiped my face with a wet cloth.

  “You’re going to be all right,” she said softly.

  I looked at her languidly, then dropped my head back on the pillow. In my half sleep, I could feel her stroking my face and hair, squeezing my fingers one by one, murmuring softly, “You’ll be all right, William. You will. You just have to.”

  None of us could have known it then, but that sudden burst of blood was the signal that my fever had finally broken and that I would surely live.

  I awoke again a few hours later. Elena was still sitting beside the bed.

  “Where’s Father?” I asked.

  “He’s not here,” Elena said. “We tried to reach him, but he wasn’t in the hotel he said he was going to be at.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes.

  In the final paragraph of the chapter of New England Maid that deals with the epidemic, Elena wrote: “My father could not be located during the critical illness of my brother. Because of that, an important experience was lost to him, the special joy of caring for a beloved person who is deathly ill, of soothing him with your voice, cooling him with water, loving him more now, at the edge of loss, than you have ever loved.”

  I have often wondered what my father must have felt when he read that.

  Within a week I was perfectly fit again, although still weak. Often I would sit on the front steps and watch the people pass. Elena usually joined me. She seemed preoccupied with having nearly lost me, forever going over how things would have changed if I had died.

  “Your room would be all empty,” she said on one occasion. “And I’d have to give the boat away.” She meant the Yankee Clipper I had laboriously constructed and which sat like a trophy on my bureau. “And your clothes, your ice skates — no one to use those.” She looked at me quizzically. “There’s only one of everybody. Only one.”

  I laughed. “Boy, that’s hot news, Elena.”

  She was only nine years old, and for her, I think, it was.

  Where does art begin? We do not know. For its first fruits are nearer to the end than the beginning:

  I go to places in the night,

  Full of terrors dark and bright,

  Into forests black and deep

  Through which I wander, stumble, creep.

  At last I wait until the light

  Reveals my courage or my fright.

  And then I toss and leap and whirl

  Till I return, a little girl.

  Elena wrote this poem when she was ten. Nothing she wrote after that more fully revealed her. “In the prologue,” as Elena wrote to Martha Farrell not long before she died, “is the coda.”

  And so I gave this poem to Martha after she first posed the inevitable question. We were sitting in the house on the Cape. To the right we could see the first buds in the flower garden Elena and Jason had planted together many years before. Martha was having a cooler, something made of white wine and seltzer. She was dressed in summery yellow pants and a white blouse, but her mood was deadly earnest.

  “I’m after that first spark of creativity,” she said, “that very first spark. Was she two or five or twelve? When?”

  “You mean when did she actually produce something?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was ten.”

  “And what was it?”

  “A poem.”

  “A poem. Really? Go on.”

  Elena was ten, and when I first read that strange poem about a threatening wood, I could not imagine that its author was my sister. She had handed it in to Mrs. Nichols, her fifth-grade teacher, and something in it so alarmed her that she came to visit my mother.

  I answered the door. Mrs. Nichols was wearing a dark blue dress which reached to her ankles. There was a thin line of white piping at the hem and collar, but otherwise the dress was quite plain. I remember how homely Mrs. Nichols appeared to me, even at this time in my life, when the humblest female form was beginning to inspire more than a little interest on my part.

  “I’m Mrs. Robert Nichols,” she said, “Elena’s teacher. You’re William, aren’t you?” She was speaking very rapidly. “I wonder if I might speak with your mother.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come in.”

  I walked into the kitchen and brought my mother out into the living room. She was wearing a loose-fitting house dress, and I remember feeling somewhat ashamed of her appearance.

  “This is Mrs. Nichols,” I told my mother.

  She said nothing; nor did she offer her hand. It had been perhaps a year since anyone had been to our house.

  Mrs. Nichols cleared her throat. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Franklin,” she said.

  “Pleased, too,” my mother said, almost in a whisper.

  “She’s Elena’s teacher,” I explained.

  Mother glanced about the room. “Where is she? Where’s Elena? Is she lost?”

  “Mrs. Nichols just wants to talk to you,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Nichols said quickly. I could tell by the apprehensive expression on her face that she already understood that poor Mrs. Franklin was one of nature’s oddities.

  “Why don’t you ask Mrs. Nichols to sit down,” I told my mother in a gentle coaxing voice.

  She responded by doing nothing at all. She simply continued to stare mutely at Mrs. Nichols. It had been so long since she had received a guest that she had no idea what to do with one.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Nichols,” I said. I pointed to a chair. “Over there.”

  “You sit there, Mother,” I said, again pointing to a chair.

  Both women took their seats.

  “Mrs. Nichols came to talk to you about Elena,” I reminded my mother.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Nichols said, “I did. It’s about a poem Elena wrote for a class assignment.” She pulled a piece of lined white paper from her purse and handed it to my mother. “This is the poem.”

  My mother took the paper from Mrs. Nichols and read it, her lips moving as she did so, a crude, ignorant gesture which Mrs. Nichols did not miss.

  When my mother had finished, she handed the poem back. “That’s nice,” she said happily.

  “Nice?” Mrs. Nichols asked, astonished.

  “It rhymes,” my mother explained. “It all rhymes.”

  Mrs. Nichols leaned forward, raising the pitch of her voice a bit, as if talking to a small child. “Mrs. Franklin, this poem disturbs me.”

  My mother stared at her dumbly.

  Mrs. Nichols rubbed her palms together. ?
??Disturbs me,” she repeated emphatically. “The violence, I mean, the underlying violence.”

  My mother nodded, but it was clear that she had not the slightest idea what the woman was talking about.

  Mrs. Nichols edged forward in her chair. “The poem is, well, it’s so full of violent things, dreadful things. And Elena is of such a tender age, as you know.”

  My mother blinked hard. “You think Elena feels bad, is that it?”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Mrs. Nichols said, relieved.

  “She’s sick?” my mother asked.

  Mrs. Nichols glanced at me helplessly, then looked at my mother. “Not exactly sick. It’s not like a stomachache. It’s something deep inside Elena, something that is disturbing her.” She tapped her fore head with her index finger. “Something in her mind.”

  “Mrs. Nichols means that Elena might be upset about something,” I explained.

  “Upset?” my mother asked. “What about?”

  “I don’t know,” Mrs. Nichols said, “but I have to tell you that Elena acts oddly sometimes. She daydreams quite a bit. She often stares out the window during class. She looks sullen. I’ve tried to break through to her, but I’ve not had much success.”

  I had often noticed Elena staring out the window, too, but her expression had never struck me as sullen. If anything, she looked thoughtful, contemplative.

  “Are you saying that Elena’s not normal, someway?” my mother asked.

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Franklin,” Mrs. Nichols said, growing more exasperated. “But that’s part of the problem, you see. Elena is very hard to know.” She shifted in her seat, and then went on. “I do think — I don’t want you to take this the wrong way; but I do think that Elizabeth Brennan is not the best influence on Elena right now.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Mrs. Nichols shot me a withering look. “I’m speaking to your mother, William.”

  I drew back in my chair.

  Mrs. Nichols turned back to my mother. “All the other children write about pleasant things,” she went on. “They write about swimming or ice-skating. Pleasant things. Do you see the difference between that and what Elena writes about?”

  My mother tilted her head to the left and said nothing.

  Mrs. Nichols looked at her sternly, unable to keep the severity from her face.

  “I don’t want to pry into your personal affairs, Mrs. Franklin,” she said, “but as a teacher, I thought it my duty to discuss these matters with you.”

  “Is Elena misbehaving someway?” my mother asked.

  Mrs. Nichols sighed. “No, Mrs. Franklin,” she said, “not in any particular way.” She stood up. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  My mother got to her feet and smiled brightly. “Thanks for coming,” she said. “And if Elena starts misbehaving, you let me know.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Nichols said dully. She looked at me. “Will you see me to the door, William?”

  I stood up and followed Mrs. Nichols out onto the porch. My mother was still standing in the living room looking puzzled when I closed the front door.

  Mrs. Nichols turned to me. A small breeze lifted the collar of her dress and she patted it down firmly.

  “I’m worried about your sister, William,” she said, “and I don’t think I made that clear to your mother. The nature of the problem, I mean.”

  “My mother has a hard time understanding things,” I told her.

  “And your father?”

  “He’s away a lot.”

  “I see,” Mrs. Nichols said dolefully. “I suppose it’s up to you, then.”

  “What?”

  “To speak with Elena,” Mrs. Nichols explained. She handed me the poem. “Read this, William, and talk to her.”

  I glanced down at the lines written in Elena’s tiny, strangely broken script. I could not imagine what all the fuss was about.

  “I leave it to you, William,” Mrs. Nichols said. “I’m sure you can explain things to Elena.”

  “Yes, I will,” I assured her.

  She smiled thinly, then walked quickly away.

  I looked down at the poem again and tried to discover what had so distressed Mrs. Nichols. I was still poring over it a few minutes later when Elena came walking up the street. She lifted her hand as she came up to me.

  I held the paper out to her. “Mrs. Nichols brought your poem back.”

  Elena did not seem in the least concerned. “Why?”

  “She didn’t like it,” I told her. “She didn’t like it at all.”

  “She likes Longfellow,” Elena said casually. “‘The Song of Hiawatha.’ That’s what she reads to us in class.” She lowered her voice, imitating Mrs. Nichols’s stentorian style of recitation. “Forth upon the Gitche Gumee. On the shining Big-Sea-Water. With his fishing …”

  “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 snatched 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 glass. “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 space, 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 passion 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 classroom, 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 assigned 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 banality, 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 pass 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 glasses.