Elena (2 page)

She owned time, and night meant nothing to her. She raged against the way it confined and limited her, and for hours I would lie in my bed listening to the tiny squeak of the rocking chair as my mother tried to soothe Elena into the sleep she hated.

Elena had nothing to recommend her. She slobbered her food out of both sides of her mouth, dirtied herself almost hourly, was always sticky and malodorous. And yet, my mother and father adored her. They washed and dressed her, powdered her behind and cooed lovingly into her small, pink ears. They showed her off to everyone, and these other people, sometimes total strangers, fell immediately under Elena's spell. Their faces lit up with broad, beaming smiles, their voices turned high and affectionate. I had never experienced anything so utterly bizarre.

As the months passed, Elena grew larger and more tyrannical. When I tried to walk away from her, she managed to follow me, her legs shooting out in all directions, her feet scuffing against the wooden floor, her head often banging into chairs or low-slung tables. She did not so much toddle as lunge, her arms beating against the air or flapping at her sides like unfledged wings.

She also began to speak. The babble of grunts and moans became isolated words. The first one was “more,” and it was directed at some milky squashed substance in her bowl. “More!” she shouted, opening her mouth to its full, red width, her voice almost rattling the dishes in the cabinet over her head.

Through little skips in time, Elena's hair lengthened and grew darker. She began to rope words together into short sentences. Her eyes, instead of turning brown like mine, deepened into a darker blue. She cried less often, though she would still startle suddenly in the night and rouse herself to a terrible frenzy.

In response to Elena's loss of infancy, my mother became less indulgent with her. She slapped at her hands when Elena grabbed for her sewing, scolded her mercilessly for spills, and sometimes darted away from her so quickly that Elena was left wobbling uneasily on her feet, staring at my mother's retreating figure with a look of great confusion and abandonment.

For a time, my sister reacted to these new circumstances by with drawing from the rest of us. She would sit by the window or retreat to her room and play there, quite determinedly alone. It was a pattern, this self-contained withdrawal, that would recur throughout her life. “There's a part of me that doesn't need anyone else,” Manfred Owen says to his daughter in Elena's last book, “a part that floats away from all the rest, though it's not at all an airy thing, more like a stone with wings.”

When Elena was five, my father took a job as a traveling salesman for a Midwestern toiletries manufacturer. It became his fate to roam up and down New England, hawking cleanliness and sweet smells to a people already so deodorized and sanitary they were dying of it. He drove about in a dusty, battered Model T, which must surely have been one of America's first “company cars.” There were days when Elena and I would sit by the window for hours, our ears cocked for the first sound of that sputtering engine as it turned the corner onto Wilmot Street. Then we would rush out the door and wait for him, our hands intertwined, staring up the street like two marooned orphans scanning the sea for a rescue ship.

But when he came home, the rewards were few. Something had taken hold of him. In an interview in 1969, Elena described our father as having suffered from “the rapture of the road.” As a consequence of this condition, he never looked more ill at ease than when returning home. Again, from the interview my sister gave in 1969: “I think my father was very different from the sort of weary, downtrodden salesman, the Willy Loman type, or R. J. Bowman in Eudora Welty's wonderful story, different from those characters in that he was a romantic nomad, the sort who falls in love with long distance, as Tennessee Williams put it in
The Glass Menagerie.
It is easy to think of his life as pointless, of course, but I'm not so sure that's proper, and I know it's presumptuous. There's this problem intellectuals have, this ancient problem of believing that an unconsidered life is the same as a miserable one. You can take that too far, and intellectuals often do, filling up the world with wasted, blasted lives the way the Fundamentalist mind stacks up souls in hell.”

I do not believe that Elena ever managed to convince herself on this point. “Whatever you do, William,” she told me on the day I left for college, “stay away from large black traveling cases.” She meant the ones our father carried with him on the road.

When he was at home, however, Elena tried very powerfully to attract his attention, at first by grabbing playfully at his legs or quietly crawling into his lap as he sat indifferently reading a newspaper. Later she baked him cookies or cupcakes, once even a large cake, which she dedicated to him, signing her name in pink frosting. When these ploys proved unsuccessful, however, she switched to reverse tactics, and for a time all sweetness died in her. She spilled ink all over his order forms one evening, and he was up all night rewriting them. On another occasion, she crawled into his car with muddy feet and left her tiny footprints from seats to ceiling.

But nothing worked. He simply cleaned the car, laughing and shaking his head as he did so. Then he would be off again, gone for weeks at a time, leaving the rest of us behind, feeling each absence, as Elena would later write in
New England Maid
, “like a little touch of death.”

In an early poem, written when she was fifteen, Elena described a bird that could not find its resting place. It tirelessly flitted about from limb to limb in a towering tree, but it could never get a hold, for the tree's thin, insubstantial branches were always breaking under it or drawing away from its approach. For years I thought the bird, neurotically leaping about, was our mother during her emotional crisis of 1920, and that the swaying tree was our home during that time. Later I realized that the bird was Elena, and that the tree, with its remote and ever-shifting branches, its refusal of all that is secure and battened down, was our father, and that this portrait of his eternal restlessness was the way she chose to praise, rather than to blame, him.

W
hen imagination fails,” Elena wrote in
The Quality of Thought in American Letters
, “the mind naturally descends toward the statistical.” I lived in Standhope, Connecticut, for the first eighteen years of my life. I was born there, as was Elena, and I suppose it can be said that I was “formed” by it, as much as anyone is ever formed by an environment that is essentially indifferent, insisting that the general civilities be observed but steadfastly avoiding, as Elena wrote, “the question of what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness actually are.” Elena, of course, was able not only to imagine her hometown, as she did in
New England Maid
, but to portray it powerfully. For me, however, the statistical approach is best, offering at least the candor of fact, though not the glory of supposition.

When Elena was born in 1910, Standhope was little more than a few shops built around an unassuming square. It was a rectangle of woodframe buildings, all of which looked out onto a dusty park which the town fathers reseeded every year, though without much success. Last year, when I returned to dedicate a small bronze plaque in Elena's honor in that same square, I found that the grass still did not grow in those places where it never had. All else was changed and modernized, but nature had remained intractable here and there, asserting its authority in one bare spot or two.

The square itself was very modest indeed in 1910. There was a harness shop, its windows filled with leather goods, bridles and reins and a single, shining English saddle that no one ever bought. Two Italian brothers operated a barbershop, complete with twirling peppermint pole. Their cousins worked as cobblers in the rooms above the shop. Directly across the square, though obscured by the enormous willow that grew beside the bandstand, stood Dickson's Dry Goods, a large general store that distributed everything from Pape's Diapepsin to a fully prepacked steel garage. Dickson's was continually buzzing with the latest town news. None of it ever seemed very engaging to me, or, for that matter, to Elena. “They spoke in monotones of deaths and taxes and the ‘Catholic threat,'” she said in
New England Maid.
“Only a little was worth hearing, and nothing was worth remembering.” In addition, the town square boasted an apothecary, a haberdashery, and a gun shop sporting a huge wooden sculpture of a Colt .45.

Standhope was situated about halfway between Hartford and New Haven. In the sense of one-room schoolhouses and covered bridges and austere stone walls, it was not really typical of New England at all. By 1910 it had a population of over three thousand, a great deal larger than the New England village of popular imagination. It had paved streets and motorcars, and not long after Elena was born, there was even very premature talk of a trolley. There were enough Irish, Poles, and Italians to construct a small Catholic church, but not enough Jews for a synagogue. There was a hat factory near the river, and a bell foundry behind the general store. There was no hospital, but Dr. Houston maintained a clinic. There were a number of lawyers, even a small accounting firm.

And yet, for all of this, Standhope was deeply Yankee in attitude and affiliation. Those who were not foreign, as Elena later wrote, distrusted foreigners; those who were Protestant distrusted the Catholics and the Jews. Though the small police force was Irish, it enforced Yankee law. In everything there was Yankee pride and Yankee confidence. School and church taught Yankee values. The bankers were Yankee, as was the single insurance agent. Thus Elena really was a New England maid, though one born, as it were, along that borderland which existed almost like a buffer zone between the heat and noise of New York and the laconic chill of Maine.

Had Standhope been less inland, it would have formed part of that beautiful shore drive which once stretched from the northeastern reaches of New York City to Rhode Island, and which provided the traveler with lovely inlets on one side and softly rolling hills on the other. Standhope was landlocked, however, the distance to the sea being just enough to raise doubts about the trip. Elena was eight years old before she saw the Atlantic Ocean, although relative to most other Americans of the time she lived practically upon its beaches. Similarly, the town was just far enough from New York to avoid the smoky clutter that was already engulfing Greenwich and Bridge port. Thus, as Elena wrote, “Standhope rested near two great powers, New York and the sea, far enough from the former to escape a sense of its own provinciality, and too far from the latter to know a true humility.”

In terms of culture, of course, Standhope left a good deal to be desired, particularly for someone like my sister. She described the cultural life of her hometown as residing “somewhere between the general store and the cave.” This is a harsh evaluation, for Standhope was not Paris or New York. It was not even Hartford. It was simply a mildly prosperous town in southern New England, ready for progress, though not slavering for it, deeply Yankee, though helpless, as Dr. Houston once said at a town meeting, “before the immigrant horde,” a village that had quite recently become a town and would never become a city. Its people lived, like most of the world, between glory and debasement, and if they did not produce great works of art, neither did they produce a Savonarola to burn them in the village square. It had a town band, which shattered the peace of summer evenings with wheezing renditions of hymns, patriotic melodies, and, infrequently, some tune that had wafted up from Tin Pan Alley, which the audience usually greeted with the closeted thrill of the faintly disreputable. It had a group of local singers, mostly conscripted from the Congregational choir. There was an unstable flutist who sometimes sat cross-legged in the park, tooting madly at the birds, and who was finally committed to Whitman House, the large asylum which served as the town's chief employer. It had no painter save for Mr. Webster who did signs of various sorts, and whose greatest work was the enormous representation of a Bethlehem stable that served as backdrop for the annual Christmas play in the school auditorium. It had no writer, except for Mrs. Tompkins who wrote “meditations” on mountains, streams, the willow tree on the town square, and the endless charity of a loving God. It had no sculptor of any kind. Even tombstones had to be purchased elsewhere. And except for a single black-haired Italian anarchist who asked loaded questions at the town meeting, Standhope had no philosopher at all.

It did have a few old homes, however, very stately and universally admired. From time to time a rushed New Yorker would find his way to Standhope and stare wistfully at the Potter house at the edge of McCarthy Pond, or the Dutton place, with its spacious porches, or the old Tilden house, whose gambrel roof towered over a capacious attic. There was a small stone house not far from the bell foundry. It was said to be the oldest structure in the town. It was certainly the steadiest. Even the garden gate was hinged to stone.

The largest house in Standhope, though not the oldest, was owned by Dr. Houston. It was a sprawling structure and seemed to sprout new rooms each year. Dr. Houston's wife was named Mabel, and she had insisted that her daughter be called by the same name. When she was thirteen, Elena dubbed the Houston domicile “The House of the Several Mabels,” and she called it that for the rest of her life. For his part, Dr. Houston wrote a fiery denunciation of
New England Maid
when it was published. “Had I known that those little white fingers would ever have written such a book,” he declared, referring to the time Elena had smashed her fingers in the door and my mother had taken her to him for treatment, “I would never have mended them.” Early adversaries, they remained wary of one another to the end. “There is a kind of beauty in the unforgiven wound,” Elena says in
The Quality of Thought in American Letters
, “one which warns away all further wear, the ragged hem, the splintered edge.”