Elena (7 page)

Once begun, the plague was a long time passing, and during that period, the single line that connected the various shuttered households of our town was the peripatetic Dr. Houston.

He treated the symptoms of the disease in a hit-or-miss fashion: senna as a purgative, ammonium carbonate to clear the bronchialtubes, phenacetin for fever, nux vomica for the nervous system, digitalis for the heart. He lived in a cloud of medicinal odors, from camphor to cardamom, and each day he seemed to rise with a renewed energy, as if this battle were truly his own. “In one corner, Death,” as Elena later said, “and in the other, at one hundred ninety pounds, Standhope's favorite son, Dr. Winston Barrett Houston.”

The epidemic was the medical emergency for which Dr. Houston had been waiting all his life, a chance to be the central figure in a great drama of life and death. He took to his role like a seasoned stage performer, moving from house to house with tireless energy, shouting orders at the top of his voice, sending everyone within earshot scurrying about for wet clothes or iodine or baking soda or anything else his chaotic treatment required. “He never seemed more alive,” Elena wrote in
New England Maid
, “than in this lethal season.”

All my life I have expected to die young. I am over eighty now, and I still expect it. But I have been close to death only once. It started with a cough. I had been sitting in the living room reading
Great Expectations
as if it were no more than a British “penny dreadful.” Elena sat across from me, poring over A
Christmas Carol
, though far less intently. Then, suddenly, I coughed, and Elena jerked her head up from her book.

“Do you feel hot, William?” she asked.

“I feel fine,” I said, a little annoyed at being pulled away from the woes of poor Pip. Then I saw it: the concern in her face. The dreaded plague. I felt a wave of heat shoot up from the soles of my feet. “Elena,” I said softly, “do you think …?”

“I don't know,” Elena said quickly.

A breeze rustled the blue curtains at the living room window. I could have sworn it was the wing of death.

“It's just a cough, maybe,” Elena said. The somber tone of her voice was not reassuring.

“Maybe I'd better tell Mother,” I whispered.

“I'll tell her,” Elena said. She bounded out of the room, and within a few seconds my mother was staring down at me with her wondering, confused eyes.

“How do you feel, William?” my mother asked.

“Fine,” I said weakly.

Elena watched me, worried. I coughed again and she shrank away, staring at me as if I were already dead.

“Do you feel tired?” she asked.

“That's enough, Elena,” my mother blurted. However vaguely, she could sense the terror in my mind.

“Have I got it?” I asked softly.

“Do you have a headache?” Elena asked.

“Quiet, Elena,” my mother whispered. “You're scaring William to death.” My mother was not one to search for the best choice of words.

“How about breathing?” Elena asked frantically. “Are you breathing okay?”

I still do not know where Elena learned the symptoms of the Spanish flu, but she certainly knew them.

My mother stamped her foot. “Go out and play, Elena.”

“It's raining.”

“Then go into your room!”

Elena walked slowly down the short hallway to her room. She did not close the door, and I knew that she was listening.

“Now, William,” my mother said, then she stopped, thinking, trying to get her disordered mind around this strange new circumstance. “Well, now, William … uh … um … let me know if you get worse.”

“What if I've got it?” I asked shakily.

“Well, uh, just don't worry it, don't worry it,” my mother sputtered. “It'll go away, that's what it'll do. It'll go away.”

And with that she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me alone in the room, my mind wildly calculating all the things I would miss in life by dying at such a tender age.

Elena came back into the living room a few seconds later and sat down across from me. She pulled her legs up under her and observed me carefully.

“I think I've got it,” I told her mournfully.

“You'll know soon, one way or the other,” Elena said.

She was right. I did. Within a few hours the coughing became more severe and I began to develop a dull, throbbing pain, which began behind my eyes then swept out across my head and down throughout the lumbar region. A heaviness fell upon me, parts of my body became numb, and my consciousness began to swim in and out as if I were being pulled under water and then raised up again.

The next morning I awoke to hear Elena pleading with my mother to summon Dr. Houston. My mother was having a good deal of trouble deciding what to do, and I could hear her broken, half-finished sentences jerking along as she tried to respond to Elena's insistence.

“You've just got to,” Elena said in a high, lean voice. “You've just got to, right now!”

“Well now, Elena, you've, uh, you've … listen, I, uh, maybe some juice would be good for him.”

“
No!
” Elena shouted. I heard her feet scurrying across the living room floor and then the hard, almost brutal slam of the front door. The unseasonable warmth of the day before had given way, as it often does in New England, to a frigid morning, and as I glanced out the window I saw a few snowflakes drift down and imagined that this would certainly be the last snowfall I would ever see. Then I felt the darkness sweep down upon me and I was asleep.

When I woke up, Dr. Houston was standing over me. Elena had stationed herself directly beside him, shivering in a thick red cloth coat, her hair wet and stringy from the melted snow.

Dr. Houston watched me for a moment, then sat down on the bed and took my temperature. It was a dangerous 104 degrees, and he made no attempt to conceal the state of things. He glanced at my mother, who had edged herself into the doorway, and nodded solemnly. She stiffened and fled the room, her way of bearing the unbearable.

“Has he got it?” Elena asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Houston said. He turned to me. “You're going to have to fight, William,” he said. He hoisted his medical bag onto the bed. “I've got all the tools in here, but you're going to have to help me. It's a war, young man. Like our boys went to in France. They put up a fight and won, and now you must, too.”

“William wants to be a soldier,” Elena said. I wanted to be no such thing, and she knew it, but I think that in her child's mind she understood that this might encourage Dr. Houston to do his utmost for my life.

“Good for him,” Dr. Houston said. He kept his eyes on me. “We need soldiers.”

I nodded.

Dr. Houston turned to Elena. “Would you be a good little girl and go get me a spoon, honey?”

Elena did as she was told, and when she returned Dr. Houston administered a host of foul-tasting elixirs. Then he stood up.

“I'll be going, now,” he said, “but I'll be back to look in on you.”

Elena's eyes shot around to him. “Maybe you should just stay here,” she said.

Dr. Houston laughed. “Stay here? Why, I can't do that, honey. There are other sick people who may die without my assistance.”

“William's going to be a soldier,” Elena lied. “Soldiers are more important.”

“I'm sure they are,” Dr. Houston said. “But there are still other sick people I have to see. There's no one else in Standhope who can help them, you see?”

“No,” Elena said flatly.

Dr. Houston's face suddenly turned sour. “Well, you will in time,” he said, with an unmistakable edge in his voice.

“You stay here,” Elena insisted. “You stay here in case William gets worse.”

“Yes, well,” Dr. Houston said, and then he started to move toward the door.

To my astonishment, Elena blocked his path.

“You stay here,” she said. “You've got to.”

Dr. Houston's face hardened. “Now look here, young lady,” he said coldly, “I don't have time to waste on this sort of behavior. Now please, get out of my way.”

Elena stepped into the doorway, lifted her arms, and pressed her hands against the door jamb.

“He's going to be a soldier,” she said, “and you've got to stay until he's better.”

Dr. Houston took a deep, angry breath, stepped forward, and with one sweep of his powerful arm pushed Elena out the door, sending her sprawling in the hallway.

Through the haze of my illness I saw Elena leap to her feet, then disappear down the hall, following Dr. Houston.

“Mrs. Franklin, please!” Dr. Houston shouted, but I could not make out much else of what he said. I could hear my mother sputtering for Elena to leave the doctor alone. “Now, Elena, uh, you, well, the doctor, you've got, listen, I've …” Then I heard more scuffling about in the living room, and Elena's peeling voice. “You've got to stay here, you've just got to!” The front door slammed, and after that, silence, except for Elena's low whimpering as she cried softly by the window. For me the entire scene was more or less unreal, coming to me, as it did, through the fog of my illness. But later I learned that Elena had actually made a frenzied leap and struck Dr. Houston in the face, then followed him to the door and flung her shoe at his head as he dashed down the walkway to his car.

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.

W
here 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.