Elena Read online

  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.”

  Our own house was among the more modest structures in Stand-hope. It was on Wilmot Street, in easy walking distance to the town square. There were several other houses on the block, all equally undistinguished, though with ample yards for the children. Our house was made of wood with a brick foundation. It had a small porch with wooden stairs and a little two-person swing in the eastern corner. It was painted white with dark green trim, as was most every other house in Standhope, and it was shaded by two large elms. A narrow stone walkway led from the street to the front steps. In the back stood a dilapidated structure, which creaked terribly in the wind, and was either the fallen-down remains of a small stable or a large potting shed.

  The inside of the house was as unassuming as the outside. There was a small living room with a fireplace and wooden mantel. The floors were of wide, varnished pine. There was a large kitchen and a small room behind it which my father used as a makeshift office, complete with roll-top desk and wooden filing cabinet. Elena and I each had our own bedroom. For art, there was a portrait of George Washington in my father’s cramped backroom office and in the living room a large seascape with gulls in the air and clipper ships. For music, there was an old upright piano which my mother
had inherited from her family and which no one ever played. For literature, there was my collection of back issues of The American Boy, fifteen volumes of Beacon Lights of History — by means of which my father had proposed to educate himself but never had — and an assortment of romantic fiction, all belonging to my mother, novels that ran from Scott to his crudest imitators along the single line of blighted love.

  But over all of this — the town itself, the people, its modest culture and small attainments — there was a pervasive sense of comfort and repose. “Its shade was deep and its water pure,” Elena wrote in New England Maid, “and the one thing I will not take from Standhope is its beauty.”

  It really was beautiful, and even though I scarcely remember any thing of the town’s history or politics, I do remember the loveliness that remained in every season, as if all that was unbecoming in the town, the prejudice and ignorance, was but a momentary blemish, or, as Elena called it, “a hasty, ill-considered stroke upon the larger portrait of a great ideal.”

  But of all those aspects of Standhope which Elena saw so clearly, she felt most strongly for the mute and painful isolation at the center of each individual life. In the passage on Robert Frost in Quality, she wrote that “the notion that good fences make good neighbors can only be true of a society that has already resigned itself to a terrible demarcation.” In this, I think, Elena became a victim of the thing she mourned. A photograph taken when she was seven suggests her own isolation, renders it clearly, as if it were a part of her own strange mass, the impregnable wall against which the electrons beat. She is standing in front of a large tree, clad in a white short-sleeved dress, which gathers around her like a swirl of snow. She is wearing a pair of white gloves, buttoned at the wrist, and her hair is pulled back and held in place by an enormous bow. Her shoes are black with large metal buckles and her socks white, one of them drooping a little below her ankle. She does not smile; but her face is not expressionless, for she is staring very pointedly at the camera, as if trying to outwit it, give it a wrong turn. Her lips are parted slightly and I can almost feel her small, moist breath. This is one of the photographs she will choose to illustrate New England Maid, and in it I can sense that invisible solitude that held her all her life.

  After 1914 the United States moved slowly toward war while the young men of Europe slaughtered each other in unprecedented numbers. From time to time the enormity of what was going on in France intruded on Standhope. I recall seeing pictures of bodies strung out in the hard embrace of concertina wire, their arms and legs thrown out antically as if they were no more than clowns furiously entertaining invisible children on vast, muddy fields. Place names were mentioned in conversation at Dickson’s — Verdun, the Somme, Chemin des Dames — but it was impossible to gain any emotional, or even visible, sense of what was going on there. Town opinion held that it was terrible, terrible, and that we should stay out of it.

  Then, in 1917, Standhope intervened in the Great War. The people gathered for patriotic musicales or stood in the grassless park listening to the exhortations of politicians and old war veterans (quite a few from the Civil War), who feverishly insisted that Europe must be saved from the ravages of the scowling Hun. German atrocities were lavishly detailed by army recruiters who stood on caissons, their arms flung toward the sky.

  It is difficult to believe how much war fever can be generated in a small town. The fierceness, with which Standhope embraced the war effort would have seemed impossible only a few seasons before. Prior to 1917, the flag simply fluttered over the square as it always had and, everyone presumed, always would. Men in uniform were vaguely distrusted, presumed to be sex crazed, and suspected of coming from disreputable backgrounds. And of course, in staunchly Republican Standhope, no one believed that Woodrow Wilson had any intelligence at all.

  But everything changed after the United States entered the war. Flags and bunting decorated the town in swirls of festive color. Soldiers marched by smartly in their olive-green uniforms and round doughboy hats, their feet prancing to the beat of military bands. Elena stood beside me in a light blue dress with a large, dark blue sailor’s collar, watching the parade pass by. She asked if a circus were coming. I said no, a war.

  “Someday I’ll go to war,” I added bravely.

  “Me too,” Elena said.

  I laughed. “You won’t ever go to war,” I told her. “Girls don’t go to war.”

  Elena’s eyes followed the retreating parade. “Maybe I’ll be in the band, then,” she said.

  I granted that she might be able to do that someday, but that she should rid herself of any thoughts of battle.

  “Is Papa going to war?” she asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he doesn’t want to.” Certainly at that moment, I could not have imagined why anyone would not want to go to war. It seemed the greatest adventure possible, and I had dreamed of it ever since hearing about the exploits of the Lafayette Escadrille.

  “I want to fly a plane,” I said.

  Elena crinkled her nose. “I want an ice cream, William.”

  I fished in my pocket and withdrew a small change purse.

  “Let’s see if I have enough,” I said. I opened the purse and counted the money. “Okay,” I said after completing a very complex series of calculations, “but only one scoop.”

  We made our way across the street to Thompson’s Drugstore, Elena gently tucking her small hand in mine, a gesture she would repeat from time to time throughout our lives and which gave me a sense — a false sense, I think — of being in command.

  We sat down at a small wrought iron table with a white marble top. Across the room I could see the tall dark shelves of the apothecary, its huge tun-bellied jars filled with brightly colored liquids.

  “I think maybe I’ll be a doctor,” I said absently.

  Elena glanced quickly toward the soda fountain. “I want a chocolate ice cream.”

  I smiled, stepped over to the counter, and brought back two scoops of ice cream, each resting rather forlornly at the bottom of a huge fluted glass.

  Elena had almost finished hers when Bobby Taylor walked into the drugstore. He looked splendid in his uniform, his hat held firmly on his head by a sleek leather chin strap, the gleaming boots rising almost to his knees, a rifle slung romantically across his shoulder.

  I watched him admiringly. “I wish I were older,” I said to Elena.

  Bobby walked to the counter, then turned slowly in our direction. He must have been eighteen, an age which strikes me now as only a little beyond infancy. He had a lopsided grin that spread over his face with an innocent and unhindered openness. No doubt he had just experienced one of the most uplifting moments of his short life. He had marched down Washington Street and kept his eyes manfully forward while the girls blew kisses at him or waved white handkerchiefs. Only days before he had been an inconsequential teenager, but now he was a soldier, one of those stout lads his country had summoned to beat back the German hordes. The transformation must have been dizzying. One could almost sense his feet rising from the floor.

  It took all my courage to address him.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Bobby took his glass of soda from the counter, and walked over to us.

  I cleared my throat nervously. “I saw you in the parade.”

  “You did,” Bobby allowed casually. He lowered one of his hands onto the stock of his rifle, a gesture which was no doubt meant to convey the gravity of the task before him. “Where were you standing?”

  “Just across the street.”

  “Got a good view then, I guess,” Bobby said.

  Elena was indifferently finishing her ice cream, as if nothing at all had happened, as if Bobby Taylor were just another ordinary mortal, not a gallant knight.

  “That ice cream looks pretty good,” Bobby said to her.

  Elena looked up. “Do you like ice cream?” she asked.

  Bobby laughed softly. “Sure.�
��

  “Bobby’s a soldier, Elena,” I said.

  Elena glanced at me scornfully. “I know that.” She turned back to Bobby. “Does that gun have bullets in it?”

  “Sure it does,” Bobby said.

  Years later I learned that soldiers on parade do not carry loaded weapons.

  “I’ll bet you’re a good shot,” I said.

  “Fair, I guess,” Bobby said modestly. He patted the stock gently. “Got to be, where I’m going.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you going?” Elena asked.

  Bobby shrugged. “Don’t know for sure. Wherever the war is, I guess.”

  “The war is in Europe,” I told him.

  Bobby chuckled. “Well, I know that much. But I don’t know for sure where in Europe I’ll be going.”

  “Bobby’s going to go help whip the Germans,” I told Elena solemnly.

  Elena studied Bobby’s face. “Do you have a dog?” she asked.

  Bobby reached down and touched Elena’s hair. “Used to have one,” he said, “but it died a few months back.”

  I watched his fingers as they gently caressed a strand of Elena’s hair. For a moment he seemed to draw away from us, lost in his own thought. Then he opened his hand and allowed Elena’s hair to fall from it.

  “I’d better be going,” he said, though his eyes remained on Elena for a few seconds longer.

  “Give those Germans a licking,” I told him manfully.

  “They’ll get what’s coming to them,” Bobby said. Then he turned smartly on his heels and strode out of the pharmacy and down that road which would take him to Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry, to become one of those brave boys who would break the Ludendorff offensive.

  Standhope sent nine boys to Europe and all of them came back alive. One of them had his arm in a black sling, but aside from that he looked just fine. For a while, these returned soldiers were the toast of the town. The mayor gave them a luncheon, and there was another celebration in their honor at the school auditorium. For a few weeks after that, a soldier or two could sometimes be seen squatting in the park. I remember hearing one of them talk about a horse he had seen trotting across no man’s land with forty feet of its intestine dragging along behind it. Then the uniforms disappeared along with almost everything else redolent of the war.