Elena Read online

  Listening to Elizabeth’s quick defense of her grandmother made me feel like one of those irate and benighted villagers who, torch and rope in hand, demanded the gentle creature of Dr. Frankenstein’s.

  “I’m sure she is,” I said immediately.

  “I come here once a week,” Elizabeth went on. “My grandmother likes to see me. I usually bring her something.” She lifted a beribboned box. “Chocolates.”

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “You want to come with us?” Elena asked.

  “What? Me?”

  “She likes to see new faces,” Elizabeth explained. “Elena’s coming with me.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll wait for you out here.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway, William?” Elena asked.

  “I just sit around here sometimes,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “To watch the insane people,” Elizabeth said.

  “Like animals in a zoo,” Elena added in an accusatory tone.

  “It’s a nice little park, that’s all,” I said.

  Elizabeth’s eyes bore into me. “If you’re so interested in insane people, why don’t you come in with us?”

  It was an outright challenge, and with Elena standing there I had no choice but to take it up.

  “All right,” I said boldly.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” Elizabeth added.

  “I said all right, didn’t I?”

  I stepped in front of them, gallantly leading the way. Whitman House loomed ahead but I kept a steady pace. There was, of course, nothing at all to fear, but I did not know that at the time and in my mind I saw the interior of Whitman House as a dark labyrinth of seamy hallways down which inhuman cries echoed continually, a world where muscular orderlies brutally wrestled murderous, popeyed lunatics to the floor.

  “I guess your grandmother has her own room,” I said hesitantly.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said. She was walking jauntily beside me, the box of chocolates nestled in her arms.

  “Is her room near the front door?”

  “No. Second floor.”

  I could feel my skin tightening around my bones. What in the name of God had I gotten myself into?

  At the entrance I stepped back, opened the door, and allowed Elizabeth and Elena to pass in front of me. They strode briskly into the building and trooped directly up to the receptionist’s desk.

  “Hello, Elizabeth,” the receptionist said. She appeared to be a nurse, dressed all in white, with a little peaked cap emblazoned with a red cross.

  “Hello,” Elizabeth said. “I brought something for my grandmother.”

  The woman behind the desk smiled benignly. “Well, you may go on up and give it to her, then.” She looked at Elena. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Elena Franklin. She lives down the block.”

  The woman’s eyes lifted toward me. “And the gentleman?”

  “That’s Elena’s brother, William,” Elizabeth said.

  I brought a stiff smile to my lips.

  “Well, your grandmother is waiting,” the woman said. “I’m sure she’ll enjoy seeing you.”

  Elizabeth led Elena and me up a wide spiral staircase to the second floor, then down the hall, mercifully empty and silent, to her grandmother’s room.

  “Hello, Grandma,” Elizabeth said as she opened the door.

  Elena and I followed in behind her and watched as she stepped up to her grandmother’s bed.

  The old woman was sitting upright, propped against two enormous pillows. Her eyes twinkled when she saw Elizabeth.

  “Did Mama take you to the castle?” she asked.

  Elizabeth nodded. “I brought you something.” She pulled the rib bon from the box and held it out. “Chocolates.”

  Her grandmother took the box, lowered it to her lap, and stared at it a moment. The box was pale yellow and trails of small red rosebuds adorned the four sides. I still see chocolates adorned this way from time to time, part of the grace we have not lost.

  “You can open it, if you want to,” Elizabeth said quietly.

  The old woman wiped her mouth with her hand and glanced out the window.

  “You can have a piece of candy now,” Elizabeth said.

  A look of alarm suddenly passed over her grandmother’s face. “Dogs’ll get you if you don’t watch out,” she said.

  Elizabeth’s eyes closed briefly, then opened. “I brought some people to see you,” she said, forcing a smile.

  Suddenly her grandmother snatched the ribbon from Elizabeth’s hand. “Gimme that,” she snapped. “I want it!”

  “Yes, take it,” Elizabeth said quickly.

  I felt Elena draw back toward me.

  The old woman peered back down at the box of chocolates.

  Elizabeth took a small white cloth from the table next to the bed and pressed it tenderly at the side of her grandmother’s mouth.

  Instantly she slapped Elizabeth’s hand away. “Lily took it,” she said. “I don’t have none.”

  Elizabeth replaced the cloth on the table and looked at us.

  “Sometimes she’s better than this,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” I told her.

  Then Elena stepped toward the bed. “I’m Elena,” she said.

  The old woman glared at her irritably. “Lily took it, not you.”

  “Lily was her younger sister,” Elizabeth told Elena in a whisper.

  Elena’s hand swept out in my direction. “This is my brother, William.”

  I stepped forward haltingly. “Glad to meet you.”

  She did not look at me. Her gaze fell back down toward the box.

  “Want me to open it for you, Grandma?” Elizabeth asked. “It’s chocolates. You like chocolates.”

  “Teddy,” her grandmother muttered. She was still looking at the box, her fingers moving shakily along the line of rosebuds. “Teddy died. Daddy doesn’t know.” She moved her hands over the edges of the box, then stopped, her eyes dwelling on her fingers. “Lily took the whole thing. I seen it.”

  Elizabeth gently tugged the box from her grandmother’s hands and opened it.

  “Look, Grandma,” she said, lowering the box back into the old woman’s lap. “Chocolates.”

  Her grandmother stared aimlessly at the small, rounded candies. Her head slumped forward slightly.

  Elena stepped back to my side and smiled sadly.

  Elizabeth took one of the chocolates and delicately placed it near her grandmother’s lips. The mouth opened and Elizabeth slid the candy in.

  “It’s good, Grandma,” she said.

  The old woman munched slowly, her eyes still fixed on the box.

  Elizabeth raised her hand and began gently stroking her grandmother’s hair, her fingers gliding slowly up and down the long, wiry strands.

  I glanced down at Elena, and something in her face held my gaze. She was watching Elizabeth and her grandmother intently, but it seemed to me that she was also watching the room — the texture of the drapery, the picture of a seascape that hung slightly askew above the bed, the iron railing of the bed itself, the quality of the light as it flowed through the window, silvering the air — all those small, almost invisible details that, as she would later write in Quality, “render unto some imagined space the wry and subtle poignancy of earth.”

  When it was over, they called it, rather romantically, “The Plague of the Spanish Lady.” It was the great influenza epidemic of 1918-19. It killed a half-million Americans, and various places responded to it in various ways. They closed the schools in New York, held court in the open air in San Francisco, distributed medicated masks to the entire population in Seattle.

  In Standhope, however, we only waited, though with surprisingly little dread. I can remember Elena and myself standing in the school yard listening to a group of children singing the verses to a song that everyone thought extremely funny:

  “I had a little bird and his name was
Enza.

  I opened the window and

  In-flu-enza.”

  For quite some time, the flu epidemic was something that only existed in the newspapers. The slumber of Standhope continued undisturbed. In the small schoolhouse only a few blocks from Wilmot Street, Elena worked at her multiplication tables or relentlessly practiced her penmanship, monotonously drawing the interlacing circles and parallel lines required by the Palmer method, while only a few doors away I struggled through Poor Richard’s Almanac or marveled at the stately prose of the Leather-Stocking Tales.

  Then, rather suddenly, Jeremy Blake died. The effect of his death on Standhope was surprisingly severe. The war had ended only a short time before, and some people in Standhope were still wearing “To H–ll with the Kaiser” buttons when the Spanish flu struck. It seemed an unbearable affront, as if from now on we were destined to endure one mortal trial after another. I remember that Mrs. Farrington, the first-grade teacher, wept openly when she announced Jeremy’s death to the class, and that even the mayor, surely one of the last men in Standhope to sport a handlebar mustache, looked broken and desolate at his funeral.

  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 w
as 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.