Elena Read online

  All of this — the loneliness, the sense of being hopelessly awkward and unattractive, the unmistakable scorn of my sister and Elizabeth — produced in me a self-loathing I could not escape except in fantasy. And so I dreamed of friendship and communion, of some wild boy from a distant land. I imagined him as having a dark complexion and fiery black eyes, telling tales of Krishnapur in a voice accented with that exotic place. Together we would discover a world of dark, vaguely sensual adventure. He would summon forth my self-confidence, dismiss my self-hatred, laugh all my pain away.

  This wild boy never came for me, but from time to time I can still see him, dancing at the edge of McCarthy Pond or swinging from the limbs of the enormous elm that shaded our front lawn. He was the piece still missing, as Elena once described it, from the puzzle of my life.

  Which is not to say, of course, that my childhood offered no adventures. The first one, I suppose, the very first, was a trip to New York.

  I was sitting on the front steps when my father pulled into our driveway in a new car. Elena instantly came out of the house, with that look of eagerness she always had when she saw him in those days.

  The car was a Wills Sainte Claire, a long, sleek convertible with a silver eagle hood ornament. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life, and it seemed to me that my father had somehow found the secret to happiness: a life of high-class vagabondage.

  I quickly got to my feet and raced toward him. Elena leaped off the porch behind. My father’s arms spread out to her.

  “How ya doing, Princess?” he said happily as he swept her up. “Missed you.” He kissed her, then returned her to the ground.

  “It’s a great-looking car,” I said excitedly.

  My father smiled. “You bet it is, Billy,” he said. He shifted his straw boater to the right. “Damn thing’s got sixty-eight horse in the engine.” He stepped proudly to the front of the car and slapped the hood. “It’s got a two-hundred-sixty-seven-cubic-inch displacement. Spitting to go, every inch of her. Salesman said it was modeled after a Spanish power plant.”

  My mother walked out onto the porch and eyed us warily. The very sight of her seemed to dampen my father’s mood.

  “Wanna come out and give her a look?” he asked lamely.

  My mother massaged her hands under her wet dishcloth, then walked back into the house.

  My father smiled at Elena. “What do you think of her, Princess?”

  “It’s wonderful,” Elena said. “It’s so shiny.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s wonderful,” my father said, “New York is wonderful. And that’s where we’re going. This car and you, Elena, and you, too, Billy, and me to do the fancy driving.”

  Elena and I stared at each other, stupefied.

  “Well, you want to go, don’t you?” my father asked grandly.

  “Sure!” I said excitedly.

  “Good,” my father said. “I’ll just step inside and clear things with your mother.”

  He dashed into the house and emerged a few minutes later with a single overnight bag.

  “Got all your stuff in here,” he said. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “What about Mother?” Elena asked.

  My father tossed the bag into the rumble seat, then looked at her. “You coming or not, Princess?”

  Without the least hesitation, Elena leaped into the car. I walked around to the other side and took a seat in the front next to my father.

  “Ain’t this buggy swell?” he crooned. He glanced toward the house. My mother stood at the window, her fingers tugging gently at her lower lip. He frowned slightly, then glanced back at Elena. “You got to give a little something to life,” he muttered, “if you wanna get something back.”

  Once on the road, my father grew extraordinarily expansive. He prattled on about trips he had made in the past, and it was quite a few years before Elena and I realized how much of what he told us was untrue. He spoke of Paris, London, Rome, compared their food and traffic. His descriptive information came from the travel brochures we often found nestled among the clothes in his open travel bag. Thus London was “a foggy town.” Paris was “a city of lights.” Rome had seven hills, which, he said, made the traffic problem there “a real bottleneck.” Amsterdam was aglow with tulips, but you had to watch yourself walking around Venice, because the streets were filled with water, and who would want to tumble in. “A work of the imagination,” Elena would later write in Quality, “first requires the discipline of fancy.” My father never learned that discipline.

  We reached New York in about two hours, approaching it from the Connecticut shore, old U.S. 1, the back door of the city, winding first through Yonkers and the Bronx, then finally across the Harlem River to Manhattan.

  “We’ll take the Broadway route downtown,” my father said a bit boastfully, demonstrating how well he knew what was to us a mythic city. Elena, sitting wide-eyed and awestruck in the back seat, took it all in, and she described it later in New England Maid: “We entered Manhattan by way of the old settlement the Dutch called Haarlem, but which, by 1920, when I first saw it, was a sprawling Negro reservation, a sweeping grid of dense, noisy streets, which to white eyes must have looked very gay indeed, gay and eccentric with its conk parlors and skin-bleaching emporiums, the blinking lights of the Apollo and the Savoy, the knot of Negro children ‘street fishing’ with pole and string, trying to retrieve a lost coin from the sewer.” Such startling juxtaposition of the frivolous and grim runs throughout Elena’s description of our journey through Manhattan that morning. But none of this darker appreciation was visible in her face then. She simply looked like a child whose mind was fiercely engaged in assimilating a rush of foreign data.

  “And that’s Columbia,” my father announced, pointing to the left as we cruised down Broadway. I looked up and saw the rounded dome of Low Library.

  “Maybe we should stop around here, have a highball, something like that,” my father said.

  We parked near a small soda shop only a few yards from the bustle of the Broadway trolleys. My father ordered three egg creams, a drink he said we must try, and we found seats at a table near the front window. I remember that the place was very cramped, that an advertisement for Alois Swoboda’s conscious evolution system was taped to the wall, and that at a nearby table two earnest Columbia students were discussing the regatta with Cornell, which was soon to be run on Lake Cayuga.

  “Ain’t this a helluva town?” my father asked with an enormous smile.

  Elena nodded and sipped her egg cream. “I like it here,” she said. To the very end she would insist that her decision to leave Standhope and move to New York had been the single greatest one of her life. “Otherwise I might have remained — and in more ways than geographical — exactly where I was put down,” she wrote in a letter to Martha Farrell, “another coin resting at the bottom of the pool.”

  After our brief refreshment, we continued on our way. My father drove us past St. John the Divine, which was still under construction, then swung west to Riverside Drive and took a short detour past Grant’s Tomb, and below it, in the river, Fulton’s ship, the Clermont, which served as a fashionable tavern in those days.

  “He shot himself, didn’t he?” my father asked me tentatively. “In the jaw? President Grant, I mean.”

  I shook my head. “No, Father.”

  My father fixed his eyes on the road. “Facts aren’t everything, Billy,” he muttered, somewhat irritably.

  We moved southward along the western edge of Manhattan until, at Fifty-ninth Street, my father turned left and we headed across town. Elena, still in the back seat, gazed about hypnotically. In New England Maid, she wrote: “The effect was kaleidoscopic, beautiful and amazing, especially to a mind as untutored and isolated as mine. For if all of this existed but two hours from Standhope, then what wonders lay four hours from it, ten, sixteen, twenty? If this wonder were New York, then what sights might strike us blind in Istanbul, how much gold on its towering spires, how long the lines around
its public wards?”

  At the southeastern corner of Central Park, my father grandly wheeled the Wills Sainte Claire up to the entrance of the Plaza Hotel.

  “We’ll stay here tonight,” he said. Then he smiled and nodded to an enormous mansion just across the street. “You know, next door to old Connie Vanderbilt.”

  I looked over at the mansion, so very beautiful and remote behind the great iron gate and the circular drive.

  “You mean people live there?” Elena asked. “That’s a house?”

  “Sure is,” my father said. “And we’re staying right next door.”

  Within a few minutes, my father had completed all the business of registering us. Elena and I had waited near the tea garden, too stunned to speak, watching the elegant men and women drift in and out of the lobby, carried, as they seemed, on air.

  “Well, how about a walk,” my father said as he came up from behind. He dropped his arm onto Elena’s shoulder. “Feel up to it, Princess?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, let’s give the legs a little work, then. And maybe after dinner we’ll give them a rest, maybe take a victoria through the park like all the newlyweds do.”

  We walked out onto the street. It was late in the afternoon but people were everywhere, strolling along the sidewalk or sitting idly along the rim of the Pulitzer fountain.

  “Let’s head downtown,” my father said. “Maybe find a restaurant, have an early dinner.” He glanced at his watch. “I want to get back early, you know?”

  “And so it was the good fortune of my brother and myself,” Elena later wrote, “to stroll down a Fifth Avenue that would disappear within a decade, an avenue of stately, doomed mansions: Vanderbilt’s Renaissance château, the Florentine palazzo of Collis Huntington, and last of all, that curious reproduction of Fontainebleau, whose wrought iron palisade was ordered sunk into the sea and thus preserved from man’s vulgar desecration, though not from that of the sea snake and the shark.”

  We walked all the way to the library at Forty-second Street that afternoon, passed the great churches, St. Patrick’s and the Collegiate, the few fashionable men’s clubs that still dotted the avenue in those days, and that enormous array of expensive shops, one of which, I recall, was offering a rather risqué item, an “overnight case” for women.

  Still, for all the elegance of the avenue, as Elena later wrote, it was the people who most fascinated, for they were unlike anything my sister or I had ever seen. Especially the women, who were entirely different from those in Standhope, their hair cut short and tucked under those tight-fitting toque hats so popular at the time, their eyebrows plucked into sleek thin lines, then penciled in for even more striking effect, their shoulders draped in mink or silver fox, their bodies made straight by dresses designed specifically to conceal their waists. “They did not, in 1920, appear precisely as those flappers on Easter Eve painted by John Sloan,” Elena wrote in New England Maid, “but the spirit of that later rebellion was already rising as surely as the hemline of their skirts.”

  My father looked rather tired by the time we made it to Forty-second Street. Evening was falling over the city by then, though the frantic activity along the avenue had not in the least diminished.

  “You know, that little snack uptown didn’t quite do the trick,” my father said, patting his belly. “Why don’t we get a bite between here and the hotel.”

  As it turned out, we “got a bite” at a small but rather elegant restaurant a block or so from the Plaza. The atmosphere was very gracious: round tables with white tablecloths, cut flowers in crystal 59 vases, a pianist at the back of the room gracefully offering selections from his lightly classical repertoire.

  I suppose we looked rather odd, seated around that table. My father’s stud pin, winking under the chandelier, must have been a disquieting touch for the waiter, as was Elena’s wrinkled blue dress and my scruffy shoes. Still, he treated us with great politeness, conveniently looking away as my father poured a bit of whiskey from his hip flask into the teacup.

  My father ordered a steak. I followed his lead. Elena asked about trout amandine, however, and after the waiter had explained it to her, she ordered it.

  My father smiled. “That’ll be a new experience for you, won’t it,” he said to her. “Fish with nuts.” She said that it would. And then something very somber swam into his face, and he leaned toward her, and he said, “I love you, Elena. I always have.” He did not look at me, did not give me the slightest glance.

  We finished dinner quickly. My father was never one to linger in a place. He offered dessert, but we could tell that he really didn’t want to be taken up on it. He wanted to leave, to get back to the hotel.

  Our room was at the front on the third floor, facing the esplanade. There were only two beds, but a cot had been wheeled in for Elena.

  “Well, I’m bushed,” my father said as he slumped down on one of the beds, still entirely dressed, even down to his shoes.

  “You’re going to sleep now?” I asked.

  “You got an objection to that, Billy?”

  I shrugged. “I guess not.”

  “Good,” he said. Then he closed his eyes.

  For the next hour or so, Elena and I sat and talked about the day. She talked about street signs and shop windows. She was astonished by how many accents she’d heard on Fifth Avenue. We could hardly imagine the deep foreignness that must preside in those more exotic quarters our father had described, Little Italy and Chinatown and the Lower East Side.

  Finally, at around nine, we were both exhausted. Elena took to the cot and I pulled myself into the bed across from my father. He was still lying on his back, snoozing peacefully, the hip flask resting on his chest.

  I don’t know exactly how long I slept, perhaps an hour, perhaps four or five. I remember hearing my father as he walked out of the adjoining bathroom, slapping cologne onto his face and neck. Then he put his jacket on and quietly walked out of the room, gently closing the door behind him.

  For a while I continued to lie on the bed, my eyes closed, my mind once more going through the adventure of the day. But my father’s cologne gave the room a cloying, musty smell, so after a moment I got up, walked to the window, and opened it. It was then that I saw him. He was standing beside the fountain, his hands thrust deeply into his trouser pockets, as if searching for a coin. From time to time he would weave right or left, then lean back on his heel. He was in constant motion, either tugging at the cuffs of his jacket, glancing down to check the shine of his shoes, fiddling with his tie, or checking his watch. He looked like a man who was waiting for something important. I could not imagine what it was.

  She was wearing one of those fur-trimmed coat-dresses so fashionable at the time, and a felt hat. She was tall and walked very gracefully, with her head tilted upward. She approached him from behind, and when she reached him, she gathered her arms around his waist and threw her head back, laughing. He turned around, surprised, then threw his arms about her and lifted her off the ground. For an instant they only stared at each other. Then he kissed her.

  I turned away, stricken, and then I realized that Elena was standing beside me, her eyes locked on the same unbelievable scene.

  “Go back to bed,” I told her sternly.

  She shook her head. “No.” She stepped closer to the window and stared down at the street. My father had drawn the woman under his arm and the two of them were walking away from the hotel.

  “Where are they going?” Elena asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  We continued to watch them from the window. They were walking very slowly, arm in arm. Then, suddenly, my father spun around to face the fountain and tossed a coin into it. The two of them laughed and walked on, finally turning onto Fifth Avenue, where they disappeared around a corner.

  In Elena’s short story “The Tryst,” two teenage girls hide a pornographic magazine, and as the story progresses, this sordid act and their mutual involvement in it corrodes and finally destr
oys their friendship. In “The Keepers of the Flame,” two hunters stumble upon the body of a woman both have known and of whose murder both might be accused. Together they burn the body, bury the ashes, and leave the woods. But from that time onward, they speak to each other only in dark corners, only in whispers. “No novelist of her generation,” one critic wrote of Elena in 1975, “has so intensely explored the corrosive quality of a single lie.”

  On the trip back to Standhope, Elena and I sat together in the back seat, locked in silent collusion. My father must have been mystified by the dark mood that had come over his two children, a fifteen-year-old boy who watched him sourly and refused to join him in the front seat, and his daughter, only ten, who stared at him silently but with neither anger nor resentment. For Martha, the incident at the Plaza became the central thread by which she traced Elena’s psychological development. She found the secret of my sister’s character in that moment by the window: “It can perhaps be stated that Elena Franklin’s intellectual honesty flowed from this first experience of moral corruption, her directness from an early experience of extreme deviousness.” Thus does a saint sire a prodigal and a prodigal a saint.

  But I remember that Elena’s response to what she must have known about our father, though perhaps a bit more vaguely than Martha suggests, was very muted. For a time, she took her cues from me and remained chilly toward him. Certainly she knew that something was amiss, but perhaps she also sensed a more general disarray. In her short story “A Summer Trail,” a young woman blithely strolls through a pastoral wood until she begins to feel something dreadful around her, a rustling in the brush, which “was not made by wind or falling twigs but which came from the core of the forest. I gazed down at a tangle of vines, which seemed to have lain there through the millennia, silent victims of some early shiftlessness and disorder. And it seemed to me that along this summer trail I had found my way to the center from which all else goes out and then goes wrong, this first garden, our unkempt Eden.”