Elena. Part 14

Elizabeth kissed him very gently. "Yes," she said.

"How did you two meet?" I asked.

"At the library," Elizabeth said. "I work there, you know, and Howard came in one afternoon and asked for something." She looked at him. "It was The Canterbury Tales, wasn't it?"

Howard nodded. "That, and maybe a volume of sentimental poetry, something like that." He looked at Elena. "I don't like my own taste. I resent my own taste. It's so juvenile."

Elizabeth laughed delightedly. "Well, I had the book, of course. I mean, who in Standhope would ever read The Canterbury Tales? It hadn't been checked out in thirty years."

"She thought I was shy," Howard said. "People think I'm shy, but I'm not. I used to approach strangers all the time, when I was a little boy, and ask them questions. But of course, you can't keep doing things like that. Not when you're grown-up. You frighten people if you do. They think you're after something, or just crazy, perhaps." He shrugged. "So I stopped doing that about twenty years ago. I still miss it."

"He came up to me, though," Elizabeth said. "He told me who he was and where he lived and why he'd come to Standhope. He told me all this before he mentioned The Canterbury Tales."

"Because of her face," Howard said in an almost wistful tone of voice, as if relating events so long past that they were already golden with nostalgia. "Her eyes, you know. They were very clear." He laughed. "It helps my confusion, you see, to have clear eyes around."

Elena looked at him skeptically. "Are you serious?"

"Oh yes," Howard said. "No matter how crazy it sounds."

"Howard has a sort of condition," Elizabeth said.

"That's right," Howard said, quite openly. "A condition of being easily thrown off balance." He was looking very closely at Elena. "Have you ever had a day when you just couldn't manage anything?"

"Yes," Elena said.

"Well, I have years like that."

I couldn't help it. I started to laugh, then caught myself. "Sorry, Howard," I said, trying to regain my composure, "I didn't mean to laugh."

"Oh, that's all right," Howard said. "Really, quite all right." He looked at Elena. "I'm not sensitive about it. I don't try to hide it. I know that if I weren't wealthy, I'd probably starve. But there are times when it seems almost a blessing, you know?"

Elena was evidently intensely interested in this person, and she would later write that he had seemed to her like a floating cloud, a sympathetic presence, "precious and unreal, a figure carved from the prose of Walter Pater."

"You say a blessing?" Elena asked.

Howard nodded. "Yes."

"In what way, Howard?"

"Because I feel I'm everywhere at once, sometimes, and so everything lives in me, you see?"

Elena smiled. "Not really."

"Well, I'm many things at once," Howard went on. "Partly an adult, partly a child." He smiled. "Even partly man and partly woman." He turned to me. "It must seem odd to you, William."

"It surely does, Howard," I told him.

He laughed, then put his arm around Elizabeth and squeezed her to him. "She understands as much as anyone can."

"He explained it another way once," Elizabeth said. She looked at Howard. "You don't mind?"

Howard shrugged. "If I said it, you can repeat it."

"He said he sometimes felt that the basic thing had been reversed in him."

"The basic thing?" Elena asked. "What do you mean?"

"Life," Elizabeth said. "He thought it had been reversed in him. The process, I mean. So that he was really a ghost, only born out of turn, before it had a life."

Howard smiled. "So now I'm a ghost who hasn't died."

I shook my head in despair. "Well, it certainly must be an interesting feeling, Howard."

He nodded quickly. "It's a handicap, though, being odd. Not really crazy, or anything like that. Certainly not dangerous. Just odd."

"Yes, I suppose it is," Elena said.

"It's like being scarred or something," Howard explained. "You know that people want to know about how you got cut or burned before they want to know anything else. Then, once it's been explained to them, well, then they lose interest." He took a sip of water, his eyes on Elena's. "That's why I always tell them first, like I did with Elizabeth, before I mentioned The Canterbury Tales."

It seemed an appropriate time to change the subject. "How's your father, Elizabeth?" I asked.

Her mood immediately darkened. "Not very well," she said.

"He sleeps on the porch a lot," Howard added. "I help Elizabeth get him back into the house sometimes."

Elizabeth looked at Elena. "I don't think he has much longer."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Elena said.

"Sometimes he gets a letter from an old war buddy or something," Elizabeth said, "and he'll go out on the porch with his whiskey and read it over and over until he pa.s.ses out."

"Then we bring him in the house," Howard said. "We never drank in my family. Teetotalers, all of us."

"Well, my father has been known to have a few," I said.

"I was all for Prohibition," Howard told me. "So was my family. I think my father gave some money to help push it." He nodded sternly. "Good cause, I think."

"Perhaps," I said dully.

Howard slapped his hands together. "Have you seen any of Elizabeth's new paintings?"

Elena looked surprised. "I didn't know there were any old ones."

"Well, I've been sketching a few things," Elizabeth said modestly. "Nothing much."

"Actually, they're very good," Howard said. "Especially the ones of the town bandstand and the front of the library."

Elizabeth waved her hand in a dismissive way. "Howard is such a fan," she said.

"Next time you come to New York, you should bring a few with you," I told her. "Elena and I have some friends who might be interested."

Elena looked at me quizzically.

"Harry," I explained. "He's interested in painting." I turned back to Elizabeth. "Are you doing mostly sketches?"

"Anything, really," Elizabeth said casually. And she quietly went on to tell us how Howard had coaxed her into what I believe she thought of as the beginning of a more creative life. She talked about her paintings, first describing them physically - the color and design of each canvas - then describing the mood she hoped to portray. There was a sameness in all of this, not of unoriginality, which in the end devolves into self-parody, but rather of a uniformity of vision, a sense of the world that was her own. Elizabeth saw the life of Standhope as something that shifted continually but remained unchanged, the fickleness of the human mood anch.o.r.ed by the clockwork of the seasons. That vision was more pleasant, perhaps, than mine, and certainly less severe than Elena's became, but it remained distinct and comprehending.

"I guess I've come to love Standhope," she said, as if in conclusion. "That must seem very silly to you, Elena."

"No, it doesn't," Elena said. "It's just a question of what you emphasize."

Elizabeth looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"

I think it was the first time Elena had ever been asked a direct question concerning her own feelings about Standhope. She would answer it in New England Maid, of course, but on this day when such a book was beyond both her intent and her ability, she could only begin to address those matters which would so enflame the prose of her first book, giving to it, as one critic wrote, "a sense of lost amus.e.m.e.nt which darkens every page."

"You don't like Standhope at all?" Elizabeth asked.

"I feel as if it got in my way, Elizabeth," Elena said. "It's just something I feel. I don't understand the implications of it."

They talked on for a while, both of them reliving, as they had not had a chance to do in some time, the shared pleasures of their childhood. They talked of McCarthy Pond, of diving off the cliff above it, with me always diving last, as they said, "in the role of manly protector." They talked of their schoolroom antics, and poor Mrs. Nichols was once again skewered by their wit. They seemed to delight in each other, and Howard and I sat enjoying them as well, though Howard repeatedly glanced apprehensively at his watch.

The reason for this was finally made plain, to my disappointment and, yet more pointedly, to Elena's.

"I suppose we should think about getting a train now," Howard said.

"A train?" Elena asked. She looked at Elizabeth. "I thought you were staying for the weekend."

"Howard didn't want to do that," Elizabeth said.

Elena was not satisfied. "Why not, Howard?" she asked him.

"I like to be back in my house," Howard said. "I don't like New York for a whole day anymore." He glanced at me helplessly, then turned back to Elena. "It's one of the inconveniences of knowing me. Quirkiness. I'm working to get rid of it. But I decided on the trip down that I'd better not stay in the city for more than a few hours."

"I see," Elena said. She looked at Elizabeth. "Well, if you have to."

"I do," Elizabeth said.

Within an hour they were on the train headed back for Standhope and Elena and I were walking along together down Seventh Avenue.

"Well, he doesn't seem so bad for all that craziness," I said.

Elena did not look convinced. "You have to know what you'll in dulge," she said.

"Of course."

"You have to be able to say, 'All right, I'll do this, but not that."

"Yes, you do."

"It's like a voice in your mind," she added.

I laughed. "Careful, you're sounding a little cracked yourself."

"A separate voice," Elena added. "Like Dr. Stein has described Ariadne's, full of guidance."

"Well, maybe Elizabeth has a voice of her own."

Elena nodded. "And maybe it's telling her to stay in Standhope."

"Maybe."

We continued to stroll down Seventh Avenue, the Sat.u.r.day evening bustle sweeping by us in all directions in carnival chaos.

I laughed. "I mean, when you compare it to this noise and frenzy, small-town life may not be so bad."

"Perhaps," Elena said.

"Especially for a painter," I added. "I mean, Monet preferred Giverny, right? And Cezanne left Paris for Aix-en-Provence."

Elena walked on silently, glancing randomly right and left as if trying to get hold of the city itself. "I couldn't have stayed in Stand-hope," she said after a minute. Her eyes filled with a sense of determination. "I always thought it was trying to make me disappear."

I shook my head. "I don't think so, Elena."

"I do," she said firmly. "And I was not going to let that happen." She seemed certain that she'd made the right decision. Later, though perhaps only fleetingly, she would question the course that had led her from Standhope for good. "I would not become the shadow my hometown would have made me," Dorothea Moore says in Inwardness, "and so, avoiding that, I became a stone."

A few weeks after Elizabeth's visit, Mother died in her sleep at Whitman House. The orderly who found her the next morning said that the bedclothes had been completely smooth. "She couldn't have had pain, Mr. Franklin," he a.s.sured my father as he stood in the portico of Whitman House the next afternoon, "because, you see, when they have pain, well, they just twist around and things get all tangled up." Many years later, when an overly romantic essayist wrote that Elena Franklin's mother had "died the death of Keats's fond dream, 'to cease upon the midnight with no pain,'" Elena responded in a terse note that "Keats's fond dream had nothing to do with the death of a woman who had been slowly going mad for twenty years and of whose pain you can know nothing whatsoever."

Miraculously, the director of Whitman House found my father at our house on Wilmot Street when he telephoned there on the morning of my mother's death. Minutes after hearing the news, Father telephoned Elena in New York. Then Elena called me.

"William, I have some bad news," she said, her voice noticeably strained. "Mother died this morning. We need to get back to Standhope today."

An hour or so later, Elena and I met at Penn Station and boarded a train. She was very self-contained, completely controlled. From time to time I would attempt to engage her in conversation, but she always resisted, mumbling one-word answers to my questions. In Inwardness, when Dorothea's mother asks her how she intends to deal with the grief she feels for her dead son, Dorothea replies, "I intend to think and think and think."

That is probably what Elena did on the train that afternoon, refusing to be drawn into conversation, using a book only as a prop, something upon which she could hold her eyes to keep them from searching ceaselessly about the train. By the time we pulled into the station, she looked exhausted, yet somehow vibrantly alive, as if thought itself refreshed her.

Father met us at the train. He was wearing a trim black suit and black bow tie. He stood very erect, as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. That weight was, of course, my mother, as Elena was to make plain in New England Maid: "At the railway station my father looked as though he had regained his youth, the happy gait that was synonymous with his vitality, a freedom that was but newly his - the carefree consequence of a woman's death." That my father was able to reconcile himself to Elena after he read that line was one of the minor miracles of his small life.

"I'm glad I was here in Standhope when the news came about your mother," he said to us as we stepped off the train. There was a hint of liquor about him, or perhaps cheap perfume.

I shook my father's outstretched hand. "What happened exactly?"

"You mean cause of death, Billy? Well, n.o.body seems to know. She just died in her sleep, that's all." He moved away from me and embraced Elena. "Just died in her sleep, Princess."

Elena looked at him steadily. "Where is she?"

My father seemed puzzled. "You mean the body?"

"Yes."