Elena. Part 3

"Sit down, William," Elena said. "You don't have to go right now. "

I lowered myself to the ground opposite them and looked at Eliza beth. Just to make conversation I said, "Is your mother home?"

"My mother's dead," Elizabeth replied in a voice as featureless as if she had told me nothing at all of consequence.

"Oh," I sputtered. "I'm sorry."

"She's been dead for about a year," Elizabeth said.

"Well, I ..."

She turned briskly to my sister. "That's a pretty blouse."

"Thank you," Elena said, beaming.

"What's it made of?"

Elena shrugged. "I don't know."

Elizabeth touched the upper sleeve of Elena's blouse, rubbing a portion of it between her fingers.

"Do you know how to sew?" she asked.

Elena shook her head, her eyes downcast. "No."

Elizabeth nodded. "I didn't think so. Want me to teach you?"

Elena's eyes brightened. "Would you?"

"Sure," Elizabeth said easily. "Do you have a sewing machine?"

"My mother has one."

Elizabeth smiled, then slowly brought her hand up to Elena's cheek.

"You're very pretty," she said. "You have such a pretty face."

In her short story "Desire," Elena described this moment in her life, using the voice of an old woman remembering: "She leaned forward and I could see her hand rising. The fingers stretched out toward my face, tips raised, and pressed against my cheek delicately, as one might touch the canvas of a painting one has grown to love, the fingers sliding tenderly over the brush strokes, seeking the small rills and valleys within the structure of the whole." Later the old woman walks out into the fields behind her estate and sees the face of the girl in the clouds: "As children, we could find figures in the sky by making the clouds roll and press inward to the shape that we desired. But the face I saw now was not fashioned by a cloud, did not merely occupy some small corner of the sky. It was an elemental force which drew the clouds into itself, shifting light and shadow until the portrait was fully drawn. And it was as if the face had taken the sky as but a canvas upon which to display itself, carving its own wild features with the brush strokes of the wind."

When, after a moment, Elizabeth withdrew her touch, it was as if a line had been cut between them, a current shut off, and Elena seemed almost physically to slump backward.

I stood up immediately. "We'd better go," I said to Elena.

Elena's eyes remained fixed on Elizabeth.

"You go ahead," she said.

"You should come, too," I insisted.

"No, you go on. I'll come later," Elena said, still staring into Eliza beth's face.

Elizabeth stood up slowly, brushing bits of gra.s.s from her skirt.

"You'd better go with your brother," she said to Elena. "I have to begin dinner, anyway."

"But I can stay a little longer," Elena said.

"Come back tomorrow," Elizabeth said gently. She looked at me. "You can come back, too, if you want."

She was not in the least contemptuous of me, but I felt contemptible in her eyes. The power she had over Elena was drawn from a strength that seemed mysterious, and therefore terrifying, something that had the force and authority of an older world. Suddenly the absurd goggles dangling from my hand struck me as being wholly infantile, as repulsive as a soiled diaper.

Elizabeth glanced at Mr. Brennan, slumped in his chair on the porch. He had fallen asleep and the brown mug had tipped in his hand, spilling whiskey across his thighs.

"I'd better go in now," Elizabeth said.

Elena stood up. "I'll see you in school tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay," Elizabeth said. Then she walked toward the house.

Elena's eyes followed Elizabeth's retreating figure. Watching her as she watched Elizabeth, I felt as if something of great value was seeping from my life. I bent down quickly and took Elena's hand. She turned toward me, surprised.

"Let's go home now," I said.

Elena nodded. "All right."

We walked together for a time, neither of us saying anything, Elena entirely absorbed in her newfound friend. Then, suddenly, she skipped away from me, and I was left shuffling along behind her, preoccupied now with a new sensation, that of being utterly alone.

Adolescent loneliness is difficult for an adult to remember or imagine. I do recall, however, that for a time I had not the slightest notion of who I was, or what, in the end, I might become. There was only a sense of aimless floating to which was added an intense and bottomless desire, which, for all its feverishness, had no specific object, person or idea. It was just desire, naked and dimensionless, a need that coiled in the pit of my stomach and pulsed there like a second heart.

In this painful state I frequently took long walks, perhaps believing that I might finally pa.s.s through the border of my desire, leave it behind me like a road sign. Almost invariably, these treks ended at the gates of Whitman House, a mental inst.i.tution where vast numbers of insane people were said to reside.

From the outside, Whitman House appeared tame enough. It was a graceful structure with a large portico supported by four high Doric columns. The road beyond the dark wrought iron gate was bordered with azaleas, and huge oak trees rose above it, shading the drive and lending it a peaceful, gentle aspect. Many years later I was reminded of Whitman House by the movie Gone with the Wind, when the camera rises above a rounded hill revealing Tara in the distance, cradled in a grove of trees. Elena was sitting beside me in the theater. She turned to face me, neither smiling nor frowning. "That's where Mother died," she said.

There was a small park across from Whitman House, and at the end of my walks I used to sit down on one of the benches there and watch the people come and go. During visiting hours, the imposing gate was swung open and a steady stream of traffic moved in and out. Beyond the gate, visitors sometimes strolled casually with an inmate friend or relative, who always appeared vaguely baffled, as if still trying to discover that open window through which derangement had entered, soiling the carpet and leaving the carefully appointed room in disarray.

I still don't know what drew me to Whitman House, or why, of all the places in and around Standhope, I invariably retreated there. Certainly there was a morbid quality to my interest, the craven curiosity one feels outside the door of a brothel and which only fear or prudence can control. Perhaps I have always been attracted to the freakish and disordered because it is so powerful a counterpoint to my own life, rooted as it is, so utterly predictable. And yet I also feared Whit man House as a place where all the st.u.r.dy rules by which men live had somehow been set aside, that one abode on earth where, in Cowper's phrase, "Baccha.n.a.lian Madness has its charms."

Consequently my dismay when one afternoon I saw Elena and Elizabeth making their way toward the open gate of the asylum.

I leaped up and bounded across the street, calling to them, my arm raised in frantic warning.

"Elena! Elizabeth! Where are you going?"

They looked at me without the slightest sense of anything unusual.

"We're going inside," Elizabeth said matter-of-factly.

"You can't go in there," I told them, "that's a nuthouse."

Elena shot me a vicious look. "Elizabeth knows somebody in there," she said hotly.

"My grandmother lives in that ... what did you call it ... nut house?" Elizabeth said.

My mouth dropped open. "Oh, sorry, Elizabeth."

"That is why we moved to Standhope," she added. "So we can visit her."

"So, your grandmother, she's ..."

"Old," Elizabeth declared. "Very old. She can't look after herself. Once she set her house on fire in Boston. After that, we brought her down here."

"She's just old, William," Elena said. "That's the only thing that's the matter with her. Her mind is old."

I was unaware of the varieties of madness. To me insanity simply meant explosive moods and terrible violence. I knew about mental r.e.t.a.r.dation. Standhope even had one such person, the thirty-year-old son of Luther Coggins, whose nocturnal wanderings had been the subject of more than one town meeting. On one occasion, Dr. Houston, using the medical language of his time, had referred to him as "the Coggins imbecile." I also knew that old people went "soft in the head." But that they might also wind up in Whitman House was news to me. The "nursing home," of course, had not been invented.

"She's senile," Elizabeth said flatly. "But she's very nice and she doesn't hurt anybody."

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 G.o.d had I gotten myself into?

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

"h.e.l.lo, Elizabeth," the receptionist said. She appeared to be a nurse, dressed all in white, with a little peaked cap emblazoned with a red cross.

"h.e.l.lo," 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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."