Elena (3 page)

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.

A
fter 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.

In
New England Maid
, Elena wrote that “the flags and bunting and uniforms held their own for a while in what appeared to be a rear-guard action on behalf of memory. But normalcy was a more powerful foe than anything confronted in the Great War, and in the end all the symbols of that struggle faded as if embarrassed by their own eccentricity, fashions that no longer suited the times.”

Of all the people who fought that “rear-guard action on behalf of memory,” Bobby Taylor was the bravest. He had been gassed twice and shot once, but except for a hard, dry cough, he looked more or less as he always had. There was a drawn quality to his face, a certain wildness in his eyes, but these could be assigned to the extremity of his experience.

It was his behavior, not his appearance, that aroused speculation about him. He would sometimes burst out crying in the middle of a conversation or laugh inappropriately, and in a high, thready manner which sounded almost girlish. Dr. Houston blamed these aberrations on the residual effects of mustard gas and prescribed withering purgatives which left Bobby weak and feverish. Pastor James went by to see Bobby and offered the comforts of Christian endurance. Nothing availed, however, and within three months after he came back to Standhope, Bobby Taylor placed a note on the mantel in his living room. It said: “Thank You.” Then he walked into the back room of his house, took off his clothes, crawled into bed, and shot himself between the eyes with his father's pistol.

Elena and I were together playing croquet on our front lawn when the bell began ringing down the street at the Taylor house. We ran toward the sound of the bell as fast as we could, both expecting to see dark smoke rising in the distance since the bells were almost always used as fire alarms. But when we saw no smoke, we slowed our run, then finally stopped a few yards from the house. We could see Bobby's mother talking intently to her neighbor, Mr. Parks, in the front yard. Mr. Parks looked briefly toward the house, then drew her under his arm, lowering the side of his face into her hair.

For a long time Elena and I stood on the walkway watching people hurry past. Then Mr. Parks came over to us. His face was flushed. “Go home,” he said, rather harshly. “There's nothing for you to see here.”