Elena by Thomas H. Cook Page A

face, and her head sometimes jerked about, birdlike and anxious, distrustful of the crumbs held out to her.”
    Beyond all this, there was a certain sensuousness about her, which I never noticed until Elena graphically described it in what became a celebrated passage of her memoir:
    In the heat of summer it became visible; never in the winter or the fall. It rose to the surface of her face like a layer of warm, moist air. Suddenly the brown, weathered face took on a kind of tropical intensity, a lushness about the mouth and eyes. She would stretch out beneath the grape arbor upon a sheet she had taken from the line, kick off her shoes, and lie back, her arms spread out from her body as if floating on the grass, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. This was the only luxury she knew — the shade beneath the arbor, the sweetness of the grapes, the coolness of the grass, the crispness of the sheet beneath her. She would rest in this dreamy state for hours, languidly accepting a gift her husband had refused, the sense not of passion building but of passion spent.
    Predictably, this passage came under close scrutiny when New England Maid was published in 1933. That a daughter could think of her mother in such overtly sexual terms was distressing to more than a few provincial critics: “Miss Franklin has in one particular passage of unprecedented tastelessness transformed her mother from the hardworking and thrifty lady she no doubt was into the lolling figure of a sultan’s concubine,” was one response. “ New England Maid should only be read behind the green shades of the pornographer’s shop,” declared another. Still another was somewhat more temperate: “It is one thing for Mr. Freud to deal with intimate matters as a matter of science, and even for Mr. Lawrence and Miss Radclyffe Hall to deal with them in literature. But surely to allow such unwholesome preoccupations to besmirch the noble tradition of the memoir tests the limits of our liberal age.” In this, of course, the critic recalled the reticence of Montaigne but conveniently forgot the candor of Augustine.
    For my own part, I was somewhat disturbed by the passage when I first read it in 1932. I had always seen my mother as something of a drudge, helplessly tied to a wandering husband and two children whose characters and ambitions were entirely different from her own. As she declined further and further, I saw her madness as inevitable. After all, my grandmother had ended her days more or less locked in the back room of a New Hampshire farmhouse. Madness was something to which the Mayhews had always been disposed. Even so, I could not have predicted that my mother’s long-standing nervousness and befuddlement would reach such severity.
    It began rather subtly. Sometimes, for example, my mother would suddenly stop her stitching, glance toward the window, and absently allow her embroidery to slip to the floor. At other times she would stand at the sink, her fingers poised above the water, and watch the back yard as if it were about to move. By early summer, her daydreaming had worsened into what Martha calls “acute withdrawal.” In the middle of the afternoon, my mother would unexpectedly walk to her room, close the door, and remain there until the next morning. Left to ourselves, Elena and I would fix dinner, and Elena would leave a plate for my mother in her room. Normally the food would be eaten by the next morning, when Mother would emerge casually from the bedroom with the empty plate in her hand.
    By summer’s end, however, even the most routine elements of life no longer existed for her. She neglected all her household duties. She would not wash herself and sometimes wore the same filthy dress for days. She began to mutter to herself, though never loudly enough for either Elena or me to understand a word of it. She was clearly edgy, irritable, but for the most part she remained silent, spending her