Elena by Thomas H. Cook Page A

you.” He kissed her, then returned her to the ground.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œWanna 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?”
    â€œIt’s wonderful,” Elena said. “It’s so shiny.”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œWell, you want to go, don’t you?” my father asked grandly.
    â€œSure!” I said excitedly.
    â€œGood,” 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.
    â€œGot all your stuff in here,” he said. “Okay, let’s go.”
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œAin’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.
    â€œWe’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