Elena by Thomas H. Cook Page B

the Savoy, the knot of Negro children ‘street fishing’ with pole and string, trying to retrieve a lost coin from the sewer.” Such startling juxtaposition of the frivolous and grim runs throughout Elena’s description of our journey through Manhattan that morning. But none of this darker appreciation was visible in her face then. She simply looked like a child whose mind was fiercely engaged in assimilating a rush of foreign data.
    â€œAnd that’s Columbia,” my father announced, pointing to the left as we cruised down Broadway. I looked up and saw the rounded dome of Low Library.
    â€œMaybe we should stop around here, have a highball, something like that,” my father said.
    We parked near a small soda shop only a few yards from the bustle of the Broadway trolleys. My father ordered three egg creams, a drink he said we must try, and we found seats at a table near the front window. I remember that the place was very cramped, that an advertisement for Alois Swoboda’s conscious evolution system was taped to the wall, and that at a nearby table two earnest Columbia students were discussing the regatta with Cornell, which was soon to be run on Lake Cayuga.
    â€œAin’t this a helluva town?” my father asked with an enormous smile.
    Elena nodded and sipped her egg cream. “I like it here,” she said. To the very end she would insist that her decision to leave Standhope and move to New York had been the single greatest one of her life. “Otherwise I might have remained — and in more ways than geographical — exactly where I was put down,” she wrote in a letter to Martha Farrell, “another coin resting at the bottom of the pool.”
    After our brief refreshment, we continued on our way. My father drove us past St. John the Divine, which was still under construction, then swung west to Riverside Drive and took a short detour past Grant’s Tomb, and below it, in the river, Fulton’s ship, the Clermont , which served as a fashionable tavern in those days.
    â€œHe shot himself, didn’t he?” my father asked me tentatively. “In the jaw? President Grant, I mean.”
    I shook my head. “No, Father.”
    My father fixed his eyes on the road. “Facts aren’t everything, Billy,” he muttered, somewhat irritably.
    We moved southward along the western edge of Manhattan until, at Fifty-ninth Street, my father turned left and we headed across town. Elena, still in the back seat, gazed about hypnotically. In New England Maid , she wrote: “The effect was kaleidoscopic, beautiful and amazing, especially to a mind as untutored and isolated as mine. For if all of this existed but two hours from Standhope, then what wonders lay four hours from it, ten, sixteen, twenty? If this wonder were New York, then what sights might strike us blind in Istanbul, how much gold on its towering spires, how long the lines around its public wards?”
    At the southeastern corner of Central Park, my father grandly wheeled the Wills Sainte Claire up to the entrance of the Plaza Hotel.
    â€œWe’ll stay here tonight,” he said. Then he smiled and nodded to an enormous mansion just across the street. “You know, next door to old Connie Vanderbilt.”
    I looked over at the mansion, so very beautiful and remote behind the great iron gate and the circular drive.
    â€œYou mean people live there?” Elena asked. “That’s a house?”
    â€œSure is,” my father said. “And we’re staying right next door.”
    Within a few minutes, my father had completed all the business of registering us. Elena and I had waited near the tea garden, too stunned to speak, watching the elegant men and women drift in and out of the lobby, carried, as they seemed, on air.
    â€œWell, how about a walk,” my father said as he came up from behind. He dropped his arm onto Elena’s shoulder. “Feel up to it,