Read Elena for Free Online

you?” I asked. Elena’s squeamishness was beginning to irritate me.
    â€œNo, I don’t,” Elena said frantically. “I don’t want to see it.”
    I lowered the match over the shell. “Yes you do.”
    â€œ No! ” Elena shrieked. She grabbed the turtle from the table and rushed from the room.
    â€œCome on, Elena,” I shouted, “you’re crazy.” I darted after her.
    She was already through the living room and I could see her running about in the front yard as if unsure what she should do next. I ran out onto the small porch.
    â€œBring me that turtle,” I said. By then I had quite forgotten it was a gift for Elena.
    Elena hugged the turtle to her. “No. I won’t.”
    â€œBring me that turtle, Elena,” I repeated.
    Elena shrank back. “Please, William.”
    â€œHand it over,” I demanded. I took another step.
    She stepped back again, squeezing the turtle tightly to her chest. “No.”
    I bolted forward and Elena rushed away from me. She was running frantically but I was gaining on her quickly. Then she suddenly veered to the right as she reached the edge of the sidewalk and I flew past her. As I whirled around, I saw her step into the middle of the walkway. She raised the turtle high above her head, and in one fierce movement she slammed it down against the pavement, cracking the shell with the blow.
    I stared down at the broken turtle, horrified.
    â€œAre you crazy, Elena?” I said. “Why did you do that?”
    Elena stood trembling on the sidewalk. For a moment she watched the insides of the turtle ooze out from the shattered shell. Then she walked silently back to the house, her long hair swaying left and right as she made her way through the thick covering of leaves that blanketed the yard.
    Years later I related this incident to Jason. We were sitting in his apartment in the Village and he was looking very stately, pipe in hand, the smoke curled about his head.
    â€œIt’s an odd story, don’t you think?” I asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’ve never been able to figure it out, exactly. But I’ve never been able to shake it, either.”
    â€œPerhaps that’s only because Elena is so famous. Every little thing matters.”
    â€œBut I kept remembering it long before that. It’s one of my childhood memories, not just one about her.”
    Jason nodded. “What is it that pesters you, William?”
    â€œI don’t know, exactly. The contradiction, I suppose. The idea of destroying a thing in order to save it.”
    â€œYou mean the turtle?”
    â€œOf course.”
    Jason smiled. “You’ve got it all wrong, William. Elena didn’t throw that turtle down to save it from its pain. She threw it down to save you from your cruelty.”
    I leaned forward slightly. “So she was just behaving like a sister?”
    Jason nodded. “A dutiful sister, yes.”
    Jason had the gift of giving everything he said the sound of indisputable authority, and yet I think that his interpretation may not have been correct. For her part, Martha related this same incident in her biography and used it to suggest Elena’s early rebelliousness against male authority, first my father’s, then my own. But I have come to believe that Elena would have rejected any gift from me. For she was acting in defense of something far more important: the mood of thoughtfulness that had overtaken her, and which she would not permit to be stolen from her by small devices. All her life, my sister believed that she had an absolute right to her unease, that it was the central resource of her intelligence. “There is a kind of anxiety that debilitates,” she wrote in Quality , “and a kind that ennobles, that offers resistance both to the inward and to the outward misery, that cries out for reformation, as the voice of Captain Vere does from the decks of the Indomitable , both