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within the life of one and within the lives of all.”
    There are times now when I gaze at all those many photographs I have of Elena, and in each of her changing faces this basic seriousness remains, as if it were the single line she threw out to the world, her determined gravity.
    Martha ends her chapter on Elena’s birthday party with a dramatic interpretation of it, describing Elena’s refusal to blow out the candles as “a gesture of resistance and refusal in its initial childhood phase.” She says that in the end my sister was made whole, at least as an artist, “by various episodes of psychological disjunction, which, added together, argue for the general diagnosis of periodic childhood depression.”
    But something of my sister’s life is already missing in Martha Farrell’s report: her ordinary needs, the ones that bind her to the rest of us. She needed to leap into McCarthy Pond, dress up like a witch on Halloween, take a hay ride to MacDougall’s farm, sing all those boring childhood songs. And then, of course, there was that one further need, which rose in her at this time, one that did not so much darken her childhood as give it greater ardency. It was unmistakable. It lived in everything she did: in the way she hesitated before entering the shed or kept the door to her room slightly ajar. It stared outward through her eyes, and was, I suppose, most simply embodied in that lock of Lewis Carroll’s creation, that creature of tightened bolt and unbending steel who beats about tirelessly, searching, searching, as it says, for someone with the key to me.
    H er hair was almost the color of strawberries, and her name was Elizabeth Brennan. Her eyes were green, and they moved continually. Elena described her in New England Maid: “She was sitting in the school yard, cross-legged on a bench, methodically chewing a piece of Wrigley’s. She was wearing a blue dress with a white lace hem and black shoes, dusty from the playing field. Her hair was red and hung freely to her shoulders. She had taken out the bow and now twirled the ribbon through her fingers with a strange, unchildlike dalliance. Her eyes never came to rest, and everything they fell upon, they singed a little.”
    It was Elizabeth who first had the key to my sister. She moved to Wilmot Street not long after Bobby Taylor’s death and lived there with her father, a large, heavyset man, who spent most of his time sitting morosely on the front porch of their house, a mug — not a glass or cup, but a mug — of whiskey in his hand. He drank in this fashion all the time, publicly, his legs sprawled out in front of him, his head drooping down, the mug balanced so uneasily in his hand that the whiskey sometimes sloshed onto the unpainted wooden floor.
    In 1919 few people referred to alcoholism as a disease. It was a moral failure, a willful dissoluteness. “Your father is a sot,” Dr. Houston told Elizabeth bluntly the afternoon she finally dragged her father to his office after a bout of coughing blood. “He’s a drunk,” Dr. Houston went on, the voice of his time, “and he will remain a drunk until he makes up his mind to stop drinking.”
    But Mr. Brennan couldn’t stop, and so for endless hours he sat out on his porch, outrageously shirtless even in the fall, and sipped at his great brown mug until his eyes finally closed and the mug slipped from his fingers. Then Elizabeth would rush out to him, clean up the mess, rouse him into semiconsciousness, and with great effort maneuver his large hulking body back into the house.
    They had moved from Boston, where Mr. Brennan had worked on the docks for many years. No doubt he had pilfered enough un guarded goods there to ease himself into a sodden retirement. “There was an air of lost criminality about him,” Elena wrote in New England Maid , “of small virtues abandoned for the larger one of survival. It was as if