The Golden Age: 3. Elsa Summary & Analysis

Instead of napping, Elsa is in the Babies’ Room. She’s cuddling Rayma Colley, whose whimpering she heard from down the hall. With two younger sisters of her own, Elsa isn’t sentimental towards babies but is very competent in taking care of them and soon stops Rayma from crying by coaxing her to look at the sky. In the time she spent in the hospital, largely immobile, Elsa has spent hours examining the sky, and is amazed she never paid such close attention to it before.

Elsa assures Rayma that her mother misses her and thinks of her. Elsa knows Rayma crying for her mother because all the children miss their mothers intensely and spend most of their time waiting for them to come visit. Elsa remembers listening for her own mother’s footsteps all day in the Isolation Ward. To Elsa, the sky and her mother have become “entwined,” since both are so important to her and absorb so much of her attention.

Despite this comparison, Elsa remembers that when she left the Isolation Ward and her parents were allowed to sit by her, they looked “smaller” and “shrunken” by the terror they’d endured. For her part, she felt distant from them and alone in the effort of fighting polio. Elsa knows that, just as she did, Rayma has to learn to be without her mother and think for herself.

Elsa reflects that when her mother leaves after a visit, she sometimes imagines that her real mother is waiting for her somewhere else; unlike the mother who visits her, this hidden mother is “beautiful as an angel, with an angel’s perfect understanding.”