Well, she’s got nothing to fear from me as far as that goes. The only change in my feelings toward her is that I’ve moved from indifference to dislike.
She’s just one more person making it more likely Hawthorne will close.
The Bustle in a House
The Morning after
Death
Ten days.
According to the paper, the police are currently speaking with “one or more persons of interest.”
(I have never understood why when a person of interest meets another person of interest, they become interesting persons. The rest of us turn into people when we go plural.)
Reading this, I felt a faint stirring of hope. Then I was amazed at my own idiocy.
I’m fairly sure the police talk to interesting people all the time. And murders still go unsolved.
But this time is different. Isn’t it? I’m allowed to hope I’ll learn something new after something so new has happened.
Not all die early,
dying young—
Maturity of Fate
Is Consummated Equally
In Ages, or a Night—
Stephen James lost his whole life—his present and his future, too. He wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, and he was young enough that people would say “yet” after each of those. He was clearly going to get better known in his field, given the chance.
He lost all those possibilities.
But he also lost his “real” death—the one that had been waiting for him down the road until the murderer pushed him down and stole it.
Maybe that death would have been terrible, too. Maybe Stephen James would have ended up out of his mind with pain, or on life support, or both. Maybe one sunny summer day the doctor would give him six months to live, and tactfully refrain from pointing out how horrible the last half of that time would be.
Maybe, when Stephen James was face-to-face with the end that had been written for him, he would have thought that a bullet to the back of the head wasn’t such a bad way to go. Maybe he’d have been willing to make a deal with the devil to have such a swift and painless end, even if it meant leaving a few years early.
But I bet he still would have resented having someone else decide his death for him.
Nothing has happened but loneliness, perhaps too daily to relate.
A rare burst of rain today. It caught Ms. Lurie by surprise, but she laughed it off. Said it was nice to be able to take a shower outside for a change.
She’s taking walks again. Has been for days now.
M said she can’t decide if Ms. Lurie is a portrait of courage or a prisoner of muscle memory, but she sounded admiring so no one yelled at her.
In other local news, the persons in question are no longer of interest to the police and new ones haven’t come along to replace them.
SOUTH HADLEY SEMINARY
Nov. 2d, 1847
BILL OF FARE
ROAST VEAL
POTATOES
SQUASH
GRAVY
WHEAT AND BROWN BREAD
BUTTER
PEPPER AND SALT
Dessert
APPLE DUMPLING
SAUCE
WATER
Isn’t that a dinner fit to set before a king?
There’s a book I love about a girl whose family dies of arsenic poisoning while she’s safe upstairs, having been sent to bed without her supper for being bad.
It was a novel and the narrator was legitimately insane, but still I think there was a lot of truth in that story.
Not being allowed to eat can be a gift. It can certainly teach you perspective, even if the dinner in question promises not to kill you.
Perspective like this is no fun but it could be a lot worse.
And so many things are out of your control, it’s important to be able to control the things you can.
And let’s not forget being a little hungry doesn’t kill people—knives and guns kill people.
Tonight I sent myself to my room without dinner, not because I’d broken any rules but as a reminder to keep them firmly in mind.
Contrary to popular opinion about boarding school food (which has definitely held true at every other school I’ve attended), Hawthorne dinners are good. Easily as good as what Dickinson was served at Mount Holyoke, I’ll bet. Certainly good enough that missing dinner tonight felt like legitimate punishment, even if it spared me one more meal with everyone either avoiding everyone else’s eyes or giving one another Meaningful Looks.
Anyway. I planned to get some work done and think very hard about anything but food and go to bed early. If Ms. Lurie came up to see what was what, I’d tell her so.
It wasn’t Ms. Lurie who knocked, though. It was M.
“Hey, writer-girl,” she said without waiting for me to answer or open the door. “Put down the quill. It’s dinnertime.”
I opened my mouth to argue and then closed it again. Anything I said could and most definitely would be used against me.
A pause, and then a rat-a-tat-tat, as if she were banging on my door with something metallic. Brass knuckles, probably.
“Come on,” she said, and then lowered her voice a bit. “Ms. Lurie has enough to worry about without you being a diva.”
I gritted my teeth. I was not being a diva, and Ms. Lurie had the opposite of anything to worry about as long as I was shut up in my room.
There was a long silence. I thought maybe she’d left, and felt a surprise that was almost like disappointment. M didn’t seem the type to give up so easily.
I’d just clicked on the online random number generator to see which poem I’d try to write an essay about—I like that better than reading Dickinson’s work in order, and her poems only have numbers, not titles. Then I heard an odd rustling noise, and turned to see what it was.
A note slid under my door.
No one is weirder than M. Does she think she’s at secret-agent academy or something?
If I’d been at my desk, I’d have had to get up to see what it said; but unfortunately I was on my bed in a nest of books and papers, so I could read Fresh strawberry shortcake as easy as glancing.
I didn’t respond, didn’t even move. She was probably listening for the least little anything.
More silence, and then another note. This one I could have read from across the room—possibly across the school—since M was kind enough to write in block capitals as big as the moon:
YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT
I jumped off my bed, knocking a book to the floor in the process. Picking up both notes, I crumpled them up as loudly as I could as close to the door as possible.
M laughed heartily.
“All right, little princess,” she said. “I’ll tell Ms. Lurie you’re suffering from the vapors and beg to be excused for the evening.”
I waited until I heard her footsteps retreat all the way down the hall, and then I returned clumsily to my bed. I was still holding the notes.
M’s handwriting was pretty and upright. Even her capitals were elegant.
Had she brought writing materials with her on the suspicion that I wouldn’t open the door to her, or does she carry them around as a matter of course?
I do that. So did Dickinson. Her famous white dress had one pocket, on the right-hand side, just the right size for a pencil and a bit of paper.
(I’ve read this and I understand it would be handy, but it still seems batty to put a pencil in the pocket of a white dress. Granted, Dickinson didn’t have to do her own laundry.)
The notes in my hands were opening a bit in spite of my violence toward them, like origami if you don’t fold it hard enough.
M had used a fine pen for the first note and what looked like heavy pencil—charcoal?—for the second.
The paper was so thick it had been hard to get much in the way of a satisfactory crunching noise from scrunching it up. It was from a sketch pad, maybe—or would paper this heavy be for painting?
It seemed a shame to waste it on
me, at any rate—especially when she had to know it wouldn’t work.
And now, with the mention of cake, I was officially starving.
It is startling to think that the lips, which are keepers of thoughts so magical, yet at any moment are subject to the seclusion of death.
Last night I went to see Emily Dickinson’s house.
I can only dream about it, of course. I guess maybe it shouldn’t be “of course”—she’s past being hurt, even by me. But I can’t help worrying the place might get burned down after my visit, and then I’d feel guilty for the rest of my life.
It’s one thing for me to go places I clearly have to go, and another to make what’s obviously a trip only for fun. Can’t risk it. Especially now, after Stephen James.
I’ve had this dream before. I’m never visiting the house the way it is now—a museum. In my dream Dickinson is still alive, a local legend smiling secretly in her bedroom.
Her home was sort of a tourist attraction even then. The Homestead, it was called—probably the first brick house ever built in the town, later added onto and fancified by Dickinson’s father.
People didn’t care about the house itself, though. They just wanted to see her. Meeting Miss Emily, the myth of Amherst, earned you some serious bragging rights—mostly because it almost never happened.
It hasn’t happened to me yet, but I keep hoping.
I knock on the front door and the maid, Maggie, answers. I know it’s Maggie and not Emily’s sister Lavinia—I’ve seen the old photographs. In the picture I like best, Maggie stares at the camera, looking half-amused and half-impatient, as if the photographer is a child she’s hoping will run along and leave her alone so she can get on with her work, for pity’s sake.
I feel a little rude thinking of her as “Maggie.” The Dickinsons called her that. So did their friends. But her family called her Margaret, and that seems to be what she called herself when she had any choice in the matter.
Bosses tended to rename the servants back then—to show them who was in charge, I guess, as if that wasn’t obvious enough.
To be fair, Margaret didn’t seem to mind the nickname that much. She once ended a letter by signing herself MISS EMILY’S MAGGIE. And she called Dickinson “Emily” when they spoke, which Dickinson seemed to like very much and which seems quite warm and open for a time when people would usually say Miss or Mister until they’d known each other a hundred years or so.
Fortunately, I don’t have to call her anything. She opens the door with an inquiring look and I hand her a card with my name on it—kind of like a business card, but old-fashioned, with just my name and some flowers around the border. A calling card, back when calling meant using your feet rather than your phone.
I ask Maggie/Margaret if she could please send word to Miss Emily that a guest would like to see her, if quite convenient.
Her expression is professionally blank. “It would mean a great deal,” I continue in my best imitation of nineteenth-century speak. Nothing I say will work, of course, but I have to try.
She doesn’t say anything. She just leads me into the smallish sitting area I recognize from pictures of the house—too wide to be a hallway; too small to be a room.
I seat myself in a hard wooden chair with a strangely curvy seat, and watch as Maggie/Margaret disappears up a dark, narrow flight of stairs.
I may not get to see Miss Emily, but the woman I’ve already met gave the world Dickinson’s poetry every bit as much as anyone else did. Dickinson wrote the words, and her sister pushed for them to be published posthumously, but Margaret Maher, Miss Emily’s Maggie, was the one who gave Dickinson almost twenty years of writing time. She took over the hard, unglamorous housework Miss Emily had been stuck doing before Maggie came along. When Dickinson sewed so many of her poems together into dozens of strange, clever booklets, she asked Maggie to keep them in her trunk. And when Dickinson died, Maggie sobbingly handed that poetry over to Lavinia rather than destroying it as Miss Emily had requested.
Without Margaret Maher, there wouldn’t even be that one photo of Dickinson you always see on her books and biographies. Dickinson’s family didn’t think the picture did Emily justice, so they didn’t bother keeping it. Maggie did. Not because it would become the only known image of a great American poet. Just because Maggie loved Emily.
Not right away. When Maggie first came to work for the Dickinsons, she found the household so strange, so little like what she was used to—no babies to look after, but they did insist she play with the cats!—she nearly left. Strong, competent Margaret Maher was in demand, and she wanted to accept an offer elsewhere. But her sister Mary was lonely and illiterate and wouldn’t hear of Margaret moving miles away. Margaret was fifteen years younger and the only other girl-child in the Maher family to survive to see adulthood. Mary wouldn’t part with her, so Miss Emily got to keep her, too.
And Margaret—like Dickinson and very much unlike me—got to have a sister who held tight to her and protected her like a mother might.
I sit and wait for some sort of reply. The house is absolutely silent. It’s huge, so I suppose I shouldn’t make this sort of assumption, but I feel sure no one else is there.
I don’t know exactly what year it is. Maybe the Dickinson parents are already dead. But where is Lavinia? Out on an errand, maybe—she’s not the one who stays in the house all the time.
It would be nice to meet Lavinia Dickinson, or even one of her cats.
I wait what feels like forever, but one time I woke up from this dream in the middle of waiting and it was only three minutes after I’d fallen asleep, so clearly my mind is playing games with me.
No matter how long I wait, “Miss Emily” never comes down to see me, and she certainly never asks me to come up. Maggie is always forced to deliver the message that she’s very sorry, but Miss Emily can see no one today.
When she says this, I always feel the same combination of disappointment and relief. I don’t quite know that I’m dreaming, but I have a vague understanding that it’s a miracle I’m in this house at all—to have fought so hard and well against all kinds of impossibility, and then not to be able to see her after all!
But if I had been granted a visit, what would I say? It’s not as if I could exactly count on Dickinson to carry the conversation. She was famously flustered and speechless in person, even with close friends. And what do you say to a genius? “I know you decided never to publish during your lifetime, but I was born a long time after you died and I love your work”?
The first few times I had this dream, Maggie came downstairs with an empty-handed apology. After that, Miss Emily started softening her refusals with a handwritten note. She did that in real life—she hated being intruded on, but sometimes she hated hurting people’s feelings even more. So she’d send down a few words, occasionally even a poem if the visitor were really lucky or had offered her something in exchange.
(One lady played the piano and sang so that Dickinson could listen to her from another room; and when she was finished, Dickinson sent Maggie to give her a poem she’d just written about how awful it was to have visitors barging in all the time.)
Last night Miss Emily sent me a note that might have been a poem. It’s hard to tell with her letters sometimes.
I decided to believe it was one, and that I’d finally joined the ranks of the lucky few.
I wouldn’t have minded if my poem had been a complaint, but it wasn’t. At least I don’t think it was. It seemed more like an apology.
Usually I can’t remember what she writes to me, but this note I remember perfectly. It was wrapped around the stem of a white rose, which Maggie offered me on a tray.
I pick it up, embarrassed by my gloveless hands. I’m never dressed for the nineteenth century in these dreams, and I’m the only one who ever notices or cares.
I feel a little shy of reading the note in front of Maggie, but she seems to understand and whisks her aproned self away, having wasted enough of her busy day on yet ano
ther fangirl.
The note is secured with a bit of white thread. Maybe she’d pulled it from the hem of her famous dress—or her nightdress? Surely that would be white, too?—or maybe she’d asked Maggie to fetch her some.
The rose itself is perfect, of course: a silky white bud just beginning to open.
The note unrolled itself as soon as I tugged the thread. It was written in pencil.
Silence is the sum
not of too few words
but too many.
That’s not one of Dickinson’s real poems. I checked when I woke up. Which means I wrote it, sort of.
It’s not a bad poem, as bad poems go. Anyway, I’m not interested in being a poet, at least not when I’m awake.
I sit and look at my flower and wish I could take it home with me. A wonderful smell of bread baking has begun to spread through the house. Maggie at work—but didn’t she leave the baking to Emily?
If I stayed long enough, maybe one of them would offer me a crust, if only to keep me from passing out from hunger. That would be embarrassing for everyone involved.
Instead I woke up hungry at Hawthorne.
Usually I’m happy to find myself here.
then it is all over, as is said of the dead.
what used to be
I have to walk by ^ Alyssa’s room to get to the closest bathroom. (I wish there were some way for each of us to have our own, but there’s no way Ms. Lurie would agree to that. Sharing common space teaches habits of consideration, and of course makes us appreciate the privacy we do have that much more. Which would sound like a preachy way to save a lot of money and earn virtue points in the bargain if she weren’t so obviously sincere.)
The door to Alyssa’s ex-room keeps surprising me by being open to emptiness. Today that room startled me with an occupant. A girl was standing quietly looking out the window as I hurried by.
Just for a second I thought Alyssa’s parents had let her come back. But this girl, though small and blonde like Alyssa, was the wrong height and shape.
I stopped, she turned, and I saw it was M.
She smiled, though her eyes were serious. I didn’t say anything, but she answered me anyway.
The Letting Go Page 6