I am most suspicious. “Then who is your man?”
“Tom,” says she.
I’m wounded through and through, as if shattered by a pistol shot, but I recover quick enough after I reckon it is a lie.
“Zilpah Marsh, I do not care one jot that you are our class monitor. It’s evil to slander Tom. Miss Lyon had him tossed to the wolves, shipped him to the ends of the earth I suppose.”
“Gracious,” she says. “I visit him ev’ry day.”
“How can that possibly be?”
“It’s no miracle, Miss Em’ly. Tom the Handyman has the same ol’ address—he still resides in his shack.”
“Then is it legerdemain?” I ask. “Where does the other Handyman sleep?”
“In the church. Miss Lyon rented a room with the cash in her pocket.”
I don’t believe a syllable, & I wonder if Zilpah herself is in league with the Devil.
“What is Tom doing in the shack if he’s no longer the Handyman?”
“Resting,” Zilpah says, “recov’ring from that terrible Flue.”
It’s past the Flue season, and I tell her so, but it doesn’t bother her one bit.
“Hell on high water! It’s Nature that rules. He near died, Tom did.”
I have to pinch my leg, or I might fall wounded again.
“Tom’s not strong enough for too much lovin’,” says she. “I can only kiss him once or twice a day. But that one kiss is much better than a whole meal.”
I want to flee the ironing room & drown myself somewhere, but Zilpah grabs my arm. “Sissy, don’t you want to see Tom? He keeps asking for you. He says, ‘Zilpah, where’s that kind girl with the ratty red hair?’”
IT’S HARD FOR ME TO IMAGINE ZILPAH WITH TOM, OR THAT MY Tom would ever say I had ratty hair. He was the gentlest of burglars. Perhaps he pined for me, & seized upon Zilpah as second best. But I couldn’t wish evil upon her head, even if she took away my Tom. And I can’t stop thinking of the baby deer he rescued from the snow.
We sneak out the rear basement door of Holyoke Hall, Zilpah & I, and walk in the April mud to Tom’s shack. Zilpah knocks once with her fat fist.
“Tom, I brought you Miss Em’ly. May I come in?”
I hear some gruff reply from within the shack that does not have an ounce of Tom’s gentleness, but I am caught in my own excitement to see him, even if he is Zilpah’s paramour.
It’s very dark inside. But I can catch the outline of a man on Tom’s cot. He reaches over & lights the whale-oil lamp while my heart pounds, & I cannot even register my disappointment when I discover Richard Midnight’s brutal black hair. The top half of him is positively naked. And the hair on his chest is just as black, & tangled up like a strange forest. I doubt that all men have such a complication of hair as Richard Midnight.
I am trapped between him & Zilpah, who blocks the door.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” says Midnight in a thick voice, full of drowsiness & phlegm. “Ain’t it the gal that poor Tom smooched? Didn’t she live with him in this shack?”
“Darling,” says Zilpah, with a purring sound that’s close to song—she must have been delirious with her own sense of victory. “I couldn’t care if you beat her to death. It’s the last time she’ll ever humiliate another soul—introducin’ me to her brother as if I was a country cow.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do much damage,” says Midnight, patting the rough cloth of his cot & leering with his usual leer. “Come, sit beside me.”
I cannot take my eyes off that tangle of hair on his chest. The perspiration that came off Midnight was like the pungent perfume of a laboring ox.
“I’d rather you did beat me to death,” I tell him.
“What? And have Auntie Lyon grieve for you and send me to prison? I won’t even lay a finger on ya. I’ll just watch you undress, one article at a time. That’s as much pleasure as I could ever take from a skinny thing like you.”
I stand there in some no-man’s-land between disappointment & sadness that I have to look at this creature instead of Tom.
“Well,” he says, “I’m a-waitin’. Undress.”
But I wouldn’t disrobe for Richard Midnight. I might have done so for Tom had he implored me in his own sweet voice, & I would have felt no shame.
“Sis, I’m not waitin’ one second more.”
I squeeze my eyes shut as he jumps off his cot in his smelly winter pants. He starts to touch my dress. He pokes a finger in my bodice—it feels like a big hot carbuncle. I’m about to scream with the horror of it, & then I hear a scuffle next to the door.
Zilpah begins to whine. “It was just a joke, Missy. I swear to God.”
Miss Rebecca has pushed her way through the door with her yellow gloves. She must have smelled Richard Midnight’s rankness all the way from Seminary Hall, or else she followed us to the shack, knowing that Zilpah was up to her usual tricks.
Richard Midnight stands as frozen as a deer in a forest upon first encountering humankind—that’s what happened when Missy’s gaze first fell upon him. But Zilpah pulls her attention away from Midnight.
“Don’t you dare hurt my Richard,” she sings with false defiance. “Rebecca, I will never, never let you kiss me again.”
I watch the whirl of one yellow glove in that wanton light, never having seen so much mystery attached to a slap in the face. Zilpah recoils & sinks to the earthen floor of the shack. And while she sobs softly, Miss Rebecca returns to Richard Midnight.
“Vacate,” she rasps, “before I pull the teeth out of your head.”
And Richard Midnight spits at her like a snake. “I’ll tell Auntie Lyon that you threatened me…and that you’ve been having an unnatural romance with one of her monitors.”
“Vacate, I said.”
I am under Missy’s spell, waiting for that yellow glove to leap again. But Richard Midnight slithers around her in his smelly pants & flees the shack as fast as rotten legs can carry a man. She does not bother with Zilpah, but leaves her sobbing on the floor.
And I wonder when it’s my turn. It’s time for Rebecca to attack. I’m more dangerous to Missy than Zilpah Marsh or Richard Midnight. I have my father’s language and law court, and the breeding of a Dickinson. I wouldn’t be startled to learn that Missy was an orphan, like my Tom.
“Come,” she says, reaching out to me with a yellow glove. I grip the glove, feel its cool leather skin, feel my fingers in hers. I’m all a-tremble, not from any fear, but from the surety of Miss Rebecca’s hand.
11.
NO ONE COULD TELL ME WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO TOM. PERHAPS no one knew. He vanished from his shed while I was under Father’s regimen, swallowing corn mush and steam. Tom went to sea, I opine, heartbroken after he spent a few precious moments with Miss Em’ly, realizing with his weakened lungs that our love could never be.
I have to dream that Tom felt something, that he took comfort in my amber eyes, that he adored my tiny, birdlike hands, both of which he could have captured in one of his paws. And he might have captured them had he not been so ill. But I have to live in the land of conjecture concerning Tom. Not so with Richard Midnight & our monitor. Midnight was cast out of Holyoke with barely the shirt upon his back, even if he was Mary Lyon’s distant cousin. I would have plucked out both his eyes with much pleasure had Mistress asked me to do so. But contrary creature that I am, I might have pitied him then & led blind Richard about with his paw clasped in both my hands.
I also pitied Zilpah Marsh. She had to go before the duchesses & dowagers of the Female Prayer Circle, who had transmogrified themselves into a review board upon this rare occasion. The duchesses were quite harsh with Zilpah, since they were the ones who had purchased her tuition at Mt Holyoke & had sponsored her as a scholarship student. Mistress tried to intervene in our monitor’s behalf. But the duchesses remained without mercy for this stable hand’s daughter who vanished from our little mountain.
“Dear Mary,” said their leader, a certain Mrs. Belcher of Belchertown, “sexual congr
ess with a handyman upon seminary grounds? If we countenance that, we might as well call the school Mt Seraglio.” I was not privy to such conversation, but at least two of our Seniors swore they overheard Mrs. Belcher in Mary Lyon’s sitting room. And even if they exaggerated a little, it could not have been far from the truth.
Zilpah Marsh was locked out of our grace. She was stripped of all her rights. She could not stand with other Seniors at the school’s Anniversary, could not graduate with a Certificate, but had to return to Amherst posthaste. Yet our principal did try to protect her. Mary Lyon was not quite so cruel as the Female Prayer Circle. Rather than expel Zilpah Marsh & leave a devastating lifelong black mark, she erased Zilpah from our rolls, thus giving the impression that Zilpah Marsh & Mt Holyoke never existed within the same hemisphere.
Would that it had happened to me and not the stable hand’s daughter. Even at seventeen I was not the sentimental sort who cried into her handkerchief about the woes of humankind. But I could not feel guiltless in regard to Zilpah Marsh. To get my own way & have her pilot me to Tom’s shack, I had lied & led her on, inducing Zilpah to believe she might have a chance with my brother when she had none. And the moment Austin “spurned” that girl with one brutal glance, she must have plotted her revenge on me.
I missed her, if truth be known. There seemed to be some hollow at school—some implacable hole—where Zilpah had been. I had no one else to rouse me of a morning and lead me to the bake room. My bread & puddings suffered, and I suffered too. Even with her harshness, she had been my one compatriot. And thus I endured my last months at Holyoke as an idle daydream. I wrote to Austin & Little Sister, begging them to unearth the whereabouts of Zilpah Marsh. My dear Lavinia played detective, but could not uncover a single clue. Finally, at my behest, Austin visited the secret society where Zilpah’s mother worked as a housemaid, even though Brother had no moral right to be on the society’s grounds, since he had pledged himself to another such society. “My Dearest Emily,” Austin wrote the very day of his encounter with Mrs. Marsh. “You cannot imagine how that poor woman bruised my heart. Shall I describe her? She is a tiny thing, all scrunched over, with hands that resemble a lobster’s red claws. She claimed that her one and only daughter was a wicked, wicked girl who had run off with a reprobate employee & relative of Miss Mary Lyon’s & asked me did I know a lawyer, since she considered suing Miss Lyon for damages. The seminary in which she had put all her hope had ripped apart her daughter’s reputation, said Mrs. Marsh. Sister, I think it is time you came home.”
And I did come home, a no-hoper who had nightmares for a month. In my dreams I wasn’t assaulted by Richard Midnight or Zilpah Marsh. I wasn’t asked to disrobe like some harem-girl in a seraglio imagined by Mrs. Belcher of Belchertown. I was caressed by a pair of yellow gloves. But these gloves did not belong to Miss Rebecca Winslow. They belonged to Tom. I could not see his face, only a patch of blond hair. And gentle though Tom be, his diabolical leather scorched my skin. I was tantalized nonetheless. That was the worst part of my torment. I wanted Tom to touch me, & the moment he did, I screamed as I had never screamed before.
Ben Newton
He was Father’s law student, Ben Newton of Worcester, nine years older than Emily, but he didn’t huff at her and show off his brilliance, like Father’s other clerks, who had fat hands and chalk on their collars. Ben had beautiful long fingers, like Chopin, and a persistent, nagging cough. It worried her, because he seemed so frail. He’d arrived at Father’s office while she was still at Holyoke, and they didn’t become friends until she returned to Amherst in August ’48. He would often come to dinner, accompanying Father home from work at noon, carrying a mountain of briefs. But legal matters were never discussed at the dinner table, and it distressed Emily that Father had turned poor Newton into a camel that had to carry briefs.
He had an angular face with enormous brown eyes that hid some of his shyness. She wasn’t frightened to show him her own scribbling. She didn’t know what else to call it. And she wasn’t ashamed to confess that poetry mattered to her more than the pumping of her heart.
Ben Newton didn’t laugh or make light of this urgency she had kept locked inside for so long. He gave her books to read, and talked of Ralph Emerson, the man of Concord, who had toured the capitals of Europe and met Chopin and Dickens and Lord Tennyson.
Her head reeled at the mention of such firmaments. She was Father’s little mouse who had been nowhere, seen nothing and no one. She would have traded all the copper in her hair, lived the rest of her life as a brunette, to breathe in Chopin and his lovely hands for five minutes. And when she told this to Ben Newton, he said, “Miss Emily, I believe that Ralph Emerson would call you the priestess of Pan!”
She was stunned, but she couldn’t show her consternation. She ruffled her nose and behaved like a typical Amherst belle. “Why, Benjamin Newton, what could you possibly mean?”
But now he did laugh and immediately had a coughing fit, and she wanted to take this tall shivering man into her arms. She brought him a glass of sherry and he recovered, but he kept a handkerchief near his mouth.
“I wasn’t being spiteful, Miss Emily. I meant to say that I can feel you take on the limbs of a poet.”
“You mustn’t flatter me, Ben. I’m a country girl, and you a Worcester man. You ought to take pity.”
“I’m the one ought to be pitied. It’s Mr. Emerson who writes that the priestess of Pan has to shun father, mother, sister, brother, and friends the moment that her genius calls.”
She might have fainted, fell to the floor, if she hadn’t been so concerned with Ben Newton’s cough. How could she have shunned Father, Mother, Austin, and Little Sister, even if she ever did become the priestess of Pan? She was a country girl with note paper in her pocket and a mechanical pencil that worked only when it wanted and might make her fingers bleed on account of the splinters in its blue glass. And one afternoon Ben saw the blood and wrapped her writing hand in a wad of cotton, as if she had been wounded in war.
“That’s a mighty poor mechanical pencil, ma’am, if it makes you a casualty every time you use it.”
“It’s a king’s pencil,” she had to explain. “Father found it for me in Boston. And I would not dream of betraying him by using an inferior pencil with inferior lead.”
Ben cut through her vanity by applying a bandage to her king’s pencil. That’s how he became her Tutor, and he might have been her Tutor for life if he hadn’t gone back to Worcester. But she had him to herself for a whole year while he slaved at Father’s office.
Ben Newton worried about her immortal soul, while she worried about his cough. She looked for signs of blood in his rumpled handkerchief, but found none. She meant to seduce him in church, sit next to him, and brush against his hand. But he wouldn’t go to church with Emily, wouldn’t sit in the Dickinson pew. Ben was a Unitarian. He didn’t believe in hellfire, and he didn’t have any truck with the Devil. Ben’s Lord God wouldn’t have frowned upon a priestess of Pan, and would have set aside a room in His domain for an apprentice poet.
Emily no longer knew what to think. She would have liked to have the Lord at her side while she wielded her mechanical pencil. And her Tutor said that Lord Jesus wasn’t the Son of God, but a man with a gift for poetry who could heal the sick and the lame with words alone. Emily wouldn’t contradict her Tutor, but she didn’t believe that words could heal; they were dipped in hellfire. And she did believe in the Devil. But she had no one to sail with into the wind, to pull against her own ballast, without Ben. She wished that Father would take him into his law firm, not as a fledgling, but as a full partner. But Ben had no strong desire to remain in Amherst. And Emily imagined that he had a sweetheart waiting for him in Worcester, though he did not seem to carry her silhouette in his pocket.
So she beguiled him as long as she could. Yet what did she have to offer? A short stop at a female seminary where Ralph Emerson would have been the same as the Devil? A mask of freckles on her face? How could she ever ho
pe to compete with a Worcester girl? She would have to devour the best parts of him like a bear in the forest, but she wasn’t the devouring kind, not with her Tutor.
They would walk in the burying-ground behind Father’s house on West Street, where the Dickinsons had moved when Emily was nine or ten. Grandpa Samuel had nearly bankrupted Father, who lost the family Mansion and whose only dream was to buy it back. But Emily didn’t have the same wish. She liked the phantoms in the graveyard, feared them too, and the sound of the wind against the tall stones often soothed her on winter nights, rocked inside her head.
But there was little wind in the burying-ground that afternoon when her Tutor announced that he was returning to Worcester. It was like the unwinding of a marriage that never was, the dissolution of whatever small indemnity she had with Ben while he was still in bondage to Father’s firm. She wouldn’t cry in a graveyard. But her Tutor didn’t even hold her hand. She could see the mask of death he wore, the pale mouth and bloodless eyes, and she felt like an evil witch who could only fall upon pictures of decay.
“Miss Emily,” he said in the softest voice, “I would be grievously disappointed if I did not live long enough to see you become a poet.”
And she chided him out of her own despair. “Why, Mr. Ben, you are a bit selfish. I’m already the priestess of Pan. Ain’t that good enough?”
He laughed once, and in some paroxysm of feeling he kissed her hand. That was his goodbye. And she could have survived on that kiss for months if her king’s pencil hadn’t broken a day after her meeting in the graveyard. The blue glass split in half. It was the very worst omen she could imagine, as if that kind Lord of the Unitarians had deserted Emily and her desire to write.
PART TWO
Carlo and Currer Bell
Amherst College and Township
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Page 5