The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  14.

  BROTHER REPORTS BACK TO HEAD-QUARTERS LIKE A SERGEANT major. He’s recommended the housekeeper from his rival fraternity, Phi Upsilon, who is sick of having her Seniors revel in rum resorts and return with their coats soiled and with a sulking nastiness about them. It is Zilpah’s mother, Mrs. Marsh, and she can provide a list of references as long as a scholar’s scroll. President Hitchcock has appropriated her himself for certain Senior levees.

  I do not utter a word. I haven’t forgotten my halcyon days and nights at Holyoke, when Zilpah Marsh tried to mutilate me in the Handyman’s shack behind Holyoke Hall. But I would not hold a daughter’s sins against Mrs. Marsh. Ma-ma cannot aid in the interview. She is too ill. And so Father interviews the housekeeper on his own while I am out with Carlo, who has made himself master of the town. We have become an infamous couple, Carlo and I, as we sail into the snow, most of me hidden behind the dog’s great black coat. Carlo can sniff out suspicious characters within one glance of a particular street.

  He should have sniffed closer to home. I was suspicious the second Father told me that the housekeeper he had hired had gone to that nun’s school in the hills, as he likes to call Holyoke, and had used my name as a reference.

  “Father, how many housekeepers within your knowledge ever attended a female seminary?”

  “Should I hold that against her?” he asks with all the acumen of the town’s foremost lawyer.

  “How old does she happen to be?”

  “Hard to tell. Her face is worn with worry marks.”

  “And does she have a faint mustache?”

  “No,” says the Squire. “Not that I can remember.”

  I still should have told father to unhire her, but I did not. There was the lingering guilt that I had played the serpent with Zilpah, enticing her, rattling Austin in front of her eyes.

  “ZILPAH MARSH, YOU MAY HAVE FOOLED MY FATHER, BUT I have seen your sinister side. You will be out the door at the first sign of any contretemps. And if you are co-habiting with Richard Midnight, as his mistress or his wife, you will not be long in Father’s employ.”

  I barely have the breath to complete so large a soliloquy. Father is not so wrong about Zilpah. She is wizened with worry marks.

  “I left that maniac,” says she. “And sorry I am, Miss Em’ly, that he was ever born.”

  “And why are you impersonating your mother?”

  “Because who would hire me?”

  “But you have an education. You could be a scrivener, work in a lawyer’s office. You could teach school.”

  “I was thrown out of Holyoke with not one word of commendation. Mistress Lyon might have written a kind word, but Mistress is gone.”

  She expired the year after I left Holyoke, having failed to convert every single scholar into a bride of Christ. And Miss Rebecca withdrew with her yellow gloves behind the walls of another female seminary.

  “Zilpah Marsh, I am not a demon, nor am I a tattletale. I will not ruin your chances here.”

  “You won’t be sorry, Mistress.”

  She wanted to kiss my hands, but I could not bear to reign over her. Whatever defect she might have had, it was not in the matter of intellect. Zilpah Marsh is my equal, whether she works for us or not. That doesn’t mean I am not wary. I watch her all the time. Thus she curtails my outings with Carlo, but I have to be on my guard. I can feel a tremor of violence in her, but I do not warn Pa-pa. I will be the policeman of the house. Yet she is kind to Mother—perhaps too kind—and cares for her while Mother has her attacks of Neuralgia. She has even assumed the burden of Mother’s knitting, and now it is Zilpah Marsh who darns Father’s winter stockings, Zilpah who bastes the chicken, Zilpah who pumps the water and lights the stoves.

  Father is enchanted with her and boasts to his law clerks that he has a housekeeper who went to Holyoke. It worries me that Zilpah might become the siren of West Street. But how can I fault a housekeeper for her refined Prose? I am the wicked one. I am already plotting how to rid myself of her, hoping that Father might recommend her to some law office, even his own. But the Squire seems content to keep his housekeeper under lock and key.

  And there was one last hurdle: Austin. Would she shiver in his presence, swoon when she served him a rack of lamb? But she was as calm as a sea captain around Brother, did not fawn over him, and Austin would never have recognized her as the monitor with a mustache from Holyoke Hall. She says not a word to him, nodding her head at any of his wants and calling him the young master of the house.

  Zilpah could have lived with us, but I did not invite her to do so. She arrived just after dawn and went home late, but I had no idea where exactly her home was. I assumed she lived with her mother somewhere behind the hat factory. Zilpah did not tipple, did not drink, like our earlier housekeepers, and I had no cause to be alarmed about anything she did away from West Street. I was no longer a policeman beyond our door.

  And then one morning she startles me. I catch her in the kitchen wearing yellow gloves. The sight of that shiny leather wakes unwanted memories.

  “Zilpah, did Rebecca Winslow give you her gloves?”

  “Yes, Mistress. Missy mailed them to me.”

  “I’d rather you not wear them in this house.”

  “But they are most practical, Mistress, when I have to light the stoves or climb under the sink. And I was hoping that Missy’s gloves would not prejudice you against me.”

  I could not counter her arguments, and I did not want to be willful about the gloves. And so I had to swallow the memory of that assassin-poet who first wore them. But Zilpah’s presence reminded me of an earlier housekeeper whom I adored: Evelyn O’Hare. She was practically my nurse, though she could neither read nor write. It was before we moved to West Street. I was six when Evelyn arrived. I loved her and became her schoolmistress while she did her chores and minded me and Lavinia. Whatever I learned at school I taught to Evelyn. She would brush my hair for hours, confide in me, talk of the “young lads”—carpenters or handymen—she intended to marry.

  She smoked a pipe when Mother and the Patriarch weren’t around. The burning tobacco smelled like a foreign flower, sweet and tart. Evelyn talked of her trousseau and all the treasure she would accumulate from her many husbands. Father had found her in an orphanage, said she was the best servant he ever had.

  She would bake him pies and stand silent at his shoulder until he drew her into a conversation. The Patriarch liked to discuss law with Evelyn, said she had “an undiluted mind.”

  But when Father went off to serve in the State House and lived in Boston for months at a time, Evelyn seemed to suffer as much as we did. She began muttering to herself and neglecting her chores. Mother found her in the kitchen one afternoon with a knife in her hand. The town marshal had to carry Evelyn out in a horse blanket. And she was carted off to the Lunatic Hospital at Worcester. Mother’s relatives called her deranged. But Evelyn’s “derangement” grew out of sadness and grief. She worshiped Father and couldn’t survive the winter without him.

  And, if truth be told, a little of my fondness for Evelyn leaked onto Zilpah Marsh. Zilpah wasn’t an orphan, but she might as well have been. She wouldn’t have been made invisible by the matriarchs at Mt Holyoke, removed from the rolls, and tossed into limbo, if she had ever had a father like mine. And so I was considerate of her, in spite of those yellow gloves.

  15.

  WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF THE MATING SEASON. VALENTINES continue to fly like missiles, and every belle seems to have a horde of beaus—every belle save one, since my tall suitor no longer seems to count once he bartered my love away to lighten his College bills, and my other suitors, nameless upon my lips, do not have the worth of one lemon cake. I considered writing a Valentine to that Tutor from Mars, Brainard Rowe, but I had no idea where to send it. Mars did not have a Post Office, according to my recollections. And I felt extremely barren, though the words ran amuck inside my head.

  “Sir,” I compose like some hapless truant, “I have n
either the wit nor the charm to persuade you, but should you have the urge to meet, I will meet you anywhere.” And I sign my missile, Currer Bell.

  Of course it travels to no other place but the circuits and lanterns of my brain. And stillborn love notes provide small satisfaction. But I do not mope or lie on the lounge with a pretended case of Acute Neuralgia. Nor do I absent myself from the usual round of winter partying. And when Gould invites me to the candy pull, I come along with Carlo. It takes a feat of engineering to cart a Newfoundland and six Seniors on a one-horse sleigh, but Austin is our driver, and Father has permitted him to lure Horse Henry out of the barn for such a special occasion. And little Currer Bell doesn’t count, being part flesh and part fantasy.

  Sitting with Austin now, I recollect the rides we had together as children, and the times we would talk for hours, our faces in candlelight, turning us into creatures with a sinister glow. Brother was the first to have a Lexicon, and we perused his book under the fickle tyranny of a candle that obscured one word and lit another. And what a random list we had to explore. Exaltation—Estate—Dirk—Doom—Diadem—Petal—Paragraph. Brother had a deeper Imagination than a little girl without a Lexicon. He could splinter each word into a hundred parts, or create a stringed jewel, such as Diadems of Dirks and Doom, or A Petal of Estates and Paragraphs. But such poetry has now fled from his face. He has inherited a portion of Mother’s Neuralgia and steers our sleigh with a frozen cheek.

  I ride up front with Carlo, and miraculously the sleigh does not crash into a tree or tip over as we climb the hills. But Brother rules the roads and paths like Genghis Khan, and we nearly bump into a sugar-house, which could not have survived the strain of a horse, a dog, and so many Seniors. But our runners swerve at the very last moment, and the sugar-house is saved.

  It is a primitive shed where the sap from nearby trees is collected and boiled down in a gigantic kettle to give us our supply of syrup and maple sugar. The sugar boys who stir the pot with ladles tall as a man do not wear shirts inside the shed. I can thank the Lord that they do not have a forest of black hair on their chests, like Richard Midnight, that renegade from Mt Holyoke. And these shirtless boys don’t leer at me. They warm themselves in the hissing heat of the vapors that rise off the kettle. But their torsos have turned brown during the whole process of sugaring-off until they look like creatures made of mountain tar. I am caught in their spell.

  The sugar boys are shy among College Seniors. College Hill is a sacred place for these sons of farmers who have had little schooling and can hardly spell their names. But they feed us the sweet liquid from the ladle that hardens into candy in a second and will not permit us to pay them. They seem to take pleasure in having us regard their brown torsos. Their muscles ripple under that strange sticky tar, and they have a quiet beauty that I can find nowhere but inside a sugar-house.

  Our little idyll is interrupted. Henry Shipley, that wanton editor of The Indicator who published my Valentine, barrels into the sugar-house with a group of Seniors from Phi Upsilon, mischief in their red eyes. They must have come from the nearest rum resort, since the aroma of Domingo is unmysteriously on their lips. They challenge the farmers’ sons, claim they have captured the sugar-house for Phi Upsilon, and are now in complete charge of the kettle.

  Austin has to step into Shipley’s way.

  “Your rudeness is insufferable,” he says. His frozen cheek has begun to twitch.

  “And you, Sir,” says Shipley, “are trespassing upon the territories of Phi Upsilon. This is our sugar-house.”

  I am concerned about Brother and the sugar boys, since Shipley has brought half of Phi Upsilon, and it seems like open warfare between the two societies. But another man enters the sugar-house in cape and floppy velvet hat, a scarf wrapped around his throat. It is my Tutor from Mars, and he must have been to the same rum resort with Phi Upsilon. He bows to me and smiles.

  “Hello, Currer Bell. Forgive this intrusion. Mr. Shipley was about to leave.”

  “I will not leave,” says Shipley. “And no Alphas can make me do so.”

  “Pity,” says the Tutor. “Would you rather find yourself stuck in Carlo’s jaws?”

  “Who’s Carlo?” Shipley asks, his eyes like sinister red needles.

  “The Newfoundland that Austin’s sister is restraining as hard she can. You are an imbecile among imbeciles. Do you think that dog would allow you to attack a member of the family?”

  Shipley is polite as a schoolboy all of a sudden.

  “Brother Brainard, I apologize to one and all…I never even noticed a dog.”

  The Tutor had done well to come when he did. As much as Carlo was devoted to my every whim, he would have destroyed Phi Upsilon if that fraternity had dared lay a finger on Austin.

  Shipley withdrew with his band of Seniors, and I was hoping that our Savior in the scarf would remain with us, but he did not. He had courage enough to scratch Carlo’s head. No lesser personage would have attempted to do so. And then he absconds with his dastardly brothers on the Phi Upsilon sleigh, while Austin clutches his frozen cheek.

  Dare I understand Brother’s dilemma? I’m no prophetess. I’m not even Currer Bell. But I grew up with Austin, sat beside him at supper, breathed his very breath. The answer’s in his Lexicon. Austin couldn’t recover from his own enchantment, his Diadem of Dirks. Father has groomed him to be a master of legal documents, a prince of the courts, while Brother has a softer side that rebels against the law. I should have had the whiskers, I want to tell him, and he should have become an enchantress of Petals and Paragraphs. I’d have argued Father’s cases in a lawyer’s black shirt, while he wandered amid the butterflies in a crown of red hair.

  We are one creature, Brother and I, but both of us inhabit the wrong half. I have to depend on suitors and their silly Valentines, when I’d love to wear a hawk’s wings and pursue my own prey, while Brother has to invest all his power to conjure up an ideal wife. Meanwhile he drives Horse Henry away from the sugar-house, while I’m the one who dreams of Dirks.

  16.

  DESPERATE AS I WAS, I WENT ON AS MANY EXCURSIONS AS I could with Carlo, but I never seemed to encounter Brainard Rowe on whatever route or trail we took. I might have asked Brother’s help in finding Brainard, but it would have lessened Austin in the eyes of his fraternity brothers, since said Tutor was in the Phi Upsilon camp. And so I had to conspire on my own.

  But I haven’t lost the Dickinson edge. I practice my honeyed talk on the housekeeper.

  “Zilpah, where might one find a rum resort?”

  I cannot fool her so readily. “Mistress, why in God’s name would you ever want to know?”

  “Speak. Have you ever been to one?”

  “They are not enamored of females,” says she. “They wouldn’t let you in without an escort.”

  “But have you been to one?”

  “Yes, Mistress. Once, with a very bad man.”

  “Richard Midnight?”

  “Yes, Mistress, before I found religion and returned to the Lord.”

  “And where was it? Tell!”

  “On the far side of the Commons, at the very edge of Merchants Row.”

  “And what is it called?” I ask in my usual whisper, like some disinterested detective.

  “Tardy Tavern. But it isn’t a tavern. It’s a noxious hole in the wall. And a decent young lady like yourself ought not go there, never in her life.”

  I WOULDN’T LISTEN TO ZILPAH MARSH. I STROLL ALONG THE Commons with Carlo at five of an afternoon, suspicious of pitfalls in the swampy ground. But the swamp is frozen in February, and I sail above solid snow. Commencement is held on the Commons and our October Cattle Show, when Mother rises out of her torpor to act as a judge for one or two of the prizes. The Commons is also where our militia holds maneuvers and our children launch their kites. But no one, not President Hitchcock nor the Merchants Association, has ever dreamed of draining the swamp. It’s malodorous in summer, slippery in autumn, and treacherous in winter, since there are
always soft spots even in the solidest snow, and local legend has it that one mad dowager drowned in the winter swamp centuries ago.

  But I do not intend to drown in a sloping field of ice. And Carlo can test the firmness of the ground with his magnificent paws. It’s the rum resort that worries me, not the variables of our village green. My heart pounds the moment I arrive at Tardy Tavern. It is a hole in the wall, with nothing to announce itself but a card in its filthy window. And its entrance, barely visible, was in an alley at the southern edge of Merchants Row.

  I could not bring Carlo inside—he would have terrorized the place. And so I park him in the alley as my sentinel and pull on the bell. Nothing happens. I pull again, and a gruesome man with a seam on the side of his face opens the door. He must have been the rum resort’s very own guardian. He’s clutching a baker’s battledore and might have crowned me with it had he not discovered Carlo at my feet.

  “Missy, this is a private club. It’s not open to strangers.”

  “I am not a stranger,” I have to insist.

  “That’s welcome news. But friend or foe, you are a woman accompanied by a dog and not by one of our regular patrons.”

  “But I have an escort other than my dog.”

  “And who is that?” he asks, leaning his damaged, diabolical head into the alley and sniffing the cold air. “Brainard Rowe.”

  He vanished, but I knew I had the right key to get into this cave. I was not left in the lurch for very long. That gruesome man reappeared and led me into the rum resort, which was no larger than our kitchen on West Street and had several long tables, around which was a scattering of Seniors who resembled scarecrows in the crooked light that came off the rum resort’s lone lantern. They must have been the college’s “lost souls,” the flotsam of Phi Upsilon, Seniors who would never graduate, having ruined themselves on rum.