The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  And that was all. I lost Evelyn the moment I was blessed. She fled from me and the warden. I wrote to Evelyn for a month and sent her little gifts. She didn’t answer my letters, and the gifts came back with a stamp on my original wrapper: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN.

  I RETURN HOME WITH CARLO FROM TOM’S CUL-DE-SAC, HIS housebreaker’s hotel. It’s my mute Confederate who drags me along. I have no remorse, and not much sassafras in my bones. But that makes me even more of a danger to that gang of burglars on Rooming-house Row. I’m the town’s tiny marshal, seeking her revenge. Richard Midnight could not belong to the same little gang, or he would not have revealed himself inside the rum resort. He must have had a falling out with Zilpah before she came to work at our head-quarters. Had he hid his identity in the dark, I would never have construed of Zilpah Marsh as a housebreaker.

  I confront her in the kitchen while Mother is asleep and Father is away on business. I am carved of ice.

  “Zilpah, you will remove your yellow gloves and leave them on the table,” I whisper without a false note.

  “Mistress, I am tired. You must repeat yourself.”

  “Remove your yellow gloves.”

  She unties the elaborate wrist straps and dangles the thick leather fingers for a moment to demonstrate her mastery over me; then, and only then, does she put the gloves on the table.

  “I will give you ten minutes to pack.”

  She manages to smile, but it has little force, as there is already a pout upon her lips. “I will tell the master that you have been rude to me. And I am not the one who will be punished.”

  “Zilpah, if you have any sense of preservation, you will run as far from Amherst as you can, or spend your days in the women’s farm at Springfield.”

  But she’s a seminarian, even if she has been erased from the seminary’s books. Zilpah’s no less intimate with Shakespeare or John Milton than I am. She might be a stable hand’s daughter, but she can bend language to her will. Had she been born a Dickinson, I would have had no sway with her. She also wouldn’t have become a housekeeper, but housekeeper she is. And I have begun to frighten her a little. She tests me with a couple of tears.

  “You are a cruel mistress. What have I ever done to deserve this?”

  I am cruel. I want Zilpah Marsh to die. She has my Tom in her bed. Her cul-de-sac is a kingdom. I choose my words like a rapier that can scratch deep into the skin.

  “I have seen the clock that Tom burgled from President Hitchcock’s parlor.”

  I was waiting for her to gasp, but she drills at me with her eyes. The tears are gone. She hadn’t expected a Holyoke scholar to be the town marshal. She reaches for her yellow gloves. She is pondering whether to strangle me or not.

  “Does Squire Dickinson know about this?”

  “Yes. And it is only because he is fond of you and your service to him that he begged me to give you this chance to escape. You know how weak men are, Zilpah. He did not have the heart to fire you himself.”

  “Where is he now?” she asks, still reaching for the yellow gloves.

  “On his way here with the county sheriff.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she says.

  “Then wait and find out.”

  “I should be mistress here,” she says. “I would sit in Master Edward’s lap. What makes you so special? I could suck out your life, Miss Em’ly, with one pinch of your windpipe.”

  I do not like that image of her in Pa-pa’s lap, but poor Zilpah, she does not have my ice. I thrust out my throat as near to her as I can, like some insane turkey hungering for its own slaughter. But I have Carlo right under the table, and that whimper of his was growing into a growl.

  “Zilpah Marsh, you shouldn’t have stolen one of my Pa-pa’s paisley scarves.”

  Now I’ve really alarmed her. “I did not,” she says.

  “Then how come Tom was wearing it on Rooming-house Row?”

  “You’re jealous of me and Tom,” she says. “That’s why you are doing this. You can’t bear that we’re together. Tom doesn’t even remember who you are. I bought him the best shirt and shoes in town with money I got from the master, and I bought him that scarf, just like Master Edward wears.”

  She is waiting for me to slap her with one of Miss Rebecca’s yellow gloves. Then she’ll flaunt her own incaution and strangle Miss Em’ly. But I do nothing, nothing at all.

  She disappears into the sink-room, gathers up whatever paltry articles she has, and runs out of head-quarters, cursing me and all the Dickinsons.

  “It isn’t fair,” she says. “You have the name and the money. And I will have to toil and toil and toil.”

  As Tom’s pilot, I want to hurl back at her, but I keep to the quiet. I am trembling so hard, I have to sit. I have no rapier, I now realize; whatever weapon I had was used against myself. I have scratched under my own skin, while Zilpah is unscathed. She will go off with Tom, become his accomplice with Shakespeare in her heart, pose as a housekeeper, and plunder another village. What is all my breeding worth? I might as well live in a root cellar. I am the maiden of Amherst, who tends to bulbs and plants and rises at dawn to prepare her father’s bread. But I do have one small consolation—Miss Rebecca’s gloves. I would never wear them. But perhaps they can serve as my talisman, and lend me the privilege of becoming a poet.

  Lord, I do not feel much like a poet. The yellow gloves are meaningless without Zilpah Marsh. Suppose she herself was the talisman? Zilpah is as scratched as I am, but I didn’t want to see the scars. And I am sentenced to live in a root cellar I made for myself.

  I don’t sing out a word at supper, but excuse myself from the table and wander upstairs like a lonely ship captain with a storm inside his head. I lie down on my pillow and wait for the storm to begin. My eyes are closed but I do not drift. I’m struck with the Lord’s own lightning and Zilpah Marsh is confused in my brain with Evelyn O’Hare. Zilpah still has her teeth, and she don’t require Miss Em’ly to help her study the alphabet, but she’s no less a pariah, even if she has my Tom in her bed. And part of my anger against her has nothing to do with Tom. Maybe I wished that Zilpah and Evelyn were soldered into one. And somehow I blamed her for Evelyn’s incarceration, as if she were my own bad angel who had come in Evelyn’s stead. I start to cry as I’ve never cried. My root cellar ain’t much more than the darkest well.

  Suddenly the crying ends, and I’m inside a carriage, but it isn’t Pa-pa’s one-horse affair. It’s an old-fashioned stagecoach, along the Boston run, before the Lord invented railroad tracks. I can’t see the driver, but I’m the only one aboard this wooden beauty, and the wheels fly right under my feet. I ain’t so sure about the landscape. It seems like an endless tumble of Pa-pa’s own fields. And then we ride down a hill at breakneck speed. I’m not scared. The carriage comes to a sudden halt.

  A leather snake weaves right through the curtains. It’s the driver’s whip.

  “Miss Em’ly, come upstairs.”

  I step out of the coach. I’m not even startled that the driver is Tom. Who else would be on the Boston run? But I’m much too small, and I can’t reach up to the driver’s box. Tom bends over and lets his arm slide down like an elephant’s trunk. And I ride that arm right into the box.

  It’s higher than an attic, higher than a church. Tom has a team of twenty horses—no, twenty-six. I can see a jumble of tails and ears, rows of glistening rumps. I climb between his legs, sit upon leather that has been rubbed raw, while Tom anchors me with his thighs. The horses whinny, but once Tom cracks his whip, the rows fall into line.

  I’ve talked enough for a lifetime. I don’t have to badger Tom. The carriage makes its own weather, and we ride into the wind.

  Pa-pa & the Reverend Wadsworth

  The whole of Massachusetts was ripped with anti-slavery fever that February of ’55, the whole of Massachusetts except her Pa-pa. He railed against Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said that its Authoress was in league with all the Literati and other such devils. And she wondered if Father’s ranting had
more to do with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sex than with her ideas. But Emily didn’t argue with Pa-pa.

  She felt like a peacock that had strayed from its pen, wearing outfits with feathers and frills and brightly colored tails. She and Little Sister had been put on display. They accompanied Father to Washington as the proud daughters of a United States Congressman from Massachusetts’s Tenth District. But their pride had been shot. Poor Father was filling out his first and last term. Dickinson and the entire Whig Party had gone down to defeat. The “Black” Republicans had tainted Father until he seemed like a champion of the South. Father couldn’t even carry his own town. And the people of neighboring Pelham voted against him nineteen to one. So the two daughters followed the vanquished Congressman to Washington, while he bled out his last days in office.

  But they weren’t treated like abandoned belles. The staff and guests at the Willard, Washington’s finest hotel, which was a few doors from the White House, fell at their feet. Vinnie prowled the halls like some ravishing heiress, rather than a small-town girl. She walked the muddy, broken streets of the capital with her new friends, the wives and sisters of Senators and Supreme Court Justices. But Emily wouldn’t venture beyond the Willard’s front door, into the noisy metropolis where lives and goods were bartered with the wink of an eye. Emily was much too worried about Father to gallivant in Washington with a tail attached to her rump. And she wasn’t much happier within the Willard’s walls.

  Emily would have crushed the entire hotel, with its chandeliers, its gold cages and satin settees, crushed it to the ground, if she could have had her way. The pomp of the place disturbed her; it reeked of a citified wealth, of whisperings in back rooms, of deals made amid the smoke of cigars. That was not Father’s strong suit. Edward was a rough, country man who was never roundabout in his ways, who never whispered in the dark, but who spoke in the simplest manner and couldn’t involve himself in the fistfights that broke out between Slavers and Anti-Slavers.

  Father could not function in such a wild atmosphere. He did not know how to tame the demons in such men. Their demons were so different from his own. He could rescue a horse from a burning barn, save a colored orphan from being sent back to his master, have his daughters study rhetoric and religion and ask nothing more of them, but he could ask nothing for himself. Emily had never touched Father’s face, and it needed touching. She clung to Father at the Willard whenever she could, sat with him over a glass of sherry, watched the sadness collect under his brows until Congress itself seemed like a plague that would flatten him.

  She did go on one adventure with Pa-pa. While Lavinia remained at the Willard with some potential beau, Edward hired a carriage and rode with Emily along Pennsylvania Avenue. She saw mansions side by side with hovels, and it bewildered her, this marriage of penury and unimaginable wealth. The carriage stopped on G Street, at the Orphan School & Asylum, an old red-brick castle with turrets and chimney pots.

  Edward had a stipend for one of the orphans, a boy named Ralph, whose mother had once worked for a manufacturer in his own Congressional district. But Pa-pa couldn’t get any farther than the vestibule with his fifty dollars in cash. Strangers weren’t allowed to visit with orphans at this school, even if said stranger happened to be a Congressman.

  Father wouldn’t stir from the spot until the headmaster sent a note to the boys’ dormitory, and within ten minutes Ralph arrived in a beggar’s costume, with sleeves that were much too short. Emily could see the rage build in Father’s eyes.

  “Sir,” he said to the headmaster, “you will put the boy in my custody for half an hour so that I may buy him a proper suit of clothes, or God is my witness, I will find a way to shut you down.”

  The boy was alert, with blue eyes. He clutched Emily’s hand and called her “Marm,” while Edward delivered him to a tailor shop on the far side of Mausoleum Square.

  “Sir,” he told the tailor, “there will be a bonus for you if the boy can walk out of this shop within the hour with a suit upon his back.”

  All the gloom seemed to lift from Pa-pa when he returned with Emily to the Willard Hotel. Lavinia was startled at his sudden transformation. His old vigor had come back. The girls could hardly keep up with him as he pranced across the lobby.

  They left the capital after three weeks and traded one metropolis for another. Philadelphia might have had its own rascals, but not Congressmen who were also duelists and slaveholders. They didn’t have to wander through the halls of a hotel. There was much less mud in Philadelphia; the horse-cars didn’t sink into the ground. But Philadelphia had just been ravaged by its own Great Fire; there was still rubble on the sidewalks, and some of the horse-cars looked like half-burnt carcasses.

  Edward deposited his two girls with their second cousin, Eliza Coleman, at her father’s house near Chestnut Street and returned to Amherst. Emily still worried about him, but she was much less feisty in Philadelphia. She didn’t have to rub up against Senators. She could sit by the window, write notes to her friend, Susie Gilbert, listen to the bells on the horse-cars, trace the outline of the trees with her finger, feel the rub of a word inside her brain.

  And then she had a rude shock, an awakening that was like a blow to the head. It arrived from the most unexpected place—the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, where Eliza’s father had his own family pew. The two sisters had gone to worship with the Colemans on their first Sunday in Philadelphia. Emily had listened to a heap of sermons half her life, had met ministers whose fame was like a lightning bolt in a particular town. But she had never come upon the likes of “Philadelphia.”

  Rev. Charles Wadsworth didn’t mingle with his congregation, didn’t ride out of the vestry in a splendid robe. He appeared in the pulpit from a trapdoor, like some mechanical man sprung from a palace of toys. Emily’s first impulse was to mock the melodrama of his entrance and belittle the man. But she felt a chill as he glanced about the pulpit with eyes that gleamed under his spectacles. His hair was very long, like a pirate or a ship captain, and covered his ears entirely. He wore a silk cravat tight against his throat, and she couldn’t be certain he was wearing gloves, or if his hands themselves had the color of clotted cream. His shoulders were narrow, and he wasn’t so very tall, but his whole face shivered as he began to talk.

  And Emily shivered in her seat. The minister’s cavernous voice was like a rifle shot in her ear. He wounded whatever small comfort she had in Philadelphia with the tremors she could feel beneath his intoxicated tone. She could tell in an instant that he had all the wiles and weariness of a poet. He sang his words as if he were reciting to Emily alone. He could have been plundering her, ripping into the peacock’s garb that she wore, searing her flesh.

  His chest throbbed with thunder as he gripped the lectern with his cream-colored hands. “What is Christian chivalry?” he asked. “What has the Lord demanded that we do? Not to lose ourselves in the ritual of good deeds. Not to bask in our little charities. Not to sacrifice our own strong will and abandon ourselves to mindless giving. Then we would be Christian by habit only, a Marist reciting her beads. No, the Lord has asked one thing of us, that we not violate our inner nature. We must sally forth, with the plumes and banners of a proud heart. We are adventurers who will inscribe ourselves on the hardest stone, with the tap of the telegraph to guide us, the whistle and smoke of the steam engine.”

  He challenged his own church to raise itself up as a Christian army.

  “If you be a bricklayer, then lay your bricks with music in your soul. If you be a doctor or nurse, then heal with your whole heart. If you be a poet, then delve not into mysteries and dreams, with cobwebs over your eyes, nor pity us with wild plaints, but investigate a squirrel’s flight and the path of a torpedo. The Lord’s perfection can be found in the meekest animal and the mightiest machine. And we must rejoice in this world of ours. Heaven must not take us away from the here and the now. God revels in the work we do.”

  There was silence in the assembly hall, the silence that seizes after a
rockslide or an avalanche. And then that magician of a minister disappeared just as he had appeared, through his damnable trapdoor. She would have married him in a minute were he not a married man, with a menagerie of little children, she imagined. Her throat was parched after Rev. Wadsworth’s vanishing act. Her cheeks were flushed. She had a tingling in her own narrow chest. And the minister had not noticed her, wasn’t even aware that Emily was alive. She could not paint herself like Amherst’s own Cleopatra. She would still have had her freckles and raucous red hair.

  She stopped exploring Philadelphia after her visit to the Arch Street Church. There were still ruins on Chestnut Street from the Great Fire. She saw the husks of burnt buildings, roofs eaten away, leprous walls with red marks on them. And she felt like such a ruin—a ruin with red hair. But she prayed to her good angel that she might not recover from the Reverend Wadsworth and her own wreckage so soon.

  PART THREE

  Sister Sue and the Lost Souls

  The Homestead and the Evergreens

  Summer, 1858

  21.

  LORD, IT WASN’T LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. I WAS FRIGHTENED of Susie Gilbert’s smoldering looks, as if she had a hole burnt into the middle of her forehead that could set the whole town aflame. Susie was an orphan and a vagabond who maneuvered like a general. She conquered me and Brother and Pa-pa. She’d spent part of her childhood in Amherst, with her own renegade Pa-pa, who kept opening and closing taverns until the day he died. I try to imagine Susie at six. Did her brown eyes burn holes in the shop windows on Main Street? Did she weave ribbons into her hair? And would she have wanted to play with a freckle-face like me?

  Susie returned to live here with an older sister when both of us were eighteen. But I didn’t cross paths with her until a year later. And by then all the Dickinsons were becoming Susie’s slaves. She was just more interesting and volatile than our Amherst mice—those silly creatures who knitted their own white vails and could see no further than a bridal gown. Susan never talked of matrimonial bliss. She swore she did not need a man. Even at nineteen she was the town philosopher, a bit of a deacon, who could talk Scripture with Pa-pa for hours. Mother was frightened of the fever in her eyes. Sue prevailed in any argument. She even had a faint mustache, like Zilpah Marsh, but it wasn’t unbecoming—it went with her smoldering eyes. Brother was positively blue if she didn’t erupt once or twice a month. She was our Vesuvius, who rained hot lava down upon our heads. It wasn’t that she screamed or spat. Susan sulked.