The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  Brother courted her for five whole years. He grew despondent; his fine red hair began to fall out. An army of belles ran after him vails in hand, their dowries trailing behind them like a caboose, while Brother looked at them with scorn; he would marry Sue or remain unmarried the rest of his life.

  Father took long walks with Sue, went to Church with her. In his own silent way he was wooing her for Brother. We began calling her Sister Sue. It was as if we were waging war in Brother’s behalf. Mother kept out of the picture, but I played the diplomat. I cast a net around Sue without her ever knowing it. I was drawing her into the family on pieces of invisible string. It worked only too well.

  She got herself engaged to Austin without bothering to tell us. It made no difference to her that I lived by Susan’s moods and Susan’s weather, that I couldn’t smile until she smiled, that I wore her own expressions, sulked when she sulked, but I wasn’t much of a Vesuvius, with smoke coming out of my head. And she went off on a tryst to Boston with Brother, just to be away from Amherst’s eyes. It couldn’t have been much of a tryst, since Sue barely had a place in her heart for a man’s affections. But suddenly I did start to smoke, and I thought my head would catch fire. I was jealous of their time together, the little secrets that grew around them, their own invisible string.

  And just as suddenly, Sue relented and married Austin. I was happy for them and full of misery, as if Sue and I were no longer conspirators who could hug and kiss and declare that no man would ever claim us. I’m not sure Brother ever claimed Sue; I would learn that Susie had demanded a “chaste marriage,” and Brother agreed. And it’s heartless of me to say it, but I took some pleasure at the thought of ice and ashes strewn on the bridal bed. I could bathe myself in ice and ash, and live there with Austin and Sue…

  We’re sisters now; she reads the poems I scribble on old recipes and scraps of paper, and understands the peculiar weave of my mind, welcomes it even, like a general examining the words of a rival, sending missiles back and forth.

  She’s become mistress of the town, fighting the scarlatina that grows worse with every epidemic. Suddenly my Susan is everywhere, succoring the ill, soothing the bereaved for the loved ones they have lost, while I can barely stir from Father’s mansion, with or without my dog. And when the daughter of our stableman is stricken, Susie sends Dick flowers and feeds him soup, though the stable is but steps away from our kitchen.

  “God bless Mrs. Austin,” Dick says to Mother and myself. “She’s the angel of Amherst, Miss Em’ly, she is.”

  I pray for little Harriet, who is seven, but I have not ridden to see her yet in Father’s chariot. Susan has enlisted Father, who accompanies her on missions of mercy. I have never seen the Patriarch so involved in the turmoil of our little town. I watch them from my window. He has taken to calling her “Dolly” now, not by any malicious design to hurt his own flesh and blood. After all, Dolly is what her brothers and sisters called her when she was a child. So it is natural that he would find a nickname for Sue, forgetting in the flush of his involvement with a new daughter-in-law that he has not called his own daughter Dolly in years.

  And when I see them now in the chariot, Susie with a piece of black crepe pinned on her bonnet to mourn the town’s dead children, and Father wearing a black armband, they look like some couple prepared to do battle with all the fatalities of scarlet fever, and Lord knows, they might win. Sometimes Father even lets her have the reins, and she’s the one who leads Black Fanny, Father’s mare.

  It is odd that the epidemic should arrive so early in the season, during our torrid summer with its attack of lightning and ladybugs, and not during the colder months, when scarlet fever may lurk behind a wet cough and a spotted throat. But our village has happened upon a most unfortunate season, where everything is out of kilter: barns burn, children die, carriage horses drop from exhaustion, and thunder splits our brains. Sue is the one who is bold enough to move against the prodigal force of the season, defying thunder and burning barns to save as many children as the Lord will allow her to do.

  I can fancy Father and Susan wearing muslin masks to protect them from catching the scarlatina that might vanish with the red spots or worsen into a relentless fever that will scorch a child’s blood and bones with the same implacability as the Sahara sun. But I do not have to fancy the vanilla ice cream that Sue whipped together with her own hands; she’ll arrive at a farmhouse with Pa-pa and spill that cold elixir into the raw throat of a stricken boy.

  Mother and I are helpless in the manufacture of ice cream. We have fallen into a deep malaise ever since we moved back into the Dickinson Homestead. For Ma-ma and me it was a house of ghosts, with goblins and old men who lived in the attic. It wasn’t like our white mansion on West Street, where the ghosts were much more pious and played in the cemetery behind our backyard. But this white mansion wasn’t Pa-pa’s ancestral seat, so we returned to the Homestead, with Sue right beside us. The baroness has her own manor-house, the Evergreens, which Father helped construct to tie Brother and his bride to our village. And because Mother was ill and couldn’t even preside over Father’s house, Mrs. Austin soon presided over Amherst itself. Her afternoons and soirees at the Evergreens eclipsed the President’s own levees at the College. Ralph Emerson stayed with Brother and Sue after giving a lecture at the Church Meetinghouse. He talked about the Beautiful in Rural Life, I’m told. Lord, I would have loved to listen, but I was too gnome-like to sit beside that Sultan! Yet in another life, I would have asked him if he had an Orchard like ours, and if it had the same skeletal silence that could stun a bird.

  But Sue was less of a baroness this summer while the fever raged. She canceled her afternoon teas with philosophers and poets. There were no guests at the Evergreens. I watch her from my window like some forlorn spy as she returns from her latest mission. Poor Fanny comes to a stop with little rivers of sweat on her hide. Sister Sue steps out of the carriage with Father to hold her hand. She is the first lady of Amherst, even with the feel of sickbeds on her clothes. We are all little street Arabs in her wake, vagabonds of a lesser nature.

  She’s been writing a novel and has been most secretive about it. The sky don’t fall on Susie’s sentences—nothing does. She hasn’t shown a line to Sister Emily. Father has become the guardian of Susie’s flame. He is satanically serious about her writing, whispers about publishing it himself, or sitting down with a Boston publisher in her behalf. Father salaams to Sister Sue. She calls him “Master” in front of Austin and me, but I can fancy who is the Master and who is the slave.

  I can’t put Pa-pa in mind of me. It is not that he is cruel or neglectful. He worships my Indian bread. But I have become one more Phantom in his household, as minuscule as Mother or Vinnie. I am the female who repairs his slippers, but it is Susie he takes into his carriage on their rides to rescue feverish, spotted children, or bury those that need burying. And it is black-eyed Susan, not his pale daughter, whose sentences he scans, though how much of Susan he has read I still cannot surmise.

  It is like being stabbed in the side with a Tomahawk that I have to clutch with my own hand. I do not utter a word. I keep pretty dark about what I feel and what I think. I have no novel to offer Pa-pa, and do not have the wildest scheme of how to write one. But I have taken my phantom flowers and sewn them into little booklets from the best paper I could buy. I had meant to leave those flowers to sit and gather dust in my drawer. But I prettied them up for Pa-pa—no, that is an untruth. I did not prettify. I put my own feathers on every stamen and stem, thrust them up with whatever little force I have. I am a creature of feathers. And I stole the idea of binding my flowers into a little book from Father himself. He’s the one who saved his college compositions by sewing them together. And I planned to leave my flowers under Father’s door in five or six booklets that might have the aroma of a novel. But no flowers of mine could ever charm him. He lives in a world of Prose, except when it comes to Sue.

  22.

  IT IS A SEASON OF SMOKE AND SCARLAT
INA, OUR SUMMER OF ’58. Three barns took fire in July alone. And our fire engine is much too feeble, though it weighs 21/2 tons and has to be dragged around by horses and men. It has a steamer that often explodes and its pump can’t be operated by less than sixteen souls. We had a westerly wind that was brutal, and the barns themselves were dry as sticks and stones. And Father, who was our fire marshal, had to roam around in the tall grass.

  “It’s amazin’ weather,” he opined, after he finished prowling. “The Lord had best be on our side.”

  But the fire alarm sounds this morning at 1/4 to 10. I can sniff the smoke from my window; a black patch invades the sky like a cloud sent from the Devil. It sits across from our fields—the fire could spread along the dry grass like some startling snake and arrive at our door.

  Pa-pa does not panic, or signal to me with the side of his head. I do not have to fetch Lavinia and move Ma-ma and our possessions far from that hypothetical storm. The dray horses snort and rumple their noses at the heat; Pa-pa helps unhitch them from the engine before they go berserk by the nearness of the fire. Then Father’s little band of volunteers haul that machine into the heart of the conflagration, a monstrous black belly of smoke in front of Coulter’s barn. What mesmerizes me for a moment is that they are wearing yellow gloves like the ones Missy had worn and lent to Zilpah Marsh, and now lie hidden in Father’s attic, like some cruel reminder of Missy’s own relentless magic.

  Soon I could only see little swatches of yellow in all the blackness and hear the firemen heave and whistle under their breath as they primed the hot pump; then the whole machine shook, and water shot from the silver nozzle with a great swoosh. These enchanters with their yellow gloves had solved the riddle of a westerly wind. The fire sputtered; Coulter’s roof collapsed, but the barn had been saved from the worst sort of ravage. It stood like some creature with half a head.

  Father was the first to walk out of the smoke. He had a wildness about him that was not unattractive, as if he had shed a dozen years in fighting that fire. His red hair was unruly under his hat. The edges of his cloak were singed, his face mottled with bits of ash from the burning barn.

  “Refreshments, boys,” he said in that hoarse voice of his. “I’ll splurge a bit. I’m buyin’ drinks at the tavern.”

  “Aw, Squire,” said one of the volunteers, an Irisher who was a handyman at the Evergreens and took care of our own barn. “You’ll only steal it back from the insurance company and the fireman’s fund.”

  Father laughed. “Indeed I will.”

  I had never seen him so relaxed, so full of goodwill. He had once been a major in the town’s militia, and this tiny militia of firemen must have brought back memories of drilling on the Commons with his own command. He wasn’t the sort to be part of any group, even when he went to Congress. He could not parade like other men, could not strut. He was a Dickinson, who didn’t think it proper to reveal more than he had to reveal. I doubt that he missed his Congressman’s seat. Yet here, after the fury of a fire, with an engine that was fickle and spat steam at firemen, scalding one or two, he found a poetry he had no place else. The volunteers serenaded him on our journey to the tavern.

  Who’s the man, oh who’s the man

  Who gives his best, his very best

  To fight that monster in the fire

  And bring us some tranquility?

  Squi-re Edward, Squi-re Edward,

  Master of the town, of the town.

  AS MORE BARNS TOOK FIRE, THEY SEEMED IN SOME MYSTERIOUS way to burn out that epidemic of scarlet fever. Father began to see less and less of Sister Sue. There were no more carriage rides into the hinterlands and not so many whisperings about a Boston publisher for Sue’s intended novel. Father had his law practice to consider and this new epidemic of burning barns. He strolled the village, hat in hand, with the Sheriff of Northampton, our shire town. There was talk about some insidious arsonist, a disgruntled farmer or a lunatic who had escaped from the asylum. But there were no missing lunatics that Father could reckon. The Governor had appointed him a trustee of the asylum, and Father was scrupulous in search of the grounds. So he and the Sheriff had to look elsewhere to solve the riddle.

  They couldn’t solve a thing, since the arsonist did not leave a trace in the summer grass. Father began experimenting with watchdogs. He borrowed five mastiffs from a breeder in Belchertown, had them stationed on strategic hills, but the Amherst fire-maniac poisoned all five dogs, feeding them arsenic from his own hand without being spotted by a single soul. Father wanted to requisition Carlo, but I would have died had I found that Colossus writhing in the grass, rigor mortis about to settle in. And finally Father relinquished his demands on my dog.

  That don’t mean I was disrespectful. I patrolled as much of the town as I could with Carlo, but I wasn’t much of a sentinel, and neither was he. His shaggy ears would perk up whenever he saw a stranger. If that stranger had no evil designs on his mistress, Carlo ceased to care. He wasn’t a good citizen of Amherst, just a watchdog over one old maid.

  And Sister Sue? Without any spotted children to care for, she returned to her grand salon. Lord, she couldn’t have Ralph Emerson every other week. But we did have charades in the library or on the lawn, tea and pyramids of ice cream in her dining room, and sporadic musicals, where I sit at the piano and pound on the keys whatever fanciful tune comes into my head. Mrs. Austin says I’m the Chopin of Massachusetts, but my improvisations have little in common with Chopin’s etudes—or with Chopin, the rage of Paris while he was still alive, in love with George Sand and her men’s scarves and hats. George Sand’s scarves wouldn’t help me much. My flutterings are more like the lopsided growth of an untamed flower than the rise of a real melody.

  At least Carlo loves my music. He crawls under the piano with a look of rapture on his face; he must think his mistress is losing her mind. Perhaps I am. But suddenly the Evergreens is more of a home than Pa-pa’s estate. I have Mr. and Mrs. Austin, Carlo, and sometimes Lavinia, who is less at ease with Susie’s volcanic temperature. Sister is scared to death of Mt Vesuvius, and Susie might erupt at any moment. But I don’t mind a volcano next door. Carlo and I—and Austin too—have learned to shiver around her eruptions, though my dog keeps as far from Susan as he can. Yet she is as sweet and calm today as the yellow in one of my pies.

  And damn me if she don’t get down on her knees to coax Carlo out from under a chair and feed him a hefty slice of strawberry ice cream that she herself cut from that scrumptious pyramid on the table. And while we devour ice cream with my dog, Susan starts to recite a poem she must have scratched out this very morning, since she had not read a single line of it to me.

  Fame is for the pirate and other trackers of blood

  Who shirk the notion of family and household faith

  But I am a pirate who never seeks the far flood

  And would as lief remain—

  But Susie couldn’t even finish the first stanza. The doorbell rang, and I, who cannot bear foreign society or any sudden rush of intruders, ran out the room with Carlo and hid in the library. From that listening post, Carlo and I, like two Comanche, could hear the sound of merriment and the clapping of hands. Then there was the rhythmic patter of feet and a determined knock on our Comanche door.

  “Emily, you will vacate the library this instant,” shouts Sister Sue.

  “But couldn’t we escape through the pantry?” I whisper.

  “You will do nothing of the kind. Would you shame me in front of our guest? He will think your father raises barbarians.”

  “He certainly does. Lavinia says I am cross and crusty most mornings and a barbarian.”

  “Well,” says Mrs. Austin, who can counter any argument I could ever make. “I would consider it a kindness if the barbarian in this house agreed to acquaint herself with Mr. Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican.”

  Sam Bowles was just about the most famous editor in the land. Father and I couldn’t finish a day without reading the Republican. And what was a m
etropolitan like Bowles doing in Amherst?

  “Susan,” I whisper into the library door. “I can’t meet Mr. Bowles. I’m not dressed for the occasion.”

  “Emily, will you stop wasting time? Mr. Bowles begs your acquaintance. I told him I have a sister-in-law who writes sonnets.”

  All the Comanche had gone out of me and my bones. “Susan, how could you? You’re the poet. I’m just a girl who gathers feathers around me. It’s pure camouflage.”

  “Emily, I will unfeather you and your dog if you don’t come out.”

  I surrender to Sue. I scamper into her drawing room utterly out of breath and look at Mr. Bowles a little aslant. Lord, he is the most handsome fellah I ever laid my amber eyes upon. He couldn’t have been much older than myself or Sue, and with his bushy eyebrows and dark beard he seemed like an Arabian prince who fell from the sky. I was blushing so hard at the beauty of him, I had to hide my face.

  “Miss Dickinson,” he says in that familiar twang of a Massachusetts man. “Mrs. Austin says that you are a great admirer of Mrs. Browning and her sonnets, and that you have a picture of her on your wall.”

  How could I not, Sir, considering that Elizabeth Barrett was an invalid most of her life and had a morbid fear of strangers. She might have been locked up forever in her father’s house had not the prince of poets, Mr. Robert Browning, fallen in love with her verse. He stole Elizabeth from her father and married her in clandestinity. But how could I speak of her Sonnets from the Portuguese with a perfect stranger, albeit as handsome as a sheik?