The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  And so I am a penitent while I pack. Carlo can sense the doom that’s hanging over him. He even manages to get the hair out of his eyes.

  It’s a miracle that Brainard reappeared while Father and Mother are in Monson visiting her people. I wouldn’t have had the nerve to steal myself away had Father been around. I walk down from my room with my carpetbag and my dog while Vinnie is dusting the stairs. She’s quick to read that mad determination in my eye.

  “Emily, where in damnation are you going?”

  “Little Sister, can’t you tell? I’m eloping.”

  She drops her duster, removes her apron, and tries to keep calm.

  “And who’s the lucky fellah?”

  “Domingo—remember him? That Tutor from Yale.”

  “But he vanished from the face of the earth,” Sister says, seeing if she can catch her breath and her bearings.

  “I thought you liked him, Lavinia.”

  “I did. But what is his current occupation?”

  “Cardsharp,” I say.

  She’s silent for a second, her eyes gathering up intelligence.

  “You can’t be serious. I will not listen.”

  “But listen you will. Father will not come one more time with his lantern and drive me out of the Evergreens like household cattle, not while I love a man.”

  Sister started to cry. “Will you become a cardsharp’s wife?”

  “A cardsharp’s mistress, I imagine. Brainard has not promised to marry me.”

  Lavinia’s face went all white. “Then he is a worm, the vilest sort of seducer. He took advantage of your kindness with his sugary talk and convinced you to run away with him.”

  “Little Sister, I’m the one who had to sugar him…I will need some hard cash.”

  Lavinia is the one who kept the accounts, since Mother could not be trusted with the simplest sum, and I walked around in a daze, with holes in my pockets. But Lavinia could add and subtract like a bank cashier, bargain with the grinder who came to our door to sharpen Mother’s knives, and argue with Mr. Sweetser over the cost of an item on our monthly bill; she kept a purse on a string near her waist, and it was usually fat with three-dollar gold pieces that she dispensed like the Lord’s own bookkeeper.

  She must have seen the ravaged look on my freckled face and took some pity. She couldn’t abandon her deranged sister to the wolves. So Lavinia meted out nine three-dollar pieces into the palm of my hand. I barely had the strength to carry them. A neophyte as I was in matters of money, I never realized the heft of a three-dollar coin. I had no purse of my own. And all the pieces did not fit into my pocket.

  I reached out to kiss Lavinia, but she was gone, dusting stairs in some far corner, I suppose. It was odd that she did not offer a parting hug, since she might not see me for a century. I had to depend on Little Sister’s good nature, that she would feed and befriend Carlo, who had no friends other than his mistress.

  Hair was no hindrance, and I realized for the first time that Carlo only saw what he wanted to see. That dog had a preternatural intuition. He couldn’t take his eyes off my carpetbag. And he must have sensed that it wasn’t his cradle. I was going away and hadn’t provided a proper wagon for him. It was a wound to his dignity. “Darling, I’d take you if I could.”

  HERE I AM, GOING TO MEET MY LOVE AT THE AMHERST AND Belchertown depot, and I can’t stop crying. The sun bakes on my back, and my brains begin to boil under my bonnet. I don’t sniffle once over Pa-pa, who will recover from my exile, my flight into Egypt. Mother hardly exists, and I’ve long ago put her into my box of Phantoms. I wish I could have said my farewells to Austin and Sue, but if I had confided in them, they’d have held me prisoner in the Evergreens until Father arrived with his lantern—Lord knows, I need a brutal break. Nothing short of that will ever land me in Egypt.

  I march down Main Street, past Father’s meadow with its stacks of hay like little mountains of red in the sunlight, past the hat factory, past Rooming-house Row and the “graveyard” it has become ever since the railroad cut through its territories and built a depot. It’s a mystery to me where most of the factory workers and the Irish maids now live. I wouldn’t be startled to learn that some invisible no-man’s-land near the depot had swallowed them up. But I haven’t found it yet, at least not during my late travels with Carlo.

  The depot is little more than a wooden hut with a narrow wooden walk and a barn at one end to house and repair broken trains. The tracks that lie between the barn and the hut look like irregular rows of rusty rails that are overrun with grass. A person would have to suffer from blindness or something close to consider the Amherst and Belchertown a thriving enterprise. I’m not sure where the railroad’s capital went. But it didn’t go into building a depot and laying tracks.

  People start to collect on that wooden walk for the afternoon run to Springfield and beyond. I begin to fancy that some of them are railroad detectives, though I haven’t the intuition to tease out which ones. There are no immediate neighbors of mine, but I am such a recluse that I wouldn’t have recognized even a half-familiar face. I can still see Carlo with his brown eyes on my carpetbag, and I wouldn’t want strangers to watch me cry.

  But forlorn as I am, I can feel that flutter in my heart. And I sing to myself, Domingo, Domingo, he’s a takin’ me to Egypt.

  I could sing until the crickets formed a chorus and chirped back at me and I’d never find Domingo.

  He don’t show. I fancy he’s hiding somewhere, but fancying can’t get me far. And finally I do see a familiar face. I don’t need a wandering gypsy teller to read my fortune. Lavinia wasn’t hiding somewhere in the house when I exited without my dog. She ran to the Evergreens for Sue. And with her dark eyes and fierce features, Susie looks like she has been to Egypt, and now I’ll never get there.

  “You can’t persuade me,” I hiss like a serpent. But my venom is small.

  She smiles under her bonnet. “Will you make a spectacle of yourself right on the floorboards of your father’s depot?”

  “It don’t matter,” I insist. “I’m the extravagant daughter who never dusts the stairs and who sails around with a big dog.”

  “Emily, I will not leave this station until you march home with your portmanteau.”

  “Why?” I ask, pretending to have Cleopatra’s swagger in matters of love and war. “Are you frightened of a little scandal? Ralph Emerson will boycott your salon and Mr. Sam Bowles will never leave his hat again on your settee.”

  “Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, you are hurtful and imbecilic.”

  “But those are useful ingredients in a war.”

  She laughs the bitterest laugh I have ever heard. Her mouth is blue from all the bitterness. “War against whom, my dear?”

  “The Evergreens and the Homestead.”

  “Perhaps I have neglected you during the scarlet-fever outbreak. I did not have time to answer all your notes.”

  “But you had the time to show Father pages of your novel.”

  My venom seems to bite. The hardness and calculation are gone. And she lapses into her old habit of a shivering lower lip.

  “There is no such novel, you silly creature. I am not one of the Brontë sisters and never will be. I have no Jane Eyres or Rochesters in my narrow constitution. I only talked to Squire Dickinson about the idea of starting a novel, and he had the graciousness to listen. Would you really run away with a ne’er-do-well, a gambler who robs people of their bread and butter?”

  “I would.”

  “And break your father’s heart?”

  “He don’t have a heart to break.”

  That lower lip stops trembling. Sister Sue might have commenced strangling me had she been in less public a place.

  “The Squire loves you to distraction. He thinks of nothing but his family and its welfare.”

  “Then why don’t he let me marry a man?”

  “Good Lord, how many suitors have you and your sister spurned?”

  “At least a hundred,” I lie. “And likel
y a hundred more. But it’s too late for Pa-pa to appear with his lantern. I’m leaving…with Brainard Rowe. I love him, Susie. And I want to trade in love, just like Cleopatra. I’ll never have another chance. Didn’t we both swear that we’d never abandon wonder? Well, Brainard is my own pale storm. And I ain’t giving him up.”

  But Susie mocks my battle cry. “Sister, you could stand here forever and he still wouldn’t come.”

  “Did you meet with my man?” I ask like the meekest squirrel.

  “I certainly did. I found him skulking behind a barn near the depot. And I warned him that if he did not disappear and promise never to plague you again, I would make sure he was delivered to the penitentiary.”

  “And I will wager with my life that he cursed every railroad detective in Massachusetts and laughed in your face.”

  Suddenly I’m not so sure. Susan hands me an envelope with some scratchings on it in that oily butcher’s crayon she carries around in case she has a fit of inspiration. I peruse the envelope.

  Daisy—Domingo!

  I loved him for the terseness of that note. He didn’t palaver with an oily crayon, didn’t scribble ten thousand excuses. He wrote just enough to make certain I’d realize the note was authentic. I could sense the despair in that long dash between Daisy and Domingo, as if it were a frozen sea.

  I shut my eyes and pretend I’m on the train with my man. His shoes still want polishing. I don’t care. I nestle my tawny scalp in his summer coat, right under the crooked strings of his cravat. I cannot hear the murmur of his heart. Our seats are made of a rough rattan that’s like a nest of thorns. It don’t bother me. I’m an heiress with five gold pieces in her pocket and another four inside her ruche. But it ain’t wealth that interests this heiress. It’s the light that pours through the mucked-up windows on Father’s train. It’s as slanted as a melody of mine. The light is laden with dust and tiny bugs that swirl like an army in retreat. And it’s peculiar, because all that busyness of bugs seems to lend the light a golden hue.

  It’s the same shower of light that accompanied the Savior when He visited Amherst during one of the Awakenings. I was a child of six or seven. Every face was filled with the gravity of God. Sensible women fainted in the street. Men wandered into the fields and muttered to themselves like lunatics after seeing the Lord. But I was different. I squeezed my eyes, certain that the Savior would come. And the Savior did come, shrouded in that golden light. He stood near the gate of our Mansion on West Street, his beard as red as Pa-pa’s side-whiskers, while I wondered if the Lord was a Dickinson! I rushed into that shower of light, feeling the Lord’s glow on my eyelids.

  I don’t have to rush right now. The Lord’s golden light was taking me and my man West. And I’ll worry when we get there!

  25.

  FATHER WAS PALE, PALER THAN HE’S EVER BEEN. THERE WAS dust on his coat. One of his boots was unbuckled. I’d never seen him in such disarray. Even his cravat hung like a pair of mousy strings. I wondered what plague he’d passed through, what storm of grasshoppers.

  It wasn’t a plague. He’s just back from a visit to the insane asylum at Northampton as its newest trustee. Took him an hour to wash up. And out of nowhere, after reading from the Bible at breakfast, with Ma-ma’s hands still enclosed like a cathedral, he said, “Can you guess the lost soul I met at the lunatic hospital?”

  “Father,” Vinnie said, playing up to him, “I have not the least little clue.”

  “Our former housekeeper, who went to that nun’s school with Emily.”

  I was jumping with rage, but did not show it. Time couldn’t heal Pa-pa on the lesson of Holyoke. He still believed I had gone to a witch’s coven in South Hadley, where the Tutors practiced black magic and wrecked us for life.

  “Father,” I said, “you cannot mean Zilpah Marsh.”

  “None but her. She could recite John Milton while tinkering with the stove, and what good did it do her? That little bit of education poisoned her mind. I found her raving like the dickens in a padded cell. But the moment I questioned her, she was as lucid as a clock. She kept crying and asking you to forgive her. And I promised the poor creature that I would bring you to Northampton.”

  Pa-pa’s talk had helped cure my ills. He took my mind off Domingo, and made me dream of Zilpah—and Tom. Of the Handyman I’d not had a word in eight years. And not of Zilpah either, though she spent months on and off in our village, in that robbers’ den of Rooming-house Row. I pitied Zilpah, in spite of my abiding interest in Tom. I didn’t want to reveal that interest to Pa-pa, but I was curious about the hired girl I had driven from Pa-pa’s door. And so I put on my Plumage, with its attendant Tomahawk tongue.

  “Pa-pa,” I said, “what on earth happened to Zilpah? Do tell.”

  And Father, who had a lawyer’s genius for straight lines, told us all the facts, as he had perceived them. Bear in mind that he knew nothing of Tom, or of Zilpah’s life as a burglar’s mate. She could not endure the shame of being dismissed from the Master’s service, she said, and she disappeared from Amherst for six years. Setting up burglaries with Tom in other towns, I imagine, and living high off the hog on their lucre. But she returned to Amherst suddenly a year or two ago. Perhaps Tom had abandoned her, or was in jail, or hiding out somewhere. Zilpah Marsh was back in that roost behind the hat factory, living with her mother on a shrunken dead end, with ghosts as her neighbor and the factory’s whistle in her ears. It was a bothersome noise from my windows—it must have been deafening from Rooming-house Row.

  Her mother took ill and died, and Zilpah wasn’t even left with a hair ball. She had no uncles or aunts, not one older brother, as I did. And this is where the story turns strange. She lived for a while in our root cellar, she confessed to Pa-pa. But I never saw her. She also lived in our barn, eating whatever swill she could find, and sharing hay with our horse. But why didn’t she knock at our door? Father asked her that very question. “I was afraid of Mistress,” she told Pa-pa. “Miss Em’ly thought evil of me, and I could not face her, Master. So I hid.”

  Father’s words tore at me as he gave voice to what Zilpah had said. I should have been gentler, Lord. I don’t believe she would have harmed Pa-pa or Ma-ma, even with her pilfering and her plunder of other houses, but she might have wanted to harm me. I knew her history. Father did not. And should I have turned a blind eye while she and Tom raped the town? But I am not so fine a moralist. I might have protected my classmate and let her plunder a little more had she not been attached to Tom. I was raw with jealous rage. I had to get rid of her, or carry a Tomahawk inside my brain and become as mad as Rochester’s wife.

  She could not find employment. The clothes she wore had turned to rags. She thought of becoming a prostitute. But how could she lie down with drunken factory louts when she had had a first-class education? And the louts would probably not have had her. There was another reason, I surmised. She was still in love with Tom and would not have permitted other men to paw her. This troubled me, and I’m not sure why. I wasn’t bitter about Zilpah’s love for Tom; my bitterness revolved around his love for her. We were sisters of a sort, obsessed with the same burglar.

  It wasn’t hunger that hurt Zilpah the most. She could have lived forever on a diet of roots. It was having no one to converse with. She’d recite Shakespeare to her mother, a mere housemaid at the College. But after the woman died, Zilpah did not utter another sound. And this was what had insaned her, the deathly silence.

  Zilpah had no one but herself to entertain her. “I missed you, Master,” she told Pa-pa, “missed you and our talks about literature. And I missed Miss Em’ly too, because her words had just the right sting. She was smart as a bumblebee, and I didn’t mind the pain. The sound of her stinger gave me an awful lot of pleasure.”

  I was mortally ashamed, but I did not reveal it to Pa-pa or Lavinia. I listened as if I had a hair ball stuck in my throat.

  Zilpah had to weave around our handymen and female servants, or she couldn’t have remained on our property wi
thout being discovered. And once she had nearly been discovered. “By whom?” Father had asked.

  “By Miss Em’ly. I was eating an apple in the orchard, enjoying every bite, and Mistress walked right up to me, looked me in the eye. But she must have been versifying, because I was no more visible to her than a tree.”

  I did not recall such an encounter, but it might have happened. I often walk “blindly” in the Orchard, with diadems or dirks inside my head. But I had shocked her, and the thought of being exposed as some horrible vagrant, and disappointing Pa-pa, sent her into a spin. She had to run. She took the road to Northampton. She had stopped counting the days or the nights. Her existence fell into the blackest hole. She could not recall when or where she slept. A constable found her eating mud and dirt under a bridge outside Northampton and had her delivered to the insane asylum. She whimpered and whipped her head back and forth, but did not say a word. The guards had to force food into her mouth, and she would bite them whenever she had the chance. They could not bathe Zilpah or remove her rags. They had no idea who she was until Pa-pa stumbled upon her cell while making his rounds of the asylum.

  She pretended not to know him. Father hid his stricken face inside his handkerchief. But she could feel his body stir, and she approached him in all her filth. “Zilpah Marsh,” he said, “would you break my heart?”

  And she spoke for the first time in six months. “Master, you must not look at me. I have not washed. And you mustn’t cry. I will not be able to bear it.”

  His equilibrium shattered, Father shouted at the guards to open the cell door. A nurse scrubbed Zilpah while she stood behind a blanket, so that Father wouldn’t have to compromise her modesty, and he fed her with his own hands. She trembled at his touch, kissed his hands, and Father had her removed from that cell and placed in the women’s ward, where she could see other faces. Zilpah wouldn’t stop crying until Pa-pa promised to bring me to the asylum.