I feel as doomed as a dead soldier lying in the Wilderness. I’d rather have oblivion than be a prisoner without my Pen. I cannot soothe the constant noise inside my Brain, like a fluttering of feathers that grows fierce until I can scratch the syllables that each feather suggests—see them, touch them, my own fine feathers. Emily’s Brain will burst with all the bustle of her Plumage. But she does not rebel.
She watches the flutter of her physician’s hands, the finesse of his fingers as he manipulates that silver disc with its own subtle eye—it’s almost as if he can pull a strange, silent hum out of the lantern attached to his machine, as if he has a music that is profounder than mine.
I listen to such music, and while I sit in his little backless chair the noise inside my Brain subsides.
28.
IT’S TANTALIZING TO THINK I AM STUCK ON A STREET THAT bears my brother’s name, as if Austin shared the Calvary of his sister, that blind Kangaroo at 86 Austin Street. But he is embroiled in marriage and I seldom hear from him. I have a nephew now, little Ned, a blondish boy, born three summers ago to Brother and Sister Sue. Father seems delighted to be a Grandpa-pa, and he rides Ned around in a red wagon or sits him on his new mare, who is prim as a preacher with little Ned on her back.
I am dazzled by this boy, and he’s charmed the Devil out of me with brooding eyes that seem ready to erupt. I call myself Uncle Emily, because I will need all the advantages of a male to deal with him. But Sue was remote with young Ned around, and there were fewer games of shuttlecock, fewer salons. She had been frightened to death before her delivery. It took her months to recover, months to find a proper name for the boy, and Austin seemed utterly outside whatever sphere she was in. But that didn’t bring him any nearer to our own little orbit.
No one could court Sue, no one could find her key. Even Father, whom she admired, could not crawl under her mysterious cloak. I did not try. Neither luck nor intuition can interpret a Volcano. But Cambridgeport was my amulet—I learned that I could court Sue from afar. I risked my eyes writing to her. I did not talk of the mosquitoes that flew in from the marshlands, half as big as bats. I did not mention the ophthalmoscope and its magic lamp, or the rides into Boston on the horse-car that bumped and slid along its rails. I said nothing of our landlords, Mrs. Bangs and her Daughter, who wore silk at breakfast as if they were dressing for a ball. I talked only of Sue and how much I missed her. All my feathers bristled as I came out of my dark Jail, like the little soldier ready for war.
I DID NOT SIT ON THE VERANDAH WITH THE OTHER FEMALES of the boardinghouse. The sun would have bitten my eyes and made them swell. We had our own theatricals in our room. Fan and Loo picked Antony and Cleopatra; I was Enobarbus, Antony’s aide-de-camp who understood the queen of Egypt a sight better than his master. I preferred to play a man; as Cleopatra I couldn’t have worn a beard.
“Would I had never seen her!” Antony moans after her own fleet has fled from battle.
And I, his loyal soldier, insist: “O, sir, you had then left unseen a wonderful piece of work.”
Only as Enobarbus can I read the full force of her passion: “We cannot call her winds and waters sighs and tears; they are greater storms and tempests than almanacs can report.”
Cleopatra’s storms were so unlike Sue’s; they were meant to trap a man, not to drive him away. Yet Sue alone would have been a match for Antony’s Egypt, would have seen all the flaws in Cleopatra’s glass. Perhaps I misjudge Sister Sue, and she has a passion hidden somewhere beneath the volcanic ash, a passion for Mr. Samuel Bowles or some other guest who wandered into her drawing room and played shuttlecock with her.
I am much bolder at night when the mosquitoes are a little more merciful in their attacks, and I can walk the streets without fear of any damage from the sun. I am still in disguise, under dark glasses to protect me from errant lamps. My Norcross cousins are agitated about my wish to walk alone. A kind of anarchy reigned during the night, with a Civilian Guard that caroused and stole more than it protected people, and a police force that had been denuded by Mr. Lincoln’s Department of War and could not control malcontents.
“Aunt Emily, there are rascals and ruffians in a city where strange men can prowl.”
I smile under my dark glasses. “Loolie, you and Fan have made a metropolitan of me. Besides, even the worst rascals wouldn’t take advantage of a blind girl. They might lose status among their friends.”
“But someone could mistake you for a trollop, a woman of the night.”
“Dear cousins,” I laugh, “I would be most flattered.”
And I launch myself, venture from 86 Austin Street without the least map, wishing I could conjure Carlo with my own magic lamp. Then we would have strolled to river’s edge, and I would have whistled in the dark and waited while he ran after muskrats and other rodents in the marsh. But without my dog to guide me and help me explore, I stick to half-lit streets that cannot hurt my eyes.
It is hard to express the exhilaration of fleeing my cell, that curtained-off room with its mosquito net where I have to hide during the day like the blindest bat…or a Vampyre, though I haven’t the littlest desire to feed on anyone’s blood. I wish I had the wherewithal to wander about like a warrior, but I have neither gun nor beard. I am the Queen of Cavalry out on a stroll.
On a torrid night in July, I find myself on Magazine Street, not far from the water. I pay no mind to the mosquitoes, but the marshlands have a rampant odor, and I clutch a handkerchief to my nose. I happen upon an almshouse, or what looks like one.
Even with the disadvantage of dark glasses I can tease out the words OVERSEERS OF THE POOR etched into a signboard above the front gate. But I discern no beggars or other lost souls entering or leaving the almshouse. I hear the sudden clop of a horse upon the cobblestones, then the shrill laugh of a woman as several creatures, dressed in silk, alight from a carriage that has stopped near the gate. And the Queen of Cavalry wonders to herself if the cream of Cambridge have descended upon the almshouse to assist in certain charities. But where are the beggars in piebald put in place to welcome them?
My eyes have begun to bother me, and I totter across the street to a little square. I have never felt such vertigo before. I can find nowhere to rest—my eyes are seared with fire and seem to jump out of my skull. That is the last thing I can recall…until I catch myself afloat in a blinding white fog.
There is a buzzing in my ear. Men are all about. I sniff the curious perfume of their skin. I can see nothing but their elegant rags. They are wearing gloves from which their fingers protrude like perverse flowers. They mumble to one another—about me.
“Drag her into the river and drown her. These ladies and gents wouldn’t notice. She’s not part of the same crowd. She don’t have their glamour. She ain’t a high hat, ain’t hoi polloi, I’ll wager on that. But we could strip her, sell the little darling’s clothes and all her hair—red’s a costly color, red will fetch us a price.”
They pull on my scalp, and I can see a pair of scissors shine in the dark like the mouth of a primordial bird. I scream as that shiny bird bites at my hair. I had never been attacked in so rude a manner. Lord, I should have listened to Fan and Loo.
But suddenly an apparition appeared and drove off those wretched men with their scissors and sour perfume. He uttered not a word. I was lying on the ground, and my champion must have bundled up his own jacket and cratered it under my head—thus I had some part of him as my pillow. He did not taste of their sour rot. He must have watched me squirm.
“Lie still,” he said.
“But where am I, Sir? I believe I am lost.”
“You fainted outside the Athenaeum, Sis.”
“But I was standing in front of the almshouse, and people arrived in carriages…help me, Sir. I am confused.”
I could hear him laugh. But it wasn’t unkind. His voice sounded foreign and familiar. He purred at me like a piece of silk and spun his little tale about the poorhouse. The poor had been trampled upon and removed, he
said, not to Shady Hill with all the Harvard Professors, but to the very edges of the town, near Tannery Row, with the stink of leather that could give a man seizures.
“So,” I said, “the Cambridge Athenaeum is a salon for the hoi polloi, according to your confederates, who wanted to drown me and steal my hair.”
“They were puffing out their chests, Miss. They’re showy people. But they knew I wouldn’t let ’em touch a hair on your head.”
I was still quite weak and had to depend upon my champion. “And what is your profession, Sir?”
“Pickpocket, and you’ve cut into my receipts. I couldn’t get near the hoi polloi, what with a young lady swooning in front of my eyes.”
“I’m not so young,” I said, wanting to devil him a little, though I couldn’t read one detail of his face under my dark glasses.
“Well, I would make you my mouse if I wasn’t so busy picking people’s pockets.”
“You shouldn’t confess your crimes to a stranger—and suppose I did not want to be your mouse?”
“I found ya,” he said. “And that gives me certain privileges.”
I didn’t quite understand a pickpocket’s etiquette. What privileges could he have possibly had? We were strangers, as I said. I hadn’t even given him my calling card.
Finally my debonair pickpocket helped me to my feet. I was staggered by his strength and the softness of his touch. He did not have the refinement of my Philadelphia, or a voice that thundered down at you from a pulpit. He could not sear my flesh, but he did have his own quiet power.
“Sir, would you consider marrying me? I am tiny, that is true. But I can cook and mend your socks.”
I heard the lilt of his laugh again. I could tell that I had pleased him. “Never,” he said. “Marriage is not a mouse.”
He took my hand, not to claim his territory, but to lead me along as you would a blind girl or a child.
“Sir, you must educate me. Why would the hoi polloi seize this almshouse for themselves and keep a sign that proclaims ‘Overseers of the Poor’?”
“That’s their persnicketiness. They’re snobs. They want to have their Cambridge culture, their high teas and fandangos with that poorhouse sign staring ’em in the face. That’s why I don’t have much mercy when we pick their pockets, Sis. We’re the Shady Hill Gang. But we had to move from Shady Hill. The sheriff’s men started climbing down our backs. And now we’re wayfarers without a fixed domicile. I like that better. Out of sight, out of mind. But where do ya live, my little mouse?”
I told him without any qualms: 86 Austin Street. I wasn’t fearful in the least that he would rush through Mrs. Bangs’, battering her boarders while he picked their pockets. He would have been as courtly to my little cousins as he was to me. I believed in him, though I could not see more than the bare outlines of his face.
“Your name?” he asked, with a slight tug of my hand. “For future reference.”
“Daisy. Daisy the Kangaroo,” I said, using my nom de guerre. “…and you must tell me yours. I can’t keep calling you ‘Sir.’ Where I come from, such formality would be a mark of rudeness.”
It wasn’t a mark of rudeness at all. And believe it or not, I was growing preternaturally fond of this rascal and lord of the Shady Hill Gang.
“Couldn’t tell you my name, could I, Sis? The sheriff’s men might interview ya, and I would have to swim in the same brine with all the other pickles. No, anonymity is best under the circumstances, even if you are my mouse.”
I was the one with proper Plumage, and I hadn’t expected a pickpocket, cavalier as he was, to smother me in his own abundance of feathers.
“But I have to call you something, Sir.”
“Then I leave it up to you, Sis. Invent a name for me.”
Even with all my loquaciousness, I could not. I was stunned into silence. Fancy feathers had failed me. I had never been called upon to name a man on such short notice.
He laughed again, and the sound rippled into the night like a switch of melody.
“Cat caught your tongue, my pretty little mouse?”
“You’re a flatterer as well as a pickpocket,” I said, but I could feel myself expand into a giantess. The old maid was gone. None of my suitors had ever called me a pretty little mouse.
“Sir, I shall call you Enobarbus. Not even the sheriff’s men will ever unravel that name.”
“I’m not so sure. Wasn’t he some Roman soldier with a gaudy tongue?”
Enobarbus did have a gaudy tongue. And he celebrated Cleopatra with it. But what library had my rascal entered that he could pick at Shakespeare with his nimble hands? I’ll never mock metropolitans again. Lord, I had come to this metropolis as a prisoner with failing eyes and had found enchantment across the street from an almshouse dressed in false feathers.
I would have gone into the Athenaeum with my new admirer—the pickpocket and his mouse. But the hoi polloi would have heaped abuse upon our heads and sent for the police. I’d have started my own sirocco, stronger than Sue’s. Father would have to come to Cambridgeport to plead my case. He’d never prevail. I’d be sentenced to six months in the women’s farm as a pickpocket’s moll. Who would marry me now!
But I had one consolation. I didn’t have to share Enobarbus the Pickpocket with any other mouse—at least not for the duration, that is, tonight. We walked hand in hand in that hot, mosquito-ridden air, while he swatted at the mosquitoes with his one free fist.
“It’s the filth in the marsh. It breeds those monsters, the largest in all of Massachusetts. I’ve watched a swarm of ’em eat a man alive.”
“But why didn’t you help him the way you helped me?”
Enobarbus stopped for a moment, and I lost the rhythm of his stride, since my feet were infantine compared to his.
“He was a deputy’s man. I owed him nothing but his death. He wasn’t a mouse of mine.”
His stride picked up again, and I was able to patter a half-step behind him. The mosquitoes could bite until eternity was here and gone. I did not want this night to end, my night with Enobarbus. All the men I loved had escaped from me—Brainard Rowe, my Tutor from Mars; Mr. Bowles, with his Arabian beard; Tom the Handyman, who had burgled one mansion too many; and my Philadelphia, Mr. Wadsworth, who was hiding somewhere between the Isthmus of Panama and my heart. But dark glasses had given me a boldness I’d never had with sighted eyes. I prowled like a pickpocket and had been rewarded with treasure. The streets themselves vanished as Enobarbus tugged at my hand. I had want of nothing—not the scratch of my Pen upon the page, nor that mix of pleasure and pain whenever I got too close to Sue’s volcanic ash.
Enobarbus had rescued me from ruffians who would have robbed me of my hair. It was the madness of war that had made men so desperate. But I couldn’t have met Enobarbus had it not been for them and their scissors.
He accompanied me to 86 Austin Street. I wished the entire boardinghouse could see my beau. But not a lamp was lit. The whole of Mrs. Bangs’s entourage had repaired to bed, even Fanny and Loo, who must have started to snore while waiting for me.
“Enobarbus,” I said, as bold as can be, “will I ever see you again?”
I still could not read his face in that dark blur.
“That depends,” he said. “We’ll be working Blue Hill tomorrow. We have to cross the river a couple of times a day to keep the deputies guessing. But I’ll do my best to be there whenever you swoon.”
And he went off into that wilderness of mosquitoes, with all their viciousness! I could hear them snarl in their tinny voices as they fed upon my Enobarbus. They were the true Vampyres, not this little mouse.
29.
I HAD MUCH TALLER FEET IN THE MORNING. THE GIANTESS slept and slept. I was the talk of 86 Austin Street. Mrs. Bangs dared not ask where I had been. And Big Daughter—Louise was her name—would offer not an instant of reproach while she buttered her toast at breakfast. But their Irish maid, Margaret Tripper, wasn’t so genteel. She harrumphed in the midst of serving Mrs. Bangs�
��s best pickled beef.
“Some’s are decent, and some’s are not. That is my stark opinion. If I had me way, I’d bolt the door at the stroke of midnight, tho’ bless her little heart, I’m sure Miss Emily had her reasons.”
“She had none,” said I in a throaty voice that was the mark of my new size. I would not have been startled to learn I had sprouted manly hairs and moles during the night.
“It’s her red crown,” said Mrs. Tripper. “It makes her saucy. Satan himself has a red beard.”
“And so would I were I a man.”
She stood bewildered at my remark; her eyes wandered as if she meant to massacre me. But she was kind in spite of her truculence, and when she snorted into her apron, I began my retreat.
“O, Trip”—that’s what we called her—“I was lost, and it took me hours to find my way again.”
“But there are evil men about, Miss Emily, adventurers who might hook themselves onto a young marriageable lady like yourself.” The word marriageable made me blush. I was the one who proposed to Enobarbus the Pickpocket, since he was much too busy plying his trade even to have me as his mouse.
“Trip,” I said, sinking fast from my stature as a giant. “Did you ever hear of the Shady Hill Mob?”
“Murderers they are,” answered Margaret with a shriek. She commenced to shake. “The likes of them haven’t been seen in Cambridgeport for years. God forbid those Shady Hillers should ever come back! Their chieftain was hanged by the neck and buried at the back of Mount Auburn Cemetery where madmen, murderers, and paupers are put without a marker.”
I’d been to Mount Auburn on an earlier trip to Boston—Lord, I was fifteen at the time, staying with my mother’s people. I rode the railroad car right to that City of the Dead, stood in a swirl of tulips and honeysuckle, but I never found one unmarked grave.
“What was that chieftain’s name?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“Byron Thrall, unless you’re calling me a liar.”
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Page 17