The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  We sat in the front parlor and fed on my black cake. Miss Rebecca swallowed three whole portions. “I’m ravenous,” she said. “I haven’t had my breakfast.”

  “Missy,” I asked, “how did you ever find me?”

  “It’s not so difficult. I saw ‘The Snake,’ and I said to myself, ‘That, dear heart, had to come from Emily Dickinson’s Pen.’”

  “But why are you so sure?” I asked, purring like one of Lavinia’s cats.

  I’d given her China tea, and her hand trembled over the cup.

  “Because you were a sly one on the page. I read your compositions, can’t you recall?”

  And she had. She’d been a fierce mistress, who followed the curve of my Pen, had shredded my language, and shorn me of whatever confidence I had. And yet her rippings had been much more valuable than my other Tutors’ polite remarks. She was the one who robbed me of all my pretty ornaments and gave my sentences a little of her heat.

  “What happened to your own Verses, Missy, or would you rather not tell?”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” she said, between bites of cake. “I lost my Pen.”

  I did not want to seem impolite, but I had to press her, since I was dying to know.

  “And you never found it?”

  “No,” she said, clutching the teacup with two hands. “It fell out of whatever tiny kingdom I had.”

  I was the one who nearly dropped her teacup now. “Missy, I have a similar sufferance—a lost Pen that reappears from time to time. I am shorn of melody.”

  And Miss Rebecca laughed for the first time. “Then we are sisters in pain, cast out from the kingdom of words. You could recover. I cannot.”

  “But where did you land after Mt Holyoke?”

  And Miss Rebecca recited her little tale of woe. She had been born into the backwoods gentry, like the Dickinsons, but her Pa-pa was a drunkard who fell from grace and left his wife and daughter in dire circumstances. Missy had to beg from her mother’s people to remain in school. She was among Holyoke’s first graduates. She had found God during one of the Awakenings and was all fired up to become a missionary. But Miss Lyon couldn’t seem to survive without her, and Rebecca stayed on as a Tutor and vice principal.

  The yellow gloves had once belonged to her Pa-pa, who wore them in his own palatial barn to wring the necks of chickens, wipe the blood from newborn foals, and wash down his favorite mare. They were instruments of life and death, and Missy took to wearing them at Mt Holyoke. I did not ask her how many chickens she had strangled. Miss Lyon had tolerated the gloves, but the new headmistress did not and also found her harsh. And now her own Calvary began, from one female academy to the next, each one less rigorous than the last, until she was teaching farmers’ daughters who snickered in class and wanted nothing to do with her Pen. And after Missy’s grandfather left her a pittance, she stopped teaching.

  “I live on that…I could not bear students without your quality.”

  “But you scolded me all the time.”

  “And you wanted scolding. But that’s not the point. You weren’t intractable.”

  “And neither was Zilpah Marsh,” I said, entering a wild place where I should not have gone.

  But Missy did not sputter or spill a drop of tea. “Zilpah is locked inside Northampton. Your father is a potentate there, is he not? I have seen him on the grounds—I sit with Zilpah almost every week. She’s interested in your art.”

  “My art? Missy, I do not know what you mean.”

  Her teacup no longer clattered. She held it firmly in her hand. “Dearest, I think you do.”

  That touch of intimacy was meant to be a slap, as if she were at Holyoke, reprimanding a delinquent scholar.

  “Zilpah Marsh is your ardent admirer. I read ‘The Snake’ to her every time I am there. She insists. She closes her eyes and relishes every word with her tongue. ‘The Snake’ is keeping her alive.”

  A shiver went through my body, like a whiplash, and I realized that Miss Rebecca was still an Assassin, even without her father’s yellow gloves. But I had been fired in her crucible, formed by her, and knew how to fight back. I asked if Zilpah ever talked of Tom.

  “Ah,” she said, cupping her own chin. “Is that Tom the Bishop or Tom the Burglar?”

  “You know the Tom I mean.”

  “Yes, the handyman with the mark of a foundling on his arm…a deserter who ran out of the stockades and is still on the run.”

  “Then Tom isn’t dead. He could be hiding in a circus or somewhere else.”

  “Why not? He had no education. He belongs in a circus, with all the other animals.”

  “Has Zilpah seen him?” I asked, like that delinquent scholar still in Miss Rebecca’s thrall.

  “He wouldn’t dare go back to Northampton. That’s where he was born—in the charity ward. He hasn’t been on the grounds, or I would have seen him. But I wouldn’t have come here, Mistress, if your father hadn’t been kind to us. He told me, your father did, that Zilpah Marsh had been his favorite housekeeper. He adored the idea of a maid who could spell. But she was under the influence of that burglar at the time, Mr. Tom, and he ruined her.”

  “Missy,” I said, “please wait here.”

  My head was aswim. I was nauseous, and I bristled like a porcupine. Father had adopted Zilpah Marsh, had made her my secret sister, and Rebecca had now become my own sly aunt.

  “Where are you going, child?” she said in the softest voice.

  “I have a gift for you. I’ll be right back.”

  I climbed the stairs, but not with my usual patter. I moved with the gait of an antelope. I wanted to give Missy back her yellow gloves, to be rid of them. I passed the cupola that Father had built onto the house—I could have seen the roofs of a hundred orange tents from the cupola’s narrow windows. But I was not thinking of circuses. I strode into the attic, found Missy’s gloves beneath Father’s old militia uniform and a welter of dust.

  I returned to the front room. Missy had removed her dark glasses. Her eyes were watery and weak. She looked at the yellow gloves with great alarm. They couldn’t restore her to her old venue. I was the Mistress now, not her shivering seminarian. Perhaps the gloves reminded Missy of her own subterranean passion for Zilpah Marsh. She put her glasses back on.

  “Mistress,” she blurted out. “Do you have any stale bread?”

  I stared at her. “Why?” I had a sudden image of Pa-pa feeding the birds in our backyard with stale bread crumbs while he stood in his slippers in the freezing cold.

  “I’m starving,” she confessed.

  I did not know how to answer. I should have been alarmed when she devoured my black cake. The pittance she lived on was no pittance at all. My Plumage was gone. I started to cry.

  “Missy, you must sit down and sup with us. Father will be home soon, and—”

  “No,” she said, “I do not want the Squire to see me here. I would rather go into the kitchen with you, Mistress. Isn’t that where mendicants come knocking at the door?”

  “But you are not a beggar,” I insisted. “And Father will certainly help you.”

  She clapped her hand over my mouth, not to harm, but to silence me for a second.

  “Promise you will not tell the Squire about this talk. I would die of shame. It took all my energy to appeal to you, Mistress. The two of us are bound together, are we not? You were my protégé. And please do not say another word.”

  She removed her hand from my mouth. We passed from the parlor through that dark, subterranean passage into the kitchen. I let her have all our stale bread. She wouldn’t accept some cold chicken or Ma-ma’s prize crullers, though she looked at them for a long time.

  “Missy, may I have permission to speak?”

  She began to crack the stale bread with whatever teeth she had left.

  “If you’re asking about the gloves, I gave them to Zilpah, because I loved her near to madness, and I was hoping that the gloves would bind her to me, but the only thing that connects us, Mistress,
is a madhouse…and the gloves don’t suit Zilpah. They never did. Yours is the better fit.”

  Disguised again in her dark glasses, she ran out the beggars’ door with her fortune of stale bread, but the glasses couldn’t hide how shriveled she was and forlorn. Her back was bent like some grandma who had lost her brood. Holyoke had been half her life—she couldn’t survive without her scholars. I watched Missy scramble to the side of the house, and then she disappeared. But she’d left her mark. I realized that whatever melody I had left was locked into those gloves. But I could not wear them. I went up to Father’s attic and returned the gloves to that same welter of dust.

  36.

  I MOURNED MISSY AND HER SHRUNKEN SHAPE. “MISS Rebecca,” I shouted at the wind, haunted by a legacy of bread crumbs that pulled me back into my past. Holyoke had fashioned me in ways I had never understood. It was my one great embarkment, a fissure eleven miles wide, between Amherst and that fortress on a hill. Pa-pa had ridiculed my schoolmarms’ college, as he liked to call it, but he wasn’t there. I should have become a schoolmarm. Then I might have had a few pennies of my own in my pocket. But how could I have run a class in Rhetoric or enforced Miss Rebecca’s silent study? My voice couldn’t echo across a classroom, and even if it did, I was much too tiny to teach.

  Perhaps I was a missionary at heart, a convert who had been seized by some mysterious Awakening. I didn’t have the means to help Miss Rebecca, but I could still help Zilpah Marsh. A few months after that encounter in the kitchen, I roused Pa-pa from bed so that he could catch the early train to Northampton for his rendezvous with the Trustees of the insane asylum. I put a bundle wrapped in butcher paper under his arm.

  “Emily, what is that?”

  “Black cake for your favorite housekeeper. And you might give Zilpah Marsh my greetings. After all, we were scholars together—a century ago.”

  I’d unsettled Pa-pa. His eyebrows jumped around like reddish beetles. His mouth had gone raw. He handed me back the butcher paper. And this was the hurtful tale he had hidden from us all.

  Years ago, Pa-pa had asked the warden to have Zilpah removed from that horrid women’s dormitory and put into her own cell, where she could paint or read and look onto the lawn without being shackled to her cot. And then he forgot about her, even on his own visits to the asylum. But Zilpah hadn’t forgotten him. She kept sending messages to Pa-pa through the warden.

  Finally he visited her cell. She had decorated herself for Pa-pa, wore a hint of blue on one cheek from her painter’s palette. It wasn’t the mark of a madwoman. She asked Pa-pa what books I had on my mantle. Father mentioned those books he could recall.

  “Well, Master,” she said, “I would like the same as Mistress Emily has.”

  He couldn’t ignore Zilpah’s request. Her pitiable condition disturbed Pa-pa. So he bought her a Bible and a Lexicon, a complete Shakespeare and some of Mrs. Browning. He even had the asylum give her an allowance, and she paid for things with her own little purse. She would always make a list—trinkets, paint tubes, pieces of silk, wire fasteners called paper clips.

  Her greatest wish had been to be a scholar. She had wanted no other life, she said. Pa-pa asked her what purchase such a life could bring. And she said, “Bliss.”

  The distance between her own desires and where she was now pained Pa-pa. It was almost a year before he visited her again. Meanwhile, she’d turned Pa-pa’s paper clips into jewelry, wore these fasteners on her arms and around her neck, like Cleopatra’s condiments. The ingenuity of it touched Pa-pa—a necklace of paper clips.

  Would she ever leave the lunatic hospital? But where could she go? She was a scholar in his mind, not a housekeeper. He made inquiries, tried to place her at the female academy in Utica, where Sue herself had been a scholar. But even with Pa-pa’s persuasion, how could the headmistress there trust a woman who had been in an asylum to teach her young charges? And even had the headmistress agreed to give her a trial, it would have come to naught. The other Trustees wouldn’t release her, not even into Father’s care.

  She languished in her room that could have been a tiny suite at the Willard Hotel, except for the cagelike door. He promenaded with her on the lawn once or twice, and still she languished. He saw her less and less. But he did visit her one last time. She did not use matted paper for her art. She painted on the walls—forest scenes with wild boars. These boars had prickly heads and powerful teeth, but their eyes were scattered and full of fright. The boars were always dark blue, with red in their eyes, but Father was too saddened by what he saw to realize that the red was written in her own blood.

  And without much of a prologue, she said, “Master, you must not come to visit anymore.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I might do ya harm—’cause you love Miss Em’ly more than you’ll ever love me.”

  “But she’s my daughter,” Pa-pa said, feeling like a fool who suddenly had to defend himself before an inmate at the asylum. But he wouldn’t abandon Zilpah. He had the warden hire a special guard to watch over her. Unfortunately, this guard was cruel. He clucked at Zilpah and demanded that she undress for him, Pa-pa would later find out. The guard was hoping to turn Zilpah’s cell into his own private seraglio. She spat at him every time he came near, and he lost interest in Zilpah Marsh. While he was snoring she slit her throat with a piece of glass and scribbled something on the wall in the ink of her own blood, with her pinky as a Pen. No one could interpret what Zilpah had said, not even Warden Jeremiah, who was a Harvard man. But Father knew, and it just about broke his heart. She had scribbled “Zilpah is zero at the bone” a little before she died.

  Pa-pa wouldn’t allow her to be buried in the paupers’ plot behind the hospital, without one calla lily, but had her carted to Amherst and put in our burying-ground. And I had never known that Zilpah was lying two fields away. After Pa-pa returned from his rendezvous with the Trustees, I wouldn’t even let him finish his wine.

  “Pa-pa, take me to the cemetery. I want to see the stone you put up for Zilpah.”

  Pa-pa rolled his eyes and pretended to be annoyed. But he wasn’t annoyed.

  “Child, are you gonna chase me out of my own head-quarters?”

  “Indeed,” I said, “indeed.”

  I crouched like a servant girl and helped Pa-pa out of his favorite slippers and into his boots. A storm was brewing, and we put on our winter coats. I wasn’t gonna be waylaid by foul weather. We wrapped our heads in woolen scarves that Ma-ma herself had knit, and we wandered across the fields. Pa-pa was in the habit of burying people. He’d buried my fellah in our Orchard out of respect for me. He’d have put up a marker with Carlo’s name on it, but I didn’t want the handymen pondering Carlo’s grave while they picked our fruit. I knew he was lying under the Moss, and that was enough.

  The wind bit into my forehead while Pa-pa opened the cemetery gate. Our own scarves were blinding us, but Pa-pa still found Zilpah’s stone; it was a tiny tablet that gave her years—ZILPAH MARSH, 1830–1873—and read HOLYOKE SCHOLAR. I couldn’t have chiseled anything finer into that stone.

  I hadn’t been this far from the Mansion in centuries. I could smell the first snow, and it was like a cool shiver in the wind that near lifted me off my feet. I wasn’t scared. I read the chiseled words over and over again.

  HOLYOKE SCHOLAR

  I heard Pa-pa sniffle. I wondered if he was catching a cold.

  “I maligned that college of yours, Dolly. Didn’t it produce a pair of my favorite scholars?”

  Father had never capitulated like that before, and here he was switching sides. It worried me.

  “Zilpah’s in her grave, Pa-pa. And what have I ever done?”

  My scarf had slipped, and Father had to wind me back into it.

  “You’re precious to me,” he said. “Ain’t that enough?”

  It was dark by the time we got home, and that cool shiver had turned into a snowstorm with a beautiful blinding sheen—it blanketed the Dickinson meadow and the barren trees until
I was one more creature lost in that blaze of white.

  37.

  WHAT WAS IT THAT WOULDN’T PERMIT PA-PA TO STAY AT HOME with his little brood of horses, cows, and Dickinsons? He startled us one afternoon, told us that he was returning to the state legislature, to its lower house, when he had once been a State Senator and Congressman. Pa-pa, who was so private a man, had little love of Washington or Boston rooming houses. He was now seventy-one years old, hell-bent on returning to the State House. Amherst was battling for the rights to a new railroad line, and Pa-pa had to protect the interests of the town. But it had nothing to do with railroads. Pa-pa was restless. He had to be somebody’s champion again. And my foolish father got himself elected to the legislature. He was in Boston half the time, living at the Tremont, a quarter of a mile from the capitol. He had to trudge through the sleet in his topcoat and white beaver hat. Pa-pa worried all the time that one of us might disappear in a pool of ice or get squashed between two railroad cars. But he was the one who was riding the trains and wandering about in snowstorms.

  He asked Brother to write him every day—Austin’s letters would let him taste his family a little. But he don’t ask Daisy to write. My letters must have feared him, made Pa-pa think of falling icicles and scarlet fever.

  I moped around with Father gone, a maiden of forty-three, with my fingers beginning to gnarl. But I felt useless without slaving over his puddings and Indian bread. And whenever he returned to Amherst on the night train, I felt instantly safe, as if a wand had passed over me, even from within Pa-pa’s remotest wall. I could read the weariness on his face. The winter of ’74 was brutal, and lasted into the spring. And during one particular snowstorm, the birds called out their fright and collected at our kitchen door. Their cries tore at me. Mother and Vinnie were frantic. We circled the front and rear rooms like weak-willed savants, not knowing what to do. And then Father appeared in his slippers.