He borrowed my shawl and flew right into the storm. Vinnie and Mother had shut their eyes, but I watched from the window. He strode like Cromwell in that storm, Cromwell in velvet slippers, and returned from the barn with a milk pail full of grain. He opened the kitchen door, scattered the grain, and didn’t have to invite a single bird into the Homestead. They hopped out of the storm and feasted on little piles of grain. Father didn’t cluck like some proud hen. He hid himself, worried that his presence might embarrass the birds and interfere with the feast.
SUDDENLY THE ORCHARD THRIVED WITH PLANTS AND SNAKES that seemed to crack right through the frost, and we found ourselves in June; Pa-pa was supposed to return to the State House next morning to vote on an issue that escapes me now, and like some small-town Salome I lured him into spending the afternoon with me, sending Mother out on some fraudulent mission while Vinnie was in the midst of a nap. Father was startled to see me. I brought him wine and cake, and he began tossing crumbs to the birds.
“Emily, these are gluttons for black cake. I know. I’ve fed them before. They will pester us till eternity.”
“So be it,” I said. “A millennium of black cake in our garden.”
“A millennium at the least…Your brother is occupied with my affairs, and while I am away, you must be the captain of this house. Mother’s mind tends to scatter. Vinnie is the practical one, but she cannot lead. You can.”
“Lord,” I muttered, reddening all the way to the roots of my neck. “You’d think I had the possibility of bein’ Goliath.”
He laughed, and it was curious to hear, as if it had come out of a hidden place.
“Child, I’d be the chief imbecile of Massachusetts should I ever trust a captaincy to Goliath. He couldn’t even survive a pebble cast by a boy without a beard.”
“Then I’ll be the same beardless boy.”
He laughed again, and tired as he was, he looked like that hero who could step out of any storm with a pail of grain.
“Pa-pa, make up your mind. It’s either David or Goliath. You can’t have both.”
“Then I won’t have one or the other, but Captain Emily—”
“Whose letters you never even asked for while you’re livin’ at the Tremont…Pa-pa, a letter can’t bite!”
Father held my little hand in his larger one; the grip was firm, but his face hadn’t ungentled.
“You’re right to scold,” he said. “But you see, I cannot bear to be away from home. And Austin’s letters feed my nostalgia. They’re crammed with the commonplace. They’re as comforting as a hot bath in a strange hotel.”
“And mine are like cobwebs under your bed.”
He laughed and pinched my hand, as if to single out my naughtiness.
“Worse than cobwebs, because your letters stick to the bone. I have cherished every word of yours since you were away at that nun’s school…but I cannot savor your words without the comfort of my footstool and a cup of homemade wine.”
I was beginnin’ to wear Goliath again.
“Father, I could learn from Austin and write up a streak of commonplaces.”
“Then I wouldn’t have letters from my Emily, but some imp out of an ink bottle.”
And now both of us laughed on a bench in my own garden, where the Queen Recluse had labored behind a wall of shrubs, patting the earth with her own fingers or a trowel, beyond the jurisdiction of the village’s own little spies.
“Emily, I wish I had the power to slow the sun and make this afternoon not have an end.”
I could see Brother coming toward us from the Evergreens, and not wanting to rob him of his own pleasure with Pa-pa, I waved to him and ran back into the house. Not even Goliath could have predicted what happened next.
I woke Pa-pa in the morning as was my wont whenever he had to catch an early train. And while he didn’t step with the swagger of King Saul on his way to the depot, well, he was entitled to a little vacation from his own vigor.
I kept thinking of Pa-pa, who was like a ferocious engine on a lonely track. I pitied him and loved him as I loved no other and never can.
Next morning the sun was brutal. It seemed to rip right under the roof. There was no relief, and I wondered how Pa-pa was doing on Beacon Hill. If our village blazed, then Boston must have been a furnace. He would have to walk to the State House and stand under the rotunda in that infernal heat.
His three women were seated at the table having a light supper, brooding over Pa-pa’s empty place, when Brother appeared with a dispatch in his fist, his face full of gloom. I knew it was the end of the world, but I wasn’t sure why until he told us that Pa-pa was very ill. Brother and Little Sister would leave for Boston right away. The last train had already gone, so the two of them would take the Dickinson carriage. But while the horses were being dressed, another telegram arrived…
He’d had his breakfast at the Tremont that morning with his fellow legislators and was in a fine mood. He left the Tremont a little after eight and walked up Beacon Hill without his Panama hat—he must have forgotten it at the hotel. I imagine him standing under the portico of the State House to catch his breath, and then climbing the great marble stairs and entering the House chamber into a blinding light. He sat down to rehearse his speech about the railroad line. The chamber began to fill. His vigor returned when he began to address the House. But then a terrible flash, like a wayward streak of lightning, afflicted his eyes. And suddenly his own words failed him. He grew faint and had to sit. But he finished the speech.
He walked down the winding cobblestone lanes and returned to the Tremont, where he dined alone on corned beef hash and then retired to his room. He looked out his window at the horse-cars on Tremont Street when he experienced a sudden vertigo—the horse-cars seemed to fly up to his room. He began to pack, having decided to abandon Boston, abandon his next speech, and catch the train home. He summoned the porter, but he couldn’t even finish packing. His shoehorn fell out of his hands. He lay on his bed, drifting in and out of his own dreams.
The hotel had called in a doctor, who administered morphine, but couldn’t pull Father out of his spasmodic dreams. I like to believe that Pa-pa was dreaming of us, that our own shapes whirled in front of his eyes. He died toward six PM, with that doctor and other strangers scrambling in and out of the room. He shouldn’t have had to die around all those strangers.
THE WHOLE TOWN WAS GARTERED IN BLACK; NOTHING STIRRED except the black bunting—it was like a melody of merciless lines that traveled across roofs and porches and was draped in every window of every shop. Even the Church was quiet as a mouse. I couldn’t go down to the parlor. I was frightened to see my pale Pa-pa in his funeral clothes. I sat in my room with the door open a crack while Vinnie and Mother sobbed downstairs. Austin, I’m told, had lost his ruddy complection and was as pale as Pa-pa. He bent over and kissed Pa-pa’s face.
No one had the audacity to climb up the stairs but Mr. Sam. He’d come from Springfield for Pa-pa’s funeral. All the blackness had been bleached out of his Arabian beard. I hadn’t seen Mr. Sam in a year. He was doubled over with sciatica, and he had to carry a cane. He had wrinkles under his brown eyes. He was as mortally wounded as Pa-pa ever was. He didn’t even ask himself in. The Queen Recluse just opened her door to Mr. Sam.
We were a pair of old Confederates who didn’t have to talk. Mr. Sam took me in his arms. He hadn’t always been polite to Pa-pa in the Republican, had once even called him a relic, a dinosaur who sat on his own private fence during the Civil War. But Pa-pa was full of private fences, and Mr. Sam cherished him in spite of the critical remarks.
We stood there, in the shadow of my door, both of us trembling, and without saying a word he went back to the parlor. He couldn’t settle into his own skin, or decide to kidnap Sue, and so he wandered between the Evergreens and God knows where, like an invalid allergic to peace and war. I returned to my post and listened to the sounds in the parlor.
The Mansion was swollen with mourners, and the service itself spilled out
onto the street, as Pa-pa’s friends and associates sat on chairs spread across the lawn. The Reverend spoke, but I did not listen—he could only praise the public man, Treasurer and Trustee, the Squire of Amherst who was proud of his horses, but not the Pa-pa who stepped into a storm and rescued starving birds, or watched over a mad housekeeper in her necklace of paper clips.
A cadre of the town’s most prominent citizens, including a couple of College professors, carried the coffin on their shoulders across two fields to the burying-ground, where Zilpah also lay, unbeknownst to everyone but Pa-pa himself. And it comforted me to recollect that their graves were only fields away from my window. But that don’t mean I didn’t grieve. I nearly died of it. To think that I would never hear him paddle through the house in his slippers, or read the Bible in that raspy baritone of his. I couldn’t eat. And the slumber I had was like a tiny groan in a sea of wakefulness.
I laid siege to myself and hardly ever stirred from my room. Little Sister shoved scraps of paper under my door, wanting to know if Emily was still alive. To ease her mind, I answered that I hadn’t taken flight. But it wasn’t entirely true. In the madness of mourning, I imagined myself as an old maid with wings—not an angel, but a bona fide bird-woman who could carry her weight into the sky and wouldn’t plummet more than once or twice. Flying wasn’t much of a revelation. It was as brutal as breathing air. But I had small adventure in the span of my wings. I never dreamt of Morocco or the Gulf of Mexico. My pattern was as constant as a star. I flew out my window and traveled no further north than the burying-ground. I hovered in that neighborhood with a daughter’s conviction that there was no other home than where Father happened to be.
Snow
Cats! Vinnie was suspended in a demimonde of cats—pugilists, ruffians, and coquettes, they seduced her, bit her arm, caterwauled, had kittens in the shavings barrel, and she fed them, stroked their tails, slept with them, gave them all a home until the mansion was overrun with cats. She’d given up on most of mankind. Long ago she’d been in love with Joseph Lyman, a classmate of Austin’s, who’d allowed her to sit on his lap, and then ran off to New Orleans and found another bride. Vinnie would consider no other man, though she’d had a dozen suitors, two dozen, who would have married the youngest daughter of Squire Dickinson, now in his grave. But she wouldn’t marry. She had an invalid mother and invalid cats and a secretive sister who wouldn’t even put on a shawl and stroll, as they had once done, arm in arm, while Pa-pa was still alive.
Sister was filled with intrigue. And Vinnie had become her accomplice, her messenger and post mistress. There was always some note to mail to Sister’s mysterious correspondent, the Reverend Wadsworth. He’d gone far away, sailed to San Francisco, and then sailed back to Philadelphia several summers ago.
Emily called him “Master.” She’d smile like one of Vinnie’s mad felines and say to the housekeeper, “Margaret dear, I have another missile for the Master.” And she’d clutch the note in her hand as if it might explode any minute.
Then, years after all the clandestine deliveries, her Master showed up at the door. Emily was in the garden with her watering pail. And Vinnie knew it was the Master, knew it in an instant, as he clutched the bell pull. He didn’t announce himself, but asked for Emily in that deep voice of his, like wind barreling out of a tunnel. She could feel the boards shake with his thunder. He had wrinkles around his lips, and he also had a slight limp. But his gaze was terrifying for such a diminished man.
Vinnie hopped into the garden with a puss on her shoulder and announced the visitor with the deep voice. And Emily, who’d always fled from intruders and depended on Vinnie to be her shield, rid herself of the pail and ran to Rev. Wadsworth, her Master, like a child out of breath. Vinnie tried not to listen, though Lord forgive her, she did prick up her ears.
She couldn’t glean every word, not while Puss scratched at her, but she could catch enough of their sweet patter. Emily talked of her own surprise. She might have had the housekeeper or the handyman meet him at the station had she known about his visit. But he hadn’t planned to come. He had decided in the middle of his sermon, as if in the thrall of a sudden revelation, and had gone from the pulpit to the train depot.
Vinnie saw Sister through the curtains, with that curious glow of someone caught in rapture. She heard Rev. Wadsworth say that he had some “affliction” and might soon be dead. And the Master’s affliction was registered on Emily’s face.
The glow was gone. Even her freckles had fled. But her pale complection wasn’t a sign of weakness. Sister’s voice was suddenly robust.
“Master, you must not go away from me.”
“I cannot succor you,” he said, in a voice that was like a cannon shot. “I cannot even succor myself. And if I came to you, Miss Dickinson, it was not to guide you in any journey toward God, but to say goodbye.”
“And must you say goodbye to my Snow?”
“Your Snow,” he said. “I can no longer afford your Snow. I am refreshed by the music of your lines, but it fatigues a poor Philadelphia preacher. The images clash, and I find myself on a battlefield.”
“It was not my intention to hurt you, Master.”
There was such lament in Sister’s voice that Lavinia had to skulk away with her cats and eat some bread and butter or go insane with that sad sound in her head.
Master did not stay very long. And Emily’s paleness did not vanish with him. It took a whole week for the freckles to come back. But Vinnie kept wondering about Sister’s Snow. And one afternoon, while Emily was in the garden, she drifted through the mansion like a drugged woman, a puss on either shoulder. The cats were like rudders that steered her away from some dark corner and kept her from falling. She dusted the stairs, her hands gliding over the banister knobs, feeling wood that gleaned like butter, and with a stroke of raw courage, she marched into Emily’s room.
She had seldom dared cross into that inner sanctum where Sister scribbled her letters, created her Snow at a cherry desk in the far corner, but Vinnie did it now.
Sister’s combs were on the bureau with her toiletry set. Vinnie opened one of the drawers, thinking she would have to sift through a pile of correspondence. But she found something else. Little sewn booklets in a box, like the magic fans of a courtesan or coquette. And with these fans were scraps of paper and envelopes and fliers with poems scratched onto them in Emily’s own hand.
She began to cry and laugh at this startling treasure, but was too timid to read a line. No, she wasn’t timid. She was as ferocious as Saul. She couldn’t say why, but she started to dance in Emily’s room. She wanted to cover herself in Emily’s Snow, to feel it against her skin. Perhaps she was the coquette. And old, silent “Saul” with an army of cats could grasp her sister’s songs; vibrations went through her body like the shivering of the Lord. Then she shut the drawer and crept out of Emily’s room.
PART SIX
Jumbo
The Homestead, the Evergreens, and the Circus Grounds
1875 & Beyond
38.
I HAD NEITHER NIGHT NOR AFTERNOON, BUT AN AVALANCHE of dreams that shook my system, as if Daisy had been flung into a well. So it went for years, on and off, ever since Father discontinued stepping through the house in his slippers. I did not dare ransack his closets looking for clues. I never even opened his door, which had been my compass as a child, my true north. While Father lived with us, I would climb the stairs like a soldier and feel a majestic safety whenever I passed his door. But all safety has now abandoned this house.
I moan in the middle of the night. A Monster chases me, with a ruffled, unfamiliar form, yet owning my father’s dark eyes. I cannot bring myself to call him Pa-pa. And even if I did, I’m sure he wouldn’t answer to that name. So I call him Dark Eyed Mister, and his horrid, unnatural face begins to smile—or grin, I should confess, since he does not have a regular mouth, but a lipless hole that serves as a mouth. It puzzles the mind. Is this Monster my Pa-pa, the earl of Amherst, transmogrified by some subst
ation between celestial and terrestrial ground? I will not believe that the Lord’s anointed are hapless surgeons who have mutilated my father so. Even the direst angels would not commit such a crime.
Then it must be the Devil’s work. Satan has sent me an apparition that mocks my father’s form. But when the Monster utters a few syllables with his strange mouth he is most tender with me. And this is disconcerting, since I am not even allowed to hate the creature. “Miss Im’ly,” says the Monster, as if he were one of Father’s stablemen, “ef it is cold, I could light a fire under yer ass.” And laugh he does at his little profanity, with a shapeless hand to cover that hole of his.
“Who sent you, Mr. Dark Eyes?”
“Yer father sent me. Can’t ya tell?”
And it is the affliction of my dreams that I can get no further than that—a Monster from a realm that makes no real sense, yet seems to have my father’s eyes. Perhaps he is a palliative from the Devil, who has taken pity on the Dickinsons after Mother fell ill—she swooned a year to the day that Father died and woke to partial paralysis, as if she were marking that grim anniversary with her own blood. All feeling had left her Hand and Foot, and her mind could no longer seize upon what was current and what was not. Father was still alive in her Phantom thoughts, and she would chide me for going to bed before the Squire returned from his office. I did not have the heart to rob her of whatever small felicity she had left. And so Lavinia and I were counterfeiters who continued the masquerade that Father would soon be at the door in his beaver hat.
And it was amazin’ how the leanest lie gathered its own flesh until both Dickinson girls believed that the Squire, or his ghost, would appear at the supper table. And Ma-ma, who had never really been able to mother us, caught as she was within Father’s will, had suddenly become our child. I had to feed her with a spoon, and call Horace Church to carry her from her bed to the chair. But the burden of it all fell upon Lavinia’s back. Little Sister sat with her while I baked or prowled through the Homestead like a burglar without a destination. I usually ended up in the Northwest Passage, that dark corridor at the rear of the house, where I could elude any guest, since it had five escape routes—five mysterious doors—one of which led right to the back stairs. I was as much of an apparition as my Dark Eyed Mister within this corridor. Lord, I could play the Phantom here.
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Page 23