The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

She didn’t wake until well into the night. She was on her blanket, in her Dimity gown, and couldn’t recollect how she’d gotten there. It was the first of her fainting spells. They’d come in their own season, without much warning. Sometimes her nose would bleed, sometimes not. Once her spittle was nearly black, and she saw her father’s face. But she never woke up to Pa-pa’s apparition, not in any form. And how could she converse with a wraith who wasn’t there? Lord, she was alone.

  But after one of her fainting spells, she was startled by a memory that beat like little feathers against her eyelids. She was eight years old again, just like Gib. And Father was in Boston with the Legislature. The State House was very cold, and Father had to wear his hat and storm-coat or freeze to death. Father put her in charge of Mother and Little Sister while he was away. Hadn’t he written home how he expected her to be the best little girl in town?

  It was terrible to be without Father. There were ice storms every day. And Amherst was a relentless river of ice. And just as she was about to curse Pa-pa and the State House, Pa-pa arrived from Boston, his collar wet with snow. The floorboards whined with each of Father’s steps. It was Little Sister who leapt up and took off his white beaver hat. Emily would not have dared. It was Austin who found his slippers, while Mother fed him a glass of wine and prepared tea and scones with a neighing noise that was almost like a laugh. There seemed nothing for the best little girl to do.

  She couldn’t even slide the footstool under his feet. Austin was there first. She would have warmed Father’s winter stockings with her own hands, but he would have thought her a pickaninny come to pester him while he had his wine. And so she stood like a sentinel and watched Father’s raw red brows through the wineglass.

  Father removed something from his pocket and placed it on the footstool. It was a tiny cylinder of blue glass with a piece of graphite sticking out like a lizard’s tongue. Emily had glimpsed at such a marvel in a handbill. It was a mechanical pencil made in the British Isles for princes and kings, and a replica of it was sold in Boston shops. A drummer must have come into the State House with a king’s mechanical pencil in his sample kit and caught Father’s eye. There was no other explanation that Emily could imagine.

  Austin couldn’t have cared a whit, but Father must have known how much she would covet a king’s pencil. Her shyness was gone. Emily clutched the king’s pencil in her hand, felt the smoothness of the glass, and Father’s eyes lit with a laughter only she could share.

  PART SEVEN

  The Boy in the Barn

  The Homestead

  1886

  47.

  HOW GLORIOUS IT WAS AS I LAY ABED, DELIRIOUS AT TIMES, barely able to breathe, that I should have a sudden Avalanche of suitors, as if some gentle Robber were knocking at my door. I was so pale I dared not look in the mirror. Yet that chalkish color becomes me, I think, or is it the vanity of the oldest maid in Amherst? The first of such admirers was a visiting Tutor at the College, a Tutor from Yale no less, like my poor Domingo, Brainard Rowe, who had been run out of town by Brother’s fraternity.

  This second Domingo, Carleton West, was insidious in his pursuit of me. He did not seem to care how often I rejected him. He redoubled his overtures like some artillery master who was closing in on his target. He sent flowers and little notes. He stood outside my window, the steadiest of swains. And each afternoon there would be another note from him, another flower, carried upstairs by Maggie Maher, who would have chased him with a broom had I signaled her to do so. His ardor began to intrigue this recluse. He was but half my age. Why should he have cared about so pallid and sickly a maiden?

  It was Miss Emily’s House of Snow. He had compiled a tiny booklet of my Verses—all the lines that had escaped my bedroom bureau somehow and had appeared in the Springfield Republican, or in Drum Beat and other journals with a circulation that had vanished long ago. My admirer did not intend to publish this booklet. He had prepared it solely for my sake. How could he have guessed what my reaction to the booklet would be? Looking at those lines was like looking into a mirror that accented your skeleton and the brittleness of your bones. But I could not blame Carleton for this. He hadn’t meant to bruise. And so I observed him from my window, apparitionally. His ears seemed a little too large. I did not have that mad urge to touch him, which had always been the barometer of my affection for a man. But I would not abandon this Tutor with the big ears.

  I scribbled a few lines under the last of his love notes. His language was florid, I fear. But perhaps it was the price of his rapture over me.

  Dear Mr. Carleton West, I am not in the habit of visits from strange men who bear even stranger fruit. It is a mystery how you compiled a catalogue of my Verses. You must have ranged through many an attic. And how can I hold the ardor of your pursuits against you? But I so seldom hear the sound of my own voice that it startles me at times, and should I add another voice—your own—it might overwhelm me with Awe. I will honor your request, but in my own fashion. If you agree to stand outside my door tomorrow at 101/2 in the morning, I will submit to an interview. My maid, Margaret Maher, will let you into the house. But you must promise beforehand not to look at me through the door. Should you do so, Sir, I will be impelled to terminate the interview.

  Yrs,

  E. Dickinson

  And on the morrow Maggie did let him in. I heard this compiler of poems trudge up the stairs. My suitor was not fleet of foot, and it made me wince. Lord, I had merciless expectations of a man. With all my feebleness, I was finicky as a porcupine.

  I was embalmed in my bedroom, with my door ajar. He could not see very much through this crack; hence, I had him in my thrall. I could hear him sigh and suck on his teeth.

  “Miss Dickinson, couldn’t I see a little slice of your face?”

  “Mr. West, did you not agree to the terms of this interview?”

  “But I have been waitin’ so long. Your poems are my life’s work.”

  “Then it cannot be much of a life, digging in a cemetery devoted to a spinster’s ragged rhymes.”

  I had not meant to be so cruel, but the scratchiness of his voice upset me, like the aromatic wine bitters I was supposed to breathe to waken my nerves. The wine bitters and Carleton made my head spin and threw me into a kind of delirium. I clutched the doorknob.

  “I could recite every line,” he said.

  “And that would sicken me, Sir.”

  “Couldn’t you call me Carl?”

  “No,” I said. “Now you must entertain another topic, or I will narrow that crack in the door until even an ant could not navigate the space, and my voice, whatever is left of it, will sound as if it were floating through a fog.”

  “I would cherish it still,” he said.

  Even with my vertigo, I had an itch to crash through the door and behave like a Pugilist.

  “You’re a scavenger, Mr. West, who would rob me of whatever little Treasures I have.”

  “But I adore those Treasures, and if I weren’t so impecunious, I’d ask you to consider marrying me.”

  I’d really have to wrestle back his big ears. He was full of confidence in his own mission—to steal what he could from the Queen Recluse.

  “Are you in the habit of marrying wraiths, Mr. West? I may not even exist.”

  “A trifle,” he said. “A mere hindrance.”

  And he did what he should never have done—peek through that crack in the door. All I could remember were two ears that looked like truffles and eyes that were splashed with the pink silver of a wolf, not a man. I summoned Maggie, who arrived from some secret well and carried my suitor down the stairs by the seat of his pants.

  That should have been the end of Tutor West, but it wasn’t. He would appear outside my window in wind and rain until I asked Maggie to feed him in the kitchen and send him back to the college with a kick. But it seems he wasn’t the only one in the habit of haunting Father’s house. Maggie had sighted a beggar outside our kitchen. I took scant notice because I was breathing in the
bitters much of the time. But once, as if in a dream, I had wandered down to the kitchen and stood in front of my pastry board like a little girl in a trance.

  Behold! I leapt back when I discovered a man rooting around in the yard. It was not my Imagination taking advantage of the wine bitters, nor was it a whimsical twist of words. This tattered gentleman groveled on the ground and ate at the roots, much as would Nellie, the Dickinson sow. The sight of him should have sent me reeling out the kitchen. But I did not look away once. I recognized my Domingo in all his dishabille. And I was overcome with a pity that lent the Queen Recluse a certain boldness, despite her weakened state.

  I opened the kitchen door and went out into the February frost in nothing but my nightgown. I was not cold at all.

  “Domingo,” I whispered. He didn’t bother to glance in my direction. Finally he did look up, and I was bolted right out of my dream, because it wasn’t Brainard—it was my other Tutor, whose eyes had the color of dirt today. And I had to pity him too, even if he wasn’t much of a swain.

  “Tutor, I told you never to return.”

  “I couldn’t stay away, Miss Emily. Your poems keep boiling inside my head.”

  He was crying like a baby. I took him by the hand.

  “Why are you eatin’ roots in my yard?”

  “I was paying homage,” he said, “hoping that the earth in your yard would bring me closer to you…Besides, I had hunger pains, and I have to fill my stomach with something.”

  I couldn’t behave like a criminal. After all, his devotion had impoverished him, reduced him to rags.

  “Mr. West, I can’t ask you to dinner because I’m ill, but would you care for a cup of water and a slice of black cake?”

  And I scolded myself, for I had none of my black cake to give—Emily the Baker was a denizen of the past. I could not measure, could not concentrate on little spoons. I had to depend on Maggie and Sister for black cakes that were no longer moist, and filled with crumpled raisins that resembled rats’ eyes.

  He followed me into the kitchen and fed on water and burnt black cake. I offered him a glass of wine to help him swallow the cake, and suddenly he was the suitor again.

  “Only if you’ll drink with me,” he said.

  I consented to a sip of wine and wondered how to get rid of him. It wasn’t completely his fault. My poems had given him a sort of brain fever. But I couldn’t have him groveling in the yard.

  “Tutor, if you promise not to pester me for five years, I’ll consider marrying you.”

  It was a desperate ploy—I didn’t have five years to wager with—but it worked. He salaamed and kissed my hand. All I could see were his big ears.

  “I’ll be faithful to you, Miss Emily—I promise.”

  He went out the kitchen door as if he were in the middle of a waltz. I couldn’t take much pleasure in my mean trick. And I began to miss those big ears after a while.

  But he crept right into my dreams again, if pale imaginings can be called a dream: I’m back at Holyoke, and Carleton is one of my Tutors, but he’s wearing a bonnet and a housedress. I can’t find a single scholar—not on the stairs, or in the space-ways, or in the ironing room. Holyoke has become a Haunted House. Tutor West keeps calling to me, but I don’t listen. I climb up to the attic. The door’s open, and the attic is filled with old examination booklets and lit with a blue light. A man’s waiting inside, dressed in a robe and red beard. He’s a magistrate of sorts who sits behind my own cherrywood writing table. But his legs are much too long, and he cannot fit his knees under my table, so he has to lean back with his legs in the air, like an acrobat. All the while he leers at me and reads out my crime.

  “Dickinson, I charge you with desertion of your father’s memory.”

  I am trembling now. All my bravura is gone. “Sir, I dream of Pa-pa every night.”

  “Dreams are not enough. Deeds, my dear. You clung to your writing tablet and deserted him.”

  And suddenly my classmates appear behind this judge, but I cannot see their faces in the blue light, only the mechanism of their mouths.

  “The Poetess of South Hadley and Holyoke Hall,” they hiss.

  The magistrate claps his hands. “Dickinson, you will remain forever in this attic.”

  “I will not,” I scream, but the magistrate disappears, and in his place is my Tutor, reading from that little booklet he has assembled of my Verses. The sounds crackle like hellfire.

  But I wake on my pillows, in my own wooden bark, without Tutor West.

  48.

  BEDRIDDEN AS I WAS, WITH BUT FEW EXCURSIONS INTO THE “wilderness” below, I could command an audience, have my own levees near my comforter and pillows. And I did command Brother to come, in a note that Maggie delivered.

  A., I require you instantly.

  He must have thought I was halfway to Heaven. He arrived utterly out of breath, his red face blue with worry, and saw his sister presiding like a female pasha upon her bed. Brother had become the Beau Brummel of Amherst. He pranced through the village in purple trousers and a Prince Albert coat, his hair tinted green, and clutching a gold-hatted cane.

  “Austin, you must not abandon Sue.”

  “Abandon her? I got up this morning with Sue beside me, a look on her face that could freeze a man’s blood. Thank God she wasn’t holding a knife.”

  Maggie’s spies at the Evergreens had told me that Sue no longer slept; she walked the stairs at night and stood outside Gib’s old room. I had tried to summon Sue with another note Maggie delivered, and it came back in Sue’s own scrawl.

  I’m out of the country, Dearest.

  The Volcano you admire has lost all her lava.

  Susie

  Suddenly I felt stranded. Sue had taken flight from the Dickinsons and did not want the female pasha to intervene.

  And for a moment I fancied that my good angel had visited me in the guise of Gib; this angel had Gib’s blond hair and silk cravat, and I was hoping it might restore the peace. But the angel was adamant and wouldn’t sit with Sue. And I realized it was no angel at all.

  The weaker I grew, the more of an appetite I had, even with the wine bitters. I was ravenous. I could have devoured half a chicken, gobbled Maggie’s bone-dry black cake, as Tutor West had done. And then my dream of comestibles disappeared, and I did not even have the strength to walk from my bed to the chair beside my window.

  I felt as if I had been ravaged by some foreign war, left with a piece of tin in my skull, so that my mind was like a mouth harp with missing metal teeth. And I could only play on certain registers, certain reeds. But I couldn’t bring Pa-pa back with that mouth harp of mine, and I couldn’t console Sue.

  ONE MORNING IN MARCH I WOKE TO AN ODD COMMOTION. There seemed to be some palpable music coming from the rear of the house. I struggled to put on my slippers and housedress and climbed up to the cupola that Father had built long ago. It was a place for spooning, but I never did spoon in Pa-pa’s house, and I seldom visited the cupola. But this morning I was glad I had made the trip. Surely I had gone to Heaven, since I saw a man—a boy, really—dance with a cow. Cows do not stand on their hind legs in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But this cow did. And danced with the boy-man. He wore a red neckerchief, and I wondered if he were a fugitive from some Circus, like my Tom. He danced with a grace I had seldom seen while he hummed a song and beat time with one of his boots. The cow was caught in rapture—her face was phosphorescent.

  I pinched myself to decide whether I was a ghost in the midst of some Illumination, but I was still all skin and bones. I returned to my room, and when Vinnie arrived, I declared with my own enraptured smile: “Sister, I saw a miracle—some fellah dancing with a cow.”

  “That’s no miracle,” she said. “It’s the boy in the barn.”

  “What boy is that?”

  “Our boy,” she said. “He lives in the barn, sleeps there with the cows and horses and pigs.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Dennis, I think. We call him
the Boy in the Barn.”

  “And where did he learn to dance with cows?”

  “Gracious, he taught himself I would imagine.”

  “Are his eyes blue?” I asked like some detective.

  “I think so, but I never much concerned myself with Dennis’s eyes.”

  “Well, you must go to the barn and see whether his eyes are blue.”

  Little Sister saw the urgency in my own acorn-colored eyes. She scrambled to the barn, holding the pleats of her housedress, and returned with a bewildered look on her face, as if she had to appease the preposterous female pasha who posed as Emily Dickinson.

  “Blue,” she said. “His eyes are blue.”

  “Then you must bring him to me.”

  Little Sister did not argue. I washed up and awaited the Boy in the Barn. He must have arrived with a pair of wings. I listened for his tread on the stairs and heard no sound at all. He was carrying a cap in his hands, kneading it like a lump of dough. His hands were strong, but with fine blue veins that could have been some tributary of the Nile.

  Lord, I was shy in front of him. My heart was pumping like the fiercest engine in Massachusetts. His eyes weren’t as blue as my blond Assassin’s, but blue enough. And his blond hair was giving me even more palpitations. I had to speak before I fainted in front of this Boy.

  “My dear,” I said, trying to sound like his own lost maiden aunt. “How kind of you to come.”

  “A pleasure,” he said, his voice a musical score dipped in honey. “Miss Lavinia says you have been ill. And Maggie says I am not supposed to disturb ya. Otherwise I would have shouted hello.”

  “But you are my physick.”

  “Mum, I am not aware of such a word.”

  “My tonic,” I said. “My rhapsody. I saw you dance with the cow, and I have begun to bloom. Aren’t my cheeks a little red?”

  He peered at me as if I were the cow. “Splashes of red, mum, mixed in with all the paleness—but a roaring red, if I might say so.”