“You have nothing to say?”
“Concerning what, Uncle?”
His voice remained quiet and dry, the loudest noise being the rustle of the letter he was holding, the one Miss Miller had written to him from her school. He looked up from the pages.
“It has come as no surprise to me that you are considered wild. Your mother was similarly … unthinking.”
Emily had expected to be lectured on her conduct but this sudden sharp mention of her mother caught her off guard. Her mother had been anything but unthinking. In a sudden complete, absorbing vision, she saw her sitting by the fire, saw her now in bright colors against the grayness of this room, flushed with that intruder, that consumption, bending over her work, bravely talking, explaining to her daughter about the myth of the Fall, about how Eve and the apple was as much a fairy story as any of the tales she had read to them as children. She had always tried to pass on her knowledge quickly, as fast as she could; she had known perfectly well that there would not be sufficient time. In that piercing second Emily wished more than anything that he would not mention her darling mother. With this memory in her eyes, she would not flinch; she would not be drawn on the subject. She would hold her mother close and not reply.
He continued as if he had not seen her hurt. “Tell me, my dear, what are your thoughts concerning how you intend to spend your summer with us before we consider what is to be done with you?”
She answered swiftly, too swiftly, no doubt; he seemed surprised. “I thought I might read extensively, and draw. It would not be a course of study as at school but I hope—”
“Are you not aware that too much thought is bad for the female nerves?”
And now this fierce quick anger that she could not control sprang up in her. “Did you not only a moment ago say that it was wrong for women to be unthinking, Sir?” She saw the color mount in his face and the red lips press together. “Uncle, I did not mean to cause you annoyance. Your displeasure—”
But he was clever and wiser than she and she could see would not be addressed with such openness. His voice remained calm and even.
“It matters little to me what you mean. You are my ward, not my child. If you were my daughter I might consider sending you for the cure as I have sent my dear Mary. She has not been well, filling her days with reading, writing and study—it is bad for her mind. The doctor in New York prescribes no reading matter for six months, fancywork only, and plain sewing. And under his care she is being fed plenty of butter.” He sighed briefly before continuing, allowing his eyes to leave Emily’s face. “Butter is good for her. All fat is soothing. She must be soothed.” He repeated the words like a litany, and then, quite suddenly, stopped. After a pause his voice gentled. “What pretty needlework are you engaged with, my dear?”
“I have no sewing. I used to read at home, or draw.”
“At home was two long years ago. What did you sew at school?”
“I have left my sampler behind.”
When she looked at him now she saw a tremendous anger, far greater than her own. He took off his glasses and polished them, revealing the smallness of his milky blue eyes. But he was quiet. He did not burst out as she did.
“I am not used to being spoken to in this way.”
“I am sorry, Uncle. I do not know how it is that I should speak.” With difficulty she stayed still in her chair, resisting the urge to stamp and tap her foot, and walk briskly, pace, longing to shrug him aside, alter the line of her vision, go to the window and see the ocean.
“Emily, let me try to explain what I have in mind and then you will be in no danger of misunderstanding me.”
She had to look down at her hands in case she were to laugh or cry.
“You may walk, and exercise your body. You may read, no more than two hours a day, and I will see what it is that you are reading.”
“But I may draw?” Why had she sounded so eager, so pleading; why had she let so much of her voice come into her throat?
He did not force her to wait for a reply. “I can see no objection. And you shall sew. Ask your aunt to guide you.”
A pause full of dry breathing. If it could be over she might go outside.
“My dear, there should be no need for me to remind you, you have no fortune. Your destiny will be to marry. If you cannot be accomplished, or rich, or beautiful, at least make yourself agreeable. Talk to my son; he is a sensible fellow, and he will walk with you when his health permits. You may go.”
She wanted to cry suddenly, when really he had not been so harsh. She admired him for speaking the truth.
MISS AUGUSTA DEAN
HIGH TREES SCHOOL
ROCHESTER, NY
NEWPORT
March 15th, 1861
My dearest Girl,
Only two days here and it is so complete a change that we could have been separated for a month. Let me hear from you. I long to know how you do.
In the meantime I will tell you as much as I can about my situation. This place, the house, is glorious, built close by the ocean—and what an ocean: a wild, wide salty shore, so much sky—always changing, and angry waves—so much light and dark.
I have met my cousin William—as quiet and watchful as my aunt and uncle, but with an air of profound interest in others—if not a lively one—and he has extended every kindness and politeness toward me. It appears he has periods of invalidism. He is a writer and not expected to enlist against the South. He advises me that the shore will be calmer in summer and it is true, spring is always such an unpredictable time. Already I cannot decide which walk I love better: the cliffs, with their wind and open prospect, or the beach, with its contemplation of the waves.
The town itself, as befits its name, is fairly new, and feels extremely vigorous. Beach houses like ours line the shore, wooden, with generous rooms and verandas—it is too cold to take the air on them now, but in the summer it will be open and wild. It is all so wide and open after the woods. The heart of the town itself is close by and there will be plenty of people who summer here. William assures me that there will be good society. I hope that this will be so, for I regret to say we are very quiet here at present.
I find my aunt a curiously lifeless person. I suppose because I did not know her as a child it is hard to imagine her nursing three boys and a girl, listening to tales of their blunders and dreams at her knee. I do not think it is a lack of devotion—she fusses over William and his supposed cough (I have not heard it once)—but she does not appear to feel, or see. She dresses in black; I would find it unbearable, day after dreary day. She appears not to notice me, but I fear she notices everything; while my uncle, shut up in his study reading his theology and writing his many treatises, appears to be intentionally blind. He has not looked at me—not a glance—since our interview in his study yesterday morning.
It seems I am to do as I please, within his limits, but be watched closely. Yet how can I be watched if the people who are watching do not see? It is in every aspect peculiar and contradictory, and in every mouthful I take or chair I sit in I feel conscious of doing something wrong. In their eyes, I mean, not in my own. I must draw it all for I cannot write it. As for my cousin, he comes and goes infrequently: he too is mostly at study in the library.
I love my room. It is sober and plain and I can see plenty of sky from the window, even though my eyes are deprived of the ocean. How I long for you to be here to talk to, to grasp your hand and look at you and you to know all of this without having to be told. We could lie on the bed together and laugh at their owlish ways.
After supper this evening I was invited to play, and being at the piano again made me feel calmer and more hopeful. It is a beautiful piano, with a clear and resonant sound, and the rosewood is embellished with remarkable artistry. My playing was pronounced good with a raising of the eyebrows by my uncle; my aunt did not look up from her work, but cousin William professed himself “transported” with a slightly comical expression of surprised appreciation, his head on one side
like a bird’s, his narrow face and penetrating eyes gazing as if at something invisible. I laughed and said it was hardly more than proficient, but he said I had a talent, or rather, “A way of letting my soul speak through the music.” I could tell this irritated his mother, who began to bustle about the room turning down the lights. William’s work has only recently begun to appear in the periodicals, but it appears grand things are expected of him. I have read nothing of his, or of my uncle’s, of course.
It is late now, and no moon. I think it may be raining over the ocean.
I send you my fondest love.
Emily
They walked up the cliff path—Emily dancing ahead, William at a more gentle pace behind. It was not a beautiful day; the wind was too strong and the expanse of sky thick with cloud; but her spirits were soaring, as always, on gaining higher ground. He was breathing heavily behind her and leaning on his stick; she had teased him about his comical stick, such a part of him at the tender age of twenty-nine. He had not laughed but she did not think he was displeased.
She did not hear him call her name but paused and turned, for he might have done so, and it was only polite to halt a minute, even though she fell short of offering him assistance. He was not an old man. She saw him looking carefully at the ground, picking his way as if through the treacherous undiscovered territory of their forefathers rather than a well-worn, if narrow, path sprinkled with long grasses and boulders. A little higher and the wind would whip her hair in earnest and she could already feel the longing to run and laugh. But she stayed.
Reaching her, he was breathing and panting and stooped, beginning only slowly to straighten up. Looking at her, he smiled. It was a surprisingly beautiful smile, not least for being so rare. “You are very quick.”
“I know the path.”
“And unusually tactful.”
She had to laugh. “Perhaps.”
“If it were not for my back …” He put his hand upon an obviously tender spot and allowed his words to trail off.
“It is not broken, I assume?” She laughed again and this time he laughed too.
“An obscure hurt that cannot mar the beauty of this day.”
She looked about her at the headland still rising above, the beach below and the veiled sky. “It is not so beautiful today.”
But he was looking at her only. “I assure you, it is a beautiful day.” And it gave her an unexpected delight to be looked at as a source of pleasure, to feel that by standing beside him she was recognized as something good. She looked back at the light in his eyes and felt for the first time that here was another human being who might perhaps feel as she did, even if he seemed so unknowable.
“Are you sufficiently rested? Shall we go on?” And this time she smiled in a way that approached tenderness as he returned her gaze.
“You lead the way, my dear, you lead the way.”
Turning away from him into the wind and beginning almost to battle its full force, Emily began to fear it might be too much for him, but she did not want to turn and look behind her for fear of disconcerting him. She could tell he hated to be embarrassed. And so she went on blind to him at her back, yet checking her pace and the briskness of her step. It was not far until the ground became a smoother turf, and the prospect was complete. In another minute he stood beside her, and although they were within touching distance they were obliged to call to one another to be heard because of the strength of the wind.
“Do you take this walk every day?” he said.
“I roam about here on the cliffs. Do you know it well?”
“I am not in the habit of walking far, and we have not been staying here long.”
“Farther along I found a perilous place where the sea boils called the Devil’s Punch Bowl. I have approached it, but my nerve has failed.”
He frowned. “I am glad of it. You should not venture that far alone. I have heard of the spot; it is treacherous—promise me you will not attempt it.”
“Of course I promise.”
He gave her his arm, although she took care not to lean on it.
“I love it up here—it is wild and undisturbed and I can look over the ocean and imagine crossing it one day.” She was shouting. It was the wrong occasion to attempt a conversation, let alone a confidence, but she could not help it. She turned her attention from the ocean to his face. “You have been to Europe, have you not?”
“Yes, traveling with my father, and brothers.”
“And was it everything you hoped?”
“More. If I am to be the man of letters, the man I mean to be, it is the only place.”
He, too—weak as he announced himself to be—would contend with the wind to voice his ambitions. She felt he would not object if she were to ask him why he did not live and work there already, but it was not the right time. His desire for it seemed tinged with a sense of the impossible; but the confidence was inspiring. She longed to tell him how she and her father would go to look at the pictures in the gallery at Buffalo and how their physical presence was like being surrounded by creatures, friends who loved her and whom she might one day come to know; and how she longed to leave America also, to study in Europe and to learn. She wanted to tell him that for her the study of art was everything, but it would have been a ridiculous thing to say. And besides, she was not sure it was the truth.
Instead she made the decision not to speak about her desires. They stood still side by side. Gulls wheeled in the sky and their far-off cry was the only sound. She studied his freckled cheek, the fineness of his profile and the intelligence of those far-seeing shortsighted eyes. He shivered slightly, though she herself was warm, desirous of the indefinable.
“Time to go back down, I think,” he said.
She was disappointed he did not want to walk farther. The wind dropped and his words resounded clear to her. There was a kindness in his voice and look that left her not knowing how to feel.
They continued their talk at tea; he huddled in his favorite plaid blanket, she head bent over her fancywork, needlework clumsy in the extreme. She had told herself an artist should be able to apply herself to anything, but could bring neither discipline nor passion to it. He recounted his experiences of Paris with its constant fervor over the latest thing (he said the French were very hysterical when it came to beauty), the fashions, the salons, the novels, the weather in the streets; Rome with its stench and its antiquities; the sheer dust and exhaustion of the traveling; the exhilaration in his soul. In the lamp and fire-light and gathering dusk they were undisturbed.
“You would love it, my dear. In Europe they have quite done away with vulgarity.”
She laughed. “Indeed? I am not convinced that that is possible.”
“Our country is—they say we are entering on the greatest conflict of our generation, this war with the South. I have visited the wounded and I have written stories of soldiers and their struggles and their lives. My health does not permit the battleground to be my field of endeavor, and fortunately my brothers uphold the banner in my place. I have a different path to follow. War is not my subject—the private wars between people are more appropriate to my gifts.”
“You are very sure of yourself,” she said. “I wish I could be that sure.”
“Don’t be deceitful; I have already decided that you are the truest person I have ever encountered in my life.” He looked at her and looked at her and she became still and could no longer sew. “You have the gift of pure and unadulterated life, my dear; of vitality, of a great soul.”
“You hardly know me. And you are talking nonsense and you are making me blush.”
“That is your special gift—life. In movement, in speaking, the way you play the piano—the way you express yourself without fear.”
“You are mistaken. I am afraid of a great many things.”
“Do not think I am making love to you. I am not, although you are a girl with whom absolutely everybody will be in love. I am your devoted cousin, and your confessor. It would pleas
e me greatly if you would confide your impressions of everything you see and hear and feel to me—hold nothing back.”
Emily did not enjoy listening to his opinion of her, formed and phrased as if she were a picture he was required to study. It was true that she required a confidant, but that it should be him would have to depend on more than his command.
“Let us leave me aside for a moment. Tell me more about what you intend to do.”
“I will write. I will write a novel as great as any of that of George Eliot, or of Flaubert, or of this Trollope with his flabby literal style that exhausts the readers of his brutish books. I will write. There will be no toil in it. It will be like a gilded web and I will catch my people in it.” He smiled. “It is all to come. It is why I must travel. It strengthens the mind, the spirit. It hardens the talent. This New World is so full of self-congratulation: declarations of this and declarations of that. It is embarrassing. We did not invent the human. If anyone did it was Shakespeare, and I am not at all convinced he was human himself and not some visitation from another sphere. It is in the Old World we must seek for meaning.” He kept looking at her. “You have read Shakespeare?”
“A little; not very much. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“I will fetch you some reading matter directly. Shakespeare, and Keats. You shall start with Romeo and Juliet and the Odes.”
“And will your father approve?”
“My father is of the opinion that the correct subject for both reading and writing is the exact will of God, something it appears only he and his cronies are entitled to construe.”
She laughed, left looking into the fire as he went into the library for the books. He had dropped the shawl on the floor by his chair. It must be a comfort to him to have something to stroke, she thought. The colors—tawny, russet, crimson, gold and green—were beautiful too. And the way it had fallen with the shadows around it. She put her sewing aside in earnest and fetched her sketchbook from the window seat. She was at work when he returned.
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