Afternoons with Emily

by Rose MacMurray

  Afterward, we came down carefully, one step at a time, with a sigh of our silk skirts. I arranged Kate’s cloud of veil, put the lilies in her shaking hand, and suddenly the wedding gathered momentum. Mr. Tate became imperative, with Ethan’s favorite hymn, “Awake, My Soul,” as our processional.

  I entered first, past a hundred known smiles, including most of the Dickinsons. Emily and her mother were absent, but this was no surprise. I had given up trying to persuade Emily to attend weeks ago.

  Behind me came veiled Kate on Father’s arm; her lilies trembled. Ethan and his best man stood at the altar, grave and intent, Ethan’s parents watching proudly from the first pew. I took Kate’s bouquet and lifted her veil.

  I realized I had never really listened to the marriage service before. When Mr. Jenkins read it, I felt terror at the mortal final words: “Till death do you part.” How could one prepare for or survive such a loss?

  I looked at my father and noticed that fine wrinkles had begun to rake his face like a tree, one for every year endured alone. And for the first time in years, my eyes grew moist as I thought of my mother and wondered what Father had felt when she departed.

  I heard the vows and the concluding prayers with a full heart, listening to the service in a new way. Then Mr. Tate at the organ summoned up Bach’s cheerful little sheep, grazing safely, and I was carried gently back to reality. We were swept down the aisle, with woolly lambs bounding musically all around us.

  Before we knew it we were back at Amity Street for the reception, where we joined Ethan’s joyful parents. “Was that truly Kate singing?” Mr. Howland was incredulous at what he had heard before the service. “We’ve never been treated to her brilliant voice!” We assured him that it was indeed Kate Sloan — now Howland.

  The bride lacked a handkerchief, so I ran upstairs to get her one. Coming down, I saw the first of our friends entering the house — so I walked ahead of them, through the flowering atrium, and came upon the tableau awaiting our guests.

  The temple was flooded and brimming with afternoon sunlight. The figures on the stage were luminous, defined against a blossoming May orchard. It was a view, a moment I would keep forever.

  The rest of the day was a spinning pinwheel of flowers and wine, tears and laughter. We wept when Father toasted Uncle Charles Sloan, Kate’s dead father. We laughed when Lolly sneezed from the champagne bubbles despite all our warnings! We posed under the portico for the daguerreotypes, and Kate insisted on having my urns moved to be in the picture — so I wept again.

  Aunt Helen and Mrs. Howland went upstairs to help Kate change into a gray crepe traveling costume. I stayed behind with the photographer. David Farwell had been asking me for my likeness, and since I had met him wearing this same green dress, it seemed like a good chance. When I went upstairs, Kate handed me her bouquet.

  “I don’t want to throw this, Miranda. I’d much rather you took it to Miss Dickinson, to thank her.” She pinned on a tiny gray straw bonnet. “You may fetch Ethan now.”

  When he arrived, Kate took her husband’s hand and then turned back to give her last kiss to me. Her green eyes met mine steadily. “I’m leaving here, Miranda, but I’m not leaving you. I never will.”

  I stood at the head of the stairs and watched them depart. My tears blurred the clouds of rice, the waving friends, the carriage pulling away. For the first time, I saw beyond the excitement of our planning, the perfection of the day itself. I realized that Kate, my dearest friend, my spirit’s twin, would never be back. From now on, she would be Mrs. Howland, whose life was apart from us, who loved us second.

  Kate was my first young friend ever. Her wise good sense, her sweet high-mindedness, enabled me to become Miranda, my particular self. And her unreserved, unquestioning love changed me forever. Now I had to go on and grow up alone, without her support.

  It took me until one in the morning to finish my letter to Miss Adelaide, telling her every outward detail, every inward reflection. I felt as if I had written a novel! And although the day following the wedding was Saturday, not Monday, I broke custom and went to Emily to give her Kate’s bouquet. People stopped me on the way to praise the wedding; they were delighted to hear about my errand with the bouquet. It was another thread woven into the fabric of our village life. As Emily told me, her well-known solitude made Kate’s gesture to her doubly interesting.

  At The Homestead, the hall door was locked, so I went past the conservatory and around to the front. I knocked. There was a long wait, so I used the heavy knocker again, a little louder. Perhaps this was a bad idea; Emily was not good with surprises. I turned to go, and just then I heard steps and saw a curtain twitch. I waited.

  The big door was opened by an older woman, stooped and gray haired, with the saddest face I had ever seen. Although we had never spoken before, I knew she was Mrs. Dickinson, Emily’s mother; I’d seen her at church.

  “Lavinia is out,” she told me. The Dickinson family certainly abbreviated their greetings!

  “Good morning, Mrs. Dickinson. I am Emily’s friend, Miranda Chase. I have brought Emily my cousin Kate Sloan’s wedding bouquet.”

  “I see,” she remarked. We continued to stand there in the doorway until Emily called from upstairs.

  “Mother, please ask my guest to come up!”

  So the sad, silent woman stood aside, and I entered The Homestead. I climbed the broad stairs, distressed by the awkward meeting at the front door — but Emily shrugged, unconcerned.

  “Mother cannot cope with people. She isn’t shy or timid; she just can’t COLLECT herself for strangers. Actually, she can’t even talk to her own family. We can hardly hear her from the bottom of her WELL.”

  I thought of my own mother. She too was not connected. This was another facet of life experience Emily and I shared. Then I shook myself back to the present and my errand.

  “Emily, Kate wanted you to have her bouquet, to thank you for being so generous with your lilies.”

  My friend was charmed. “What an exchange! I give you the raw material, and you return the artifact — slightly USED at the altar! Your florist did these little ribbons very nicely. I’m sure I taught him a useful trick about the ice bath overnight. Now, start at the very BEGINNING.”

  Using Emily’s own rules for narrative, I produced an account that pleased us both — quite different from the outpouring to Miss Adelaide and from what I would eventually share with David Farwell when I wrote him next.

  “I hear from all sides the wedding was a PERFECTION,” Emily stated. “Father said that Kate’s singing from the balcony was ‘angelic,’ which is his strongest language. He PREFERS angels to women!”

  Emily cocked her head and looked at me intently. “My eyes are impaired right now, and I want to get a good look at you.” She led me to the window. “Ah, it’s as I thought. You HAVE been grieving.”

  I nodded, hoping my fresh tears wouldn’t spill. I wasn’t sure how Emily would react to anyone’s strong emotions but her own. I didn’t want her to feel imposed upon.

  Emily, unpredictable as always, responded with genuine empathy. “You and Kate are so close — how could you not feel her going? I know if Lavinia were to leave me, I should weep the PACIFIC. I vow you need some fresh experience to distract you, Miranda — while the AMPUTATION heals.”

  Emily was right; I did feel I had lost a part of myself. Her insight touched me, though I was afraid her sensitivity was bringing me dangerously close to tears.

  I believed she even sensed this; she went on talking quite sensibly, calmly. “I have a plan — just listen. My mother is particularly sad just now, and her doctor recommends a voyage and a change of scene. My father is taking her and Lavinia to a spa — in the White Mountains, I believe. She said once that she was happy there, when she was a girl. Now, Miranda, I am going to play doctor and give the same advice.”

  She gleamed and twinkled; what was she up to? “What do you mean, Emily?”

  “I am recommending the same cure for your sadness: a
VOYAGE and a change of scene, right here in Amherst! Won’t you visit me here in The Homestead, while my family is in the mountains? We could keep each other company. Your house without Kate may give you pangs for a while. And we could do some important WORK in our time here together. Perhaps we could even sort out my poems? You know that all I do by myself is STIR them; you’ve seen me at it.”

  This all appealed to me very much, evoking as it did those happy hours at York Stairs helping Father bring his Greek-dramas volume to life. If we could establish some sort of chronology and order in Emily’s poetry, then she might be persuaded to show them to an editor for publication. And her intuition about me was unfailingly correct; I had dreaded the first weeks in the house without Kate, and the marks and memories of our friendship wherever I looked. This was a solution to suit us both.

  “Do whatever you choose,” said Father when I asked permission at supper. “Remember these aristocratic old maids are always one step short of hysteria — but you seem to handle her pretty well.”

  “You must come home the very first moment you feel uncomfortable,” Aunt Helen fretted. “I really wish your father would forbid it.”

  “Miranda is not a child, Helen. It’s her friend and her decision.” Just then there came a firm knock at the door, and Father went to answer it.

  Over his shoulder, I saw Mr. Edward Dickinson. To have him drop in on us at suppertime was as likely as Queen Victoria calling on Sam in the stable! The two men went to the library, and we heard their voices faintly for about half an hour. Aunt Helen and I finished our supper and picked at our dessert, waiting. What could they be talking about?

  Father walked Mr. Dickinson to the door and then returned to the dining room.

  “You have just seen something very rare, very impressive,” he said as he settled back into his chair. His plate of cold food had been removed, and he ignored the cake in front of him. “You have seen a fanatically proud man demean himself to ask advice. Edward Dickinson ate humble pie for the sake of his daughter — and she’ll never know what it cost him.”

  “Jos, you’d better tell us what you mean,” Aunt Helen demanded.

  “I mean that Mr. Dickinson is a protective and observant parent. He is deeply troubled about Miss Emily’s tendency toward romantic and sentimental friendships. He told me that, time and time again, she exaggerates her emotions and then expects the same degree of feeling in return. Mr. Dickinson considers Miss Emily’s dramas inappropriate and . . . dangerous.” He looked at me very seriously, very directly. “He wonders about your visit, Miranda. He is afraid she may work herself up into just such an excessive attachment if you come to stay in his house.”

  “Are you sure that was all he meant, Jos?” Aunt Helen was very disturbed. I knew what worried her. The same worries that had befallen Susan Dickinson as the recipient of Emily’s fevered letters. My stomach tightened at the suggestion.

  “That was all he said to me tonight. Miranda, have you personally experienced anything like this with Miss Dickinson?”

  I was quiet as I replayed every visit I’d had with Emily, searching for any hint of this unwholesome feeling toward me. I wanted to answer completely truthfully, for my own sake as well as Father’s. “Not really, Father,” I answered honestly. “She tells me all about her melodramatic friendships, of course, and shows me some of the letters she writes. All the romances are imaginary, you know — they’re always about people whom she considers her superiors. But she’d never make up a drama about me; I think I’m not important enough.” This was a truth that didn’t bother me — it was simply a fact. “She just likes having me there to tell me stories and to hear mine.”

  “Then it seems to me that Squire Dickinson acted honorably and responsibly, coming here to talk to me.” Father was quite ready to dismiss the very odd call.

  “He’s a frightening parent to Emily,” I confided, wanting to plead Emily’s side and also hoping I might learn something more about the Dickinson patriarch.

  “Is he now? I do get the impression that he sees her as foolish and unreliable — as he sees all women. She doesn’t belong in his real world of commerce and power.”

  “She doesn’t,” I admitted. “But he sees her world and her interests as trivial. ” My indignation surprised me but was heartfelt. Mr. Dickinson’s dismissive attitude was an affront, for much of what Emily valued, I did as well.

  “Miranda, Edward Dickinson is totally single-minded. He eats and sleeps and breathes Amherst! It is more than a patrician’s interest — it is his duty, his very life. The town calls him ‘one of the River Gods.’ He believes that the least detail of the village is his responsibility. He runs for every town office — even dogcatcher and frog marshal — and sometimes he gets only one vote: his own!”

  We all laughed; this was a new view of the squire. It made him more human and a bit endearing.

  “Let me tell you ladies a story,” Father continued. “The winter of 1854 — a few years before we moved here — broke all records for cold. The river was frozen for weeks. One night, Mr. Dickinson looked out and saw a remarkable sight: the northern lights. The baron of Amherst saw his duty to his peasants and went down to the church. He personally rang the church bell — the town alarm — for five minutes. No one in Amherst missed seeing the aurora borealis!”

  It was clever of Father to tell us that story. From now on, I would remember there was another side to Emily’s parent — that of the Amherst “River God.” And it was easier to understand where Emily had gotten her sense of superiority: she had inherited it!

  I arrived to visit at The Homestead with a deliberately scanty wardrobe, so I would have to go home for fresh clothes every three or four days. Emily showed me to Miss Lavinia’s room, which was across the hall from hers. It seemed staid and impersonal compared to mine at Amity Street — but the shelves were packed with gothic novels. Father would not permit these in the house, so until now, I had not known where to find them. Perhaps, I thought with devilish amusement, I will do some extracurricular reading during my visit!

  Since there was still a month of academy classes, Emily had kindly arranged a worktable for me and cleared a shelf for my texts. I was soon unpacked and installed, and Emily and I prepared supper together very companionably — a roast chicken and the summer’s first peas. We ate in the dining room and made plans for my visit. I was pleased that Emily was deeply serious about organizing her poetry.

  “I have hundreds of poems — literally HUNDREDS! I’ve been adding to my hoard for years, saving anything worth keeping — from a phrase to a complete poem. We must start tomorrow.”

  “What if we used this table?” I suggested. “You and I could have our meals in the kitchen, I should think.”

  “Miranda, how clever of you! We can leave all our papers spread out undisturbed until we finish.” Then she added gleefully, “Father would be in a FURY!”

  Quickly we established our routine: Emily worked by day at her papers and letters until I returned to The Homestead at four after school. She greeted me downstairs — new for us — and we had tea and shared casual news in an alcove off the parlor. I reported that one of my teachers was leaving to marry and move to Kansas. Emily believed a second robin family was housekeeping in the same nest as the first.

  I did my homework until it was time for us to prepare an early supper together, talking idly. Usually Emily had baked us a surprise dessert using a French cookbook.

  “Father prefers SERIOUS food,” she called to me from the kitchen one evening. “Something WORTHY, like Indian pudding, to move us along the road to salvation. I fear this SOUFFLÉ will cost us time in purgatory!”

  Then she startled me by running from the kitchen into the dining room, where I was straightening our piles of papers.

  “Miranda, do you know we are committing MORTAL SIN?”

  My eyes widened with surprise. “No, Emily — how are we sinning?”

  “We are TALKING from ROOM to ROOM! For the first time ever, in this house of
constraint. Oh, we are a gloomy lot here, we Dickinsons!” And from then on, Emily called to me deliberately, to spite her absent father’s rules.

  After the dessert, we got down to business. In the large, dark dining room, we lit two lamps, borrowed from the parlor, and labored in Emily’s Augean stables of verse. We sifted through piles of boxed pages and separated the finished poems, putting the best version of each into one folder. The alternate versions went in a second folder, and the disconnected, unused lines or phrases in a third. Then Emily sewed the poems we considered finished into little volumes, loosely stitched at the fold. She would not explain how she grouped them. I could see some general categories — Nature, Love, Death — but I saw no chronology or plan, though she assured me both were implicit.

  Sometimes Emily asked for my help in choosing between two versions of a poem. I was gratified when she praised my taste. She often related Sue’s comments or opinions; despite Emily’s disapproval of Mrs. Austin’s lavishly social lifestyle, she clearly respected her sister-in-law’s literary and editorial talents. Emily had been sending Mrs. Austin most of her poetry for quite some time. I enjoyed being included among those Emily trusted with her most prized possession — her words.

  “My greatest influence is Isaac Watts, whose hymns I am sure you know and sing,” Emily offered. “He would admire your ear for meter.”

  I recognized the name; he was a pastor in the early 1700s, and I did indeed know his hymns.

  “His verse is TAUT, without padding,” Emily continued. “He was a pure radical thinker, stripping away all the trimmings and go-betweens around God. He has no flesh; he writes the BONES. He has a stark view that I share. Listen!” And in a child’s clear treble, small and true, she sang, “O God, our help in ages past.”

  “I know he wrote ‘Joy to the World,’ ” I said. “But what else did Watts write?”

  “There’s my other favorite,” Emily replied. “ ‘Jesus Shall Reign.’ His book Prosody — that means the arrangement of poetry — is a ‘lantern to my footsteps.’ Sometimes I wonder why I write at all, when Watts has said everything there is to say in what I just sang to you.”