In response, Nicholls sulked and moped around the pulpit so dramatically that Charlotte was touched by the depth of his attachment and began to reconsider. Elizabeth Gaskell did her best to find him other opportunities through her network of friends. He even found a job to take him away from Haworth, but Charlotte and Nicholls corresponded secretly for months. At last Patrick was persuaded by Nicholls’s willingness to come live at the Parsonage with them. I’m more puzzled by Patrick’s attitude than Charlotte’s. His daughter was nearing forty: Who did Patrick think would magically come along and be good enough? Thackeray? Wellington?
Before they were married, Charlotte seemed to find Arthur as puzzling as he was endearing. He wrote her that he was ill, leading her to worry in a letter to Ellen that she’d chosen a partner with serious health issues; by her next letter, he’d arrived in Haworth to visit, prompting her to tartly observe, “When people are really going to die—they don’t come a distance of some fifty miles to tell you so.” She continued, “Man is indeed an amazing piece of mechanism when you see—so to speak—the full weakness—of what he calls—his strength. There is not a female child above the age of eight but might rebuke him for the spoilt petulance of his willful nonsense.”3 However much Charlotte had grown and softened, there was some vinegar in her yet.
Any time I get deeply interested in an author, I go see if their correspondence has been preserved—Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, P. G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, Dawn Powell—and I devour it. Discovering that dozens of Charlotte’s letters had survived in the hands of her school friends and her publishers was like finding out that Christmas was not only arriving early, but every day in small doses, like an Advent calendar. Letter-writing Charlotte is opinionated and ambitious, though sometimes depressed, and frequently annoyed by the scarcity of options available to women of her class. And this is silly, but her letters also assure me of a gratifying piece of trivia: she knew my name. She signed one of her letters to Ellen Nussey “Caliban,” which means she read The Tempest, which means we would have had at least one small spark for conversation, had we ever met.
In addition to this encouragement, and the appealing daily snapshots of life in the early mid-nineteenth century, the letters Charlotte wrote to Ellen have one strong advantage over her more literary writing. With Ellen, she talked about love. Without Ellen’s guardianship, I wouldn’t know what Charlotte’s voice sounded like when she was young, eager, tired, or grouchy. Charlotte’s letters to Elizabeth Gaskell and W. S. Williams are written by a writer, a thinker, someone aware, however distantly, of a public presence in the world. The letters to Ellen, though they were frequently passed between family members, are more private, free from the constraints of professionalism. Without these letters, we’d have no hard proof of how she felt about romantic attachment, or that when Ellen’s brother Henry, a minister, proposed marriage to Charlotte in 1839, he was kindly but firmly rejected:
I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you—but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you.… I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose—you would think me romantic and eccentric—you would say I was satirical and severe—however I scorn deceit and I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid* take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.4
Eat your heart out, Lizzie Bennet. Charlotte would afterward add, in a letter to Ellen,
I asked myself two questions—Do I love Henry Nussey as much as a woman ought to love her husband? Am I the person best qualified to make him happy—?—Alas Ellen my Conscience answered “no” to both these questions.… I had not, and never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him—and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband ten to one I shall never have the chance again but n’importe.5
These were all actually fairly radical thoughts for the eldest of three grown daughters to be having; Charlotte may talk about her duties as a wife, but I think she was also fully aware that Henry Nussey could not have made her happy; nor could the social obligations of the marriage he was offering her. Regardless of what Charlotte settled for later in life, she was once as passionate and headstrong as I, and as certain she would require a life-or-death attachment in order to commit herself to matrimony.
It was also to Ellen that Charlotte addressed her thoughts and rationalizations about George Smith in 1851, demonstrating the maturation (or perhaps deflation) of her romantic ideals. Smith was eight years younger than Charlotte, and she felt herself very provincial by comparison:
Were there no vast barrier of age, fortune &c. there is perhaps enough personal regard to make things possible which are now impossible. If men and women married because they like each others’ temper, look, conversation, nature and so on—and if besides, years were more nearly equal—the chance you allude to might be admitted as a chance—but other reasons regulate matrimony—reasons of convenience, of connection., of money.6
I think she sounds like she was working very hard not to be in love. The dynamic between Ellen and Charlotte is also marked by the disparity in their intellects and interests, which Charlotte never interpreted as a fault of Ellen’s, but as a sign of her own deficiency in what was good and proper for a young woman to value. Charlotte is pretty much my ideal woman, so it sometimes feels bizarre to me that she should look up to Ellen so ardently. Then I remember, it probably looked to Charlotte like Ellen was doing everything right, and was happy doing it. Ellen wasn’t chafing at the hand life had dealt her. She didn’t need to escape from reality for hours at a time to scribble secret stories. Ellen had brothers who were not drunk and disorderly, who could help support her if need be. She had access to a more sustained education, and she never had to go to work. She probably got bored, truth be told, but felt free enough to travel occasionally among the relations that lived nearby. While it’s possible she was being disingenuous, I get the sense that Charlotte really thought her own ambition and creative energy made her deficient, or even broken. Charlotte felt so exactly like I felt, and still feel, if I’m honest—as though everyone else found it easy to be who they were supposed to be.
Ellen is the source of the vast majority of Charlotte’s surviving letters, despite explicitly promising Nicholls she’d destroy them. She became the main custodian of Charlotte’s legacy, and she talked about her famous friend to anyone who would listen until she died at the ripe age of eighty. Friendship, like love, is a skill that has to be practiced, and the lesson of Charlotte’s staunch loyalty to Ellen is that the effort is worth it. So figure out who the Ellen in your life is, and try to stay on good terms.
THERE’S a certain temptation to leap straight from getting engaged to being married, skimming over the messy, lonely year and a half in between. I could just tell you that eventually, I wrote us into Jane Eyre, and not bother to spell out how. But that wouldn’t be true. He wouldn’t be him, and I wouldn’t be me. This would have been a whole different story.
As a young girl I dreamed more about getting into Narnia than walking down the aisle; I wanted a good marriage, not a perfect wedding. Eric’s proposal had been emotional and spontaneous—maybe a little too spontaneous. He still had some deep-seated reservations about actually getting married, it turned out. He never wanted to talk about it—and not in that cliché “men never plan weddings, they just show up” way. He didn’t want to exchange a single word on the subject—not to figure out when, or where, or who to invite. Not to write a ceremony, not to plan a menu, not to make a single decision. I hadn’t expected putting together a small, laid-back ceremony would remind me quite so much of pulling teeth. I could have written off Eric’s reluctance as typical late-thirties commitment-phobia, but whenever I offered him an out—we could just keep living together, we could go to City Hall, we could elope somewhere else, and believe me, breaking up w
as still an option—he’d vehemently insist that his hesitance wasn’t a reflection of his feelings for me, but a knee-jerk reaction to everything matrimonial.
“Maybe we can suss out what marriage means to us, outside of what it means to everyone else,” I attempted. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he replied. “I just proposed because you clearly wanted me to.” He apologized, but that sting lingered. Every time I tried to dig deeper I just found another layer of the wall he was building. Drafting our vows—an element that could be entirely reflective of us and what we wanted—left Eric literally curled up on the couch in the fetal position while I took the dog for a walk and bawled. The social script around weddings is not helpful in moments like this. Either everything’s a red flag and you should run, or it’s all standard pre-wedding jitters, and nothing to take seriously. I felt like I was in one of those nightmares where you wake up in a bull-fighting arena waving a white ball gown you never wanted in the first place, and have to fight your way out clutching a bouquet and glowing radiantly.
To make matters worse, my mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer earlier that year. For months, as my mom prepared for treatments and surgery and recovery, an alarm was going off in my head—“Mom Mom Mom Mom Mom.” It only subsided when I set an actual alarm to remind me to check in every other day. In Shirley, the daughter gets sick and the mother provides the magic cure, but I wanted to be the one who provided exactly what my mother needed. We’d never had that dynamic before, but suddenly there was an urgency to find it. The anthology launch party that marked the unofficial end of graduate school fell on the same day her chemo started—I can see the tension in our faces in those pictures, the last ones in which my mom had her own hair that we took for a long time. We sat in a midtown restaurant and looked at wig catalogues like everything was normal. I collapsed into Eric’s arms afterward.
In addition to the shelter of her ferocious love, I also grew up under my mother’s fiercely critical eye. I think she imagined that by making me aware of my faults—my too-loud laugh, a flash of fleshy stomach between my shirt hem and my waistband, my appetite, my affectations—she would enable me to avoid the judgment of outsiders. But by the time my mother realized I was pudgy, awkward, and loud, I already knew. The world makes sure you know. Years later, she is so proud of me that she is in persistent denial I could ever have been unhappy or felt unlovable. She would do anything for me, if I called her in a panic. She once drove eight hours to hear me read for fifteen minutes. During this cancer year, I tried to make sure all of the baggage we carry between us stayed strapped in the trunk—I didn’t fight the battles I would usually fight or keep the distance I often keep. I felt vacant and weepy a lot. I couldn’t write much; when I did, my feelings about my mom seeped into everything.
I made my presence known any way I could. I came to visit and brought movies to watch on my laptop during chemo appointments. I tried to be at her disposal, helping around the house, playing whatever she wanted on the piano, and singing without worrying about how I actually sounded. When she scheduled a lumpectomy, I met the family in Baltimore, and did what she would do, which was stock the hotel room with candy and magazines and lotion and tissues and place the room service orders afterward. I texted the extended family with updates. I held her wedding and engagement rings while they wheeled her in for surgery. Later, I was the one who stepped forward when the doctor asked who would help with her drains. Despite a lifetime of squeamishness, I didn’t faint when it came time to empty them into beakers and measure the contents.*
If this was even one one-thousandth of what Charlotte Brontë went through as she faced the illness and death of her brother and sisters, I am in awe that Shirley was ever finished, that she was able to even conceive of Villette. Throughout my mother’s year of treatment I clung to Eric, to my books, and as I hadn’t done since I was a little girl, to my mother herself. It was like a trade-off—my hard-won independence in exchange for the assurance that I was doing everything I could to make sure she knew I loved her.
Naturally she wanted to help plan the wedding, but despite her proud track record of feminist nonconformity, she turned out to have a number of traditional ideas. Every alternative element that appealed to me—a private ceremony, a small dinner with family and friends afterward, a colorful tea-length dress, no bridal shower of any kind—appalled her. She couldn’t understand why I would want to go off and get married by myself (even though she and my father eloped); I couldn’t believe she thought I should be surrounded by a large group of people during an intimate moment, no matter what’s “traditional.” Every “mother-daughter moment” that TLC would have me believe was an essential part of being a bride ended in tears; I felt unheard and unseen, she felt unappreciated and excluded.
Eric took my distress as a sign that I would regret not having the big wedding she wanted, instead of a sign I needed his support to stand firm. He didn’t believe me when I insisted that eloping was what I wanted, and he withdrew into his own thoughts and feelings. He became less thoughtful and spontaneous, and spent most evenings at his desk in the living room. Some of this was normal “settling down.” It can’t be all roses and declarations of love under the full moon. At a certain point you have to get work done and clean house and be regular people. But I didn’t realize just how abandoned I was feeling until about two weeks before we were supposed to elope. After much coaxing and many roundabout approaches, we had planned a small ceremony in Maine, to be followed a few weeks later by an intimate family dinner in New York.
Eric’s twin brother Jason’s wife went into labor with their first baby on a Monday morning; Eric called me to tell me the good news; I congratulated him, texted Jason to say I was thrilled, and got on the train back uptown. Back in Inwood, my phone revived as I stepped into the elevator, and I picked up expecting to hear an excited uncle’s voice. Instead, the man on the other end bore almost no resemblance to the Eric I thought I knew so well.
He was confused about what train to take to Long Island, but rather than consult a map, ask someone employed by the MTA, or just take a breath and wait for the next train, he was calling to demand I get to a computer and help him figure out what to do. Startled by his urgency, I dropped the dog’s leash, got my computer open, and tried to find the hospital’s address so I could give him directions. In the back of my mind, I was wondering why he hadn’t just done this himself on the phone that he was currently yelling into, which contained the entire Internet. In the few seconds it took for my computer to boot up, Eric’s anxiety brewed into a state of agitation I had never seen before, at least not directed at me. It would later turn out he was actually crumpling under the weight of the convergence of his thirty-ninth birthday, our impending wedding, and the idea that since his brother was having a baby, it meant we had to have one and his life was over. Our already frantic conversation broke down into inarticulate and almost menacing pieces as his panic became my panic until he finally snapped, this is useless, thanks for nothing, why did I even bother, and hung up. In tears, I texted him the name of the train stop that had at last appeared on my browser, and the name of the train he should take to get to it. “Are you screwing with me?” he texted back. It took the better part of an afternoon to even realize why I was so shaken.
Nobody had yelled at me like that since I was a child—maybe since my dad had discovered I’d snuck out of the house and gone to visit the neighbors, worrying my then-pregnant mom. He’d strong-armed me into my room, tossed me on my bed, and hissed in my face. There had been other explosions over the years, the kind that steamroll any response until the only possible reaction is hysterical crying. I had learned to marshal my anger, turn it into reason, present it like a closing argument instead of an instinctive reaction. Hearing Eric on full blast triggered helplessness and fear I never thought I’d feel again. I was due at work shortly afterward, so I cried on the floor of the shower until it was time to pull myself together. Once I got on the train I buried my face in a book and tried to stop s
haking; then I felt a tap on my shoulder.
It was my college friend C.J.! We had always flirted but never dated, despite the shared love of jazz and the Marvel Universe that had kept our friendship warm. He was supposed to be in Israel, but some quirk of fate had put him on that train, on that day, to give me a big hug and ask why I looked like I had seen the end of the world. I gave him a slightly defensive version of the truth, and without taking sides or passing judgment, he managed to acknowledge that people lose tempers, and I also had every right to be hurt. He let me vent a little while longer, and then we pulled in at my stop. “Being happy is a choice,” he said to me, squeezing my hand. “I know you’ll know what to do.” It was like a Jane Jane Jane moment, calling me back to myself.
The Incident, as I think of it now, brought to light what a fight-or-flight mode Eric had been in since well before we got engaged. Maybe I’d been walking on eggshells since I’d first tentatively begun to bring up marriage, a year before. Maybe since my building in Brooklyn had been put on the market and we talked about moving in together. Maybe since his dad died. Maybe if Eric had been more communicative under duress it wouldn’t have happened; maybe if I had been more experienced in relationships or less burdened by childhood baggage, I wouldn’t have been so rattled. But I was rattled, and scared, and eventually angry. I’d watched my mom navigate the emotional minefield of being married to someone who screamed during arguments—she and my dad had made it work, but it was not what I wanted.
A Girl Walks Into a Book Page 20