I could not behead you, dears, if I doubted your assured Resurrection. But as children caper when they wake, merry that it is Morn, my flowers from a hundred cribs will peep, and prance again.
When her basket contained a sufficiency to hide what was at the bottom, Emily turned nervously to face her brother’s house.
The Evergreens had been erected four years ago, a lavish wedding present from Emily’s father to his only son (calculated, Emily frequently thought, to impress the town of Amherst with Edward Dickinson’s stature as much as to house the newlyweds). The impressive white Italianate house with its boxy corner turret stood a mere hundred yards away, separated from the ancestral Dickinson Homestead by a small copse of birches, oaks and pines, linked by a narrow well-trodden path “just wide enough for two lovers abreast,” as Emily had described it to her good friend Sue Gilbert, upon that selfsame friend’s attainment of the sacred status of Mrs. Austin Dickinson.
But at this moment—as at so many, many others—in terms of Emily’s ability to reach it the house might have been situated halfway across the globe, midst the wastes depicted in the engraving “Arctic Night” hanging in The Homestead’s parlor.
She did not know what flaw or affliction bound her so strongly to the confines of The Homestead, sometimes indeed forbidding her even to leave the cloister of her bedroom. The face of that cruel Master was always in impenetrable Shadow, strain as she might to glimpse it; though His Hand was always more than real, squeezing her heart with fear and self-loathing, should she try to run counter to its fluctuating dictates.
It had not always been so with her. Why, even as recently as five years ago, she had journeyed to Washington and Philadelphia, exulting in the freedom of travel. (Particularly stimulating had been her first encounter with an old family friend, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and the many talks they had had on literature and art, continued now by correspondence.)
But as Emily had grown older, her Father—the dominant presence in the household—had grown less flexible, more demanding, harsher. (His religious spasm of a decade ago, during which he had bullied everyone except Emily into joining the First Church of Christ, had accentuated a certain Calvinism in him.) The Squires iron rule of his quiet, insignificant invalid wife and his two daughters was positively Draconian, circumscribing all Emily’s actions.
Still, Emily knew she could not place the blame for her reclusiveness totally on her Father. After all, Vinnie exhibited no such fear of society, and she too chafed under the Squire’s reins. No, there was some congenital defect in Emily’s own personality that made the prospect of venturing out among other people, dealing with their naked faces and needs, inherently impossible most of the time, however desperately and paradoxically she might feel the need for companionship. . . .
Yet now here she was, out in the open, late in the afternoon of the day that had begun so oddly. (The egregiously hirsute Mister Whitman had dressed and departed somewhither before Emily could con how to address him after her pert dismissal of his oratory. She prayed now that her hasty impudence would not foreclose further communication between them. . . .)
Steeling herself to walk across those paltry twenty rods and into a house full of strangers, with bold plans to accost one in particular with the secret that resided beneath her flowers, Emily reminded herself: If your Nerve deny you, go above your Nerve.
Straining forward, willing confidence to arise, she teetered on her tiptoes, yearning toward The Evergreens. A sensation as of a hot bath tingled along her limbs. Her innards were molten. This was exactly how it had been three years ago, that December when the Sage of Concord, Mister Emerson, had visited The Evergreens, and she had longed to go to him, that noble personage out of a dream, but instead, oppressed by a certain slant of winter light, she had faltered and hung back.
Emily felt poised on the verge of a high precipice, volitionless to fall either backwards into safety, or forward into danger, without some kind of Motive Push.
And then it came.
From out of the primal greenery bordering the connecting path poked the enormous naked head of a strange bird.
Carried a full six feet above the ground, at the end of a long pliable neck, the sapient avian head examined Emily with quaint goggle-eyed curiosity for a timeless period. Then, giving a soft mooting call, the bird pulled its head back into the shrubs, followed by the sound of its retreat in the direction of The Evergreens.
The most triumphant Bird I ever knew or met embarked upon a twig today. . . .
Emily set out after the apparition.
Halfway down the path, with yet no renewed sight of the fast-moving mysterious bird, Emily felt a sense of unreality sweep over her. Was it really possible that she was doing this? If Father had not been in Boston, speaking with the politicos of the Constitutional Union Party, who wanted him to run for Lieutenant Governor, she doubted that she could ever have braced herself for such a wild flight.
At last Emily emerged from the boskage and onto her brother’s lawn.
And there was the glorious bird!
In the open, Emily could recognize the creature for what it was: an ostrich—from fabled Ophir, perhaps, yet still comically resembling a stilted feather-duster. No supernatural messenger, to be sure, but a strange sight nonetheless to encounter in placid, pedestrian Amherst.
At that moment a prepossessing young man, casually attired and roughly Emily’s age, appeared from behind the house. Spotting the bird, he hailed it thusly: “Norma, you rascal, git back a-here, or tain’t gonna be no supper for you!”
With unnatural alacrity, the big-footed bird hastened to obey the youth, trotting toward him with the zig-zag locomotion peculiar to its species. Soon, bird and man disappeared back around the house.
Simultaneously, the door of The Evergreens opened, framing Emily’s brother within. His thatch of hair the same red as Emily’s and his extravagant sidewhiskers had never looked more familiarly reassuring, though the unwonted expression of troubled distraction which he wore was less so.
Searching for the source of the ruckus, Austin’s gaze fell on his sister. He molded his features into a forced semblance of hospitality.
“Why, Emily, what a pleasant surprise! Please, come in.”
Now that she was fully committed to making her visit, however unwelcome it seemed to be, Emily found within herself the capacity to put some adamant in her limbs. She advanced with unfaltering steps across the lawn and into her brother’s house.
Once inside, her brother tried to relieve her of her basket.
“Sue will appreciate these blooms, sister. She’s been feeling rather low since her return from Boston.” A look of woeful gravity crossed Austin’s countenance. “As have I, to tell truth.”
Emily resisted Austin’s gentle tug. “No, please, let me hold them a while longer. They comfort me.” She was not prepared to show what lay beneath the blossoms yet, nor to just anyone. “But what is it that grieves you so? Does it have any connection with the guests Vinnie has told me you’re entertaining?”
Austin closed his eyes and massaged his brow wearily. “Yes, in a roundabout way. Although I only fell in with these people accidentally, through my connection with the College. But they and their mission answer a need of mine, a need which has been growing apace this past year.”
“Your words confuse me, Austin. What need do you speak of, that I know not? Since when have we kept secrets from one another, dear brother? Come, tell me what troubles you.”
Austin opened his eyes and fixed his sister with an agonized gaze. “You would hear all, then? Very well, so be it. I have tried to spare you prior to this, but shall not refuse your direct offer of a sympathetic ear. But my story needs some privacy. Let us step into the study.”
Somewhat daunted, Emily nevertheless followed Austin into the room whose shelves were lined with the lawbooks of his profession. Once they were seated, Austin pul
led his chair close to Emily’s, reached forward to clasp both her hands (the sweaty palms of a fevered man, she thought), and began his recitative.
“My problems, sister, concern relations between Sue and myself. No, please, let me speak plainly, before you interject a word on Sue’s behalf. I know that you’ve ever been her partisan, Emily. Sometimes, in fact, I think we never would have married, were it not for your urgings. But that’s of no consequence now. Married we are, and married we must stay. But you must know what connubial life has revealed to me of certain traits that were perhaps not fully developed in Sue when you and she were girlish chums.
“Sue is a very ambitious woman these days. She desires to become the paramount hostess in all of Amherst. Not a very wide sphere, you might say, and you’d be right. Sue’s ambitions do not stop there, I fear. She has grander dreams, to be enacted upon a larger stage—a stage which I am to provide somehow or another.
“Now, you know me, Emily, at least as well as I know myself. I’m not as driven as Father. I have no desire to venture beyond the pleasant ambit of Amherst as he has, representing the Commonwealth in Washington or parts more exotic. I’m basically a dreamy fellow, with a nature fully as poetic as yours. The fabled rushing blood of Grandfather Samuel has dwindled to a proportional trickle in my veins. Nothing would suit me better than a simple family existence conducted right here for the rest of my mortal days.
“But family life, you see, is just what Sue is dead-set against. She feels that children would be a drag on her social climbing.”
Emily considered long and hard before venturing a comment. “I had wondered why the past four years had brought me no little niece or nephew. Father, too, speculates aloud why no heir has yet appeared. But I never expected that it was Sue’s reluctance to consummate your union.”
Austin laughed mirthlessly. “‘Reluctance to consummate!’ ’Tis far worse than that, dear sister! The union has been consummated more than once, as a result of certain ungovernable impulses upwelling from both our baser natures. And a year and a half ago, the natural result obtained. Sue became with child.”
Emily faltered. “But, I never—Did she miscarry?”
“Far, far worse! She killed it!”
It was as if all the Heavens were a Bell, and Emily just an Ear. When she returned to herself, she struggled to utter the fatal word, but Austin mercifully preempted her.
“Yes, she journeyed to Boston in ’Fifty-nine for a—an abortion!
“And this latest trip was for another!”
With this revelation, Austin burst into deep wracking sobs.
Emily cradled her brother in her arms, his violent sorrow washing away her lesser pangs, until he had cried himself dry. When he raised his face, it was stamped with inexpressible grief.
“The thought of that first death grew and grew in me, Emily, like a worm. When I learned of the second—although Sue begged to accompany me to the city on my latest trip, I never guessed her intention to repeat the evil deed, and she only divulged it upon our recent return—it nearly did me in. I cannot find it in me to put all the blame on Sue. Not only does she suffer terrible pangs from what she’s done, but she’s also only acting in accord with her own ideas of what’s best for our life, horrible though her crimes may be. No, I account myself equally guilty with her, as much as if my hand had held the bloody instruments of infanticide! That is why, you see, I have taken up with these strangers. There is a Spiritualist among them—”
As if a Cloud that instant slit, and let the Fire through, it flashed like summer lightning upon Emily what her brother intended. Somewhat disdainfully, she said, “You wish to speak to the souls of your unborn children, then, and seek some token of absolution, through the medium of this mystic personage. . . .”
Austin fixed Emily with a wild, dire gaze.
“Speak to them! If only it were that simple!
“No, dear sister, we’re going to visit them!”
3
“THE SOUL SELECTS HER OWN SOCIETY”
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Despair and Fear, thought Emily, is like the One between the instant of a Wreck and when the Wreck has been.
Her brother’s uncanny words had indeed pushed her across the line separating those twinned emotions.
All her life, Death had loomed large in Emily’s mind, an insurmountable wall she could only hurl herself against, falling back time and again with bruised mind and spirit.
Hers was not entirely a doctrinal Christian concept of Death; just as she could not bring herself ostentatiously to pronounce her faith aloud as the rest of her family had done, neither could she wholeheartedly subscribe to any church’s tenets concerning the Great Clock-Stopper, although her philosophy partook of many schools.
Easer of cares, reward for a lifetime of pain and humiliation, cruel reiver of friends, coachman to Paradise, cheerful swain, whimsical thief—all these roles and more had that Inescapable Presence assumed in her fancies. Yet none, she knew, fully captured Death’s real import. She had become ruefully reconciled to the fact that, try as she might to snare Death in her webs of words, its ultimate nature must forever remain a mystery.
And now here was her own brother telling her that he was embarked on a project to fathom that very mystery, to penetrate somehow into Death’s Cold Kingdom—but in an insulting, materialistic fashion.
It was almost more than she could comprehend.
Sensing her bafflement, Austin spoke.
“What do you know of the Spiritualist Movement, Emily?”
Proud contempt swelling in her bosom, Emily replied, “I know only this, having read plainly what was often writ between the lines in the penny press: that some twelve years ago, two young flibbertigibbet sisters—by name of Fox and dwelling then in Rochester, New York—decided to pull a prank on their parents—a prank which quickly escalated into a farce beyond their wildest imaginings. By concealed rappings and other sleights, they insinuated that they were in contact with the so-called ‘spirit world,’ easily tricking their gullible mother and elder sibling, who quickly promoted herself to their manageress. From such an humble beginning, they’ve gone on to make their fortune by becoming regular stage charlatans, duping thousands of poor bereaved souls with simple tricks that were old when Cagliostro was born, and sparking the like ridiculous behavior in millions across the globe.”
Austin’s red-eyed face showed a somber mien. “You seem awfully sure of the Fox sisters’ falsity and avarice, Emily, and by implication, that of all other mediums. I had thought that you of all people would be sympathetic to the opening of such a dialogue between this world and the next. How can you be so certain there’s nothing to their claims?”
“How could I feel otherwise, based on the puerile and ultramundane messages such ‘mediums’ transmit? Their source is obviously the hoaxer’s own insipid imagination. Why, if I were to believe for one minute that the indescribable glory of the next world were to be found in such utterances as ‘Mother, do not weep for your little boy, ’tis all peppermint sticks and licorice whips here on t’other side,’ then I would have to—well, I do not know what I would have to do. Surely not kill myself, lest I wind up any sooner than necessary among these milk and water spirits!”
“I grant you, sister, that some of the, shall we say, less-inspired revelations of certain untalented individuals plainly betray a modicum of, ah, fabrication. But among the true mediums, invention is only employed when actual contact fades, mainly out of an honest desire not to disappoint the assembled seance-goers. In fact, the medium might not even be aware of the transition from genuine inspiration to unconscious generation of babble. But let us not quibble over the debatable duplicity of some hypothetical Chicago mountebank. Not only is the medium with whom I am involved authentic beyond reproach, but we also have the generous—nay, essential!—offices of a certain eminent scientist to put our whole expedition on an absolutely rigorous footing
.”
Emily stood up, knowing full well that she was allowing a look of disgust to disfigure those plain features of hers that could ill stand such an additional burden. But so angered with her brother was she, that she didn’t care.
“It wouldn’t impress me if you and your mysterious friends had a whole academy of bearded and begowned savants behind whatever bizarre scheme you’re hatching! And you can chop whatever kind of specious logic you wish—I still maintain that any sort of Spiritualism is a load of bunkum!”
Austin permitted himself a small smile as he played his trump card.
“And what if I told you that your beloved poetess, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was a firm believer in the spirits and in their earthly partners?”
Emily sank back into her seat, shocked. Her dear Elizabeth—that noble Foreign Lady who had captivated Emily’s soul in youth, whose poems had made the Dark feel beautiful and bred in her a Divine Insanity—the genius behind Aurora Leigh—the heroic Female Poet whose given name Emily proudly bore as her own middle appellation—Could it indeed be true that such a superb mind could give any credence to this simplistic new faith sweeping the world?
Seeing Emily’s doubt, Austin pressed forward with his case. “It’s quite true. Mrs. Browning’s involvement with the spirit world began some five years ago, when she met the famous Daniel Dunglas Home. When she felt the phantom hands he caused to materialize, when the ghostly concertina played, when the spirits placed a laurel wreath upon her brow—then she knew the truth of the matter! Just as all doubters shall be convinced when I and the others journey to Summerland and back!”
Emily knew not what to think. First she had been overwhelmed with the hidden familial discord between her brother and Sue. Then her dogmatic anti-Spiritualist stance had suffered a severe blow with the news that One so admired had been willingly ensnared in what Emily had heretofore taken to be the clearest kind of popular madness. Yet, she reminded herself, much Madness is divinest Sense to a discerning Eye, and much Sense the starkest Madness—’tis the Majority in this, as All, prevail.
The Steampunk Trilogy Page 21