Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  Weakly, Peter fumbled for Owen’s hand and shook it limply. Turning away, he stumbled out of the Lord Jeffery Inn. The bruises of his life-and-death battle with Winifred Gaw were beginning to throb in his arms and legs. Desperately his poor head tried to come to grips with the sudden collapse of his circumstances. He had hoped to sweep everything before him in total victory. Instead there was this sickening defeat.

  On the way back to the Homestead it seemed surprising to Peter that nature was carrying on as usual. A bird uttered a ticking note in the bushes. A small blue butterfly folded and unfolded its wings on a flower in somebody’s front yard. An insect was buzzing in the grass. Across the street a pine tree lifted and dropped its branches in the warm wind, then lifted and dropped them again, as though the world had not become an entirely different place, as though the claims of Peter Wiggins were still valid, as though they had not suddenly become sensational, a piece of charlatanry, a hoax—as if it were still possible that some respectable institution of higher learning would rush forward and award him a teaching appointment with cheery accompanying perquisites, a private office overlooking the college green, a carrel in the library, a membership in the faculty club.

  But then Peter took heart. He reminded himself that all was not lost, There was an escape, a possible way out. He had prepared himself for trouble, for disbelief. He was ready with an alternative, a drastic fallback position in case of disappointment.

  Turning from Spring Street onto Churchill, tripping over every twig in his path, shying at fluttering leaves like a spooked horse, Peter wondered if he could work up the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to carry out a thing like that.

  Hoping for comfort, he called Angie, using the phone in the hall on the third floor.

  But Angie had no comfort to give. “Oh, Peter, you woke me up. Listen to that. You hear that? The kids, there they go, the two of them. You might have had the courtesy—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Angie, I forgot about the difference in time. How are things going?”

  “Lousy. I mean it’s just so incredible. There’s green stuff dripping out of the air conditioner. Yesterday there was a scorpion in the bathtub. Nicole’s diaper rash is back, and Michelle has these hives all over her neck. It’s the heat.”

  Peter listened to his wife’s complaints and made soothing noises and hung up at last, more miserable than ever, to find himself staring at the steep stairway to the cupola. The steps were bathed in dusty streaks of sunlight.

  Careless in his wretchedness, Peter put his foot on the bottom step, climbed to the top, and stepped out on the cupola floor.

  Around him lay the town of Amherst, with its airy domes of leafy green, the roofs of its comfortable houses, the pink blossoming of its apple trees. To the south he could see the hazy undulations of the Holyoke hills. It was easy to imagine Emily Dickinson climbing up here to gaze out at them, trying to look past them to Springfield, where Samuel Bowles was busy editing the Springfield Republican, cut off from Emily Dickinson by Long Mountain and Mount Hitchcock and Mount Holyoke, and by a much larger mountain range in the shape of Mrs. Mary Schermerhorn Bowles.

  The solemn Alps—

  The siren Alps

  Forever intervene!

  It struck Peter that Emily Dickinson’s impossible longings were very much like his own. He too was reaching across a barrier. For him, too, there was a gap between desire and object. Like her, he was tottering across a shaking bridge, hammering at a door that was forever locked and sealed.

  Slowly, Peter moved from one window to another, staring with greedy attention at the low hills of Pelham, at the cupola of Austin Dickinson’s house next door, at the brick buildings of Amherst College, at the white wooden clock tower of Johnson Chapel. It was all so mellow—so mellow and old and green. Not red and raw and choked with dust!

  A moment ago, climbing the stairs to the cupola, Peter had not yet settled the matter. Now, as he descended, he made up his mind.

  He would fall back on his ace in the hole.

  But first he leaned over the stair railing and looked down at the hallway on the second floor. Had Winnie’s dead body been discovered? The house was quiet. There were no shouts of surprise, no tramp of running feet. How long would it take them to decide to open her door? Well, it didn’t matter to Peter. His duty was simple. Until someone told him Winnie was dead, he would behave as if nothing had happened. Then he would register surprise and shock. Easy enough. There was nothing to worry about on that score.

  Closing the door of his bedroom behind him, Peter took his wallet out of his pocket and reached into the secret compartment. In every wallet he had ever possessed, there had been a flap where you could secrete something, but this was the first time Peter had ever had anything to hide.

  Like his original photograph, this one was protected by a wrapping of tissue paper. The second picture of Emily Dickinson was exactly like the first. And that was its glory, because Peter had manufactured it from nothing.

  It had cost him a year of effort, a year of failure, a year of trying one thing after another.

  One by one, the technical problems had been solved. An old photographic carte de visite had provided the right sort of paper and card stock. Peter had soaked them apart, then bleached off the old image in Farmer’s Reducer, and resensitized the paper in baths of ammonium chloride and silver nitrate. Then, after taking a careful picture of the original photographhe had worked over the new negative with a retouching tool until the image was a miracle of clarity. The perfection of the sepia coloration had simply been a matter of money—twenty five dollars for a gram of gold chloride! And the glue was organic, a few scrapings from a horse’s hoof, boiled down on the stove. (Angie had wrinkled her nose. “Peter, what are you doing? That stuff really stinks.”)

  But it was the writing on the back of the picture that would really prove his case.

  Peter turned over his little forgery and smiled at the inscription. The oak-gall ink was organic, like the glue. The pen had been a sharpened goose quill. That part had been easy. It was the message itself that had called for all of Peter’s scholarship and wit. It could not be too bald—Emily Dickinson, poet, Amherst, Massachusetts—that would never do. It must be the sort of swift identification scribbled on the backs of photographs by relatives as they sorted through old boxes of pictures, or the hasty comments jotted down just before a picture was slipped with a letter into an envelope—Frieda’s baby, six months old.

  Peter’s choice had been clever. Looking at his forged inscription, he could almost believe it was real, it looked so right, so similar to Lavinia Dickinson’s handwriting, so much like something Emily’s sister might actually have said—

  Emily don’t like this much.

  In one brisk sentence it identified the picture and explained why it had vanished from the family. Emily don’t like this much—it was the perfect thing to say. After studying hundreds of Dickinson family letters, Peter was especially proud of his use of the word don’t, rather than doesn’t. It was the way they had talked. It was what they said informally, in writing to each other.

  Holding the picture delicately, Peter went to the window and gazed at the distant view of housetops across the street. Somewhere in Amherst he must find it a home. His little counterfeit was small, after all. It wouldn’t take much space, only a narrow slot two inches wide and four inches tall. Surely among these tree-lined streets there was a temporary hiding place for the woman with the magnificent eyes? A place where someone would discover her soon, and pounce upon her, and bring her to the light?

  Peter Wiggins was no sentimentalist. He had been schooled in the dry astringency and healthy caustic skepticism of a great graduate department. But something had happened to him that was worse than sentiment, worse than slipshod scholarship. The single overwhelming reason why Peter was willing to sacrifice his principles and endanger his scholarly good name was simply that he had fallen in love with a dead woman.

  28

  There’s something
quieter than sleep

  Within this inner room!

  Owen, too, had lost his appetite for breakfast. Abandoning the Lord Jeff, he walked down Spring Street to his own house, where he found Homer Kelly making pancakes.

  “Look at this,” said Homer, handing him The Hampshire Gazette, tapping the front page with the pancake turner.

  Owen took the paper cautiously, fearful of another brutal attack on Peter Wiggins. But it was only another report on the status of the Coolidge Hall fire investigation. Something had turned up in the bushes between the parking lot and Coolidge Hall. A guy looking for a lost hubcap had discovered an empty can of lacquer. The color of the paint was opal gold.

  “Lacquer?” said Owen. “Not kerosene, after all?”

  “Well, maybe. That is, if the can has any connection with the fire at all. It would narrow down the problem of the source, and that would be good. I mean, you don’t buy lacquer at every, supermarket, right?”

  “But who uses lacquer?” said Owen, bewildered. “All I can think of is Japanese screens and lacquered boxes.”

  Homer laughed and waved the pancake turner. “I see. It was somebody in a kimono with long fingernails, skulking around in Coolidge Hall, setting the place on fire. Aha! A member of the Japanese Poetry Society, no doubt. Whee, whoops!” Homer flipped a pancake inexpertly, and it did a somersault in the air, then dropped with a splat on the floor. Picking it up, he dabbed at it with a towel. “I’ll eat this one. You want to know who uses lacquer? I’ll tell you, my friend. Guys who work on dented chassis. They repaint the cars with lacquer afterward. Spray the stuff on with a compressor. Archie Gripp will have his hands full, poking around all the body shops in Hampshire County. Here we go again, whoopee!”

  This time the pancake hit the ceiling, stuck for a moment, then fell on a bicycle pump that happened to be lying on the counter.

  “Oh, that’s quite all right,” said Owen. “I know it will be delicious.”

  After breakfast, Owen said good-bye to Homer and hurried back to the Homestead. There he found Dombey Dell storming up and down the front hall, waiting for him.

  “Listen here, Owen, I promised the Smith brothers a private tour of the house before the memorial church service this morning. Get that Gaw woman up! She doesn’t answer when I knock. It’s just like the day before yesterday. She’s sulking. Come on, if you can’t get her out of there, I’ll drag her out by the hair.”

  In Owen’s stomach Homer’s pancake lay like a stone. He followed Dombey upstairs. “Are you sure she’s here at all?” he said, staring at the bedroom door. “Perhaps she’s gone home to Ware.”

  “Oh, she’s in there all right. Her van is still parked outside.”

  Owen knocked gently on the door. “Winnie?”

  There was no answer, no sound at all but the drowsy buzz of a fly against the sunlit panes of the hall window.

  He knocked again, and called louder. “Are you there, Winnie?”

  Again there was no reply. Dombey swore under his breath.

  Owen put his ear against one of the white-painted panels, remembering the last time he had leaned against the door and felt it quivering with the suspended breath of the fat girl on the other side. Today the stillness was different. It was the unspeaking habit of voiceless, lifeless things, the staring pictures on the wall, the china bowl and pitcher on the dresser, the cast-iron fireplace. It was the wooden silence of tables and chairs. Surely there was nothing alive on the other side of the door.

  “Go on in,” demanded Dombey.

  Owen tried the knob. It turned easily in his hand.

  Bracing himself, he opened the door.

  29

  Pain has but one Acquaintance

  And that is Death …

  “Oh, God bloody damn,” said Dombey Dell. “What’s the bloody damn woman done now? Gone and got herself killed! Didn’t I tell you she was going to ruin me? Didn’t I warn you she’d destroy the whole bloody goddamn symposium? Look at that axe! My God, think how that axe will look on TV! Think of the headlines! Axe Murder at Emily Dickinson Conference! Bloody God, bloody damn, bloody hell!”

  Owen was on his knees beside Winnie, tears running down his face. Picking up Winnie’s hand, the one with the missing little finger, he felt the pit yawning once more beneath his feet. Grimacing painfully, he stared around at the chaos in Emily Dickinson’s bedchamber, at the fallen table, the upended chairs, the tipped-over sofa, the broken glass scattered on the floor. From a gold frame on the wall Edward Dickinson frowned down at Owen. George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning gazed at him blandly, indifferent to Winnie’s fate.

  Then Dombey discovered the pills. “Hey, look at this,” he said. “Pills all over the floor. A couple of empty pill bottles. Look at that, two new cotton stoppers. Hey, maybe she took a lot of pills, see? There’s only a few on the floor. I bet she swallowed the rest. So maybe she was committing suicide. Did she leave a note? Suicides, they always leave a note. Nope, I don’t see any note. Just this book on the floor. Looks familiar. Library book, Letters of Emily Dickinson, Volume Two. What’s this doing here?”

  “I doubt very much it was suicide,” said Owen sadly, getting to his feet. “You forget the axe.”

  “Oh, right, the axe. Well, what the hell do we do now? Listen, Owen, do we have to call the fucking police? I mean now? Do we have to call them right away? After all, our schedule for today is so harmless. All we’re doing today is being pious, that’s all. Can’t we just go right ahead? We’ve just got a church service and a pilgrimage to the grave and a picnic, nothing but stuff like that. All in perfect taste. The symposium’s practically over. Why can’t we wait until everybody goes home before we call the cops?”

  Owen shook his head grimly. “Of course we have to call the police. We have no choice.” Then Owen’s face brightened. “I know, I’ll talk to my cousin Harvey. He’s the medical examiner. He’ll know what to do. And I’ll get Homer over here. Homer used to be a policeman. Good heavens, why didn’t I think of Homer right away?”

  Dombey was flabbergasted. “You mean Homer Kelly, the big Thoreau man? Homer Kelly used to be a policeman?”

  “That’s right.” Owen picked his way over the smashed fragments of the rose-colored wineglass and started downstairs.

  “Oh, Lord,” groaned Dombey, leaning over the railing. “It was spite, I tell you. The woman did it out of spite, just to make a monkey out of me. Listen, Owen, I don’t care what you do, but I’m not going to say one word about this to anybody. Maybe by some miracle it won’t hit the news until everybody’s gone home. I’ll give the Smith brothers some excuse, take them out for coffee or something before the church service. And then we’ll cancel the open house this afternoon, during the picnic. We’ll just let people use the garden and the kitchen, okay?” Dombey yelled louder as Owen moved out of sight at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, God, Owen, do you know what day this is? It’s May fifteenth! It’s a hundred years to the day since Emily Dickinson died in that very room. Oh, God bloody Christ. Another gruesome headline, Axe Murder Commemorates Centennial of Poet’s Death.” Clapping his hand to his forehead, Dombey stamped down the hall to put on his church-going clothes and comb his hair.

  Owen’s cousin Harvey was not at home to answer the phone. At that moment Harvey was rolling up his sleeping bag in the state forest at Petersham, getting ready to spend the day on Quabbin’s bright blue water. Therefore Owen heard only Harvey’s recorded voice on the line, announcing with a hint of smugness that he would not be back in his office until Monday morning at nine o’clock, and in the meantime the emergency number at Cooley-Dickinson was …

  But Homer Kelly picked up the phone on the first ring. When he heard the news about Winifred Gaw, he was darkly triumphant. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say these conferences are murder? An axe? Did you say an axe? And the medical examiner is unavailable? How about some other doctor?”

  There was a pause. Then Owen’s voice brightened. “Yes, I know another doctor. And she’ll
do very well.”

  30

  Presentiment—is that long Shadow—on the Lawn—

  Indicative that Suns go down—

  The Notice to the startled Grass

  That Darkness—is about to pass—

  Tom Perry was feeling pressured. He was late. He had forgotten to bring his alarm clock, so this morning he had overslept, and there was no time to have breakfast before the Emily Dickinson memorial service in the First Parish Church. He couldn’t possibly be late for that, because he was supposed to stand up in the front of the church and read a passage from First Corinthians.

  But he had to phone Alison first. Tom was feeling guilty about Alison. He should have talked to her last night. He should have made up with her on the phone. He shouldn’t have been such a self-righteous asshole. Opening the door, Tom looked out into the hall, rubbing his frowsy hair.

  Where was everybody? Well, Dombey was still here, banging around and cursing in Owen’s bedroom. But the rest of the house was silent.

  Dressing quickly, Tom plunged downstairs to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed Coolidge Hall.

  A voice answered briskly, “Fourteenth floor.”

  “Hello, who’s that? Listen, I want to speak to Alison Grove. Right now. I’m in a hurry.”

  “Well, bully for you,” said the girl at Coolidge Hall. “Sorry, but Alison hasn’t been around for a couple of days.”

  Tom was nonplussed. His voice rose in anger. “But that girl last night, she said Alison was there.”

  “Who said? Listen, Rachel told me at breakfast this morning—Rachel Clapp, she lives right across the hall from Alison—she told me she hasn’t seen Alison for two or three days.”