Emily's House

by Amy Belding Brown

  * * *

  I wasn’t planning to tell Mary my troubles, but Sunday evening at Kelley Square, it just came out. We’d finished the washing up after supper and were sitting at the table having another cup of tea. She asked how I was liking the Dickinsons, and before I could stop myself, I was telling her what the Squire said he’d do if I left them. Told her how raging and helpless it made me feel, how hateful it was to be trapped.

  “I’m thinking I’ll go mad if I stay,” I said. “God’s truth, I’d rather go back to the Boltwoods than bow to himself. We could have stayed in Tipperary if we were looking for a boot to lie under.” I expected her to be as outraged as myself.

  Instead, she put her hands to her head and smoothed her hair, something she did when she was agitated. “Oh, Margaret, for the love of Jesus, why must you torment me so?”

  God’s truth, I was surprised. “ ’Tis not myself tormenting you,” I said. “ ’Tis the Squire. I’m after living my own life, is all.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t make your peace with staying in Amherst.” Her voice was watery. “If the Squire turns on Tom, he’ll make our lives a misery. He’ll have no job nor any prospects and we’ll all be starving out on the street.”

  “You won’t be starving,” I said. “Tom will find other work and I’ll be sending you piles of money from California.” But my voice wobbled. In truth, I didn’t know what the Squire might do.

  Mary sat shaking her head as the night came down all blue and black around us. “Don’t you have any pity? Here I am with all these children to look after and a husband with only one arm. How would he be getting another job?”

  Her words shook me. But I saw the sense of what she was saying. I was bound to my sister, and it wasn’t right to risk her family’s happiness for my own prideful dreams. My duty was plain. Mary needed me, so I’d be staying in Amherst.

  But it was a great bog of sorrow I was mucking through that night as I walked back to the Homestead.

  Chapter Six

  At the end of May, the Squire raised my wages. Told me he was pleased I’d decided to stay on. He said I should feel free to take two-day-old bread to my sister’s family because he wanted to be sure they’d not go hungry. He said as long as I was the Dickinsons’ maid, my family and myself would be provided for.

  Sure, I didn’t like his charity, especially when the cost was my freedom. It wasn’t my idea to stay and himself saying so made me cross, glad as I was for the extra money. But nobody can be a good maid when anger’s at the boil. If I couldn’t stop myself yearning for California, I could wait till a more promising year. So I saved my wages and bided my time and fixed on making the Homestead kitchen my own.

  Mary was fond of saying my heart was too warm for my own good. Put me in a room with some poor beggar I never laid eyes on, and in five minutes, I’d be sighing and weeping like his dearest darling. Folks took advantage, she said. It was the easiest thing in the world to get me to-ing and fro-ing to satisfy some rich lady’s whims.

  She was right about my affections, to be sure. By summer I was starting to feel tender toward the Dickinson women. Even began speaking of the Squire’s wife as Mother Dickinson. Soon enough I had the other Dickinsons sorted too.

  Austin stopped by every day, with his loud voice and great pillow of red hair atop his head. It was plain he thought himself important. Tom said Austin was a squire in training, and that was God’s own truth.

  Sue came and went as if she lived at the Homestead. Sometimes I didn’t even know she was in the house till I saw her coming down the front stairs with Emily. She and Austin had two children everybody doted on. Ned was eight, same as my niece Nell. Spindly and bookish, he looked solemn as a judge. Not a bit like other boys, nor like his father. Sensitive, he was, same as his aunt Emily.

  Mattie was three, a little mite of a thing, but high-spirited as they come. Her parents and grandparents were forever chiding her for one thing or another, seemed to me. Even Vinnie was stern with the child. Only Emily admired her pluck. She’d slip her a sweet when nobody was looking, and take her into the conservatory for stories and pretend tea. Like conspirators those two were.

  Same as all gentry, the Dickinsons had visitors. Sometimes professors from the College would come to talk with the Squire or pay a social call on the family. Friends and relatives came and stayed the night, like the newspaper man Samuel Bowles and Judge Otis Lord, a close friend to the Squire. Emily and Vinnie’s kindly cousins Louisa and Frances came from Boston and their aunt Elizabeth visited from Worcester. She was a disagreeable woman if ever I saw one, with a sour face, the manners of a general, and a gift for meddling. Whenever she came she put on a pair of white gloves and went around the house inspecting every blessed thing for dust. If the tip of her finger came up gray after poking the back of a candlestick or running it along the rung of a chair, it was myself she scolded, though it was Vinnie mostly did the dusting.

  Sometimes Aunt Elizabeth snooped around my kitchen, where she had no business being. Once I came in from sweeping the veranda and there she was big as life, moving things on the pantry shelves—putting spice tins on the wrong shelf and shifting dinner plates. I had to cross my arms tight over my chest to keep from pushing her away. “Is there something I can be getting for you?” I asked.

  She put down the plate she was holding and looked at me like I was a spider she wanted to step on. “I’m frankly surprised my brother hired you. Look at this.” She stabbed the plate rim with her pointy finger. “Two chips, plain as the nose on your face. Two. And both nearly as large as the tip of my finger. Truly, you must take more care in your washing.” Her voice was sharp as her face.

  “It wasn’t myself chipped the plate, ma’am,” I said.

  Her eyebrows went up. “Are you suggesting it was someone else in this household?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “That’s absurd. In any case, that doesn’t excuse its presence in this pantry. Any maid worth her keep would have removed it long ago. It’s good for nothing but pan drippings now.”

  Likely my face went bright red. She was waiting for me to speak, but I knew I’d say something wicked if I unloosed my tongue.

  She made a ticking sound in the back of her throat and shook her head, making the silly little curls on her brow bounce. “I suggest you work on improving your competence and attitude immediately. My brother is a kind and generous man but his patience is not inexhaustible.” And she left the room, muttering the word Irish clear enough for me to be hearing it.

  I waited for the boil of my anger to settle to a simmer and managed to make a grand dinner. Everybody but Aunt Elizabeth praised my butter and the brown gravy. But that evening when I was lighting the lamps, I heard her in the library. Speaking to the Squire, she was, and it didn’t take more than a minute to know I was the topic.

  “You really ought to see about getting a good English maid,” she said. “Or a German one. The Irish are notoriously shiftless.”

  I heard himself answer but couldn’t make out the words, just his low voice rumbling along.

  “Well, honestly, Edward,” he said. “There’s more here to concern yourself with than Emily’s satisfaction.”

  His chair creaked. He must have stood up. Then her skirts hissed against the wall and I skittered into the parlor to hide myself as she left the room. It was a good reminder to keep my guard up. There were always folks bent on humbling the Irish.

  The next day was Aunt Elizabeth’s last—she was leaving right after breakfast. In truth, I was glad of it and didn’t even mind herself ordering me to pack her bags. I was that eager to see the back of her. Even waved good-bye from the kitchen window.

  Emily and Vinnie came into the kitchen after seeing her away, jolly as if they’d just come from a ceilidh. It unsettled me, so I busied myself in the pantry, putting things right while the two of them were talking and laughing away. Then Vinnie said, “It’s time you assumed
your social responsibilities in this community, Emily.” And didn’t her voice sound exactly like Aunt Elizabeth? Both of them burst out laughing as if it was the funniest thing in the world.

  Sure, I wanted to laugh myself. But even a fool knows it’s wicked to mock your elders. I didn’t even think about it, just marched back into the kitchen.

  “ ’Tis your father’s sister you’re mocking,” I said as if I was talking to my own nieces and nephews. “You oughtn’t disrespect your family.” Soon as I spoke I was sorry—it was the sort of thing could get me sacked, to be sure. But instead of being cross, they blinked and laughed again. Emily said, “Don’t be vexed with us, Maggie. We love Aunt Elizabeth, but she’s a human corset, and a tight one at that. A person needs to breathe after a week of wearing her.” Which set Vinnie giggling again. God’s truth, I couldn’t help chuckling myself.

  * * *

  It was after that day Emily started talking to me when we worked in the kitchen. Asking questions, mostly. They came out of the blue—not joined to anything I was doing. Maybe she was hungry for ordinary talk instead of the grand Dickinson conversations about politics and philosophy and poetry.

  She asked what it was like where I came from. God’s truth, recollections of the hard times growing up across the water were close to me as breathing. Seemed all I had to do was turn my head and I was back in Tipperary, grieving one thing or another. But I knew the misery wasn’t what Emily wanted to be hearing, so instead I told her about the yellow gorse on the hill and the turtledoves nesting in the rowan tree behind our cottage, the dunnocks singing from the hedgerow and the flocks of swifts. She smiled and rocked back on her heels and closed her eyes like she was seeing it herself.

  Sometimes Emily’s questions made me tetchy—too personal to be asking. Like what my father was like and who my friends were and if I’d ever been in love. Felt she was probing too deep. But the truth is I was so grateful for a change from the long kitchen quiet, I always answered.

  Once she asked me to talk about leaving Ireland. First thing came to my mind was the live wake our neighbors gave us the night before we left. Then she wanted to know what a live wake was, said she’d never heard of such a thing.

  “ ’Twas a wake for folks leaving after the Great Hunger,” I said. “We all knew it wasn’t likely we’d be meeting again on this earth.” Just answering her tumbled me back to that day, as if I was thirteen again, saying good-bye to most all the folk I ever knew. “All our friends and relations came to see us away,” I went on. “We were stuffed into my uncle’s cottage, more than thirty of us packed tight and making enough noise to frighten the Devil himself. Folks were keening and crying and saying farewell all the night long.”

  I didn’t tell her more, but my remembering was fresh as the night it happened. Even as I worked I could still see Katy Hogan sitting in the corner with her shawl over her head, keening in her grandest voice. The air hot and sulky, as if all four of the Maher children had died in one stroke and even the wind wouldn’t blow for the grief of it. Danny McClatchy bleating on about the English with his voice wobbling in his beard, so scuttered he kept falling off his stool. All of us singing “Éamonn an Chnoic,” our voices so sweet they were near raising the thatch off the roof. The terrible lonesome feeling that came over me, till I found Mam and sat leaning against her while she put her hand atop my head like a warm cup.

  Emily stopped her bread making. “What does it sound like—the keening?”

  Took me a minute to figure out an answer, for there’s no good way of describing keening to those who’ve not heard it. Finally, I said, “ ’Tis the loneliest sound in the world, surely. Like the cry of the Banshee. Makes your hair stand on end, it does.”

  Emily was turned in my direction, but it felt like she was looking past me instead. “I once heard wolves on a winter night,” she said softly. “Their singing is unearthly.”

  “Aye,” I said. “ ’Tis something like that. But more uncanny.”

  “It seems strange, grieving a death without anyone dying.” Emily went back to her kneading, her arms pumping. “There’s plenty of time for mourning—an eternity of time—is there not?”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t certain what she was meaning. Was she talking about Purgatory?

  “On the other hand,” she went on, “perhaps there’s wisdom to be learned from the practice. After all, there’s a certain exhilaration in the prospect of attending one’s own funeral.” She looked up at me and smiled. There was a mischief in her eye I’d seen before.

  But I knew death isn’t the sort of thing folks should be jesting about—it draws the notice of the Faery Folk. So I quick changed the subject.

  To be sure, Emily was overfond of speaking about things nobody else did. And her sentences would ofttimes veer off in curious ways—she might start talking about the sea like it was a lad, or the hills having shawls as if they were women. I sometimes couldn’t make hide nor hair of half of what she said, but it was nice to have the company.

  I watched the way she bound herself to the house and yard. As if stepping past the front gate would cause her to plunge into some dark pit. More than once I spied her standing behind the hemlock hedge, peeking out at passersby. Like a ghost she was in her white dress, drifting through the garden and up and down the stairs. She had a way of stepping out of the shadows that made my hair stand up and more than once I yelped with the shock of it.

  One night after I finished up in the kitchen late, and all the house was dark and quiet, I heard music on my way upstairs. I crept down the Northwest Passage to the parlor, and there was Emily playing the piano in the dark—a tune so lovely the Faeries could have made it. Sure, maybe it was a Faery Tune, for I couldn’t move with the beauty of it. I stood enchanted, listening and watching the moonlight slide in under the drapes and lie in silver strips on the carpet.

  From the doorway I could see her fingers stroking the keys the way Vinnie stroked her cats. The tune was lonesome and glad all at once, making me think of Ireland and my family and all the lads I ever loved. I must have sighed out loud, for Emily stopped playing. For a minute the only sounds were the house creaking around me and my own heart thumping in my chest.

  “Maggie?” Emily said, and there she stood in the doorway, her white sleeves floating spooky in the air beside her. “What is it? Are you ill?”

  Sure, I was feeling embarrassed to be caught. But even more I wanted to be hearing the tune again. “I amn’t, miss,” I said. “Listening to you, is all. ’Tis a lovely tune. Would you be playing it again?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I couldn’t repeat it. It’s just something I dreamed up.”

  I think it was that first beckoned me to her—knowing she made her own music, like a Tipperary fiddler or Mary crooning a lullaby to one of her young ones. After that night I found myself listening for her feet on the stairs and turning when she came into a room.

  * * *

  August came and the Dickinsons put on their Commencement Tea. It had been an annual event for as long as she could remember, Vinnie said. All the College lads and Amherst gentry came for nibbling and mingling—it was the grandest party of the year. The family fretted over preparations for weeks, and by the end of July, everyone was in a tizzy. And no wonder, for there was a mountain of work to be done. It didn’t all fall on me, to be sure. Vinnie was a hurricane of cleaning and Emily baked pans and pans of black cake and gingerbread. The Squire hired young lads to beat the carpets and girls to polish the silver.

  Eliza Thompson came—Vinnie told me she’d been running the Tea for years, knew how everything was to be done. Took over my kitchen, Eliza did, and I wasn’t a bit happy about it. She was quiet and pretty, with skin the color of chestnuts and the manners of a lady. Sure, I never saw a servant more dignified. But when she was in a mood, she squinted her eyes and got a crafty look on her face, so I did what she said, no matter she was sometimes bossy and proud.
>
  The day of the Tea the sun came up fiery red and the air was steamy. Emily whirled in and out of the kitchen, as lively as I’d ever seen her. Once I ventured to ask if she’d be attending the Tea. I figured she’d say no, since she made a habit of keeping to her room when visitors came.

  “Oh, Father will never forgive me if I don’t show myself,” she said. “I’ve always poured wine for the young gentlemen.” The way she was smiling as she left the room set me blushing with sinful thoughts.

  Eliza chuckled. She was putting out cherries on a silver pedestal tray.

  “I’ve never seen Miss Emily like this,” I said. “Acts like a young lady at a frolic—not herself at all.”

  “Oh, she’s no stranger to levees,” Eliza said. “There’s more than a few wild stories about her younger days. She and her sister, both.”

  “Sure, I’d like to be hearing them,” I said. “Hard to credit Miss Emily was ever wild. Why did she change, then?”

  Eliza shrugged. “The world’s a noisy, tumbling place. I reckon a lady like Miss Emily needs to concentrate on her work.”

  “What work? Mending? Baking?” Made no sense to me. The housework Emily did wasn’t the sort required much thinking.

  “The work God gave her, I expect.” Eliza was spreading a layer of grape leaves on the cherries. “What’s inside her head. And she’s still plenty wild in there.” She looked up at me. “Have you taken a close look at her fingers? Seen the ink stains?”

  “I have, to be sure,” I said, feeling tetchy. Hadn’t I been living at the Homestead six months? “I know she writes stacks of letters.”

  Eliza started dropping raspberries onto the grape leaves. She was making the most elegant fruit dish I ever saw. “That’s not the half of it,” she said. “Miss Emily’s a poet. You can’t spend your life on frivolities when the Good Lord’s given you a talent. Says so right in the scriptures.”