Emily's House

by Amy Belding Brown

  In truth, I don’t have a plan for meeting the man. I don’t even know what he looks like, so I wouldn’t know if I passed him on the street. On my everyday errands in town, I start making a point of walking up Spring Street so I can pass the church, thinking maybe I can spot him. Surely a rector would be dressed different than an ordinary man. But I don’t like going that way because I have to pass the Dell, the big house Austin designed and bought for Mabel Todd. Three stories tall, it is, with more than a dozen rooms—a jumble of arches and gables and quare windows. As ugly a place as I ever saw. It’s a blessing the Todds aren’t living there anymore so I don’t have to worry about running into Mabel. But for all my trouble, I’ve not laid eyes on the rector. And I’m starting to grow vexed at myself for dithering.

  On the last Saturday in March, I’m outside pegging work pants on the line when a quare thing happens. It’s a grand, bright day with the birds flitting about. I drop a clothespin and bend to pick it up, and out of the blue, Patrick Quinn pops into my head. Haven’t thought of him in months and months. But now, as I’m shaking out a pair of heavy cotton drill trousers, I’m seeing himself laughing, his head thrown back and his mouth open and a great hoot coming out of him.

  “And what would you be laughing at now, you big gack?” I say. Right out loud too so anybody looking over the fence will be thinking I’m daft. And maybe I am—for there’s no one here, let alone a lad who for all I know is dead and in his grave. If I’m talking to anybody, it’s likely a ghost.

  God’s truth, I spent too many years with Emily, where nothing was fixed, and the edges of things were so thin and supple and it was hard to see them at all. I shake my head to get Patrick out of it, and train my mind on what’s in front of me. But even as I’m hanging the last collar, I hear his voice in my ear—When did Margaret Maher grow so timid?

  And just like that, I know I’ve got to find the rector and talk to him direct. I know nothing about his habits or even where he’s living, but he’ll surely be at his church on a Sunday. I can see him before Mass.

  * * *

  Sunday morning is blowy with high clouds scuttering across the sky. Grace Church is the size of St. Bridget’s, but fancier. A gust of wind comes up as I’m climbing the steps and I have to hold my hat or risk losing it. Can’t deny I’m feeling guilty going into a Protestant church, worrying the taint of heresy might fall on me like dust and everybody will know what I’ve been up to.

  Inside it’s shadowy as a winter twilight and near as cold. Strikes me right off what a fool I am for coming. But then I hear footsteps and see a man walking toward me through the gloom. He’s wearing a long black cassock, like a priest.

  “Hello,” he says. “Can I help you?” He steps closer, into the light cast from the big round window over the door. For a minute it looks as if he’s surrounded by it, like a great halo. Reminds me of a picture of Saint Finbarr Molly Ryan once showed me. He’s a nice-looking man—younger than I expected—with a liveliness about his eyes. But it’s his smile surprises me—it’s so kindly I stand there gawking.

  He leans closer. “Are you all right?”

  Sure, I must look a sight with my hat askew and my hair flying out of its bun. It takes a minute to unstick my tongue. “Are you Reverend Parke, then?” I ask.

  “I am.” He nods, still smiling, but there’s a question on his face now. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Margaret Maher,” I say. “I won’t be keeping you, sir. I’m just wanting a minute of your time.”

  “Why don’t we sit down?” He nods me over to a stone bench set against the plaster wall and waits till I settle before sitting next to me. Treating me like a lady, he is, though he’s surely heard my accent and knows I don’t belong in his church.

  “ ’Tis about the house,” I say.

  “House?” He’s looking flummoxed.

  “The one you’re wanting to buy. The yellow brick place on Main Street.” I almost say Emily’s house out loud. God’s truth, I’m not feeling like myself at all—the words are tangling in my throat and turning into knots. Can’t get them out right to save my soul.

  “How did you know about that?” he asks, and I’m thinking his kindliness is gone now. No surprise in that, surely. I look a midden mess and here I am asking what’s none of my business.

  “ ’Tis what folks are saying.” I’m too flustered to look straight at him. “And I know Madame Bianchi, who’s put it up for sale. Word is you’re buying it.”

  Sure, he surprises me with a chuckle. “I didn’t realize it was public knowledge. But, yes, I’m hoping to purchase that house for my family. It’s a fine place. And as handsome within as without, I must say. Have you ever had the pleasure of stepping inside?”

  “Aye,” I say, “I know it well, for I lived there thirty years.” God’s truth, it gives me a niggle of pleasure seeing the surprise on his face. I daresay he doesn’t expect an old Irishwoman to be laying claim to such good luck. “I was the Dickinsons’ maid for thirty years,” I go on. “Had my own room over the kitchen. But”—and I pull myself up taller—“I run a boardinghouse now. For those needing a roof over their heads.” I don’t tell him I’m only taking in Irish. He doesn’t need to know everything.

  “Thirty years,” he says in a musing way. “Then you know how magnificent it is.”

  “I do, to be sure.” I try to think of a question Mattie D might want me to be asking, but he commences talking before I have the chance.

  “How fortunate!” he says. Makes me wonder what he thinks a maid’s life is like, if he’s calling me fortunate for being one, but I’ve no time to ponder, for he’s rattling on. “I must admit, I was charmed by the property from the moment I saw it. ‘There’s an impressive house,’ I said to my wife, and she agreed. She’s from New York, and knows a fine home when she sees one.” He’s got that soft look comes over folks’ faces when what they’re thinking makes them happy. “I’ve always longed for a house like that—a modest estate, of classic proportions, in its proper setting. As if it belonged there and nowhere else. It’s how I always imagined my home would be—a house to be treasured for generations. A place our five children will cherish when they’re grown. A family homestead, if you will.”

  I suck in a breath. “Yes,” I say, my own voice near soft as a whisper. “It is that.” The feelings are tumbling around in me, like clothes churning in a washtub. I’m certain it’s a sign—himself using the word homestead. As if Emily herself is telling me she approves this man. It’s a bit quare, thinking of Emily’s house filled with young ones. They have a way of occupying every nook and cranny of a place. I picture them running through the rooms and banging open cupboards and closets. Yet Emily liked nothing better than chatting with children and was forever giving them treats. Can’t remember seeing her so happy as when she was playing games with Ned and Gib or conspiring with Mattie to play some trick on Vinnie.

  I give him a nod. “Thank you, sir.” I smooth my hair and straighten my hat and stand up.

  He gets up too. “I apologize. I’m afraid I’ve waxed overly enthusiastic. I believe there was something you came to talk about?”

  “Aye, there was.” I feel kindly toward this man, who’s so enchanted with Emily’s house. “I know how you feel about the place. In truth, I feel the same. But—” And I stop a minute, not sure what I want to be saying.

  “Go on,” he says in a gentle way.

  “It’s only—” I take a breath. “I think you should know—there’s ghosts there.”

  “Ghosts?” He blinks once, his mouth crinkles up into a smile, and next thing I know he’s laughing. “Ghosts!” he says again, and he’s rubbing his hands together. “How delightful!”

  Sure, I’m staggered. Don’t know if he’s jesting—or just reckless. “Well,” I say, “good luck to you, then.” I give him a nod and go out the way I came in. Sure, I don’t know what to think about a man without the good sense
to be wary of the spirit world. It’s plain he’s got no Irish in him.

  * * *

  Nell comes after Mass to help me get Sunday dinner on the table. While I’m peeling carrots and she’s mixing up a pudding, I tell her about meeting the rector, how I like him even though he fancies ghosts.

  “I guess the Homestead is the right house for him, then,” she says, laughing.

  I give her a side-look. Not sure my niece understands the nature of ghosts. “What have you been doing this week?” I ask.

  She tells me she stopped by St. Mary’s Cemetery when she was in Northampton Friday. “The grass is looking nice on Uncle Tommy’s grave,” she says. “I said a rosary for him while I was there.”

  “That was kind of you.” I feel a prickle at the back of my eyes. “ ’Twas hard seeing him go into the ground with myself the only Maher left remembering the farm.”

  After a minute Nell says, “I’m glad he came back East before he died. Gave the rest of us a chance to know him. Remember Kate asking who he was? Thinking he was a stranger?”

  I laugh, remembering my youngest niece’s puzzlement. “I guess he was. That day’s a sweet memory, to be sure.” Indeed, all my memories are sweet when it comes to Tommy. I just wish there were more of them. “It was a hard life he had, though. Don’t think I’d have stayed long if I’d gone with him back in eighteen sixty-nine like I planned.”

  “But you liked it when you visited in eighteen ninety-four,” Nell says. “You said it was grand.”

  I nod, remembering the excitement I felt the year I finally went to California. With Vinnie’s blessing and a new trunk, I took a year off from working at the Homestead to travel. “It was an adventure, surely.” I finish with the carrots and start peeling potatoes. “Especially when Tommy took me to the Midwinter Fair in San Francisco. The ’Forty-nine Mining Camp was great fun, though he warned me the real camps were full of sickness and dirt and cruel bosses, the work so hard it broke many a lad. ’Tis why he went into ranching, he said.”

  I go quiet, thinking. Most dreams come and go like the wind, but some stick hard to the timbers of a life. I was lucky to go to California after dreaming of it so many years. But by the time I did, I wasn’t looking to live there—I just wanted to see the place.

  Turned out, Tommy was hoping I’d stay on, help him out on his ranch in the New Mexico Territory. But one look at the place and I knew it could never be home. After just a few months, I was already looking to be back in Amherst.

  I remember something Emily once said. I’d been talking about wanting to go West and how I’d never stopped hoping I would. She was sewing that day and put down her needle to look at me.

  “Hope is a clever glutton,” she said. “It feeds on our dreams but leaves us empty in the end.”

  Seemed a quare thing to say at the time but now I’m guessing she was thinking of her own dream of having her poems printed. And her sorrow knowing she’d never live to see it come true.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  1886

  It was a hard winter, and Emily so sick Vinnie didn’t venture from the Homestead. Austin came often to sit with Emily in the evenings, and he stopped his trysting in the dining room with Mabel Todd.

  Emily spent most of her waking hours in bed, reading or writing letters. A little book of Mrs. Browning’s poems always lay close at hand. Lovely, it was, slim and blue with gold letters on the cover. Many a time I came in and found her reading it. She touched the pages the way Vinnie petted Buffy, her fingers loving what was under them.

  Once she said, “You must hear this, Maggie,” and read a verse out to me.

  Earth’s crammed with heaven,

  And every common bush afire with God;

  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

  The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,

  And daub their natural faces unaware.

  She sighed and closed the book. “Doesn’t it steal the very breath from your lungs?”

  I said it was a fine poem indeed. Then I saw her face was slick with tears. “Are you in pain, miss?” I asked.

  But she shook her head. Her fingers danced over the gilt letters. “This,” she said, her voice gone wobbly, “this is an immortality.”

  I didn’t understand her meaning and worried maybe her fever was back or she was about to have another fit. I took the book gently and put it on the table and smoothed her pillow.

  I didn’t think more about it then, for I was busy settling the tray on her knees and picking up the papers and letters she’d strewn across the floor. But later, after my chores were done and I was brushing out my hair before going to bed, I remembered the way the late-winter sun came in Emily’s room that afternoon while she was filling herself up with Mrs. Browning’s words. I thought how quare it was that a faraway English lady wrote words that could have been skipping straight from Emily’s heart.

  * * *

  Though Emily was frail, she was still Emily—gripped by newspaper stories of court doings, as if the Judge were still alive and she’d soon be discussing them with him. She blistered Vinnie with questions about a murder trial whose defendant had the name Dickinson. And she couldn’t stop talking about a traveling juggler tried for poisoning a lady he’d romanced.

  “It would make a fine novel, wouldn’t it?” she said one day while I was collecting her tray after dinner. “That story about the juggler and the lady.”

  “Sure, you didn’t touch your potatoes,” I said.

  She laughed. “Maggie, I thought we were having a conversation about art, and all you think about is potatoes.”

  “Potatoes aren’t to be scorned,” I said. “A good potato’s brought many a man back to health. There are worse things to be thinking of, surely.” I didn’t say what those worse things were. Figured Emily could fill those in on her own. She’d always had a melancholy turn of mind.

  “Set the tray down and tell me a potato story, then.” It was good to see her smiling after so many sorrowful days. I put the tray back on the table.

  “The only potato story I know is too sad for the telling,” I said. “ ’Tis the misery of the Great Hunger. You wouldn’t want to be hearing it.”

  “But I would,” she said. “I want to know everything. I’m woefully ignorant about the world.”

  That wasn’t true, to be sure, for Emily read every book she put her hand to and was the cleverest woman I knew. But there was so much pleading in her eyes, how could I refuse? So I sat myself down and told her about the famine—what I remembered and what Mam had told me. How I saw with my own eyes ragged children dying by the road. How good lads and their families were bundled out of their houses. How there were grain and oats and food enough to feed the starving, but it was all shipped off to England. And didn’t she listen to every word? Sure, I watched the tears come up in her eyes and one spill down her cheek.

  I reached to pat her hand. “That’s enough sadness for one day, I’m thinking. And with yourself still languishing. ’Tis not the sort of tale likely to be lifting your spirits.” I stood up.

  “I’ve had it wrong,” she said, sunk deep in her pillows. “All those years I thought the Irish ignorant and empty-headed. But I was mistaken.”

  A spider of mischief crept into my head. “And here I’ve been thinking you believed I was only good for cleaning and scrubbing.” I was waiting for her to laugh, for she surely knew I didn’t mean it. But she just looked at me with those sad eyes.

  “ ’Tis true,” I said. “We Irish seem a sorry lot sometimes. But it’s not an easy thing, living where we don’t belong. Times I’ve thought I should be going back to County Tipperary and living out my days among my own kind.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean, your own kind?” she said. “We’re your own kind, Maggie. Everyone here in Amherst. You’re American now, not Irish.”

  I think my face must ha
ve flushed pink as the roses on her wall. “I would have given half my wages to hear you say that seventeen years ago, miss,” I said. “But God’s truth, I’m Irish to the bone. And proud of it too. There’s not a country on earth more persecuted nor a people more noble and spirited.” I stopped, realizing I was reciting Maria Doughtery’s words. “Like all Irish folks, I came here to make a better life for myself and my family. Family’s what truly matters in the end.”

  She nodded. “It is.” Her eyes were shining. “And life has taught me that a woman’s true family is vaster than those she’s related to.”

  I thought about that. I wondered if she was including me in her true family and it set me wondering who might be in my own true family.

  She locked her eyes on mine. “Will you forgive me?”

  “Me?” I said. “And what would I be forgiving you for?”

  “For misjudging the Irish all these years,” she whispered. “I was so misguided.”

  Her tears came in earnest then, washing down her face. There was naught to be done but put my arms around her. I rubbed her back and wiped her cheeks with my own handkerchief and kissed her tears away.

  * * *

  A letter from Patrick came a week later, addressed to me at the Homestead. Surprised me, it did, for I hadn’t heard anything from him since I wrote after Emily’s fit. I took it straight to my room and closed the door. There were three pages, and though the words were easy to make out, I read them slow. Tasting every one, the way Emily did.

  My Dear Margaret, he wrote.

  It has been six years since I last looked on your sweet face, and I have not forgot you. I am well and prospering, living in Brooklyn and working at construction. I left my job at the Dynamite School after a year working for Professor Mezzeroff. You may have heard the name of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. He was the brave lad who recruited me and he remains my friend. But I have learned Professor Mezzeroff is a fraud and a trickster who cannot be trusted. He knows about dynamite but not about honor. The truth is, he’s not from Russia at all. Even his accent is a sham.