Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  On a sunny day in May, Cora and Clem, with Vincent bundled in Clem’s arms, drove an open Concord buggy the several miles inland to Union. They ambled along the dirt road, following it as it wound past the railroad tracks away from the coast toward the fresh green meadows in the west that marked Union. A freight train whistled as it sped by. Their mare snorted in fear and began to shimmy in the braces of her harness. Cora stood, bracing her feet against the buckboard, to gain better leverage as the skittish horse tossed her head and began to prance. Clem clasped the baby closer. Suddenly the mare reared. Cora licked the whip down across her rump as she skittered and reared again. She whipped her once, twice, and the mare bolted. Cora was thrown back into her seat, but she held fast to the reins and within moments brought the horse under control. It had been a close call, and each of the sisters, fraught with the memory of their mother’s fatal accident, was tearful and trembling when they reached Union. History, Henry told them blandly as he lifted each down from the buggy, does not repeat itself. Vincent slept soundly throughout the entire drive.

  They were settling into their new home when Charlie came to visit. He had been appearing at the Globe Museum down on the Bowery in New York City, where he was advertised as “The Adventurer and Evangelist”:

  Chas. A. Buzzell The New Orleans Stowaway, will relate his Awful Experiences while on board the Steamer El Monte for nine days and nights without food or water!

  He swore he’d seen the spirit side of nature firsthand.

  Charlie was still recuperating from his devastating entrapment, and Cora and Henry wanted him to stay with them until he had fully recovered. Now he, too, joined their family—it was a band of Buzzells, they joked among themselves. That summer and fall, Charlie and Cora, who had hundreds of songs by heart, sang together at the outdoor fairs—“Bold Jack Donahue,” “The Bride’s Lament,” and “These Hard Times.” Vincent would be placed in a hammock hung from the lowest branch of a tree in their yard, where she would croon or doze while they sang.

  The Millays were a French Huguenot family who had come to America just before the Revolution from the north of Ireland, where they’d changed their name from Millais, or perhaps Millet, to Millay. William King Millay, Henry’s father, had married a black-eyed dot of a woman named Mary Jane Pease and bought a farm in Union, where they settled down to raise a family of seven sons to pick the rocks out of the fields and pile them into the walls that still surround their pastureland. “That,” Cora guessed, “is why Henry preferred not to farm.” Nevertheless, the Millays raised tons of blueberries, and from Millay Hill on a clear day looking west you could see the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Due east lay the Atlantic.

  William Millay was a converted Methodist and, Cora remembered, “as hard-shelled as any Baptist that ever braved the water.” Although he had enjoyed a glass in his youth and knew how to deal a deck of cards, “He never took another drink, was a solid and esteemed member of the church he joined at Union.” Henry was nothing like his father; neither he nor Cora joined the church, and what he liked best was to fish. “I can remember when he rowed me around some of the ponds in Union,” Cora wrote, “while I gathered armfuls of water-lilies.” It wasn’t much fun to go fishing with him because he wouldn’t let her talk, but she remembered all her life the time he took her with him to his favorite fishing hole “and put me far enough away from him not to disturb his sport, and I caught the biggest trout of the morning.” She said that in all fairness he was as pleased as she was, “though he did say, as he always did on the rare occasions when I won from him at cards, that it was beginner’s luck.” They were so different “that any crank on Eugenics would have said we were perfectly mated for the propagation of a family.”

  Cora wrote a poem for her firstborn and called it “My Comforter,” a “Song to Vincent alone because she was all I had!”

  Sometimes, when the day is dreary

  Filled with dismal wind and rain,

  Sometimes when the frame is weary,

  Filled with nervous ache and pain;

  Then, across Earth’s darkest shadows,

  Comes Life’s dearest sweetest bliss

  As with sweet red lips uplifted,

  Baby whispers: “Onts a tiss.”

  Sometimes when no sun is shining,

  And my head is bowed with grief

  Someone comes on weak feet toddling,

  Someone gives my sleeve a tug,

  And with eyes and arms uplifted,

  Baby whispers: “Onts a hug!”

  What is striking about the poem is not only that the mother admits to emotional bad weather so early in her marriage but that the baby, not her husband, provides what comfort she needs.

  Three days after Christmas 1893, their second daughter, Norma Lounnella Millay, was born, taking her mother’s middle name for her own. She was as fair as her father and very like him, her mother always told her—except that Norma could sing before she could talk, while Henry couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

  When the weather turned warm again, Cora took her two daughters to Newburyport for a visit. The girls were put to nap in an upstairs bedroom while the grown-ups went downstairs to talk. Before long they noticed the sound of racing feet, and Cora called up to Vincent, “Are you in bed, darling?” to which she answered, all too quickly, “Yes, Mamma.”

  There was a horrible noise, and although no one could quite place what sort of sound it was, it sent a mother and three aunts flying upstairs. Facing them as they entered the room was the large bay window, into which Aunt Sue had placed an immense geranium plant. Now it was stripped of leaves, a trail of which led to Vincent, who sat astride two pillows, innocently humming and not looking at her mother. Norma was nowhere to be seen. Soon the throne of pillows began to heave and wobble. Cora raced to lift Vincent from the pillows, under which lay Norma, her mouth stuffed with geranium leaves. It became a family story—for soon the little girls were inseparable.

  Henry did not seem able to keep work, although he remained well enough liked in Union to have been appointed its superintendent of schools during 1896 and 1897. But he wasn’t so good about supporting his wife and children. The Millays’ house was sold out from under them, and a neighbor across the street made room for them in one side of her house. Cora gave music lessons to help pay the meat bill.

  Kathleen Kalloch Millay, their third daughter, was born on May 19, 1896. Cora had had three children in four years. Just three weeks shy of her thirty-third birthday, precisely the age her mother had been when she had fled from their father, Cora noted in her diary, “Henry not there when I am taken sick.… The doctor is there long before Henry is. Mr. Gales comes to Union at about this time.”

  From the moment of his arrival in town shortly after Kathleen’s birth, there is more of Mr. Gales, the minister at the Congregational church, in Cora’s new diary than there is of Henry. Her small dark red leather notebook, the first diary she’d begun since 1890, the year after her marriage, was all about the weather and the Reverend Mr. Gales.

  Sat. May 22.… Mr. Gales in just as we were eating dinner. Our dinner was real late. He was on his wheel and had a cap on, and looked real cute and boyish and happy.

  The children had colds, the weather was foul, and Henry was beginning to grow stout.

  Although Cora had not been a regular church member since Newbury-port, she was asked to fill in as an organist in the Congregational church, which had a splendid new pipe organ. It was a rarity in a rural community, and Cora loved to play it. Soon not only was she involved on Sunday, but she was made director of the church choir. But her diary records another sort of absorbing interest: Mr. Gales.

  Sunday, [May] 23

  Sermon on the threefold attitude of Christ: toward his enemies; toward the hypocrites; toward those who believe in him. It was good.… It was grand. Oh! he is a brave man, and a good one. God bless him and his work.… He spoke this morning before his sermon of a certain something that attracts people toward each other and causes
them to seek the society of each other; of scholar for scholar, artist for artist, etc. I think it is true friendship. He called it elective affinity. I think there is such an attraction between us. He is my very dear friend.

  Mr. Gales had begun to stop at the Millays’ every day. He asked Cora at first for suggestions for his sermons, then for her help in writing them. She was pleased to give him what assistance she could—it buoyed her spirit.

  I told him how much good he had done me here.… I am beginning to think that it is not too late for me to commence anew and study and be something yet. I have started in on Logic. He lent me his. I’m afraid my mind is not adapted to it. Henry says it isn’t. He thinks everything of Mr. Gales, too. So do the babies, dog and kitten.

  But not everyone in Union did. They said Mr. Gales dressed like an Englishman, which meant he wore dandified clothes, and although he was forty, he was still a bachelor. Local talk had it that the woman who laundered his shirts had noticed chewing tobacco in his pockets. There were even those who thought Mr. Gales was a sham and that Cora Millay wrote all his sermons. At last the church decided to call a meeting to decide whether his contract should be renewed. Cora was worried:

  I am all excited up over this Church Meeting. It seems to be more than I thought! … Mr. Gales will have a hard chance to stay.… They can go to the Old Nick as far as I am concerned in it. Of course I am not the whole choir; but I’m the “Power behind the throne,” all right.… If I knew I’d lose every friend I’ve got in Union (outside of Henry and the babies) by standing by him, I wouldn’t budge.

  Cora was going too far. She had no voting power in the church because she didn’t belong to it. However, a paper was drawn up by those who wanted him to stay, and Cora was asked to write it. Henry was late for supper one evening when the Reverend Mr. Gales came by. “I was a sight and so was the house,” Cora notes in her diary. “He looks as if he had been sick. He has a bad cold. He looks wretchedly, and I know he is feeling so.… I tried to keep him but he went about nine. I hated to have him go, he seemed so blue.” When Henry came home, he told her he thought the paper supporting Gales would work.

  I got so worn out I had to take my case to a higher court.… I stole off upstairs long enough to pray about it. And I have felt better ever since. I prayed to God to strengthen him and not to allow him to go back one point on the high standards he has maintained, even if he has to go. But I can’t bear to think of his going.

  The battle between Gales and those who wanted him ousted did not let up. “Henry says Mr. Gales enemies are making a hard fight. I’ve prayed until I would have tired anyone but God out,” she noted in her diary. Mr. Gales had come to represent to Cora all that was worthy and refined. If Union could not recognize his qualities, then it was the town that was at fault. “Went over to Choir Meeting … and acted like a fool. I was so dead tired I could hardly sit up. And I kept my tongue going like a mad- woman.… If this church lets Mr. Gales go now.… I’ve told everyone I’ve talked with that I should not sing if he went, and I won’t.”

  Cora was losing her head. She stormed, she railed, at last she prayed. She felt charged with passion.

  Then I went up into the pulpit, his pulpit, and knelt there and prayed for him. And as I knelt there it seemed as if I could see him standing there beside me, his earnest eyes and strong resolute face, and his uplifted hands.… and then I prayed for myself and for my friend and that he might be left to me.

  The vote was taken, and Mr. Gales was dismissed. Before leaving, he gave her a book of poems, The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell; “To Cora Buzzell Millay from Thomas Gales” was all his inscription read. She kept the book her entire life.

  Her last two diary entries were unhappy ones:

  June 5:

  Don’t feel very well. Henry home late. Went back to play cards. I went to bed.

  Sunday, June 6

  An unsatisfactory day.

  Then she quit her diary completely. She had not bothered to make an entry for Kathleen’s first birthday, nor had she marked the anniversary of her mother’s death on June 3. Maybe, as her sisters came to think, Mr. Gales had preyed on a kind of discontent in Cora; his interest had suggested a life that was nothing like the one she shared with her husband, who favored cards and fishing. The Reverend Thomas Gales offered her solace and appealed to her intellect and to her restless and dormant faith in herself. It proved a dangerous awakening. It also sounds disturbingly like her mother’s doomed love affair with Gard Todd.

  Edna Millay, who was five years old, knew none of this directly, but indirectly children know everything there is to know. They just don’t know why. They don’t even wonder why. Her mother taught her to read at five by studying poetry. She would always say, “Mother gave me poetry,” as if it had been a Christmas present.

  What she called “My first encounter with Poetry” was a curiously physical experience: “I know that it knocked the wind clear out of me, and left me giddy and almost actively sick … when, on opening at random my mother’s gargantuan copy of Shakespeare, I read the passage from Romeo and Juliet about the ‘dateless bargain’ and Death keeping Juliet as beautiful as she was in life, to be his ‘paramour.’ ”

  She called it delight. She fastened on the mysterious word “paramour.” Was it foreign? Was it French? Her entire little body felt itchy. The encounter was “truly terrifying.… It grew and grew in both my mind and my body until I became so giddy that I must surely have fallen had I not at the time been lying flat on my stomach on the attic floor.”

  We can imagine her secretly climbing upstairs into the attic, for once without her sisters, where no one could reach her. As she reads she forgets time, holds her breath; she feels, she said, an

  unearthly happiness which opened suddenly outward like a door, before me, revealing through the very tangible radiance in which I stood as if I stood in the path of the sun … even to the edge of nausea and over it, and dropping directly before me a bottomless abyss in which every colour of ecstasy moved like a cloud, now drifting close, now inexorably drawn away, and a wind from depths unthinkable puffing out my pinafore, and the tops of my doll-size slippers sticking out very black and conspicuous from the brink of the precipice into the air above the conscious void.

  This is not, of course, a simple little girl; this is a woman remembering what she chose to recall of an encounter that left her stunned by beauty, sickened by loss.

  Soon Vincent could read music as easily as poetry. “I was eager to learn,” she wrote later, “for I loved music more than anything in the world except my mother.” Since there was no piano but an organ in their home and she was too small to reach its pedals, her mother had to help her. They would sometimes spend hours together at the keyboard. “There was one chord in a piece which my mother taught me, which I could not get right,” she recalled.

  We did not have the notes of it, it was something she knew by heart. I called her to help me with the chord, and she came in. She had been doing washing, and her hands, as she placed them upon the keys were very pink, and steam rose from them. Her plain gold wedding-ring shone very clean and bright, and there were little bubbles on it which the soap suds had left, pink, and yellow, and pale green. When she had gone and I was sure that she would not hear me, I laid my cheek softly down upon the cool keys and wept. For it had come into my mind with dreadful violence as she bent above me and placed her fingers upon the keys … that my mother could die; and I wanted to save her from that, for I knew she would not like it; and I knew that I could not.

  Later she would also remember her mother sitting beside her bed after supper, in her black dress with its smooth tight bodice, her cuffs and high collar trimmed with black jet, reading to her from Hiawatha or Evangeline, or reciting it from memory, “for she knew the whole long poem by heart, the beautiful ‘Snowbound’ of Whittier, and quite unconscious that I was doing so, I learned much of it by heart myself.”

  But where was her father in all this? What did she learn in hi
s company? She didn’t seem to remember him at all.

  “That’s not quite true,” Norma said. “I remember him coming from the back of the house through a door in Union. And I remember his presence, which is nice. That the house was not just a house of women, then.… And I remember some of his samples—of wool and of worsteds. Scratchy. And hiding behind the door when Papa comes. And that he sang to Kathleen. There! That’s something, isn’t it? And Vincent said that he used to make Mother laugh.”

  In a notebook Vincent kept in the cabin where she worked late into the night when she was older, she remembered him:

  Yet, he was the one who made her laugh, for he was witty, out of a bland face;

  He could send her into gales of laughter, and never crack a smile.

  But his eyes—his eyes were very blue—would show a deep light Suddenly, like sapphires.

  In the early spring of 1900, just before Vincent Millay turned eight, Cora sent Henry away.

  Grace Whitten Thurston, who was then the Baptist minister’s daughter and a playmate, remembered when he left: “It made me feel bad that they didn’t have a father and I had. And I never heard them, any of them, mention his name after that. All I remember was he’d gone.”

  Vincent wrote about his departure only once:

  All my childhood is in those bayberry-bushes, & queen-of-the-meadow, or maybe you called it hardhack, & rose-hips. And cranberries—I remember a swamp of them that made a short-cut to the railroad station when I was seven. It was down across that swamp my father went, when my mother told him to go & not come back.