by Norman Lock
“My father’s mansion has many rooms—mine is both a sanctuary and a scarlet prison.”
Increasingly, you would shut yourself away while I yielded to coercions that had nothing to do with art or revenge, if that is not too strong a word for the passion that inflamed you like a carbuncle needing to be lanced. Increasingly, Edward and Calvinism would lie athwart desire like an oak tree fallen across a stream.
“Have you read it?” I asked, having noticed a copy of Jane Eyre on your desk.
“Not yet. Abiah says it is very exciting. I wonder if I shall find it so and if my poor heart can stand it.”
You nibbled on Chocolat Menier embezzled from the kitchen.
“Father gives me books, then begs me not to read them, all except Letters on Practical Subjects, to a Daughter, which I pretend to read as once the fair Ophelia did to gull Prince Hamlet. She also had a father, poor child.”
“It’s all a charade!”
Your eyes widened. “What is, Robert?”
“Your fluster, your fluttering! You’re not the naïf you would like us to believe.”
“You look as if you’ve eaten sour cherries.” You joined me at the window, which faced the cemetery across the street. “I’m growing root-bound like those poor clods.”
“I wish for once you would really talk to me!” I cried, at my wit’s end.
“What would you have me say? Public figures are not allowed to prattle. The private Emily is a tender animal inside a pretty shell.”
I ought to have left you then and there.
God only knows what vagary prompted your next remark. “What will Amherst say when the Mexicans come to town, dressed in sombreros and serapes, and set up flower stalls on the town common? We have our own ‘donkeys’ hereabouts, who bray together on Sunday morning. A fiesta may be gay for some, but I fear that most of the town’s good Christian folk will be intoning anathemas.”
“Why would they come?” I asked in anger and astonishment, recalling Captain Walker’s ghostly prophecy.
“To take back what we’ve stolen from them.”
“Don’t be silly!”
“I hope to be here when they do and welcome them to Amherst. I’ll wear my serape and give them bread and piccalilli. How furiously Father will glare at me!” You laughed strangely. “Now you must go, Robert; Mother will be here soon. Hold out your hand.”
I did as you asked.
“Imagine that I have given you a small parting gift.”
I played my part in the pantomime, letting my fingers briefly touch your palm. Did you even notice that I trembled?
“What is it?” I asked stupidly, looking at my empty hand.
“Anything you like, though some would call it ‘possibility.’”
You smiled; I shook my head. I did not know what to make of you. I never have.
“The secret is not to choose,” you replied to my unspoken question.
I went into the hall and put on my winter things.
“I’ll walk you to the gate,” you said, getting into your coat.
“Are you well enough to go outside?” You had a cough, which worried me.
“Well enough.”
We paused at the gate. Suddenly, I glimpsed the world beyond it, as if through your eyes. I saw the factories of Amherst and their billowing stacks, the sad dray horses, the drivers in their leather aprons, unshaved and uncouth. I heard the factory whistles calling men to account and the rattle of iron wheels over dirty streets. The earth was spoiled, and the people had lost their places in it. They ate bitter herbs and pricked themselves on thorns. They hated one another in their shame, which they did not understand, and they made war on one another for reasons they also did not understand.
“Will men make war in heaven?” you would ask in a letter written during the Utah War, called the “Mormon Rebellion” by some. By then, you’d become an Amazon pretending to be a pygmy. “They seem to enjoy it so.”
I forget how I answered, if I did answer. Unlike you, I saw only as far as my eyesight allowed; I did not have second sight and my faith was never strong enough to pierce the night and obscurity.
“Good-bye, Robert. Please write to me with your address in Springfield.”
The gate opened and then closed behind me. I almost leaned over its ornamental iron spears to kiss your cheek.
“Leave him,” I said, attempting once again to incite you to revolt.
You knew whom I meant without having to be told. “Father does me less harm than a husband would.”
“Even Mr. Newton?” I asked slyly. I knew of your admiration for the young lawyer in Edward’s office.
“I put him on like spectacles. My sight is sometimes poor.”
I walked into the world, which had changed in a harrowing instant. Turning to wave one last good-bye, I thought I saw the flaming sword and the fiery cherubim standing on either side of you. The gate had closed, and I had been shut out, while, by His magnanimity, you had been allowed to remain in His garden to prune the fruit trees, make Indian bread, collect honey, and put up peaches and pickled asparagus in jars.
I hurried down North Pleasant Street as though chased by lightning bolts and an infernal spawn. I had received a grim revelation and wished that it could be erased from my memory. Even then, I knew that time did not belong to God, but was the Devil’s realm, in which I would—in time—forget. Your mother passed me in the wagon. Her pinched face was lost in the shadows of her coal-scuttle bonnet. Tim, the stableman, sat next to her like a grizzled Charon.
Having reached the edge of town, I gazed at the snow and wooded steeps of distant Mount Holyoke. I considered making a pilgrimage there, but I was no holy man with a craving for mortification. I was tired, fretful, and nettled by uneasiness.
Your voice wound through my thoughts like an adder—something you’d said earlier, a reproach. “You don’t see us clearly, Robert.” Whom had you meant by “us”? You and Edward. The Dickinson tribe. You and me. Your heart is a locked room as mysterious to me as the one in which you receive your nocturnal visitors.
I walked home to Aunt Tess’s and, like a child, lay down with the blanket pulled over my head, afraid and sick at heart. I knew that my eviction had been final. Perhaps in Springfield, I thought, I will find a bone of faith to gnaw on . . . a rag of belief to rest my head upon.
I was not long in Springfield when a letter—your bloodless surrogate—arrived, to unsettle me again.
North Pleasant Street
Amherst
Dear Robert,
My Fate is imperial—my realm the polar page—my subjects are Words. I would be more comfortable addressing them, wearing one of Austin’s frock coats & a pair of striped trousers, but the town would sneer.
The Weather here—so you know—is impending: One feels it everywhere, but I can no more tell its future than I can my own—except that it will be bleak.
Love—like water—is liable to pour, slow, drip, & finally sink into the ground, where Generation is hit or miss. I almost miss you, Robert, well enough to enclose a kiss or, since I am chaste, a lock of hair. But I don’t endorse Idolatry.
I remain your FRIEND—
Emily
P.S. According to the Springfield Republican—which is Gospel—there is rioting in Paris, Berlin, & even in London, where John Milton sleeps in stately company. Thus, do men with bloodshed affirm universal brotherhood.
THE MORMON REBELLION
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul—
—Emily Dickinson
–1–
I DID NOT SEE YOU AGAIN until I brought the child home to live with Tess. That would have been in the fall of 1855. I stayed in Amherst long enough to see her settled. When I visited the house on North Pleasant Street to pay my respects, you were shy. I was embarrassed, your mother distant, your father furious. I recall little else of that afternoon except your smile, which seemed frozen, as if you, too, had suffered an attack of neuralgia—or a toothache. M
y visit concluded, you walked me to the gate, just as you had done seven years before.
“Your face looks as though it pains you, Emily.”
You gave no reply.
“I think my visit has distressed you.”
“Some days the rafters splinter and suns are let inside, which sting sight black.”
Your eyes slid from mine.
“Your father could not wait for me to go.”
“Emperors have cares lesser mortals cannot comprehend,” you uttered as if by rote. You seemed uncommonly listless that afternoon.
“I hope you’ll visit Charlotte sometimes. I fear she will be a lonely little girl.”
“Then we shall be great friends.”
Your eyes had returned to mine. They held them not with brazenness, but with kindness.
“It will be a comfort for me to think so,” I replied gratefully.
We stood in the yard, minding the rattle of dry leaves and the chafing wind, which caused your eyes to weep. You daubed at them with your handkerchief. In the house opposite, a woman peered through a curtained upstairs window, as though we were there solely to gratify her curiosity.
“Vulgar minds will think you’ve made me cry.” You glanced sharply at the woman at the window, who did not bother to flinch.
“Do you miss poor Ruth very much? Of course, you do! Please forgive a spinster her insensitivity.”
“You’re not yet twenty-five!”
“A widow apprentice, then.”
Why must you always demean yourself? I wondered. I think now that you were bent on becoming invisible. By a cruel instinct, you favored obscurity, like the mole. I could’ve throttled you and given the harpy pressing her baleful face against the window a choice morsel to carry to her sorority of gossips. They could have worried it to their evil hearts’ content until, like dogs, they tore it to shreds.
“We named our daughter after Charlotte Brontë,” I said to change the subject. (I lied: Charlotte was Ruth’s mother’s name.)
“I adore her novels, especially Jane Eyre!” you exclaimed with a smile, which undid the knot of anger in my throat.
“So you wrote me.”
“I often think of Bertha Mason locked in her attic room—her wits turned and her nature changed from human to animal. And then the fortunate fire! Fortunate for Rochester and Jane. I keep a box of lucifers close in case I should be shut away. My ardent verses would make excellent tinder. I wouldn’t care if all Amherst were consumed in a holocaust beginning with my officious neighbor’s house.” You sighed. “But Father would only put it out; he used to lead the fire brigade and knows how to douse a flame.”
This time, you stared defiantly at the busybody across the street, and this time, she did flinch and slink away into the depths of her room.
“My bobbin will never be emptied of its thread!”
“You are half-mad already,” I said, watching your face flush triumphantly.
“I will never be that woman!” you declared with ferocity. I didn’t know whether you meant your nib-nosed neighbor or Rochester’s captive wife, Bertha Mason.
Composing ourselves, we were quiet a moment.
“Your letters were troublesome,” I said when the silence had grown too loud to bear.
“Did my epistolary presence in the house annoy Mrs. Winter very much?” you asked without the least expression on your face or in your voice. Your thumb, I noticed, was stained with ink—you called it your “birthmark.”
“She knew of our friendship.”
“It was never otherwise.”
“I see that clearly now,” I said, reflecting on your parting words to me before I left for Springfield.
“You don’t mind?”
You had suddenly turned kittenish, and again my anger rose against you.
“Not anymore,” I replied, lying once again.
“The soul keeps exclusive company. Mine is, perhaps, overly nice in its judgments.”
Were you trying to hurt me?
“I should go,” I said, my hand on the gate. “I leave for Springfield in the morning.”
“And I have supper to make, which must be on the table at six. Father won’t abide exceptions to his rule. To think that now you are a father!”
“Not a very good one, I’m afraid,” I replied with more honesty than I could have wished.
“Charlotte will be happier fatherless.”
“Why don’t you leave Edward?” I blurted.
“I fear my muse would balk. She is bashful in unfamiliar company.”
You turned and disappeared into the deeply shadowed porch.
I closed the gate and walked down the street. This time, there were no fiery cherubim to send me rushing home to hide my head beneath the blanket.
–2–
I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT RUTH.
She gave me a child and, less than four years later, died of Bright’s disease. I knew no one in Springfield to whom I could entrust Charlotte, although Mary Lincoln offered to take her in. She and Abe lived nearby at a house on Eighth and Jackson streets. But Mary had the care of three young sons at home and, like your mother, was visited by headaches. Charlotte would be better off in Amherst with Tess. As an army chaplain, my life was liable to change in an instant. I could not devote myself to both God and a daughter. Yet the feeling nagged me that I did not love her enough and could not love Him at all.
I’ve been too brief. You want to hear how it was for me when I arrived in Springfield and how it was for Ruth and me when we courted, married, lived together, and parted at the “great divide,” which all must cross in time.
At first, I lived at the army post and applied myself industriously to my trade, which was to proclaim the Gospels in the wilderness, though it was hardly that in Illinois in 1848. Except for the Mormons and Hebrew peddlers, the land was Christian. The Treaty of Fort Adams had expelled the Choctaw. The southern tribes had been exiled to the Oklahoma Territory by the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokees had toiled over the Trail of Tears, which, like death, permitted of no return. Hostiles remained to harry white settlers, but the cavalry could be relied on to deliver the renegades into bondage or to a heathen afterlife. People in Illinois still talked of the “Long Winter” of 1832 and the famine that followed it and how northern Illinois men were forced to go south to “Little Egypt” for corn—which, unlike the Word of God, was a staff of life they could not do without. “We’re going to Egypt,” they’d say, like Jacob’s ten sons before them, who had gone down the Nile to buy pharaoh’s corn.
I met Ruth at a church sociable on Shrove Tuesday, the day before the start of Lent. We ate fried doughnuts, called “fasnachts,” as was the custom among the Amish and the Lutherans. I had been invited by the church’s pastor to deliver the invocation and had been struck by Ruth’s calm and candor. She was not bright or clever, nervous or ironic. She was not, by turns, mournful or sprightly, nor was she vexing, red-haired, birdlike, spinsterish, or eccentric. She was a big-boned, large-hearted girl whose parents had emigrated from western Pennsylvania when she was a child. She could milk a cow, deliver a foal, cook, sew, and put a sick dog out of its misery. I liked her because she was unlike you, Emily. I believed that she could make me forget you. I almost did, but your letters seemed to insist on my recollection. They were your envoy, perhaps the better part of you. You did not care a “fig” that I was married. Marriage was not what you wanted. Love was not what you wanted. If you could have passed, unmarried, into widowhood, you would have done so gladly. You were never far from “the quiet nonchalance of death.” I think now that what you wanted was my submission.
Ruth and I married on the first Sunday after Easter at the Lutheran church in Springfield. Her father gave the bride away with only a sentimental reluctance. Yours would have run off the groom with his fireman’s ax. The wedding was small; none had money or inclination to spare on extravagance. We were an ordinary bride and groom—partly serious, partly giddy, and partly anxious about what lay ahead. We never wasted
words on the subject of faith or doubt, the covenant of marriage or its obligations. We got on with each other and got on with our life together. In time, where all things—blessed and depraved—occur, we had a child. I knew by then that naught can happen in eternity—an impious notion for a minister of God. If, as I have promised many others in their bereavement, Ruth and I meet again when time has come to an end, it will be a meeting empty of all human joy, without which life and afterlife are savorless.
I expect that my despair is felt in the marrow of us all—an “awful nullity,” as you call it.
In his bones, Abe Lincoln knew the meaning of naught. We met for the first time at the law office he shared with William Herndon in the Tinsley Building on the square. After the wedding, I went there to have my will drawn. Ruth and I seldom gave thought to posterity—having trusted, if not in God and Providence, in a principle of just compensation that would transcendently balance accounts. But a child can make parents less trusting in the goodwill of others and more reliant on themselves. Ruth was determined to have children.
I liked Abe immediately; one did or did not according to his prejudices. He looked more like the militia captain he’d been in the Black Hawk War than a lawyer. He was tall, rawboned, and as awkwardly articulated as a country rube. He had a habit of leaning far back in his swivel chair, as if to ascertain the limit of gravity. I never did see him fall. He spoke in a tenor voice, which would sometimes climb into a higher register, though it was never shrill or uncontrollable. He spoke plainly in a cadence recalling Shakespeare’s plays or the Bible.
After the will had been executed, he suggested that we have lunch together. I agreed, thinking we would be going to a Springfield eating house, but he opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out apples, cheese, and peanuts, wrapped in a piece of linen that served as a tablecloth.