Mr. Emerson's Wife

by Amy Belding Brown

  I looked at him. His eyes were searching me, seeing me, in a way they had not for years. He seemed to find me interesting again.

  “A great deal happened,” I said. “You were gone for ten months.”

  He sighed.

  I plucked another dead blossom. “If your concern is for my reputation, I can assure you it is intact. The people of Concord still view me as the peculiar wife of the great Mr. Emerson.”

  “Lidian.” He put his hand on my arm, but it was his tone more than his gesture that caused me to look at him. “I know our marriage has not been what we desired. What we had reason to expect.”

  His words so startled me that I could think of no reply. I stared at him.

  “But I do not feel that I—that either of us—is much to blame in this. We were beguiled by illusions of love and marriage and easily misled. It’s natural. But there are consolations.” His hand slid up my arm to my shoulder. “Our children have brought us both great joy. And there is, I think, a mutual respect between us, a generous compassion, despite the strains and trials. Don’t you find it so?”

  I looked down at the brown petals in my hand. “I would like to think so, Mr. Emerson. But it is small comfort when compared to my hopes.”

  He nodded and then surprised me a second time by taking me in his arms. He held me with rare and unexpected tenderness. I closed my eyes and, for a moment, all the anguish of the previous thirteen years dissolved in the perfect silence of the garden.

  I wondered, in the days and weeks that followed our encounter, if my husband and I would find the will and determination to renew our marriage. Mr. Emerson was more solicitous of my health than he had been in many years, and he smiled at me more often over his dinner plate. Yet much of the time he sought solitude or the company of his philosopher friends. He no longer walked with Henry, however. A strained antagonism stood between them ow, one I feared would continue forever.

  IN MAY OF 1850 came news that nearly undid my husband—the brig Elizabeth, bound for New York from Italy, had run aground in a storm on the shoals off Fire Island only fifty miles from home. Among those who perished in the cold seas were Margaret Fuller, her husband, and their infant son.

  Mr. Emerson spread the paper across the dining-room table and sat, poring over the words for hours, as if to memorize them. Finally he closed the paper and stood up.

  “I’m going to New York,” he said. His voice was hollow, as if he spoke from the depths of a cave. “I intend to bring her body back here—to Concord.”

  “Here?” I was shocked. “But her home is in Groton. Her family will want her buried there, surely.”

  He shook his head violently. I had never seen him so agitated. His hands were clamped into bony fists and his mouth was a dark cleft in his face.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I feel responsible. I begged her to come here to live—I have paid for a home for her—” His voice caught; he swallowed, holding up his hand that I might not interrupt him. “I owe a great deal to her, Lidian. So many of her thoughts became my own.”

  “You owe a great deal to every one of your friends,” I said bitterly. “And to me as well.”

  “You are my wife,” he said softly.

  “Indeed, as I was while Margaret visited,” I said, carefully. “Let Henry go in your place. He can be your ambassador and bring her remains back to Concord if that’s agreeable to her family.”

  Henry’s name invoked the briefest flinch. “I doubt that Henry will accommodate me. He tells me I have offended him, though he will not say how.”

  “Then I’ll speak to him,” I said.

  He was silent a moment. Then he said, “I’d be grateful if you would.”

  Henry left for Fire Island the next day.

  Neither Margaret’s body nor her husband’s were found. Henry showed us a button he’d torn from a coat belonging to Margaret’s husband. It struck me as unutterably tragic that Margaret had died so soon after becoming a mother. There was a fateful symbolism in it, as if history affirmed that a woman could either put her mark upon the world of men or bear a child, but she could not do both.

  My husband, as was his habit, buried his grief in his work. He wrote a memoir of Margaret to inform the world of the power of her intellect, and the pure force of her character. He reread every letter she’d written him, every essay and poem she had published. He began a new notebook devoted solely to her life and works. He spoke of Margaret constantly, insisting that when she died, he had lost his chief audience. Her friendship, he announced, had opened his eyes to female possibility and had introduced him to a new level of intimacy.

  Margaret’s death opened a chasm between my husband and God—a chasm that would not close. He began speaking as if his life had no meaning or center. The world had become for him a welter of confusion, a dark chaos of suffering and death. Though I clung to my faith, it seemed at times that I dangled at the edge of a precipice and that God’s mercy alone was the reason I did not fall.

  ONE BRIGHT AUTUMN afternoon, as I cut flowers for an arrangement in the parlor, Mr. Emerson joined me in the garden. He greeted me pleasantly and asked the name of the flowers I held.

  “Asters.” I extended one of the dark pink blossoms out to him. He took it and examined it as if there were some philosophical wisdom to be found beneath its velvet petals.

  Something prompted me to watch him rather than return to my labors. “What occasions your company?” I asked finally. “I thought you planned to visit Bronson today.”

  He looked up from the flower. “I’ll go shortly. There’s a concern I must discuss with you—about Ellen.”

  I could not think what this might be. Ellen was his favorite. I did not imagine she could do or say anything that would trouble him.

  “What’s happened?” I glanced over my shoulder at the house, where the children were rolling their hoops in the dooryard.

  “She has a fine imagination, but she needs to learn its proper use. Like an unharnessed river it can destroy as well as nourish.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He fixed me in his hawklike gaze. “She has told me a story that, if spread, could become an ugly rumor. I reprimanded her, but I think you ought to caution her as well, since the story concerns you.”

  “What story is this?”

  He crossed his hands in front of him, grasping his left wrist in his right palm. “She says that you and Henry Thoreau kissed in my absence. I think you ought to persuade her that it’s not true. She seems to have confused imagination and reality.”

  “But it is true,” I said quietly. “She’s reporting what she saw.”

  His somber expression twisted toward a smile. “But don’t you see? Her limited vocabulary misrepresents your friendship. We must strive more resolutely to make the situation clear to her, lest her words become rumors. These ambiguities try everyone, and are nearly always misunderstood by society.”

  I absorbed the possibilities in his amiable smile. Here was my chance to dismiss my sin, to put my adultery behind me. My husband was giving me an opportunity to collaborate with him in a gentle lie. There would be no recriminations between us, no unpleasant scenes. I closed my eyes a moment and what rose in my mind was the face of a slave I’d sheltered a few months before—a young woman so weak from hunger she could barely stand—a woman who had nearly lost her life in her quest for freedom. And I knew in that instant that to collude with my husband now would be to make myself forever a slave to falsehood and deceit. My soul was chained—had been chained for years, as surely as any slave’s body—to two men. I’d imagined first one, then the other, would make me free. But I had to set myself free.

  I took a deep breath. “I believe she accurately interpreted what she saw,” I said.

  He was silent for a long time, but I did not redirect my gaze. I looked straight at him and waited for my words to penetrate. Finally he frowned and touched the side of his nose. “I know that you and Henry are friends. I never imagined it was more than t
hat.”

  “It was always more than that.” The flowers trembled against my skirts, but I did not drop them.

  His face went hard—turned to granite before my eyes. “How many times?”

  I frowned at him and at this absurd notion that mathematics mattered.

  “How many times were you intimate with him?” His words came out as separate beads of sound.

  “Once.”

  “Once? Do you expect me to believe that?” I read contempt in the line of his mouth and the raised eyebrows.

  “It’s the truth,” I said.

  His upper lip twisted oddly. “Your assignation must have been unsatisfying, then, if it was only once.”

  I shook my head. “No. It was the most joyous moment of my life, Mr. Emerson. I finally learned what love can be.”

  I saw that I’d reached him, for it was plain that my words struck hard. He winced with each one. He turned away and sat down heavily on the nearby bench. I did not move.

  “When was this single tryst?” He spoke without looking at me—his gaze was directed at the ground. “After you kissed him?”

  “No. Long before—when he was working on Staten Island and came home for Thanksgiving. The incident in the parlor—” I hesitated. I did not believe there were words to express what I had to say. “I wanted to reawaken his memory of our love.”

  I could feel the force of my husband’s scowl. “Reawaken his memory?”

  “He does not acknowledge our tryst,” I said. “He never speaks of it. It’s as if it never happened.”

  He made a ticking sound in the back of his throat. “I think it highly unlikely that a man—especially a man like Henry—would forget such an event.”

  “Then perhaps he remembers but chooses to lock it away from his recollection. It isn’t the first time. He did the same with the woodland fire he set with Edmund Hoar. And he never speaks of his brother anymore.”

  Mr. Emerson made a small sigh, yet I knew he was weighing the truth of my words. “There’s an element in Henry that embraces paradox, that loves contradiction.”

  “Then you do believe me.” I said it so definitively that there was no room for argument. Nor did he offer any. Mr. Emerson sat on the bench, his head bowed, his hands on his knees, silent for so long that I had the preposterous thought that his mind had turned to other concerns. Then he spoke into the silence.

  “And how widely is this infidelity known in town?”

  His question startled me. “I believe no one knows,” I said. “Is that all that matters to you? Your reputation?”

  “Were you expecting me to exhibit a manly jealousy?”

  “Hardly,” I said. “But perhaps you might acknowledge the fact that the incident was not only my doing, but yours.”

  A startled expression flickered briefly on his face before it returned to its customary repose. “My doing?”

  “Mr. Emerson, whatever has happened in the past, I am now seeking a reason to salvage our marriage. A reason beyond reputation.”

  “Disillusion is the nature of marriage.”

  “That’s only true in a union where there is no love.” I took a deep breath. “I have learned not to seek, nor expect, your affection, Mr. Emerson. Yet I believe I could have experienced a true and loving marriage, had it been with the right person.”

  His expression turned scornful. “If you imagine that Henry is that person, you’re mistaken. Of all the men I have ever met, he’s the least suited to marriage.”

  “There’s a great deal about Henry that you don’t know.”

  “No doubt. But I daresay that’s true for you as well. For everyone, in fact, who claims him as friend. But where do these facts leave us, after all? Are you asking my forgiveness? Do you seek a divorce?” He straightened and folded his arms across his chest. “Is that it? You are about to leave me? To run off with a young man whom I’ve welcomed into my house and treated as a son?”

  “You have treated Henry as a disciple, not a son,” I said coldly. “And I think your condemnation of me ought not to wax too righteous.”

  “You’re thinking of Ellen.”

  I shook my head. “I could never expect you to stop loving Ellen. She was your wife, after all. I was thinking of other transgressions.” He bowed his head and I knew that I’d hit the mark. Yet I found no pleasure in my accuracy, but only a great sadness, which swept through me like the wind that suddenly came up and tossed the branches of the hemlocks behind us. “I cannot forget the moonlight walks you took with Margaret Fuller,” I said. “Nor the long hours you spent in her chamber when she lived with us, while I lay upstairs, ill with one fever or another. And there were others besides Margaret—Anna Barker, Caroline Sturgis, Mary Russell.”

  “They were not the same as Margaret,” he said, so softly that I could barely make out his voice above the wind.

  “You persuaded her to live with us,” I said. “That’s why she was returning from Europe—to settle here, so that you could continue your association.”

  He said nothing, staring down at the bench seat, as if he might wrest some wisdom from the grain of the wood. Finally he looked up at me. I took a deep breath, but said nothing.

  “For what it’s worth, I could not persuade her. She refused to accommodate me. I believe she loved Count Ossoli very much.”

  I thought of Henry and my love for him. I thought of how both Mr. Emerson and I had struggled to be faithful to our vows while espousing a new openness in the relations between men and women. Of how we had each failed in our own way. In the fullness of that moment I saw myself for the first time, not as a captive of God’s will, but as a woman who had the strength to live the life she was given. As a woman free in the world.

  I approached my husband and laid the flowers on the bench beside him. “I haven’t left you, Mr. Emerson, because I have not yet chosen to.”

  He looked up at me. The sun was full on his face as I stood before him and he was forced to squint. “But your words suggest you will.”

  “I don’t know what the future will bring,” I said. “I only know that I am free to choose.”

  He raised his hand to shade his eyes. “What is it that you want of our marriage, Lidian?”

  I had no answer. I closed my eyes.

  “Perhaps it is not too late to amend it,” he said slowly.

  His words took a moment to penetrate my thoughts. I looked at him. “Amend it. In what way?”

  “By modifying our habits,” he said. “We ought not to continue opening our home to everyone.” He was no longer looking at me, but off into the distance, the way he often did when he was introducing an unfamiliar idea into a conversation. “We ought to attend less to new philosophers and more to each other.”

  I knew how he treasured his friendships, how dearly he held the image of himself as a gracious and welcoming host.

  “It’s a hard thing to remake a marriage when so much suffering has passed between us.” I picked up the flowers and sat beside him on the bench. They lay in my lap, downy pink orbs on long stems.

  “Perhaps suffering is the very tie that binds.”

  I thought instantly of Wallie. “In some cases. But not, I think, in ours.”

  He looked quickly down at the ground.

  “What will this new arrangement require of me?” I asked after some time had passed.

  “Nothing, except that you stay with me,” he said in a low voice.

  “Surely you want me to break my attachment to Henry.”

  “I think that you will do so without my requiring it. Your own nobility will not allow you to do otherwise.”

  I felt a flash of astonished gratitude. “A forlorn nobility is no substitute for love,” I said.

  He studied my face thoughtfully. “I often entertained that very thought after Ellen died,” he said quietly. “For of course you are right—there is no substitute at all for love. But perhaps we are better suited to each other than we imagined.” He surprised me by taking my hand. “Let’s begin again. For
the sake of our children, if not our vows. Will you not try with me, Lidian?”

  I looked into his eyes and saw a glimmer of hope. I thought of the intellect and nobility and honesty that had first caused me to love him.

  “I will,” I said.

  After that night, we no longer invited our friends for prolonged visits. The Prophet’s Chamber and the Red Room stood empty except for a rare overnight guest. We lived as two friends who knew each other long and well—side by side, but unfettered. We attended lectures and social events according to our own particular interests. I no longer arranged my life around my husband’s schedule, but made plans and traveled on my own. I went often to Plymouth and stayed with my aunts and cousins. I went to New York and visited childhood friends. I went to a water treatment spa in Maine, where Mary Moody Emerson indulged herself in the healing waters.

  My life assumed the shape of a nautilus shell—it held many chambers, divided by fragile, translucent walls. I lived separate, discrete lives within these chambers—there was one for each of my children, one for my husband, one for my garden, one for Plymouth, and one for Concord. And one—the smallest and closest to my heart—for Henry.

  30

  Constancy

  I am not wiser for my age,

  Nor skilful by my grief;

  Life loiters at the book’s first page.

  Ah! could we turn the leaf.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Despite Mr. Emerson’s expectations, I never formally broke with Henry. But after my confession, the quality of urgency left our association. If Henry was relieved or saddened by this change, he never told me. Instead, he honored it by no longer intruding on my solitude. The dwindling of our friendship had a curious effect on him. It seemed to drive him deeper into the exploration of nature, and I gradually became convinced that this was his true calling.

  When, in August of 1854, Henry’s book, Walden, was published, he inscribed a copy to me. I read it slowly and carefully, distilling his rare and original wisdom. Many of the thoughts were familiar to me, for he had spoken them in conversations, and read passages aloud from his manuscript while I mended clothes in the parlor on winter afternoons.