Miss Emily

by Nuala O'Connor

  “Think of this as your second Bible,” she said.

  I looked at the cover: The Frugal Housewife by Mrs. Child. I opened it and recited, “‘Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy.’ I will read it, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Dickinson looked at me solemnly. “Mrs. Child urges prudence at all times and for every person.” The twin sets of sausage curls below her ears jigged up and down as she spoke. I wanted to slip my finger into one of her shiny ringlets, to see what it would feel like. “Economy, Ada,” she said, nodded and went away.

  Like her husband, the missus is an austere bird; I don’t think a smile would ever crack her lips. But Miss Emily is spry as a colt for someone more than twice my age, and she has a mouth full of words to match. From time to time, she appears like a ghost behind me in the kitchen, knocking the heart crosswise in me. Her manners are contained at first, but soon she starts to joke and jest. She certainly loves to put things in the oven and coodle over them when she takes them out. Then she gives them away: Federal Cake to this one, rye bread to that one, gingerbread to the local children. Miss Vinnie said the other day that Miss Emily single-handedly fattens up the Sweetser family every winter.

  I stoke the stove to heat the hob for the potato scones I have ready. Grabbing a knob of butter, I rub it all around the pan with my fingers, enjoying its milky squelch. The door opens, and Miss Emily comes in.

  “Ada,” she says, “please put wine in the decanter.” Her hands flutter to her face like stray moths. “I will need two glasses.”

  “Only this morning I dropped a spoon first and soon after a knife, so I knew that a visitor would be calling before the day was out.”

  “Is that so?” she says. “The rose decanter, Ada.”

  I hold up my buttery fingers so that she sees it will take a few minutes.

  I have never known such a house for comings and goings. If it is not the letter carrier, it’s Governor Banks, and if it’s not him, or some person from the college, it is the sister-in-law from next door.

  “Two glasses,” Miss Emily says again. “Serve some of Mother’s sweet malmsey wine.” She seems ruffled, and I wonder if the wine is a balm meant to soothe her.

  I go to the wine cellar and fetch a bottle. I hold a hot, wet cloth around the decanter stopper to loosen it up; I pull firmly, but the thing won’t budge. All this time I know that Miss Emily is waiting. Finally the stopper eases out, and I fill the decanter and place the lid back in the neck. The wine is brandy-colored, and it smells rich like chocolate. I take the tray carefully to the parlor, and I am surprised to find its red velvet sofa empty. I stand for a few moments, tray aloft, and hear voices drift down the hall. They are in the library. When I enter the room, I am further surprised to find that Miss Emily’s guest is not her brother’s wife, or a man from the college, but Mr. Austin. He is a bit of a harridan, if you can say that of a man; he goes around with a cocky set to his face. He frightens me a little, truth be told. It is only a blessing that his sisters are so warm.

  “This is our new girl, Austin: Miss Ada Concannon. She’s from Dublin, Ireland. Isn’t that right, Ada?”

  “It is,” I say, setting the tray on the table by the fire. I stand back and let my eyes wander to the spines of the Ticknor and Fields books, rows of them in blue, brown and green jackets.

  Mr. Austin steps near to me. “We met already, in Miss Concannon’s uncle’s house.” He turns away and unstoppers the decanter. “Dublin. Home of Swift the satirist. Though I do believe he despised the place.”

  “Ada is preparing to instruct me on the making of soda bread and currant cake and other things. Are you not?”

  “I am, miss.”

  “What shall we make first?”

  I would like to leave the room, but Miss Emily seems determined to rope me to her. “Well, I’m fashioning potato scones today, miss.”

  “Potatoes?” Mr. Austin says. “Didn’t the Irish all but extinguish themselves over the potato? I am surprised you can look at the things.”

  “We have had two great famines, sir. The country was devastated by them.”

  “So you are a famine survivor, Miss Concannon. Well done! Well done indeed.” He sips the wine, and I stand there and resent his fingers cradling Mrs. Dickinson’s lovely rose glass.

  “I will come to you in the kitchen by and by, Ada,” Miss Emily says, and I take my leave.

  Something makes me linger outside the library door, and I hear Mr. Austin say, in his booming, scratchy voice, “We do not see enough of you, Emily. Susan wishes you to come to our house more often. We both feel it would enliven you to leave the Homestead.”

  “Dear Austin, you know that Sue and I have had this conversation. Many times. Are you her emissary sent to force me out the door?”

  “I care little for Susan’s soirées, Emily. I am merely performing a husbandly obligation. Come, let us talk of other things. I shall amuse you with the tale of the Northampton man who was trampled by a wild bull. You will laugh, Emily.”

  I turn away from the door and go back to the kitchen.

  “Famine survivor! What does he know about famine?” I thump the broom around Auntie Mary’s floor, and she yelps when I catch her ankle.

  “Pay him no mind, Ada. You’re only annoying yourself.” She sits at the table and holds her head, then shakes it.

  “It’s an insult to those who did not come through the famine. Who could not.”

  “I’m sure Mr. Austin didn’t mean it like that, a leana. More than likely he was trying to be kind.”

  I go and stand by her. “Granny Dunn made sure our family survived, didn’t she? Mammy always said so.”

  “She did. My mother never went begging to any man. She kept a crop of turnips safe and barley besides, and she got us all through. And weren’t there fat trout in the Clashawley?” Mary takes my hands in hers. “Now, Ada. These people don’t even need to look at you, never mind talk to you. You’re lucky with the Dickinsons, they’re gentlefolk. Margaret O’Brien always speaks very highly of them. But watch your step. Be mindful. Now, why don’t you go for a walk along Main Street and up to the common? Clear the cobwebs from your mind. Go and take a look around. See if you can make a friend.”

  “Well, I will so,” I say, slipping on the new gray wool coat that cost Uncle Michael twenty dollars and that I intend to wear until my feet slide into the grave.

  Mrs. Child says in The Frugal Housewife not to let the beauty or cheapness of things tempt you to buy anything unnecessary. Well, my coat is both beautiful and necessary, and it certainly wasn’t cheap, but Uncle said I needed it. I wear it with pride against the chill that creeps into the air each evening.

  I walk toward the center of Amherst. Daniel Byrne, who helps with Mr. Dickinson’s horses and more besides, passes me on Main Street; he tips his cap and smiles.

  “Mr. Byrne,” I say, trying to be a little formal, but something about him makes my mouth twitch and beam.

  I glance backward after he has passed and find that he is looking behind at me also. I whip my eyes forward, and my heart batters in my chest. I walk on, finding that I am very glad of the decent look of my new coat. I say a silent thanks to my Uncle Michael for gifting it to me.

  Miss Emily Takes to Her Bed

  SOME UNNAMABLE GLOOM HAS SETTLED ON ME, AND I HAVE retreated to my room to deal with it alone. But Vinnie does not approve of such withdrawals, and she hovers, trying to oust me. She goes to my window and settles the curtain pleats; this is my sister, always fixing, always soothing, the eternal housekeeper. She fattens my pillows with swift thumps.

  “What is it, Emily? You must aim to be less pensive.”

  “It is nothing, Vinnie. I feel weary and restless, a little overburdened. That is all.”

  “You will always be the same old sixpence,” she says, wiping the tears that fall from my eyes, though I don’t wish them to. “Try to think
cheerfully, Emily. ‘Be light in thought,’ as Mother says.”

  “I shall try,” I say. “I will take my rest now.” I lie back.

  “Emily, you mustn’t wallow for long. Ada was quite put out this morning—she was ready to instruct you on the making of potato scones. She stomps around the kitchen now like an angry sprite.”

  “Send her my apologies. Tell her I am tired. But tell her I will be as right as Irish rain tomorrow. Say that, Vinnie, won’t you?”

  “Yes, Emily, I will use those exact words,” she says, kissing me and taking her leave.

  Under its foliage and roses, my wallpaper is filled with arrows, each of them pointing the same way around the walls of my room, from east to west and on eastward again. The arrows tell me to complete my circle as I begin it. For life—and writing—is a never-ending loop of begin, push on, end, begin again. I usually take comfort from the arrows’ instruction on the inevitability of beginnings and endings, but today has not been like any day I have had before. Once this malaise descended upon me, the hours attained a stillness that I would like to preserve.

  It is mild for an October day, and the sky is pink-bright. I get out of bed and push the window up to let the world into my room. But it does not come. The day is like an illusion hovering over me; it is as if I am the only person who exists. Nothing goes forward or backward—it just is. And I know that all of this stillness is something to do with my heart; it pulses, pushing me forward, but yet I am unable to move. I often wish I were a sparrow or a blade of grass so that problems of the heart and humanity might not bother me. And yet my mind is always at its clearest when something is off balance in me.

  I cross the room and lie on my bed and think about words. When my heart or my head hurts, when my body betrays me in sickness, I have words to play with. But, more than play, they own me. I am their servant, and I serve willingly, with as much grace as I can muster. I have so little power over them, in truth. Words—all words—chill and scorch me.

  Each dash I create is a weight, a pause, a question. I select them with care. The exclamation point is juvenile, while the dash is much more promising—a mature mark. Each dash interrupts, emphasizes, connects and pushes apart the words around it. The dash is a waiting beat—dah—dah—dah.

  My lexicon bulges, but my picks from it are slender: I favor the blunt and the simple. I prefer one syllable to two. I like curt words: death, bird, pearl, bee, stone, crown, stab. These to me are the words that sing and that deserve their place in a poem, as surely as the nightingale deserves her perch in the wild.

  With words I question, I complain, I code. I love to riddle.

  Riddle-me, riddle-me,

  Riddle-me-ree,

  Perhaps you can tell

  What this riddle may be:

  As deep as a house,

  As round as a cup,

  And all the King’s horses

  Cannot draw it up.

  Words lie in me like water in the riddle’s well. They tempt me, like nothing else. Not man, not God, not even dear Dollie, in all her exquisiteness. And what is temptation but a forestalling of joy? And what is joy but the thing that we most desire? Yes, words tempt and tease me, and they send me teetering forward. Vital, immortal words.

  Vinnie styles me “mad” sometimes; she loves to flit from person to person like a bee sucking nectar, and she does not understand my need to retreat to words. And Austin thinks me wild, in my ideas, in my notions. But convention never has been, and never will be, my first choice. I have not chosen to live as woman is supposed to live. The choice is mine, so who can object when I push it further and dwell in lands that exist only in my mind and on paper? Vinnie would take exception if she knew the extent of my escape into writing and words.

  But those landscapes of my invention—poem lands—are more real to me than Amherst. More real than the Homestead and all who dwell in her. The rustling passions of life are contained more truly for me in the words of poetry than in the everyday world. Life, as lived, is so desolate at times.

  And why do I write? I ask myself daily, for the answer differs at every dawn, at every midnight. I write, I feel, to grasp at truth. The truth is so often cloaked in misleading speech. Sometimes I let words fall carelessly from my lips when I am with people, but alone I make them settle carefully onto paper. There they must be accurate, and they must work as a choir works to sing a tune well. I like to hear my own words in my own voice, and there are days when I sit at my desk and read aloud to myself from my word hoard. The words please me, the hymnal beats, too. And when they displease me, I take my pen and change them and start again. Read, cross out, read. Send to Sue. Adapt, choose, cross out.

  Oh, chimerical, perplexing, beautiful words! I love to use the pretty ones like blades and the ugly ones to console. I use dark ones to illuminate and bright ones to mourn. And when I feel as if a tomahawk has scalped me, I know it is poetry then and I leave it be.

  Miss Ada’s Head Is Turned

  IT IS AN ENTIRE WEEK SINCE MISS EMILY DARKENED THE kitchen door. I miss her, even though half the time she gets in my way. She sits, draped over the stove, jotting words on the back of sugar wrappers, lost in her head.

  The only visitors to my kitchen these past days were Mr. Austin, for a few moments, and Daniel Byrne, who came in to sharpen all the knives at Mr. Dickinson’s request.

  Mr. Austin flung open the back door, strode in and stood in the middle of the kitchen. I stopped trimming the chops I had in hand and stood before him.

  “How goes it, miss?” he said.

  “Grand, sir.” I looked up into his face. He is handsome to be sure, I thought, but his red hair is as bedraggled as a scarecrow’s; he would not look out of place in a field of corn. Or footing turf on an Irish bog.

  Mr. Austin glanced around the kitchen, as if trying to find something to fault, but all was neat and ordered. “Very well,” he declared, and he was gone as quick as he came.

  Daniel Byrne was a less alarming intruder; I welcomed the sight of him when I opened the back door to his shy knock. Like myself, he is from Dublin. He is a big fellow, with straw-colored hair and an easy manner.

  “How long have you been in America, Daniel?” I asked as he took the knives he had come to sharpen from the drawer and laid them out.

  “Since I was fourteen years old.” He may be in Amherst a few years, but he still sounds like the boy from Ringsend that he is.

  “You surely didn’t come alone?”

  “No, my father and my brother were with me. But after a spell they went west, like so many more. I like it well enough here, so I stopped.”

  “And your mother, did she stay in Dublin?”

  He dipped his head. “My mother died when I was a baby.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.” I felt bad for asking, and I wanted to say or do something to cheer him. “Will you have some coffee or tea when you’re done with the sharpening?”

  “I will.” He hissed a knife blade back and forth along the leather strop and tested its bite with a scratch of his thumb. “I’ll be able to vote soon, Ada,” he said.

  “Is that your way of telling me you’re nearly a man, Daniel Byrne?”

  “It might be.” A hint of scarlet rose in his cheeks. I busied myself scalding the pot and wetting tea leaves. Daniel finished the work quickly. He checked each knife against his skin and gave them all to me to return to the drawer. “There you go,” he said, as if it were I who had asked him to do the job.

  “Thank you, Daniel. Will you eat something with your tea? I made a sponge cake with blueberry jam.”

  “I had better get on, actually, but thank you. Next time.” His eyes lingered on my face until we both turned our heads away. “I’ll go,” Daniel said, and he went quickly back out to the yard, but he left a part of himself behind in the kitchen, a sort of warm space that I found I welcomed very much.

  Mrs. Dick
inson comes in and asks me to make an Irish soda bread—she fancies something different, being more used to yeast bread—and I am happy to oblige.

  “A change is as good as a rest, Mrs. Dickinson,” I say.

  “Indeed.” She turns her back to me and leaves the room. Sometimes I wonder why I open my beak to the woman at all.

  In her book Mrs. Child says that water for bread should be warmed during chilly, damp weather, the very type these October days bring. I am busy wondering if I should heat up the buttermilk—against my normal action—when Miss Emily slides into the room.

  “Miss, you have returned to me.” She smiles, and I ask her to measure out two cups of flour and a teaspoon of pearl ash. “Or do I have to do everything myself?”

  She takes her utensils from the cupboard—a big glass to measure by and a large silver spoon that she likes to stir with. These are her bits, and no one is permitted to touch them; she guards them shyly.

  “Two cups,” she says, and I nod. She begins to scoop; her face is as washed out as the flour.

  “Now, miss, we’ll get on with it.” I heat the buttermilk. If Mrs. Child says it should be done, it must be so.

  “I have been a little low, Ada,” Miss Emily says in a quiet voice.

  “There’s no need to explain yourself to me, miss. I’m glad to see you back on your feet.” The milk froths, and I take it off the hob. “You’re maybe like me, Miss Emily. I feel one way one minute, and the next I feel the very opposite. I find it hard to keep up with myself at times. Is it like that with you?”

  “Yes, Ada, I daresay it is.”

  “Now, miss, I’ll show you how to make a good Dublin soda bread.”

  “Thank you, Ada.”

  I set her to mixing and then let her knead the dough. Once the round is ready, I have her cut a deep cross in it.

  “That’ll keep the devil out of the bread, miss.”