Miss Emily

by Nuala O'Connor

  “That would be a help to me. It’s a curse when the water goes to ice.” The low winter sun makes his hair glow. “Well, I’d better be getting on.” I make to go back to the kitchen. “The meat and chestnuts won’t roast themselves.”

  “Ada, would you be at all interested in going to the circus with me? The Van Amburgh will be on the common from Friday, and it’s meant to be a spectacle.”

  “I heard that, all right.”

  “Have you heard the song?” He pulls himself up straight and begins to chant:

  “‘Van Amburgh is the man, who goes to all the shows,

  He goes into the lion’s cage, and tells you all he knows;

  He sticks his head in the lion’s mouth, and keeps it there awhile,

  And when he pulls it out again, he greets you with a smile.’”

  I giggle and clap, surprised by his boldness, surprised that he knows such a song at all. Daniel bows.

  “Does your man really put his head in the lion’s mouth?” I ask.

  “I have no clue. Why don’t we go along and see?”

  “I’ll have to ask Mrs. Dickinson about finishing early on Friday.”

  “Well, let me know. I’ll be around the yard all this week.” Daniel tips his cap and strolls away.

  I examine the gait of his long body as he saunters off toward the barn. He is a manly man, no doubt about it. I smile to myself, thinking he must know that I am watching him go, that I am taking him in. I wait until he is inside the barn before I dip back into the house to be welcomed by the kitchen’s pleasant heat.

  The night is biting. The New England cold is not at all like the cold in Dublin; it is sharper and meaner altogether. Earlier the rags I washed and pinned froze on the clothesline; they hung, stiff little flags, waving dully, the very opposite of summer bunting. How forlorn the rags looked after all my work to make them usable again.

  But it is not washing or work of any kind I want to think of now, ambling up Main Street beside Daniel, in the thick of the throng that makes for the common and Van Amburgh’s tent. A drone of voices drifts above the crowd; people seem excited, a little anxious, maybe. I have my Navarino bonnet on and some old kid gloves of Miss Emily’s—she said my woolen mittens were too coarse for walking out with a man. I look up at Daniel; he is handsome in that Irish way—he has a bit of a jaw on him, but that is balanced out by good, even features and generous hair. It occurs to me that Mammy would like him, and the thought pleases me.

  Mrs. Dickinson gave me a talk this morning, summoning me to her bedroom for all two minutes of it. Her room—if possible—is even sparser than my own, with little more than bed and bureau. I stood a long time waiting for her to speak; I wondered if she expected me to divine what was on her mind.

  “Rouge spoils the complexion,” she said at last. “Don’t wear any.” She stared at me, and I stared at the tallow of her bedside candle, which was running. I wanted to pinch the wick or blow out the flame, to stem the flow. “Only vulgar women paint themselves,” she said. And then, “You may leave.”

  It wasn’t in my plan to wear rouge—it makes girls look wanton, I think—but after she spoke to me I felt like going down to Cutler’s to buy a pot. Just for pig iron. But I wasn’t sure that Daniel would like to see me painted up, so I didn’t.

  Daniel puts his hand to my back now to guide me into the circus tent. Truth be told, I am wary, though it takes a bit to scare me. The place is dim, and it stinks of dirty straw and manure. The men are rowdy, shouting to one another; the women are quiet, looking at everything. An Irish lad I recognize from about the town lunges in front of us. He is a tall chap, well made, and he grins a lot.

  “There you are, miss,” he says to me.

  “Hello.”

  “Don’t get caught up in that Danny Byrne’s capers, miss,” he says. “You’ll be sorry.”

  “I can mind myself.”

  “I’d say you can, all right. Is it the Dickinsons you do for? I thought I saw you around their place.” He offers me his hand. “Patrick Crohan.”

  “Ada Concannon.” I hold out my hand, and he squeezes it warmly. “Yes, I work for the Squire and his family.”

  Daniel steps forward. “Will you go away out of that, Crohan. Can’t you see she’s with me? Find a girl for yourself.”

  “We’re only talking, Byrne.”

  “Well, take your talk elsewhere. Come on, Ada.”

  “Go on, you go-boy!” Crohan roars, though he is standing right beside us.

  “I’ll lace you, Crohan, if you don’t stop,” Daniel says. Then, to me, “Don’t mind him, Ada.” He steers me up the wooden stairs to take our seats.

  “I wasn’t minding him. He seems all right. Who is he?”

  “Nobody,” Daniel says. “Well, I work for his uncle.”

  I look back, and Crohan is watching us go; the crowd streams around him. He waves and grins, and I smile at him. Daniel and I sit, and a small orchestra starts a rousing beat. A parade of women troops into the ring; they are half dressed in spangles and fur, and some of the men whistle and call to them. The women bend their bodies back like bridges and flick their legs over their heads; they turn cartwheels around the floor. They go on and on with this until I am mesmerized by their elastic grace and by the music; their skin gleams in the light. The women have hard faces and hard bodies. The way they dance makes me wonder about their lives—if they ever do ordinary things, like bake bread or scrub steps, or if their whole day is about tumbling, twirling and putting on costumes.

  The music hurtles on—the same lively tune over and over—and the women dance out through the curtains. In trots a tiny pony, a child-size fella who is not much bigger than a lamb.

  “My God, look at that pony. What a scut,” I say, relieved that the women with their bare, flashing legs have disappeared.

  “It’s from South America,” Daniel says, and there is a giddiness in his voice. He leans up out of his seat to get a better view. “And it’s a horse, Ada. Not a pony at all. A horse!”

  He ripples with energy, and I enjoy watching his excitement. The curtain opens, and three more teeny horses trip out into the ring. The circus master cracks a whip, and they run around, tossing their long manes from their eyes.

  When the horses leave, a troop of clowns trick-act their way through mishaps involving chairs and buckets and water. My cheeks ache from laughing, and we all pound our feet for more when the clowns bounce and roll through the back curtain.

  The hard-faced women return; each one lights a torch from a brazier and places it in a circle around a box in the middle of the ring. The box is entirely covered in black cloth. The women dance to the edge and stand there, and in time to a terrific drumbeat a man marches in and goes toward the box. He is draped in what looks like a small white sheet—it barely covers him—and his brown legs glisten in the torchlight. In one huge sweep, he pulls the black cloth away to reveal a cage with a lion inside it. We all gasp. The lion lopes up and down, tossing its head; up and down, back and forth it goes, looking bored and, maybe, annoyed.

  Van Amburgh—for it can only be he—lets himself into the cage and faces the lion. He picks up a stout stick and pounces forward, waving it in the lion’s face. I can barely look, I am so sure the big cat will wrench off his arm at any moment. Or his head.

  “God protect him,” I murmur. Daniel reaches over and takes my hand in his.

  Van Amburgh holds the stick aloft and snaps the fingers of his other hand over and over above the lion’s snout. The animal opens its jaw, gapes it wide and wider, showing its long teeth. Lines of spit swing in its mouth, a dark cave from which, I fear, a mighty sound will escape any second. I sit and cringe, huddled against Daniel’s side. The man plunges his arm into the lion’s mouth, and, miraculously, the great cat does not close his maw around it. Van Amburgh dips swiftly, keeping up a manic jig, and inserts his head between the lion’s
jaws. There is not a pip from the audience. We crane forward watching the man hold himself still in the beast’s mouth. The torchlight makes everything flickery and slow. Suddenly the lion jumps backward, away from Van Amburgh, and tosses his mane; he roars, but it is a gentle sound, like a throat clearing. Everyone claps; some people pound their feet on the wooden steps, and the din all around is ferocious. Daniel grins at me, and my heart leaps into my throat.

  We fix our eyes once more on Van Amburgh. He waves his stick, calling for silence, and approaches the lion again. The big cat seems to have had enough—he sits, then lies down at the back of the cage. Van Amburgh roars, “Rise now!”

  The lion doesn’t move, and neither does he lift his head to look at his master. Again Van Amburgh shouts at him, and again the lion sits like a cat in front of a fire, refusing to stir. The man begins to beat the lion, and I can hear—and almost feel—the dull thud of the wood against the creature’s back. The whole tent goes quiet; the only sound is the wallop of the stick against hide—fwack, fwack, fwack. All around me people wince; mothers cover their small children’s eyes, but some of them start to bawl anyway. A woman sitting in the front row stands and begins to hiss. Boys and girls take up the hissing, and men start to boo. The lion cowers, and Van Amburgh belts him again and again.

  “Oh, this is not right, Daniel,” I say, “it’s not right at all.” My stomach turns to jelly, and I want to leave; I cannot stand to see an animal so poorly treated. Men get to their feet and shout their protests.

  Daniel jumps up and shouts, “Leave off!” at Van Amburgh.

  Van Amburgh steps from the cage, and the lion rises and returns to pacing, but slower this time. It opens its jaws, and the teeth are like daggers. People are stamping their feet and shouting, “Boo, boo!” Van Amburgh holds up his hands; I don’t like the beards of black under his arms, the screeds of coarse hair. It looks horrible to me, and I turn my face away. The crowd goes slowly silent.

  “Did not God himself say,” Van Amburgh shouts, “in Genesis 1:26, that men should have dominion over every animal on earth?” I look back at him, standing with his hands aloft like a preacher. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’”

  “You’re the creeper!” Daniel shouts. “You’re no better than any animal!” He pulls me by the arm to let me know that we are leaving.

  We descend the steps, and all around us people start to get up from their seats, too. A silent sea of people drifts forward, turns its back to Van Amburgh and leaves the tent. We surge out into the cold night and walk away.

  Miss Emily and Miss Ada

  Celebrate Birthdays

  I WANT A BLACK CAKE FOR MY BIRTHDAY, FOR IT BRINGS THE winter season tight to me, it seems. Ada is back from Cutler’s with my prunes, apricots and a little nutmeg for shredding. I am ready to begin the brandy syrup when she asks me, rather timidly, if she may help.

  “Get some of your exalted butter, Ada, and grease the milk pan for me. Mother vaunted your butter to the skies when our cousins were here from Boston. It would have pleased you to hear her.” I line up everything and take stock. “We need nineteen eggs for this.”

  “That’s a powerful lot of eggs, Miss Emily.” Ada keeps her head bent while she slips the butter across the pan and rubs it in.

  “Is anything the matter?”

  She shakes her head, then looks up at me. “I’m not right since I went to that circus. Honest to God, it was like bedlam. Your man—the lion fella—is half mad, I think.”

  “What happened?”

  “He stuck his head in the lion’s mouth, but when the lion got fed up and didn’t want to do more, he beat the tar out of him. With a big fat stick. It was desperate, Miss Emily, very violent. The poor thing was terrified out of its wits. We could tell.”

  “His behavior sounds medieval. Did people object?”

  “Most left, though the show was hardly begun. Daniel Byrne hooshed me out of the place before I knew what was what. But I was not sorry to go.”

  “I am glad to hear that Mr. Byrne took you away from it. The circus whips up such a frenzy when it overtakes the common. I cannot imagine that it is the safest place for animals. Or girls.”

  Still, I think, it would please me to walk among the tents and hear the hoy-hoy of the men, rallying their horses. I would like to see the women in their scant costumes, as they mince and trip, their bodies pliant and strong. Such lives as they have could never be mine.

  I blend the sugar and butter, feeling the strain of the effort through my wrist and across my shoulders. Baking will make puffed-up brawn of my arms yet.

  “Is this the cake you’ll have for Christmas, miss?”

  “No, Ada, this is my birthday cake. I like a flavor of the Caribbean to cheer up my Decembers.”

  “I was born in December, too, miss. The tenth of the month.”

  “Why, Ada,” I say, laying down my spoon, “how wonderful! We share a birthday—I was born on the tenth.”

  “Well, if that doesn’t beat all, Miss Emily. We’re birthday twins.”

  “This shall be our cake in that case, and we will enjoy fat slices of it together on our birthday. How pleasing this is.”

  I take dried pears from their jar; they were as pink as plums when picked, with crinoline hips and the flesh of candies. Now they curl—silenced yellow tongues—in my hand. I glance at Ada, and she is smiling roundly, forgetting now her Daniel and his saving of her from the lion. She uses her hands to mix together raisins and citron rind; the smell is glorious.

  “Daniel says it will snow before the week is out,” she says, making me realize I do not see well into her heart, for it is her Danny who is causing her to smile and not our shared celebration after all.

  “‘I stood and watched by the window

  The noiseless work of the sky,

  And the sudden flurries of snow-birds,

  Like brown leaves whirling by.’”

  “Oh, that’s lovely, Miss Emily. Did you make that up yourself?”

  “Alas, no, Ada—that is the work of Mr. Lowell, the poet. And I have rarely read anything as perfect as it.” I am fighting the molasses through the dry ingredients, and, seeing my struggle, Ada takes over. “And yes, I believe that your Daniel is correct—it will snow soon.” I pour a half-pint of brandy syrup into the mix and sniff deep on its fire.

  “‘It sifts from Leaden Sieves—

  It powders all the Wood—

  It fills with Alabaster Wool

  The Wrinkles of the Road—’

  “There, that is a snow poem I composed.”

  “You are as much a poet as that Mr. Low, or whatever you call him. Snow coming from a sieve—that’s perfect. Say it again, Miss Emily.”

  “‘It sifts from Leaden Sieves—

  It powders all the Wood—

  It fills with Alabaster Wool

  The Wrinkles of the Road—’”

  “It powders all the wood! Well, that is smashing. I can see it, I really can. You should do more of the writing, miss.”

  “Yes, Ada, I should. It is a matter of carving the time.”

  I steal up to the cupola to look at a sugared Amherst. The snow is very deep—it reaches up to the wagons’ stomachs, and they can move neither forward nor backward. They lie like corpses on a prairie from one end of Main Street to the other, their wheels poking through the top of the snow. With the wagons so abandoned, we will hear the ting of sleigh bells soon, at all hours. I knew that it would snow when the sky lay so huge, gray-yellow and brooding above. It snows slowly and somberly, the flakes scattering down on the town like an anointment. Men in dark cloaks drag themselves through the drifts, their factories and offices too crucial to forsake
, it would seem. Father has already been out to scatter grain for the birds; he padded across ice in his slippers, and Mother scolded him. I was pleased that he put our winged friends before Mother’s safeguarding of his health. Now he has set himself up in the dining room to peruse papers, but he does not want company, so I confine myself to wandering between my bedroom, the kitchen and my cold eyrie in the cupola. It is a taxing time for fingers and toes, and I am bundled in two shawls over my wrapper.

  “You look like a vagrant,” Vinnie says, meeting me on my way down from the cupola.

  “I am cold. Come, let us do calisthenics, to warm up our blood.”

  “I prefer to take the broom to the stairs and sweep like a dervish. That is all the exercise I need,” she says.

  So, alone in my bedroom, I bend, jump, swing, twist and kick, feeling my body’s resistance, until I am informed—by Ada—of Mother’s resistance to my “thumping.”

  “You’re like the wreck of the Hesperus,” Ada says, to my panting form. “Now, give me your other dress and I’ll get those ink spots out for you.”

  “You are full of business at all times, Ada.”

  “My world doesn’t stop over a bit of weather,” she says, and grunts to show how put-upon she is. I hand her the dress—my best piqué. “White as snow in no time, Miss Emily. But honest to God, why you gave up wearing your good brown is beyond me.”

  I follow her down to the kitchen. “I am like one of Vinnie’s cats behind you,” I say as her neat back descends the stairs ahead of me. “Do you notice how they trail her through the Homestead like a posse of devoted children?”

  “When you get Miss Vinnie, you get cats, all right. I’m fed up with them and their fur. I dread that one day Mrs. Dickinson will find an island of cat hair floating in her soup.”

  “But they keep the mice away, and we should be grateful for that.”

  Ada warms milk in a pan, and I watch her soak the ink-spotted sleeves of my dress in it.

  “By whatever miracle, the ink loosens and disappears in the milk,” she says. “That Mrs. Child knows everything there is to know about cleaning. And more besides.”