The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

“But it is my recreation,” I do my best to insist. And he seems startled that I would defy one of his commandments and cardinal rules.

  “Emily, I do not surmise much recreation in having my daughter cough her lungs out in front of a mountain of dough.” And then, Lord alive! he does smile. “Even if it is a great sacrifice and does hinder my appetite. I must have lost my reason. I shouldn’t have lent you to those fanciful dames at Holyoke.”

  “But Father, I had the croup long before I set foot in South Hadley.”

  “Then you did a good job of hiding it from me. Go to sleep. And no more palaver about baking bread.”

  Father abandons me to the dark. I am always a general after our debates, mounting attacks that will never happen, not in Father’s lifetime or in mine. I cannot sleep. I feel like a stranger in my own bed. I must be a bride of Christ in spite of my penchant for Satan & his tricks. I start to cough & sob in the same minute. My sobbing must have summoned a figure out of Hell, wrapped up in a fiery color that can shine on a moonless night.

  “Emily,” whispers the demon, “do not cry,” and climbs into bed with me in a cape that feels on fire. But my flesh does not burn or explode.

  The demon takes my hand under the covers and has the cheek to kiss me on the lips. I am paralyzed for a moment—until I realize that it is Little Sister who has crawled into our bed, wearing a bright orange coverlet that can glisten in the dark.

  “Sister,” I purr, “did the Patriarch”—meaning Pa-pa—“hide you and Mother in a box?”

  “Practically,” she whispers in my ear. “We are not to disturb Princess Emily while she convalesces under his roof.”

  “But Mother could have protested…or found a lawyer to argue her case.”

  “And risk Father’s wrath? Heavens, no! Mother’s champion would melt under Father’s gaze.”

  “As would we,” I declare.

  “As would we.”

  And both of us laugh that half laugh of co-conspirators caught in a similar maze. Suddenly I am as tired as the Devil & fall asleep in Lavinia’s arms.

  8.

  PART OF OUR FAMILY LEGEND IS THAT MOTHER DEFIED FATHER once and only once in her life—on the day I was born. The Squire had forbidden her to paper her bedroom walls. He wouldn’t even let the paper hanger, Lafayette Stebbins, into the house. It was Father’s belief that the paper hanger might interfere with Mother’s delivery. But Mother did not want to welcome me into the world with peeling brown paper on her walls. So she intrigued with the paper hanger, visited him on the sly, & offered to pay him out of her own pocket.

  It was my precarious luck that the paper hanger arrived with his ladder and materials a few hours before Mother was delivered of me. And I woke with a shout to the bright yellow weave of tulips on Mother’s wall. Of course, much of this can’t be true. Even Merlin himself couldn’t have scraped the walls and hung that yellow paper in a matter of hours. Pa-pa must have given in to Mother and let her have her way, and I was born in the shadow of Lafayette Stebbins’s stepladder. Perhaps my own stubborn streak grew out of Mother’s single act of defiance. I’ve always been partial to bright colors. That’s all I care to say.

  But why hasn’t Mother visited with me?

  It’s Pa-pa who knocks on my door & enters in his usual armor—coat, boiled shirt, & cravat—as if he were preparing for a joust at the General Court. He carries a silver salver replete with milk, corn mush, medicine bottles & sprays & a contraption that coughs up steam. It’s clear that Father means to torture me with what he calls his regimen. It’s milk & mush in the morning, with a dose of steam that could dizzify. But I am the martyr, Pa-pa’s saint & good little girl. Ma-ma must be in the house somewhere. I listen to the song of her slippers, that soft staccato of hers on hard wood. But she does not appear.

  “Father,” I ask in a whisper, between sucks of steam, “won’t your practice suffer if you spend too much time pampering me?”

  “I have my clerks. And I wouldn’t call it pamperin’. Young ladies have been known to die of the croup.”

  “But I’m Dolly. Not a wilted thing.”

  Father hadn’t called me Dolly in years. I was Dolly when I climbed upon his lap at five or six, Dolly in his rye field, Dolly when I was ill with a much earlier croup. “Where’s my little doll?” he would say. “Where’s Dolly?”

  He did not amuse himself with Sister & Brother in similar fashion. He had but one Dolly. Yet I could not coax it out of him while I lay in bed. In truth, Father held a grudge against me. He wanted to educate his daughters, but he still believed that it was a waste of money & a waste of time. Daughters could not become medical doctors or ministers, could not study law. We were meant to marry, but even that troubled his mind. He paid no heed at all to our future, neither Lavinia’s nor my own. We were female creatures to him, mostly useless, though he adored us & would have us bred into proper young ladies. But we did not enter his dreams; only Austin did I am sure. Austin would safeguard the Dickinson name, would capture a wife & a career, procreate, & produce yet another generation of Dickinsons, while Lavinia & I would be pirated away from Amherst by a husband, would cleave to him, & lose our Dickinson stature. And so I was some spotted thing that Pa-pa squinted at, but still he stayed home with me.

  “Father, shouldn’t you take your constitutional to the Post Office?”

  “What for? I won’t find a letter from you.”

  “Good gracious. I could write one from my pillow, address it to myself, and have Sister deliver it to the Post Office. Would that do the trick?”

  “No. It’s not the same as having you write from Holyoke.”

  “Father, why not?”

  “Because I couldn’t hear the hunger in your lines.”

  “You are imagining things,” I said.

  But I began to blush, & it wasn’t from that surcharge of steam. He must have sensed my loneliness & realized that even a letter to Austin or Lavinia was a letter to him. My life, it seems, was one long letter to Edward Dickinson, Esquire. It didn’t matter much whose name or address was on the envelope. I was serenading Father with my tiny Tambourine.

  After he finishes with his regimen, Father returns to his law office. And I wait for the Invisible Mistress of the house, Emily Norcross Dickinson, my Ma-ma! We are the two Emilies, Pa-pa’s best little girls. Ma-ma has bouts of “Neuralgia” that cripple the nerves in her face. And she comes to me with the left side of her face half frozen. Her mouth curls, & she can hardly speak. I have a wish, cruel as it may be, to invite her into my sickbed & have her suck up some steam. But I’m the adoring daughter nonetheless.

  “Mother, your skin is positively pale.”

  She does not have my aurora of red hair. Ma-ma’s hair is streaked with gray. Her shoulders are broader than mine, but she slumps in her housedress, filled with fatigue.

  I clutch her hand—it feels cold. Her eyes begin to drift.

  “Mummy, if you help me into my robe, I will go down to the pantry and make us a scrumptious vanilla pudding. Father need never know.”

  But she doesn’t have the will or the Imagination to conspire. She sits with me on the bed & braids my hair, singing to herself like a child. It was Mother who taught me the art of baking bread. Whatever witchcraft I have in the pantry comes from her.

  “Emily,” she says, “you are the pale one…When you are feeling better, dearest, we will fatten you up like a goose.”

  A girl without conscience, I cannot help but play at that picture of a fattened goose.

  “And then Father will wring my neck, and all the Dickinsons save one will feed on Sister Emily.”

  “Heaven forbid!” she cries. But I’ve cured her “Neuralgia” for a moment, and her face begins to unfreeze.

  I hold her in my arms and declare, “Mother, it was a jest. I am not a goose at all.”

  The damage is done. She gets up with a haunted look, caresses my cheek, & trundles out of the room. I curse my own wickedness. I can be Shakespeare with Ma-ma, put on the metal corselet of a p
rince, weave my words around her, but with Father I am always benumbed.

  I push aside Pa-pa’s little steam engine, get into my gown, & climb down the stairs in my slippers. I am all giddy with my sudden freedom. I find Mother in the kitchen, reading a recipe. There is a delight on her face I seldom see. Perhaps the clarity of measuring cups soothes her. She looks up in wonder, her mind still caught in a world of ingredients.

  “Dearest,” she says, in a voice as calm as can be, “what are you doing out of bed?”

  “Conspiring to cook an angel cake with Emily Norcross Dickinson.”

  Unlike the Patriarch, Mother knows how to laugh. She roars with a great rumble up from her belly. There’s a mischief in Ma-ma, a wantonness that must have reminded her of my birth, when she brought the paper hanger into the house against Father’s command. Does she see the same yellow tulips on the wall in a background of twill? The two Emilies are sisters all of a sudden, with the same stubborn streak. And for a moment we’re free of Pa-pa & all mankind.

  9.

  IT’S A MONTH OF DOSINGS AND HOT DRINKS, WITH PA-PA’S physician taking my pulse & peering into my mouth until I began to examine my own speckled tongue in the mirror. Brother would visit with his College cronies, all of them so superior to the little nun in bed.

  “Austin, should we borrow the girl and hoist her up the flagpole on College Hill?”

  I smile my most malicious smile, & even Brother is embarrassed by such remarks. He whispers in my ear. “We will have our revenge. Promise.”

  Lord, I was becoming the local menagerie. When there wasn’t Austin & Amherst College, or Little Sister & her friends, there were the old ladies of the town, who had to glare at the spotted girl with her steam contraption. They must have wearied me and my cough, since the coughing stopped, & Father ran out of excuses to keep me as his prisoner.

  And one morning in April I’m swept out of bed, & with the whole family traipsing behind him like little ducks, Father puts me on the stage outside the Amherst Hotel. Mother & Little Sister are crying. Austin clutches my hand. He is wearing a silk cravat, and I feel soiled beside his handsomeness. But it is Father who carries me onto the stage, though I could have climbed the single step on my own. But I will always be his little invalid, the daughter who had to return from that dame school on account of the croup. Father has given me his own leather satchel, stuffed with gingerbread, angel cake, biscuits, chestnuts, jam, and pie.

  “Emily,” he says, “you must come back to us without all the foolishness and frumpery of Holyoke dames.”

  And realizing that there will soon be a good distance between us, I can afford to be bold.

  “If you think the dames are such frumps, Father, send me to Austin’s school. You could get me in. I’ll wear whiskers and join a secret society. Brother will guard our little game.”

  Father does not laugh. He would be shocked to see me in whiskers, walking on College Hill. His own father helped found the College, ruined himself in the process, & died a broken man. Squire Sam lost the Dickinson Homestead, the first brick house in Amherst, where Brother, Little Sister, & I were born. Father did not abandon the dream of Squire Sam. He rescued the College’s finances & became its treasurer. But he never delivered money he did not have. He is, after all, the earl of Amherst—College & town. Father fights with Democrats all the time. The Democrats would like to form a dictatorship of “fat” farmers, Irish Catholics, & other citified people, while the Whigs are made up of merchants, ministers, bankers, & country lawyers like Pa-pa—“White Heads” who do not labor with their hands. Our Post Master is a Democrat for some reason, & Father finagled to have him removed, but failed, since the Democrats have a certain power in this corner of the Commonwealth. Father does not take kindly to failing. He cannot control the wind, else he would have a tornado tear the roof off the Post Office & hurl the Post Master into the woods. Short of that, he will only satisfy himself when he can repurchase his own father’s house.

  Even were I a general & a Democrat with my own troops, I still wouldn’t go to war against Pa-pa. He has Revolvers in his eyes & could make poor Emily lose her sight. I ruffle his leather satchel with its fundament of cake & pie.

  “Father, I will guard these delicacies with my life.”

  The stage rocks once & takes off from its roost in front of the hotel. I am the lone passenger this morning. We fly from the village with the coachman up front in his tall seat & the baggage boy riding the rear. The wheels seem fragile as we gather speed & I wonder if they will slip from their axles, but we do not crash into a ditch.

  The town disappears into a clutch of dots, & suddenly we are overwhelmed by woods. The trees are a maze of rough & surly bark slashed with hints of green. “It’s the slippery season,” Father loves to say, talking like a farmer in possession of his rye field. But he is even less of a farmer than I am, since I have my own garden that Little Sister tends while I am away. I am a connoisseur of bees, a matriarch of caterpillars, a purveyor of strawberries—but there are nonesuch during the Slippery Season.

  LIKE A YOUNG QUEEN IN HER COACH, I ARRIVE AT SOUTH Hadley as the school’s single topic. I am the girl who came up from Amherst, even though I went down. But such is Holyoke’s peculiar geography that it is always north of somewhere else. The entire school waits on the piazza, looking at me as if I were rent from another time & place, & not good old Emily of the fourth floor. But soon this strange welcome is over with, & I fall back into the rhythm of silent study.

  Rumors are afloat, how Miss Rebecca had to save me from a “liaison” with the Handyman and a trip to Hell. I shudder at the prospect of meeting Missy again. I avoid her and her yellow gloves like the plague. I never had an enemy until I arrived at Holyoke.

  I have another room-mate now. Cousin Lavinia, it seems, does not want to slide into Heathenism with a no-hoper such as myself who may have consorted with Satan. She would rather sleep on the third floor, near a dependable bride of Christ. I am pained to be abandoned by my own cousin, a Norcross no less, & Mother’s favorite niece. But Emily, the little warrior, would rather die than woo her back. Still, my current room-mate, Florence Stone, is foolish & fickle as the wind, & I can hardly get a word out of her.

  “Florence,” I ask, “where is our Handyman? Is he well enough to leave his shack?”

  She looks at me as if I’d just escaped the asylum.

  “Tom,” I insist. “Lord, you can’t possibly miss him. He has the blondest hair in the world.”

  “I do not know of Tom,” she says. “Our Handyman has hair as black as midnight.”

  “Impossible,” I say. “Ill as he was, Tom would not have painted his hair black in a mad fit.”

  But Holyoke must have raised up magicians & rid itself of Tom during my sojourn south. And in his place was a demon with black hair, Richard Midnight—oh, his surname must have been something else, but I called him Midnight. And he was as different from Tom as night to day. He leered at the girls behind Miss Rebecca’s back. I imagined him groping under our pinafores, dreaming of our flesh, fondling us, though I was not privy to what was inside his head.

  Richard Midnight was much more about than Tom ever was. He dined with us, sitting at a separate table, but he was endless in his gaze. And when his eyes happened upon me, with my weak chin & dull red hair, I shivered in my seat, because it was as if a shooting star, terribler than I could have imagined, had ripped right into my heart.

  Midnight must have heard the rumor about me & Tom & assumed I was part of his personal territory. Lord, I would have loved being pierced by the red arrow of Tom’s Tattoo, but not by the gaze of this vulgar man. And I had a suspicion that he would bring harm to myself or another scholar.

  10.

  I TREAD UP TO THE FOURTH FLOOR & FIND A NOTE STUCK to my wardrobe. I recognize Zilpah Marsh’s scratchy hand. “Meet me in the Ironing Room,” she writes, without offering her initials or her name. I have no business in the basement. My ironing is already done. And so I have to risk a black mark for Zil
pah’s sake.

  I ventured down into that half-lit subterranean world where we dine & do our washing & ironing. There was no one but Zilpah in the ironing room. She was leaning over her board with an iron that must have had all the heat of Hell. That’s how loud it hissed. She was working on a pillowcase, & it positively sizzled with each slap of the iron. I hadn’t seen Zilpah in a month & I wasn’t certain if she was friend or foe. Perhaps she’s a little of both.

  Zilpah blinks at me. “Jesus, how did you get so thin?”

  And before I can answer, she says, “A girl would have to be a fool to fall in love with that brother of yours.” Her mustache seems very definite & dark in the somber light of the ironing room. “How many sweethearts does he have?”

  I’m loathe to answer her, but there’s a demon in Zilpah down in the ironing room.

  “You did not even give me a proper introduction,” Zilpah says. “He rushed right past me in the parlor. I could have been a piece of dirt.”

  “I had the croup,” I argue like a counselor at law in my own defense, “and Austin was returning me to head-quarters.”

  “He still could have looked. I had on my prettiest dress. I ironed it until my arm near fell off. But who needs to bother with him? I have a paramour now, and you’ll never guess who.”

  It had to be Richard Midnight. There were no other males in the neighborhood. I feel sorry for Zilpah, that she would give herself to such a snake. That vile man was Mistress Lyon’s protégé, according to Zilpah. Mistress had not found him at any orphans’ cove in the Northampton Insane Asylum. He was her own distant, distant cousin, a boy who had no head for school & had become a butcher’s apprentice. She’d plucked him from a slaughterhouse in Springfield & had him delivered to Holyoke, vile as he was.

  “Sister,” I say, “Richard Midnight is certainly the Devil.”

  And Zilpah smiles a smile that is a mite too clever for me. “Oh, I wouldn’t bother with that ruffian. His breath is foul. It tastes of puke.”