The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  It was Susan herself who joggled me out of my silence.

  “Emily dear, must our guest repeat himself? Tell Mr. Bowles about your love of Mrs. Browning.”

  “When I read her I can feel a furnace inside my head. I cannot seem to stop. It’s as if a demon were chasing me.”

  “Or a lady poet’s muse perhaps,” said the Sheik.

  I echoed him. “Perhaps. That furnace explodes, but still I can’t stop. I shrink with every explosion, while the furnace fattens.”

  The Sheik stroked his beard with the long, crisp fingers of a piano player. “That’s as fine a definition of poetry as I’ve ever heard. Mr. Dickinson, don’t you agree?”

  But Austin might just as well have been invisible. He was little more than an appendage to Susie’s salon. That love of poetry has fled his face. I’d be willing to wager a dozen Lexicons that my poor lonesome brother no longer dreams of diadems and dirks. He’d gone north in his own mind after the marriage, though he lived but a house away. He couldn’t seem to settle in with Sue. Her displeasure at a man’s “low practices” must have insaned him a bit. He seldom visited us at the Homestead.

  “I have no such furnace,” Brother said, and I wished for a moment that I could rip him right out of time and lend him his old room. He’d vanished into the Evergreens with an air of bewilderment, but Mr. Bowles’s visit had brought some color back into Austin’s face. Bowles had come here to report on an agricultural show in Belchertown and decided to pay a visit to Susie’s salon.

  We drink wine and sup on cucumbers and cold meats. I can feel my heart lurch. I’m always scheming. I wonder if Mr. Bowles is a bachelor and might be interested in a maiden of twenty-seven. But I learn soon enough that he’s a married man with a brood of his own. His wife, I am told, had been made somber by a stillborn child, and “Mr. Sam” was said to travel with female companions; filled with wine, I fancy myself as one such female companion. I wouldn’t have to travel very far with my Sheik, but would have to stay in fashion and visit one of the bonnet rooms in Springfield until Father caught wind of his daughter’s new double life—mistress and old maid. He’d martyr himself for Miss Emily, give up his delight in the pages of the Republican, and drive Mr. Sam from our shire with a swift kick.

  But I’m the vainest of girls. One look in the mirror cures me of all my vanities. Our Mister, I realize, has scant interest in an old maid. He’s absorbed in the mistress of the house. Her dark eyes and brooding look seem to touch his appetite. We sit over our wine and play whist, while my Susie and Mr. Sam steal glances at one another. I fear for my brother but don’t say a word. She’s smitten with Mr. Sam. But she’s careful not to flirt. Susan’s the pirate who never seeks the far flood, as she says in her poem.

  But all that hot current is deflected when Mr. Bowles challenges Austin to a game of shuttlecock. Susan and I act as referees as our two warriors exhaust themselves wafting into the air that cork ball with its cluster of feathers; I have to hold Carlo down, or he’d chase the shuttlecock, catch it in his mouth, and both referees would have to interrupt their calls of “fair” or “foul.”

  Mr. Sam is a marvel with the battledore—I am dizzified. I have never seen such deftness with a weapon made of gut. He moves with all the agility of a dancer or an acrobat, while my poor brother flails at the shuttlecock and watches it fly into the ceiling, the furniture, or one of the walls. And I am forced to cry “foul, most foul.” He has to relinquish the battledore to Susan, who has a steadier stroke and gives Mr. Bowles a much longer run.

  Helpless, hardly a match for Susan or Mr. Bowles, I remain the referee. The sun begins to vanish from the walls. There are too many shadows, too many haunted spots, to play in the irregular light of a candle or a lamp. Brother seizes the battledore again and promptly loses the feathered ball in the dark of the ceiling. We search and search but cannot find the feathers. Brother is crestfallen, while Susan lets out a great laugh that resounds in my ears like the roar of a giant.

  “Good Lord, that birdie stunted us. But dearest, you must not mope. We will find that feathered thing in the morning, won’t we, Emily?”

  But she don’t allow me to answer. She serves some berry wine that Lavinia and I concocted in our kitchen and she salutes the wine-makers.

  “Emily is a wonder, Mr. Sam. She could enter her wine at any fair or cattle show.”

  “It’s Lavinia’s hand,” I whisper against the musical wind of Susan’s voice. “I squashed the berries, that’s all.”

  “It’s delicious,” says Mr. Bowles, while a drop of wine spills onto his beard—I would love to lick it off, considering he looks Arabian, and I have no more morals than a harem girl.

  Then I can feel that triangular light jumping off the walls. It’s Father with his lantern, come to fetch me, although there ain’t a hundred yards between his house and the Evergreens. Even my dog is worried, but he don’t growl.

  “It was divine to meet you,” I say to Mr. Bowles, putting on my feathers again, but false ones, since I couldn’t let him know how attached to him I was after one afternoon and evening at the Evergreens. But that’s how love is—impractical and foolish. It flares up and spreads through your loins faster than a burning barn.

  I’m all aglow, but he can’t decipher my deep blush in the lantern light. I shake his hand and try not to let him comprehend the electrical sparks in my skin.

  “Thank you for your company, Miss Dickinson, and for the berry wine.”

  Carlo and I alight from the Evergreens as quickly as we can and fall into the glow of Father’s lantern. My heart pounds beneath my shivering. The hand that clutches the lantern is wavering with all of Father’s fury. “Dolly,” he says to spite me and turn me back into a child. “Do you have any wonder what the hour is? Near midnight.”

  I say not a word. Not even feathers can help me now. I cannot plume myself against his fury. I walk behind Pa-pa.

  23.

  WE LOST SIX BARNS IN JULY, AND THE AUGUST WIND WAS LIKE hot parchment that could crackle into fire. Father would return home as morose as some veteran of a vicious war, his hands and face marked with all the black vapors off burning wood. He had to buy a dozen new handkerchiefs at Sweetser’s store, since he never approached a hot barn without a handkerchief under his eyes.

  The Elder seemed to have little fear. He’d lope into a barn and save half a dozen horses and cows, and sometimes he’d come out of that inferno with a piglet in his arms. There was no point in talking caution to Pa-pa. He wasn’t going to have some malcontent or malicious fire-maniac destroy the village and break its morale. Father was the first one into the fire and the last one home. There wasn’t a citizen in Amherst who did not step out of the Squire’s path whenever he took to strolling.

  And I was Mr. Dickinson’s whimsical daughter who pranced about the village with a large dog. I am indulged, smiled upon, a maiden moving toward thirty who didn’t even have the wherewithal to become a schoolmistress. But my voice could never arrive at the far end of a class, and what principal in his right mind would allow me to keep Carlo under the desk?

  I have my garden and my observatory at the eastern edge of the house, where I keep a writing stand like some clerk and scribble whatever nonsense flies into my head while I tend to my plants. But I wouldn’t leave Father to find the fire-maniac all alone. If I can’t be a sentinel, I can at least be a spy. Carlo and his mistress inspect the fields behind our own barn, and as I beat the tall grass for any signs of a maniac, somebody bumps along like an enormous rodent.

  “Desist,” I squeak. “Reveal your face, or I’ll send my dog after your throat.”

  He rises out of the grass, unmasks himself, removes his straw hat, and the sunlight dances off the damaged side of his face. He has been following me and my dog, and Carlo is such a magnificent hound that he never listened to Breckenbridge’s footsteps. That old master of the rum resort had crept up behind us with impunity.

  “I was waitin’ for you, Miss.”

  “Mr. Breckenbridge, you
could have rung at our door. It is not as if you are a perfect stranger. My dog treats you as kin.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to come a-calling,” he says. “I’m on a secret mission, sort of.”

  “Breck, I can’t believe you’re the fire-maniac. And if you are, you’d best abscond. I might not tattle on you for old time’s sake.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Old time’s sake. A certain party is back in town, and he says, ‘Do us a favor and find me Currer Bell.’”

  I’m shivering, but I do not show it. “But that was long ago, Mr. Breckenbridge. There is no Currer Bell—that’s Charlotte Brontë, and she’s in her grave.”

  “That’s the pith of it, Miss. This party implored me to find you. He’s waitin’ in the graveyard. And he’s running out of time. The sheriffs of five counties are after him.”

  I start to shiver from the shock. “But Brainard was a scholar,” I insist.

  “Well, his scholarship has taken a poor turn. Rum has ruined milord. He’s a cardsharper and a bit of a scamp.”

  “You slander him,” I say.

  “Well, slander or not, Miss, you’d best hurry. Posse’s approaching, and the clock’s ticking faster than milord can wait.”

  And hurry I did. We ran across the fields, dodging butterflies as huge as gold ingots, and trying not to trample on the crickets. There wasn’t a soul in the cemetery, not that I could see. But when Carlo and I rushed through the rear gate, we found milord leaning against a crooked stone.

  He was as pale and worn as an old candle, but he could still trouble a spinster’s heart. My Tutor from Mars taught me all about Domingo. He tasted sweet. His mind was quick as a dirk. And he moved with a sudden poetry. I’m not worried about what Susan calls “a man’s requirements.” I only wish that Brainard required me. I’d use the graveyard as a bower, and let the Devil drop me into Hell!

  But Brainard has a saturnine look, and I have to be bolder than my Domingo.

  “Darling,” I shout in my pygmy voice that can’t even shatter the silence of a graveyard. “I need another nom de guerre. Currer Bell is out of fashion ever since poor Charlotte Brontë couldn’t prove she wasn’t a man.”

  He laughs, but he still don’t hold me in his arms. “Then what nom de guerre would you like?”

  “My father used to call me Dolly. But he’s been distributing that name around, and it’s lost its pungent flavor.”

  “Then I’ll call you Daisy, the flower girl.”

  I’ll be damned if Brainard didn’t tame time. I’m the belle I used to be, and the rascal has made me blush. I am the flower girl—his flower.

  “But I shan’t accept it, darling, if you’ve used that name on another.”

  “Ah,” he says, “will you hold me to that promise?”

  He’s wearing a summer coat with frayed sleeves and a cravat with crooked strings. His shoes want a little polishing, but I’d take him to the shoemaker and buy him another pair with Pa-pa’s money if he’d promise to marry me, and even if he don’t. He intoxicates me in a way that Mr. Bowles never could. I wouldn’t mind being part of his seraglio, the biggest part. But I still can’t get much of a proposal out of him. Instead he drills Shakespeare into my eardrum, pretends we’re Antony and Cleopatra escaping from the battle of Actium. But he must be a confidence man, or how else would he know to seize the words of Cleopatra for himself and let me have the role of that love-sick general, Marc Antony, who gives up half the world and all his wealth for that conniving queen? “Forgive my fearful sails!” my Domingo says. “I little thought you would have follow’d.”

  “Egypt, thou knew’st too well,” I whisper. “My heart was to thy rudder tied by strings…”

  And both of us luxuriate in the village yard with words that have a lover’s lightning—lightning that can shake the world, invert what is for what ought to be.

  “Daisy, how many boys have asked for your hand while I’ve been gone from Amherst?”

  “Not a one,” I say, removing Antony’s armor and painting myself as Cleopatra with all her guile. “But if truth be known, I would have kissed my Philadelphia if he’d given me half the chance.”

  “Phil-a-del-phi-a?” Domingo says, toying with that word upon his tongue.

  “That’s what I call him—not to his face. I met him but once.”

  “Another handyman, I suppose, who can neither read nor write.”

  “You insult me, darling. He’s a minister—a married man. The Reverend Wadsworth. And the sermon he delivered could have made a rhinoceros weep—it turned me to ice. It was as if he disrobed while he talked and I could see terrible puckers of pain upon his skin. I suspect that half the womenfolk inside the church wanted to comfort Mr. Wadsworth, hold him in their arms. The Reverend Wadsworth is a minister much in demand, as you might imagine.”

  “What was a country girl doing in Philadelphia?”

  “Visitin’ with Lavinia,” I say. “She’s the prettier one, who really looks like Cleopatra. The two of us went to Washington to see the sights while Father was still in Congress, and we stopped off in Philadelphia to see Eliza, our second cousin.”

  “And did she fall in love with this minister who bleeds so lightly under his skin?”

  “No. Eliza thought him dragonish. She was frightened of the fire he breathes upon his flock—I am the culprit, dear Domingo, your Daisy.”

  He picks up my tiny freckled hand and peruses it. “Is that the hand that kings have trembled to kiss?”

  “Yes,” I warble like the asp that poisoned Cleopatra—longing to poison my Domingo, not to destroy him, mind, but make him my prisoner, hold him in my box of Phantoms, but then I remember that Phantoms can’t play.

  I whisper now. “Darling, your unsightly friend from the rum resort, Mr. Breckenbridge, has slandered you. He says you’re a cardsharp.”

  “But I am, Daisy, I am. I’ve been haunting the railroad cars on your father’s line and fleecing whatever customers I can.”

  “It’s not Father’s line,” I manage to say, camouflaging the shock I’m in. Father had brought a branch line to our village, the Amherst and Belchertown Railroad, but he wasn’t its president or principal owner. He was proud of that line, though it was near to bankruptcy and had to be financed all over again.

  “Your father’s line or not, the railroad detectives are after me—my picture is up at the Post Office, even if they haven’t tied my name to it yet.”

  “Lord,” I moan like someone seized by Satan, “how did you get from tutorin’ to stealing at cards?”

  “They’re not so far apart. Both take a kind of persuasion. Besides, I’m good at it, and Yale relieved me of my services years ago.”

  “But I could go to Father. He might be able to help.”

  “And do what? Ask me to become his handyman?”

  He laughs at Emily the naïf, sheltered as she is like a nun, and then he touches my cheek.

  “Daisy, I came here for one thing. I wanted to have a look at you before I go West, I wanted to squeeze you until you begged for mercy.”

  “I wouldn’t beg,” I say. “I’d ask for more.”

  It was no lie. Sitting on Brainard’s lap in a rum resort was just about the most salient event of my life. I ought be ashamed to admit it, but I’m not.

  And then Satan did seize me up and sing in my voice. “Darling, take me with you, take me to your West, where I can rip off my petticoats and pan for gold.”

  Suddenly my Domingo stops leaning on his stone. I’ve aroused him from that little game in the graveyard—and it’s no more Antony and Cleopatra, but a misbegotten Tutor and an old maid.

  “Daisy,” he says, “I’ll have to pay a price for one last look at you. But if I steal you from Amherst—”

  “Darling, I’m the one who’s stealing you.”

  “But the result is the same. Your Father and his railroad men will have my head.”

  “Then I’ll call you John the Baptist, and parade around with that head of yours in my pocket.”<
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  But I’m troubled by my own conceit, and I start to cry. “Flee, you hear—go on without me.”

  And it’s then, and only then, while I’m as confused and weak as a frog in a pond of crocodiles, that this cardsharper takes me in his arms and sucks at my face. I might have swooned after a kiss like that if he hadn’t kissed me once before in the rum resort, and it was the recollection of such a kiss that saved my sanity and kept me on my feet.

  “Daisy,” he says, while I’m still recuperating, “meet me at the Amherst depot in five hours.”

  “Won’t the railroad detectives be waiting for you?”

  “Yes, but I’ll make myself scarce until my Daisy arrives, and she’ll be my salvation—they see their sharper as a lone wolf, and they won’t expect to find him with a girl in a summer bonnet.”

  “I have to warn you, Brainard, I won’t be carrying much coin under my bonnet—I’m not an heiress.”

  He laughed and swooped down to kiss me again, but I might not have survived it and gotten to the railroad depot in time. And so I pulled away from him as gently as I could, but could still hear him call.

  —Daisy, remember. Don’t be late.

  24.

  MY ROMANCE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH SEASONS OR practical considerations. I likened myself to Mrs. Browning. Not with her beauty, of course, but with her desire to escape an overbearing father and be with the man she loved. Brainard Rowe wasn’t Mr. Browning, and couldn’t afford to take me to Italy. But Daisy don’t need the Florentine. I’d wear a vail and bite back whatever dust the West can bring.

  I was in misery over my dog. I couldn’t hide Carlo in a carpetbag—he’s much too grandiose. And the conductors would be mighty suspicious if I tried to board the train with him. They’d brand me as Mr. Dickinson’s daughter. We’d never even get past the terminus at Montague. The railroad detectives would handcuff Brainard and escort me home with my hound. They’d keep my name and Carlo’s from the Republican, out of respect for Father and his relationship to the line.