The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  I COULD HAVE GONE BY STAGE, BUT FATHER INSISTED ON driving me in his chariot. It must have been a burden for him. He had court appearances—he was defending a deacon who may have manhandled his wife—and continued to get cattle and horses out of burning barns. The fire-maniac was no less elusive in the final days of August. We’d lost livestock, but Father was grateful that we hadn’t lost any humans yet. The village’s fire alarms had roused families fast enough to flee a conflagration.

  “It’s only a question of time before some little girl is trapped in a fire,” he said, while he clucked at Black Fanny. The reins were taut, and Father’s cheeks were rippling. Black Fanny was as tense as he was. In all my life, I had never met a horse who could mimic Pa-pa’s moods.

  I wasn’t thinking of the maniac. I kept seeing Zilpah grovel under a bridge with dirt in her mouth.

  “Father,” I said, “doesn’t Zilpah remind you of Evelyn O’Hare?”

  Pa-pa looked at me without taking his eyes off Black Fanny.

  “Who’s this Evelyn O’Hare?”

  “You know, that other housekeeper, the one who started wearing a knife in the kitchen, when I was a child. Father, you couldn’t have forgotten. You visited her at the old Lunatic Hospital in Worcester.”

  “I can’t recall,” he said. I could see that the memory was fatal for him, that he chose to forget. And I quickly changed the topic.

  “Father, aren’t you glad the scarlet fever has abated some?”

  “But that fever has never come so early before. It’s Nature’s trick—to lull us into believin’ it won’t be back.”

  I didn’t want to ask him about the deacon and the deacon’s wife, since it would only start an argument. I failed to understand how he could defend a churchman who had nearly strangled his wife and starved her to death—but the law don’t pay attention to such niceties, I’d have to surmise. And it was the deacon who was paying Pa-pa, not the deacon’s wife.

  But I didn’t have to keep dark on the subject of Sue. And while Black Fanny sneezed and plodded through the dust, I started on Sue’s salon.

  “Isn’t Susie divine?” I said. “Making the Evergreens into a magnet—with Mr. Emerson and Mr. Bowles.”

  I must have captured him with that remark. It was the first time Pa-pa took his eyes off the road. “But do you think your brother is happy with her?”

  “He loves her. We all do.”

  “But sometimes I think he’s afraid of his wife.”

  Who in his right mind wouldn’t have been afraid? Not a person alive, even Pa-pa, could stand up to one of Sue’s siroccos. But she was clever enough to work her hottest and coldest winds around him. Brother and I bore the brunt, yet we don’t consider ourselves casualties. There is a certain pleasure in living around a storm.

  Call it coincidence, but Father and I ran into our own sirocco on the ride to Northampton. Dust and wind prevailed. I had never witnessed such perpendicular times. Trees bent in the wind, and branches near poked into our eyes. Father had to leap from the carriage and blind the horse with an old rag, or else Fanny might have plunged off the road. He calmed her, walking beside his mare, with his sturdy fire marshal’s cape slung around his head.

  26.

  WE ARRIVED LATE IN NORTHAMPTON, CREPT RIGHT OUT OF that dust storm with Fanny half insane. Father sang to her a full twenty minutes—a nonsense song—or we would have had to park Fanny inside the asylum and leave her there to rot. What thrilled me so wasn’t simply Father’s devotion to his horse, but the sheer pleasure that went into his song.

  Fan-ny, Fan-ny, Fan-ny Poo

  She’s all black and she’s all blue

  She’s my darling dearest queen

  Who can’t be found, can’t be seen.

  Pa-pa did talk Poetry, but only with his horse. The rest of the world was pure Prose, including his court cases, his fire truck, and his family—and the lunatic hospital at Northampton.

  I had not seen it until now. It was a marvel in my own backwoodsman’s mind. It must have been modeled after the royal palace at Versailles, or some other chateau that escaped my familiarity. It had a front lawn ten times as large as the Amherst Commons, but without a swamp or a frog pond. It had cupolas and spires that rose above its many roofs like great silvered teeth. It had a freshwater pond as fragile as glass and a winding road a little like a maze that any child might conquer in a minute. Forgive me, but I fancied this asylum as a huge dollhouse.

  Yet Pa-pa wasn’t the master of these dolls. He’d come to soothe, just as he’d soothed Evelyn O’Hare at the hospital in Worcester. Yet he couldn’t seem to make up his mind about us womenfolk. He took care of us, but in his own heart he must have felt that we were crippled creatures—mermaids who couldn’t swim. Daughters don’t matter much. I was a cripple to him, in spite of all my Plumage. But I did have a special place at this asylum.

  Since Pa-pa was a trustee, I was given the status of a local princess who could enter any room without the need of a magic wand. But in spite of my sudden royalty, I had not come for a grand tour of this dollhouse.

  “I would like to see a certain Zilpah Marsh,” I announced to the hospital’s warden, in my own new manner of a whispering princess.

  “Miss Dickinson, it will not be pretty. I can promise you that.”

  The warden was a peculiarity, both a giant and a gnome—hence a small man who seemed huge, or perhaps it was the irregularity of a head that protruded like a dome and sat on weak, inferior legs. He had his own strange suit of armor to protect him from all the folly and the whims of an asylum, with padding on his thighs and chest and a helmet that would have looked correct on a conquistador. Jeremiah Adams he was, a Harvard man who had fallen from grace and sat out his exile in Northampton. He’d been a churchman once, but I would swear that Warden Jeremiah had gone over to the Devil’s domain. And that was why I felt a singular bond with him.

  He led me through a labyrinth of rooms and delivered me himself to a great hall where the hardest cases were kept—it must have been the largest dormitory in creation, so vast that it was impossible to gaze at from end to end. It would have been far too kind to call it a human sea. The men I saw chained to their beds had the shrewd, silent eyes of animals. Not one jot of recognition passed from them to me.

  An image of our Orchard crept into my brain. Pa-pa’s Orchard frightened me sometimes. It was like a solitary Eden after God had fled, after the fall of the first man. And one afternoon in the Orchard I saw a little troupe of wild, hungry bears. They had the very eyes of these chained men, shrewd beyond my own capacity to comprehend, and of a meanness I had never encountered before. The hungry bears had no intent to harm me, nor did they acknowledge my right to be in their Orchard. They rooted with a clumsiness that did not have a touch of grace. Relentless hunger must have dimmed their minds. They found no food. They did not seem to know where to look. I had a terrible urge to feed the bears out of my own hand, but I never did. Perhaps they were not as luckless as these luckless men. They did not live in a dormitory, did not have to endure such a terrible sea.

  Never mind the foul aromas; the sick-room at Mt Holyoke had smelled far worse—still, I could not help but feel that Jeremiah was keeping his own sort of stable, that I was visiting a menagerie where chained men had lost all sense of measure and survived without the least curiosity.

  “Warden, where are the women?”

  “Wait,” he said. “Miss Dickinson, if such creatures were trapped in a fire and could not escape, would you mourn them?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “But they have no more sensibility than a milk cow.”

  “I am fond of cows,” I said. “Where is Zilpah Marsh?”

  We walked what felt like a mile because of all those faces that had so little need to search. And then we arrived at the women’s sector, which did not have the least mark of separation from the men’s menagerie. But it was still like stepping through a wall of glass. The women’s zone was shoddier and filthier, and the patients here even
more primitive in their passions. They did not have the shrewd eyes of the deranged dormitory men. Their eyes were much more savage…and strangely serene, as if they dwelled within a maelstrom of conflicting emotion.

  I felt attached to these piteous women by some powerful cord or string. They were not absent, like the men, in some far field. We could have been sisters in the same irregular sewing circle, where needles were sharp as knives, and we were all at risk of being punctured by some devil of a man. They moaned aloud and hurled cries at walls that could not answer. Jeremiah’s assistants, who also wore helmets and quilted armor, struck women who tried to lunge at me despite their shackles. They meant no harm; they wanted to welcome me into their sisterhood, or so I imagined.

  But still Jeremiah’s assistants struck, and struck again with their clubs.

  “Warden, Sir,” I whispered, “you must not have your men strike these poor souls.”

  “But they are feral, Miss Dickinson, and could be dangerous. Can’t you see the madness in their eyes?”

  I would not listen to his musings. I myself was sickened by what I saw. I could only stop his men from swinging if I stepped in the path of their clubs—and I did.

  Jeremiah panicked. “Miss Dickinson, you could harm yourself. Please. Your father will remove me from my post.” A fly was buzzing in my ear. And that’s when I discovered her. She too was shackled to her bed. Her hair had been shorn, and she had a scalp of tiny tufts, as if her own head had become a wild country. And her mustache had been allowed to grow—for a minute I thought she was a man.

  Her eyes were riveted on me, but I felt no alarm.

  “Mistress,” she said by way of hello, “I’m parched.”

  It mattered little now that Zilpah had once presided over a nest of burglars. She near broke my heart.

  “Jeremiah Adams, you will bring this classmate of mine some water, else I will flog the whole lot of you.”

  My voice startled me—frightened me, in fact—since I had roared like a lion. Jeremiah let me have his own flask of fresh water, and I fed her water from the flask’s silver cup. The chains were tight, and Zilpah could hardly maneuver her head. I had to hold her chin with one hand, tilt the cup, and pour water into her mouth.

  She didn’t moan like the other shackled women. She smacked her lips after she drank.

  “Miss Emily, that was delicious.”

  And such was Father’s authority at the lunatic hospital that I told the warden to unshackle her. He looked at me as if I too belonged in the women’s sector.

  “That’s a stark impossibility, Miss Dickinson. I will not go against the interests of my own institution no matter what sway your father has.”

  He must have thought he was on stage, performing some trifle at the local athenaeum, where he himself was the star. But he was not the star today—Zilpah was, even in her shackles.

  “Sir, you will unshackle Mistress Marsh post haste, or I will bring you and your duplicitous men up before my father’s board.”

  “On what complaint?” he asked.

  All the women, in spite of their incapacity, pricked up their ears.

  “Manhandling your own patients with those pernicious clubs of yours.”

  “That’s preposterous,” he said, “a wholesale lie.”

  But he motioned to his men, had them use their clubs as mallets to knock asunder the iron pegs of Zilpah’s shackles until her arms and legs were free. She lay there frozen, unable to grasp that the guards themselves had liberated her.

  “Rise, you wretch,” said the warden. “You have a benefactress now.”

  “I didn’t ask,” she said. But she did stand up and pirouette once on her shaky legs, while the other women stared in disbelief.

  “And where will you take your new charge, Miss Dickinson? To have some tea in the tearoom, behind a curtain?”

  “You will not curtain her,” I said. “You have an excellent lawn. I propose to sample it. We will have our constitutional on the grass, Miss Marsh and I.”

  “In front of our guests, with children and members of the clergy about?”

  The warden groaned, but he and his assistants led us through a packet of rear rooms that must have served as living quarters for some of these men. I discovered a blackened collar and long underpants strewn over a chair, empty bottles of ale, tattered stockings, a crooked line of boots—all with the odor of a chicken barn.

  We left this bachelors’ retreat and landed at a side entrance of the sanitarium. Jeremiah tried to steer us away from the front lawn, but I would have none of his tricks. I strutted with Zilpah on the hospital’s grounds, with its oval pond of rippled glass. The warden had covered her in a cape and given her a hat to hide her haphazard hair, so that she wouldn’t astonish visitors or the faculty. But Zilpah behaved like a duchess, bowing to women on the front lawn and flirting with the men, who did not seem to mind her mustache. But it was only pretended pluck. She began to shiver and moan midway through our walk.

  “Mistress, I’m so ashamed of how I look…couldn’t we stand behind the pond, away from people?”

  “Zilpah Marsh, I will not hide one of my classmates.”

  “And you won’t let the warden’s men tickle me with their clubs?”

  “No one will tickle you, I promise.”

  She tugged at the brim of her borrowed hat.

  “Mustn’t treat me like a grand lady, Mistress, or the little ladies on my ward will be jealous, and they’ll bite my titties off the first chance they get.”

  “Then I’ll have you transferred to another institution. My father has the power to do so.”

  She laughed. “I always liked the Master. I could get around him, but not you, Miss Em’ly—you were my iron mistress.”

  And then she did cry and insist she would cry forever unless I forgave her.

  “Zilpah, I’m not a constable or a priest. I—Lord, I forgive you.”

  That seemed to satisfy her, and she muttered something.

  “Repeat yourself,” I said. “I cannot hear.”

  “Then listen harder. I can tell ya who your maniac is.”

  I began to doubt Zilpah for the first time in her new abode.

  “What would you know about the Amherst fire-maniac? You’ve been locked away in Northampton.”

  I did not want her revelations—I feared them. But I could not remove the lightning in my mind as I pictured Tom the Handyman, my Tom, burning barns.

  “Have you seen your old accomplice, Tom?” I asked, trying to fend her off with my own infernal logic. I was hoping to launch her into some tale where she would forget the maniac. But she grew indignant.

  “I may have been a housekeeper, Miss Em’ly, but I started as a scholar, same as you, and scholars learn to listen. I read the Republican—after every wretch in the asylum reads it and the pages come to me torn. There are mentions of the Master as town fire marshal. I prayed he wouldn’t get burnt in a barn. And I asked all my visitors about him.”

  “I’m not your first visitor?” I asked like a petulant child.

  “No, Mistress, you are not. My Ma-ma’s friends come on the morning coach whenever they can—maids and such, housekeepers at the college. And they heard about this boy at Mr. Sweetser’s general store who hated the town. Seniors from Alpha Delta Phi had made fun of him, thrown him in the frog pond as a prank, and he got surly with customers at the store until Sweetser had to fire him. And so he took his revenge on the farmers he thought had slighted him at Sweetser’s. Some of the maids saw him skulking around under the railroad tracks.”

  “But why didn’t they tell my father or the Sheriff?”

  “They’re maids, Miss Em’ly, feared of sheriffs and squires.”

  “And so they let the barns burn and kept their own little private peace.”

  “Ain’t I tellin’ ya now?”

  “But you could have told my father when you saw him and saved a barn or two.”

  Zilpah looked at me as if I were the number one lunatic of our Commonwealth.
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  “He’s the Master,” she said. “I wouldn’t have dared—besides, the boy is gone. Did as much destruction as he cared to do.”

  “But why are you so sure?”

  “The maids swore on the Bible that he abandoned his perch under the tracks.”

  “And you believe them?”

  “Yes, I do. They ain’t liars and hypocrites like some people I know. You tried to steal my Tom. You tracked him down with your devil-dog. And he didn’t even remember you. Miss Em’ly, I’d call that a lasting impression.”

  She started to laugh and writhe like a woman in the midst of pleasuring a man—at least that is what I fancied she was doing. Her motions grew fiercer and fiercer, and she spat at me and Jeremiah, who was beside himself.

  “She’ll ruin my reputation,” he said, wringing his hands. “I never should have listened to you. I’ll throw her in the attic. She can dine on spiders and rat tails.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” I said, but I could not keep her from writhing on the lawn.

  A crowd began to collect. Children wet their fingers and pointed at Zilpah, as if they themselves had manufactured her out of the summer wind. Their mothers could not drive them away from the spectacle. Zilpah spat at mothers and children alike. “Rat turds and spider tails,” she howled. Then she stood in place and called to me. “Mistress, did you see my Tom?”

  “Answer her,” Jeremiah hissed in my ear. “I implore you. It will calm her down.”

  But I could not answer. I feared the tale she had to tell.

  “Tom didn’t know I was carrying his child. I locked myself inside a corselet, and wore one of his long shirts at night. He couldn’t rob houses and worry about a sweetheart who was vomiting into a paper sack. I didn’t want to slow him down. I left him, left him flat, figuring I would catch up with him later when I wasn’t such a hindrance. But I never did find him again.”