The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  “What happened to the baby?” I asked, with a fist squeezing my heart.

  “I kilt it with a knitting needle while it was roosting in my belly. I kilt it dead, and when it washed out of me, it didn’t even have Tom’s blue eyes. I wasn’t sorry.”

  She started to writhe again—it wasn’t the rhythm of a woman pleasuring a man. She was reliving that descent into the dark, giving birth to her own butchered baby. The writhing stopped, and she lunged at the children, tried to rip at them with her own bruised fingernails. Jeremiah’s men rushed at her in their quilted suits and knocked her to the ground.

  “Moses,” the warden whispered, “do you have the mask?”

  His men blocked my avenue to Zilpah; they leaned over and stifled her in a leather mask that enclosed her mouth and left her half blind. She kicked and fought, and they beat her with their clubs.

  “Miss Dickinson,” the warden said, “you must not interfere.”

  But interfere I did. I tore into his quilted men with my own feeble fists. They swatted me away as they would a fly. I was no longer a local princess. I was nothing to them. They were beholden to Jeremiah, not the daughter of a backwoods squire. I fell upon the grass, bewildered by an array of trees with brutal red veins in their bark, as if the trunks could bleed a brilliant red.

  The battle was lost. Jeremiah’s quilted men were dragging her along the grass as I struggled to my knees. And that’s when I saw Pa-pa in that miraculous stride of his, like Oliver Cromwell, loping across the lawn. He had his gold-crowned walking stick, but he did not have to wield it as a weapon. One look at the anger in his eyes had stopped the quilted men in their tracks. Jeremiah tried to remove the mask, but she gripped it with all her life and disallowed him to do so.

  “Squire,” he said, “your own daughter is a witness. We gave Miss Marsh her liberty. We let her have access to the lawn. And how does she repay us? She spat at children and nearly clawed them to death. We had to restrain her.”

  “Warden,” Father said, his eyebrows bristling, “I see no other casualties but Miss Marsh herself.”

  It was then that my classmate proved her worth; she was the duchess of Northampton, despite her debilities. She ignored Jeremiah, ignored his men, ignored me, and took Pa-pa’s arm, as if she had never been beaten and was not wearing a leather mask.

  “Master,” she said, “how nice of you to call on me.”

  And she strolled with Pa-pa, who was astute enough not to mention the mask. I could not read her expression, or catch more than a hint of her eyes, but I like to think that she took some pride in walking with Pa-pa. Not one child pointed to her now. Women curtsied, and men bowed. She could have been his daughter, a devil, or his bride. Perhaps she was all three. I’d never seen Pa-pa with so gallant a stride. His knees had their own melody on this lunatics’ lawn. We walked behind him and the duchess, as part of Pa-pa’s train. I bit back my own jealousy. I couldn’t stop thinking of Zilpah’s butchered child, and the life’s blood leaking down her legs.

  And I wasn’t an inchworm closer to comprehending Pa-pa’s mystery. He fed us, loved us, would have devoured half the world for his family, but he never looked at Ma-ma, Austin, Lavinia, or me the way he admired Zilpah in her leather mask. It wasn’t longing, no, and it wasn’t pity. I’d swear on my Lexicon that Zilpah had unshackled him while he was on this lawn. She was another mermaid who couldn’t swim, a female creature, but perhaps it was her lower station that allowed him to reveal a certain tenderness. He didn’t have to be lawyer or squire or congressman with a stable hand’s girl. He could be what he always was, a backwoods boy without a mask of grandeur.

  Zilpah walked without having to say another word, arm in arm with Pa-pa, whose redheaded daughter fell far behind.

  My Philadelphia

  Emily had her own secret service. She couldn’t write directly to Rev. Wadsworth, have her letters delivered to the post office. It would have brought scandal right to the Squire—his old maid of a daughter scribbling “love letters” to a married man. So she folded each letter to Rev. Wadsworth into a letter to one of her confidantes, who lived in Springfield. And the minister’s rare letters to her would arrive from the same confidante. Thus Emily had established a private post office.

  She had asked him to be her pastor, to counsel her from afar. His letters were formal but not unfriendly, though the minister couldn’t even spell her name. “My Dear Miss Dickenson,” he wrote, as if she were the son or daughter of Mr. Charles Dickens. He talked about the “affliction” that had befallen her, without realizing that he was her affliction. But it was her fault. How could she tell the minister of the Arch Street Church that she had fallen in love with him like a madwoman during the length of one sermon that he had delivered five years ago? And it was not the words themselves that had moved her, but the way he delivered them, as if he had a typhoon in his chest.

  The Reverend Wadsworth was a Witch. She had always believed that men made the best witches, and he was the prime example, with his cream-colored hands and volcanic eyes that could reduce her to ashes. She had called him “My Philadelphia” in her little notebook, but she couldn’t even hint at love in her letters. And so like the feeblest of female witches, she went at him with little tricks. She deplored her own dishonesty. But she couldn’t let go of her affliction.

  His mother had just died, and the minister wore black for an entire year, but that didn’t keep him from lecturing in New England. He spoke of stealing a visit on one of his tours, but Emily didn’t believe it. Her heart palpitated nonetheless. She was in constant readiness, like a live torpedo. She ordered a new housedress, and wouldn’t have Lavinia measured for it in her place; Emily saw the seamstress herself. She had become as volcanic as Sue. She could erupt at any minute. Lavinia had never seen her sister so full of conflicting moods. She would chatter and then shut up. She would laugh at some silliness and then start to cry.

  “It’s her monthlies,” Lavinia said. “My poor sister is driven by the moon.”

  Perhaps she was. But Emily was in despair. “Philadelphia” would never arrive at her father’s door. And then she heard the bell pull. And she panicked. She who never answered the door ran downstairs with tiny incautious hops, her heart in its own deep crisis.

  And there he was, all dressed in black, as if he were mourning Emily’s own reckless love without even knowing it. He’d aged in five years. His mouth was pursed. His hair had gray patches and no longer covered his ears. But his eyes held the same fury for her. He was an adorable Witch.

  She introduced him to Father, Mother, and Vinnie as her minister from Philadelphia, who had stopped at Amherst to give her spiritual guidance. It wasn’t so much of a lie. Father and Mother took it as a sign that their rebel daughter was returning to the Lord. But she bridled all through dinner, imagined black smoke escaping from the top of her head. She wanted Rev. Wadsworth all to herself.

  He could not stay very long, but he did have time to walk with Emily in the Dickinson meadow. She would have gone back to the Lord, prayed through eternity, if she could just hold his hand. He stooped. There were marks of sorrow on his face.

  “I should like to know of your affliction,” he said.

  Suddenly all her sauce had some back.

  “What about your own affliction, Sir?”

  She’d startled him, and he stood in the April grass.

  “My dear mother passed but six months ago.”

  “Reverend, it runs much deeper than that.”

  A smile appeared on his pinched lips. “You are most clever, Miss Dickinson.”

  She did not spar with him. She made no quip.

  “I am prone to melancholy,” he said. “I had it as a boy. It was like a fever that riddled my youth. I adopted another name—Sedley. I wrote verses. But Sedley was no more authentic than Charles Wadsworth.”

  She had to intervene. “Sir, you are twice as authentic as any man I have ever met.”

  “Dear child, you must let me speak. I thought to drown myself in
Sedley, to bully him and thus shake off my melancholic moods. But soon I hated him, just as I hated myself. I have no merit. I sing for my supper, whether poet or preacher.”

  “But your songs have seized my heart. And I have been smitten by no other sermons, Reverend.”

  “Because you sensed the flutter behind my mask, the song beneath the song—and hollowness can sometimes move half the world, my dear Miss Dickinson.”

  She longed to disappear with him in her father’s meadow and never, never come out. And she could no longer play the minister’s little disciple. She had to declare her love.

  “You slander yourself. The hollowness you talk of is a numbing pain. I drink it every morning. It is my daily dose.”

  “But I cannot help you.”

  “You already have,” she said. “You exist, my dear sweet minister. That is enough.”

  She fell silent after that. They walked out of her father’s meadow, out of the wet grass. Her face was flushed. Her heart pounded. He touched her hand as he took leave of her. She had been mistaken about his hands. They were not the color of cream. His hands were red and rough as claws.

  They astonished her for a moment, and he could read the alarm in her eyes.

  Quietly he put on his gloves.

  “Forgive me. I did not mean to shock…You have witnessed the scars of my youth. I was born rich. My father was the lord of Litchfield, the owner of a mill. But he died suddenly, and how could a boy of sixteen pay off his father’s debts? I was trundled off to a charity school for would-be ministers, a manual labor camp that was little better than a jailhouse. I had to wash the dishes for a hundred scamps like myself, in scalding water. And the results of my labor are these monstrous hands.”

  “They are not monstrous,” she said, but they were, and she hungered to hold his hands, to soothe him and herself. But he wouldn’t part with his gloves.

  “Adieu, my dear Miss Dickinson.”

  And he was gone before she could whisper his name.

  PART FOUR

  The Vampyre of Cambridgeport

  86 Austin Street

  Cambridgeport, July 1864

  27.

  THE UNION DEAD WERE POSTED ON THE DOORS OF EVERY church and public building. And the bells tolled every day for the dead sons of Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown; the horse-cars stopped while the bells tolled and would not pick up passengers. Members of the Civilian Guard patrolled the streets looking for deserters. The Guard were a sorry lot. Some had been invalided out of the War, and some were the same bounty hunters who had skulked through Amherst trying to capture fugitive slaves. They had mean little eyes, most of them, and I couldn’t imagine that army deserters would have been as mean, no matter how desperate they were.

  There were military performances, soldiers marching through the metropolis, but they were ill equipped; half of them didn’t have rifles or boots, and their officers had rag-tale uniforms that a convict might wear. I saluted them nonetheless. I mourned our lost sons and lost Rebel sons, who couldn’t have been less brave than ours. But it wasn’t only the dying that had put me in a somber mood. I mourned Mr. Wadsworth, who had deserted his congregation in ’62 and fled to San Francisco, via the Isthmus of Panama—it might as well have been the end of the world. Perhaps it was unconscionable to mourn a live man amid all the carnage, but my Philadelphia began to feel dead. That don’t mean I had to sulk.

  I was perchance a blind Kangaroo left to play in the dark, and like a Kangaroo I kicked whoever I could and boxed the ears of friend and foe with my front paws. Of course I had few foes in the boardinghouse where I lived with my little Norcross cousins, Fanny and Loo, and punched and kicked only in my Imagination, which bloomed like truculent dandelions in that wilderness I was forced to inhabit. Praise the Lord that it did not snow in July—it was the glare coming off the snow that quickened the ruin of my eyes. The headaches began last winter, like needles housed at the back of my head. The pain crippled me, and when the attack was fierce, I could not sleep no matter what the anodyne.

  I understood what madness meant. Like Zilpah Marsh, who rotted away in Northampton, with memories of Tom and her own dead baby, I had little connection to humankind. That’s when I became a Kangaroo, kicking with my hind legs, but the danger I did was to myself. I would have leapt from my window, but the Altitude was much too low, and I’d have ended up as Lavinia’s pawn; she would have had to feed me while my bones mended and my eyes didn’t mend at all.

  And so I moved to Cambridgeport in April to be near that magician and his eye machine, Dr. Henry Willard Williams, the noted Boston ophthalmologist who could cure Kangaroos. Without prolonged treatment, he predicted, the headaches would worsen and my eyes would become so sensitive to light that I would have to turn wherever I lived into a cave. Thus I agreed to become his patient and his prisoner not out of my own alarm, but to appease Ma-ma, Pa-pa, and Lavinia, who were worrying themselves sick over me. What hurt the most was that I couldn’t take Carlo to Cambridgeport. I wouldn’t have sentenced him to the same Jail as mine. At fourteen, Carlo was now an old fellah, and he don’t like to travel. He wasn’t a metropolitan dog. He couldn’t have thrived in a metropolis of houses rather than meadows and barns.

  I missed all my flowers and plants. I wouldn’t get to see the gentians grow and prosper in my garden. And I quaked whenever Vinnie had to go on one of her little trips. Who would water my plants? I realized that should I ever leave this Siberia alive, I would find a desert of parched earth inside my observatory.

  Ever since the Republican revealed that George Eliot was in fact Miss Mary Anne Evans of London, England, an Authoress who lived in sin with a married man, I began to think of George Eliot as a fellow Kangaroo. She could not go out to dinner parties for fear that she would be shunned; she had even been spat upon by figures of the very best society. People mocked her long face and lantern jaw and made fun of her attire—said she was entirely old-fashioned. I wondered if she had freckles like a certain Miss Emily, exiled in Cambridgeport for the duration. I kept a picture of her on my wall, together with the Brontës and Mrs. Browning. I luxuriated in her plainness. I dreamt of us as soldiers—battlers I should say. And in my dreams we were as powerful as any man and sometimes wore a beard.

  Tolling once or twice a day, the church bells ruined my reveries. Some of Cambridge’s sons had been slaughtered in a wooded place in Virginia they call the Wilderness. I imagine myself as Sergeant Emily of the Massachusetts First, wandering among the wounded and the dead with my bayonet, feeding water to men of both sides, since the Confederate gray was obscured by dirt and blood. Father and Sue were most kind with Southern boys at the College who couldn’t get back through the lines after hostilities began and had to sit out the War in our Yankee village. Father went with them to church, bridled whenever someone hissed, and Susie borrowed my own recipes to bake these boys Indian bread and lemon pie with the smoothest yellow Amherst had ever seen.

  And thus I spend my days in the dark between trips to the magic ophthalmologist who hopes to fix my eyes. I cannot ride into Boston all alone like some desperado. My favorite cousins, Fanny and Louisa Norcross, serve as my chaperones. They’re no taller than I am in their summer capes. They don’t have my freckles, but they could still be my tiny sisters; the three of us have such mousy chins.

  Fanny and Loo accompany me on the horse-car that can be hailed down on Centre Street and has to sit there until the half-blind girl in her dark spectacles hops aboard. The horse-car tracks lead right into Boston over a series of bumps, and we cross the Charles on a wooden bridge with noxious fumes right under our noses from the marshes and mud flats and other foul effluvia, the river itself as brown as a perpetual mudslide.

  “Loolie,” I say, “the frog pond in our Commons has better coloration than that.”

  “Pay it no mind, Aunt Emily,” my little cousins chirp, even though I am not their aunt and never was.

  I lean back and watch the spires of Boston through my dark lenses that guard me against th
e sunlight.

  THE DOCTOR’S SANDSTONE MANSION WITH ITS MANSARD roofs is on a street that did not exist the last time I was in to Boston, thirteen years ago. Lavinia and I had come to see Austin, who was teaching the sons and daughters of immigrants at a school in the North End, where the Irish lived in boardinghouses and abandoned factories that was a monstrous version of our own Rooming-house Row. I visited the school, which was plagued with black dust and closed down right after Austin left. The whole North End was an empire of black wind and dust at water’s edge. I warned Brother that he would become a monster of the North End if he stayed too long. I pitied the children at Austin’s school, with their savage, rooting eyes that must have protected them against the squalor, but I did not want to sacrifice my own brother to their desperate needs.

  I didn’t like the North End, no, and the Back Bay, where the doctor’s office was, had been a series of tidewater flats. And here it was, many years later, transformed into its own particular paradise.

  The doctor is a very tall man. He is gentle with his Kangaroo, wiping her eyes after each droplet of belladonna. His mansion on Arlington Street looks out upon Boston’s Public Garden, which has the grandeur of our college grounds without the swampland of Amherst’s little Commons.

  I am dizzified by his ophthalmoscope, which he himself helped to design. It has its own lantern with a lick of flame, and a long tube that goes up and down while the lantern sways. He holds a lens close to my eye, looks through a disc with a tiny hole in the middle, and tells me there is no deterioration that he can find with his diabolic machine.

  “But when can I start reading again, Dr. Williams, and scratch a few words on a page?”

  “Not for a while,” he says. “Miss Dickinson, you must give up writing and reading altogether.”