The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  This was the Master I’d been looking for without knowing where to look. I never even confessed to Sister Sue that I’d been bold enough to write Thomas Wentworth Higginson and send him a sample of my Verses with all the coquetry I could muster and several lies, saying I was a neophyte when I’d lived in the silver mines for years, waitin’ for the thunder to resound and my own peculiar lightning to strike inside my skull. But I didn’t say a word to Sue. I wandered from room to room like the ghost everyone thinks I’ve become, dressed all in white, because I will wear no other color while Carlo’s soul is in Purgatory—I for one am not convinced there is much of a Heaven for dogs; they are doomed to wander somewhere, and while my Carlo was wandering, I will wear only white.

  Of course my whiteness could be subtracted from Pa-pa’s bills. I didn’t have to march around in hoop skirts, like Sister Sue, and worry over the latest Boston fashion in bonnets, underskirts, or stratified stockings. I had to see the dressmaker but once in a century, and even then I did not see her—it was dear Lavinia who served as my mannequin, around whose body my wrappers and housecoats were built, since we were much the same size, and I would not suffer the dressmaker’s pins or conversation and white chalk. And here I was without my corset, Treasurer Dickinson’s aberrant older daughter, the Authoress of black cake, wearing a silk snood with silver tassels behind my ears, curtseying to Seniors I did not know, saluting Trustees, like some silent engine clad in white, entering and exiting all over again.

  During these parties, year after year, I became the Gnome who stood at her oven the night before Commencement with her mountain of bubbling black cake. But forgive me if I forget so fast. I was never alone during these vigils. Father would descend the stairs in his slippers, a look of mischief in his eyes—Father never played, but he played now with the Gnome. Perhaps it was the calculated risk of a country lawyer, his manner of exorcizing nervous exhaustion on the eve of the Treasurer’s party. But I like to think that he did not have to strut like Cromwell when he visited me in his slippers, that he had it in his mind to sample my black cake before the Seniors ever did. And like naughty children, Father and I stole a chunk of cake right out of the oven and took the first bite.

  34.

  MR. SAMUEL BOWLES OF SPRINGFIELD REPUBLICAN FAME HAS written Brother that I am Amherst’s Queen Recluse, just because I snubbed him once and didn’t cross my father’s lawn to palaver with him while he was visiting the Evergreens. If truth be told, I was not in the mood for shuttlecocks, or to entertain Mr. Sam with my wild piano playing—no, Lord, it’s a lie! I was shamefully attracted to his sad eyes, and that Arabian presence of his, and I did not want to flirt with him in front of Sue, or be disloyal to my blond Assassin, for whom I was nobody but a nom de guerre.

  Mr. Bowles had had a bad attack of sciatica some years back, when he was caught in a snowstorm between Amherst and Springfield, and had to get out of his sled to pry the runners free with the fulcrum of his own body. This prolonged affliction left him in a permanent state of sadness that was so attractive to a spinsterish wildflower like me. If I had heard him rant about the blue of his own life, I might have taken Mr. Bowles into my arms and joined the harem he seemed to have from town to town, or the harem he wished for, since he was devoted to his children and his wife.

  Sue was in love with him, I could tell, but the town’s leading matron wouldn’t have entered into some clandestinity with Mr. Bowles. Austin and Sue had become his very best friends, but I’d have staked my own life that half his sorrow came because he loved my sister-in-law and could do little about it. That’s why he went through storms and hurricanes to be near the hurricane of Sue.

  And what about Brother, who had heard a hissing snake in the air, the coil of stillborn passion that was like a shadow he had to live with and swallow? And it must have eaten at his insides that Mr. Sam was his closest confidant. They could discuss everything except what was vital to them, the strange electricity in a room that held both Mr. Sam and Sue.

  Austin said not one syllable about it, and Sue liked to pretend that Mr. Bowles was nothing more than her most prized “catch,” considering all the celebrities who sat in her parlor. But Ralph Emerson visited Amherst once or twice, and Sue’s Arabian prince would have foresworn railroad cars and traveled from Springfield on foot had that been the surest route to the Evergreens.

  And when I stopped parading in Sue’s parlor, or sending our handyman over with jars of winterberry wine to keep up his “spirits,” he began to haunt our mansion and leave his card. I would pretend not to be at home, but my little ruse must have upset him. He stood by the stairs and shouted, “Emily, you rascal, come on down.”

  My heart leapt at his boldness, and I stirred from my room. I smiled as I came downstairs with the patter of my tiny feet. I was already breathless by the time I reached the bottom stair.

  “Why, Mr. Sam, what more could you possibly expect from the Queen Recluse?”

  I wore my full armor of feathers under my Dimity gown, and I did not have to fear the sound of my own voice.

  “You are a rascal,” he said, but I had made him laugh.

  I served him cake and wine in our front parlor, which did not have the sweep of Susan’s grand salon, with its plum leather chairs, its gilded mirrors, and lush carpets that echoed the colors and swirling rhythm of the paintings Brother had plucked out of a Manhattan gallery. Father did not have Austin’s eye for detail. Our front room held the whisper of a man who read the Bible every morning.

  “That’s scrumptious,” Mr. Bowles said of my black cake. “You should invite me more often.”

  “But I didn’t invite you. You invited yourself, Mr. Sam.”

  There were already crumbs in his Arabian beard.

  “Holy Moses, I had to invite myself if I ever wanted to see you. I would have whistled at your window if that would have brought ya to the Evergreens.”

  “I don’t travel much. My father is in the habit of me.”

  “I’d call that an obstinate habit,” he said. “It ain’t much of a travel to cross your father’s lawn.”

  I couldn’t discern why Mr. Sam himself had ventured across the lawn. His Cleopatra was at the other house. Something must have dazzled him, and it wasn’t my figure.

  “Why, Mr. Sam,” I said, with as much melody as I could muster. “You know we all travel by degrees. I turn into a snail once I depart from our porch. It might take me a dozen years to arrive at the Evergreens.”

  But I couldn’t conquer Mr. Bowles. He took a sip of wine and said, “I’d just have to wait…I’m getting into the habit of you, I guess.”

  And for a moment the sadness fled from his soft brown eyes. They crinkled with a curious kind of pleasure as he gobbled more and more of my cake.

  “Besides,” he said. “I don’t see a snail. You’re that narrow fellah in the grass…one wrinkle, and you’re gone.”

  Mr. Bowles caught my sudden shiver, and his eyes turned sad again. The two of us were unsolid creatures, zero at the bone, like “that narrow fellah in the grass” he had usurped from my little treasury and published in the Republican without my knowledge or my consent and with a title I had never given it: “The Snake.” That’s why he had come here! It wasn’t to flirt with Daisy. He was feeling remorseful about the theft of my poem. It had appeared anonymously on the page, but Pa-pa could recognize my very own outline in the Verse, his daughter who slithered around with all the quiet decoration of “a spotted shaft.” And half the town figured who that Poetess was in the Republican. I was plagued with visitors and requests for other “versifications,” as they called it. I saw no one and did not honor a single request. But I did not have it within me to strike at Mr. Sam.

  He must have seen the Verse at Sue’s; perhaps she let him read it, and he exercised his eminent domain as publisher. Lord, he did not mean any harm, and I understood how brittle he was, like broken glass.

  “Miss Emily,” he said with a formalness that must have cost him; he was low on resources. “We do
not have that stance against what others call ‘womanish,’ not while I hold the rudder at the Republican. I was proud as a deacon to publish your snake poem.”

  He caught me shivering again, though I hid my consternation as best I could.

  “It is not a snake poem, Mr. Sam—Verses do not have a subject, I should think, but a kind of shudder, as if the whole world were born again within the flash of an eye.”

  “I’m lost,” he said. “I cannot follow you into your terrain.”

  “I have no terrain,” I told him. “I dance on a precipice, knowing I will fall.”

  “Then I’ll fall with you,” he said.

  “You cannot, Mr. Sam, just as my Verses cannot be written by two heads and four hands. I wish I were some lady novelist, like Cassandra Gale, but I’m a mere old maid with a pencil dangling from her pocket. I scribble on the sly, whenever I can. But I will not write for publication while I live in my father’s house.”

  Cassandra Gale was Mr. Bowles’s great discovery; I’d read portions of her novel, Passion’s Corner, in the Republican, and it went on to have about as much success as the Brontë sisters. Its heroine, Araminta Moss, was a silly girl who smoldered all the time. She was a Volcano, just like Sue. And suddenly I had my own bit of lightnin’. Cassandra Gale couldn’t appear in public because she didn’t exist outside the pages of the Republican. “You’re the rascal, Sir,” I said to Mr. Sam.

  He laughed. “And why is that?”

  “You invented Araminta Moss. Shame on you, Mr. Sam, tricking your readers like that.”

  But I was the one who blushed, not Mr. Bowles. Passion’s Corner was a secret love letter to Sue, so secret that not a soul could comprehend its purpose. Araminta Moss was Sue’s phantom, a monster in the mirror whose passion erupted without control. And Mr. Bowles crept outside the cover of this passion, hiding himself and Sue, as if her Vesuvius would have devoured them both if he had allowed it to erupt.

  “Emily, will you do this narrow fellah a favor? I’m Cassandra, I admit. I’m the culprit. But I announced a sequel to Passion’s Corner. And I just don’t have the time to write it.”

  Lord, I was getting angry now. Thieving my poem was unkind enough, but I was no ghoul. I wouldn’t wear Cassandra’s mask.

  “You can pocket a pretty piece of change,” he said. “And not one person in the universe need ever know.”

  My esteem for Mr. Sam was dwindling much faster than any snail.

  “But I would know,” I said. “You could have asked Sue to play Cassandra.”

  “She doesn’t have your ice, Miss Emily. She couldn’t entertain my readers…and I was a little harsh. I did swindle you out of a poem. And Lord knows, I might swindle you again.”

  The rascal was trying to win me over to his side. He had that terrible insouciance of the male, a shy seduction in the curls of his beard. Women followed him everywhere, but he kept haunting the Evergreens. He might plot with Sue and pluck another poem, but he wouldn’t have asked me outright for one. I had to live under his manly vail. But he was hankering for something? Forgiveness? Or my own confession that I was stunned by his Arabian presence? And then he startled me. His eyes seemed to disappear inside his skull. He began to shake. He was stranded in Pa-pa’s front parlor—lost, alone, as if he were still stuck in that same snowstorm between Amherst and Springfield, still trapped in his sled. I touched his beard, not to excite, but to console him. Yet it did excite me, the silk of it, that fine jungle of hair. The shaking stopped. He kissed my hand, held my birdlike fingers in his paw.

  “Bless you, dear Emily. I’ll never sneak into your garden, never steal from you again.”

  Both of us were charged up. We couldn’t finish the wine and cake. I wanted to keep him here forever. But feathers didn’t make me much of a sorcerer. I could only entertain with dots and discs. I was the kicking Kangaroo, not Cassandra Gale.

  His sciatica must have hit hard. He left the parlor nearly bent double. I watched him cross the lawn like a huge snail with a hump on its back. But he shuddered once as he got nearer to the Evergreens and slowly his back unbent. By the time he entered Sue’s domain he was as upright as an arrow. But I knew how much effort it took for him just to be Mr. Sam.

  35.

  THE YEARS SEEMED TO PASS RIGHT UNDER MY WINDOWPANE. I’d sit at my narrow desk, stare out at the Dickinson meadow, but most of the lightning was gone. I could only add tiny, tiny pieces to my treasure, and none were pure gold. The lightning had erupted around the time of war and my moon blindness. I had written poems to Carlo, to Sue and Mr. Sam, to Pa-pa and my Philadelphia, even to poor Tom. But my hand had turned spinsterish. I was a maiden of thirty-nine winters with a pencil in her pocket. The pencil rarely jumped. I was looking for wonder and alarm, and it was odd when wonder came along.

  There was nothing that could tantalize me as much as the sudden appearance in our village of a circus, with its menagerie and clowns. It did not seem to matter which circus came to town—McGinley’s or the Great North American Menagerie. The result was the same. McGinley’s would arrive before noon. A drumroll would lure me to the window, while a streak of red passed in front of my eyes, like a raw wound. This color mystified me. Did it come from the red roofs of the circus wagons, or the dust and wind that mingled with the clowns’ motley uniforms? I never knew.

  I could feel a beat of excitement in my own neck that held to the music of the drums, as if Emily had become an instrument that the circus could command. But I did not rouse myself from the window and follow the circus to the Commons, where huge orange tents rose and wavered in the sky with the thump of hammers. Not even McGinley’s could drive me out my father’s front door.

  And then the circus brought with it a kind of dread. I woke to the drums and watched the morning parade, while one particular clown clung to me, and I started to shake. I recognized him, even under his rouge and curly black wig. It was my blond Assassin, or perhaps his ghost. Had Carlo still been alive, I would have rushed out with my Confederate and raced after the clown. I did not move. I was touched by terror. I tried to summon the will, but I had none.

  Six days and nights the circus was in town, and six days and nights I called upon my own little powers while I sang to myself, It’s not him, it’s not him. I had hallucinated my Tom upon a circus clown, had grown as hysterical as Araminta Moss. But I pricked my ears and listened to the drumbeats, and it was Little Sister who told me that there had been a burglary in Belchertown while the tents were still pitched. A strange man had been found under the bed of a certain widow on College Street; but this strange man had gnarled fingers and a birdlike beak. He couldn’t have been my Tom.

  I mourned McGinley’s once it left town. I had a constant tingle, waiting for the circus to reappear, and when it did, I watched from my window like a deranged falcon, but did not discover one clown who bore the least resemblance to Tom. There were no burglaries that week, no gnarled strangers who tumbled out from under a widow’s bed. And I began to despair that I had missed my chance to find Tom.

  The Queen Recluse did not stir. I wanted to color my face white, like Elizabeth of England, and reign from my window. A reticent ruler, I would dangle morsels of gingerbread and black cake from a string and supply my subjects, meaning Sue’s second-born, Mattie, and her playmates, who stood under my window and ran off with their fealty of cake.

  There were no other visitors but these…and my Norcross cousins, Fanny and Loo, who had succored me in Cambridgeport and would descend upon Amherst from time to time. But Pa-pa’s handyman, Horace Church, had developed a most unfortunate fixation on Loolie, and would ogle her while I and my cousins were in the Orchard and he was pruning a tree. Horace Church had nothing of Tom in him. His eyes were dullish and red as a scurrying rat. His hair had the silkiness of straw. His face and fingers were coarse. He had lumps and boils at the back of his neck, not the least little blond down.

  I warned him while he was up in his tree.

  “Horace, my father does not pay you money to spy
on us. Be gone! Get yourself down from there.”

  But he wouldn’t leave his perch; he sat comfortably cradled in a fork of the tree. His mouth moved with a nasty pull as he spoke.

  “I have my orders, Miss Im’ly. I ain’t spyin’. Master Edward says the Orchard is my domain.”

  “Horace Church, I’ll domain you with a broom if you don’t disappear.”

  He must have sensed the rage in the Queen Recluse, because he slid down from his tree and went inside the barn to brush and comb Father’s mare. I’d have fired him, but handymen were hard to find, and Pa-pa seemed to have a curious fondness for Horace.

  My little cousins couldn’t stay very long; they had to look after an ailing aunt. And I went back inside the hermitage of my own head. But that don’t mean I didn’t wear my feathers. Colonel Higginson had seen “The Snake” in Mr. Sam’s Republican, and kept inviting me to palaver at the two literary clubs in Boston that welcomed women. But I’d have had to put on a corset and petticoats, and besides, I had a mortal fear of palavering in a public place. And so he came to Amherst, curious about the recluse. I handed Higginson two lilies from my garden and couldn’t stop palavering with him. He hadn’t been prepared for all my Plumage. I told him that a real Poem ripped the roof right off your head, that you couldn’t recover from reading it. I’d never talked so much in an entire year.

  LORD, I’D BECOME A POETESS IN SPITE OF MYSELF. MY couplets must have been circulating in some invisible sphere. But am I deceitful to say I wasn’t part of the conspiracy?

  Professors arrived at the Homestead, looking for the Poetess. I did not see them. I tore up every card save one. My hand trembled when I read that name: Rebecca Winslow, the late vice principal of Mt Holyoke without her yellow gloves. I had seized them from Zilpah Marsh years ago, and the gloves now lay in the attic. I did not know what to expect. Miss Rebecca had been the Poet, and I the usurper. But Dear God, she was so diminished after all these years. Her shoulders had shrunk. She wore dark glasses, the same kind I had worn in Cambridgeport to guard against the light. I wondered if she were moon blind, as I had once been.