Aunt Helen seemed to sense his distress and gave permission at once. I bundled up in my violet cashmere cloak, my Christmas present from Father; Davy did not notice it. He took my arm and we walked along Amity Street, under the cold, high stars. Our boots squeaked in the new snow.
“Is snow this same ice blue in starlight, in Lake Forest?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“I never noticed without you to point it out.”
We sat in the back of the dim, lovely church. Davy reached to hold my hand inside my seal muff. I wondered why his silver eyes looked so strange — and then I realized they were brimming with tears. That was the moment when I knew. Before he spoke, I knew.
“Miranda, there is something I haven’t told you, but — all last summer at home, I was drilling with my friends. We formed a company. We drilled and marched and bivouacked, and took some rifle practice along the beach.
“We’ll be commissioned next month — as Battery B of the Chicago Light Artillery. I am a gunnery sergeant. This way, my friends and I will all be together. We’re ready for when the war starts.”
He heard my intake of breath and gripped my hand harder.
“Darling Miranda, I’ve thought about this for months. As I see it, men my age have always been caught up in history at a certain time and place — like flies in flypaper!
“Right now, I’m a fellow from Illinois in 1861. I’d much rather have been a youth at Concord, fighting the British — or an ephebe at Marathon, turning back the Persians! But I’m stuck in the flypaper of here and now. I have to do what the times and my place require me to do.”
Bach’s arpeggios soared, piercing my new wound.
“When do you leave?” I struggled to keep my voice steady.
“Tomorrow morning.”
I blinked my eyes quickly, trying to absorb the shock.
“When I decided, last month, I didn’t sign up for any courses this term. I came back only to say good-bye to you.”
“You were right not to tell me while you were deciding. I couldn’t have helped you, Davy.”
“I wanted us to have a little more time together — but you knew, didn’t you?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
“All this means is — we’ll just put things off a bit.” How relieved he seemed to be, with everything out in the open at last. My heart swelled with compassion for him, knowing how much it must have cost him to keep this from me. “I’ll do my duty, and then we’ll get married the very second the war’s over. Meanwhile, will you wear my ring?”
I nodded again, and rose. Bach just made it worse. I had to leave.
We walked back to Amity Street in the chilly starlight, not talking. My pain was bearable, no more than life-size — but I knew it was just beginning.
“Will I see you tomorrow, Davy?”
He shook his head very hard — and I remembered this was all new to him. He was used to loving and being loved; he was used to being happy.
“No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t stand saying good-bye to you twice, Miranda.”
He was probably right about this, I decided from a strange distance; I was adrift in a state of numb detachment.
Under the portico, Davy gave me a long kiss. He repeated our ritual, his wet cheek against mine. “Never forget, darling Miranda: I intend to be a part of your life.”
Sometime in the night I woke, clearheaded and aware. Something or someone had spoken to me. I had heard words, distinct and final. Then I heard them once more.
“You will never see him again.”
Book VII
AMHERST AND NEW YORK
1861–1863
Voltaire wrote that for days after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the streets of the city had been full of people shocked and numb, moving aimlessly through the rubble. I understood what he had described. I was living it.
Davy left letters for Father and Aunt Helen, so I did not have to explain to them what had happened. I thought this very courteous to all of us. Aunt Helen cried and told me I should cry too. “You shouldn’t bottle up your feelings,” she advised me. “It’s unnatural. You should let your grief out at a time like this.”
I knew she would not believe me if I told her what I really felt: nothing at all.
“It will still be possible to have a life together, if you decide to marry eventually,” Father said, doing his best to be comforting. “It will just start later, when you are older. Which I see as a very good thing,” he added brusquely. I believed his gruffness was a mask to cover his own feelings, and I did not take offense.
I did everything mechanically: I got up, I dressed, I ate. I went to school and came home, worked on my education paper, and went to bed. My mind, desperately searching for ways to avoid the threatened agony, finally settled on intellectual activity. I was surprised how Davy’s advice to speak my mind had freed me to write as myself — as Miranda Chase. I had never taken my own opinions seriously enough to put them in writing before — and once I started, I found I had a great deal to say.
I spent endless hours at work, at study. After some days, I realized what I was doing and why I was doing it. I was a coward. I was like Davy when he said good-bye, when he announced his decision and then could not see me again. I literally could not bear our parting — so I decided, on some level of my heart or mind that I did not control, to avoid feeling pain by feeling nothing at all. I did not choose this, did not plan it — but it happened, and in a small way, I was grateful.
Once, shell gathering at Learner’s Cove, Lettie and I found a little gray mollusk that was unfamiliar to us. It was of the pectin family but seemed to have a foot like a clam. It was a live shell — that is, the creature was viable in its tiny fortress. We opened it carefully, trying to identify it — and were appalled to see it lying exposed, writhing and shuddering, a half inch of agony and terror. We closed it instantly and buried it carefully at the water’s edge.
“That little fellow,” said Lettie sadly, “he is needing that shell!”
For the first five years of my life, I was safe in my own shell; no one could get at me to hurt me. Then I risked opening up a chink in order to receive the gift of learning that Mr. Harnett offered to me. Later I opened wider for Lettie and the James family — then for the Sloans — but I was still protected. Then, loving Davy more and more, I forgot to be careful. I became open and accessible and defenseless. Now, exposed to unbearable injury, I had returned to the safety of my shell again.
Davy wrote often, active and cheerful letters. He was living with Farwell cousins in Chicago and drilling with his friends in different warehouses. They’d planned a beach bivouac, but their officers thought the weather was too cold. They oiled their stiff boots during lectures on gunnery. Their uniforms were expected any day. He had the highest score as a marksman and had been elected second lieutenant. Any day now, there would be a real war to fight.
All this in his lovely baroque handwriting — it was like hearing from a busy stranger on the moon. The only place where I could hear Davy’s voice was in the ritual closing: “I intend to be a part of your life.”
A little package came from a bank in Chicago, with dangling seals and stamps and official signatures. It was a ring, a heart-shaped amethyst, with a note from Davy in the velvet box.
My mother wore this while she and my father were “unofficially” engaged. Please wear it for me, till I can give you your true ring.
I put my amethyst heart on the proper finger at once, and both Aunt Helen and Father admired it — without any reservations about suitability. Oddly enough, this ring restored the goodwill of Lolly and her crowd. They had been waiting for my tearful confidences, which never came — and were quite put out at my unfriendly silence. A classmate who refused outings and buried herself in books and papers was standoffish and odd — but an engaged girl with an absent fiancé was permitted these aberrations. So Davy’s amethyst revived my shallow Amherst friendships. As before, I appeared to conform.
The fi
rst southern state had seceded from the Union in December 1860, within a month and a half of Lincoln’s election. There followed a tense armed limbo. By February 1861, there were seven seceders: the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as their president. Lincoln, our own president, was inaugurated in March. On Amity Street, we discussed every word, every comma in his speech — as if he knew the future, if only we could guess it.
“Doesn’t he want peace? He said, ‘I am loath to close,’ ” Aunt Helen fretted.
“I hear only noble fatalism,” said Father. “The whole nation is holding its breath, waiting to see who will act first — but something will happen soon.”
Only Emily and her crocuses ignored the news. Her bulbs came up in bright constellations. They were invisible except from her bedroom, just as she had planned.
In March 1861, the academy gave me permission to spend three days in Springfield, observing the teaching at an elementary school there. It had been described to me as “a happy place,” and I wanted to see why. I also wanted to take the opportunity to visit Kate.
When I reached her house, I found her so deathly ill that she could not conceal her news: another baby in autumn. Instantly I had a terrible fear, remembering the ordeal of Josey’s birth. And Josey was only a year old, so heavy that Kate could barely lift him. But I could not share my concerns with Kate; now she needed only aid and comfort.
“It will be lots easier this time,” I assured her. “Aunt Helen and I will help you all summer, and we’ll both be here when your time comes. I want you to make me a little girl, with green eyes like yours! Just think of her as your present to me.”
At the school in Springfield, I was immediately charmed by Miss Polly Randall, the teacher, a quiet, fair woman about Kate’s age. I was intrigued when she took the youngest children apart and worked with them in small circles on the floor, without desks or benches. She sat on the floor too. Somehow this positioning put everyone in the roles of friendly equals — rather than a group of little beginners with a teacher who was literally talking down to them.
My mind clicked acceptance: I will use this!
I noticed further that she used no memorizing as such, but rather rhythmic musical chants — which the children joined gladly. They reminded me of the songs Lolly and I used for skipping rope at recess. No one ever taught them to us, but somehow we knew dozens of jingles. Why not use this form for happy classroom learning? It was something to ponder as I rode the cars home and something to keep my mind occupied. Back at my desk, I wrote these observations to Mr. Harnett, knowing that in writing I was helping myself retain these impressions and also connecting, if even in a small way, to something larger than myself.
I was barely home and unpacked when events conspired to cause me to recall a long-forgotten dinner-table conversation at York Stairs. There we had been regretting the growing hostility between the northern and southern states, and the fearful possibility of an actual war.
“If there’s going to be serious trouble, it’ll start in South Carolina!” Dr. Hugh had vowed that night. “There is enough reckless vanity among the Charleston hotheads to fight a dozen wars.” And just as he had foretold, the bellicose South Carolinians lit the deadly torch. They were the first to secede in December 1860. They fired the first guns — against Fort Sumter, a Union bastion, on April 12, 1861.
“Could anything have averted this?” Miss Adelaide wrote. “Were all our prayers for reconciliation unheard? Has God been sleeping?”
“This is the greatest disaster in our history,” my father mourned. “We will never be the same. We will win the war, make no mistake — that is, the North will conquer the South — but we will lose our innocence, our purity. This is the end of our national youth.”
I often forgot Father’s passionate patriotism, but now I felt — from a distance — his struggle to maintain his shattered idealism.
Davy, on the other hand, could not suppress his excitement. He wrote:
Battery B enlisted the day after Fort Sumter. We are trained, equipped, and ready — and we’ve larked about long enough! Now we have left Chicago and come to Cairo, at the southernmost tip of Illinois. From here we’ll move west and south, down the Mississippi. We must open the river and keep it open, at all costs.
I wouldn’t have known this grand design before, but I’ve been elected captain. (If I was ever first lieutenant, it was over so fast I never noticed.) All our officers are fine fellows and — except for me — have succeeded at something in life. I only hope they know more about fighting a war than I do.
I felt constrained and awkward as I wrote Davy. My days and my news seemed so trivial, so irrelevant, next to Davy’s active authentic life. Finally, I decided to write about my thoughts rather than my actions, the mental work that was occupying me. This spring of 1861, my mind was full of elementary education. I found, as I wrote Davy, I understood my own thinking with greater clarity; just as in our first letters, I learned about myself by corresponding with him.
The children are told that learning is their duty, because a stern God requires it. Then they are given some dreary nonsense to memorize, to please and placate God. If they fail to do so, then they’re punished. Thus children learn from fear and obligation, rather than from curiosity and joy. To me — whose world was expanded and brightened by learning — this is nearly criminal and what I most dearly want to change.
Emily was shockingly uninvolved in the current news. She treated it as someone else’s war. She mentioned the Amherst boys who had enlisted — college students and villagers — as if they were off to Europe or graduate school. She foamed with personal outrage, however, when the Springfield Republican printed one of her poems, unsigned. I knew the editor, Mr. Samuel Bowles, was her particular friend — but she was consumed with anger nevertheless.
“He had no right, NO RIGHT!” she spit.
“But didn’t you send it to him, Emily? That gave him the right, I think.”
“I never gave him permission to PRINT MY WORK. And he even gave it a title — ‘The May-Wine.’ ” Her voice dripped with disgust. “He knows I NEVER use titles. He had no RIGHT!”
I decided this was a childish tantrum. “Emily, if your friend is an editor, and you send him poems — then you’d just better expect this will happen.”
“He’s not my friend anymore. Look at the company he chose for me! How’s that for BEDFELLOWS?” She threw the paper at my head, quite accurately.
Emily’s poem, a mild little lyric about spring fever, was paired with an effusion by Maude W. I skimmed the first few lines of the latter’s filigree verses:
She came to meet me at the tryst,
The cool, night breeze around her blowing,
Her sunny hair in tresses flowing,
Glad laughter on the lips I kissed.
Each heart-throb thrilled with sudden pain,
As dimpled hands stretched forth to meet me,
As rosy mouth upturned to greet me —
I knew we ne’er should meet again.
I saw that this offering appeared on a full page of other poetic treats, all as sugary as the desserts at Mrs. Austin’s soirees. I did not tell Emily, but I agreed that Mr. Bowles was insulting all women when he published such nonsense. This “poesy” should never be seen except in frilled, hand-painted autograph albums. But my friend was so fierce in her miniature red-haired dignity that I tried to distract her with her own wit.
“Tell me what you think Mr. Bowles is saying when he prints these silly verses.”
My dangling bait worked.
“He’s saying, ‘Look what my cat just wrote. Why, it’s almost human!’ ”
Also in April, Mr. and Mrs. Alan Harnett were joined by little Julian. I was told Mr. Harnett’s wife, Fanny, had an easy confinement and delivery, which gave me hope that Kate’s ordeal in September would go as well. I also could not contain a smile, for with the arrival of his child, I was at last replaced as the subject of Mr. Harnett’s prodigious pedagogical exper
iments.
This happy birth was followed in June by another, when Mr. and Mrs. Austin Dickinson rejoiced in the arrival of little Edward, known as Ned. Mrs. Austin also had a short labor and an easy delivery, which gave me further confidence. I was amazed by Emily, who overnight became a typical aunt — proud, parental, involved. She spoke of Ned again and again, planning his life and her place in it.
“Sue has become so WORLDLY, I will have to see to spiritual matters for him,” she stated. “The Dickinson name is assured now! I was never certain I would see Austin become a father. He told me Susan is — not DUTIFUL, as a wife.”
“Do all brothers and sisters discuss such matters?” I asked. I remembered my awkwardness in discussing such things with my own dear sweet Kate.
“I cannot surmise what others do. Shall we read some more Tudor legends now?” This abrupt change of subject suggested that perhaps Emily realized she had said too much. I was grateful; I didn’t want to hear any more such overly personal details.
“I see my own father in Henry IV,” Emily mused. “I know just how poor Prince Hal felt about all that UNFLAGGING moral indignation!” She had given me a stunning gold-tooled collection of Shakespeare’s History Plays for Christmas, and we were working our way through them.
“Perhaps you need a Falstaff, Emily,” I teased her but did not suggest myself for the role.
It was summer now, time for my graduation. I had truly loved the academy — all the more by comparison with the inferior schools I had visited for my report. Learning had been joyful for me.
The Howlands arrived from Springfield, and, to my delight, Mr. Harnett, Fanny, and baby Julian came up from New York. My former tutor had always promised to see me graduate — and now he beamed fondly when I won some prizes and then again as he toasted me at our evening reception in the temple. Father and I agreed that 1861 was no year for a ball.
Later, my mentor was more serious. “Miranda, what will you do now to engage that fine mind? You are living right on the eve of a breakthrough in female education.” He went on to tell me that in only a few short years, several colleges for women would open their doors. “There are big plans already for a collegiate institution in upstate New York. The money is coming from a retired brewer, a Matthew Vassar, who is interested in making women better teachers. Vassar will be the first of its kind — all female. But you cannot wait for it. We must find another path for you now. I will put my mind to it immediately.”
Afternoons with Emily Page 27
