Afternoons with Emily

by Rose MacMurray

  “Perhaps that is who Davy has become,” said Kate in response to this hardened stance. “You have had to change too, Miranda.”

  Davy asked that I send him a recent likeness, since the one he had — from Kate’s wedding — was three years old. I could accomplish this best in New York, where I was going to visit Mr. Harnett for an autumn fortnight. My dear tutor often referred to my academy paper on early childhood education. Now he wanted to discuss a project we could work on together based on that paper, and he promised to make me an appointment for a sitting at the studio of a Mr. Mathew Brady, a New York photographer.

  I took the cars to New York in October 1862. The city was bigger and louder and newer than Boston, but Mr. Harnett’s house, a tiny seventeenth-century Dutch cottage, was none of these things. Like Alan and Fanny — shyly I dropped the formal mode of addressing him as he requested, though I mostly still thought of him as “Mr. Harnett” — their house was full of warmth and ideas. Books and baby abounded.

  “Miranda, we have work to do!” Alan announced on my first evening as we warmed ourselves in front of his massive Dutch stove. “Your paper was exemplary. It laid out all the things the elementary schools had been doing wrong in teaching little children. Now you and I have a chance to do it right!

  “My school has asked me to design a whole new program for the incoming children,” he responded to my startled look. “The five- and six-year-olds. I’ve been reading a lot of articles by a German — Friedrich Froebel. Do you know him?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “You and he already agree on the important things. You both believe that learning should be a process of bringing out what is already there, inside the child.”

  “He’s right!” I exclaimed. “We say ‘educo,’ to lead out — and then we cram knowledge from the outside into the child. There’s a story that someone brought a block of marble to Michelangelo’s studio in Florence, and Michelangelo said, ‘There’s a statue in there. Now I will work to release it.’ That’s what I believe education should be. That’s what it had been for me,” I added with a warm smile. “Thanks to you.”

  Mr. Harnett smiled back. “We can build on this,” he said. “Now what should be released in a child, Miranda, if that child is to learn?”

  “Curiosity — it’s there in every child, until it is neglected or smothered. Joy and pride in learning. And security too — a sense of being valued as you learn, rather than punished if you don’t.”

  Mr. Harnett nodded. “A child’s mind can be a rich and pollinating place when it is nurtured and looked after. In fact, Froebel called his classes ‘kindergartens’ — gardens of and for children.”

  I smiled. “I’ve always thought that children’s faces are like flowers opening — this is a wonderful concept!”

  The next morning, I nuzzled sweet Julian and reluctantly handed him back to his lovely mother when it was time to see Alan’s school, Friends Seminary, just two blocks away. As I expected, I was deeply impressed with its progressive approach to the ways children learn. I stayed the day, observing, and when we returned to Alan’s house, we sat and talked for quite some time as Fanny put together an evening meal.

  Over a beef and cabbage stew, Alan had more questions. “What drove you to read, Miranda? That was the first thing that drew me to you. A normal child in a normal family wouldn’t have needed books as much as you did, up there in your nursery.”

  I thought back all those years ago. “I must have been looking for color, change, excitement, companions. Everything I otherwise lacked. I thought I would find them in books — and I did.”

  “Then let’s establish a child’s very first vocabulary — one that contains all those things you were needing!”

  By bedtime we had it: a hundred short, concrete words that a child could learn easily. Mr. Harnett’s words related to a child’s daily living: “mother,” “supper,” “tree.” My list included a little fantasy: “lion,” “wave,” “crown.”

  As we worked, I saw little fables chasing about in my mind, combining our words. The lion lives by the blue sea. He wears a gold crown. He is king. I could imagine the faces of children I had observed in the classrooms I visited — learning by rote in their dreary classes — becoming vivid and eager as they met our tale.

  Another evening I showed Mr. Harnett a copy of The New England Primer, a Puritan relic that was still being used by many Massachusetts schools. He chuckled over the gloom, the despair, the nagging reminders of mortality, that threatened our unlucky Massachusetts children every day.

  “I’ll never believe this!” he complained. “Here a six-year-old is being warned to prepare for death when he gets up.” He read aloud in a melodramatic voice:

  Awake, arise, behold thou hast,

  Thy life a leaf, thy breath a blast,

  At night lay down prepar’d to have

  Thy sleep, thy death, thy bed, the grave.

  “These primers should be burned,” Mr. Harnett said quite seriously. “The authors should be hung like the Salem witches. These books can only cripple souls. There’s no education here!”

  Several days later Alan accompanied me to Mr. Mathew Brady’s photography studio in a forbidding brick building on Fifth Avenue. I was bowed in and posed against a vista of formal gardens and romantic clouds, totally unlike anyplace Davy and I ever shared. When I mentioned this to Mr. Alexander Gardner, Mr. Brady’s young assistant, he was severe and unsmiling.

  “When a soldier looks at the portrait of his sweetheart, he doesn’t want to see real life, Miss Chase. I know this. I will prove it to you.”

  I followed Mr. Gardner past a curtain and into a high skylit gallery, where men were staring at photographs. Suddenly I was at war, surrounded by war, overcome by war.

  I knew there had been a fearful battle near Sharpsburg, Maryland — by Antietam Creek — a little more than two weeks ago. General Lee tried to cross the Potomac and invade the North. He was repulsed, with fearful casualties.

  The newspapers called Antietam the bloodiest day of the war. The Confederacy lost more than eleven thousand men; our Union forces, slightly more. And as my Davy, safely in Mississippi, wrote, these were numbers Johnny Reb could ill afford to lose. And now — here — I was at Antietam.

  It was a burnt umber world: brown earth, brown flesh, brown blood. There were fields just harvested, now trampled into bloody stubble. There were grotesque upside-down horses, their stiff legs aimed at the brown sky. And everywhere, everywhere, there was another harvest: the bodies that had been young men.

  I walked around the gallery, staring intently at each terrible image. It was impossible to discern gray from blue, but one understood instantly that the color of the uniform was irrelevant before this grim, gory holocaust of young life.

  Alan came through the curtain. He swept one glance through the gallery and came to hold my hand very hard. He spoke only once, about a photograph of a hundred bodies fallen beside Antietam Creek. Remembering the little river on the Trojan plain, he murmured, “The Scamander.”

  We thanked Mr. Gardner and left the Brady studio in silence, but “The Dead of Antietam” — twenty-two thousand ghosts — came with us.

  Before I returned to Amherst, I took the cars to Springfield for a short visit with Kate, my mind full of the possibilities of Alan’s primer project. I was to write a series of small tales, using our child’s vocabulary in progressive degrees of difficulty.

  When I reached Kate’s house, sturdy Josey Howland, two and a half, helped me with this. He settled in my lap, ready with a hundred questions to demonstrate what a young child would want to know.

  “A lion lives by the blue sea,” I said.

  “Wassisname?”

  “Leo the lion lives by the blue sea. He wears a gold crown.”

  “Why?”

  “He wears a gold crown because he is king of the jungle.”

  “Wassajungle?”

  “Because he is king of the forest of green trees.”

 
So we learned together, Josey and I. And watching Kate, I decided her life had eased a bit. She arranged her hair in new styles again and sang ballads for her children in the evening. She had Maureen, who was young, with tireless Irish energy, to help her daily. I thought the worst months of the babies’ demands were behind her. Ethan’s work was steady and profitable. He predicted an enormous building boom when the war ended, when all the profiteers would need palaces.

  “They won’t want plain houses like ours, Kate; they’ll be showing off in mansions like The Evergreens. I’d better learn to speak Italianate!”

  The torches of autumn foliage, and earlier my nineteenth birthday, came and went. I continued working with Alan, as well as furthering my studies. I had chosen a yearlong course on Shakespeare. Emily was avid for the details of Professor Kellogg’s lectures and our discussions. I sensed a sadness in her and also another emotion — anger?

  “Emily, are you cross that I’m taking the Shakespeare course?”

  “I’m absolutely FURIOUS — at myself! My heart is beating like a drum, with rage — pure and simple RAGE. I should have had the gumption to DEMAND those courses for myself when I was your age.

  “The Dickinsons started Amherst College, and then they saved it and kept it going — and ruined themselves to do it. The president SEARCHES for ways to repay our family!”

  “Then why on earth didn’t you ask to take courses there, like me?”

  “Because I wouldn’t give my father the satisfaction of REFUSING me!” She set her little round jaw with the defiance of a thirteen-year-old.

  “How can you be sure he would have refused?”

  “Because I know him and his cold, CLOSED mind. He is certain that women are a lesser species and that education is WASTED on them. They exist only to serve men and raise their children.”

  I heard the sadness underlying Emily’s bitter statement; I certainly knew of her father’s unfortunate condescension toward women. “Thank goodness our wonderful academy taught us more than that, Emily!”

  “True — but whatever we learned was by courtesy of a MALE Puritan God, remember?”

  Here I could not argue. I too resented the nagging reminders that every stone and every petal was God’s design for us.

  “And it’s not only Father’s fault!” Emily was well into her tirade now. “I blame Mother for letting him DEVOUR her! There’s nothing left of her now but a pitiful scatter of bones in the snow. Without her help, I was simply too young and too weak to fight him ALONE.”

  I crossed to her and nearly clasped her hands — until I remembered how she shrank more and more each year from touch. So I sat beside her instead. “Emily, who says it’s too late? You and I could still go together. You’re cleverer than anyone — you should see some of those oafs struggling with Hamlet !”

  I found I was elated at the idea of doing something new with Emily — far from the identical white dresses, stiff in her closet; the white doilies centered on her bureau; the smug white curtains tied at her windows. I wanted to get up and out and away from the tight roses on her rag rug on her polished floorboards — from all the prim, superior, insufferable tidiness of Emily’s room. And I knew such a plan would help her immensely.

  “But, Miranda — that would change our delicate balance, and Father and I have worked so hard to create it.” Emily smiled her cat smile. “We don’t CONFRONT each other. I don’t embarrass him in public, because he doesn’t make me BE in public! We understand each other perfectly.”

  The real obstacle was Emily’s need to stay isolated, to shrink from the world. Perhaps she would accept something she could simply observe rather than participate in?

  “What about all those brilliant men who come to speak here?” I suggested. “Father is taking me to hear Emerson next week.”

  “Ah, yes, the lectures. Father used to ask me to go with him when I was younger, but I always refused — simply from SPITE. It was my only weapon against him, except for withholding my piano playing. Would you believe I once missed hearing THOREAU — from purest spite!” She stood and pulled a volume from her shelves. “Why don’t we read some Thoreau now? He will lecture to us alone, a command appearance.” And so Emily won the round, but what a hollow victory — and at such a personal cost.

  Later in the week, as Father and I entered the lecture hall to hear Emerson together, I thought of Emily and her father, two people frozen in rancor, going their proud parallel ways in silence — and I shivered. I doubted Mr. Dickinson even noticed Emily’s efforts to hurt him. I recognized in myself the distance I felt from Emily; it was what allowed me to observe her with this clarity.

  I smiled at Father and thanked him for bringing me, relishing his vital presence beside me, and felt sad for Emily. As our thousands of dead young men could have told her, life is fragile, precious, and fleeting. We should reach out and touch those we can while they are still here.

  At Christmas 1862, we went to the Howlands for a muted holiday. Josey, who was starting to join the carols, was our “star of wonder,” and beautiful baby Elena was our “star of light.” I made the children a tiny tree, using Davy’s golden angel as the only ornament. I turned away for a moment, and my angel fell like Lucifer and ended as gleaming shards. I wept until Josey joined me — and then I had to stop to comfort him.

  Upon our return home to Amherst, we received Miss Adelaide’s letter informing us of Dr. Hugh’s passing. It was not unexpected; his worsening illness had prevented our oft-discussed return to Barbados. Still, it saddened me terribly to think that this vital and charming man, the man who had truly saved my life, would be with us no more. This was one more sad event in that long, sad winter. All I could do was hope the New Year would bring some sort of new joy. But with the war toll ever rising, I feared that I hoped in vain.

  Every day of the New Year 1863, I studied Father’s war map in the temple. I understood all too well, from the newspapers and Father’s briefings, that controlling the Mississippi was the key to Union victory. Davy had finally left Memphis and had engaged in some small skirmishes and a commendable battle at Arkansas Post. His Battery B took hundreds of prisoners, mostly Texans — “the finest body of men I have ever seen under arms.”

  Now he had reached Vicksburg, the crucial Confederate fortress on the Mississippi. If this city fell, the entire Mississippi River would effectively be under Union control, and the Confederacy would be cut in half. Its eastern part — Georgia, the Carolinas, Florida, and Tennessee — would be unable to obtain supplies of desperately needed grain and cattle from Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas to the west. It was Davy’s opinion that the opening of the Mississippi River would be of more strategic advantage to us than the capture of ten Confederate capitals.

  He was to take part in the siege of the city under General Grant. Battery B was dug in east of the river. As the days passed, he became

  . . . bored with the weary repetition of load and fire, load and fire, load and fire. I am thankful I do not have to see the fearful results of our shells falling on the town. We are part of a barrage of two hundred guns, firing day and night — only pausing when our siege guns overheat.

  The daily life in the shattered city is past imagining. The helpless citizens of Vicksburg are utterly cut off from the world as we surround them with a circle of fire in our effort to overwhelm their Confederate defenders. And I am deeply troubled to have these hapless Vicksburg civilians as our targets. My men and I prefer to fight armies.

  One afternoon, between the February blizzards, Mrs. Austin invited me to The Evergreens for tea. I wondered if it was to be “an Emily conference.” Although she and I met often at the dressing factory or at her elegant parties, it had been some time since we talked privately.

  We took tea in her increasingly gilded “drawing room.” Aunt Helen had heard from the sewing circle that Mrs. Austin had been in New York, attending the opera and dining at Delmonico’s. She had stayed with Alice Vanderbilt, her new and stylish friend, who had advised her to eschew the wor
d “parlor” and put away her plain eighteenth century mahogany furniture, all Dickinson family pieces. I could imagine Lavinia and Emily bristling at the perceived — and perhaps intended — slight.

  “Miranda, I’m starting to worry again!” she told me. She wore bottle-green velvet, trimmed with fringe and braid.

  “I think Emily is doing well these days, Mrs. Austin,” I reassured her. “She is writing steadily and calmly. Why are you concerned?”

  “You know about my Springfield grapevine. My friends there tell me she is writing them about some wonderful new Mentor who is going to run her life — again!”

  I put down my teacup and smiled at her. “This time it’s true. Mr. Thomas Higginson is an editor and a minister; he has agreed to advise her. He has written her several times.”

  “Why, that must be Thomas Wentworth Higginson — he’s getting quite a name in the Atlantic Monthly. And does she take his counsel?”

  “She fancies she does. At any rate, he’s a professional, and he seems interested in Emily.”

  Still Mrs. Austin appeared troubled, as if there were more to her worry. “She shuts herself away so completely, writing poem after poem. Is this sane behavior?”

  “If Emily’s poetry goes well, so does she. You really needn’t be concerned right now, Mrs. Austin. She seems quite rational to me.” Confident that I had allayed her fears, I took up my tea again.

  My hostess rose with a rustle and went to a small secretary of inlaid pear wood. She removed a slip of paper from the drawer and brought it to me. “Baby gift,” she said simply.

  I recognized Emily’s hand and what appeared to be a few lines, perhaps a draft of a poem: