Afternoons with Emily

by Rose MacMurray

  Aunt Helen made tea, and Ethan, Kate, the children, and I sat in Kate’s little parlor, with the dolls and the diapers and the closed piano. The children continually clamored for Kate’s attention, so the conversation was mostly between Ethan and me. Aunt Helen participated intermittently between Josey’s demands, Elena’s silent tugs, and the needs of the evening meal.

  “You must see the proofs of our alphabet,” Ethan announced. “I went ahead and corrected them, because Harnett said the publishers want them by spring. Other schools are already ordering them!”

  I knew I should be elated by this good news, so I smiled. I trusted that eventually my feelings would catch up with me. For now, I could put on the appearance of appropriate response.

  The proofs were wonderful, and we all discussed the books and future projects during supper. After the dishes were cleared, Ethan and Aunt Helen took the children upstairs to allow Kate and me a private visit in the parlor.

  Kate sat down with a long sigh. She closed her eyes for just a moment, then directed her glance at me.

  “Now, Miranda, let’s not waste a moment,” she said. “Tell me how you are, how you are really.” She smiled gently. “I can see that you are returning to life, that you are doing what one must. But what is inside you now?”

  “Oh, Kate,” I murmured. I searched for the words. “It is . . . hard. In ways I had not expected.”

  She settled back and listened as I described my unease; how, even at the end of my mourning, my Amherst neighbors could not meet my gaze. They averted their eyes as though I, like Davy, had been pitched out of life and into something else.

  “Will it ever be all right?” I asked her quietly. I believed she knew my deeper and unspoken question: will I?

  “You will, my cousin, but of course you will never be exactly our same Miranda after this.”

  She tucked one of my stray curls behind my ear. I could not remember when I had last cut my hair.

  “You will have to grow around the wound to survive, like a tree blasted by lightning,” she said gently. “Just as you will have to put aside other people’s ideas and expectations for how you should do this.”

  I realized then just how much I had missed her. We chatted on, and I was reassured that my concerns were common enough, vagaries that attached themselves fleetingly to death’s aftermath. In my heart, I knew my life would once again find a steady center. Rather, I was more troubled by Kate. She had gained very little weight this time, and her face was pale and narrow. Her expression was clouded and uncertain; her eyes told me she had moved far away.

  “What is it, Kate?” I asked. I took her cold hands in mine. “Now tell me what you think about.”

  She looked away. “I’m not sure; I don’t do much real thinking these days. I just do — and then there’s no time left to think. Every day is just like every other, and then I sleep at the end of it. Or try to.”

  “Do you feel the same way as you did the other two times you were expecting?”

  She picked up a clean diaper from a pile of laundry that had never made it upstairs. She folded the single item over and over.

  “No, I don’t.” Kate was emphatic. “This is different. For the first time I’m really afraid — and I never was before.”

  I watched as she laid the cloth diaper on her lap, opened it, and then folded it again.

  “But you had an easier time with Elena than with Josey,” I reminded her. “Surely this time should be no trouble . . . almost.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not afraid of the delivery. It’s the worst pain there is, but I survived twice. It’s afterward . . .”

  Kate laid the diaper on the settee, stood, and crossed to the piano. She leaned some of her weight onto her hands as she pressed down on the closed lid.

  “How in the world will I manage with three babies? How can I do it, day after day, night after night?”

  “But you have Maureen to help you, and Ethan will —”

  “No, no, you don’t understand.” Kate began to shake.

  Alarmed, I rose and crossed quickly to stand beside her, uncertain of what to do, how to help.

  “My day begins before the night has ended,” Kate said, the words coming unevenly as she gulped in air. “Elena cries for me until I take her in my arms. Josey calls that he is ‘chivering cold.’ Before I know it, I am up with both children and it’s not yet daylight. And with that I go and go, cooking, washing, tending the children, all day long, cleaning, mending, and straightening up — well after the house is dark and quiet. And then it starts again. That is why I can’t think — I’m so tired, Miranda — I’m so truly tired to death.”

  My strong, brave Kate began to sob helplessly. I reached out to hold her, but I could not get close enough. Her poor swollen body kept us apart.

  “Oh, Miranda, tell me — how did this happen to me? What will I do?”

  There was nothing to say. Instead I held her hand and carefully laid an arm around her quivering shoulders as she went on sobbing in her exhaustion and her fear.

  In the end, Kate was spared; she never had to do it all, and she was able to rest. Ethan Charles Howland required only three early hours to be born, and his mother was smiling and nursing him by noon. Then I took little Ethan for an hour or two so Kate could sleep while Aunt Helen bustled in the kitchen.

  I returned him around four. I opened the door, calling, “Wake up, here’s someone hungry!” By then Kate was quite cold — the killing blood clot must have struck right after I took the baby. Dr. Smedley vowed she died in painless seconds. He told us such a clot could not had been guessed or prevented; it was a frequent blow from God against new mothers.

  Ethan and Aunt Helen were wild with grief, for which they were utterly unprepared. There was nothing I could do for Kate’s husband, and Kate’s mother, and my own loss. But I could care for Kate’s children.

  Baby Ethan was quiet and easy, and took a bottle without distress, having only nursed that once. Dark-haired Elena wouldn’t leave my side. Just two and a half, having few words but great understanding, she knew something was horribly wrong.

  Little Josey was the most confused. “Why is Papa crying? When will Mama wake up?” he kept asking us. “She’s there in her room. I saw her in bed. Why is the door closed?”

  It was a fearful time in Kate’s house for those she left behind.

  When Aunt Helen couldn’t answer, Ethan asked me to decide if the coffin should be open or closed; I chose closed. Radiant Kate should be remembered as a beauty. The service was in the little parlor, with Kate’s voice teacher at the piano. The mourners spread out into the orchard, the little apple trees from Kate’s wedding. She was buried in the rain — in the Chase plot, next to her father. I welcomed the rain. It was as if the skies themselves were weeping.

  After Kate’s funeral, we returned the platters and emptied the vases. Emily had sent freesias and to Aunt Helen had written: “Will Mrs. Sloan accept these Blossoms for the Hand of her Daughter, with the sorrow of Emily and Vinnie Dickinson?” In her note to me she acknowledged this second loss. “Fate can have no more arrows in its quiver for you that can wound like these.” I had not thought of life in these terms and wondered now if any more blows would really matter.

  One blank day followed another as we lived on in Kate’s little house. Aunt Helen returned to Amherst and to Father, to mourn with him. The household activity and children’s clatter, added to her cataclysmic bereavement, was too much for her. These two seemed years slower and sadder than before our family tragedies took shape and multiplied. I wondered fleetingly if the same was true of me.

  I walked through exhausting days and empty nights, caring for the children. Like Kate, I was always tired and felt little or nothing but fatigue. I tried to forget the past and could not imagine a future, merely functioning in the present. Maureen, Kate’s Irish helper, was strong and steadfast; she was my only adult companion. Luckily I had no social life, for I would not have been able to carry on a proper conversation. T
he mail went unread, the war news unnoticed. My only events were those in the nursery, and one diaper was very like another.

  Ethan too was a husk of a person. We seldom met, as I kept children’s hours and Maureen gave him his late dinners. Since late 1862 he had been a project architect at the Springfield Armory, which was doubling in size to feed the insatiable war machine. He burrowed like a mole into his work, grateful he could leave the running of his household to me and Maureen. When he was home, he spent much time behind the closed doors of his small study.

  One day I decided it was shameful to detach myself from the war, as Emily had done. Even if I was beyond further injury, I owed it to the Union and to Davy’s memory to stay informed. I asked Ethan to bring me the Springfield Republican in the evenings, and I learned that our forces were attacking in Virginia, Georgia, and Mississippi. General Grant, Davy’s old commander, was now commander in chief of the Union Army. He had caused more men to be killed than any general in history.

  Just last year, Davy was shelling Vicksburg. I was studying Shakespeare’s comedies at the college and reading aloud to the ladies making dressings.

  This year, this evening, I was sitting in Kate’s parlor, reading the war news in the Republican — and suddenly I realized I was encountering geography and names from last spring. Rappahannock, Rapidan, Orange Plank Road, Wilderness Church — I knew them all. The very same hills and creeks and evil-smoking forests were a battlefield again — but in this May of 1864, the battleground was haunted. The living soldiers, in their desperate twilight combat, were trampling the bones and skulls of last year’s unburied dead.

  There had been attempts to bury some of the ten thousand corpses after “Wilderness” a year ago — but most were too badly mangled or burned to be recognized. They lay in the woods, blue serge and gray homespun uniforms intermingled. Then came the heavy winter rains, washing open the shallow graves — and then the forest animals followed the rains. Only the skeletons and the glinting brass buttons remained. Now, “Second Wilderness” was being waged over a crunching carpet of bones. From every thicket, the silent rows of skulls watched their comrades.

  The image was overwhelming. I cried out in unbelieving horror. Ethan, working in Kate’s garden, rushed in.

  “Miranda, what’s wrong?”

  Wordlessly, I handed him the paper. I was trembling all over. The war had wrested me back from the dark unfeeling gloom that had been my sanctuary these last long months.

  Now that the dam had burst, I was overcome by waves of held-back emotion flooding through me. I struggled to bring myself to order.

  Ethan laid the paper on a small side table.

  “Miranda,” he began in a low voice, “I don’t know what to . . .”

  I knew he wished to comfort me; I knew he could not. I didn’t even know if I wanted him to. I sank into a chair to settle my churning feelings. My breathing returned to normal; my heart slowed to a natural pace. I could sense Ethan’s concern, and when he pulled up a chair, I noticed for the first time that his thick, fair hair was raked with gray.

  “I have learned these weeks that grief and guilt are full-time burdens if you let them be,” he said. “I have asked God for strength to go on. I still have my family to support, and yet . . . and yet without her, I have no family.” With this, Ethan squeezed his eyes shut to stop the flow of tears.

  My raw emotions had opened the door to his own. This was the first true and personal thing he had said to me since Kate’s death. “Let yourself cry, Ethan. Nothing relieves like tears,” I murmured. I felt stronger from having released my pent-up grief. Cleansed. I thought perhaps now we could help to heal each other.

  On impulse, I touched his hand in understanding. Even the longest night must give way when the horizon parts into earth and sky. There were some things I had discovered on my own that I could offer.

  “Ethan, perhaps it won’t always be like this,” I told him gently. “But now, do you think we should try to talk and share our sorrow?”

  Saying this, I thought of treetops that sway and bend in close and shiver together when the wind comes. He looked earnestly at me — at my pale face, my dull eyes, my careless clothes, my used apron.

  “Yes.” Ethan nodded. “You are right. We can begin by having dinner together in the evenings.”

  And so we began, and this gave a new shape to my days. After I got the children to bed, I bathed and changed, just as I had in Barbados, for a social time. I arranged with Maureen that she leave our dinner for me to serve, allowing her to get some rest. Ethan and I would tidy up.

  Our meals were harmonious and pleasant. We both appreciated the companionship of a literate adult. We tried to keep our thoughts on a given subject and forced ourselves to exchange ideas on books, art, and the children. Some nights Ethan brought wine and we read poetry. When Emily wrote and asked me shrewdly, “Do you dare to live yet?” I could answer honestly that I was trying.

  I found Ethan intelligent, charming, and responsive. He had a flattering way of remembering everything I said and quoting it days later. He entertained me with tales of his boyhood in New Bedford, a large, bustling seaport built around whalers and whaling. He had dreamed of going to sea, like every New England boy — but he took a bad fall on a schooner off Gloucester and had a stiff knee. This kept him from being a sailor and later from being a Union soldier.

  One late May morning I was surprised by another letter from Emily — not from Amherst but from Cambridge. Her eye condition had worsened, and she was having daily treatments from a specialist in Boston. She was not allowed to read and could only write a few minutes a day. I took this with a grain of salt, as Emily’s illnesses always worsened in the telling. Emily had brought her Norcross cousins for company. She liked her Cambridge boardinghouse but said, “I have not looked at spring.”

  I could tell she missed her boundaries — her personal books and private views and excluding door. I felt pangs of sympathy for her, exiled and vulnerable as she was — a little weak exposed creature, without the safety of her shell.

  Father came from Amherst every ten days or so, bringing me clean clothes and college library books and Aunt Helen’s touching treats for the children. In mid-June we took a long walk together around Springfield.

  “You’ve been here over three months now, Miranda,” he said. “When are you coming home?”

  “I — I don’t know,” I answered. It wasn’t something I had really thought about in anything other than the vaguest of terms.

  “Are you trying to live Kate’s life for her?” he asked.

  This caught me by surprise, the boldness of the statement. Yet it rang with a kind of truth; I needed to consider it carefully. I wanted to answer the question honestly — for Father and for myself.

  We walked along a shaded path silently, the only sound occasional birdsong and the buzzing of bees. There was a stillness in the air, as if all of nature were waiting for me to examine my heart. I felt no pressure from my father for a quick response; I was to take my time.

  “No, Father,” I replied finally, honestly. “But right now there’s nothing else I want to do. This is the only thing I’m sure I must do. Josey and Elena and baby Ethan have helped me too, you know. They have kept me from drowning.”

  He regarded me thoughtfully. “Do you have any plans?”

  “Ethan and I have discussed finding an older woman to help Maureen. Once we do, I can leave here.”

  “And then what?”

  “I — I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

  “Well, think of this part of your life as being a corridor. We don’t know where it may lead — but it should be away from here.” He reached down and gave my hand a squeeze.

  I smiled up at him. “Father, I agree.”

  When he departed, I began to seriously consider our conversation. The reasons to leave Springfield, the future I hoped to have. I knew more of what I wanted than I had realized, as if on a subterranean level I had made myself some crucial promises. I in
tended to have a life of public service and challenge. All of my studies had led me here — to a path of educational reform. I would guide and affect many, many children — not diaper a particular three!

  I knew this passion was deeply rooted in my own experience as an isolated and lonely child whose life would have been barren without access to imaginative learning. But could this interest in impacting the nation’s children also stem from a resolution never to be an actual, physical mother? In my self-interrogation I discovered that I had a new, total, and permanent horror of childbirth — its rending ordeal, its fatal result. This decision was irrevocable.

  Yet that was a resolution that tore me in two. One morning, especially, I rose to a bright, blowing day. My first thought: We can do the children’s laundry! After a week of rain, the cellar was knee-deep in rancid little clothes. Then after Elena’s nap, I took her for one of our walks up the lane, under newly budding leaves. These precious hours together evolved from my desire to tenderly coax her from her cocoon of silence, just as spring aroused Josey’s jonquils from their winter slumber. Elena was still a convalescent from Kate’s death. Frail and far too quiet, she needed to begin her own healing.

  We stopped to pick a bouquet of wildflowers for Maureen and blackberries for the boys, which I counted out slowly while she dropped them into my sunbonnet. Then we walked on to see the Allens’ new baby lambs. We stroked their soft pearl fur, and Elena, at last, broke her silence.

  “Mama, baby,” she said, pointing to them and to me. At first I nodded my head happily, glad to see her responding to them. But then her gold-green eyes fell again on me. “Mama, baby,” she repeated, and this time there was no mistaking her meaning. She believed I was her mama. I gave an involuntary shiver.

  After our walks, there were baths and supper and stories and good nights — and I was exhausted. Loving Kate’s children, I realized there could be days and weeks and years ahead for me exactly like today. Exactly as there would have been for Kate. As Father had suggested, it would be entirely possible for me to step onto Kate’s path, experiencing Kate’s submersion of herself into her family, swallowed up by suffocating yet rewarding and tantalizing demands.