The Steampunk Trilogy

by Paul Di Filippo

  Emily felt her whole being filling with confidence and vitality. The constant anxiety that dwelt behind her breastbone began to diminish. But Whitman’s next words brought her up short, deflating her new elation.

  “And yet, like the sad piping of that lonely mateless bird, your poems exhibit a grave deficiency, a morbid strain that threatens to wrap itself around the living trunk of your songs like a clinging vine, until it brings the whole tree down.”

  Emily stiffened and tried to withdraw her hand, but Whitman would not permit it. She was forced to speak roughly while still in intimate contact with him.

  “I am not aware of any such grievous flaw as you adduce, sir. But of course, I await the instruction of one so learned.”

  Whitman took no offense at her cold tones, but smiled instead. “I am far from ‘learned,’ Miss Dickinson, save in what I have gleaned from the streets of Brooklyn and the shores and paths of my native Paumanok. And as my purse and my reviews both well attest, I am no favorite of the academies! Yet my eyes are keen enough to find letters from God dropped everywhere. And what these old eyes—and my heart—tell me about your poetry is this: it is too cloistered, too rarefied, too much a product of the head and the hearth, as if you had no body, nor a world to walk in. You have that fine facility for ‘seeing the world in a grain of sand,’ as Mister Blake would have it. But you seem unable to see the world as the self-sufficient miracle of itself. Everything must represent something ethereal to you. Sunsets, bees and rainbows—self-existent perfections which you insist on cloaking in your own fancies! Nothing can stand for itself alone, but you must bend it to represent a ‘Truth.’ If you should continue on in this vein, you will, I predict, gradually refine yourself and your poetry entirely out of existence!”

  Emily made no immediate reply. So sincere and vibrant had Whitman’s voice been, that she was forced to consider the validity of his remarks.

  Could it be possible that her constricted life—half chosen, half imposed—was really threatening her poetry with its limited scope? She had been so convinced till this moment that she had a clear vision of what was ultimately important. Were there marvels and wonders beyond her ken? Was she like a color-blind person who thought she knew what color was, but knew not . . .?

  Haltingly, Emily tried to voice her apprehensions.

  “What you so glibly condemn, Mister Whitman, might indeed be so. Yet, what if my faults be as you itemize? They are part and parcel of my very nature, a crack that runs through me like the Liberty Bell’s. And perhaps that very crack gives me my distinctive timbre. In any case, it is too late for me to change.”

  Whitman halted and turned to gaze deeply and sincerely into Emily’s eyes. “You are absolutely wrong on that score, Miss Dickinson. I know whereof I speak. For all my early manhood, I moved in a fog of false feelings and shoddy dreams, only dimly sensing that I was missing my mark. It was only in my thirty-seventh year that I awoke to my own true nature, and began to shape my songs. It is never too late to change and grow.”

  “For a man, perhaps, that may be true. Your sex is permitted to test yourself, to hurl yourself into clarifying situations that enlarge your spirit. But we women are not allowed such liberties. Bride, mother or sterile crone these are the limited roles society grants us.”

  “There is an iota of generally accepted truth to what you say—as much as there is in the assertion that a common prostitute is not a queen!”

  Emily gasped at the foul language! But Whitman continued unabashed.

  “But I say that a common trull is a queen! And I say that a woman is not less than a man, and may do whatever she pleases! Listen to me, Emily!”

  The sound of her own given name practically unhinged her. The smell of lilacs was in her blood like wine.

  “I—I don’t know what to say. How can I venture out into the world? I’ve been hurt—”

  “Do you think the dark patches have fallen on you alone? There have been times when the best I have done has seemed to me blank and suspicious. My great thoughts—as I supposed them—were they not in reality meager? Nor is it you alone who knows what it is to be evil—if that is what troubles you. I am he who knows what it is to be evil! I’ve blabbed, blushed, resented, lied, stolen, grudged! I had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak. I was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant! The wolf, the snake, the hog were not wanting in me! But I contain them all! I do not repudiate the evil, I affirm it! My poems will produce just as much evil as they do good. But there was never any such thing as evil in this world!”

  “Your words, Mister Whitman, contradict themselves—”

  Whitman’s face was scarlet. “Contradict myself! Very well, I contradict myself! I am large, I contain multitudes!”

  Seeking to calm him, Emily said, “But you have not hit on my Deepest Wound, sir. It was—an affair of the Heart—”

  Her words seemed to have the desired effect. Whitman grew calm and pensive. “There too I have sad experience. Miss Dickinson—Emily—if I share something private with you, may I ask a favor in return?”

  “What?”

  “Would you leave off this undesirable formality between us, and call me ‘Walt?’ I know the difference in our ages traditionally demands such modes of address, but I abide by no such conventions.”

  Feeling the warmth stealing into her cheeks, Emily hung her head. “It seems a small enough thing—”

  “Very well, then. Please, look—”

  Emily lifted her eyes. She saw Whitman taking a small loosely bound homemade notebook (much like one of her own chapbooks) out of his pocket. He opened it to a center page, then turned it toward her.

  From the notebook stared a tintyped face, that of a handsome woman with dark ringlets, her hands clasped over the back of the chair in which she sidewise sat.

  Whitman turned the book back toward himself. He kissed the picture, closed the leaves, then repocketed the precious keepsake.

  Emily’s heart was nigh to bursting. “Oh, Walt! Is she—is she dead?”

  “Far worse! Married!”

  Emily was scandalized, yet thrilled.

  “We met when I was editor of the New Orleans Crescent. I espied her first at the Theatre d’Orleans, during a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Succumbing to the loose tropic influence of that southern port, we fell madly in love. Her electric body exhaled a divine nimbus that wrought a fierce attraction in me, and mine likewise to her. Many were our hours of joy.

  “But she was a woman of high society, who could not afford the taint of scandal or divorce. It was the supreme wrenching for us when we realized that our love was doomed, and that we must part. She is the only woman I have ever cherished so grandly, or ever shall.”

  For some inexplicable reason, Emily grew slightly crestfallen at Whitman’s closing sentence. But not enough to obscure the larger emotions in her bosom. The similarity of Walt’s misfortune to Emily’s own doomed affair placed a final seal on the affection that had been growing half-cloaked in her heart for the sturdy, grizzled poet.

  Clutching Walt’s big hand firmly with both of her small ones, Emily said, “You truly know my soul, then, Walt.”

  “Emily—I have considered you long before you were born.”

  They found a stone bench and sat for a while, side by side in silence.

  But as the minutes passed, a small Fly Buzz irritant grew in Emily’s mind, until she finally had to voice it.

  “Walt—you used the word ‘morbid’ earlier in connection with my poems—”

  “Yes, Emily, I did. For I fear that you are overly preoccupied with death.”

  Emily opened her mouth to protest, ready with a catalogue of Death’s supreme importance in the scheme of things, but Walt held up a hand to stop her.

  “I know all you are going to say, dear Emily. Rest assured that I too have thought long and hard on death. A
s glorious as it is to be born, I know it is fully as glorious to die. Were it not for death—and it is surely false to even speak of the two as separate—life itself would be meaningless. Yes, I have heard whispers of heavenly death all my life, in the voice of the waves upon the shore and the querulous call of seabirds. But unlike you, I do not long for death, nor give it more than its due. I am too busy living, too busy indulging my holy senses, to lend death more than a passing nod. While you, dear Emily, seem more intent on hugging Death to you like a lover!”

  Emily was incensed. “I holding onto death! Who’s involved in this insane scheme of my brother’s to penetrate the shadows of the afterlife? You, not I!”

  Walt stood up. “You do not know the full scope of our expedition to Summerland, Emily. It is not an embrace of death, but a bold scientific assault on its territory, to wrest new knowledge that will benefit all the living.”

  Hoisting Emily bodily up with his bull-like strength, Walt said, “Come with me, and you shall see!”

  5

  “MICROSCOPES ARE PRUDENT IN AN EMERGENCY”

  THE BACK PARLOR of The Evergreens had been converted to an impromptu classroom, or general’s briefing post. A large slateboard rested on an artist’s easel, sticks of chalk on its ledge; a lectern and a single capacious armchair stood beside it. Tacked to the wall behind the podium was the large chart Emily had seen flattened out on her earlier visit; resting prominently atop the lectern was one of the queer glass and metal devices which had been holding down the curious map.

  Several ladderback chairs had been arrayed before the lectern. In them now sat five eager listeners, chafing slightly under a ten-minute wait: Emily, Walt and Henry Sutton three abreast in that order, with Austin Dickinson and the savant William Crookes behind them.

  The whole scene forcefully reminded Emily of her brief schooldays. And inevitably with those precious memories surfaced the glorious figure of Leonard Humphrey.

  Humphrey had been four years older than George Gould. As a child, Emily, through her Father’s close connections with the college, had eagerly followed the news of the broad academic swath the bright personable young man had cut. He had seemed to represent to Emily the proudest hopes of a new generation.

  Imagine her delight, then, when, upon his graduation in 1846, Humphrey had been appointed principal of Amherst Academy, the coeducational school which sixteen-year-old Emily and thirteen-year-old Vinnie attended.

  Through the Academy’s corridors the new principal strode like a veritable combination of Adonis and Socrates, captivating especially all tender feminine sensibilities, Emily’s not excluded. (She had gone so far as to memorize Humphrey’s valedictory speech, “The Morality of States.”) To this day, Emily still regarded Humphrey as her first Tutor, and the memory of those few times when he had stood close beside her still had the power to thrill her.

  Humphrey’s unexpected and grim death in 1850, when he had appeared yet in the flower of his manhood, had been a Devastation to Emily and the whole town.

  She did not know if it was the presence of another masculine Tutor now by her side, or the deathly topic of the scheduled lecture that made the image of Humphrey stand out almost palpably before her, as if straining soundlessly against the thin membrane separating him from the living. But so did he choose to manifest himself in her inner gaze.

  I never lost as much but twice—thought Emily, when her musings were interrupted by the voice of the scientist behind her.

  “The waste of time is the most damnable thing connected with working with these psychic types,” said Crookes. “I had to contend with the same problem with Home. He’d produce the most remarkable effects—levitation, materializations, voices—but only after hours of boredom, the lot of us sitting in the dark with our sweaty hands linked. It’s a bloody challenge to someone used to the bright light and clean-cut conditions of the la-boor-ratory, I tell you.”

  Austin chided his seatmate. “Can’t you be a little more circumspect with your language, Bill? We’ve a lady present—”

  Crookes snorted, not so much sneeringly as in admiration. “Me watch my language! Look who your sister’s sitting next to, for Harry’s sake! If she’s read his doggerel, she’s already gotten an earful. ‘Pent-up aching rivers, man-balls and man-root’ indeed! Why, he’s got more gall than Rossetti and his whole gang of libertines put together!”

  Emily felt herself blushing. She waited for Whitman to bridle at Crookes’s speech, knowing how she herself would react to any attack on her verse. But the poet merely bent his sun-browned neck, smiled, and said rather cryptically, “I am surrounded by trippers and askers. . . .”

  Seeking to divert the subject, Emily turned boldly to face Crookes. “Why do you continue to pursue your unorthodox investigations under such trying circumstances, Mister Crookes?”

  “Only because, Miss Dickinson, Spiritualism is the most exciting, far-reaching subject yet to fall under my attentions. Luckily, thanks to my father’s fortune, I am permitted to indulge my curiosity in any fashion I choose, without worrying about earning a living. Otherwise, I’d still be stuck in bloody boring Oxford, as meteorological superintendent of the Radcliffe Observatory. As things stand, however, I’m enabled to travel the globe—and beyond, if we succeed—and to meet such charming young ladies as yourself.”

  Before Emily could respond, Henry Sutton spoke up.

  “Here they are.”

  From a side entrance emerged the awaited duo.

  First to appear was Madame Selavy. Her clothing was somewhat disheveled, one of her voluminous skirts rucked up to reveal an edge of her crinolines. Close behind her came A.J. Davis. The austere author and publicist for the Spiritualist cause appeared rather discombobulated, his vest misbuttoned, his glasses askew and his hair mussed.

  Madame Selavy plopped down into the armchair set center stage. She tugged her bodice up more securely beneath her overflowing bosom, then blew out a weary breath which, Emily noticed, distinctly fluttered her mustache.

  Davis took up position behind the lectern. Seeming to realize his condition for the first time, he smoothed back his hair and straightened his spectacles before addressing the audience.

  “Madame Selavy and I have been speaking to the spirits, in connection with our trip. The audience was an arduous and tumultuous one, as there was much interference along the Celestial Telegraph. Luckily, Madame’s spirit guide, the Narragansett Indian Princess, Pink Cloud, was able to ward off all malign influences and deliver assurances of our success.”

  Madame Selavy interrupted. “Oui, mon ami, the auspices from Summerland are good. Soon, we shall be permitted to cross the border into the dominion of le Moissonneur Hideux.”

  For the third time now, Emily had heard mention of this unknown place called “Summerland.” The name conjured up for her only one of those perfect July days she lived for, when she could feel a depth, an Azure, a perfume, transcending ecstasy. She resented the appropriation of the term by someone who was in all likelihood a charlatan who had succeeded in hoodwinking her brother, and resolved to speak up.

  “Are you preparing to jump us over our beautiful New England spring straight to the dogdays, Mister Davis? Or perhaps you are merely proposing a trip to warmer latitudes of this sphere? Popocatépetl or Tenerife, perhaps?”

  Davis stared hard enough at Emily to succeed in disconcerting her before he replied.

  “On the contrary, Miss Dickinson. Summerland is a realm more exotic and perilous, yet offering commensurately greater rewards, than any mortal corner of the globe. And we shall reach it by setting sail directly from Amherst—without, in a sense, even leaving your charming little town.”

  Walt turned to Emily. “Please, Emily, listen to him. This is no simple passage to India we are undertaking.”

  Davis removed his glasses, polished them, and replaced them. “Allow me, Miss Dickinson, to acquaint you with the history of our mi
ssion.

  “I am a simple shoemaker’s son, born into humble circumstances in Poughkeepsie, New York. In the year 1843, I underwent my first magnetic trance, and began to speak of things I could not possibly have known, due to my meager formal education. Some kind believers saw fit to christen me the ‘Seer of Poughkeepsie.’ Since then, I have been in nearly constant contact with the spirits of earthly—yea, even unearthly—dead.

  “Summerland is what they call their dwelling place.

  “Summerland is not paradise, it appears, but rather a temporary stopping place on the way to God’s kingdom, where the spirit may rest before making its final ascent. My discovery, as you can plainly see, provides the whole logic and rationale for spirit contact with our world. We are speaking not to perfected angels, but to recently disincarnate entities who have not quite thrown off their human concerns or shapes.

  “The geography of Summerland—which I have managed at some pains to map—bears a resemblance to our common landscape.” Davis picked up a cane pointer which had been concealed within the lectern and turned toward the map on the wall. Gesturing, he said, “Here, for instance, we see the Chrysoprase Mountains, which run parallel to the Tourmaline Sea. Beyond this range lie such features as the Bog of Effluent Humours, the Crystal Forest, the Beryl Palace and the Ten Silver Gates.”

  Emily meekly said, “What of the Paris Exposition?”

  Her irreverence elicited chuckles from Walt, Sutton and Crookes. Austin, however, was not amused.

  “Emily—if you cannot control your tongue, you may leave. I will not have you disparaging my distinguished guests, nor the sacred quest we are about to embark on.”

  Hearing the hurt in her brother’s voice, and feeling a renewed tenderness toward him and his grief, Emily made a motion as of buttoning her lip.