Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  The baby was the last straw. It was Debbie Buffington’s big baby, Elvis. Debbie and Elvis and the Mother of Ten had come just in time to hear Winnie, their personal representative from S.I.N.G.E.D., and they had made straight for the front row, where Helen Gaunt was saving them a bunch of seats.

  But Elvis was soon bored. He began to yell.

  Winnie stopped reading, and glared at Debbie.

  Debbie was miffed. She shrugged her shoulders. Elvis hollered louder.

  “Bounce him up and down,” whispered Helen Gaunt.

  “Smack him, why don’t you?” urged the Mother of Ten.

  Debbie bounced Elvis up and down and smacked him, but it didn’t help. Soon he was hurling himself backward in her arms, roaring, his face empurpled with rage.

  “I will not go on,” cried Winnie.

  “Then why don’t you stop?” shouted a well-wisher in the back.

  Tilly Porch saved the day. Jumping out of her seat, she rushed down the aisle and gathered Elvis up in her arms. At once Elvis recognized his fairy godmother and stopped bellowing. Debbie, relieved, went out to the lobby for a smoke. There she fell into conversation with a guy from Shutesbury who was repairing a broken light fixture. It turned out that the guy had seen Debbie at a Flaky Jake concert. He had noticed her particularly when he was having a beer at intermission. “No kidding?” said Debbie.

  In the auditorium Winnie carried on. But the worst was yet to come. Glancing up from her eleventh page, she saw something terrible. Professor Kraznik was rising from his seat. With his arm around Alison Grove, he was hurrying up the aisle and leaving the hall. Tom Perry’s chair scraped across the floor behind Winnie as he too got up and ducked behind the curtain.

  Again Winnie nearly broke down. When she finished her paper at last, there were only a few compassionate listeners left in the auditorium. As she closed her folder with shaking fingers, as the thin applause stopped and the audience began to bolt, Winnie saw Professor Kraznik appear once again at the door and begin to beat his way down the aisle.

  But Winnie was too hurt. Turning away, she fumbled blindly through the folds of the curtain and broke down altogether beside a dusty piano and a pair of kettledrums.

  19

  … I cross the river—and climb the fence—now I am at the gate … now I am in the hall—now I am looking your heart in the eye!

  It was lunchtime. Owen Kraznik was weak with hunger. Deftly he escaped the clutching fingers of sensitive ladies and fellow scholars and biked home to his own house on Spring Street. There he found Homer Kelly warming up the contents of a can Of spaghetti. With a flourish, Homer dumped a jar of bread-and-butter pickles into the pot and stirred them around. Then he unwrapped a pair of Hostess cupcakes and parked one beside Owen’s plate, the other beside his own.

  “Homer,” said Owen admiringly, “this is truly haute cuisine.”

  Everyone else in Amherst, too, was putting aside the work of the morning to pause for lunch. In the Wildwood Elementary School the children were lining up in the cafeteria, and in the Gaslite restaurant the counterman reached into the fridge for a big bowl of shredded cabbage. Hikers at the top of Mount Holyoke stood on the porch of the Summit House and ate their sandwiches, looking out over the broad landscape of flat green fields and winding Connecticut River. And in the neighboring valley of the Swift River, the chief engineer for the waterworks at the Quabbin Reservoir left the Administration Building and drove to the Crystal Springs Dairy Bar in Belchertown. There, sitting at the counter, he ordered a tunafish sandwich and wondered when to close off the Ware River intake and open the valve at Shaft 12, to begin the annual surge of water through the tunnel to Boston. Soon now. He would call up Jesse Jack Gaw today or tomorrow.

  And in the reservoir itself, eighty feet down, lake trout nosed for smelt around the stone cellar holes of the lost towns of Greenwich and Prestott, Dana and Enfield. Dr. Harvey Kloop thought about the trout and yearned after them as he pushed his tray along the cafeteria line in the hospital in Northampton. Once again he had been delayed. Once again Eunice Jane had thrown a monkey wrench into the works. Before he took off for his little fishing expedition, Harvey was supposed to scrub out the birdhouse and paint the furnace. How long would that take? If he did a really slapdash job on the furnace, surely he would at last be on his way to Quabbin by late afternoon?

  Tom Perry spent the lunch hour with Alison Grove in the cozy intimacy of Judie’s Restaurant on North Pleasant Street. “Good God, Alison darling,” he said, looking across the tiny table with concern, “are you really all right?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s just that I had this really incredible headache. I mean I felt really, really dizzy. You know, like I might faint. So Professor Kraznik brought me out to get some air. I’m okay now.”

  “My poor darling.”

  But after two glasses of white wine Alison confessed she had merely been pretending. “It was just such a drag. I mean, everybody else was leaving. You know, I mean I thought it over and decided it wouldn’t be, like, polite to leave from the front row, not with this white dress on and everything. So I had to pretend to be really, really sick. I mean, wasn’t she incredible?” Alison showed her perfect teeth in a rare smile. She had taken down her hair, and it gushed in a red-gold flood over the white sleeves of her long gown.

  Tom laughed. “It’s so funny, the way you were acting out Dombey Dell’s thesis about Emily Dickinson as the pathetic Victorian female. There you were, fainting up the aisle, leaning on Owen. Well, the truth is I was glad to get out of there myself. That Winnie Gaw is certainly impossible.”

  And then Tom tackled his spinach quiche, while Alison babbled about some of the girls on the fourteenth floor of Coolidge Hall. Tom nodded and smiled, but he was barely listening. He was thinking instead about Ellen Oak. This morning he had spotted Ellen in the audience, and it had been a shock. What the hell was Ellen doing at the Emily Dickinson symposium? He had specifically told her not to come. Why hadn’t she warned him she would be here? And then Tom remembered the letter from Ellen in his mail. Oh, God, he should have taken the time to read it. He had rushed home in a terrific hurry to change his clothes, and he had snatched his mail out of the box, glanced at it, and dumped it on the kitchen table. Now it occurred to Tom that Ellen’s letter had not been stamped. She must have delivered it in person. He squirmed. He was beginning to get a nasty uncomfortable feeling about his old girlfriend and about what she might have said in the letter that was lying there at home on the kitchen table.

  It was a sticky wicket. What was he supposed to do about the woman, now that she was here? The trouble was, he didn’t have time to talk to her, not now. By rights he ought to take her aside and tell her about Alison and say how sorry he was, and how grateful, and so on. But he couldn’t do a tricky thing like that in a big hurry. Not on a day like this, when the most important speech of his life was coming up this afternoon. After all, the Smith brothers from Harvard would be listening, and everybody said they had this job at their disposal, this big Aldershot Chair of American Studies, or something like that. Tom smiled to himself. Poor Dombey Dell. Dombey thought he had a chance at having the chair bestowed on his own fawn-colored polyester backside. He didn’t have a prayer.

  In the noisy cheerfulness of Judie’s, in the jolly flicker of the lamps on the little tables, with waitresses squeezing past him and a lot of genial uproar in the background, Tom struggled painfully with the problem of his two girlfriends, then hardened his heart. It was just too damn bad about Ellen Oak. Oh, she was a fine woman, of course! No question! And back there in the hospital when she had diagnosed his inflamed appendix, there had been a kind of glamour about her, an air of distinction. But now, compared with Alison Grove—!

  Then Tom winced, and put a hand on his abdomen, at the spot where his appendix had once festered. It was as if a thread were attached to the spot, and it was stretching away from him, right through the wall of Judie’s and the row of stores next door, then trembling and thrumming along th
e sidewalk past the bus stop and glistening in the sunlight as it pulled taut across the fork where East Pleasant Street separated from North Pleasant, then poking through the clapboards of his own house on McClellan Street and fastening itself to the white envelope on the kitchen table. The thread tugged at the clean scar on Tom’s belly. Oh, God, he ought to go back there and read the fucking letter.

  But not now. There just wasn’t time.There was too much to do.

  Did Ellen Oak know he had seen her, there in the audience at Mahar Auditorium? Tom had an unhappy suspicion that just for a fraction of a second, just for the merest instant before he flicked his glance away, his eyes had met her steady gaze.

  For Peter Wiggins, the lunch hour was the most exciting of his life. Peter had been invited to dine in style at the Lord Jeffery Inn by the correspondent from The New York Times. To Peter’s surprise, the correspondent turned out to be a rather dowdy woman from the borough of Queens. She was fascinated, she said, by his talk.

  Peter was flattered. Nobly he refrained from drinking more than one vodka and tonic, even though he knew he deserved a whole bottle of champagne. Smiling modestly at his luncheon companion, he was keenly aware that everyone in the dining room was staring at him. People kept coming up to shake his hand. “I’m just so grateful,” gushed Marybelle Spikes. “It’s like you’ve given us this really fabulous treasure.” And when one of the Smith brothers paused at Peter’s table to ask him to join them for a drink after the afternoon session, Peter’s cup was filled to overflowing.

  But he didn’t allow success to go to his head. The moment was too important. The woman from the Times was asking him questions, writing down his replies. Peter was careful to mention his various contributions to the New England Quarterly and the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, to make it plain that he wasn’t just a one-issue scholar. The Times woman wrote it all down, and asked for a copy of the photograph that had been the subject of his talk. Then she hurried upstairs to her room to tap out her article on her portable typewriter.

  Left alone, Peter was relieved. The pressure was off. Grinning to himself, he took a long shaky breath and walked out the side door of the Lord Jeff, smiling cordially at a few more admirers who rushed up to shake his hand. There was just time before the next session to go back to the Homestead and call Angie from the phone in the hall outside his room, and tell her the good news.

  But Angie didn’t seem to be listening. “The kids,” she said, “they’re driving me bananas.”

  “But, Angie, listen. Wait till you hear—”

  “It’s the weather. God! The minute you stick your head out the door, you’re fried. I took the kids to the K-Mart, and the blacktop in the parking lot was so hot I nearly fainted. I had to race the car out of there before I lost consciousness. The kids were screaming.”

  As Angie talked, Peter gazed through the open door of his bedroom and saw the sunlit leafy paradise beyond the windows dissolve and become an image of the blazing sun itself, filling the windows, dazzling out over the walls until they faded away, until nothing was left but a ruthless blinding light. He hung up the phone a little sadly, remembering how important to Emily Dickinson had been the noonday sun.

  You’ll know it—as you know ’tis Noon—

  By Glory—

  As you do the Sun—

  By Glory …

  Well, good for Emily Dickinson. But she had not perceived the sun as he did, as a brutal object in the vast metallic sky. She had merely beheld it tremulous among the foliage of her father’s trees, its image dappled in little circles on the shady lawn. Or she had watched it drop slowly westward in the small New England heavens, veiled in pretty colored clouds. She had never known it as the fiery withering destroyer that blazed in the white-hot oven over Pancake Flat, Arizona.

  20

  My God—He sees thee—

  Shine thy best—

  Fling up thy Balls of Gold …

  The afternoon session of the Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium was called to order by Dombey Dell in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College.

  Owen Kraznik sat with Homer Kelly in the front pew and looked out over the audience crowded together in the handsome columned spaces. At this moment it was almost possible to regret his refusal to teach at the College instead of at the University. Tom Perry was always needling him about it. “Owen, I just don’t understand it. Why would you want to stick with that ex-cow college when you could be part of the Amherst faculty? You should hear Dombey hint around about transferring over here from U Mass. He’d give his eyeteeth. Why not you?”

  Well, why not? wondered Owen. For an instant he imagined himself talking comfortably to a small class of selected students in this sanctified place instead of shouting through a microphone to a faceless mass in Mahar Auditorium. The thought was tempting, but Owen knew he’d never do it.

  His address was the last of the afternoon, after Tilly Porch had been informative and brief, Tom Perry witty and sound, and Professor Cobb from Minneapolis boring and repetitious.

  Dombey Dell rose to introduce him, but then Dombey had to wait. There was a hushed chaotic pause. A crush of new people was wedging its way into Johnson Chapel and spreading into the side aisles. Owen’s speech was what everybody had been waiting for. Homer Kelly straightened his slumped spine and sat up as Owen began to talk.

  His address was simple and lucid, reverent and sane. The poems he examined were not in the anthologies. They came from his lips majestic, tragic, vast. Veils were withdrawn from central mysteries, trivialities vanished in the breath of the poet’s ethereal wind, immensities spread outward from her short quatrains, the sea parted to show a further sea. For a moment Emily Dickinson stood before them in all her amplitude, her grandeur and strength, her melancholy power, her quivering vulnerability. Then, as Owen finished his brief address, she rose in sober stature and withdrew into a sublimity of privacy.

  With one motion the audience stood up. There was massive prolonged applause. Owen answered a few questions, then called a halt. The audience began shuffling from their pews into the aisles, satisfied, solemnized, transfixed.

  Tom Perry was desperate to get back home and read Ellen’s letter. The white envelope on the kitchen table had been pulling at his gut all afternoon. He drew Alison across the hall into an empty classroom. “Say, Alison, listen. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do right now. And I’m having supper with those guys from Harvard. I’ll meet you at that recital this evening, okay? You know, at Merrill Hall.”

  Alison was peeved. She was not used to being set aside. “So what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she said angrily.

  “Oh, Alison.” Tom put his arms around her and kissed her, feeling his body engorge with thick warm blood. Once again he understood the necessity of breaking off with Ellen Oak.

  But Alison jerked out of his embrace. Turning her back, she flounced away down the hall. Alison was really mad.

  Our first quarrel, thought Tom sentimentally, letting her go, watching her turn swiftly to descend the stairs. Peering over the iron railing, he caught a last glimpse of her bright hair against the dark stone of the granite steps. Then Tom remembered Ellen’s letter. He walked down the stairs slowly, to avoid encountering Alison again, and raced down the hill in the direction of McClellan Street.

  There on the kitchen table, waiting for him, was the letter. Tom tore open the envelope, read the letter hastily, and smiled with relief.

  Ellen was breaking it off herself. She wasn’t accusing him of anything. She didn’t seem to have heard any rumors. She was just taking a serene farewell. Somehow she seemed to have grasped the fact that things had changed, and she was bowing out gracefully.

  You had to hand it to the girl. She was a damn nice woman. Smart, too. Had Ellen heard his talk? Tom preened himself on the thought, and then his love-fogged mind cleared. For an instant he saw Ellen and Alison side by side, not in their physical embodiments but in their essences and selves, and he was shaken. He remembered somethin
g Emily Dickinson had said. A Letter … is the mind alone without corporeal friend.

  But people were not just minds, Tom reminded himself. Ellen had a body as well as a mind. What a shame her ancestors had been so stingy in handing out corporeal goodies! It was really too bad.

  As it happened, Tom’s vainglory about Ellen was wrong. She had not come to Johnson Chapel to hear his lecture. She had been one of the crowd that pressed into the hall just in time to hear Professor Kraznik.

  Now, walking down Boltwood Avenue in the direction of the Gaslite, Ellen’s head was reverberating with the poems he had examined, and with the sound of his voice. For the first time in twenty-seven hours, Ellen was not thinking about Tom Perry and Alison Grove.

  I could not have defined the change—

  Conversion of the Mind

  Like Sanctifying in the Soul—

  Is witnessed—not explained …

  At that moment Owen Kraznik himself was opening the front door of the Homestead. He was worn out. Dragging himself upstairs, he was glad to find the bedroom empty. Dombey was elsewhere. But Dombey’s clothes were all over the bed—his sharp new blazer, his boots with the cowboy heels, his three-piece suit, his boxer shorts. Owen pushed everything to one side and crawled under the covers. Laying his teeming head on the pillow, he went to sleep.

  Instantly he was in one of his spinning nightmares.

  And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

  And I dropped down, and down —

  And hit a World, at every plunge,

  And Finished knowing—then …