Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  21

  Success is counted sweetest

  By those who ne’er succeed.

  To comprehend a nectar

  Requires sorest need.

  Winifred Gaw was too miserable to attend the afternoon session of the Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium. She had been planning to sit in the front row and clap loudly for Professor Kraznik. But this morning he had hurt her too deeply by walking out of her lecture in the company of Alison Grove.

  With her bosom still heaving in long shuddering sighs, Winnie drove southeast on Route 9. In Ware, she pulled up in front of Astrella’s Doughnut Snack Bar on North Street. Winnie needed comfort. More than anything else, she yearned for a certain kind of solace, and this was the place to get it. Good things lay on the paper doilies in the glass case in Astrella’s. Winnie poured herself out of the front seat of the big van and crossed the street.

  The shop was warm and fragrant. Avoiding the eye of the cute high-school girl behind the counter, Winnie peered hungrily at the piled-up doughnuts in the glass case. “I’d like some doughnuts, please,” she said coldly. “A dozen glazed, a dozen chocolate, a dozen cinnamon.” And then she saw the éclairs. “Oh, and a dozen of those too, okay?”

  The high-school girl was slow. She picked up each doughnut daintily in a piece of tissue paper, so that it would be untouched by human hands, and put it carefully into a white box. Winnie balled her disfigured left hand into a fist in her pocket.

  At last the girl handed a stack of four white boxes across the glass case. Each box was tied separately with white string. The boxes and the string were the color of Emily Dickinson’s white dress, thought Winnie, the dress that still hung in the closet, the dress she had saved from Alison Grove. They were also the color of gluttony—the color of sugar, the color of flour, the color of lard—but Winnie didn’t think of that. Quickly she carried them across the street to the van and put them down on the front seat. Then she climbed in, fitted herself under the steering wheel, and tore at the string on the uppermost box.

  The doughnuts inside the waxed paper were covered with a brittle sugary glaze. Winnie put one to her lips. The first bite was rapture. Crystalline sugar flaked against her mouth, crumbs fell on the shelf of her bosom, the airy interior dissolved upon her tongue. Holding the doughnut delicately between finger and thumb, Winnie started the car again. On the way home she polished off three more of the glazed doughnuts and two of the chocolate éclairs. The éclairs were delicious, eggy and soft in texture, and puddingy with filling.

  Driving along Greenwich Road, Winnie forgot the woes of the morning. She chewed and swallowed and chewed, and thought, as she so often did on Greenwich Road, of the lost town of Greenwich to which it had once led. Greenwich was the village in which her parents had lived as children, in houses long since destroyed to allow the water of the Swift River to fill the valley, rising higher than the Town Hall, higher than the textile factory and the Walker sawmill, higher than the Village Hotel and Chamberlain’s. Store, higher than the steeple of the Congregational church, higher than the little one-room school-house in which Winnie’s father and mother had acquired all the education they were ever going to get.

  Of course, Winnie herself had never seen any of these places, but she had heard about them all her life, in the angry reminiscences of her father. Her mother always said, “Forget it, let dead dogs lie,” but her father couldn’t let it alone. Even though he worked at Quabbin for the Metropolitan District Commission, even though his wages from the MDC had been supporting his family for years, Jesse Gaw’s anger was alive and festering.

  You would think it was yesterday instead of fifty years ago that the bulldozer had knocked down his old schoolhouse and broken the schoolhouse bell and run over his leg and crippled him.

  Winnie hated her father. She felt no sympathy for his lame uneven walk, and she was sick to death of his rancid indignation.

  Turning into her driveway, she was careful not to look at the house, because the sight of it depressed her. She ignored, too, the wrecked cars all over the front yard. But she couldn’t avoid seeing her father working in the garage beside the house. JESSE JACK GAW, COLLISION, FRONT END WORK, Said the sign over the garage. Bending cars back into shape—it was what her father did in his spare time. Sometimes the noise was unbearable, the violent repetitive crash of the sledgehammer against crumpled pieces of sheet metal, the clang of the chain and the frame-puller, the hissing throb of the compressor. Sometimes it drove Winnie right out of the house.

  Jesse Gaw glanced up without expression as Winnie’s big van pulled up beside him, and then he looked back at the object on his workbench. It’s that damn bell, thought Winnie. The broken bell from the old schoolhouse in the valley was red hot under his torch. For years her father had been talking about replacing the broken fitting for the clapper. Now he was working on it at last. Would wonders never cease.

  Winnie climbed down out of the van with her white boxes and stood watching him sullenly, but he took no notice of her. After a moment he abandoned the bell, limped to his workbench, and picked up the axe that lay there, gleaming on a heap of rags. Then Jesse Gaw began sharpening the edge of the axe blade on his grindstone. Sparks flew up from the wheel.

  Only then did Winnie’s father look at her with his small mean eye.

  Clumsily, Winnie whirled around and lumbered up the porch stairs, aware of the furious beating of her heart. Carefully she opened the front door, hoping to creep up to her room unheard. But she couldn’t prevent the creak of the treads under her weight. Her mother called out sharply from the kitchen, “Is that you, Winifred? I been waiting lunch.”

  “I don’t care for any lunch,” said Winnie daintily. Opening her bedroom door, she waited for her mother’s reply. Downstairs there was a slam and a crash. Her mother was mad. But Mrs. Gaw said nothing more. Relieved, Winnie went into her room and closed the door, safe at last. Putting down the boxes on the dresser, she sat down beside them on the bed and began working her way through them methodically, alternating cinnamon doughnuts with chocolate, glazed with éclairs, until at last she could eat no more. She wiped her face, which was sticky with sugar and smeared with chocolate, and put a hand on her swollen midriff. The effort to digest was robbing her of strength. There was a feeling of tightness around her heart. She was suddenly thirsty. All that sweet stuff, it really made you thirsty. Winnie went to the bathroom, filled a cup with water, drank it, filled it again, drank it, and filled it yet again.

  It was time to get to work. With an effort, Winnie dragged herself back to her room, took the second volume of Sewall’s biography of Emily Dickinson out of her bookcase, and opened it to the controversial frontispiece, the so-called photograph of Emily Dickinson. It was the picture the man from Arizona had been talking about this morning. Carrying the book, Winnie tramped downstairs, all the way to her darkroom in the basement.

  She had her work cut out for her, the manufacture of a solid piece of documentary evidence. It wouldn’t be easy, but Winnie had figured out a way to do it.

  And there in her darkroom Winnie forgot about the humiliation of the morning. She forgot about Alison Grove and Professor Kraznik. She forgot about the fire in Coolidge Hall and the two sophomore men who had perished in the choking smoke of the north staircase. For the next two hours, Winifred Gaw forgot about herself and all her troubles.

  22

  … death claims a living bride …

  Owen Kraznik was still asleep in Lavinia Dickinson’s bedroom in the Dickinson Homestead, groaning aloud, plummeting between vertical cliffs of basalt, when Winnie’s van whizzed down North Street once again, on its way back to Amherst.

  This time Winnie didn’t give Astrella’s Doughnut Snack Bar a second glance. Erased from Winnie’s memory were the three dozen doughnuts and the twelve chocolate éclairs.

  But even from herself Winnie couldn’t hide the physical results of consuming a dozen custardy confections and thirty-six deep-fat-fried doughy morsels. There was a dull pain in
her gut and a heavy pressure around her middle. She was short of breath. In her basement darkroom Winnie had managed to forget the chagrin and sharp dismay of the morning, but now the shame of her failure came back and flooded over her. Her mood collapsed into a poisonous settled depression.

  She drove carelessly through Belchertown, her eyes glassy, her foot jolting from accelerator to brake, from brake to accelerator. In Amherst she tried to stop in front of the house where Helen Gaunt had an attic room, but she misjudged the distance to the curb and ran the van up on the sidewalk. Heaving herself out of the front seat, she plodded up the walk, dropped her envelope in the box labeled H. GAUNT, climbed back in the van, jerked it into reverse, careened down onto the pavement, and took off with a jackrabbit start.

  There was a traffic light at the next corner. The light turned red. Winnie didn’t feel like stopping, but at the last minute she jammed on her brakes. Her body lurched forward. In flatulent impatience she sat staring at the red light. There were no vehicles crossing the intersection the other way. There were no other cars on the street. There were no pedestrians. Then, just as the light turned green, someone appeared from the bushes screening the sidewalk of the cross street, and began to walk in front of Winnie’s van.

  It was Alison Grove, in her white dress. Alison Grove, the girl whose terrible prettiness had robbed Winnie of everything she held dear.

  Winnie’s grievances overwhelmed her. With one great sob, with no direction from her conscious brain, she lifted her right foot from the brake and jammed it on the accelerator.

  Alison Grove went down, her destiny fulfilled.

  23

  To stir would be to slip—

  To look would be to drop …

  It was a Pit—with fathoms under it …

  The afternoon was waning as Owen woke up, more fatigued than when he had gone to sleep. In the bathroom mirror his face was haggard. Was there any cure for nightmares? Last year Owen had asked this question of his cousin Harvey Kloop, the medical man. But Harvey had merely looked at him without speaking, his face ashen. And. Owen had understood that it was Harvey’s problem too. The tendency to nightmare must run in the family. It was therefore hopeless.

  Winifred Gaw, too, was having a nightmare, but Winnie’s bad dream was real.

  Getting out of her van, she stared down at the body of Alison Grove.

  Alison’s eyes were open. She was looking up at Winnie. She was not breathing. She was dead. She was really dead.

  Winnie’s heart began tumbling in her chest. She was frightened and exultant at the same time. She’s mine now, thought Winnie. She belongs to me. All that loveliness of face, of red-gold hair, of dainty body, of tiny waist, of small soft breasts the size of peaches—they were Winnie’s now. Alison didn’t belong to herself anymore. No longer would she take things away from Winnie. No longer would she even have a will of her own. From now on, Winifred Gaw was in charge of Alison Grove.

  Two streets away from the crossing where Winifred Gaw stood staring down at the body of Alison Grove, Dr. Harvey Kloop was making a right turn, glancing back at the boat-trailer behind his car. Out of the corner of his eye he saw something queer.

  It looked like trouble. Dr. Kloop was in no mood for trouble. At last he was escaping from his tyrannical practice, from telephone calls at two in the morning, from the beeping electronic summons at his belt, from the nagging of his wife and her insane preoccupation with Emily Dickinson. He was going to Quabbin at last, with all his fishing gear and tackle, his pup tent, his sleeping bag, his six-pack of beer. His fishing license was pinned to his hat. Soon he would be alone on the water with silence all around him. The entire creation would not be buzzing and beeping. There would be no Emily Dickinson claptrap ringing in his ears. There would be no sound at all but the plunk of the sinker in the water and the tick of his reel, and maybe the occasional honking of a stray flock of Canada geese or the quack of a pair of ducks in rapid flight, or even—but this was merely fantasy on Harvey’s part—the cry of the legendary catamount, howling from the depths of the forest.

  But now this queer thing was happening down the street. Resolutely, Dr. Kloop turned his head away and refused to think about it. Shifting into third, he sped away. It was no business of his if some woman was standing in the road, picking up something white from the pavement in front of her car—a big woman, really big, positively huge, like that patient of his, Winifred Gaw.

  Staunchly, Harvey Kloop drove straight down Route 9 in the direction of the Quabbin Reservoir, trying not to think about his Hippo-something oath.

  Winnie was slow, but she moved with thick persistence, and her mind ran rapidly ahead, making a plan. As her car raced back along Route 9, the plan grew and blossomed until it included a scheme for Winnie’s own future, one she had often dreamed of but had never quite dared to carry out. Swiftly Winnie itemized in her mind the things she would need to gather up at home.

  Back in Ware, she was lucky. Her father had gone to work. So had her mother. Winnie was able to help herself freely to the stuff in her father’s garage. She knew what she wanted, and snatched it up quickly. Therefore it was only five o’clock when Winnie’s van slowed down at Quabbin Gate 43, with a miscellaneous collection of things piled beside her on the front seat.

  Turning in at the gate, Winnie drove past the road to the boat-launching dock, with its big sign listing the rates for boat-rental and fishing and parking. Then she stopped her car in front of the long green boards that blocked the way to Shaft 12.

  Winnie was familiar with those green boards. Once, a long time ago, when her father’s car had been out of commission, its dismembered chassis hoisted over the grease pit, Winnie had driven him to work here, day after day. He had been doing a job at Shaft 12. Now, dragging the boards aside, Winnie felt like part of the administration of the Quabbin waterworks, a ranger or an engineer or something. She really knew her way around.

  The paved approach to Shaft 12 was three miles long. Again Winnie’s van was alone on the road. There were no walkers in the woods, no bird-watchers with binoculars searching the sky for eagles. There was nothing along the road but birches and pines and oak trees, and hemlocks with new green growth on the tips of their branches, and tall ferns, and maples with fresh green leaves. Here and there in the woods, she passed a stone wall that had once belonged to a house long since torn down because it stood in the Quabbin watershed. Some farmer’s whole lifework had been destroyed, Winnie knew that. His white wooden church had been moved away, and the MDC had dug the bones of his ancestors out of the ground and buried them someplace else. Winnie knew the sad stories well. Altogether too well. She was sick and tired of sad stories about the vanished towns of the Swift River valley.

  Shaft 12 was a solid little stone building right on the shore of the reservoir. Winnie pulled up and stopped in the clearing. Beyond lay the water, glittering and blue. Winnie had her father’s key. She had taken it from a hook on the wall of the garage. Now she opened the the door and looked around, remembering.

  Yes, there was the overhead crane. There was the great bucket, lying on its side. And there above the shaft were the wooden trap doors, flat in the cement floor.

  Last fall, it had been dark. Winnie had found her way to one of the trap doors with a flashlight. And then the bucket of paint and the propane torch and the suitcase had plummeted into the bottomless hole. The water had been far down. The splashes had been faint and far away.

  Now, seeing the place in the daytime, Winnie was reminded of the past, of that time when she had come here with her father. In those days the empty shaft had echoed with the immense noise of the work going on below, as the crew tore out the old wooden stop-planks that controlled the flow of water into the tunnel. Until then her father had come to Shaft 12 twice a year to throw the switch on the wall, so that the great hooks on the traveling crane would lift the planks or drop them down. But from now on there was to be a huge valve, opened and closed by a control switch far away.

  It had b
een a big job. When the work was done, Winnie had knelt beside one of the openings in the floor and looked into the shaft, expecting to see the new valve far below. But the shaft had been full of water, and she had seen nothing. Would it be full today, or would the water be way, way down in the shaft as it had been last fall? Winnie didn’t know what to expect. She was ready for anything.

  It was going to be easy. She would pick up one of the trapdoors and drop the body down the shaft into the tunnel, and then the flow of water would carry it far from the town of Amherst, far from the town of Ware, far from a person named Winifred Gaw. And maybe the body of Alison Grove might never turn up at all. Winnie had a vague idea that there was a power station somewhere along the way to Boston, with big spinning turbines, turned by the water from Quabbin. She didn’t know what a turbine looked like exactly, but she suspected it would mess up a body pretty bad.

  Going back to the van, Winnie opened the back doors, dragged Alison out, and hoisted her with a gasping effort over her shoulder. Then she lugged her up the steps and into the building, and dropped her on the floor next to one of the trapdoors. She was careful not to look at Alison. Winnie was beginning to feel that the dead body of Alison Grove had nothing to do with her. It was just a piece of garbage to be thrown away. Then, puffing to regain her breath, Winnie went back to the van for the bell.

  The bell had been an inspiration. There it had lain on her father’s greasy workbench, still warm from the torch. It was just what Winnie needed. If there was water in the shaft again, she would use the bell to weigh Alison down, to make her sink all the way to the bottom of the shaft, to be carried away by the rush of water in the tunnel.

  The bell was heavy, but not too heavy. Winnie dropped it on the floor next to Alison, and it rolled over with a hollow clatter. Then Winnie bent over the trapdoor and tugged at the rope handles. The trapdoor was stuck. She had to heave and heave before it suddenly came loose, throwing her off balance so that she staggered backward. At once the rope handles slipped from her fingers and the trapdoor fell, the noise of its impact with the floor making a tremendous hollow reverberation against the hard surfaces of the room. Gasping, Winnie knelt down and looked into the shaft.