Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  It was a good thing she had brought the bell! Once again, the shaft was full of water.

  Full of water? For the first time, it occurred to Winnie to wonder why the shaft should ever be full of water. Panting, she sat back on her heels to think. And then she groaned as she understood.

  The shaft was full of water because this was the wrong time of year. The water in the tunnel wasn’t going anywhere. The tunnel at Shaft 12 was closed off. Instead of flowing from the reservoir to Boston, the water was coming the other way, from the Ware River floodplain to the east. It was flowing all the way from Shaft 8 in the Ware River Valley toward Quabbin, entering the reservoir half a mile farther up the shore at Shaft 11-A, beyond the baffle dams. Sooner or later Winnie’s father would throw a switch to close off the Ware River intake and open the valve here at Shaft 12. That was part of his job. He bragged about it all the time. And then the water would run through the tunnel the right way, from the reservoir to Boston.

  But not now! Right now the water wasn’t going anywhere! It was just standing there. It was dead water, dark and dank and still.

  Until this moment a kind of desperate glee had kept Winnie going, an urgent obsession to carry out the idea she had worked out in her head. But now she was overwhelmed by a sense of nightmare. Her eyes filled with tears, and a painful lump rose in her throat. Weeping, she struggled to her feet, and then she made two trips back to the van—once with Alison, once with the bell. Slamming the rear doors, she climbed back into the driver’s seat, her breast heaving with exhaustion, and headed for Shaft 11-A.

  There was only one thing left for her to do. She would dump the body of Alison Grove directly into the reservoir, right there where the Ware River flowed out of the pipe into Quabbin, and trust to the turbulence of the water to carry it far out and away from the shore.

  Behind her as she drove away from Shaft 12, the door of the gray stone building hung open, swinging on its hinges. In the empty room within, the long rays of the afternoon sun streaked through the high windows and shone upon the trapdoor that lay half over the concrete floor and half over the watery abyss.

  24

  Oozed so in crimson bubbles

  Day’s departing tide …

  At six o’clock the air of Amherst was still bright with afternoon. The Common lay in shadow, but the whole length of Amity Street was flooded with sunset, and an old woman walking her dog across the intersection mumbled a line or two from Emily Dickinson—

  “Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple

  Leaping like Leopards to the Sky …”

  Once again it was suppertime. Brains were glutted, vascular systems were in need of alcohol, stomachs were hungry for food. In bars and restaurants all over Amherst, the cravings of the body were being satisfied.

  In the Lord Jeffery Inn, the Japanese Poetry Society had taken over most of the bar. They were toasting the Swedish schoolteachers, clashing their wineglasses together in small tinkles of international congratulation.

  In the Pub, a popular eatery off East Pleasant Street, Tom Perry and Peter Wiggins joined the Smith brothers in a couple of rounds of Scotch, and then the Smiths called for the supper menu and they all switched to Moosehead beer.

  The New York Times correspondent had already finished her early supper at Plumbley’s Restaurant, in the company of her friend, who happened to be a reference librarian, back in Queens. Now the correspondent was back in the Lord Jeff, sitting on the edge of her bed, phoning in her story, passing along a suggestion by the librarian that somebody in Rewrite consult a guy at Columbia about the photograph that had been the subject of the talk by Peter Wiggins.

  In South Amherst, in her own kitchen, Eunice Jane Kloop was feeling sulky. Damn Harvey anyway! She had already prepared his supper, a bowl of cold boiled chicken necks, but Harvey had escaped. He had driven away with that damned boat of his to fish at the Quabbin Reservoir. It was too bad. For some reason Eunice Jane enjoyed serving chicken necks to Harvey. There was a peculiar pleasure in watching him spit out the bony bits onto his plate. Now she huddled alone at the table, gnawing at one of the chicken necks, peering at an article in a learned journal, “The Revitalization of Existential Contiguity in Deconstructive Metonymy,” taking a swig every now and then from her bottle of sauerkraut juice.

  Tilly Porch was used to eating alone. But tonight Tilly was having company. Once again Debbie Buffington was her guest at the kitchen table, while Elvis sat on the sofa pillows gobbling everything in sight. Tilly had been hoping to get up in the attic after supper, but instead she offered to babysit with Elvis, be cause Debbie had a date with this guy from Shutesbury. “I’m supposed to meet him at this tavern,” said Debbie. “There’s this group is going to play, The Soft White Underbelly, and they’re raffling off this king-size water bed. Okay if I borrow your car?”

  Homer Kelly was worried about Owen. The man looked positively ill. “Tell you what, Owen,” Homer said. “I’ll take you out to dinner in honor of your speech. What a noggin-dazzler that was, wow! How about someplace classy? Say, have you ever had a seafood platter at the Gaslite? Or their homemade chili? Or what they call their Junior Exec? Bulky roll, French fries, lettuce and tomato on the side?”

  “Why, Homer, that’s very kind of you,” said Owen. “It all sounds delicious.”

  At the Gaslite, Owen was pleased to find Ellen Oak sitting at the counter, and he introduced her to Homer Kelly. After supper the three of them wandered across the Common and climbed a steep path to Johnson Chapel and the Octagon, to admire the view of the Holyoke hills. Then Ellen remembered the evening entertainment, and they ran all the way to Merrill Hall and sat down in the front row with hot faces. Owen hadn’t done anything so sporting in years.

  Tom Perry was sitting in the back. He looked up as they came in, hoping to see Alison Grove. When he saw Ellen Oak instead, he was jolted, and then a little miffed to see her red-faced and grinning in the company of Owen Kraznik and a tall stranger. Maybe Ellen was getting along without him a little too well. He looked up again as a flock of undergraduates streamed past him. Still no Alison. The program was beginning. The dancers were running out, frisking to the music of harp and flute, while someone read a Dickinson poem, Beauty—be not caused—It Is. Triumphant leaps by the dancers, arpeggios from the harp, chirrups from the flute!

  Tom couldn’t keep his mind on it. He kept glancing over his shoulder. If Alison didn’t come soon, he would leave. He didn’t want to find himself face to face with Ellen Oak at intermission. Tweedle-tweedle, trilled the flutes while the dancers hopped and twirled.

  Four blocks north of Merrill Hall, as the harpist plucked a delicate glissando, Winne Gaw’s big van pulled up behind the Homestead and stopped with a jerk. Winnie’s tank was almost empty, but she didn’t care. After tonight nothing would matter for a while. Not until she was out of the hospital. Not until Professor Kraznik told her he was sorry. Not until he gave her back her job.

  Winnie was worn out. Her heart was skipping and bobbing in her chest. At Shaft 11-A she had stood for only a moment to watch the body of Alison Grove disappear like a sliver in the boiling tumult and spray of the water in the cove. Then she had closed her eyes and dropped her head and slumped her shoulders, trying to recover her strength, and then she had driven back to the Homestead in the fading light. There was still so much to do. Her day was not yet over, her long day of tension and disappointment and greed and hard work and sudden violence and intense physical effort, her tortured day of grinding back and forth along Route 9 in the van, and up to Gate 43 and back along the Greenwich road.

  Now Winnie struggled out of the van, slung her purse over her shoulder, picked up her basket, and reached into the back seat for the axe.

  Winnie Gaw was not stupid. It was true that her mind had not been encouraged in childhood. It was true that her early education had been feeble. But Winnie had picked up a lot of miscellaneous information in other ways. Escaping from bad times at home, she had often holed up in the library or spent the
afternoon at the movies in the Casino Theater in the middle of town. Sometimes’ Winnie stole dollar bills from her mother’s purse and ran away as far as the bus would take her. The result of all this snatched education was not a collection of verbal skills but a kind of shrewdness, a cleverness sharpened by one violent compulsion after another. Chief among Winnie’s obsessions were her passion for Professor Kraznik and—until today—her fear of Alison Grove. Now another tremendous urge had seized her, and it was focusing all her faculties on one thing, and on one thing only: her need to sleep—to sleep and sleep, to sleep so deep that she might die, only she wouldn’t. She would wake up at last to find Owen Kraznik by her side.

  Carrying the basket and the axe, Winnie shuffled across the driveway to the north door of the house. On the porch she put down the basket, leaned the axe against the doorframe, and turned her key in the lock. Cautiously she stepped into the twilit gloom of the central hall.

  In Winnie’s excited condition, the fragrance of the indoor air affected her strongly. Distilled in the scent given off by the polished furniture, by the paintings on the wall, by the ivory keys of the piano in the parlor, by the books on the shelves, was the ineffable presence of everything Winnie wanted, everything that was the opposite of her own life, everything that was of unutterable worth. Sniffling, she labored up the stairs in the dim light and walked along the hall. For a moment she stopped to stare at the door of Professor Kraznik’s room, where he would soon be lying softly under the bedclothes, only a few feet away. So close, and yet so far, so impossibly far away from Winnie Gaw!

  The key to the door of Emily Dickinson’s bedroom was different from the house key. Winnie extracted it from her purse, opened the door, and locked it behind her. At once she felt a return of proprietary confidence.

  There was still so much to do First, Winnie took off her clothes and put on her nightie. Then she examined her dress and sweater, her slip, her bra and panties, her shoes and socks. Miraculously there were no bloodstains on any of them, anywhere.

  Alison’s body had not bled at all, decided Winnie. She must have been, like, squeezed to death by the wheels of the big van. And then Winnie put the thought of Alison Grove away from her. The memory of what she had done was beginning to fade, to be tucked away in the creases, like all, unpleasant things. Winnie turned to her present task. What should she do now?

  The book. The book was next. Winnie put the book beside the bed and opened it to the page where she had underlined a passage with a pencil. The book was like a suicide note, a personal message to Professor Kraznik.

  The pills. For weeks Winnie had been carrying around Dr. Kloop’s new prescription for sleeping pills. This afternoon in the drugstore in Ware she had filled the prescription. And then at home she had flushed most of the tablets down the toilet. Carefully, Winnie dumped out the rest of the tablets and arranged the two empty bottles—the new one and the old one—side by side on the table beside the bed, next to the book. Then she put the bottle caps and the two fluffy pieces of cotton wadding beside the bottles. Now it would look as if she had swallowed two whole entire bottles of pills. Spreading out the remaining tablets on the edge of the little table, Winnie counted them again. There were twenty. That was enough to put her under, way under, but it wasn’t enough to finish her off.

  Next, the glass of water. A lot of water. Enough water to help her swallow all those pills, and satisfy her burning thirst. Winnie was parched. She took the decanter of rose-colored glass from the dresser and filled it in the bathroom. There was a plastic cup beside the sink. Winnie filled it, too, and drank, again and again. Then she brought the decanter back to the bedside table and tipped it delicately over one of the rose-colored wineglasses. The water poured silently into the glass, filling it nearly to the brim. There was not a drop on the table.

  What else? Was she ready? No, of course she wasn’t ready. There was still the axe. How could she forget the axe? With trembling fingers Winnie picked up the axe from the floor and put it on the bed, The axe went with the passage in the book. Professor Kraznik would understand, and then he would be sorry.

  How did she look? Winnie went to the mirror and took the clips out of her hair, so that it fell loosely beside her face. In the blotched old mirror she looked almost beautiful. Her eyes were her best feature, just like Emily Dickinson’s.

  She was ready. Winnie turned away from the mirror and lay down on the bed. Arranging her nightie around her ankles, she nestled the axe cozily at her side, and stretched out her hand for the wineglass and the first of the pills.

  But then something occurred to her. She sat up and stared at the door.

  If they saw that the door was closed, they might leave her undisturbed. They might not get to her in time. She might sleep and sleep, and then wake up alone, all by herself. No, no, they must see her sleeping on the bed, and realize something was wrong, and try to wake her and not be able to do it. And then they would know she was trying to kill herself, and they would take her to the hospital and Professor Kraznik would be there to comfort her when she woke up at last.

  Therefore the door must be left open. Open wide. Winnie slid off the bed. Moving noiselessly on bare feet, she unlocked the door, pulled it open as far as it would go, and then lay down carefully again and put out her hand for the first of her Secanol tablets.

  Again she stopped with her hand in the air.

  Someone was coming into the room.

  25

  ’Tis so much joy! ’Tis so much joy!

  If I should fail, what poverty!

  For Peter Wiggins, the day had been one long triumph. When the Smith brothers said goodnight to him at last in a back-slapping mood of tipsy joviality, he walked off into the dusk of evening feeling like a colleague already, a fellow faculty member, an associate professor in the English department at the most famous educational establishment in the East. Peter had visited Harvard once, last year, to look things up in the Houghton Library. It was green there, in the place they called the Yard. There were elm trees in a leafy canopy overhead. This evening, after two Scotches and a couple of beers, Peter had distinctly seen ivy gushing out of the Smith brothers’ chins, twining down their shirtfronts, reaching to the top button in one case and the middle button in the other.

  Of course, neither of the brothers had actually promised him the job that would soon be opening up, but they had made it clear that he was high on the list of candidates.

  The back door of the Homestead was unlocked. That was lucky, because Peter had not been given a key. In the front hall he was shrouded in darkness. None of the lights had been turned on. The house felt empty. Everybody else was probably at that music and dance thing in a place called Merrill Hall.

  Peter smiled as he felt his way along, recognizing the shadowy rectangle of the hall table and the dark squares of the portraits on the wall. He couldn’t stop smiling. He smiled halfway up the stairs. But then as he paused at the second floor, something occurred to him with a shock. What about Winifred Gaw? Peter had forgotten all about Winifred Gaw. He had forgotten about her “documentary evidence.” Documentary evidence! What kind of documentary evidence was the idiot female talking about? Good God, thought Peter Wiggins, standing in the dark hall with his hand on the banister of the stairway to the third floor, what if by some crazy miracle the woman had actually discovered something real? This morning in the auditorium he had made her look like a fool, but what if she actually possessed some nutty scrap of paper that identified his photograph as somebody else entirely, not Emily Dickinson at all? Jesus, it would ruin everything.

  Peter took his hand off the banister and walked noiselessly along the hall toward the room Winnie Gaw had stolen from that beautiful girl, Alison Grove.

  The door to Emily Dickinson’s bedroom was open. The room was dark.

  Winnie must have decamped. She must have gone with the others to the evening performance of music and dancing and poetry.

  Peter stood in the hall listening. Was he still alone in the house?
He heard nothing at all. No one was opening the door downstairs. In all the hollow spaces of the rooms, he was the only living soul. Peter felt a sudden access of freedom, an impulsive sense of adventure. It was like the first time his mother had left him at home by himself, in the family house in Providence, Rhode Island. Peter had opened the forbidden drawers of his father’s desk and taken out the drawing instruments and played with the delicate little compasses. He had gone upstairs and fumbled in his mother’s bureau drawers, inspecting her brassieres, trying on her gold wristwatch.

  Now Peter peered through the open door of Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. At first he could see only the two west windows, the last of the daylight moving in the leaves outside. But then his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, and he noticed the basket and the pocketbook on the floor.

  That lumpy pocketbook was certainly Winifred Gaw’s.

  Peter was consumed with curiosity. He had to know. He couldn’t allow some half-baked notion on the part of this ignorant woman to jeopardize his year of preparation, his hopeful future, all that had brought him so urgently across the continent to this place, to this moment of fulfillment.

  Boldly he walked into the room.

  And then he paused, awestruck, remembering that it didn’t really belong to Winnie Gaw. It was Emily Dickinson’s own bedchamber, sacred as a church. Here within these four walls the woman with the magnificent eyes had written nearly two thousand poems. In his half-drunken condition Peter was so moved, he almost sobbed aloud. Instead, he whispered to himself, “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”