Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  Therefore, when a massive shape loomed up beside him in the darkness, he gave a grunt of surprise and jumped backward.

  “Who’s there?” gasped the woman on the bed.

  Peter could feel his face flushing with embarrassment and anger. The damned woman was here after all! He pulled himself together. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you were in here. I mean, the door was wide open.”

  Winnie stared at Peter Wiggins. Never since she had grown up had she found herself alone in a bedroom with a man. She didn’t know what to say. Peter Wiggins was looking at her so oddly. In the thin illumination of the streetlights beyond the hemlock hedge, his fine blond hair was a halo around his head. He was just standing there, staring at Winnie. This morning he had been part of the enemy, part of the world that always treated Winnie like dirt. But now he was a man in her bedroom. And he was looking at her so strangely! It was weird, thought Winnie excitedly, it was really weird.

  She misunderstood the cause. To her amazement she, too, began behaving in a new way. Lying back on the pillow, she lifted her arms behind her head and raised one knee. Somehow she knew exactly what to do. “Well, hi, there,” cooed Winnie softly.

  “Listen here, Winnie,” said Peter severely, “what did you mean this morning? You know, when you said you had evidence my picture isn’t genuine? You said you had some kind of documentary evidence.” Peter could see Winnie dimly now. She was smiling at him and lowering her eyelashes.

  “I don’t remember,” teased Winnie, looking up at him again, remembering that her eyes were her best feature.

  Peter was repelled. It dawned on him that the woman thought he had really come into her bedroom to—God!—make love to her, or something. Angrily he lashed back at her. “For Christ’s sake, what the hell do you think you’re doing in Emily Dickinson’s bed? A slob like you?”

  And then it boiled up in Winnie all over again. Everything that had been hidden in the crevices of her flabby body, everything that had been tucked into the fat creases around her neck, in the deep dimpled folds of her elbows and knees, in the crannies between breast and belly, now came raging forth, exploding like bubbles of gas. Seizing the axe that lay beside her, Winnie launched herself from the bed and lunged at Peter, swinging.

  He was totally unprepared. With a yelp he jumped aside, and Winnie’s blow smote the floor with a splintering crash. When she came at him again, he flung out his arms and grasped the handle and tried to wrench it away from her. Good God, an axe—the thing in her hands was an axe!

  They were face to face, panting. Even as he struggled and jerked with all his strength, Peter thought, This can’t be happening. The woman was pulling away from him. He couldn’t hang on. She was stronger than he was. She had more mass to throw at him. And she wasn’t dizzy from swallowing six ounces of Scotch and a couple of pints of beer.

  Terrified, Peter stumbled backward, knocking over a small table. Reaching for it, he snatched it up and threw it at Winnie as she rushed at him again. It hit her in the face and stopped her cold. Winnie groaned, and kicked the table aside. Again she came at him, flourishing the axe. Again he grabbed it by the handle. Again he couldn’t hang on. Wrenching it from side to side, Winnie jerked it away from him, then threw him against the dresser. Sacred objects crashed to the floor. Glass tinkled and shattered. Peter’s heart jolted in his chest. This fool was trying to split his skull!

  Desperately he used his wits. When Winnie came at him again, Peter dropped craftily to the floor. She was taken by surprise. Tripping over him heavily, she fell with a sprawling thud that shook the house. Frantically, Peter scrambled up, hoping to make a rush for the door. But, quick as a cat, Winnie was on her feet, blocking his way, and immediately they were locked together. Again Winnie shoved him backward, and this time Peter’s head cracked against the wall. Reeling, he braced himself as Winnie swept the axe violently upward.

  And then, suddenly, it was over. She let go. The axe slipped from her fingers, fell against her, and clattered to the floor. Her body sagged. Peter saw the dim broad shield of her face tip away from him as she collapsed backward. A dark stain was spreading over her nightgown.

  Peter too slumped feebly, and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. In front of him lay the mounded shape of Winifred Gaw, her head bent sideways against one of the fallen chairs.

  For a little while Peter merely breathed in and out, hardly able to believe he was still alive. What the hell had happened? The woman had been about to kill him! And then she had dropped the axe and toppled. Was she dead? Or was she only pretending? Was it some kind of trick? Was she about to spring savagely to her feet?

  Cautiously, Peter got up on his knees and leaned forward. Winnie’s eyes were staring upward. Her huge bosom was not rising and falling. To Peter she looked as dead as any corpse in the movies. Picking up her wrist, he felt for her pulse.

  It was fluttering. She was still alive! But then the beat in her wrist hesitated under his fingers and stopped. She was dead now, for sure.

  Peter’s mind began to race. Even in his panic he thought of Dombey Dell and Tom Perry and all the rest of them coming back to the house very soon, probably any minute now. With prophetic clarity he could imagine how they would view this grotesque event, and instantly he was frantic to separate himself from it. After all, it was no business of his what happened to Winifred Gaw! How would he explain what he had been doing in her bedroom? How would he tell them that he had found himself in a battle to the death with a stupendous woman in a flannel nightgown? And, Christ, how would he make them believe that he, Peter Wiggins, had not slashed at the woman with that lunatic impossible weapon? What would happen to his precious photograph, what would become of his new destiny, if he found himself all mixed up in the public eye in a murderous scramble with a freakish fat lady in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom?

  Peter stood up shakily and looked at himself. There were a few dark splashes on his shirt. That was no problem. He could wash them out. Stepping carefully around Winnie, he went to the window and looked out. Someone was whistling beyond the hemlock hedge. Was Dombey coming home? The whistling stopped. He could hear laughter farther away. Was that Owen Kraznik coming along the sidewalk? No, the murmur of voices was trailing away toward the center of town. For a moment Peter held his breath and listened, but he could hear nothing else. No car was turning into the driveway, sweeping its headlights across the mirror and the pictures on the wall. There was no sound of an opening door. There were no footsteps in the hall downstairs.

  He had time, then, a little time to recover, to retrace his footsteps and obliterate any sign of his presence. What had he touched? The fallen table? The handle of the axe? He could take care of that. He could wipe them clean. He could even take a minute or two to look for the thing he had originally come to find, Winnie’s “documentary evidence.” He could look through her pocketbook, her basket, the closet, the drawers of the dresser.

  It didn’t take long. In a moment Peter was once again standing in the hall, satisfied, pulling the door shut, his shoes under his arm. With his shirttail, he wiped the doorknob clean. Then he made his way back to his room on the third floor.

  He was home free. He would examine the soles of his shoes for fragments of glass, he would wash his polyester shirt and hang it up over the tub in the third-floor bathroom, he would pay particular attention to his fingernails. And then he would be through with the matter.

  Let them discover the body of Winifred Gaw whenever they got around to it! Let them invent whatever theories they cared to about the cause of her death. It was none of his business. He could go to bed with an easy mind.

  Below Peter’s attic room, at the end of the second-floor hall, in Emily Dickinson’s bedchamber, Winnie lay still, her soft brown eyes fixed on the ceiling in an empty stare. Her long hard day had come to an end.

  The longest day that God appoints

  Will finish with the sun.

  Anguish can travel to its stake,

  And then it must r
eturn.

  26

  I meant to find Her when I came—

  Death—had the same design …

  Owen came back to the Homestead from the music and dance performance and went straight to bed, exhausted. But as he lay down he looked at his pillow with suspicion, dreading another nightmare.

  As soon as he shut his eyes, there was a knock on his door.

  It was Tom Perry, opening it a crack, peering in at Owen. “Oh, sorry, Owen. I just wondered if you know where Alison went. She was supposed to meet me in Merrill Hall, but she never came. The fact is, we had a little tiff.”

  Owen lifted his head. “Alison Grove? She’s not in the back bedroom?”

  “No.”

  Owen was too drowsy to think. “What about her dormitory? Could she have gone back there?”

  “Well, maybe. I suppose that’s where she is. Wow, I didn’t think she was that mad at me. Thanks, Owen.”

  Tom Perry closed Owen’s door and ran lightly down the stairs to the telephone in the kitchen. He knew Alison’s number by heart. It wasn’t really Alison’s own number. It was the number of the phone on her corridor on the fourteenth floor of Coolidge Hall in the Southwest Quad. Sometimes it rang for a long time before anybody bothered to answer it. But this time a breathless voice responded quickly. “Hello?”

  “I’d like to speak to Alison Grove.”

  “Alison Grove? Wait a sec. Let me think. I’m from downstairs, but I know who you mean. She’s got this really red hair, right? Sure, I just saw her go into the John. Just a sec, I’ll get her.”

  “No, wait. Don’t.” Suddenly, Tom was angry with Alison. Now that he knew she was all right, his relief turned to pique. He would let her stew in her own juice till morning. “That’s, okay. Never mind. I just wanted to be sure she got home all right. Thanks.”

  “Well, sure, okay.”

  On the fourteenth floor of Coolidge Hall, Sukey Darrow hung up the phone and went into the John with her bottle of shampoo and her towel and her blow-dryer. The John on her own floor had been out of whack since the fire, so everybody was using the bathroom on the floor above.

  Pushing open the door, Sukey saw the girl with red hair. She was brushing her teeth.

  “Oh, say, Alison,” said Sukey, “some guy just called you up—only he said, never mind, like he didn’t have to speak to you, he just wanted to be sure you were okay.”

  The redheaded girl spat out toothpaste and glanced up at Sukey. “Who, me? My name’s not Alison. It’s Rachel. Rachel Clapp. Alison Grove has like this really, really curly hair. Well, sure, mine’s red too—only, see? It’s straight. It’s really, really straight.”

  “Oh, wow, I remember now. Right.” Sukey turned on the water in the shower and tested it with her hand.

  “Alison’s not here anyway,” said Rachel, shouting above the noise of Sukey’s shower. “Her room’s right across the hall from me, and she hasn’t been there for a couple of days.”

  “Oh, no, oh shit,” said Sukey, pulling off her bathrobe and jumping under the hot spray. “I just gave this guy a bum steer. I wonder who he was? Hey, Rachel, can you hear me? Aren’t you in my chem lab? Hey, listen, do you know anything about all those creepy valences?”

  27

  The Heavens stripped—

  Eternity’s vast pocket, picked—

  The last morning of the Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium dawned pearly and warm. Burning through a gold mist, the sun reached over the dark water of the Quabbin Reservoir to light up the Pelham hills and Sugarloaf and Mount Toby and Mount Tom, and skip westward along the ragged peaks of the Holyoke Range. At the University of Massachusetts it picked out the top of the library and the upper floors of the high-rise dormitories in the Southwest Quad. Shining into Alison Grove’s empty room on the fourteenth floor of Coolidge Hall, it glistened on the cosmetics lined up on her dresser, the lip moisturizer in cinnabar, the contour blush in burnished copper, the liquid foundation in Portofino Peach. On the top of Alison’s bookcase it sparkled on the silver frame of a studio portrait of Alison’s mother. Below the window the bed lay in shadow, the bedspread smooth and undisturbed.

  On the other side of town, the sunlight filtered through the oak tree in the Dickinson garden and dappled the east window of Lavinia Dickinson’s bedroom. Splashes of light wobbled on the sleeping face of Owen Kraznik and woke him up. Lifting his head cautiously, he found himself alone in bed. Dombey was up and gone. Dombey’s clothes lay in a jumble on the floor.

  Owen got up too. In the kitchen he was surprised to find Peter Wiggins standing in the middle of the room, looking around vaguely. Peter seemed relieved to see him. “Good morning, Professor Kraznik,” he said, his voice high and sharp. “I’m just going out for breakfast. Will you join me?”

  Owen looked at Peter curiously. The young man’s eyes were glittering, but his face was very white. How did he keep so pale in a sunny state like Arizona? Maybe everybody in Arizona wore a ten-gallon hat, or maybe Peter suffered from a skin disease and had to stay indoors. “Well, of course I will, but you’ve got to call me Owen.”

  Together they walked up Main Street. Peter’s head was in a whirl. His fingers trembled as he opened the door of the Lord Jeff for Owen, but his spirits were high. The scuffle last night with Winifred Gaw had been crazy, impossible, wild! But he had come through it unscathed. As for the shakiness in his’ limbs, that would surely disappear with a few bites of breakfast. Peter supposed he should not be spending his money at a fancy place like this—he should be eating in some greasy spoon instead. But at this point in his life, money was surely no object. He must continue to show himself drinking from fortune’s cup.

  But this morning, as Peter walked into the lobby of the Lord Jeffery Inn with Owen Kraznik, his brimming success suddenly drained from the bottom of the glass.

  They were hailed by Dombey Dell. “What ho, good morning. Hey, looky here. See what I’ve got.”

  Dombey had a copy of The New York Times. The city edition had been trucked during the night from New York to the Holyoke News Company, and from there to the Hastings Stationery Store on South Pleasant Street, then rushed across the Common to the Lord Jeffery, to greet early-rising guests in this most perfect of rural New England inns.

  Dombey tapped the newspaper and shook his head sadly at Peter. “Too bad,” he said. “They’re trampling all over you. Shame on them.”

  “They’re what?” Peter’s white face turned whiter still. His shaking fingers rattled the paper as he took it from Dombey.

  “Good heavens, what do they say?” Owen stood on tiptoe to look over Peter’s shoulder.

  There at the top of the left-hand column was Peter’s photograph of Emily Dickinson, right there on the front page of The New York Times. But the headline was a disaster—“EMILY DICKINSON” PHOTOGRAPH DECLARED FRAUDULENT.

  Peter gasped. He couldn’t believe his eyes. That woman from the Times, she had seemed so interested, so convinced. How could she do this to him?

  Owen craned his neck to read the small print, feeling in the pit of his stomach Peter’s disappointment and chagrin. But Dombey was looking on with vindictive relish.

  “It’s some Columbia professor,” he said. “He’s discovered who wrote the identification on the back of that picture of yours. You thought it was probably some relative, right? Well, he says it was the guy who originally sold the picture, back in the nineteen-sixties.”

  “Oh, God,” whispered Peter. His eyes raced over the column of newsprint.

  “… If only Professor Wiggins had done his homework,” said Dr. Ransome, “he would know that the handwriting on the back of the picture is that of a New York collector notorious for his overoptimistic attributions.”

  Peter’s lifeless fingers dropped the paper. Owen picked it up and gave it back. “It’s just one man’s opinion,” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” said Peter, his eyes racing down the page. “Oh, God.” An expert in the photographic identification of criminals had been given
the last word.

  “If Wiggins claims to prove his theory with diagrams, it’s wishful thinking. Any quack can make diagrams. I could find you a hundred photographs of anonymous people you could diagram to prove they were Abraham Lincoln. If that woman is Emily Dickinson, I’m the Emir of Kuwait.”

  Peter lowered the paper and gazed at Dombey Dell, not seeing him, staring right through him. Peter’s eyes had sunk back into their sockets. His body was covered with perspiration. The words Any quack were clucking in his head.

  “Oh, well,” said Dombey Dell, “what the hell? At least our symposium made the front page of The New York Times, thanks to you. That’s a step up from The Hampshire Gazette.” Dombey clapped Peter heartily on the back, almost knocking him down. Then Dombey turned with relief to the long stream of Oriental scholars flooding down the stairs. “Excuse me, chaps,” he said. “I think I’d better continue my duties as the jolly host.” Swiftly, Dombey deserted Peter’s sinking ship.

  But for Owen, a sinking ship was just another name for a lame duck. “Come on,” he said cheerfully to Peter, “have something to eat. You’ll see it’s not important. Write a letter to the Times, why don’t you? Refute everything they say. Nothing to it. This kind of thing happens to us all, every day.”

  But Peter was utterly shattered. He had lost his appetite for breakfast. He had no courage to enter a dining room in which the morning edition of The New York Times would soon be passing from hand to hand, accompanied by exclamations of surprise and terrible reorderings of opinion about Professor Peter Wiggins of the University of Central Arizona and his controversial photograph of Emily Dickinson.