Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  “Well, where is she?” shouted Tom. “That girl last night—” Tom slammed down the phone and stared at the wall where someone had tacked up a reminder, Get sugar.

  Where the hell was Alison? Could she have gone home to her mother, there on Pomeroy Lane? Tom didn’t relish the thought of calling Alison’s mother. Mrs. Grove would get all upset.

  Tom had met Mrs. Grove, back in March, on Easter Sunday. Alison had taken him home to the big builder’s Colonial, with its brick facing and white shutters and foundation planting and lamppost. Alison’s mother had turned out to be a handsome woman, worthy of her daughter, but Tom hadn’t exactly taken to her. Mrs. Grove had hardly noticed him. She had kept her huge blue eyes fixed on Alison. She had fussed with Alison’s hair. She had painted Alison’s fingernails. And she had seemed less interested in Tom, the bridegroom, than in the wedding to come. The wedding was going to be complicated and magnificent, with all the trimmings. More like a coronation, Tom had thought, watching Mrs. Grove run her hands under lengths of transparent tulle.

  The last thing he wanted to do right now was get Mrs. Grove all worked up. Besides, he didn’t have time. He was supposed to be across the street in the church, right now, ready to climb into the pulpit.

  Jumping up, Tom strode down the hall, jerking at his tie. But when he flung open the door, he found Owen Kraznik on the porch, with—Jesus God—Ellen Oak, and that tall craggy-looking guy who had been with the two of them last night.

  “Why, Tom, good morning,” said Owen, startled. “Oh, Tom, have you heard what’s happened?”

  But Tom was staring at Ellen, a painful flush surging up from his collar. “Oh, Ellen,” he said heartily, “there you are.”

  Ellen’s face reddened too. “Hello, Tom,” she said.

  “I—uh—read your letter,” said Tom.

  Owen looked from one to the other. “I understand you two are old friends,” he said lamely. “Oh, excuse me, Tom, have you met Homer Kelly?”

  There were introductions. Homer shook hands with Tom Perry and wondered what was the matter with everybody.

  “Well, Ellen and I certainly are old friends,” explained Tom, suddenly overcome with joviality. It sickened him, but he couldn’t help himself. “You see, Owen, Ellen is a doctor, and I was her patient. We met in the hospital when I was having my appendix out. I lost my heart as well as my appendix, ha ha!” Tom was appalled by his own idiocy, but he gibbered on. “Well, Ellen,” he chuckled, glancing at his wrist, where there was no watch, “we’ve got to get together and talk, don’t we? But right now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m supposed to be across the street. So long.” Nodding and beaming, showing his teeth, Tom dodged past them and escaped, running long-legged in the direction of the church.

  “She says it wasn’t the axe,” said Homer cheerfully, coming into the kitchen.

  “The axe hardly touched her,” said Ellen. “I know it looked like a lot of blood, but it wasn’t really.”

  “Well, then,” said Owen, fumbling with the coffee cups, “maybe it was suicide after all? Do you think Winnie really swallowed two whole bottles of pills?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” said Ellen. She sat down and looked around the room at the electric stove, the dishwasher, the bright wallpaper. For a moment she was disappointed that this was no longer the same nineteenth-century kitchen in which Emily Dickinson had baked bread. Then she chastised herself and turned to Owen. “The pills were Secanol, a very commonplace sedative. Not very potent. It would have taken at least ten of them to knock her out. You’re not allowed to prescribe more than thirty at a time. But Winnie had two bottles. That would have been sixty pills. I counted eighteen on the floor. There may be more in the bedclothes. If she swallowed all the rest, she would have taken about forty altogether.”

  “Would forty have been enough to kill her?” said Owen.

  “Well, it certainly wouldn’t have done her any good. Not a woman in her condition. We’ll have to ask Dr. Kloop, whose name is on the prescription. He’s a colleague of mine at the hospital. I never knew he had such a distinguished cousin.” Ellen smiled at Owen, and made a gesture of resignation. “Now we’ll just have to wait till he’s back in his office. Then he can do an autopsy and make a blood test. He was perfectly correct in allowing her only thirty tablets in each of those prescriptions, a month apart. That’s supposed to prevent this kind of overdose. But of course he couldn’t stop her from saving two months’ supply and taking them all at once. If that’s what she did. Homer noticed something interesting.”

  “The decanter,” said Homer wisely, holding up one finger. “The decanter was still nearly full of water. And so was the wineglass beside it. How could the girl have choked down a lot of large dry pills without drinking any water?”

  Owen was puzzled. “But if she didn’t take the pills, and if it wasn’t the axe, how did she die? And who on earth was in the room with her, throwing furniture around? There must have been a knock-down, drag-out battle. The poor girl must have been fighting for her life. The noise—think of the smashing of glassware and the crashing of furniture on the floor! And yet none of us heard a thing. When could it have happened?”

  “Obviously, when you weren’t here,” said Ellen. “Have you called the police?”

  “Yes,” said Owen, “just now. I spoke to a man named Archie something, They’ll be with us shortly.”

  “Good old Archie Gripp,” said Homer importantly. “Old friend of mine. I’ll talk to him, if you like, and show him around.”

  “Poor Dombey,” said Owen, shaking his head. “He didn’t want us to call the police at all. He wanted us to go on as if nothing had happened, so that he could finish up his symposium in perfect decorum. Good heavens, that reminds me.” Owen looked at the kitchen clock and jumped up. “They’ll be leaving the church in a minute, and heading for the cemetery. I’m supposed to read a poem beside Emily Dickinson’s grave.”

  31

  “Called back.”

  The ceremony was open to everyone. People came in throngs, and dropped their flowers over the railing of the Dickinson family enclosure. Schoolchildren reached through the iron fence to sprinkle violets around Emily’s tall stone. The minister from the First Congregational Church said a prayer. And Ellen Oak recited a famous poem:

  “Because I could not stop for Death—

  He kindly stopped for me—

  The Carriage held but just Ourselves—

  And Immortality …”

  It was Owen’s idea. Owen was supposed to read the poem himself, but at the last minute he shoved the book at Ellen. She didn’t need it. She knew the poem by heart.

  Tom Perry was standing morosely at one side. Tom had come to West Cemetery in the hope of finding Alison Grove, but now he couldn’t help listening to Ellen Oak. He couldn’t help noticing that Ellen’s way of saying a poem was different from Alison’s. Altogether different. Different in a dozen ways, a hundred, a thousand. Tom couldn’t get over it. But then he told himself it didn’t matter. Only one thing mattered—finding Alison herself. Stopping in at the Homestead after the church service, Tom had finally called Alison’s mother. But Mrs. Grove had not seen Alison. And as he feared, she had turned hysterical. He had promised to go to the police.

  Ellen finished the poem and moved away from the Dickinson enclosure, remembering what she had read about the burial that had happened here a century ago. It had been a day as fine as this. The country exquisite, day perfect, and an atmosphere of its own, fine and strange, about the whole house and grounds.… The grass of the lawn full of buttercups. Well, the buttercups were still springing up in the grass of the cemetery, but the mourners were not like the people who had followed Emily’s coffin across the fields on that lovely May day in 1886. Today no one was wearing dark funereal colors. Only the shiny shoes of the Japanese delegation were black. Students from U Mass and Amherst College stood around in jeans and T-shirts. Some of the kids were barefoot. Everyone was talking cheerfully. After all, it had been a hundred yea
rs since that funeral procession had trailed among the buttercups to bury its dead.

  The Amherst Historical Society was handing out paper cups of wine. Owen gave one to Ellen, and congratulated her on her recitation. Then, with an excruciating effort at conviviality, he introduced her to Eunice Jane Kloop.

  “I suspect your good husband has gone fishing,” he said kindly to Eunice Jane.

  “Who knows?” said Eunice Jane darkly. Eunice Jane was not interested in her husband’s foolish outing on the Quabbin Reservoir. She had no eyes for Ellen Oak. With a grip of steel she fastened her talons into Owen Kraznik and pinned him to the back of a granite slab. What did Owen think about her new analysis of Poem Number 1615, “Without Diminuet Proceed?” Had he read it in the church bulletin? He hadn’t? Well, then, she would explain it from line one.

  Ellen looked on for a moment in horrified amusement, then interrupted boldly. “Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Kloop, but I think Professor Kraznik is wanted over there.” Waving her hand at the gravestones behind Eunice Jane’s back, Ellen called out, “He’s coming.”

  Swiftly she walked him away from Eunice Jane.

  “Oh, how fortunate,” breathed Owen. “Oh, what an escape! I must confess I find that sort of analysis very trying. Who wants to speak to me?”

  Ellen looked at him sheepishly. “Well, no one, I’m afraid.”

  Owen’s jaw dropped. “But how courageous! What a brilliant rescue! You are a woman of valor!”

  Peter Wiggins, too, was wandering among the urns and obelisks. It was Peter’s first venture into the world after seeing the article about his picture on the front page of The New York Times. Furtively he watched the Smith brothers. They were sipping wine, standing in a huddle with Dombey Dell. If he were to speak to them, would they still be as cordial as they had been last night? Courageously Peter moved across the grass, determined to brazen it out.

  But as he drew near, Dombey turned his back and shepherded the two Harvard professors down the hill. Peter followed, hurrying his footsteps, but now the three of them were ducking behind the graves of eighteenth-century Dickinsons and sidling along the edge of the cemetery, becoming entangled with a cluster of children who were climbing the straggling trees. By the time Peter changed direction, Dombey and the Smith brothers were driving away in Dombey’s car, the children were high in the branches, and a woman was running across the lawn.

  It was the Mother of Ten. “You get right down from there, Ronnie and Richie! You hear me, Sharon? Kevin and Brian, I’ll tear you apart! Donna and Diane—”

  Peter’s footsteps faltered as the car disappeared on Kellogg Avenue. He flushed with humiliation, then jerked violently as someone spoke up at his elbow. “You know what I think? That article in the Times was really dumb. That’s what I think.”

  Peter turned in surprise to find a gray-haired woman at his side. She was carrying a small child. “Oh, excuse me. My name’s Tilly Porch. I heard your talk yesterday. Those experts in New York, they didn’t hear it. They didn’t see your diagrams. What do they know?”

  Peter was comforted. He smiled faintly at the baby. “Your grandchild?”

  “Oh, no. This is Debbie Buffington’s baby. She’s staying with me for a couple of days. I’m just baby-sitting at the moment. His name’s Elvis.” The baby was squirming in Tilly’s arms, and she put him down. “Come on, Elvis dear. Time for the picnic.”

  Peter fell into step with Tilly, and together they walked along Kellogg Avenue with Elvis toddling in front of them. Tilly didn’t seem to notice the raw state of Peter’s nerves. Instead she talked comfortably about the Amherst Women’s Emily Dickinson Association and all the fancy cooking they had been doing for the picnic. The more she talked, the more interested Peter became. His false photograph was burning a hole in his pocket. He was going to have to put it somewhere, very soon. Time was running out.

  “I wonder,” he said casually, “how many of the people who are here today had ancestors in Amherst in Emily Dickinson’s time?”

  “Oh, not many.” Tilly thought about it. “I guess, as a matter of fact, I’m the only one. Good heavens, Professor Wiggins, I’m still living in my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s house on Market Hill Road.”

  “No kidding?” Peter’s interest in Tilly became suddenly more intense. “Did your ancestors know the Dickinsons?”

  “Oh, well, I suppose everybody in town knew everybody else in those days. Here, Elvis, hold my hand while we cross the street.”

  “Do you have letters and—you know, old pictures, things like that from those days?”

  “Oh, yes, I guess so. I haven’t worked my way through all of it yet.” But Tilly wasn’t interested in her own family history. She was fascinated by Peter’s picture, and wanted to tell him so. “You know, there’s something wonderful about that photograph of yours, isn’t there? It’s funny, I have this feeling I’ve seen it before.”

  “In Sewall’s biography,” agreed Peter. “That’s where you’ve seen it.” Peter in his turn didn’t want to talk about himself and his photograph. He wanted to find out more about the old papers in Tilly’s possession. “You mean to say you have more nineteenth-century Amherst material to examine? Things you haven’t looked at before?”

  “Well, good grief, when your family has been living in the same house for a couple of hundred years, you get bogged down in so much stuff. I try to sort through a little more of it every year.”

  “A little more?” Peter pretended to be scandalized. “But how can you wait? You should look at everything immediately. At once! There might be something of great significance among your family papers. Surely you owe it to the—what do you call your organization? The Amherst Women’s Emily Dickinson Association? Really, there’s no telling what treasures you might find.”

  “Well, of course, that’s true. That’s absolutely true. That’s right, Elvis dear. Here we go, right around the corner.” Through the trees at the bottom of the Dickinson garden they could catch glimpses of blowing white tablecloths and women running back and forth with trays. “Now that my last child is in college, I really should have time to explore the attic. Until now it’s been impossible. Raising five children and teaching school—it’s kept me terribly busy, as you can imagine. And then my husband was ill, and I nursed him for five years. It’s only since he died last fall that I’ve had any time to myself.”

  They walked up the granite steps and strolled across the lawn in the direction of the picnic tables. “Oh, Tilly, guess what?” Carolyn Chin was rushing forward, her face anxious, her hair in a frazzle. “We forgot the sugar and cream. I thought there might at least be some sugar in the Homestead kitchen, but there isn’t a speck.”

  “I’ll run home and get some,” said Tilly decisively. Reaching down, she swept up Elvis and turned to say good-bye to Peter. Then her face dropped. Putting Elvis down again, she apologized to Carolyn Chin. “Oh, I forgot, I don’t have a car. Debbie took it. You know, Elvis’s mother. She dropped me and Elvis at the cemetery and went off in my car to meet a friend.”

  “Well, then, allow me.” Peter couldn’t believe his good fortune. Once again heaven was smiling! “I have a rented car. Permit me to provide transportation. No, no, I insist. I positively insist.”

  “Well, in that case,” said Tilly gratefully, “I positively accept.”

  A blue-and-white patrol car and a big police van were parked beside Peter’s little Datsun on the other side of the house. “What do you suppose they’re doing here?” said Tilly, getting into the front seat. “Oh, I suppose they expect a big crush at the picnic, and there’ll be a lot of traffic and all.”

  “I expect that’s it,” said Peter smoothly, picking up Elvis, settling him in Tilly’s lap. Getting in on the other side of the car, he smiled at the thought of the forged photograph in his pocket. It was warm over his throbbing heart. The opportunity was at hand. At Tilly’s house he would delicately inquire if he might use the bathroom, and then surely he could make his way swiftly to the atti
c?

  Grinning broadly, Peter swung the car around and headed out onto Main Street. His work of art, his handmade reproduction of the photograph of the woman with the dark eyes, was about to find a happy home.

  My Hope put out a petal—

  32

  New feet within my garden go …

  The shadow of the white oak tree lay across the lawn. With its dangling infant leaves it seemed as much in flower as the pear tree, the apple tree, the umbrella magnolia, the lilacs, the Jacob’s ladder, the bleeding heart. A pitcher was passing around again, another kind of wine, sweet malmsey this time, a heroic attempt by Barbara Teeter to follow a recipe of Mrs. Edward Dickinson’s. Everyone made the same joke, I taste a liquor never brewed—From Tankards scooped in Pearl.

  It was the last event of the symposium. The sun was warm. The participants were mellow. They seemed to have known one another all their lives. Their reverence for Emily Dickinson was turning sentimental. What a miracle it was that she had been born, right here in this house, and lived to become so great a poet; how staggering that her words had survived to become talismans for the condition of all their minds and hearts! When Dottie Poole appeared with an enormous memento on a tray, everyone cheered.

  It was the pinnacle and masterwork of the picnic, an enormous black cake, made according to Emily’s own recipe. Dottie had stayed up all night to finish it. In a giant plastic washtub she had beaten together three dozen eggs, four pounds of flour, four pounds of butter, four pounds of sugar, ten packages of raisins, and a pint of molasses. Then she had tucked the cake in the oven and drowsed on the sofa for six hours, leaping up every now and then to test it with a broom straw. Recklessly at last she had poured over it every drop of her husband’s precious Armagnac brandy at five o’clock in the morning.