Emily Dickinson Is Dead

by Jane Langton

  “Why not?” whispered Mary, bending over Dottie. “Did he die at sea?”

  “Would that he had,” said Dottie with melancholy emphasis, rolling her eyes at Barbara Teeter.

  Barbara crooked her finger at Mary. Obediently, Mary came closer and bowed her head until her ear was next to Barbara’s lips. “He was a civil engineer, you see,” hissed Barbara. “Alison’s grandfather, I mean, during the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir. You know, clearing the land, building the dam. And there was this tragic accident. He fell into the concrete core while they were pouring the cement for the dam.”

  Mary gasped and withdrew a few inches. “How terrible.”

  It was Dottie’s turn. With solemn pride she touched Mary’s sleeve. “They never found him.”

  “They never found him? You mean he’s still there in the dam, buried in the cement?”

  Dottie and Barbara nodded regally.

  “But how did it happen?”

  “Nobody really knows,” said Barbara. “Some of the people say there was this man, one of the people who were forced out of the villages in the valley, and they say he was driven mad with the injustice of it all, and they say he was standing next to Alison’s grandfather on the dam when it was under construction, and he gave Alison’s grandfather a little push. But of course nobody actually saw it. I mean when it was happening. Nobody was ever prosecuted. There’s a nice memorial plaque to Alison’s grandfather’s memory in the Quabbin Cemetery, only it doesn’t say what happened.”

  “Well! So much for Alison’s grandfather,” said Dottie Poole, picking up the story eagerly. “Wait till you hear about her father.”

  “Her father?” whispered Mary. “What happened to him? Did he drown in the reservoir or something?”

  “Oh, no.” Dottie’s solemn expression gave way to cruel giggles. Barbara Teeter laughed. “All he did,”said Dottie, “was run away with another woman.”

  “Nobody could understand it,” offered Barbara. “She was plain as a mud fence. She had, you know, these big buckteeth and bulgy eyes. And Shirley Grove is so beautiful.”

  “Inscrutable,” murmured Mary, “the ways of the male sex. May I have some tea for my husband?”

  She found Homer standing dolefully in the corner beside a gigantic basket of white pompom chrysanthemums. Homer gulped down his tea thirstily, and inclined his head to hear the sorrowful history of the death of Alison’s grandfather, while the organ played the wedding march from Lohengrin at a funereal largo vibratissimo.

  “Do you suppose it was Jesse Gaw’s father who pushed him?” said Mary. “You know, in retribution for crippling little Jesse with his bulldozer?”

  “Are you suggesting that Winnie Gaw killed Alison Grove, and Winnie’s grandfather, by some zany trick of fate, killed Alison’s grandfather?”

  “It does sound ridiculous, when you put it that way.”

  “God knows what really happened,” said Homer. “You know, we’re surrounded by cracks in the universe on all sides, holes in the rational undergirding firmament, fundamental anomalies in the—whoops!”

  “Oh, Homer, watch out!”

  It was too late. Homer’s teacup was falling from its saucer, exploding on the floor with a hideous crash, fracturing the reverent mood of the soprano as she sang “O Promise Me.” Reaching for a high note, she squawked instead, and muffed it.

  45

  So give me back to Death …

  “Sorry, you people,” said Dombey Dell. “You’ve all got to leave today. The people at the College, they want to start the regular tours again.”

  The front door was open. Another mild spring day glistened outside. Sunshine streamed through the parlor windows, glowing through the translucent porcelain of the Dickinson china, filling the hollow cups with light. Invisible pollen drifted into the front hall, mingling the fragrance of lilacs with the hot smell of tar from the truck that was cruising down Main Street, repairing winter potholes. The lilacs themselves were turning rusty. The flowering trees had dropped all their petals and put on a thick new growth of leaves. Grass rushed up out of the ground. An employee of the buildings and grounds department at the College was taking care of it, running a noisy lawn mower around the garden, guiding it deftly with one hand under the bushes, leaving a few tall whiskers between the elephantine toes of the white oak tree. In the narrow front yard a sprinkler whirled, sparkling in pulses in the sunlight, making a light pattering on the ground.

  Tom Perry was ready to go. He came down the stairs heavily, lugging his suitcase. Sourly he looked at Dombey Dell. “Did you hear about the job at Harvard?”

  “No,” said Dombey sharply. “What about the job at Harvard?”

  “There isn’t any job at Harvard. You know that guy they were going to fire, Rexpole? He just won the Nobel prize.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “So relax.”

  “Well, what the hell,” said Dombey Dell. “C’est la vie.”

  Owen, too, had packed up his slender possessions. Sitting on the top step of the back porch, he waited for Ellen. It was broad noon. A fly buzzed around his head. Leaning against one of the porch pillars, he closed his eyes.

  When the door opened behind him, he was too sleepy to turn around. But he looked up as the long white skirt rustled past him, flowing easily through the floor of the porch. Yes, that made sense, because the porch wasn’t old. There had been nothing here a hundred years ago but a pair of granite steps. The white skirt rippled with the briskness of the woman’s forward motion as she walked away from Owen and hurried past the barn. Now she was climbing into the field beyond the stone wall. Soon she was only a determined bobbing note of white, farther and farther away, walking firmly in the direction of the cemetery.

  Owen’s head jerked up. Getting awkwardly to his feet, he stared at the place where the barn had been so clearly visible a moment ago. It had vanished. There was only the garage on the other side of the driveway. Beyond the stone wall lay the backyard of somebody’s house, with its green lawn and swimming pool. The spell dissolved.

  Owen smiled. His dreams were improving. This one was particularly satisfactory. Emily Dickinson was burying herself again. From now on she would lie in her own alabaster chamber, Untouched by Morning And untouched by Noon. Untouched at least by anybody at the Emily Dickinson Centennial Symposium, because the symposium was over. Even Dombey Dell was abandoning Emily Dickinson, getting ready to rip and claw at somebody else. This time it was Julia Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan.

  But, decided Owen, it was not just Dombey’s greedy territorial ambition that was to blame for the indignities Emily had suffered, and for the tragedies that had engulfed them all. Blame, too, the passions of mind and heart, those very same terrors and fervors that reeled in her poetry. Those ardors were still raging in Amherst, tormenting the strong and maddening the weak. Blame disappointed yearning, the drop of Anguish That scalds me now—that scalds me now! Blame the frustration of reaching without achieving, of longing for the impossible, I’ll clutch—and clutch—Next—One—Might be the golden touch. And as for the nightmares and fatalities of the last few days, who had known better than Emily Dickinson the terrors of death, the supple Suitor That wins at last?

  “Open the screen door, would you, Owen?”

  Owen turned hastily to open the door for Ellen. She was carrying a bag and a slide projector for Peter Wiggins. Peter stumbled after her clumsily, moaning a little under his breath.

  “Now, see here, Peter,” said Owen, taking the slide projector, following him to his car. “Are you sure you can drive all the way back to Boston?”

  Peter smiled wanly, and climbed into the front seat, favoring all his bandaged places. “Oh, yes, no problem.”

  Owen felt sorry for Peter Wiggins, his newest lame duck. He stood beside the car with Ellen and rested his plaster arm on the open window. “Oh, Peter, I forgot to tell you the good news about that picture that turned up. You know, the one that said, Mother before we moved to Topeha. You can for
get about it.”

  “I can?” Peter’s drawn face brightened.

  “You certainly can. Helen Gaunt brought it over and showed it to me, and there’s no question about it. It’s brand new, not nearly as sharp as the original. And the cardboard backing was just cut out of a shoe box or something. It’s a very crude job. Helen said somebody left it in her mailbox. Homer Kelly assures me it must have been Winifred Gaw.”

  “Oh, so that’s what Winnie meant by documentary evidence?” Peter smiled faintly, and then hunched his shoulders, waiting for Owen to say something about another embarrassing forgery. But Owen was silent. Impulsively Peter burst out, “I hate to leave.” And then all his frustrated hopes came gushing forth. He looked up at Owen with his sad rabbit eyes. “You see, the truth is, I was hoping to get a teaching job somewhere in the East. You know, around here.” Peter gestured at the woodsy confusion of light and shade beyond the garage. “Someplace with trees and flowers. Things like that.”

  Owen didn’t know what to reply. But Ellen looked at Peter in surprise. “You mean you don’t like it in Arizona?”

  “No,” said Peter, closing his eyes and shaking his head from side to side. “I don’t like it in Arizona.”

  “But that’s such great country out there,” exclaimed Ellen. “Why don’t you enjoy it? Why don’t you just wallow in it?”

  “Wallow in it?” Peter stared at Ellen, and blinked. Once again he shook his head in clumsy protest, and then he recited the names of his gods, Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson. “They all belong here, you see. Here in New England.”

  “No, they don’t,” said Ellen quickly.

  “They don’t?” Peter gaped at her.

  “They don’t?” said Owen, amused.

  “Of course not. Emily Dickinson isn’t here. She’s not in this house anymore. She’s not distilled somehow in the fragrance of the flowers in the garden. She’s not folded into the pleats of that white dress in the bedroom. Emily Dickinson is dead.”

  “Dead,” agreed Owen sagely.

  “Dead,” agreed Peter, nodding his head up and down.

  “Stone dead. She only comes alive when some kid in Anchorage, Alaska, or Nashville, Tennessee, or Brooklyn, New York, or—where do you come from?—Pancake Flat, Arizona!—opens an anthology of American poetry and reads one of her poems for the first time. It’s all the life she’s ever going to have. Listen, you idiot, Emily Dickinson is alive and well in Pancake Flat as long as you’re there to pass the book around.”

  “Pancake Flat,” said Peter dreamily. “Alive and well in Pancake Flat.”

  “That’s where she is,” concluded Ellen, beaming at him kindly. “Not here.”

  “Pancake Flat,” said Peter again, nodding sleepily. Owen and Ellen watched him as his car floated backward, then drowsed forward out of the driveway like a piece of mesmerized machinery.

  “My dear, you were superb,” said Owen Kraznik.

  46

  I had a guinea golden—

  I lost it in the sand …

  The black glass negative on the mantelpiece was gathering dust. Tilly couldn’t seem to get time to examine it carefully. At first she was kept busy by her duties in the Amherst Women’s Emily Dickinson Association. Marilyn Wineman, the chairperson, had asked her to write up an account, for the minutes, of the historic march on the Homestead. And then it was Tilly’s daughter Margie. Margie sent Tilly three yards of fabric and a dress pattern, urging her to make it up in a hurry. And then it was the clothing exchange at Grace Church. Tilly was in charge of collecting all the stuff.

  All of these things had taken one hundred percent of the time left over from the care of Elvis Buffington, who was such a little go-getter Tilly had to keep an eye on him every minute.

  But today for sure, decided Tilly, she would get a look at that glass plate during his afternoon nap. The trouble was, when Tilly at last dumped Elvis into his crib, she felt so tired herself that she couldn’t resist lying down just for a couple of winks.

  And then her nap turned into a really good snooze.

  Elvis woke up first. Taking hold of the bars of the crib, he tried hoisting himself over the top. It was easy. Elvis was proud of himself. Clambering quickly down to the floor, he turned around and looked across the room at Tilly. Her eyes were shut. She was still asleep. Toddling to the stairs, Elvis negotiated them rapidly, scrambling down backward on hands and knees.

  Downstairs he explored the house, looking for something to play with. In the living room he climbed a chair. Behind the chair a bookcase offered easy handholds. On the top of the bookcase he stood up carefully. A jar of flowers wobbled. A statue thing tipped back and forth, then righted itself. Elvis stood silently on the bookcase watching it, a drop of water suspended from his lower lip. Then he turned his head. Beyond the bookcase, on the shelf over the fireplace, he saw something interesting. A black thing, shiny and flat. It was made of glass. It would break. It looked like “No, no, Elvis!” Edging sideways along the top of the bookcase, Elvis leaned his stomach against the edge of the mantel and grasped the piece of black glass. Miraculously he carried it to the floor without mishap.

  Where to now? Outdoors! Holding the piece of glass carefully in both fists, Elvis made his way purposefully to the kitchen door. With extreme care he set the glass on the floor and undid the hook of the screen. Then he picked it up again, clutched it to his stomach, and pushed the door open.

  The sun was high over the treetops, yellow and bright. A dog was barking up the road. Elvis slid down the grassy slope to the driveway and got to his feet. What next?

  And then he saw something worthy of his epic journey. Once again the neighbor’s cat was stalking beside the field. Catching sight of Elvis, the cat froze, then streaked across the street.

  Dropping the piece of glass on the driveway, Elvis took off after the cat. Soon he was toddling along a path on the other side of Market Hill Road.

  And therefore it wasn’t until much later that afternoon, it wasn’t until the neighbors had been summoned to look for Elvis, it wasn’t until the police had organized a search party along Cushman Brook and were wondering whether or not to drag Factory Hollow Pond, it wasn’t until Elvis turned up at Whittemores’ Store at the bottom of Market Hill Road and the people at Whittemore’s called the police and the police called Tilly and Tilly rushed down to get him and hug him and scold him and take him home for supper and a bath, it wasn’t until she put him to bed and locked the bedroom door—it wasn’t until then that Tilly discovered the disappearance of the glass plate from the mantelpiece in the living room. Only then did she begin to look for it all over the house. Only then did she find it at last in the driveway, crushed into a million splintered shards by the wheels of the police chief’s car.

  “Oh, well,” said Tilly regretfully, stirring the pieces with her foot, “who cares what Emily Dickinson looked like? It’s the poems that count, after all.”

  I reckon—when I count at all—

  First—Poets—Then the Sun—

  Then Summer—Then the Heaven of God—

  And then—the List is done—

  But, looking back—the First so seems

  To Comprehend the Whole—

  The Others look a needless Show—

  So I write—Poets—All …

  Afterword

  The photograph that appears at the front of this book and on page 247 became famous when it appeared as the frontispiece for the second volume of Richard Sewall’s 1974 biography of Emily Dickinson. Below the picture, on the same page, Professor Sewall displayed the scribbled, misspelled identification from the back of the photograph, Emily Dickenson 1860, but he took no position as to the genuineness of the attribution:

  This frontispiece is an enlargement of a 3” x 13/4” photograph reproduced here by the kind permission of Mr. Herman Abromson, who bought it “some years ago” from a bookseller in Greenwich Village, New York City, since deceased. The name and date (in handwriting unknown) appear on the back
of the photograph. Opinions vary as to whether it is an authentic picture of Emily Dickinson, the poet.…

  The Greenwich Village bookseller was one Samuel Loveman, who actually did not die until 1976, at the age of eighty-nine. According to his former partner, David Mann, Loveman had owned and cherished the picture for a long time before he offered it for sale in 1961. The catalogue for his Bodley Book Shop listed it incorrectly as a daguerreotype, an unknown daguerreotype portrait of Emily Dickinson, and described it like this:

  95 DICKINSON, EMILY. Original Portraits of Emily Dickinson, are, alas, all too Few—a Daguerreotype or Two, a Drawing or a Verbal Description, and the Sum of Portraiture of this Unique American Poet is Complete. We offer a Completely Unknown Photographic Portrait of Emily Dickinson on a Crad [sic] de Visite (4 x 21/4 Inches)—an Exquisite Likeness of One of the Loveliest Faces recorded in Early Photography. This is a Bust-Portrait, and a Pencilled Inscription on the Verso reads: “mily [sic] Dickinson, 1.” $25.00

  Mr. Loveman failed to explain that the inscription on the back of the picture had been written, and misspelled, by himself. His handwriting has been identified by David Mann.

  How did Samuel Loveman acquire the photograph and why did he think it a likeness of Emily Dickinson? Among Loveman’s surviving friends, no one seems to know. As a self-taught scholar, he made attributions that are sometimes dismissed as naive or overly optimistic. Lorraine Wilbur of the Gramercy Book Shop in New York remembers an example. When she asked Loveman why he claimed that his unsigned landscape had been painted by Albert Bierstadt, he said, “I feel it.”

  At the same time, Loveman had a considerable reputation in New York as a cataloguer of rare books. An occasional poet himself, he was a close friend of the poet Hart Crane. After Crane’s suicide and after the death of Crane’s mother, Loveman became his literary executor. Many people attest to his interest in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Perhaps he “felt” that the woman in this photograph resembled the seventeen-year-old Emily as she appears in the famous daguerreotype of 1848. And then, perhaps he made a guess at the date of the carte de visite. Or perhaps, on the other hand, he had a solid reason for his attribution.