Emily's House

by Amy Belding Brown

  Emily was almost invisible, hardly leaving her room for days. Times she did, she’d float through the house, in and out of shadows. It reminded me of the weeks after the Squire’s death, when she’d startle me by coming around a corner like a ghost.

  But she kept writing. It was all she did besides caring for her plants. She wrote for hours and hours at the little desk in her room. She had Dennis put a table in the conservatory so she could write there. Page after page she wrote. Every day I carried her letters to the post office and every day I collected a stack to carry back to her. But her poem scraps were so full of sorrow I stopped reading them.

  April came and the crocuses bloomed and a new clutch of chicks hatched out. Dennis spaded and raked the flower beds for planting. On warm days Emily put on her garden gloves and went out to weed, though it was plain her heart wasn’t in it. She’d kneel down and poke in the dirt a smidgen and then she’d be up and walking back and forth, drifting the way a butterfly does, from one plant to the next. One afternoon I was churning butter on the piazza and saw her walking the same way she did when she was with Judge Lord. Even listing a bit to her left as if she was leaning on his arm. Gave me a chill, it did. I even stopped my churning. Took me a minute to turn back to my work.

  That spring my nephew Willie turned thirteen and started plaguing his parents with wanting to go West and join his uncle Tommy working the mines. Tom wouldn’t hear of it and Mary said it would break her heart. But I saw the love for adventure gleaming in the lad’s eyes, same as my own at that age. Took a special shine to him, and gave him a bigger slice of cake when he stopped by the Homestead kitchen. I served up a lesson or two of my own while he was eating—made it plain to the lad that family was the only treasure worth having.

  In May Mabel Todd and her husband rented a house on Lessey Street behind the Homestead. A grand one, it was, with columns and trees and a wide lawn. Not five minutes it took Mabel to walk from her door to the Homestead. She came every day and Austin was always there waiting. The trysting was so regular I knew the hour to start looking for Mabel. Soon I was arranging my chores to take me upstairs and outdoors between two and four thirty in the afternoons so I couldn’t hear their cavorting.

  Mabel began noising it around town she was great friends with Emily Dickinson. Said Emily admired her and told her secrets. I don’t know where she got such a notion. She didn’t know Emily at all, let alone her secrets. Maybe Mabel was just so full of herself she figured everybody believed her. I know she fancied herself a great artist. She used to paint flowers on her collars and the fronts of her dresses. She even showed them off to me, and I murmured nice things and pretended I was dazzled by her talent. But in truth, my nieces, every one of them, could draw flowers more real than Mabel’s.

  * * *

  In the middle of June, Emily had a fainting fit in the kitchen. I was making a coconut loaf cake with her, the two of us working away and chatting. Since the Judge died she wanted my help when she baked. She’d weakened and was sometimes dizzy and having trouble remembering the recipes. That day she was standing at the table cracking eggs into a bowl when her legs gave out and she sank right down to the floor.

  I spoke her name, but the way she lay so still told me she couldn’t hear. She closed her eyes and a blue cast came into her skin.

  I ran for help.

  Dennis came and carried Emily to her room while I went for the doctor. When I got back to the Homestead, Vinnie had come back from her marketing but there was no change in Emily. She lay on her bed, and only her breathing told us she was still among the living. Dr. Bigelow took her pulse and looked in her eyes. He said she had no fever but somebody should sit with her till she woke and then summon him. So I said I would.

  Emily was insensible for hours. When she finally opened her eyes, it was twilight and the birds had all gone quiet except for a lonesome phoebe singing outside her window. Maybe that’s what woke her is what I was thinking there in the gloom by her bed. As soon as she sat up, she was sick all over her sheets.

  When Dr. Bigelow came, he pronounced she was suffering from revenge of the nerves. Likely from all the deaths in the family, he said. Sure, he didn’t know the half of it. The truth of it is we were all scared, every one of us thinking Emily was at death’s door. And it was plain she thought so herself, so weak she could hardly turn her head on the pillow.

  Sue came first thing the next morning and sat with Emily till afternoon. I don’t think they talked much, for Emily could barely whisper, but I saw their hands were clasped together the whole time.

  All summer Emily was confined to her bed. Sue came and went. Sometimes she just sat watching Emily sleep. Sometimes they whispered together. Vinnie took to reading to Emily in the mornings and Austin visited every day after work. It was August before she was strong enough to sit up and write a letter. We all of us felt we’d been spared a fresh sorrow.

  * * *

  By fall Emily was up and about, though still feeble. Instead of working in the kitchen, she sat on the veranda watching squirrels and birds and looking across the grounds to the Evergreens. On days she felt stronger, she walked in the garden or worked in her conservatory.

  In October Mabel Todd put on a grand afternoon tea and invited all the best people in Amherst. Vinnie went, wearing a new frock in rose silk and white taffeta with pleats and tucks and flounces. She looked very grand indeed. She came home with her cheeks flushed, eager to be telling what she saw. She dragged Emily out of the conservatory and I wet the tea for us all.

  Even before the kettle boiled, she had Emily laughing. It wasn’t till that minute I realized how long it had been since I’d heard that happy sound.

  “She served chicken salad, Em. Chicken salad! On chipped plates with cups of apple compote.” Buffy, Vinnie’s big tomcat, came wending into the room and jumped on her lap, bumping her arm and sloshing tea onto the tablecloth. I reached for him but Vinnie draped an arm around him and shook her head. Emily gave me a wink and dabbed the spot dry with her napkin.

  “Tell us more, Vin,” she said. “Tell everything.”

  So Vinnie unspooled the afternoon’s happenings, setting them out like gifts for our pleasure. “Mabel’s mother was there— Mrs. Loomis. An elegant woman, very proper. If she knew what Mabel was up to—” A giggle caught Vinnie and she had to take a sip of tea to stop it. She went on petting the cat, who was purring away loud as you please. Vinnie had to raise her voice to be heard, which made Buffy just purr louder. Soon I was biting my tongue to keep from giggling myself.

  “When Mrs. Loomis learned I was Austin’s sister, she wanted to know how friendly he was with the Todds and why Sue wasn’t at the party. Said she was surprised her daughter could afford the house rent on a college professor’s salary. I’m convinced she knows what’s been going on between Mabel and Austin. I told her they were only friends, but I don’t think she believed me.”

  “What would Father say if he knew his sweet Vinnie was telling lies?” Emily was frowning but it was plain she was pretending her concern.

  “It’s our house now, Em.” Vinnie tossed her head back in a smart way as if she were still a young lass. “And I’ll not do anything to stifle Austin’s chance for happiness. He’s had little enough.”

  “And what of Sue’s chance for happiness?” Emily’s voice was sharp. “Austin’s supposed unhappiness in his marriage is Mabel Todd’s invention and you know it.” She stood up, holding the table to steady herself. Ever since her fit, she’d been shaky.

  I jumped up and took her elbow. “Shouldn’t you be lying down now?”

  I thought she’d be resisting me, but instead she whispered yes and leaned on me while I helped her upstairs to her room.

  * * *

  In truth, Emily never came back to her old self after the fit that summer. More and more she kept to her bed. She caught all sorts of coughs and fevers and dyspepsias. She slept late and rarely came down for br
eakfast. Most of her waking time she was writing letters. Sometimes when I went in early to light her fire, I found her sleeping with the lamp still lit, her lap desk on her knees and a half-written letter fallen to the floor. Twice she spilled ink on the bedspread. The stains set so, scrub as hard as I would, I couldn’t get them out.

  She started refusing to see Dr. Bigelow. She said it wasn’t medical treatments she needed but birds and sky and light. A few times she let him watch from the hall while she shuffled past her open door. She said it should be enough if he was any good. I knew she was teasing and told her not to be a silly gombeen, let the man do his job. But she just laughed and declared she’d always secretly been a gombeen, though I was the only one who recognized it for what it was.

  But no matter how I scolded and fussed, she wouldn’t agree to a proper examination. It vexed the doctor and soon enough I learned he’d spread the story all over Amherst, making Emily seem foolish and cracked.

  Set me raging sometimes, the way some folks will twist the truth and strew it about, without a care for how hurtful it is.

  * * *

  Emily started asking me to sit with her afternoons. She liked me to read out letters from her friends. My voice soothed her, she said—my way of speaking made her feel safe and cherished. Sometimes the letters were enchanting as a book. One winter day she had me read a note from a friend staying in California. The lady’s words made the place a wonder of bright flowers and warm breezes over a silver sea.

  “Sure, it sounds like the Garden of Eden before the Fall, now, doesn’t it?” I said, sliding the letter back into its envelope.

  Emily smiled. “I’ve thought a great deal about Eden. But I don’t think you’ll find it in California.”

  “Sure, I don’t either,” I said. “Not anymore. Though it would have been nice to see the place. There was a time I thought it came close to Heaven.”

  “Oh, Maggie.” The smile was on her still. “Heaven’s not just close—it’s the very air we breathe. I believe most of the time we live within its gates unknowing. Sometimes—if we’re very lucky—the veil is lifted, and we see.”

  I didn’t understand what she was meaning that day. Thought maybe her weakness had muddled her brain. Like her poems, her talking was a riddle took me years to untangle.

  * * *

  Emily starting confiding things she told no one else. I don’t know if it was because I was always there. Or because her sickness made her do it. But I wanted to believe it was because we were close as sisters and she trusted me with her secrets.

  Whether she was trusting me or not, many things she said were surely secrets—surprising and troubling and some of them sweet. Those long hours linked us. And sitting with her in that room filled with afternoon light, I spilled secrets of my own. As the days opened into weeks and the weeks into months, I began to understand my destiny hadn’t been my own for years, but was forever bound to hers.

  I told her about Patrick, about his work in the Dynamite School and the bombings in England and Scotland. I told her about the arrests and trials of the bombers. I told her it made me ashamed to know what Irish lads were doing. Yet the truth of it was I had no dearer wish than for Ireland to be free.

  The way she listened told me she was giving me all her attention—her eyes never strayed from my face for a minute, and she even winced hearing the sad parts. I could feel the worry coming from her, same as my own. There’s something about being listened to that way gives a person relief.

  “But he was brave,” she said. “And that’s a quality I admire. For all his faults, it appears your Patrick was a warrior.”

  A warm flush came over me. I remembered Maria Doughtery calling Patrick a warrior after her lecture in Northampton. Hadn’t thought of that in a long while. At the time it worried and confused me, but now I was feeling pride in the recollecting. “A warrior, yes,” I said. “But I’m thinking he was a rogue too.”

  She laughed. “It’s the easiest thing in the world to fall in love with a rogue, isn’t it?” Emily was looking past me, at something that wasn’t there. She’d been doing it so often lately it had stopped giving me a chill. “They’re practically irresistible. It’s the wildness in them, I think. It makes you want to live”—she paused and looked at me again—“incandescently,” she said slowly. “Yes, that’s what it is. You have some of it yourself, Maggie. There’s a wildness in you that keeps my heart buoyant when you’re near.”

  I stared at her. “Sure, I’m no wilder than one of Miss Vinnie’s house cats.”

  Emily smiled. “Ah, but you have put your finger on it. Every one of them has teeth and claws and an untamed heart, no matter how they purr and preen.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Wondered if I should take offense, but in truth her words warmed me. I saw the rightness of them, surely. For after all those years of training myself to be a proper American woman, I’d become more Irish than I was before. Emily was the only one to have known it, maybe. But it was a sweet thing to finally be seeing it myself.

  I wrote a letter to Patrick that night. Three pages long, it was. I thanked him for giving me Knocknagow and for introducing me to Maria Doughtery and for taking me to the Irish Fair in Worcester. I thanked him for being my friend and for wanting to marry me. I told him what had happened in Amherst since he left—the Phoenix Block fire, my long bout with typhoid, the coming of Mabel Todd to town. I told him about Mother Dickinson dying and the calamity of little Gib’s death. I asked how he was and said I was sorry for not writing sooner. On the last page, I wrote that I missed him. Things weren’t as lively since he left town. It was as if some color had gone out of the sky. I pondered a long time how to sign it. And my eyes were blurry with tears when I finally wrote: Your own Margaret.

  One afternoon in April when I was sitting with her, Emily showed me the last letter she had from Judge Lord. It had been folded and unfolded so many times there were tiny cuts in the creases. “It’s a message from the grave,” she said. “We never had a proper farewell, you know. When we parted the last time, neither of us imagined it was the end.” She pressed the letter to her breast a minute. “I suppose that’s the way Death most often comes, isn’t it? Yet his very last words were a Caller comes. When I first read it I thought a visitor had interrupted him, but now I believe the caller was Death. He knew when he wrote it he was dying.”

  I nodded, for it was no surprise to me a man might hear the knocking when Death was at his door. Hadn’t I heard the Banshee screaming myself—and more than once? “Some say ’tis a blessing not to be taken without notice.”

  She blinked. “It would be a great blessing to join him,” she whispered. “And I believe I shall before long.”

  “Don’t say so!” I grasped her hand as if it might hold her. There was no thought in it—just the needing to protect her.

  She smiled and laughed a little. “Honestly, it will be a relief when the end comes, Maggie. I have lost so many. Nearly everyone I’ve loved and who loved me.” I squeezed her hand but I didn’t know if she noticed. Tears were coming up in her eyes, ready to spill. “All gone into eternity ahead of me.”

  “There’s Vinnie,” I said. “And Sue.” And then, because I couldn’t contain it longer and because it was so, “And myself. Don’t be leaving us yet.”

  But I don’t think she heard me. She was staring out the window, where the sunset was streaking the sky pink. Same color as her Damask roses just before the petals fall. “It’s all come to nothing,” she murmured. “All my hopes gone like smoke. All my dreams turned to ashes.”

  Ashes and smoke? Her words chilled me. “It’s not so, Emily. ’Tis your sickness talking.”

  She shook her head. “I mean my poems, Maggie. Do you still have them?”

  I nodded. “Aye, they’re safe in my trunk,” I said. “I know they’re precious to you as children and you couldn’t bear it if they came to any harm. But my trunk�
��s a lucky one, it is. Came all the way from Ireland with nary a scratch.” I patted her shoulder. “Sure, they’re safe as houses. Nothing will be harming them.”

  She shook her head. “I want you to promise me something, Maggie. You must swear to it.”

  “I’ll do anything you say,” I told her, not thinking for a minute what she was about to be asking.

  “Promise me you’ll burn them when I’m gone,” she whispered.

  I think I flinched. I know I sucked in my breath and drew back my hand. “Oh no!” I said. “Don’t be asking such a thing.”

  She shook her head. “You must. They belong in eternity with me.”

  “Eternity?” I wondered where she thought eternity was and how her poems would get there if I burned them.

  “Swear it.” She was looking into my eyes, holding them with her own. And now it was herself squeezing my hand. Her face had a begging look I’d not seen before—so forlorn I couldn’t refuse.

  Still it took me a minute before I nodded. “I promise,” I murmured.

  “Bless you.” She raised my hand and kissed my fingers. I felt her lips fluttering over them soft as a butterfly. Then she turned my hand over and kissed my palm. Right in the middle of it. Brought tears to my eyes, it did. And all the rest of that day my hand burned like it was singed.

  Part VI

  Corridors

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  1916

  After promising Mattie D I’ll find out what I can about Reverend Parke, I start asking around town. Nobody has ever heard of him. But then I don’t know a single soul who goes to the Episcopal church, so it’s not surprising.