“Oh, Mr. Dickinson,” said Mabel reproachfully.
“No, no,” he said, “I think it has some fine lines—‘If in that room a friend await,’—that is very well done—but why will she never end a verse? See the way she leaves off in mid-effusion?”
“It’s my poem,” said Mabel. “I consider it perfect.”
Better than perfect: the poem had at once struck Mabel as true. She wasn’t yet sure what this meant, she needed time to reflect, but here, she knew, was one who felt the vibrations of unspoken feelings between people even more acutely than she did herself.
“I would so like to read more of her poems,” she said.
“She keeps them tucked away,” said Vinnie.
“Please tell her I admire this beyond anything.”
As Austin escorted Mabel back across town, he complimented her on her singing, and she thanked him for his kind words, exactly as if they were in a public drawing room where everything they said was heard by others.
Then Austin said, “That line in the song you sang, the last line. It haunts me. ‘Oh, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?’ ”
“And yet,” said Mabel, “you remained unmoved by my poem.”
Already it was hers, written for her.
“I didn’t say that. But there’s something willful in my sister’s way of writing, as if she wants to obscure her meaning, which grates on me.”
“Why would she want to obscure her meaning?”
“To appear grander and deeper than she is.”
“Mr. Dickinson!”
“I’m sorry if I shock you,” said Austin, “but she is my sister, and I know her too well, perhaps. Emily has a tendency to pose.”
“I won’t listen to you,” said Mabel. “I’ll have no more of your brute masculine intellect.”
They walked a few steps in silence. Then Austin sighed.
“Don’t abandon me, Mrs. Todd,” he said. “My intellect is no friend to me. Truly I am one who inhabits this bleak world alone.”
“That is your choice, Mr. Dickinson,” Mabel replied.
At the door of her boardinghouse, taking his leave, Austin reminded her that she was expected the following evening at his daughter Mattie’s whist party.
“May I fetch you at seven o’clock?”
“You may.”
He watched until she was safely in the house, then turned to retrace his steps.
Mabel showed David her poem. David was very struck by it.
“It’s certainly odd enough, but it’s got something. I’m damned if I know what it is.”
“Truth,” said Mabel. “We live our lives among lies, so the truth seems odd to us.”
“But you and I, puss. We don’t lie to each other.”
“No, David. We don’t.”
As they were preparing to go to bed, he saw that she was in an unusually thoughtful mood.
“So is my puss going to tell me what’s on her mind?”
“Oh, so many things,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about my father. He’s such a wonderful man, David. I wish you knew him better. There was a time when he was a friend of Thoreau, and Emerson. He’s a truly wise man. I wish he was here now.”
“What would you ask him, if he was?”
“I’d ask him to tell me about love. I remember him telling me once how God has created us with the power to love, and how it’s the best of us, and we must never be ashamed of it.”
“A wise man indeed.”
“But our religion tells us we must only love one person.”
David said nothing. Mabel, half undressed, turned to look at him. He beckoned her to come to him.
“My darling puss,” he said. “I’ve already made my confession to you. I know that I, as a man, am capable of loving more than one woman. Why should not you, as a woman, be capable of loving more than one man?”
She let him caress her, gazing into his eyes.
“Do you know what you’re saying?” she whispered.
“I think so.”
She kissed him.
“You’re a darling,” she said, “and I adore you.”
• • •
The next day it rained without ceasing. Austin Dickinson presented himself at the door of the Amherst House armed with a large umbrella. Beneath its shelter, necessarily close, they walked down the street towards his house, the Evergreens.
“Our last evening,” he said.
Mabel and David were due to leave for Washington the next day.
“Must you go?”
“David says we must,” said Mabel. “They are to decide who is to lead the expedition to photograph the transit of Venus. He says he must be there to have a chance. You know this is his big opportunity.”
“The transit of Venus, yes.”
“He hopes to be sent to the Lick Observatory in California.”
“Will you go to California with him?”
“That is not yet decided.”
They walked on through the rain.
“I will miss you,” said Austin. “I’m not sure you appreciate quite how much. Your company has meant a great deal to me over these past few months.”
“And to me,” said Mabel.
“But you’re young, and admired wherever you go. Your life lies fair before you. For me the prospect is very different.”
“And yet here we are,” said Mabel, “on the same street, walking towards the same house, under the same umbrella.”
“What do you mean to say?” His voice shaking.
“We have the same prospect before us, if we so wish.”
They were on the high path now, with the picket fence and hickory hedge of the Dickinson properties on their left.
“Mrs. Todd,” he said, speaking very low, “I have never met anyone in all my life who I feel understands me as I believe you do. Perhaps I delude myself. I speak as I feel. You have become the one person in whose company I feel the possibility of happiness.”
They had now reached the gate into the Evergreens. At this point, where they should stop and turn into the path to the front door, Mabel did not stop. She continued walking, and Austin walked on by her side. In that moment, by that action, Mabel knew she had given him the answer he longed for, and had made her own irrevocable commitment.
“Tell me if I’m wrong to believe what I believe,” he said.
“You’re not wrong.”
“You believe it too?”
“I do.”
“My dear Mrs. Todd,” he said, “you may not realize it, but I am a drowning man, and you have just saved my life.”
“I’ve done nothing,” she said. “There’s a power here that is stronger than both of us.”
“There is,” he assented fervently.
“I don’t know what name to give it,” said Mabel. “It may be God’s will, it may be nature taking its course. All I know is we have been prepared for this moment, you and I, and this is what was meant to be.”
“Amen,” said Austin.
“But at the same time I’m frightened.”
“Of course. We’ve crossed the Rubicon. There’s no turning back now.”
He sounded like a different man, younger, filled with a joyous energy. As he spoke the words “there’s no turning back,” they both turned back, towards the gate. For a brief moment, beneath the umbrella, he took her hand, and their eyes met.
“Am I not too old?” he said.
She shook her head, struck by the blaze of his happiness.
“Let’s be the same age,” she said. “Both born today.”
7
The West Cemetery, where Emily Dickinson is buried, is up at the farther end of Triangle Street, beside Jones Realtors and facing Triangle Family Dental. Iron railings bound the grassy gravestone-studded hill. Emily lies within an inner iron-railed compound, one of a line of four family headstones, between her sister and her father. The other stones give the date of death beneath the one word DIED. Emily’s date of death, May 15, 1886, is headed
CALLED BACK.
The day that Alice visits the grave is chilly, damp, grey. There’s no one else in the little cemetery. She takes some photographs. Earlier pilgrims have tied a red ribbon to the railings by Emily’s headstone, and on the stone itself have placed a half-burned candle and a small glass vase holding a white flower. The grass within the railings is weed-filled.
She tries to imagine the day of Emily’s burial. Austin was there, of course, leading the mourners, with Vinnie. The accounts of the time make no mention of Sue. But Mabel was present, discreetly at the back.
Emily was familiar with graveyards. In their former house on Pleasant Street, before the family moved back to the Homestead, her bedroom had overlooked what was then the main entrance to this same cemetery. In so many of her poems she imagined her own burial.
Ample make this Bed—
Make this Bed with Awe—
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and fair.
Be its Mattress straight—
Be its Pillow round—
Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground—
Alice feels half ashamed of how intensely she responds to Emily’s death poems. She senses the longing for escape in them, escape from the unmeetable demands of life, that she be successful and beautiful and loved. In this surely Mabel stands as Emily’s opposite. She was one who sought out the yellow noise and, bathed in its flattering glow, demanded and received attention.
My story, Alice tells herself, is about Mabel, who chose life in all its mess and hurt, not Emily, who withdrew into the sepulchre of her own room. And yet in every picture she forms of Mabel, Emily is near, the listener behind the closed door. She’s near even now. The words on her gravestone come from Emily herself, from almost the last letter she ever wrote: Little Cousins. Called back. Emily.
She leaves the cemetery by the old entrance, which comes out into a parking lot, and walks up the road beside the Mobil gas station onto Pleasant Street. She’s beginning to get her bearings in the town. Left onto Main, past the Evergreens and the Homestead, the very walk taken so many times by Mabel and Austin, and so to the unlikely mansion where she now has her lodgings.
Her guest suite awes her. She has a bedroom with a wide bed and a television, a bathroom where toiletries have been supplied as in a hotel, and a further room furnished with a writing desk, two armchairs, and a second television. She wants to tell someone about it and realizes that someone is Jack. After all, he’s responsible, indirectly, for her presence in Nick Crocker’s house. So she takes a photograph on her phone of the suite’s sitting room, with a glimpse through the open door of the bedroom, and sends it to Jack with the message: Not exactly roughing it. My guest suite chez Crocker, thanks to you.
She wonders for a moment what he’s doing. It’ll be late evening in England. Is he sitting at a kitchen table marking essays, dreaming of pretty girls in head scarves?
She hears a car pull up outside and goes to her window, which overlooks the entrance drive. Nick’s wife, Peggy, is due back from Boston anytime. Alice is curious to meet her. But it’s Nick himself, returning home in an old red truck. An odd vehicle for him to drive, as if he’s pretending to be a builder. She watches him get out of the cab and cross to the back door of the house. Then he looks up and sees her, and she retreats from the window.
She sits down to work at last, at the writing desk, with her laptop before her and her books by her side: Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, and Austin and Mabel, the Love Letters. She opens up the document in which she has begun to write the first experimental draft of her screenplay and reads through the notes she’s made so far. But she finds it hard to concentrate. All she wants to do is go to sleep.
After half an hour or so she gives up and goes down to the kitchen to make herself coffee. Nick hears her and comes in, spectacles on his nose, book in his hand.
“I can’t seem to keep awake,” she says.
“Why not have a swim?” he says. “That’s what I do to wake myself up in the mornings.”
“You have a pool?”
Alice has seen nothing as vulgar as a swimming pool in this part of historic Amherst.
“It’s hidden away in the stable block. Come, I’ll show you.”
She follows him across the backyard to the stable block. From the outside it’s a handsome white-painted, twin-gabled building, with two large doors painted russet brown. Inside, through a small lobby, an inner door opens onto a long shadowy space. A dark glistening pool fills almost the entire area. It’s lined in black marble and lit by shafts of daylight falling through glazed panels in the roof.
“Are you shocked?” says Nick.
“Why would I be shocked?”
“Well, conspicuous consumption and all that.”
“I think it’s beautiful.”
“All yours, if you feel like it. Heated to eighty degrees.”
“I haven’t brought any swimming things,” Alice says. “I never thought I might be going for a swim.”
“So what? Swim naked. There’s no one to see you.”
He waves towards a cubicle to one side.
“Plenty of towels in there.”
He leaves her alone in the great space. The heat from the water warms the air. She walks slowly down the side of the pool towards the changing cubicle. At first she has no intention of swimming. She kneels down and dips a finger in the water. It’s pleasantly warm. As she stands up again she feels a little dizzy, no doubt the effect of jet lag. She looks round the long dark space and sees that she’s all alone. Why not?
She strips in the cubicle. There’s a tall mirror there in which she sees her naked body reflected. She feels a delicious surge of wildness possess her. She stands for a moment looking at herself in the flattering half-light. She may not be a beauty but she has a good body. She examines herself, twisting this way and that, trying to catch a reflection of her behind. Not a bad bum, all things considered.
She runs out of the cubicle and dives straight into the water, a clumsy dive that half winds her and makes a great splash. Then she drives down to the shallow end with a powerful crawl, and back again. She loves being naked in the water, she feels like a wild animal. Her sleepiness has vanished. She resolves to do fifty lengths. Somewhere after twenty she runs out of energy and turns onto her back to paddle lazily up and down. She closes her eyes and lets herself drift in and out of the shafts of light.
She becomes aware of a tapping sound. She curls her body round and opens her eyes. Nick has come back in and is standing at the far end.
“Sorry,” he says. “I need to know if you’re in for dinner.”
Slowly she lets her body sink below the surface of the water.
“Can I be?”
“Yes, of course. See you later.”
He goes. Slowly, like a sleepwalker, she emerges from the pool. She finds a towel and dries herself and dresses.
So he saw me naked. So what? He’s seen naked women before. Did he enter silently, secretly, so he could see me? No, he announced his coming. He knocked on the door. Did I hear his knock? All she remembers is the sensation of floating on her back in water, the luxury of it, and the sweet relief of letting go.
And if he did see me, did he admire? Did he desire?
• • •
The dinner they share turns out to have been cooked by Nick himself. This takes Alice by surprise. Somehow she assumed there’d be a servant in this grand house. But no, they’re alone.
He’s made a stir-fry. Noodles, sugar snap peas, finely cut strips of rare beef.
“You like wine?”
“Yes, I like wine.”
“This is a Syrah from the Walla Walla Valley, Washington state.”
The food and wine are both sublime. Alice feels intensely aware of taste and smell and touch. They eat in the kitchen, facing each other across the narrow Formica-covered breakfast bar. Nick’s eyes remain on her with gratifying attention.
“So no Peggy
?” she says.
“Maybe tomorrow. What are your plans for tomorrow?”
“Look around town. Get a feel for the geography. And I have to make contact with the library at Yale. I want to see some of the original letters and diaries.”
“I thought the archive was in Harvard.”
“That’s Emily’s poems. All Mabel’s papers are at Yale.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
“A little. There’s so much more to do.”
“Well, if you need any help, just ask.”
“Where I really need help,” says Alice, “is in working out how to tell the story. I mean, the biographical facts are all there. We know pretty much who did what and when. What we don’t know is why.”
“And that matters?”
“Totally. If Mabel was just a social climber, and all she wanted from Austin was status and attention, then why should we care about her?”
“Do you have to care about someone to write their story?”
Alice thinks about that.
“Yes, I think so. If I don’t care about my heroine, why should anyone else?”
“She could be fascinatingly bad. Like Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair.”
“Yes . . .” Alice considers this too. “But Becky Sharp always knew she was looking after herself. Mabel wasn’t like that. She really did fall in love.”
“Whatever that means.”
“You don’t believe people can fall in love?”
“Oh, you don’t need my views on the subject,” says Nick with a laugh. “But you, I take it, do believe in love?”
“Yes,” says Alice. “Of course I believe in love. Not to believe in love is second-rate cynicism. It’s just silly. Everyone experiences love. Even you.”
She stares at him fiercely, daring him not to agree.
“Then why not believe in Mabel’s love?”
“I do, I do,” says Alice. “And I don’t, I don’t. I don’t know. I’m in a muddle. Can I read you some of the things she writes?”
“By all means.”
Alice runs up to her rooms to fetch the book of letters. Returning down the long stairs she feels a little giddy and realizes she must have drunk more red wine than she thought.
Why did I go for Nick like that?
In the kitchen, she reads aloud to him.
Amherst Page 6
