Savage Beauty

by Nancy Milford

  The Buzzells eventually left Belfast, where they had two sons, Bert and Charles, and moved to Camden, where twin girls, Susie and Clem, were born in 1873. Eben Buzzell, who had become a cooper in Maine, had not prospered, and when the twins were several months old the young family moved again, this time to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Clementine’s older sisters lived. There was the promise of work in the rich mills along the Merrimac, and with a large, young family to support, Buzzell took what he could get. He became a night watchman in the mills. In Newburyport they soon had another child, Georgia, but all did not go smoothly after that. The Buzzells quarreled. One of the twins, Clem, later wrote in her memoir that their conflict was due to a difference in religious beliefs, but she was only five when the split occurred. Cora, who was fifteen, knew the real story because she had played a part in it.

  When the newborn baby needed special medical care, Clementine turned to a young doctor, Gard Todd, for help. Soon Todd, who was her sister’s brother-in-law, was with her every day, offering counsel, helping even to ease her household duties. The trust and confidence she felt for him, his gentleness and his learning, turned to love. And the only person she confided in was her oldest daughter, Cora.

  One unhappy day, when I saw her grieving in a desperate hopelessness over the maelstrom she was being sucked into, I asked her why she did not leave him. I told her, her little girl for once the older woman, that I knew it must be hell for her to have him as a husband to her, to wait in bed for him mornings, when she loved this other.

  At first she said she couldn’t leave him. Then she asked, as if to herself, how she could leave him with all her little ones. They would be adrift and motherless. Cora told her to take only the three little sisters; she would stay at home with the boys and her father.

  The astonishing thing is that her mother took that advice. She fled in the night. Years later, Cora called it her martyrdom; in letters and in peculiar fragments of a memoir she wrote about it again and again:

  My mother was gone from the house at the head of the wharf. It was evening. My father was at his work for the night, watchman at the mill.… I was alone in the house … save for the two little boys, my brothers, who were crying for their mother.

  I wasn’t crying for my mother. I was too much buoyed up by what was happening, and what was coming in the morning, when my father would come home; too much buoyed up by the part I was taking in this tragedy, my responsibility in this breaking up of a family, I was keyed up to this sort of martyrdom, by my love for my mother.

  She thought it was “prostitution” for her mother to remain with her father; she was fired with a sense of self-importance:

  My mother was young, she was only thirty-three; she was very beautiful … and she had long since ceased to love [our] father. Further than that, he was often very unkind to her, even to being abusive in his talk and more than that.… More still, she was deeply in love with another man. All this I knew.

  When her father returned, he asked where her mother was. Cora was merciless. “I did not try to soften the blow,” she wrote. “I told him baldly, with what I now know was an hysterical strength and coolness, that she had left him.”

  Dazed, he glanced around the room. He heard his sons weeping, looked into Cora’s face, and began to cry.

  Eben Buzzell returned to his kin in Maine without much fuss. For a while it looked as if Clementine and her little brood were going to succeed. She established a thriving hairdressing business. It was said that her own lovely red hair was the only advertisement she needed, and her business flourished. Soon she was making regular trips to nearby towns, taking orders for the frizzes, bangs and coils, puffs and switches, with which women transformed themselves. Cora quit school in order to help. She and her mother would hire a horse and buggy and set out to gather hair combings, returning home to wash the hair for the real work, which was fashioned on hand-operated equipment, a hackle and a header, through which the combings were unsnarled and made over. Her mother’s hands flew, weaving the fine strands of dead hair, locking it into place, literally weaving the hair on the instrument that looked like a harp.

  Later Cora wrote that she cut her father completely out of her life. She remembered that her mother was madly in love and now she was free to become engaged to Gard Todd. “Not that she ever neglected us, we had our place, but all the thwarted years of her mis-mated life had to be made up for in the little time she had him for her accepted lover. I have never seen anyone so much in love as my mother was with this man.” They would meet in the late afternoon at a spot called The Laurels because of the lovely wild pink laurel that bloomed there.

  One warm day in May 1882, Clementine was driving alone in her open buggy along a country road when something startled her horse. It shied and bolted, and she was thrown to the ground. Her head struck a rock. On June 3, one week before Cora’s nineteenth birthday, her mother died of wounds from that fall. She was thirty-seven years old. As she stretched her arms out in the darkened room, her last words were “I cannot leave my babies!”

  Cora suffered such wild remorse that the family thought she would be harmed by her grief. All her life she remembered her mother lying in the downstairs room, where the funeral was quickly held:

  her hands quiet for almost the first time in my memory, clasping some white lilies, after all that … she was forever locked away from me, from us all, from the daylight and the sunlight … from the lover who was now making a heaven on earth for her, from the life she was too young to leave; from the life she was too beautiful to leave … they shut her away, and I knew I should never see her face again, never, never, it could not be shown to me again … when they were closing her little last house away from me and my loving, adoring gaze.

  The twins, who were nine, were immediately adopted by her mother’s sister Susan Todd and her husband, Gard Todd’s brother, while Cora, Bert, and Charlie set up housekeeping with little Georgia. They took an apartment in Newburyport and filled it with their mother’s fine old furniture. One night, shortly after they’d settled in, a fire broke out and destroyed the building and with it every memento of their past. All Cora could remember was running through the smoke with Georgia in her arms, holding her rag doll.

  After the fire the family was finally broken. Georgia was taken in by a childless couple in New Hampshire, and the boys, young as they were, were put to work. Cora wandered stricken from relative to relative, first in Massachusetts and then to Maine.

  Cora finally settled in West Camden with Joe and Marcia Keller, cousins of her mother’s with three sons and no daughters, who took to her as if she were their own. They were generous, kind, and even-tempered. Their seventeenth-century farmhouse was painted a fresh white, with an attached barn and a larger cow barn out back, and apple orchards. Beyond the farmhouse were fields of herbs Marcia gathered for home remedies, and beyond them the sea. The Kellers gave Cora a distance from her past and provided her with a link to her mother’s kin.

  But she had to work to earn her keep. She began to practice the hair work she’d learned from her mother. When she shut her eyes, she could still see her mother pulling and combing and weaving the silky strands of hair; she could almost hear the humming sound it made as it was worked into place.

  Among her keepsakes was a bright pink flyer. “To the Ladies,” it read, “CUSTOM HAIR WORK! On short notice, in the best and neatest manner, in the latest styles and at the cheapest rates.” Below it said that Miss Cora L. Buzzell, formerly of Massachusetts, would be in Lincolnville Centre, Maine, on Monday, September 13, 1886, “For a short time only.” While she lived with the Kellers, she canvassed the surrounding countryside, from the small towns and villages of Warren, Union, Hope, Appleton, Searsmont, and Lincolnville to Camden.

  All was not work, however, for among her flyers were tickets for “Miss Buzzell’s Concerts.” One night she met Henry Millay at a dance sponsored by the local grange, where she was chief musician. Henry Tolman Millay was the sixth of seven brothers
of a farming family in Union, Maine. Tall, handsome, and broad-shouldered, he was a year younger than Cora, as fair as she was dark, as easygoing as she was intense, and there was never a time when he could not make her laugh.

  Henry loved to fish in the ponds that lay like cups of sweet water between the hills surrounding Union. And he played a mean hand of poker. His blond hair was short, his face smooth and wide and open, with a fine mustache and blue eyes that rarely darkened. He had a knack for wearing his clothes with a nonchalance that distinguished him. He was generous to her: from the beginning he bought Cora presents of books she adored and that he rarely read. He was not uneducated, but he lacked her appetite for self-improvement. Henry Millay was a charmer, and he liked to loaf.

  On January 1, 1889, Cora began a diary (adding an “e” for elegance to the end of Buzzell). She was writing to Henry almost every day now; when she was not writing to him, he was likely to visit her on horseback. Marcia Keller made them molasses candy as they sat in the parlor playing High-low-Jack with the Keller boys. On January 9, Henry brought her an engagement ring. Five days later, the diary broke off. Two months after that, on St. Patrick’s Day 1889, they married in the Kellers’ parlor.

  They settled at first in an apartment in Rockland, a small city on the coast of Maine. Henry took a job selling men’s clothing and worsteds. Within the year they’d moved into a smart two-family cottage with mahogany sliding doors between the parlor and dining room. In the parlor were Cora’s piano, a smoking set for Henry’s cigars, and an overstuffed chair big enough to hold them both. Cora had hemstitched and cross-stitched linen pillow shams and antimacassars in bright red to adorn every available surface. Henry’s contribution was a set of deer antlers. They both agreed their new place was entirely “D.E.”—damned elegant!

  On November 1, 1889, Cora began another diary, this one given to her by Henry. She called it a “journal,” and on the first page she quoted her beloved Tennyson:

  Break! break! break!

  On the cold gray stones, O sea!

  And I would that my tongue could utter

  The thoughts that arise in me.

  In her first entry, she mentioned that The Maine Farmer had come with one of her poems in it, and that she did not feel very well and was taking iron medicine. From the beginning of her marriage she suffered constantly from those small illnesses, headaches, and fatigue. She recorded in her journal:

  I do not enjoy taking it: but will for the sake of health; and to please Henry.

  Cora was still troubled by the loss of her family. She yearned for Charlie’s company and fretted over Clem’s welfare at the Todds’. In that stuffy household no one danced or played fan-tan, pitch, or poker, and she knew that Clem, who was not yet eighteen, felt stifled there. Shortly after their move into their new home, they invited her to visit. Henry had to be on the road during the week, and Cora, who could go along only sometimes, wanted company. By the time Clem arrived, their adored brother Charlie had shipped out on a cargo boat, bound for adventure.

  Henry, with no sisters of his own, was suddenly surrounded by women. Clem adored him, and he came to think of her as his own sister. Together he and Cora taught her the reel dances they loved, the Portland and the Boston Fancy. Cora turned into a crackerjack card player. Her only flaw, according to Henry, was that she loved to win and couldn’t help but show it, whereas Henry played with an ease that appeared to be indifference. On weekends friends came to call for cards, or for sing-alongs. Henry’s specialty was a parody of “Down on the Farm.” His thumbs tucked into the armholes of his vest, his feet planted far apart, he would glance slowly around the room, grin, and sing. Clem, who’d come for a week’s visit, stayed with the young couple for eighteen months.

  While Henry was gone, Cora and Clem would visit Marcia and ramble with her along the country roads and through the fields, harvesting herbs and wildflowers. They learned when to pick pennyroyal, tansy, camomile, yarrow, and boneset, and how to dry or soak and steep the great leaves of the mullein plant and the hairy stems of alkanet for their curative properties. They made ointments, decoctions, oils, and syrups carefully and kept them even more carefully. Marcia Keller, having no daughters of her own, took Cora out into the fields in the mornings when the air was clear and taught her all she knew.

  Cora remained ambitious for her writing. She had poems in Judge and The Maine Farmer, and although she was not able to place her stories or poems outside New England, it was not for lack of trying. When she sent her story “Whippoorwill” to Frank Leslie’s Magazine in New York, her note of rejection came from Mrs. Leslie herself. She said it was “very pretty and well-written, but on account of its length” they could not take it. That was rejection blunted with praise. Cora kept the letter all her life.

  Then, in the summer, she found she was pregnant. She was terrified: “I was sure I was going to die.” Eventually she and Clem began to make baby clothes and to embroider the soft flannel garments and bedding, but Cora grew restless and found it hard to stay indoors. Local convention almost prohibited pregnant women from being seen. If after the fourth month the mother was startled, it was whispered that the baby was sure to be disfigured for life. Bad news was kept from expectant mothers for fear of its effect. So Cora did not know, until she found a telegram stuffed in Henry’s jacket, that her brother Charlie was in grave condition in New York at St. Vincent’s Hospital.

  After shipping out on the El Monte while it was loading a cargo of grain in New Orleans, Charlie either had an attack of fever (which is what he said at the time) or was (as he later admitted) drunk. He lay down on a bale of cotton in the hold of the ship and fell asleep. When he awoke, he was trapped. Between the last day of January and the tenth of February, he lay pinned belowdecks; he couldn’t move, and his shouts went unheard. He had given up all thought of being rescued when, suddenly, a light began to grow in the blackness of the hull, “& I could see through the ship as though it was made of clear glass.” He felt free of his body and could see himself from a distance. It was not, he felt sure, delirium or a dream. “I was compelled to accept the fact that I had been in touch with the spirit side of nature,” he later wrote.

  He was found unconscious and rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, to the care of the Sisters of Charity in New York City. Newspapers around the country carried the story of the incredible man who had lived to tell the tale of his imprisonment. The varying accounts of his entrapment said he’d gone nine to ten days without food or water. They said he had died and been reborn.

  His family knew no more than that he was working as a stevedore aboard the El Monte when, on the fifteenth of February, a Western Union telegram was sent to Henry Millay in care of Spear & May in Rockland:

  CHARLES BUSSELL IS WELL ENOUGH TO LEAVE HOSPITAL.

  SISTERS OF CHARITY.

  When Cora found the telegram in Henry’s pocket, she fainted. Six days later, on February 21, Charlie wrote to them himself: “O Henry you don’t know how I long to see you all again for its something that I had given up all hope of doing but I am feeling all right now and will be at home as soon as I get through with this engagement.… it’s hard to kill yours truly.” To Cora he added a separate note, using her childhood nickname: “My Darling Sister Nell don’t worry about me I’m all right and at work be at home as soon as I get through here.”

  But by then Cora had gone into labor. Restlessly pacing the floor, she complained of indigestion and asked Clem to call for Henry’s aunt Lucy, who was a practiced midwife. Henry ran next door to tell their neighbors and raced through the snow to fetch the doctor.

  It seemed like hours before they heard a sleigh draw up to the house. When the doctor finally arrived, he told Clem to stay with Cora while he and Henry had a cup of coffee with Aunt Lucy. Clem tried not to show her fear as she passed a wet cloth across her sister’s lips. Meanwhile, Henry and the doctor fell asleep. After ten hours of labor, just before first light broke, the doctor told Cora to push while Clem and Aunt Lucy climbed onto
the bed to hold her legs down. Then, as the moist little head with a thatch of red hair plastered down like wet feathers crowned, the doctor stepped toward the tiny body as if to receive it and made a curious gesture with his hand to wipe something from its face.

  A few minutes past six o’clock in the morning of February 22, 1892, exactly as the baby was being born, bells began to peal wildly. For a moment, everyone was startled. The baby reddened and howled. Then they realized that it was George Washington’s birthday as well as hers.

  Clem wrote to Charlie three days later, “We have named the little one Edna Vincent Millay. Don’t you think that is pretty? … the Vincent is for the ‘St. Vincent’ Hospital, the one that cared so well for our darling brother. Nell would have called it ‘Vincent’ if it had been a boy.” They called her Vincent anyway.

  She was born with a caul, which was why the doctor acted swiftly to slip the thin membrane from her face so that she could breathe. But that caul, considered a good omen by midwives, confirmed their belief that this child was gifted with eloquence and promised a long life of riches and fame.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the spring, when Vincent was a few weeks old, the Millays moved inland to Union, where Henry’s parents still lived. The move was suggested by the senior Millays, but why their suggestion was taken is not clear. There must have been some resistance, at least on Henry’s part, for he had said he would never consent to live on a farm again. His parents offered him a house in the center of town, close to the common. Around the leafy green were the single general store, the livery stable, the Masonic Temple (to which Henry’s brothers belonged but he did not), the common school, and two Congregational churches.

  If Rockland was a small city, it was nevertheless a real city, with a certain bustle. There were people on the streets after eight o’clock—there were even sidewalks. Whereas Union, with a population of seventy-seven souls in 1892, was something less than a village. They rented a spacious old white frame house within an easy stroll of the common.