Mr. Emerson's Wife

by Amy Belding Brown

  “What tidings are these?” Mr. Emerson appeared in the open doorway. His hand was braced against the doorframe and his smile was so full of innocent expectation that I could not keep from blurting out my news on the spot.

  “I’m carrying our child,” I said.

  His hand dropped to his side and he stared at me as if I’d just told him some rude gossip. I did not look at Lucy, but I could feel her holding her breath, just as I held mine.

  “So,” he said, “I’m to be a father.”

  “It would seem so.” I smiled through a sudden wave of nausea.

  “Well.” He seemed to be struggling for words, an adversity I had not thought him subject to. “Very good then, Lidian. Well done.” He stepped into the room and reached out to me. Thinking he meant to take my hand, I extended my own, but he ignored my gesture and placed his hand on my waist.

  “Welcome, my child,” he said, in a voice as reverent as a prayer. I saw then the wonder and fear in his eyes, and knew it was a moment of utmost solemnity. Yet some inner mischief made me laugh out loud.

  Both Lucy and Mr. Emerson looked at me as if I’d suddenly gone mad.

  I ANNOUNCED my news to the rest of the family the following Sunday at dinner. Elizabeth Hoar was there, having attended worship services with Charles and unwilling to be parted from him for the remainder of the day. Mother Emerson sat stolid and forbidding at my husband’s side. Before I finished speaking, Charles leaped from his chair and raised his glass in a toast. Elizabeth rose to embrace me.

  “What wonderful news!” she cried. “I promise to be a devoted aunt!” But it was Mother Emerson I watched, waiting for some sign of approval. She didn’t raise her eyes from her plate, but continued cutting and chewing her slice of lamb, behaving for all the world as if she hadn’t heard a word.

  I WAS DETERMINED to perform the task of childbearing properly and well. The infant I carried was no ordinary babe, but the child of Mr. Emerson—and certain to be an extraordinary being. Yet pregnancy was not the instinctive process I’d hoped or that my husband chose to imagine. From the beginning, I felt invaded and beleaguered. As Lucy predicted, dyspepsia plagued me and for many weeks I could tolerate no food but mild custards and broths. My appetite, never robust, diminished to nothing. Weeks before the child quickened, I felt its presence within, draining my vigor and altering my flesh. My skin coarsened and darkened beneath my eyes. My hands grew dry and freckled with brown spots. I craved sleep and cold air. I often threw open my chamber window and leaned out. How like a captive bird I felt! A bird trapped in an overheated cage, desperate to fly, yet unable to find my way between the imprisoning bars.

  My husband grew more devoted, daily asking after my health, urging me to sleep late into the mornings, discouraging me from taxing work. He no longer objected to my airing the close winter rooms. He insisted I must do nothing to harm the child, by either act or disposition. Calmness and clarity of mind were of the utmost importance. Lucy remarked at his tenderness.

  “He treats you like a piece of fine china,” she said, as we rolled out pies one morning in the kitchen. “You must disabuse him of the notion of female frailty or he’ll suffer terribly when he hears you in labor.”

  “But I enjoy his attentions.” I lifted a circle of dough carefully into its pan. It was perfect, save for one small wedge that had broken off. I sighed, bunched the dough back into a ball, and started again. “I feel that things between us have assumed their proper arrangement.”

  Lucy straightened to massage the small of her back. “Were they not satisfactory before?”

  I frowned as I rolled out yet another circle of dough. “Satisfactory, yes. But I aim for higher goals. Improvement is always desirable.” When she did not respond, I looked up at her. “Don’t you agree?”

  She looked at me sadly. “Perfection is not a goal that can be reached, Liddy. Not when it comes to marriage.”

  I put down my rolling pin. “But if two people are high-minded and devoted to truth, surely they’ll achieve a measure of it.”

  “It can’t be done.” She spoke with an ill-humored certitude that reminded me of Father. “It’s never happened in the history of the world.”

  I picked up my rolling pin and slapped it back down on my circle of dough. “Well, the world has not yet had Mr. Emerson in it,” I snapped. “It’s a new age and the old assumptions are valid no longer.” I bent over the table, and ruthlessly attacked the dough, not glancing her way again for fear I would find either hurt or amusement written on her face.

  EARLY IN MARCH, carpenters came with their saws and hammers and measures to add the two new rooms that Charles and Elizabeth would occupy after their wedding. Their parlor would be located behind Mr. Emerson’s study, and their bedchamber situated directly over it. Charles was filled with excitement and good cheer. Each morning he woke early to greet the carpenters, two muscular and taciturn brothers who carried the scent of fresh-cut wood on their clothes and skin like some strange cologne. They worked without speaking, laboring steadfastly inside the noise of their saws and hammers.

  Elizabeth came daily to watch the downstairs room take shape. The prospect of living under the same roof with her became even more attractive to me, for she radiated such serenity and happiness that I was always uplifted in her presence. Her gentle gaze calmed whatever anxiety I was feeling and I found myself confiding in her with increasing frequency.

  Elizabeth wanted the parlor done in blue. She chose dark blue serge for the drapes and a blue-and-rose carpet. She had her couch upholstered in blue velveteen. Her wallpaper was blue fleur-de-lis on a pale blue-green background. I praised her choices, though for decorating I preferred plain creamy colors that did not distract a visitor’s eye from the room’s occupants.

  Though Mr. Emerson was eager for Charles and Elizabeth to be married and installed as a couple under his roof, the racket necessitated by the addition distracted him from his studies. By the end of the month he was protesting that it was taking too long, that the addition should already be completed. He could not think clearly enough to put two sentences together, he said. Reading was nearly impossible under the cacophony of hammers.

  He increased the length of his walks in the afternoons and was sometimes out for three and four hours at a time. He looked forward to his out-of-town lectures, especially those that required him to visit a city. Upon his return, he would inspect the new construction and complain that more progress had not been made. It disturbed me to see this petulant and despondent side of my husband, for I’d failed to imagine that he might be in any way like my father.

  Spring was slow in coming. For as late as April that year, a rough and crystalline snow stood ankle-deep on the ground. In the hollow behind the house, it had melted into miniature gullies; rivulets of melt water ran beneath the snow. I could sometimes hear it in the short silences between passing wagons and thudding hammers.

  Each morning I walked to the Mill Dam to shop for meat and such vegetables as were available. Lucy or Nancy sometimes accompanied me, but more often I went alone. In this way, I came to know the immediate environs of Bush—the long, empty fields; the poorhouse; the gray bulk of the Hosmer farmhouse that reminded me of a woman dressed in half-mourning; the small village houses on Lexington Road; and the unpainted wooden schoolhouse, not three hundred yards from our house. I delighted in the sounds of children at play during their recess hour and found myself recalling my own school adventures, such as the time I’d challenged all the girls to climb a bank of snow and fling themselves from it—an exercise that resulted in my sitting through the rest of the day in wet wool stockings and petticoats. I passed the First Parish Church, where I often saw Reverend Ripley’s buggy parked in the stables behind the building. Close to the Mill Dam stood the tavern and the shops, and on the sloping hillside to the right, the burial ground with its canted stones, each telling its own brief tale. I often took a few moments to walk there and read the stones, just as I had done in Plymouth. Mr. Emerson’s great-grandfat
her, the Reverend Daniel Bliss, was buried there with his wife, Phebe. He had been a New Light during the Great Awakening, whose visions had distressed so many in his congregation that he was dismissed. But what, I wondered now, had Phebe believed? I took off my gloves and traced the carved letters of her name with my fingers, studied the symbols of eternity and hope cut into the dark slate. Her solemn visage stared back at me from the smooth surface. Had she privately disagreed with her husband? Had his public shame shamed her as well? How many friends had she lost when the church voted to dismiss her husband?

  I straightened and looked at the sky, which was streaked gray with clouds. The bare branches of a maple stretched above me. I was reminded of my encounter with young Henry Thoreau in front of the church and the memory made me smile. He was embroiled in his studies at Harvard now, perhaps struggling at that very moment to memorize a page of Greek or Latin. I tried to picture him bent over his books in a great library but, oddly, my imagination was only able to place him beneath an open sky.

  THAT SPRING a bitter wind swept down daily from the western hills and blew through the cracks of the windows and doors. My husband complained constantly of the cold. He would have liked summer to last all year-round. He told me he’d heard wonderful tales of Florida, and suggested it was his fondest dream to move there.

  For my part, I spent my afternoons walking back and forth behind the house, planning my garden. There the land sloped steadily down to the brook, where Charles had supervised the planting of a screen of trees shortly after my arrival. As soon as the ground thawed, I would have the soil turned and send for my Plymouth rosebushes, now in the care of my aunts.

  Near the end of March, Charles became suddenly and gravely ill. A winter chill had settled deep in his lungs, spawning a noxious fever. His cough could be heard throughout the house, and it followed me from room to room, reminding me of my mother’s cough.

  “It’s just carpenters’ dust,” he said, but after two weeks Mr. Emerson sent for Dr. Bartlett, a large and gentle man, with a head too big even for his massive shoulders. He had thoughtful eyes and a voice that sprang from deep inside his chest and inspired a rare confidence. He was still young, a few years older than I, yet wonderfully skilled in medicine and the healing arts. After nursing Charles for two weeks without improvement, he declared that the only cure would be for him to go south, to free himself from the damp New England climate.

  We were gathered in Charles’s room that afternoon—my husband, Mother Emerson, and I seated in chairs near the window, while Elizabeth sat by Charles’s bed with his hand clasped between hers.

  “They say it’s lovely and warm in Puerto Rico this time of year,” I offered.

  Charles shook his head. “Not there.” His breath raked the air in the overwarm room.

  “Edward died in Puerto Rico a year and a half ago,” Mr. Emerson said gently. “Perhaps some other place.”

  “Forgive me.” I knew little about my husband’s next younger brother, except that he’d battled consumption for many years.

  “Europe, I think,” Elizabeth said. “Italy has an agreeable climate. A few months in the sun will bring you to health, Charles. And we can still be married in September, as we planned.”

  “No,” Charles said, between spasms. “I won’t leave Concord.”

  “But you must!” Elizabeth stroked his hand. “You must do it for both our sakes.”

  “No. I cannot.” He gazed up at her. “I refuse to be parted from you.”

  Mr. Emerson sighed and dropped his head into his hands.

  I heard a tap at the window and looked up to see a chickadee sitting on the sill. “You have a visitor.” I gestured, hoping to distract us all from our sorrow and turn the conversation to pleasant matters. “It’s a happy omen,” I said. But before the others could turn to look, the bird had flitted away.

  “Omen of what?” Mother Emerson’s tone was bitter.

  “That Charles will soon be well,” I said cheerfully.

  Yet his illness continued. One April morning, when he came downstairs to survey the progress of his parlor, he was so weak he had to be helped back to his room. Elizabeth turned pale overnight; her skin assumed a waxy, gray cast. She fretted about the progress of the building and stood over the carpenters, urging them to hurry. She displayed an excessive animation, as if not only her mind, but her body as well, would not experience a moment’s peace until Charles recovered.

  ONE AFTERNOON, Elizabeth and I measured between the two windows, only to find that the space was three inches too narrow to accommodate her beloved piano. Dismayed, we stretched the string repeatedly along the new plaster wall, but to no avail. After the sixth try, poor Elizabeth sighed and threw down the string. “It’s hopeless,” she cried. “What a futile endeavor!” Her face had reddened and her hands were clamped into fists. She looked like a small, peevish child.

  “That’s nonsense,” I said, my heart melting for her as if she were my sister. “We’ll make the piano fit. If the carpenters have to redo their work, then so be it.”

  “It’s not that,” Elizabeth moaned. “It’s everything! This whole endeavor.” Her right arm swept out. I followed her gesture and looked around the room—its gracious lines, the late afternoon light falling through the windows, the curled wood shavings on the floor.

  “There’s no need to worry,” I said. “The carpenters are on schedule. It’ll all be finished in another month.”

  But Elizabeth continued to shake her head so violently that her hair came loose from her cap and dropped in heavy loops onto her shoulders. “It’s a dream that won’t come right.” Suddenly she began to sob.

  I embraced her. “Of course it will!” I stroked her disordered hair. “I know your future with Charles seems too good to be true, but rest assured it will come to pass.”

  She gulped air and drew away to look at me directly. “Did you feel this way before you married? That it would never happen?” There was such longing, such raw desire in her sweet face that I could not hold her gaze, but glanced away.

  “I think all brides feel it,” I said. “It’s a consequence of our imperfection—our human sin. That knowledge of our incompleteness is God’s way of fulfilling His purpose.”

  She looked at me blankly through her tears. The rims of her eyes were the pink of fresh salmon. Her fine skin was blotched red.

  I had given her no comfort at all. She was so utterly lost in her love for Charles there was no room in her mind or heart for the grand principles that had propelled me toward union with Mr. Emerson. Elizabeth’s view of marriage was molded wholly by her relation to Charles.

  I longed to comfort her, but knew my thoughts and feelings were sorely inadequate. Nonetheless, I tried. I led her into my parlor and murmured all the wise adages that I could remember. Yet it was not until we heard the sound of Charles’s slow footsteps on the stairs that she wiped her tears away and regained her composure.

  10

  Affliction

  I have felt in him the inimitable advantage, when God allows it, of finding a brother and a friend in one.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  I prayed daily for Charles’s recovery, yet as April advanced and the days gradually became longer and warmer, he grew weaker and his fevers grew stronger. He lay in bed for days at a time, filling the house with the sound of his terrible cough.

  When Charles had his first lung hemorrhage, I was there to spread a doubled towel across his chest and press another to his mouth, to wipe the blood from his hands and arms and replace the soiled blanket with a clean one. His countenance was as white as the bleached pillow casings. I found a clean nightshirt in his bureau and helped him strip off the old one, for he was too exhausted to do so himself.

  “I’m sending for Dr. Bartlett,” I said, gathering up the stained towels and blanket.

  Charles nodded, not yet able to speak. I knew from his melancholy gaze that he feared the worst and was too weak to oppose me. He closed his eyes as a triangle of sunlight fell
across his face. I was struck by how sunken and dark his eyes were—an effect normally eclipsed by the liveliness of his gaze. His chest slowly rose and fell and I supposed he had fallen asleep. I recalled how deeply my mother had slept after her attacks—as if God took intermittent pity on her, granting a few hours of oblivion.

  I was about to tiptoe out of the room when Charles spoke my name. “Stay with me a moment longer. Please.”

  “Of course.” I hurried to his side. “What would comfort you? A prayer? A favorite Scripture?”

  His eyes were still closed but his hand emerged from beneath the blanket. I took it in mine and began a prayer.

  “Do you believe in heaven, Lidian?” His words interrupted my supplication.

  “Of course I do.”

  “There’s no idea that’s so certain it can’t be questioned. I mean are you—in true sincerity—assured of the fact of eternal life?”

  I found myself sinking into the chair next to the bed. I thought of my mother and father. I had often tried to picture their spirits meeting in an ethereal realm of clouds and sunlight, my father’s caustic disposition dissipated in the beautiful surroundings. “Christ has promised us heaven. That should be assurance enough.”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Aren’t you a believer, Charles?”

  He did not appear to have heard me. “I was so young when Father died that I scarcely recall him. Yet I remember little Mary Caroline well. She was born a few months before his death. Such an angel—all smiles and yellow curls—a family pet and special consolation to Mother.” He smiled and I noticed a smear of blood across his teeth. “She was three when she died. I remember standing by her coffin in the parlor, waiting for her to wake up. I must have been five or six. I like to think of her in paradise, but I’m not sure if she survives anywhere but my memory.”