Mr. Emerson's Wife

by Amy Belding Brown

  I was well aware of the power my husband wielded over young females, for I’d been influenced by that magnetism myself. I bore Miss Fuller no ill-will despite her flirtatious nature. In fact, I admired her, for no other woman I knew was so independent a genius. When she encouraged me to talk openly with her, I willingly shared my thoughts and feelings. One warm afternoon we walked along a wooded path on the long ridge of land north of the house, discussing the nature of love. I remarked that love and duty were two sides of the same coin.

  “Yet love must always triumph over duty,” she said, her eyes shining.

  “A truly noble person will see no distinction between them,” I insisted.

  Margaret stopped and faced me and I felt her radiance flow over me—a phenomenon I was certain she controlled in some way—a glow that she cast, the way witches were said to cast spells. “If God himself is love, then what is nobler than obeying the instinct of love? Did not Christ command us to leave all and follow Him?”

  I was bathed in an unpleasant warmth. “But he did not command us to follow our whims and instincts! Following Christ is not indulgence, but sacrifice.”

  “You burden yourself with unnecessary suffering, Lidian. God does not require humiliation but joy.” She made an odd, dipping motion with her hand and resumed walking.

  “There’s little joy in a marriage without warmth,” I said.

  “You speak of your own situation.” She stooped to pluck a wood anemone from a sunlit tuft of grass. Her movements were quick and often awkward—but what she lacked in grace was compensated by her vitality. “I don’t envy your position as Mr. Emerson’s wife,” she said, twirling the small white flower in her fingers. “It can’t be easy to sit in the shadow of his brilliance.”

  “I never thought to sit in his shadow,” I said. “Our marriage was to be a partnership of ideas.”

  She gave me a long glance and then, blinking rapidly, surprised me by tucking the flower over my ear at the temple. “You’re a brave woman. I doubt I’d have the courage to marry such a gift to the world.”

  I did not reply. Despite her words, I believed she secretly thought she would have made a better wife to Mr. Emerson. A light breeze came up and stirred the ribbons on my cap. Margaret wore no cap—a convention that she insisted humiliated women, though I pointed out that it well-served its dual purpose of keeping a woman’s hair tidy while preventing dirt from begriming it.

  She bent for another flower, which she settled into her own thick hair. “You must allow Waldo his eccentricities, Lidian. In the name of the great wisdom he shares with the world, if for no other reason.”

  I turned away and commenced walking, for I could not at that moment meet her gaze. The slope we climbed grew steeper, and I began to feel the strain in my legs. “You believe you could accustom yourself to his indifference if you were in my place then?”

  “He’s a genius,” Margaret said, quickly catching up and walking beside me. She held her hands before her as she spoke, her fingers exciting the warm air. “A great deal can be sacrificed for the sake of genius.”

  I knew she did not believe that he would ever ignore her. She was as innocent as I once had been and mistook intellectual fervor for passion. Yet I had hoped for more from her. She spoke so eloquently and with such great understanding of the lot of women! She knew how much we bore of men’s vicissitudes—she upheld the brave banner of sisterhood for us all. It saddened me to discover that her own life was as muddled as the next woman’s. It ap – peared that she too yearned for the solace of a man’s love.

  We walked in silence for a time, watching the nesting birds and chip – munks skittering in the leaf mold. The sun was high and filtered by pines and hemlocks along the path. Pebbles of light fell at our feet and I took deep breaths, drawing in the clean, sweet spring air. Then I felt a pulse of urgency in my breasts as they filled with milk beneath my bodice.

  “I’ve enjoyed our walk,” I said, “but I must head back to Bush. Ellen will soon want to be fed.”

  Margaret nodded. It seemed that everything suited her that afternoon. “I’ve meant to ask you,” she said as we made our way back down the path, “why did you consent to the name Ellen? I would never have allowed it.”

  “I named her,” I said. “It was my idea.”

  “Your idea? But how can you so plainly incorporate Waldo’s first wife into your marriage? Surely it must grieve you.”

  “Time will break the potency of that bond,” I said. “The dead are fixed. But my child”—and I pictured my daughter sleeping, her skin rosy with life against the pillow—“she will grow plump and sweet and smile at him and wrap her arms around his neck. And soon the name Ellen will mean only his daughter.”

  “I hope for your sake you are right,” Margaret said. “It could prove a terrible blunder if her name has the opposite effect.”

  PART II

  April 1841 – July 1844

  Transcendental Times

  Look at the sunset when you are distant half a mile from the village, and I fear you will forget your engagement to the tea-party.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  13

  Dependence

  I delight much in my young friend who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  On the April morning in 1841 when Mr. Emerson informed me that he’d invited Henry Thoreau to live with us, I’d been about to tell him I was with child a third time. He announced the arrangement as he bent over the washstand, wearing only his trousers and braces, which hung in black loops past his knees. His skin was waxen in the dim morning light as he splashed handfuls of icy water onto his face. He straightened and pressed his face into a towel, then turned to look at me where I lay on my side beneath the counterpane.

  “It’s not like you to have no response, Asia.” He’d called me Asia after Wallie was born. I didn’t like the name, and yet he insisted it suited me, as it reflected my emotional nature.

  “What would you have me say?” I sat up, pushed the counterpane away, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. “I know you enjoy Henry’s company and seek to encourage his writing. It’s generous of you to offer him shelter here.”

  “I thought you might object to the extra burden. You’ve told me often how our guests encumber you.”

  Indeed, I had frequently protested under the strain of our friends’ visits. Just a month before Margaret Fuller and Anna Barker had descended upon Bush and stayed nearly two weeks. As always, with Margaret present, the house was filled with callers, and it was left to me to order sufficient food and make sleeping arrangements, to plan my days around what would bring comfort and happiness to our guests.

  He dropped the towel on the washstand, took his shirt from its hook on the door, and pushed his arms into the long sleeves. “Henry’s a poet. He needs a situation where poetry is appreciated. His mother’s boardinghouse is hardly the place. It’s noisy and crowded, filled with unromantic souls.”

  “I’m familiar with Cynthia’s establishment.” My voice was crisp. “You forget that I regularly frequent her parlor.”

  “I did not forget.” He turned away from me to button his shirt. There existed a peculiar modesty between us despite six years of marriage. Mr. Emerson’s studied reserve was present even in our most intimate encounters. “Then you have no objection?”

  “I think it’s a noble idea.” I sat very still, my hands grasping the edge of the mattress, the balls of my feet brushing the floor. The truth was, this was an arrangement I had contrived to bring about for nearly two years. I’d suggested many times that Henry needed a place to work suited to poets, a place where his writing would be understood and appreciated. Now Mr. Emerson was presenting the idea to me as if it were his own.

  He moved to his bureau without glancing in my direction. I heard the clink of cufflinks as he sorted through his box of jewelry. “He seemed pleased by the proposal.” He raised his left hand to expose the inside of his wris
t and the holes in his cuffs. He pushed his cufflink through, and fastened it. “Since he and his brother closed their school, he’s been at loose ends. Rather than rush off to teach in some frontier town, I convinced him to try developing his talent here. I believe it will be an agreeable situation for all of us. I know how often you’ve depended on him.”

  Depended. It was not the word I would have chosen, for it seemed too limited to encompass my relationship with Henry. The truth was that I’d come to rely on him in all manner of things—his skill with hammer and saw, his proficiency in the garden, his ability to charm and entertain the children, and—most significantly—his companionship. It was the most unlikely of ties—this strange affinity with a man fifteen years my junior. Yet the hours we spent in conversation had been both exhilarating and sweetly satisfying. Henry had interjected himself into our family so tidily that I could no longer imagine my days without him.

  My husband fastened his other cufflink into its slot and looked at me. “Surely your silence has some significance.”

  I shook my head. “None but happiness. I’m sure Henry’s occupancy will be a blessing.” I slid off the bed and busied myself with making it. “Is it to be a permanent arrangement?”

  “We agreed upon a year.”

  I slapped the pillows, flipped them, and drew the counterpane over them. “A year.” I imagined Henry every morning at breakfast, pictured sitting each evening with him in the parlor, saw myself washing his clothes, sweeping out his room. “Have you given any thought to where he should stay? We don’t have an extra room at present, except the garret.” Our son and daughter now occupied the room that had been Lucy’s—it had become a nursery shortly after Wallie’s birth. And the room over the kitchen that was once Charles’s apartment had been the servant’s quarters for four years now. “Perhaps we should install him in the Red Room.”

  Mr. Emerson frowned as he put on his jacket. “That would preclude other visitors.” I knew from the way his face softened that he was thinking of Margaret. “What about the room at the top of the front stairs?”

  “It’s more passageway than chamber.” The room he suggested was a dark corridor off the front-stairs landing. Opened as a hallway five years before, to access Charles and Elizabeth’s bedroom, it had been abandoned, unfinished like the chamber itself.

  “Still, it would afford him the privacy he requires.”

  I pictured Henry in that raw, dusky space, his desk lit only by one small window. I knew how he treasured light and nature. He ought not to be in such a room.

  “We’ll let him decide between that and the garret,” I said.

  “The garret’s too far removed from my study,” Mr. Emerson said. “He’s not seeking a life of seclusion, you know.” He gave me a slight smile. “He’s agreed to perform the duties of a handyman while he’s here. There are always things that want repair. As you’re ever reminding me, dear wife.” He smiled again, more broadly this time.

  Was my husband so preoccupied with his studies that he didn’t notice when things were fixed, repairs made? Had he forgotten that Henry had been doing handyman chores at Bush for nearly three years, practically from the moment he first stepped across the threshold? First there had been the barn door I’d been after Mr. Emerson to repair for months—a door that hung on one hinge and squealed unmercifully when opened. Henry had come to the house one morning and fixed it unbidden. I discovered it when I went to the barn for my rake to work in the garden. Instinctively bracing myself against the door’s shriek and wobble, I pulled the latch. But there was no scrape; the door swung silent and balanced on its doubled hinge. Later Nancy informed me that Mr. Thoreau had come by early with a satchel of tools and spent an hour out at the barn. When Henry came to collect Mr. Emerson for their walk later that afternoon, I met him at the door, embarrassing him with my enthusiastic gratitude.

  In public he was shy with me, more deferential than with other women in our circle. He possessed a special affinity for Lucy during the months she boarded with his mother, and had corresponded with her when she visited Plymouth. But the warmth of that association had not extended immediately to me. My relation with Henry had found its own slow path to friendship, mediated by a mutual passion for abolition and a shared pleasure in the daily activities of my children.

  Now there would be a third child to delight and exhaust me. A child who would be born while Henry was in residence. A child whose existence I had not yet revealed to my husband. I heard the low murmurs of our son and daughter from the nursery—Wallie and Ellen had wakened and I must go to tend them.

  “Mr. Emerson,” I said, wrapping my dressing gown around me and moving to where he stood before his bureau adjusting his collar, “there’s something I must tell you.”

  He looked at me, and something in his face told me that he knew what I was about to say. Knew and did not want to know. I put my hand on his arm, on the hard muscle just below the crook of his elbow, as if to steady myself with his strength, and I told him. The words fell from my lips in an odd monotone as if I’d memorized and spoken them a hundred times before. He listened, the grave expression on his face unchanging. He knew how severely my pregnancies drained and tortured me. Yet how I welcomed them! Each child was a gift from God’s abundant hand.

  He was—as always—gracious in his congratulations. He kissed me and assured me he was pleased. Yet I detected a weariness in him that matched my own, a recognition that a child was as much burden as joy, that the new life growing within me shackled him yet more certainly to the encumbrances of love.

  HENRY HAD JOINED our circle of friends upon his graduation from Harvard, soon after Lucy left Plymouth and returned to Concord, where she installed herself in an upstairs apartment at Cynthia Thoreau’s boardinghouse. She had placed both Frank and Sophia in schools. Concerned that she might grow lonely, I had visited her daily, and grew familiar not only with her chamber, but with the Thoreau parlor. Many afternoons I sat conversing with Lucy and the Thoreaus’ youngest daughter, Sophia, a woman whose plain looks were compensated by a lively intelligence and sweet disposition. On one occasion when we discussed a recent lecture of my husband’s, Sophia declared that Henry had written a letter to her in the very words Mr. Emerson had spoken. She was so struck by this that she fetched the letter and read it aloud. The correspondence of thought was remarkable. At first I was troubled by this similitude, for I considered Mr. Emerson’s a singular and unmatched intellect. But Lucy persuaded me to bring Henry to Mr. Emerson’s attention.

  “You know how he likes to discover young people of genius. And Henry’s similarity of thought will flatter him.”

  I was not given to flattering my husband, but I recognized the truth in Lucy’s words. Mr. Emerson had a penchant for taking an interest in particular men and women, drawing them into his circle, and making them disciples of his metaphysics. Often these people were many years younger than he, but Mr. Emerson was not a man given to antiquated hierarchies. He claimed he judged a man solely on what he said and did. There were no other reasonable standards.

  When I spoke to Mr. Emerson about Henry, he insisted on inviting him to one of our evening conversations. Henry did not at first appear to be a valuable addition, for he had little to say, and his appearance was common. Less than common—there was an extreme disorder in his rumpled clothes and his dark hair was always in turmoil. He looked as if he gave no care whatsoever to his appearance. It was not until the third evening that he spoke more than a few words—I recall how well his voice and words matched, for they were both startling in their sharpness. In response to a remark of my husband’s on the value of book learning, Henry referred to a professor’s lecture on electricity and asserted that on that subject colleges were blind to the fact that a twinge in the elbow was worth all the books and lectures on the subject. A comment that made my husband laugh and astonished me with its wit and insight.

  Thereafter, Mr. Emerson pursued Henry with the zeal of a lover, wooing him with the brilliance of his mind, bent
on cementing their friendship. One of my husband’s most notable traits was his proclivity for taking thoughts propounded by others and incorporating them into his own work. He harvested ideas like a farmer and refined them to use in his lectures. This harvesting was so characteristic that I did not question it. Mr. Emerson believed adamantly in the universality of thought—that ideas were the property of no one. His gift lay less in his own creative insights than in his ability to glean and blend and polish the thoughts of others.

  It was natural that Henry should be deeply flattered by Mr. Emerson’s attentions. He was freshly graduated, still searching for his place in the world, still eager to taste all of life’s intellectual delights. He enthusiastically shared his insights with my husband, divulging the treasures of his mind the way a small boy proudly displays the stones in his pockets to a friend.

  Unlike so many of Mr. Emerson’s followers and friends, Henry was a native of Concord. I believe that my husband secretly envied him that distinction, an envy that expressed itself in a periodic vexation with Henry’s thoughts and actions. Yet he often referred to Henry as his friend and they took long afternoon walks together, dissecting the issues of the day and the great philosophies of history. They sat in Mr. Emerson’s study for hours, discussing poetry and the importance of meter. Henry emerged from these conversations with eyes glowing and cheeks flushed with excitement. At first occasionally, and then with increasing frequency, he sought me out later to talk about what they had discussed. He said he found that my thoughts balanced Mr. Emerson’s and brought his own reflections a greater clarity.

  “Your perspective distills your husband’s,” he said and though I was not entirely sure of his meaning, the penetration of his eyes silenced me. When he looked at me I felt as if I were being seen for the first time, a circumstance I found both exhilarating and unsettling.