The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson Page 2

  “My father is never without his Bible, Mistress. He wrestles with the Lord’s angel day and night.”

  Mistress dons her thinnest smile that she reserves for backsliders.

  “Then Squire Dickinson must be another Jacob who climbed the ladder to God. What did he see in Heaven, child?”

  I do not have an answer that would satisfy her. Father never feasted on God’s face. He wasn’t Jacob who stole the birthright of his twin brother with great guile. He had no twin.

  “Has a cat caught Miss Emily’s tongue?”

  “No, Mistress.”

  “Then tell us what the earl of Amherst found at the top of the ladder?”

  Maude Munison giggles under her breath, but the other brides of Christ do not make the least little sign.

  A single tear descends my cheek. I will not wipe it away. Mistress stares at me, her face as red as Esau’s. Suddenly she starts to cough & cannot resume her Inquisition. She unfolds a handkerchief & wears it like a mask. I can see the outline of her lips. Miss Rebecca comes running into the room, scrunched up like an elf caught in a moment of panic.

  “Vanish,” she clucks. “Ungrateful girls, you have provoked Mistress into having a fit of phlegm.” Now she glares at us. “Hurry, hurry. To your rooms. And no loitering. Heaven help any girl I catch who is not engaged in silent study.”

  IT IS THE CURSE OF HOLYOKE. SILENT STUDY. WE ARE A LITTLE nation of whisperers on a hill forty rods from the village church where brides of Christ who were already saved sat in pews while rats & mice leapt upon their laps. But Miss Rebecca is always sentencing us to silent study, as if we don’t have enough silence at South Hadley. We have to whisper in the library, whisper in the dining room, whisper in the pantry, whisper in the space-ways, whisper on the stairs, but I haven’t a soul to whisper at while I pad up to the fourth floor. The other scholars from our little séance shun me now. I have upset Lyon with my prideful talk of Father wrestling with an angel, & sent her spinning into an attack of the ague until she had to hide behind her handkerchief.

  Cousin Lavinia wasn’t in our room. She must have been reading her Valentines in some secret alcove. And so I have my silent study without Lavinia. I ask the Lord to forgive me for heaping distress upon our principal, though she shouldn’t have called Father the earl of Amherst. He’s no earl. Our Tutors might suspect that Satan was inside me, that it was Satan who spoke, not Miss Emily, the scholar & would-be bride of Christ on the fourth floor. But God & Mistress Lyon live in the land of Prose, while Satan sings. Foul, with sulfur as his perfume, Satan is still a Poet. Yet I prefer Father’s primitive Prose to Satan’s Poetry. Father has no songs, neither for himself & his family. He moves in silent sweeps. Perhaps Father is an earl. He rides across town in his chaise, Horse Henry in the lead. God alone ever saw such a gallop. I fear for Father’s life, & for the lives of those who might step blindly into his path. I never knew a cautioner man, except when he’s in his carriage.

  There’s a knock on my door. Miss Rebecca enters pious as a mouse. She hasn’t come to chastise me.

  “Mistress would like a word with you.”

  Her gentleness disarms me, & I start to cry.

  “Missy, I did not mean to provoke Miss Lyon into a fit of phlegm. I am mortally sorry if I have wounded her. Sometimes I have the Devil inside me.”

  “Tut,” she says. “You’re the daughter of an earl, and you think that gives you privileges. Well, we do not have such a high opinion of the Amherst aristocracy.”

  My crying stops in an instant, as if my tear ducts were scorched with fire. This is the Rebecca I know, with acid in her veins, always wearing that ruffled ruche round her neck & her yellow gloves; her eyes are pale, & she has a cruel, tight mouth. She could be one of the female assassins that Elizabeth of England kept around her. But assassins are not exemplary at a “dame school” near a mountain, & Miss Rebecca has no cause to cut our throats with razors inside her yellow gloves.

  I walk downstairs & knock on Lyon’s door.

  “Emily Dickinson, Mistress. You asked for me.”

  She’s reclining on her settee, wrapped in a shawl. She wears a handkerchief round her neck, like an invalid with a ruined throat. She clasps my hand & begs me to sit beside her.

  “Forgive me. Sometimes I go too far. I should not have mocked Squire Dickinson. It was my own pique. Our critics call us a band of Puritan witches and nuns. A dame school will lead girls to perdition. We should study wifeliness, not the art of Alexander Pope. Do you think I ought to run a cooking school, Miss Emily?”

  “No, Mistress.”

  “We are scholars, not cooks. But when my daughters won’t give themselves to Christ, I feel utterly helpless…Is there hope for you?”

  “Mistress, I’m as hopeful as any daughter of an earl.”

  I never said another word. Two encounters in the same day with Emily of Amherst had exhausted our poor principal. She shuts her eyes & starts to wheeze. I did not think it ladylike to listen.

  I tiptoe back upstairs. That night I dream of Esau with his ruddy face & hair. He lived with us at Holyoke as our one & only male scholar. But in my dream Esau had Tom’s Tattoo, & I did not need any Daniel & his lions’ den to interpret it for me. I wanted Tom the Handyman to be my room-mate. I’d have spent the night beside his Tattoo, & all the mistresses and monitors in the world wouldn’t have been able to yoke me from him, not even that assassin with her yellow gloves.

  3.

  THE ONLY TATTOO I EVER GET IS A RAP UPON MY DOOR AT 5 in the morning. It is Missy & her breakfast squad calling me to action. I have to rise quick as a sorceress & rush to the basement without the least tumult on the stairs. Father’s angel must have accompanied me, because I glide off each stair like a girl with velvet soles. I bow to Rebecca & the chief of her monitors, Zilpah Marsh, who possesses a faint little mustache & the shoulders of a man. Zilpah’s father is a stable hand & her mother a housemaid in one of the secret societies at Amherst College. She herself is the poorest girl at Holyoke & her tuition had to be waived, but Zilpah is part of Mistress Lyon’s “experiment” to raise up young women of modest means & have them found their own female seminaries.

  Zilpah Marsh is ornery as a snake, but most gentle to me. She’s in love with Austin, my older brother, & it’s no big secret. He’s a Sophomore at Amherst, & Zilpah must have spotted him on the campus or at a secret society. Brother is hard to miss. He’s as handsome as the Squire, with a shock of red hair that’s visible for a mile. She dreams of marrying Austin one day, though he has never laid eyes on her, & I doubt that Brother would ever marry a girl with a mustache, faint as it is. It would not concern him one jot that she’s the daughter of a stable hand. Austin would consider the quality of her mind. We Dickinsons are not horse traders when it comes to matters of the heart. When we marry, we will marry for love.

  Zilpah steals up to me in the bake room, while I prepare the morning bread. Aside from collecting & cleaning knives with a soapstone, I am the school baker several times a week. If truth be told, the girls are delirious over my puddings & bread. I never vary the formula, at Holyoke or at home. The magic lies in the measuring cup. A dollop of molasses too little or too late, the wrong pinch of salt, & you will have soapstone in the pan & neither bread nor pudding.

  “Miss Em’ly,” she says, careful not to soil my baking smock with hands that have been tinkering with whale-oil lamps. “Can I get you some gingerbread from the pantry, or another sort of sweet?”

  “Rebecca will punish us for breaking the rules—no eatables before breakfast.”

  “Don’t you bother about Rebecca! I run the school. She’s in love with me.”

  “Zilpah, you must not say that,” I say, trembling with the intrigue of it.

  “She touches my hair—it’s the only time she takes off her glove. She even writ me a poem. Don’t you want a sweet?”

  Zilpah disappears and returns with a fortune of gingerbread. We nibble while I peruse the oven. I dare not ask Zilpah about Miss Rebecca’s
love poem, though my mind is like a massive flint-stone of sparks & syllables on fire. And while I imagine Rebecca’s words, Zilpah starts to recite—she’s memorized the poem.

  Your smock is stained with wild berries

  That bear the color of your lips,

  And I the huntress with her heart as prey,

  But when—

  The huntress appears in the bake room with her yellow gloves, drawn to Zilpah’s voice, though she could not have heard more than a whisper. But she hasn’t lost her cunning.

  “Have you both been conspiring against me?”

  “Yes,” says Zilpah, who sashays past our vice principal as if she were invisible. And I cannot help but stare at Rebecca, who turns suspicious.

  “Child, you must not pay attention to Zilpah Marsh. She does not have your breeding.”

  “No, Missy. Her father is most certainly not an earl.”

  And I am stunned by my own harshness. I do not hate Rebecca. I watch her in wonder. I have never met a Poet. Her lines are like little panthers poised to strike. She’s an assassin who could harm & hurt with one of her panthers, & I a baker of bread, who should worship at her feet.

  But it’s the scholars who worship me in the middle of breakfast. They have caught a whiff of my bread all the way from their rooms. Their eyes are watering as they sit down. They have to whisper in the dining hall, & whisper they do.

  “Cake,” cries Lydia Fisk under her breath. “Our Emily can turn the commonest loaf into cake.”

  I ought to burn with pride, but it’s fear I’m filled with. Bread & cake are nothing beside a huntress in a chaotic field of words…

  There is a crisis afoot when we return to our rooms. The whole fourth floor is suddenly swallowed up in billowing black smoke. A bitter wind has forced the smoke & its deadly sparks back down the pipes of our Franklin stoves & made of each stove a red hot inferno. We all have to retreat to the stairs, while Miss Rebecca wades into the blackness with her yellow gloves & a wet horse blanket covering her like a tent. We hear her howl as she wanders into a room. She returns to us with the horse blanket sizzling.

  “Where in thunder is the handyman?” she growls. “The heat is insufferable. I couldn’t get near the pipes.”

  Tom arrives in an old coat, carrying a crowbar & a bucket of snow. He must feel irregular around us, away from the dark comfort of his shed. What could he possibly think of a harem full of girls in the midst of revival meetings? Do we bother the bit of peace he has? He steps timidly but soon regains his poise. He dips the crowbar into the bucket & then charges into our infernal fourth floor. We listen as he bangs away at the pipes. The smoke begins to clear.

  Tom emerges, his eyebrows covered with soot. Miss Rebecca does not even offer him a cup of water or a wet rag to wipe the soot from his brows.

  4.

  I WALK ABOUT IN A VAIL. NO ONE QUESTIONS ME BUT Zilpah Marsh.

  “Miss Em’ly, why in tarnation are you wearing black?”

  “Someone has to mourn Tom,” I say.

  “What if Tom don’t need mourning?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen him live or dead in a week.”

  “That’s because he’s shut up in his shack.”

  Zilpah must consider me queer, but I laugh to know that Tom is still among the living. It is a nervous laugh, the laugh of a seventeen-year-old maiden who’s never been courted & kissed by a man.

  “Did he fall off the roof?” I ask, frightening myself with my own morbid Imagination.

  “Silly creature, Tom don’t climb roofs. He’s shut in, that’s all. He has the grippe, and Mistress won’t let him out of the shack. She fears he might contaminate us all. She’d ship him on the stage to another town, but Tom has nowhere else to go.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Lord knows,” says Zilpah Marsh, as high and mighty as Solomon’s Sheba.

  “But Tom isn’t a ghost. He must have his own people somewhere,” I say.

  “What people? Tom grew up in Northampton, inside the insane asylum.”

  “Zilpah Marsh, I don’t care a bean if you are our monitor. It is most wicked of you to imply that Tom is feebleminded.”

  “I said nothing of the sort. The asylum has an orphan’s wing. That’s where Tom was reared. Rebecca told me so. She says Mistress plucked him right out of the orphan’s wing.”

  “And what’s his family name if I might be bold enough to ask?”

  “Don’t you comprehend my meaning, Miss Em’ly? He’s Tom-of-any-town.”

  “I never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. We do not have nameless children in Massachusetts.”

  “We most certainly do. The paupers’ association looked after Tom, but they never got around to giving him a proper name.”

  I don’t believe a word of it. Northampton Tom. And then I shiver at the appalling truth. Tom was tribeless. Perhaps that was why I seem so soldered to him, as if the two of us wore the same hot bolt. I have all the fruit a name and family can bear, but I might as well have been shaken out of some orphan’s tree.

  I couldn’t even tell time until I was fifteen. Father was convinced he had taught me himself, but I just didn’t understand the circling of a clock. I was mortified, like a child caught up in the great mystery of numbers & dials on a replica of the moon’s own round face. But I solved the riddle, saw the dials as the wings of a bird hovering over mountains on the moon with numbers rather than peaks. I could feel in my mind a shadow that the bird left over every numeral, a shadow that darkened as the numbers grew, & thus brought us from breakfast to midnight, round & round again. But it was an orphan’s trick.

  I couldn’t leave poor Tom to rot all alone in his shed like the drudge that Mistress imagined him to be. I had to plead with Zilpah Marsh, who could wander wherever she wanted without drawing any suspicion onto her shoulders.

  “Zilpah, I have to see Tom.”

  “Impossible,” she opines. “Tom is sick as a dog. Missy and I have to wear masks. His bile is all black. I feed him China tea from Missy’s own hospital kit and whatever crusts we have left.”

  “What about winter apples and hot potato pie?”

  Zilpah scorns me with one of her highfalutin glances. “You are doltish, Miss Em’ly. Mistress wouldn’t waste that kind of grub on a handyman. She’d as lief send him back to the insane asylum in a cart and find another orphan.”

  “That’s heartless.”

  “Well, child, it’s a heartless world.”

  Clever as she is, Zilpah Marsh is no match for a girl who taught herself to tell time by looking for shadows on the moon. I’m loathe to take advantage of her weakness for my brother, the Squire’s son. But Lord, I’ll do anything to get near the Handyman.

  “Zilpah,” says Orphan Emily, “my darling brother might be visiting next week.” It’s mostly a lie, but there’s a parcel of truth attached to the word “might.” Zilpah’s ears prick at the mention of my brother. Her eyes grow alert. Her interest in Austin is unbounded.

  “Will the young squire be sitting in the parlor with you, Miss Em’ly?”

  “Why not? My own brother has to be on the list of male callers. And who would keep him off the grounds? Tom is much too ill.”

  “Gracious,” she says, just like one of Mistress’s dowagers. “Would it be much of a burden if you introduced me to the young squire?”

  Her face darkens, as if she’s having a dialogue with herself. “Not as the daughter of a chambermaid. I would not want that mentioned. But as your classmate. Will you swear on the Bible not to say a word about my Ma and Pa?”

  I pity her mustache all of a sudden, but I still set the trap, even if I’m hellbound in all my wickedness.

  “I swear, but you have to do me a favor first.”

  Suddenly her eyes are hard as glass.

  “I wouldn’t be much of a monitor if I started doing favors for every little nun at Holyoke—what is it you want?”

  “Take me to Tom’s shed.”

  Lord, punish me for my pride. I
have underestimated this stable hand’s daughter. She has much poetry in her blood. She pretends to slap me, touches my face with the tips of her fingers.

  “I love the young squire, Miss Em’ly, but you ought not have attempted to bribe me. It belittles you in my estimation.”

  5.

  WHO CAN FATHOM THE WAYS OR MEANS OF ZILPAH’S HEART? She rouses me at 51/4 of a cold, cold morning, but it’s not to join the breakfast squad. While we’re wrapped in our shawls like woodsmen of the far north, she takes my hand & leads me down to the kitchen & dining hall, through a rear exit that had escaped my eye until now, & into our own little Siberia behind Holyoke Hall.

  We walk in great drifts of snow, our legs disappearing under us as if amputated by the frozen weather, & we arrive at Tom’s shack, near the southern wing of the seminary. Zilpah does not even bother to announce herself with a knock. She gathers her legs out of the snow & sails nonchalantly into the shed, pulling me along. My ears were pounding, & I was full of vertigo, but I wasn’t blind. Tom’s shack looked as if a hurricane had visited & torn out whatever it was you might call a home. The shed had nothing but a dirt floor, no writing table or chair, no Bible or bookcase, no chest of drawers—nothing but a tool box, a heap of clothes, a whale-oil lamp, a blanket, & an old crooked cot with the Handyman therein, feverish & forlorn.

  His beautiful blond hair has gone to straw in the agony of his illness, but his blue eyes burn in the weak light of the lamp; he’s truly a man on fire, even with his haggard face.

  Zilpah masks herself with the shawl, but I do nothing of the kind. She shouts at me through the mask. “Keep away, or you’ll catch sick.”

  “Zilpah Marsh,” I shout back, my anger all aboil, “you and Miss Rebecca and the whole establishment are cruel, cruel, cruel.”

  And she starts to huff under her mask. “Is that the thanks I get for leading you to Tom?”

  “Dear, when did you last feed Tom and bring him some water?”