Classics Mutilated (12 page)

Walking away.

She wondered when she would see him again. How many years? How much time?

Would he again sit on her bed and tell her he loved her? Or would he be angry?

She wasn't sure she ever wanted to find out.

May 24, 1886

The Homestead

Amherst, Massachusetts

Vinnie clutched a pile of poems in one hand. So many about death. Perhaps those were even more shocking than those about love. And the death poems—they weren't typical reminiscences. They were odd, like Emily had been odd, and a bit unfathomable.

Vinnie had even heard Emily speak some of them aloud. Only Vinnie had not realized they were poems at the time.

Like this one, which Emily had spoken late one night, almost unbidden. She looked up from her scratching pen, and smiled sadly at Vinnie. Emily didn't speak the poem exactly as written. She added a bit to make it conversational. But Vinnie remembered it as if it had happened just a week before instead of decades ago.

"Sometimes I think a death-blow is a life-blow to some," Emily said, "who, until they died, did not become alive."

Vinnie had stopped walking by, looked at Emily oddly, and then shrugged, wondering what had provoked that outburst. She still did not know. 

Had someone died recently? Had Emily been reacting to something? Or had she simply felt an inspiration?

Except that it felt true, as if something provoked it. Emily often broke into strangely structured speech when provoked, and now Vinnie knew why.

She had been reciting her own poems.

Vinnie wished she could go back, wished she could recapture memories of all of those recitations. Maybe she was; maybe that was why she heard Emily's voice whenever she read a poem. Maybe Emily had spoken them all.

Vinnie clutched the poems against her chest. How could she burn them? They had bits of her sister in them, clinging to them, as if she had not yet died.

March 8, 1860

The Homestead

Amherst, Massachusetts

They were calling her crazy and maybe she was, maybe she was. Certainly she felt wild-eyed and broken, her thoughts swirling in her head. Emily had taken to writing them down, capturing them in bits of paper, and then sewing them into bound booklets like she had done her herbs just a few years before.

At the West Street House, when she used to roam the garden, when she wandered the burial ground.

Emily buried her face in her hands. Her room here in the Homestead was larger than her room in the West Street House. She had a conservatory and a better kitchen. She should have liked it here, in the best house in Amherst.

She should have liked it.

But she didn't.

Her room here overlooked the street. The house was far enough back so that street sounds seemed faint, but through the trees, she could see the horses, watch the carriages, see the
life
.

She let her hands fall. Then she grabbed a sheet of paper, its smoothness soothing to her fingertips. She stared for a moment at the windows, then grabbed her pen and dipped it in ink. 

She hadn't thought she would miss him.

I cannot live with you
, she wrote.
It would be life, and life is over there behind the shelf the sexton keeps the key to….

She paused, sighed, and held the pen away from the paper so it wouldn't blot.

She wasn't alive without him. He had taken something from her. Everyone noticed it. They had always thought her strange, but now they feared her, and she wasn't quite sure why.

She hid away from them, mostly because she didn't want to see the fear in their eyes.

She wrote,
I could not die with you.

Was she writing him a letter? And if so, where would she leave it? Did she truly want him to find it, to know she missed him?

Nor could I rise with you, because your face would put out Jesus's
….

Her hand trembled as she wrote. 

They'd judge us—how? For you served Heaven, you know, or sought to. I could not
.

No one dared see these. Not him, not anyone. Think of what they would say. Think of what they would do to her, even in this enlightened time.

She shuddered, feeling the temptation to go to him. But she could not. She dared not.

So we must keep apart
, she wrote to him. She
was
writing to him now. She had known that, but she finally acknowledged it.
You there, I here, with just the door ajar….

The door ajar. That was what the others felt. She straddled the world between, half her life there, half here. She hadn't fled him quickly enough.

She hadn't known what he would cost her, what she had chosen. Then, five years ago, she had tried to go back to a normal life, not realizing it was too late.

So she lived in this strange half-world, neither here nor there, not willing to cross the threshold into his life—and Eternity, not able to fully live in hers.

She hadn't expected this, and she had no idea how to live with it.

Except to scrawl the maddening thoughts. Except to try to quell the feeling of panic, always rising inside.

Her pen, her paper. Her silence. She had nothing else left.

April 20, 1862

Worcester, Massachusetts

The envelope itself looked a bit odd, the handwriting tiny, the edges a bit too thick. That Higginson noticed it was odd too, considering the volume of mail he got lately. He had published an essay titled "A Letter to a Young Contributor" in the
Atlantic Monthly
, hoping to slow down the volume of unsolicited submissions the magazine got as the war got underway. Instead, his essay increased them. And worse, they were all addressed to him.

Only the most select made it to his study in Worcester. Later he would say he added the thick envelope because he had known it carried something marvelous, but at the time, he had taken it only because it struck him as unusual.

He sat in his leather-backed chair, a mound of manuscripts on one side, and his own writing paper on the other. Books surrounded him. He didn't keep newspapers in his study, preferring they remain in the parlor. The news since Lincoln's inaugural a year before had been ugly at best, and Higginson wanted to keep horror out of his study.

He had a hunch it would enter his life all too soon.

He slit the envelope with his letter opener, careful not to disturb the papers inside. A second envelope tumbled out, followed by five sheets of paper—four poems and an unsigned letter. He opened that envelope first, only to find a card inside with the name Emily Dickinson printed upon it in pencil. The five pages had been written in pen.

Intrigued, he started with the letter:

Mr Higginson,

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see, distinctly—and I have none to ask—

Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—

If I make the mistake—that you dared to tell me—would give me sincerer honor—toward you—

I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me—it is needless to ask—since Honor is its own pawn—

The breathless style startled him and it carried over to the poems, all untitled. Of course the verse lived; he had never seen such life in poetry, and he had read a lot. An untamed life, that reflected the writer more than any other poems he had ever read, as if the writer put herself on the page without regard to convention, or even to a reader.

He reread all of the documents before answering Miss Dickinson. Her verse was alive, her words breathed. But the grammatical errors grated on him. He tapped the tip of his pen against his teeth. He had somehow to tell her that she wasn't yet ready for publication without destroying the spirit that crackled out of the poetry.

Finally he decided he would operate on the poems himself, and she would be able to learn from his surgery. He meticulously copied what she had done, then set about to repair it.

October 5, 1883

The Evergreens

Amherst, Massachusetts

It was a mistake, Emily knew it was a mistake, but she couldn't stop herself, she didn't dare stop herself, didn't dare
think
about any of it as she clung to Vinnie's arm and stepped outside the house. The fresh evening air seemed a mockery—next door, right next door, little Gilbert was dying, didn't the Gods know that?

Of course they did; they had ordered it, and because they had ordered it, she cursed them for reveling in the death of children.

She adored Gib, her brother's youngest child, born late. Witty and funny and oh, so alive, he made her feel like a child again. Certainly she hadn't laughed so hard in the years before he learned to speak—maybe she hadn't laughed at all.

She loved him, her heart's child, and now typhoid was taking him, and she couldn't stay away, even though she knew she should, even though she tried.

She had picked the right moment to flee her own mother's bedside, and her father's too. Vinnie had to tend the dying, because Emily could not, frightened as she was of ever seeing
him
again.

But she could not flee Gib's bedside and forgive herself. Sometimes love made harsh demands, and this was one.

She walked across the yard into a house as outwardly familiar as her own. Huge, built in the style of an Italian villa, the Evergreens housed the other Dickinsons, the ones who ran her life—her brother Austin, his wife Sue, and their three beautiful children.

That Austin had all but abandoned Sue few knew except Emily. She didn't approve of Austin's mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, but Emily didn't dare disapprove either, not after the way she had lost herself all those years ago. Austin was here tonight, but Miss Todd was not, and Emily was grateful for that. Even though she knew Miss Todd frequented Emily's home, Emily had not seen her and preferred to pretend that Miss Todd herself was little more than a ghost.

Vinnie put a hand over Emily's as they walked up the steps into the Evergreens. Emily had not been inside in fifteen years, seeing it only from the windows of the Homestead. Her heart pounded as if she had walked a thousand miles, and the smell—the smell nearly turned her stomach.

It was a sick house, reeking of camphor and vomit and despair. 

But she continued forward, leaning on Vinnie a bit too much, walking up the stairs to Gib's bedchamber, the smells growing stronger, harsher, more insistent.

Vinnie, bless her, did not say a word. When they reached the door, Emily let out a sigh of relief.
He
was not there. Gib would not die this night.

The boy looked small in his bed, too thin for an eight-year-old, too frail to be the vital child Emily so adored. Sue—grown matronly in middle age—saw Emily and hugged her so tightly that Emily couldn't catch her breath. Austin peered at her from his post near the bureau.

"You're too frail," Austin said. "We don't need you ill as well."

Emily glared at him, and Austin looked away, as everyone did when she gave them her gimlet eye. Then she sat beside Gib and took his hand.

His eyes opened for a brief moment and he saw her. "Aunt Emily," he breathed, his voice raspy and congested. 

"Gib," she said, unable to find words for the first time in her life. 

His skin was too hot, his eyes glistened with fever. He turned away from her, but kept his hand clamped around hers. Sue placed wet cloths on his forehead, and Austin fretted about feeding the child.

But Emily simply held his dry little hand, hoping he would look at her again.

He did not.

Instead, there was an emptiness in the room. She looked up, the hair on the back of her neck rising. She and Gib were momentarily alone. Sue had gone for more cloths, Austin for water or perhaps just to escape, Vinnie to find camphor to ease Gib's increasingly labored breathing.

The light suddenly turned silver, and Emily inwardly cursed. She had not made her escape.

He
had come, and he would see her, an old woman, losing a child of her heart.

She didn't look up. Instead she wrapped her free hand around Gib's. 

"Don't take him," she said. "Please don't take him."

"You know I can't do that." His voice was as she remembered, only more musical, deep and filled with warmth. "I have missed you, Emily, more than I could ever express."

"Don't." She brought her head up, and her gaze met his. 

Damnation, he was still beautiful. His cowl was down, his scythe against the wall. He looked like he had moved in, and despite that, despite the horror of it, she felt his pull even now. He reached out to touch her and she leaned away.

"This is about Gib, not me," she said. "Don't take him."

"I must," he said. He didn't sound sorrowful. He didn't know Gib. She did.

"Take me instead," she said. "My life for his."

He shook his head. "You're already half mine, Emily," he said. "It's not a fair trade. Is there another life you would give for his?"

Her heart chilled. He would have her trade someone else's life for Gib's? What kind of bargain was that?

"Take me,
please
," she said. "You have always wanted me."

He nodded. "And I still do. I love you, Emily."

She knew that; she also knew that she had loved him once, and feared him too. She didn't fear him now. All she feared was his power.

"So you have what you want," she said. "Leave Gib. Let him grow up."

He looked at his hands as if they were not his. Then he sighed. "I cannot, Emily. His soul is incandescent. Pure."

She knew his next words, but she didn't want to hear him say them. "And mine is not."

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "But you can come with us."

"No," she said. "
No
."

He touched Gib, and Gib froze—froze!—the heat leaving his body.

"
No
," she said again. "No!"