Afternoons with Emily (38 page)

It was hard to believe this fulsome sentimentality could come from the very same pen that created the light, delicious image
of Emily as the bear
“handled with a Chain.”
And I was uncomfortable with Emily’s strange possessiveness about the dead, which I had noticed before. Even before a body
cooled, it became her property! Her connection with the dead, however slight, turned instantly into an important and exclusive
bond. She did not even know Frazar Stearns well enough to spell his name accurately! I had never heard her mention him until
now — when his death in battle suddenly established their extreme intimacy. And Emily further exhorted her cousins to believe
that Austin’s grief over his friend (“I think he may die too!”) was as tragic as Frazar’s death.

I was deeply offended by all this forced and self-indulgent emotion. After a week of considering the tasteless “soldier heart”
letter, I confronted Emily with my feelings on my next visit. I had never before been so openly critical of her attitudes
and affectations, but I was driven by the terrible verities of Davy’s letters.

The moment we were in her room, I stood to face her squarely. “I have always admired you for not being swept along by the
current modes of thought,” I told her. “You write your own truths, and they are yours — even if they go against the popular
grain. But what you wrote about Frazar was in another voice. You were conforming to fashion, you were imitating popular feeling
— which you have never attempted before. Those weren’t your own emotions, Emily — and they do you no honor with me.”

She gazed up at me, seeming very small, but I detected nothing false or defensive.

“I DESERVE your contempt,” she said calmly. “The little cousins won’t know the difference, but you do. How can I explain to
you what I feel may have happened?” She began to pace a bit. I waited for her to collect her thoughts. Having expressed myself
clearly, I could feel my agitation dissipating.

Emily stopped and looked me straight in the eye. “When I was still out and about in the world, I sometimes bought dresses.”

I knew that she had her wardrobe made at home now and that since she didn’t like being touched, Lavinia served as a fittings
model. I wondered where this example would lead. I nodded to indicate that she had my attention and should continue.

“Well, when I used to shop, I’d try on a dress in a store — and it just wouldn’t suit! That letter to the little cousins was
just Emily trying on and trying out what a woman was MEANT TO FEEL in wartime — and it didn’t fit her. You were entirely right
to say so.”

As always, Emily surprised me. She had allowed me my own opinions, as she did so rarely, and, even more unusual, admitted
her own failing.

A few weeks later, Emily and I shared some genuine elation. At long last, after my years of urging, Emily had actually consulted
her “surgeon of choice,” Mr. Thomas Higginson — the Unitarian minister and liberal thinker whose
Atlantic
article about women’s intellectual gifts attracted her back in 1859. I was first incredulous, then full of joyful congratulations.

“I might have waited forever. I know
you
believed I would!” Emily smiled at herself. “Then he wrote another article in the latest
Atlantic.
It is just as fine; he is advising young writers to keep working.” She sat up very straight as she quoted,
“ ‘A book is the only immortality!’

“This seemed like a message aimed directly at me. When I read it, I RECOGNIZED the tutor I had awaited. I sent him three poems
and a letter; I asked his frank opinion. Here is what I said to him. I kept the draft for you.”

Emily was radiant as she handed me her letter to Higginson.

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 it’s own pawn —

I was very relieved. Remembering Emily’s embarrassing “Master” letters, I had feared she would address Mr. Higginson in the
same vein. But this note had an appealing sincerity and dignity. Surely a kindly writer and editor would feel obligated to
answer this request.

“That’s really lovely, Emily — it’s just right. And has he written back?”

“Indeed he has — several times. But they are not the sort of letters one SHARES. Shall I tell you what he said to me, more
or less?”

“I wish you would.”

“Well, Miranda, he was really very INTERESTED, not just in my poems, in my SELF — as a WOMAN. He asked me a lot of PERSONAL
questions. He wanted to know all about me; he was very specific. Here is a copy of what I replied.” She handed me the paper.

Mr Higginson,

Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude — but I was ill — and write today, from my pillow.

Thank you for the surgery — it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others — as you ask — though they might not differ
—

While my thought is undressed — I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the Gown — they look alike, and numb.

You asked how old I was? I made no verse — but one or two — until this winter — Sir —

I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none — and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I
am afraid — You inquire my Books — For Poets — I have Keats — and Mr and Mrs Browning. For Prose — Mr Ruskin — Sir Thomas
Browne — and the Revelations. I went to school — but in your manner of the phrase — had no education. When a little Girl,
I had a friend, who taught me Immortality — but venturing too near, himself — he never returned — Soon after, my Tutor, died
— and for several years, my Lexicon — was my only companion — Then I found one more — but he was not contented I be his scholar
— so he left the Land.

You ask of my Companions Hills — Sir — and the Sundown — and a Dog — large as myself, that my Father bought me. . . . I have
a Brother and Sister — My Mother does not care for thought — and Father, too busy with his Briefs — to notice what we do —
He buys me many Books — but begs me not to read them — because he fears they joggle the Mind. . . .

Two Editors of Journals came to my Father’s House, this winter — and asked me for my Mind — and when I asked them “Why,” they
said I was penurious — and they, would use it for the World —

I could not weigh myself — Myself —

My size felt small — to me — I read your Chapters in the Atlantic — and experienced honor for you — I was sure you would not
reject a confiding question —

Is this — Sir — what you asked me to tell you?

Your friend,

E — Dickinson.

This was exactly the sort of reply I had feared: Emily at her mannered worst, coy and oblique, hinting and evading and name-dropping.
It was evident the distinguished, busy man had asked her serious professional questions, and she had replied in playful peekaboo.
I could not approve this grotesque letter; it reeked of bad taste and bad manners. I took up the smallest flaw among many,
thinking it the most prudent approach. From there I could determine her sensitivity to criticism today.

“Emily, are you actually telling Mr. Higginson that the big wheezing old dog who sleeps in the barn is your ‘companion’? I’ve
never even seen him inside the house. Mr. Higginson wanted to know about your
friends!
”

As I spoke, I grew angry and disgusted. If I was not her friend after nearly five years, then who was?

“Carlo was my friend, in his SALAD days, before we moved back to The Homestead. Father gave him to me years ago, for my PROTECTION.”

“Protection from what?”

“Protection from tramps and robbers on those country walks I never take!”

“Well, I think Mr. Higginson was asking about your livelier companions — livelier than the mountains and a dog who can’t breathe.”

The conversation ended there, Emily making an abrupt change of subject. And despite Emily’s affected letter, Mr. Higginson
wrote again. The editor and the poet maneuvered a little, and I followed their letters back and forth. By June they had a
working arrangement. Emily was to continue to send Higginson poems, and he agreed to comment on them. Meanwhile, he asked
her “to delay in publishing.”

“As if I would want to publish!” she scoffed. “I told him that publishing was as foreign to me
‘as Firmament to Fin.’ ”

But Mr. Higginson had agreed to be her official “Preceptor,” which seemed to rank just below “Master” in her hierarchy. Emily
with an actual Mentor by correspondence — Emily with a real author as her tutor — seemed truly wonderful to me. Perhaps her
“golden thread” of fame had become a gleaming possibility.

I completed my course in medieval life and was given high marks for my research paper. For my next course, I chose history
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I wanted to discover why the Puritans, those defenders of spiritual freedom, fought their
way to the New World — and then promptly established moral jails as schools for their children. I found a passionate interest
growing inside me for all those unknown children — past and future.

With my classes, visits to Kate, occasional afternoons with Emily, and reading to Aunt Helen’s snipping and folding ladies,
the spring and summer of 1862 passed in an almost cheerful green-and-golden blur.

Davy was not in immediate danger, except from boredom. After Shiloh, his battery besieged and overran Corinth, Mississippi.
Then they marched to Memphis, where they seemed to have settled in permanently. Davy was not fighting; he was waiting for
the war to join him.

This is our fourth month of drilling and target practice and painting the guns. I have made my tent so elaborate and comfortable
it lacks only a portico, like Amity Street! Here in camp we have a glee club, a Shakespeare study group, and a Bible class
for every religion, old and new. We eat our own vegetables from our own garden. Every single man in my company is thinking,
What in — am I doing here?
but no one speaks the heresy aloud.

A later letter was more serious:

At least this lull between battles gives me a chance to visit with my old Lake Forest friends in camp. I don’t mean to sound
pompous, hauling in Achilles and Patroclus, or Alexander and Hephaestion — but it is a strange and wonderful thing that men’s
friendships are sweeter and keener in wartime, where Death is always on our minds. I would give my life for any one of these
dear fellows, because I know he would do as much for me. We all recognize this new bond between us.

And what of us? I wondered. While the war was bringing Davy closer together with his company, I feared it was drawing him
farther from me. And for the first time, I held my feelings away from Davy in our letters. I was wearing a mask of sorts with
him, something I had vowed never to do. The war was changing us both.

Davy said there were always traders and peddlers hanging around idle armies in camp. He had sent me several portraits taken
by wandering photographers. One was of the battery officers, his boyhood friends from Lake Forest, looking like the young
knights at Camelot — intent and dedicated. Then there were two of Davy alone: one three-quarters, looking away, and one gazing
straight into my eyes. This Union captain was young, handsome, and earnest — and I did not know him. There was no trace of
the open heart, the fanciful spirit, the profound sweetness, I had loved.

Even President Lincoln’s recent Emancipation Proclamation was treated by Davy with a measure of cynicism:

Yes, my dear Miranda, the president’s words were stirring. But don’t believe he acts for the most humanitarian of reasons.
There is no humanity anymore. No. By setting emancipation as the price the South will pay for continued insurgency (for emancipation
applies only to territory outside Union lines), the president ransoms the black man but does the Moral Righteousness of freedom
no Honor. And Lincoln threatens to topple the South’s entire economy when he confiscates the slave owners’ investments in
black capital. By a stroke then our president has turned this war to preserve the Union into a War of Conquest. The South
will not soon surrender now.

“Perhaps that is who Davy has become,” said Kate in response to this hardened stance. “You have had to change too, Miranda.”

Davy asked that I send him a recent likeness, since the one he had — from Kate’s wedding — was three years old. I could accomplish
this best in New York, where I was going to visit Mr. Harnett for an autumn fortnight. My dear tutor often referred to my
academy paper on early childhood education. Now he wanted to discuss a project we could work on together based on that paper,
and he promised to make me an appointment for a sitting at the studio of a Mr. Mathew Brady, a New York photographer.

I took the cars to New York in October 1862. The city was bigger and louder and newer than Boston, but Mr. Harnett’s house,
a tiny seventeenth-century Dutch cottage, was none of these things. Like Alan and Fanny — shyly I dropped the formal mode
of addressing him as he requested, though I mostly still thought of him as “Mr. Harnett” — their house was full of warmth
and ideas. Books and baby abounded.

“Miranda, we have work to do!” Alan announced on my first evening as we warmed ourselves in front of his massive Dutch stove.
“Your paper was exemplary. It laid out all the things the elementary schools had been doing wrong in teaching little children.
Now you and I have a chance to do it right!

“My school has asked me to design a whole new program for the incoming children,” he responded to my startled look. “The five-
and six-year-olds. I’ve been reading a lot of articles by a German — Friedrich Froebel. Do you know him?”