Afternoons with Emily (45 page)

I felt his presence so keenly it was hard to speak. After a long silence, I whispered,
“Thank you, Davy.”
I cleared my throat and then said to Father, “Perhaps now Mr. Harnett and I can print our alphabet in color.”

Father came out from behind his desk and embraced me. “Of course you can, my brave Miranda.” I heard his voice break. “There’s
no end to what you can do! You will touch a thousand lives. I am so proud of you. And of Davy.”

I was as moved by Father’s embrace as I was by his words. He was not a parent given to easy displays of affection. I allowed
myself the pleasure of sinking into the steadying circle of his embrace. I had thought, with Davy and Kate gone, I would have
to live without love given or received. Now there would be another source, another direction for my own unused love. I would
pour my energies into Davy’s inspiration, for the benefit of children we would never have but who would be “ours” all the
same. With my father’s arms about me, just as Kate had promised, I felt my life and dreams taking root once again. I felt
the actual start of my healing.

That night, I sat in my room, gazing down at the heavy gold ring on my finger, the diamond sparkling with reflected moonlight.
I took a deep breath and slowly, tenderly, removed the ring. I would keep it always, perhaps wear it on a gold chain along
with the amethyst heart Davy had given me, but as an engagement ring, it held me in a frozen moment with my lost love, the
marriage never to be. Now was the time for me to move forward and engage in a future. Davy would be with me through my actions
— my life itself would be a testimony of our commitment to each other’s best selves.

The next day, a note came from Emily: “Monday, once more.” As I walked to her house, I felt again that our years of afternoons
were long, long ago. Another girl than today’s went cross lots that very first time, and yet another in the February snow
to our reading of
The Trojan Women.
My eyes took in neighbors’ carefully tended gardens; their lovely designs had always been a source of pleasure for me. But
today I saw the borders of marigolds and salvia as flickering bronze and scarlet flames, and I heard the screams of burning
soldiers and fleeing civilians. Atlanta was now under siege, and in my commitment to stay informed, it was hard not to see
signs of war’s devastation everywhere.

But Emily was as I had left her, twittering over her miniature dramas and preoccupations. Dick the stableman’s child was down
with typhoid. This year’s robins had eaten their young; how very unnatural! And Emily herself was unsettled from her trip
to Boston; she had barely unpacked. Her eyes were “restored.” She still felt “strange to all but my books.”

“I have not ROOTED myself yet,” she stated. “I do not know the village news. Have the wild geese crossed already? Are the
apples ripe yet?” She fluttered to her seat and gazed at me. “But you’ve been away from EVERYTHING too, haven’t you?”

I stood awkwardly, not feeling at home but not knowing how to leave. I thanked her for her last poem about the “bird’s-eye
view.”

She shrugged off my words of appreciation. “I merely thought of your days in Springfield, caged in with demanding little children,
as being very like my life in Cambridge with the little cousins,” Emily confided. “How much I rely on a person’s literary
CONTENT! I have to be able to refer to Artemis or Prince Hal, or I DISAPPEAR. Living with the unread is HARD WORK!”

“Little children are quite another sort of work,” I corrected her. “It’s much more strenuous. You lift and wipe and button
and brush. You forget your inner self for days.”

This did not interest her, and she changed the subject.

“I suppose you have heard our sad news, Miranda?”

I could see she was longing to tell it. She gazed up at me coyly from under her dark lashes.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What, pray?”

“I thought your father might have told you. I heard it was in the paper, but I never saw it.”

She always enjoyed this conversational hide-and-seek. Today I had little patience for it.

“You still haven’t told me what it is I don’t know, Emily.”

“It happened in South Carolina, on one of those coastal islands. There is a Confederate fort there.”

“Emily, I’m not going to play anymore.” I sat in “my” chair and crossed my arms over my chest. “Just tell me.”

“Mr. Higginson was wounded.”

This was actual news. I was instantly concerned. “I’m truly sorry. Was he hurt badly?”

“I don’t really know. Too gravely to WRITE, at least.” Here she pouted a bit.

This was my clue that perhaps the story was not as dire as she had presented it. I leaned back again. “When did this happen?”

“Last summer — the summer of 1863, that is.”

I began to understand. Emily was taking her Mentor’s misfortune personally. “And where is Colonel Higginson now?”

“He said he has left the Army and is recovering by the sea with his wife. He wrote me from Newport a few weeks ago. He has
not been well enough to write me since. Of course I feel his wound DEEPLY myself.”

I considered these facts very carefully. As I understood it, Colonel Higginson had been hurt a year ago. He recovered and
returned to civilian life. He had only just now informed Emily of all this, and her feelings were hurt.

On the way home, I realized she had never once asked about Kate’s children. It was just as well; I could not have borne hearing
Emily describe her unassuaged grief over the little motherless Howlands. My own feelings of guilt and separation were too
raw.

The village trees had their dusty late summer look. One of these mornings there would be a scarlet limb on a maple, and then
another. Father and I had been making plans: I for my life and he for his. We had talked a great deal about what I would do
in New York. I would design more children’s books with Mr. Harnett, and I would try teaching at Friends Seminary while our
material was being tested in the classroom. But I also wanted to learn a great deal more about other teaching systems and
methods. I approached Dean Griswold at the college. Since I had graduated from the academy three years ago, he had been my
sponsor and my kind friend. He knew Davy as “Amherst’s best.”

He welcomed me graciously into his library. “Miss Chase, I salute your courage in returning to the ‘groves of academe.’ When
one encounters tragedy, the only weapon against it is hard work.”

“Yes, I am learning that.”

“I know and respect your interest in primary education. What are your plans now, to further your career?”

I told him about teaching in New York at Friends Seminary and then explained, “I want to find out how and what little children
learn in other parts of the world. There must be a thousand philosophies and systems of teaching. How can I learn about them?”

“You should study ethnography. My old friend Seth Whitman is head of the Society of Ethnography in New York. I’ll write him
and see if he’ll arrange it so that you can work there — as an Amherst student.”

A few days later a note came to me on Amity Street. “You will find what you need at the American Ethnological Society on Fifth
Avenue,” the dean wrote. “They will be expecting you there. Please remember me to Dr. Whitman, my old classmate — and come
to see me when you return.”

Once this was decided, Father announced his own plans. With the tide of war turning in the Union’s favor, Father was taking
a sabbatical. Now that the notorious commerce raider
Alabama
— which had seized and sunk scores of Union vessels — had been sunk off Cherbourg, the sea lanes were finally clear. Father
would visit many spots he first discovered when he was the age I was now — Rome, Athens, Venice — and would stop at Sicily
too, a new vista.

“I will go,” he exulted to me and Aunt Helen over dinner one evening, “while I can still clamber about the ruins. Every classicist
should know Sicily, where Athenian hubris met its nemesis. With Miranda in New York, I shall mark time among the ruins.”

I marveled at this casual reference to me as if his plans were dependent on mine rather than simply on his own wishes. Things
were changing indeed!

Father would leave in early October, before the first Atlantic storms rendered the seas too rough to cross. Although we did
not say it, this was assuredly a valedictory tour. At his age he was not likely to undertake such a long sea voyage again.

I made my good-byes to the ladies at the factory, promising Lolly Wheeler and Mary Warner Crowell that I would write. I then
went to Emily with more of a sense of obligation than pleasure. She must have felt this; she was responsive and entertaining.

“I was not at my best when you called last, Miranda. I must have been recovering from my drunken spree. Yes, I have been INTOXICATED
for several weeks!”

“That news never reached the town gossips.” I smiled.

She gave me an impish grin back. “Wouldn’t they have loved it, though! I’ve read about the signs of intoxication, and they
certainly do match my ORGY when I came home from Cambridge and was reunited with my books. You should have seen me! I opened
my books all at once — on my bed, all over the floor — to let the precious words out to breathe. We had been STIFLED!”

“Aren’t your cousins good company for you?”

Emily laughed tolerantly. I had forgotten that, according to “Emily’s truth,” the Norcrosses never got any older or any wiser.

“Those pitiful little lambs? All they need is a Bo Peep!”

“Tell me some more about coming back to your books, Emily.”

“I remembered the music of ‘Welcome Home’! I heard ANTHEMS. I flew to the shelves and DEVOURED the luscious passages. I thought
I would tear out the leaves as I turned them. I ate, I drank, I FEASTED. Then I settled to a willingness to let ALL go but
Shakespeare. Why do we need ANYTHING ELSE to feed on?” Now she became thoughtful and silent.

“Miranda, you must excuse me. That conceit of books as food — I must try it out NOW.”

It was a good way to part. I had heard her true voice, speaking about her books. Behind the disguises, among the variations,
there was always the essential, authentic Emily.

Alan Harnett had taken a small suite of rooms for me in a little house not far from Friends Seminary. The Harnetts’ tiny cottage
was now too crowded with the birth of their most recent child, Henry. When I reached New York, I found Mr. Harnett jubilant.
Our alphabet had sold out two printings by a well-known publisher of textbooks.

“It’s a fine start for our reputation, Miranda,” he stated. “The drawings did it!” This might have been a good moment to tell
him about Davy’s trust, but I decided to wait until the final papers arrived from the Chicago lawyers.

The next morning I met with Dean Griswold’s friend Dr. Whitman at the American Ethnological Society, a Gothic tower on Fifth
Avenue.

“Dean Griswold speaks very highly of you, my dear,” the gentleman said. “I believe you will find what you need here.” He brought
me to the library, full of thick volumes and silent readers — not what I had expected, considering the society’s daring expeditions!
Here he introduced me to one of the librarians, Mr. Chris Butler, who was a graduate student, telling him that I was to have
full access to the library.

Mr. Butler and I discussed my interest in comparing educational systems. He steered me away from the African and South American
tribal cultures, based entirely on hunting, and toward the Asian and Pacific peoples.

The Chinese and Japanese educational systems appeared admirable, incorporating the arts and sciences — but irrelevant to our
country, as the students must all be noble and male! Reading further, I found myself strongly attracted to two particular
cultures: the Pacific, or Polynesian — and the Eskimo, or Inuit.

Neither of these had formal schools, and their priests were the only teachers as such. They learned everything else that their
society required from their parents, working beside them. Thus education came naturally, with living and maturing — and life
itself was education.

I discovered the Polynesian sexual customs were radically different from ours. The first day I sat in the society library
reading of the relaxed nature of Polynesian sexual practices, I found myself blushing. I furtively glanced at Mr. Butler,
the librarian, imagining he knew precisely the passages I was reading. I told myself that this was professional material and
continued on.

In this society, intercourse was cheerfully encouraged after puberty; incest was the only taboo. The ethnographer linked these
attitudes to the economic structure. Children inherited from their mothers only, making paternity a less critical issue. Through
these cross-cultural studies I was better able to understand that there was a larger context for our own morals and mores.
These were simply
ideas,
not necessarily innate or immutable laws. I began to feel rather radical, as I walked back in the evenings to the Harnetts’,
pondering such bold concepts. Some nights, as I lay contented in my little rooms off Stuyvesant Square, I wondered how the
Polynesian social attitude would have affected Davy and me as lovers.

Later that week, Mr. Harnett brought me round to the seminary. Rather than a single building, the seminary was a cluster of
brick houses, Federal style, and I was pleased to discover that Mr. Jewett, the headmaster, was friendly and informal.

“Harnett here has sold me on the Froebel system,” he assured me. “Follow your system, but keep detailed records every single
day. We’ll need them to compare with the progress of our traditional first-year class.”

A fortnight later, Mr. Harnett and I started our kindergarten with a big round table, small chairs, a thick carpet for teaching
and story circles on the floor — and a wreath of twelve delighted children. Alternating my time between the classroom and
the Ethnological Society library, I realized I was happier than I’d been in a year. The unfamiliar street noises kept me from
sleeping at first, but I didn’t mind — for the first time since Davy’s death, I felt my present and my future were connected.
Somehow, the isolation I had endured as a small child had led me to this path, and that early unhappiness finally had a purpose.