Savage Beauty (10 page)

Her fury turned into disgust, then physical revulsion:

Our class had a play this winter. He was my father. I put my arms around his neck and kissed him every night for weeks. Oh, I could strike my mouth! I can feel the touch of him now. I laid my head on his knee and clasped his hand. Oh, I loved him dearly in the play, but if I had known what I know now, my mouth would have burned him when it touched him. Oh, Mammy, I can tell it all to you, for it won’t hurt you, it won’t sadden you, except as you know it hurts and saddens me. I can’t tell it all to mama. She knows all that happened, but she doesn’t know the way it feels to me. Only it worried her that I didn’t cry about it.… But I couldn’t cry even to please her. I cry when I’m angry, not when I’m hurt.

Thwarted and angry, finding her rival repellent, she fell ill. No amount of oranges, sherry, or milk would cure her.

When the class photos were taken, Martha Knight remembered, Vincent wasn’t there. “
She was absent a good deal her last, her senior year, as I recall. I don’t know if she was ill or somehow discouraged about her future—I just don’t know. We did not discuss it. But she missed the class picture, and Mrs. Millay called me up and got irate.… She said that if I had told Vincent, she could have come up. But I hadn’t thought to tell her. I mean, I didn’t intend not to, I just hadn’t thought to tell her.”

Instead Vincent had her photograph taken in town, wearing her graduation dress. Seated on a Roman bench, she is wearing two great white hair ribbons, one at the back of her neck, the other perched atop her head like a white moth. Her bright hair is swept back from her face, caught up behind her ears. Her dress is of flowered Persian lawn, with a deep V
bodice trimmed with lace, the long puffed sleeves caught just below her elbow, her tiny waist cinched with ribbon. She looks weighed down with bows and ruffles. Her gaze is direct and unsmiling.

The graduation exercises were held the evening of June 16, 1909, in the Camden Opera House. Martha Knight gave the first essay, on Scottish folklore, while Stella played a piano solo. Then the boys recited their talks on “The Value of Higher Education” and “The Uses and Values of Electricity”; near the close of the commencement ceremonies, Henry Hall, who stumbled out of nervousness, read his class poem, “Our Destiny.”

The final speaker was Vincent Millay. Jessie Hosmer, who was sitting in the audience that night, said she would never forget the small girl with her bright red hair, her chin lifted, her head thrown back, who seemed almost to sing out her essay, the poem “La Joie de Vivre”: “
Well, she spoke it just as if she was doing what she was doing. She was stealing thunder.”

All the heat and urgency of being young was in her poem, and it began like an anthem to youth:

The world and I are young!
  Never on lips of man,—
  Never since time began,
Has gladder song been sung

Her writing vindicated her. “
Oh, Mammy,” she wrote in her diary, “they gave me the prize!” With that ten dollars she went to visit her aunts in Massachusetts, alone, for the entire summer.

CHAPTER 5

I
n October, Vincent won the lead in a traveling stock company’s production of
Willowdale
, in which each of her sisters had a small role. Vincent, playing the prim Milly Bassett, “who loves Tom” and loses her primness, stole the show. When the company left Camden for their next stop, the ingenue there fell ill and Vincent was summoned from Camden to play the role. Throwing her clothes into a suitcase, racing to catch the steamer and then the train, she wrote in her scrapbook, “
Spree!
Lunch & Bath at Midnight.” Kerosene lamps were lit in the train stations along the way and stoves were banked with coal, for in November it was already winter in the North.

She’d played amateur roles before at home, but this was different: “—oh, this was life! It was more than life,—it was art.” While at home, “I might pretend to myself as much and as long as I liked,—until the deep-vibrant-note I had discovered in my voice … out-Hedda-ed Nazimova—yet was my native village unthrilled and unconvinced; I was asked to serve ice-cream at church socials, and the grocer-boy called me by name.” But no longer. The costumes had not been altered since she’d worn them, and the other girls in the company “hooked me up the back and pinned me together in a dozen places, one knelt and put on my shoes while I balanced with my hand on her shoulder, one went to find the frilly sun-bonnet I was to carry on in the first act.”

When she heard the silky swoosh of the curtain rising, she glanced in the mirror, took a deep breath, and ran onstage

with my sun-bonnet over my arm and held out my hands to Danny; there was a sudden hush all over the house, more pleasant to me than would have been the most enthusiastic hand. For this was genuine, the result of keen and unfeigned interest and curiosity. Probably every person in the house knew that I was the girl who had been sent from out of town.… Not that there would have been any pains to conceal it; on the contrary, because of its unquestionable advertising advantages.

Flushed with excitement, she calculated her effect: “There, away from home, I was under no restraint from loving friends in the orchestra seats or hated rivals whose talent and time had not been solicited. For the first time in my life I could, from rise to fall of the curtain, unstintedly play the part.”

She let her voice fill to its most vibrant; she knew her voice was becoming a remarkable instrument that she could use to draw the audience to her. “I did not hurry with my lines.… I made my pauses tell. I felt that the audience liked me, and I did my best to make it love me. I did little wistful things, made little forlorn gestures, and once or twice smiled piteously. It seemed to me I could hear the lumps come into their throats.”

Afterward, the company’s producer and director, Van Duzer, offered her a position in his permanent company—if he should ever bring it together. She never heard from him again. Instead she received an autographed photograph of his wife, a middle-aged woman holding a lorgnette and wearing a flat straw hat like a plate of salad greens.

Then she returned to Camden, and the winter turned to iron.

Throughout the fall and winter, her father’s letters to her remained the same as they had always been. In September, he inquired about their
mother’s health, sent five dollars, promised to “
send you some more the first of the week if possible,” and closed fretting about his own health: “I am having a bad time with my stomach but I guess it isn’t going to be any thing serious.” One week later he sent two dollars: “I have got money coming in soon and will keep you going somehow.” How that seven dollars would keep any of them going is hard to tell. Still, he assured Vincent, “I think there is no doubt I will get to see you this fall. I intend to, if possible.” Seven dollars within three weeks was very unlike him. But the assurance of his own arrival—“I
think
there is no doubt.… I
intend …
if possible”—was just like him. By December 11, the reality was clear:

My dear girl; I cannot possibly go to see you just now. I haven’t the money but I am going just as soon as I can. I haven’t been able to do much for two months I have a very bad cold now but I always expect it this time of year. I would like to go now so much. But I will get to see you this winter sure.

But he didn’t come. He sent them a little money for Christmas presents instead, a dollar each. “
I wish I could make you some Xmas presents but it don’t look like it now.” It’s hard to imagine a more forlorn, defeated man than Henry Millay must have seemed to his daughters.

On Christmas Day, alone in the house with her sisters, Vincent wrote to her mother, assuring her that they were having a “
beautiful Christmas.” She put the best face on their being without her. She’d had a quarter ton of coal put in; she’d bought a pound of “nice butter”; she told in exact detail what each of the girls had done to make their presents for one another. Only one of their gifts appears to have been bought. Then she enclosed a copy of her next
St. Nicholas
poem, “Friends.” “This is all I can think of now. We must dress for dinner. Good-bye, Honey. With love, Vincent.” Her letter was dutiful, as if she were working to muster the details. Within six months of graduation she had taken over the running of their household. Only her poems began to tell how she felt under the weight of that domestic burden.

The last poem she sent to
St. Nicholas
(because after eighteen one could no longer contribute) won its Cash Prize, which was the hardest to get. The editors spent half their editorial praising it, calling it “a little gem,” pointing to its “striking excellence” in the use of double rhymes.

She wrote the magazine a farewell letter:

Dear St. Nicholas:

I am writing to thank you for my cash prize and to say good-by, for “Friends” was my last contribution. I am going to buy with my five dollars a beautiful copy of “Browning,” whom I admire so much that my prize will give me more pleasure in that form than in any other.

Although I shall never write for the League again, I shall not allow myself to become a stranger to it. You have been a great help and a great encouragement to me, and I am sorry to grow up and leave you.

Your loving graduate
Edna Vincent Millay

“
Rosemary,” a poem she’d written earlier that same year, was shot through with longing for childhood, a perfectly acceptable convention although at seventeen she was a little young to long.

The things I loved I may go to see.
  I may lie in them no more.
But I stand at the door of the used-to-be,
  And dream my childhood o’er.

…

I sit at my window alone.
  I hear each voice, and I know
That I miss through them all the sound of my own
  As it rang in the long-ago.

Becoming a woman meant more than the loss of freedom and playfulness, it meant loneliness. Worse, it meant the loss of her voice.

Truly homebound now, she turned inside. Her diary entries fell slack. On February 24, she waited to catch sight of Halley’s comet but didn’t and began to embroider a corset cover for her mother. “
Mama said today, that if she dies before we do, Kathleen is to have her wedding ring and I her mother’s ring though she formally expressed a wish to have that buried with her.”

Her father, who had not written since Christmas, wrote now, telling her a fire had destroyed most of his belongings. His letter ended with a postscript: “
I am going to see you just as soon as I can get any money ahead and I mean for it to be this spring. Papa.” Ten days later he enclosed three dollars—it might not buy “many Easter hats but will get you a dinner”—and described the fire:

The Hotel that was burned was run by an old man (and owned) and was paying him over $2000 per year besides all expenses without selling a drop of liquor. And if it had not burned I should have had a lease of it this spring.… I might have known something would happen, but I didn’t. I really thought I was going to get hold of a business that my health would stand and that would pay more than well. I had visions of being able to do a whole lot for some girls that I think about a great deal although I haven’t seen them for eight years. But I mean to see them this spring. I know Vincent I am a poor correspondent and I can’t explain why. I only know that when I have said a few words to tell you how much I inclose, my pen stops.

This was the saddest letter he had ever written. The way he described his losses that spring suggested how constant and expected they were. Even in his letters he was distant, a solitary man of small ambitions and dashed hopes. His life had settled into small and constant illnesses, which he told her about—long winter colds, asthma, and stomach trouble. The only dream he ever admitted to his eldest daughter was this one, and he told her only after it had burned to the ground and his hopes were reduced to ashes.

Henry Millay never contributed the five dollars a week for child care that he was supposed to. In Camden, Vincent mentioned him only once, soon after she’d arrived, when a girl in her class asked what had happened to her father. “
She was quite upset and said they’d lost him, and didn’t like to talk about it. She gave the impression that he wasn’t even alive.” She didn’t mention him in her diaries, except to note that once a month she wrote to him. Why she wrote is clear enough in this poem:

Dear Papa, I am puzzled sore
To think why you don’t send some more
Of that nice stuff you sent before.

…

Now, Papa darling, will you tell
When ham is fifty cents a smell
And cold soused trype is quite too swell
  To view,
How in the world your daughters dear
Can keep alive—or anywhere near—
Unless from time to time we hear
  From you?
But, Papa, this is not a fluff,
I’ve lived on sawdust long enough:
’Tis quite unsatisfying stuff.
  And so
Your hat in deepest mourning drape—
Send me some pinks tied up in crape,—
Or send me something in the shape
  Of dough.