Authors: Nancy Milford
Doesn’t it seem good to be out of quarantine? I should think you’d be just hopping joyful. Unless you’re too tired even to hop, you poor dear. Binnie’s sorry!
Mother and daughter were engaged in a sort of duet of need. Cora, hurt, found fault, and Vincent, prodded, flew to respond. Everything at home was fine, she wrote: “We serve three meals a day at ‘Millay’s Cafe,’ if you please.… come home quick as you can to your ‘free bad tids.’ Lovissimusosso, Vincent.”
The baby talk was never a good sign. A poem (this one would later be titled “The Suicide”) was slashed in pencil across the back of one of her mother’s letters:
Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou has mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me
I have kissed thy crust, and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash glad crawled away,
As if spent passion were a holiday!
Then she returned to him. She lit her candle and kissed her ring, but the flame guttered out and she now called her ring “a ghost ring.”
We have been betrothed just half a year tonight. I have been very faithful to you. I have loved you more and better every day. Six months is quite a long engagement, I think.… I do so ache to be taken care of. How I shall glory in your strength—I who am not strong.… With you I shall be complete and wonderful, but without you I am nothing.
But she did not set foot outside her home. She didn’t seek a permanent job. She didn’t venture forth with any of the young men who came to call. Mostly they came to call on Norma, anyway. Vincent stayed put. She wrote.
In the working draft of a poem she called “Interim,” the death of a wife is personified by language:
Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast;—save that contrast’s wall
Is down … where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms.
It was a fine piece of writing, but if she sent it out, no one took it. She had not been able to publish anything since
St. Nicholas
. She’d begun to work on a long poem that was entirely different from anything she had tried before. A dramatic monologue written in the first person, it began as simply as a child’s counting-out rhyme. But there was nothing childish about the poem itself; it was luminous and wild and—so far—incomplete. Only her mother knew she was working on it.
Only once did she come to her love without need of his comfort. She linked her giving to what she called “The mother-heart: there is no strength like it”:
I want not to be comforted, but to comfort;—to hold your head on my lap, and love you, and fuss with your hair, and cry over you; not stormily, not hysterically, but tenderly; and quietly, lest you see and be grieved. I want to find things for you, to pick up things after you, to straighten your tie and brush your coat, to fill your pipe,—all the little things so many women have done and that I long to do.
Domestic, devotional, almost, the pull for her was always back to being good at home.
That fall and winter she came to him more than she ever had before. Soon she didn’t want a boy anymore, she was too tired. “Two girls,” she wrote, “are enough for me.” She wanted a man. But why didn’t he come? What was all this hard work for, if not for him?
I looked out of the window a minute ago and saw the mountains.… They are so beautiful they almost kill me. The color—oh—there is never anything like their color in the fall! And I want to climb Megunticook before the leaves are all gone.
But she couldn’t; she had to work, “Sweep the floor, and sweep it again tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that and every day
of your life;—if not that floor, why then—some other floor.” Very few young women have ever put it more clearly—or more fiercely—than Millay did when she was nineteen:
I’m getting old and ugly. My hands are stiff and rough and stained and blistered. I can feel my face dragging down. I can feel the lines coming underneath my skin. They don’t show yet but I can feel a hundred of them underneath. I love beauty more than anything else in the world and I can’t take time to be pretty.… Crawl into bed at night too tired to brush my hair—my beautiful hair—all autumn-colored like Megunticook.
Then she stopped. She’d promised him she “would never let go again.” But she hadn’t really broken her promise. “No one else knows how I feel. I am keeping up before everybody else.” Now she imagines him as her husband. “My husband,” she writes again and again and again, “I am ashamed to think I didn’t know why Megunticook is there! It is to look at! … to lift your eyes to!” Beauty was the only thing that sustained her. Except him.
On January 3, 1912, snow and ice covered everything in Camden; even the bay was icebound. No matter where she was, she couldn’t get warm.
Honey, I don’t feel good a bit. I’ve a tooth-ache and I think I’m going to have a cold. I’ve been freezing all day and now my nose feels all squizzled up. Does your nose squizzle up when you’re about to have a cold? Mine does, and my conscience with it.… I’m dissatisfied with everything,—myself first of all. I’m egoistical and self-analytical. I suffer from inflammation of the imagination and a bad attack of ingrowing temperament. I don’t believe in anything. I am morbid and miserable. My mind must be rotten, I think. I need a man who has been somewhere and done things to graft his healthy ideas into my silly brain. Truly my head is in dreadful condition. I don’t know what to do.
It didn’t let up, and her writing became more frenzied, more desperate. On February 3, when she returned to him again, she simply wrote, “This is another death—this night.” A week later it was darker. She felt she was suffocating, as if she were being buried alive. She would be twenty in less than two weeks, and still he had not come for her.
I do not know what will become of me.… I know that I am in a dreadful condition. I know that the thoughts that fill my mind are fearful thoughts.… I do not think there is a woman in whom the roots of passion shoot deeper than in me.
CHAPTER 7
S
he was alone in the house when the telephone rang—a long-distance call from Kingman, Maine. The voice of the operator was scratchy and faint, but at last Vincent made out “Mr. Millay, your father, is very ill, and may not recover.” Stunned into silence, she just stood there. “After a minute she asked me if there was any message … I managed to stutter something and to say that I would send a telegram. Then she said, ‘Is that all?’ And I said, ‘Yes’ and hung up the receiver.” Quickly, Vincent called her mother in Rockland, and they decided Vincent would start for Kingman in the morning, for she’d just missed the noon boat. She borrowed a suitcase and threw some clothes together. On March 1, she caught the boat to Bucksport, traveling from there by train to Bangor, where she took another train and arrived in Kingman at 6
A.M
. Dashing down a cup of coffee, she hurried to the house where her father boarded.
The minute we came in I heard from upstairs the sound of a man’s coughing, and it was then, for the first time, that I realized how long it had been since I had seen my father,—eleven years!
His nurse met her downstairs and told her he was expecting her. The owners of the house as well as her father’s doctor, Dr. Somerville, and his daughter, Ella, stood watching her. “They kept telling me to brace up, and be calm, and things like that, which was really funny, as I was not the least bit nervous and everybody else seemed very much upset.… Perhaps I wasn’t so calm, tho, as I was numb.” As the doctor guided her up the stairs, he told her she could stay only moments and that her father had very little time to live. She entered the room.
It didn’t seem to me that the man on the bed was my father, but I went over and stood beside him and said, “Hello, papa, dear,” just as I had planned to say only that my voice seemed higher than usual; and when he heard me he opened his eyes—the bluest eyes I ever saw—and cried out “Vincent! My little girl!” and struggled up in bed and held out his arms to me.… I put my arms around him and made him lie down again. Then I sat on the side of the bed and talked to him a little, not of anything in particular; I remember saying that I wished my eyes were blue, too, so that they’d match my hat, and that he whispered back—he couldn’t speak at all—“You can’t very well change your eyes, Vincent, but you might have got a green hat.” Then I laughed, and he smiled a little, with his eyes closed. He had difficulty, I noticed, in keeping them open and somehow that made me all the more certain he was going to die.
That night she wrote to her mother briefly to tell her that Dr. Somerville had given her “very little hope.” Cora wrote back by return post:
My dear little daughter:—
Such a hard experience for my little girl to meet all alone. If mama could only help you darling and help him too.
She urged her to tell Henry he had to get better, “
to enjoy his dear girls for years yet.”
But seeing his daughter had done him more good than any of them had counted on. On Friday, March 1, the doctor hadn’t expected him to live out the night. By Monday, March 4, Vincent wrote home excitedly, “Papa is better and they think he will get well.” By then her mother’s anxious letter had crossed with hers. Cora didn’t know Henry was improving, and while Vincent didn’t know exactly what was the matter with him, she tried to waylay her mother’s fears: “
He’s had pneumonia I guess, and asthma and a bad heart,” but now he was clearly on the mend.
Dr. Somerville, who looked, she told her mother, “exactly like Andrew Carnegie,” took her driving every day and sleighing miles upriver, where she saw a deer hanging in a tree, killed by a bobcat. “Papa says that now a bob-cat is the only thing that can legally kill deer. He seemed rather skeptical.… I have to run on like this because I’m in a hurry.” What had begun as an ordeal for Vincent was becoming an adventure. She promised her mother she’d tell more later, and she closed admiringly with this:
I see Papa twice a day. We can’t talk very much but he loves to have me with him.… I have never in my life heard so many people inquire for one man. All festivities here are postponed until he recovers. An M.D. and an L.L.D. from somewhere around here came in on the train today just to see him a minute—great friends of his.
I’ll write later, home,
Love,
Vincent
Cora regained more than her composure with the news of Henry’s recovery. She said it was “nice” that Vincent was having a good time after all—“
I am glad your papa has so many good friends. He was always very popular and made friends wherever he went.” But now she asked pointedly
how much Vincent’s trip had cost and reminded her, “It is hard for those left at home sometimes and they want a letter. Write often.” Then she sent Vincent a photograph of herself in her nurse’s uniform, looking stern and competent, her face more deeply lined than it should have been for a woman just shy of her forty-ninth birthday. It was a telling gesture, and it was intended for Henry. Vincent, after all, had just left home; she knew what her mother looked like. “Give my best wishes to your papa, and tell him to get well and do the best he can for his nice big girls I’ve kept so well for him.”
Her mother continued to press her not only for news but for her return. Norma needed her help with French. “I can get along without you when I’m away; but home misses you awfully.” But Vincent wasn’t thinking of Norma’s French or her home duties, and she didn’t respond to her mother’s letters. The next letter came with an enclosed note from Norma that flashed with anger:
Sister Millay:—
I am exceedingly ashamed of you for not letting us hear something from you.… You have been up there almost three weeks and you haven’t exerted your self in writing letters to your family. What is the matter, dear? Are you sick yourself? Just because you have found your father must you forget all about your mother and us kids?
She closed in a voice very like the one Vincent used when she was trying to reassure her mother that she loved her: “I can’t help scolding you for I am disgusted wif youse.”
In that inevitable tug between parents, especially those who have divorced, one parent wears the mantle of the victor and the other becomes the vanquished. Henry was clearly the vanquished. But there is a peculiar susceptibility children have to the fallen, to the not victorious, particularly if it is the father and they are girls. Henry had been irresponsible. He hadn’t supported them, and Vincent knew it. But now, for the first time since she’d been very young, she was in his world, and she was thriving. She found him as charming and winning as her mother once had. However, her lengthening absence, with very little word home, made Cora excruciatingly anxious. And Norma was acting her part in a family drama long established among them. She wrote not only on her mother’s behalf, but on her own.
Cora tried to telephone Kingman, but the line above Bangor was out. She told Vincent that if she didn’t hear immediately she would telegraph, which was costly. Still Vincent didn’t write. Her mother would write ten letters to her four.
She wasn’t sick, she was having fun. The gloom that had engulfed her at home was lifting. She began a letter to her sisters on St. Patrick’s Day (the date of her parents’ wedding anniversary), but as she became more and more drawn into the social life of Kingman, she let it slip. She even forgot to write to her beloved on March 3, “
because … I don’t care a snap about you. I don’t even think of you. No, these are lies, I adore you, but yesterday was the 3rd and I didn’t know.” In fact, she only once again turned to him on the third. The intensity of her need was over for good.