Savage Beauty (28 page)

she assured me, that everything would be most simple because of the war. That she should be allowed the benefits of your institution has seemed so wonderful to me. That the same field seems to be opening to Kathleen seemed almost too much to believe.…

But now, this awful thing seems more than I can bear. It does not seem that it can possibly be true that my girl will not be with her class-mates on Thursday. You cannot realize what it means to us. Such a possibility never occurred to us, and it is a terrible shock. If it must be, if your decision is final, it is a blow from which I shall never recover.

It didn’t seem right to Cora that “the class for which she has won so many honors, for whose ceremonials she has originated so much, should sing her very songs while she is weeping outside.” Then she asked, “Must I give up the picture of my girl in her graduation exercises? … You are taking the very bloom from the best thing that ever came into my life.”

On June 7, MacCracken sent a letter out to the faculty telling them that 108 members of the class of 1917 (somewhat less than half the class) had sent him a petition asking that “Vincent Millay be permitted to remain for Commencement, insomuch as she has contributed largely to our Commencement activities and we feel that the penalty inflicted is too great.” It was accompanied by letters from eighteen individuals urging that the penalty imposed was too severe, particularly “in view of the leniency shown to Miss Millay before the spring recess; second, that false rumors regarding her reputation” would be stopped by allowing her to take her degree with her class.

Millay had met with him before the petition arrived. The only record of this encounter is two letters of hers, which he kept.

You told me once that if I ever needed a friend to let you know.—I need one now. And I want to see you. May I?—If you don’t want to see me, I shall understand. But there is nobody else I want to go to.

Mayn’t I see you this evening.—Sunday?—If not, don’t tell me that it is because you are too busy; I shall know quite well why it is.

Her tone here was extraordinary for any undergraduate, let alone one in trouble. She told him that if she were to sleep on the letter she was about to write, she would probably destroy it.

But I’m not sleepy.—and I remember that you chided me a bit for never telling people who are kind to me how kind to me I think they are and it occurred to me that if I should die tomorrow it would be rather shabby of me not to have blessed you just.

I shall remember till I am very old—if I live to be old—your great gentleness with me.

Vincent Millay

Then she heard from her mother:

What are they thinking of dear? Is it absolutely final? … Is there nothing that can move them so that I may not be robbed of that proudest day I have ever dreamed of seeing? I may not live to see Kathleen graduate. Tell them so, those people. Forgive me dear for turning the knife in the wound.… I’m so sorry for Vassar, for you, for the girls and Miss Dow and your class and myself.

Ella McCaleb wired Mrs. Millay on June 12 at one o’clock that she had just seen Vincent get her diploma with the rest of her class. On the thirteenth, McCaleb wrote to Cora, apologizing at first for not having written to her the week before, when it had all begun, “but,” she said honestly, “
I really did not know what to say. I was rather dumbfounded by the action of the faculty when it decided that Vincent would have to withdraw last week and not be allowed to take her degree with the class.” The petition from part of her class had helped, but “All the way through college Vincent has found it extremely difficult to live according to college regulations, and she had been forgiven possibly too often.”

In other words, it wasn’t only that she’d calmly stayed in New York to go to the opera instead of returning at the end of spring recess; it was that “when the impulse came to go off for a lark, she yielded as any little child might have done, hoping that she would not be found out.” The entire experience had been both “bitter and trying for her friends as well as for
herself,” and McCaleb hoped that Kathleen would take a different attitude from that of Vincent. “If I did not believe this I could not work to have her come here.” A full scholarship for her first year was promised, but beyond that nothing was assured.

After commencement, Vincent fled to Miss Haight’s apartment in New York, from which she wrote to Norma:

Tell Mother it is all right,—the class made such a fuss that they let me come back, & I graduated in my cap & gown along with the rest. Tell her it had nothing to do with money;—all my bills have been settled for some time.—Commencement went off beautifully & I had a wonderful time. Tell her this at once if you can.

After graduation Vincent went straight to New York to look for work. Maybe she could return home with Kathleen after her graduation from the Hartridge School.

You see I have to start right in working as soon as I can get a job,—& I may not be able to come home at all. We mustn’t be foolish about these things.… But I
can’t
come home unless I have something sure here to come back to,—you understand.

—I sent Wump a pair of silk pajamas & a neck-tie & a large white silk handkerchief & a pair of arm-elastics for a Commencement present,—“To my dear brother, Kalloch.”—! … Please write me, darling, darling, darling, sister.

Vincent.
(Edna St. Vincent Millay A.B.!)

But Norma did not understand. She did not understand why Vincent could not be home with her and their mother. She grasped only that she had begun to lose her—and she held on fiercely. She wrote her a letter, which she didn’t send:

Highly Esteemed Edna St. Vincent Millay, A.B.

Oh—My baby, cute thing—How things are changing—I realize now that you don’t really belong here any more. You belong in New York. It hadn’t been that way through college but it begins right now to be so. It’s lovely and it’s dreadful. How childish minds like mine hate to admit a change, things were always so nice “as they used to be.”

At six in the evening, sitting in an old red string hammock on the front lawn “(unmowed because I have no lawn mower and no way or means of
procuring same) I don’t in the least care whether or not it is ever mowed,” she had exactly nine cents in the house.

The next morning she wrote to Vincent again, trying to explain why she felt such despair, coupled with such longing: “I have really no interest outside—concerning myself I mean. You are interested in your affairs—Kathleen in hers … Mother has
her
interest—her work.”

Norma was the only one of her sisters who was exempt from her mother’s expectations. She remained alone, at home. Yet of all the family she was perhaps the sharpest about Vincent. “
Mother—listen—” she wrote to her,

I think it would have been one mighty good thing for
Edna St. Vincent Millay
if this thing had gone thru.… They have been wonderful—Simply wonderful to her all thru her College career and she has done exactly as she did so please.… She thinks it rather cute to stay out to go to the Opera just because she
dares
and wants to. She has done things like that all her life. It is not part of the genius which prompts these things in her; it is
because
of the genius that she
dares
do everything she pleases.

I found a small green leather case upstairs in Norma’s bedroom which I brought to her, sunk into the long sofa in front of the fireplace. We opened the box. There was a thin gold chain with a baroque pearl in the center. “Mother gave each of us one, because the other girls in Camden had jewelry and we had none.” She also had three identical rings made for the little sisters, with real scarabs—ancient fat bugs—set in the center. We found the one Norma had once urgently sent to Vincent. “Hunk” is engraved inside the band, but the scarab is missing. Lying next to it, wrapped in chamois, is Vincent’s gold Vassar class ring of 1917. It’s as tiny as a kitten’s eye. Norma slips it on her little finger. “
Vincent was free now, while I was the one at home, you see. Looking back at my life, I felt … I might have done something else. Oh, something with my life. I was keeping house, that’s all. But I had nothing. Having no way, no control of yourself, of your life. I was just a girl in a lonely house.”

*Djer-Kiss was a heavily perfumed bath powder.

*My friend, I do not forget you. Don’t be frightened. You are always my child. You know that well. And I love you. You know that well.

PART THREE
GREENWICH VILLAGE: BOHEMIA

CHAPTER 12

M
illay had been in New York only a week when she decided to go home, “in time for baked beans” on Saturday night, she wrote Norma. “I am enclosing $2. to make sure of the baked beans.” It was the wrong time to find a job in the city: it was expensive, and it was hot. She would go home with Kathleen, do a big wash, get to her writing, “and then come back in the fall, whether I have a job or not.… I wish you could come back with me. But that would leave mother alone.

We could have such a good time if we had some tiny dirty uncomfortable room somewhere down in the disreputable district … that’s where I’m staying now,—way down on West 4th Street.… Darling, I wish we could arrange it so that you could be here with me next winter. Don’t you suppose we can? There’s nothing for you there at all, and I’ve always wanted to bring you out here with me.… Don’t you suppose mother could get a job editing some dum page in some newspaper?—she might. She writes such beautiful English and she’s so funny. She could try. At least there’s no reason for sticking in Camden.

The convention of leaving one unmarried sister at home to care for an aging mother was not going to become a pattern in their lives. If one got out, they all would. That was the tacit bargain struck within their family. But the burden of getting out depended entirely upon Vincent. How would she manage?

One of her plans was to try the stage. Edith Wynne Matthison, the actress and friend of Miss Haight’s whom Vincent had met at Vassar that spring, had promised to arrange an introduction to a theatrical manager in New York. She and her husband, the English playwright Charles Rann Kennedy, invited Vincent to their summerhouse in Connecticut. “I shall ultimately be able to find something for you,” Miss Matthison assured her.

Don’t be downhearted; and
do
keep in touch with me, and let me know where you are, and everything you are doing. I hold out my hand to you in love and fellowship. Take it in full belief of my sincerity.