Savage Beauty (35 page)

5

In February 1919, the Millays moved again, this time into a neighborhood they thought was Chelsea. It was, in fact, farther west, in the poorer Irish district. “The new Millay home was a ground-floor flat at 449 West 19th Street, in the colorless, rundown block between 9th and 10th Avenues,” Roberts wrote. “It was an incongruous setting for the family, but … Strong personalities create their own atmosphere, and this did not apply only to the poet.”

Roberts had just met Cora Millay. It’s fascinating to see him stumble about, trying to pin her down: “Mrs. Cora Buzzelle Millay was not beautiful, and she looked workworn, gnarled.… Her conversation was pithy and the ruggedness of her character salient.”

“
I have never come across a more devoted mother and daughter,” Susan Jenkins Brown recalled. She felt there was something odd and forced about their relationship. “This might have been, what,
Little Women?
They were together the perfect picture postcard—the Christmas postcards—of the family. Edna was, however, the least effusive.

“But”—and with this Susan Brown wagged a cautionary finger—“the important thing to remember is that the whole family were devoted to each other.”

I decided to discuss this with Norma. It had crossed my mind that I, too, was being drawn into a spell. By now I had an inkling of the furies that drove the Millays, and I was wary of their enchantment. I didn’t know then the strength of that pull on women, or that one cannot be wary enough.

Norma was poignant when she described Cora’s first months in New York with her and Vincent:

“
We realized now that we were not in Camden, Maine, anymore. We wanted to live in our own way—and now we were with people who did. Oh, I don’t mean just people you had sex with or who used dirty words. I mean interesting people. We were either going to include Mother in our fun, or we were not. And I remember Vincent and I sitting down and talking about it, deciding what we were going to do—were we going to leave Mother behind? Mother could say quite startling things.… [We decided] that we would not just put Mother on the shelf; that we would continue to share our lives—as we grew up.

“We were pals, companions, and we were trying to get on, make a living, to get on to better things. So we’d always stuck together; and now we were branching out.”

“Did you worry that would hurt her?”

“Yes. Damned right!”

“Did it hurt her?”

“No, I think she handled it marvelously.”

They handled it by making of their lives a theater piece, a family romance. It was their story of triumph over adversity, one of the best women’s stories there is in America: hopeful, enduring, centered in family, and fraudulent—not especially because it was deceitful but because it was built on so much unadmitted pain that it was impossible to sustain. By now that air of plucky resilience was as much a family routine with the Millays as singing in parts. But Vincent’s role was an increasingly tough one, for now
she
, not Cora, was their caretaker. She sustained all of them. One solution was for Cora to go visiting relatives or friends from time to time when Vincent couldn’t muster the cash to support her.

We’re not going to let you stay away from home much longer, little old Irish devil! … Financially, dear, I need to get bucked up a bit before I can send you the money to come home with. I’ve been giving all my time to this play, you see.

The play was
Aria da Capo
, and she knew it was “a peach,—one of the best things I’ve ever done.” Alexander Woollcott, the drama critic for
The New York Times
, announced on December 13, 1919, “
You should see this bitterly ironic little fantasy by Edna St. Vincent Millay.… this is the most beautiful and most interesting play in the English language now to be seen in New York.”

But there was more going on in her life in 1919 than writing a superb antiwar play. She’d fallen in love with a young engineer who was working for the Bureau of Construction of the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., whom she had met through Norma. His name was James Lawyer, and he was married.

All that remains of their love affair is a tarnished silver identification bracelet inscribed “James P. Lawyer” and eighteen letters, which began with a special delivery letter dated November 27, 1919:

Dearest Girl, My Own,

This is just a scrawl to let you know … that I adore you.… I’m already planning to see you again so soon. Love me I need your love so. I am writing this at a corner cigar store I don’t dare write it home.… Oh love me girl, love me. Mrs. Lawyer is quite ill and … she knows something happened.

He wrote to her every day, sometimes two letters in a single day, not wanting to, “for I am so afraid that we will burn our love by being [too] feverish.” From the beginning of this correspondence he was troubled by thoughts of his wife’s response to his deception. “That is the hardest part for me for I hate deceit.

God knows, Edna, that I adore you. My love for you has certainly been tested very thoroughly. I feel so sorry for my poor wife and I really love her you know. Next to you there is nothing in the world I love better. She just suspects something she doesn’t even know herself what.… Those things make it so much harder to hurt her but I simply cannot give you up. Not even if I tried for in my heart I would always love you. What a pity that we could not have met long ago.

That was the first ominous note struck in their correspondence, but four days later he was back with her in New York. Each time now it was more difficult to leave her: “I felt so badly today when Norma and you both cried.… You were right when you said that I would come back to you unless I died and I don’t believe even death could keep me away from you.”

At first Norma didn’t want to talk about him, but she had already acknowledged his importance by admitting one of her sister’s letters about him to their mother into the collection of Vincent’s
Letters:

I carry my typewriter all over the world with me, the little Corona Jim gave me. He was a sweet boy, mother. I loved him very much. And still do, whenever I think of him, though it was all nonsense, of course, and I wouldn’t want him back. Only I like to think about him sometimes. You were wonderful, mother, about him and me. I realized afterwards how terrible it must have been for you. But you never hurt me in any way.

This was written well after the fact. What Norma hadn’t done was to identify him or give any description of their affair. When I discovered a tiny snapshot slipped into the soft leather fold of Millay’s first passport wallet, I guessed it was Jim, and Norma relented:

Jim was a beautiful boy, you must understand that. He was tall and slim and blond. Godlike, really, a lovely man. And, yes, he was married—although I don’t think Mother knew it, certainly she didn’t at first—and, yes, Vincent loved him. Well, you know, it can happen that you can feel quite a lot for someone who is not in any way your equal.

But she left me to guess for myself in what way Jim was unequal to Millay. At first I thought it might have been because he was not literary. I should have realized that would have been to his advantage.

Jim was going to try to return for the opening of
Aria da Capo
on December 5, 1919. He hoped she had finished the costumes “and that you are not dead, dead, tired. You were not meant to live in a big city anyway. You were meant to live in the beautiful out of doors somewhere with me. You do need someone to take care of you too.”

By December 22, he referred to his wife no longer as Mrs. Lawyer but as Louise, and by January 2 Louise knew “that I love you more than anyone else and that we intend to live together.” The rest of the story was not pretty. His wife wanted to be absolutely certain they loved each other “before she gives me up.” She was not nearly as upset as he’d thought she would be; she treated him with contempt and was hurt that he’d spent so
much money when they were together in New York—“She keeps telling me that I never spent so much on her.” And she was reading Millay’s poetry. On January 6, he wrote to tell her that his wife was treating their affair as a joke and telling people about them. “There is a great difference though when we happen to be alone.” Four days later he wrote to assure her that within three days they would “have all of the things both of us have always wanted all of our lives.… I adore You, Darling.… Your own Jim.”

Then his letters broke off. When they resumed twelve days later, it was with the news that Louise had tried to kill herself. “Oh, Girl, Dear,” he wrote Vincent, “things are hard very hard just now but they won’t always be this way. God will let us be together soon if we can stand all we have had to stand nothing can keep us apart.” At the close of this letter he added, as if it might be reassuring, “God Bless You and help us to do the true right things.”

There was only one true right thing to do. And Jim did it. In an undated letter that began, “My Own, My Darling,” he used the past tense for the first time: “I loved you more than I ever have before and I realized what I must do.” There would be no terrible scene. He was “writing instead of calling You because if I should hear Your voice I might weaken.” He asked that they not see each other again. He told her that he would love her always, and on February 10, 1920, he returned everything he had of hers. “Your letters I have always destroyed.… The memory of you no one can ever destroy.”

Two weeks later, in a burst of anger and hurt pride, Edna told Norma she’d wired Jim from Cincinnati, where she was giving her first professional reading outside the East: “
If I can earn my way lecturing I’m going from here right around the world, & he’ll never see me again,—tell him.” That was sheer bravado.

No one knew then that Jim, having broken with Vincent, had turned to Kathleen and that Kathleen had agreed to see him.