Savage Beauty (4 page)

THOUGHTS OF ANY POET AT A FAMILY REUNION

Would I achieve my stature,
I must eschew the
you
within my nature,
The loving notes that cry
“Our mother!” and the “
I, I, I
Name you, claim you, tame you beyond doubt my creature!”

Cool on a migrant wing, if I sing at all,
Down-gliding, up-carried,
Free must be over mountain and sea my call,
Unsistered, unmarried.

Unsistered, unmarried. But what she did not say—what she never said—was unmothered. For locked in the stories of her mother’s life and her grandmother’s past lay clues to her own future.

CHAPTER 2

If Cora looked more like her father than her mother—her hair was a deep brown like his, and her eyes were gray—she was very like her mother in temperament. She was impulsive and possessed what one of her sisters, in an unpublished memoir, would one day call “
a driving force that carried all before it.” Even as a child, she flamed. From the first mother and daughter were more like sisters, united by a special bond of intimacy that only strengthened during Cora’s adolescence.

Cora’s mother, Helen Clementine Emery, was the baby of her family of twelve. Spoilt and pretty, she was a redheaded scamp with a sweet, clear voice and a wealth of bright auburn curls piled high on top of her head in the puffs and lovelocks of the Civil War era. When Eben Lincoln Buzzell, a handsome giant of a man, came to Belfast, Maine, to hire out as a field hand at haying time, she fell in love with him. He was fifteen years her senior, and her parents did not approve of the match. But although she was only seventeen, Clementine (that is what she was called) married him anyway. When Cora was born seven months later, the sharp-eyed neighbors slyly checked the baby’s fingers and toes to see if the nails were fully formed.

The Buzzells eventually left Belfast, where they had two sons, Bert and Charles, and moved to Camden, where twin girls, Susie and Clem, were born in 1873. Eben Buzzell, who had become a cooper in Maine, had not prospered, and when the twins were several months old the young family moved again, this time to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where Clementine’s older sisters lived. There was the promise of work in the rich mills along the Merrimac, and with a large, young family to support, Buzzell took what he could get. He became a night watchman in the mills. In Newburyport they soon had another child, Georgia, but all did not go smoothly after that. The Buzzells quarreled. One of the twins, Clem, later wrote in her memoir that their conflict was due to a difference in religious beliefs, but she was only five when the split occurred. Cora, who was fifteen, knew the real story because she had played a part in it.

When the newborn baby needed special medical care, Clementine turned to a young doctor, Gard Todd, for help. Soon Todd, who was her sister’s brother-in-law, was with her every day, offering counsel, helping even to ease her household duties. The trust and confidence she felt for him, his gentleness and his learning, turned to love. And the only person she confided in was her oldest daughter, Cora.

One unhappy day, when I saw her grieving in a desperate hopelessness over the maelstrom she was being sucked into, I asked her why she did not leave him. I told her, her little girl for once the older woman, that I knew it must be hell for her to have him as a husband to her, to wait in bed for him mornings, when she loved this other.

At first she said she couldn’t leave him. Then she asked, as if to herself, how she could leave him with all her little ones. They would be adrift and motherless. Cora told her to take only the three little sisters; she would stay at home with the boys and her father.

The astonishing thing is that her mother took that advice. She fled in the night. Years later, Cora called it her martyrdom; in letters and in peculiar fragments of a memoir she wrote about it again and again:

My mother was gone from the house at the head of the wharf. It was evening. My father was at his work for the night, watchman at the mill.… I was alone in the house … save for the two little boys, my brothers, who were crying for their mother.

I wasn’t crying for my mother. I was too much buoyed up by what was happening, and what was coming in the morning, when my father would come home; too much buoyed up by the part I was taking in this tragedy, my responsibility in this breaking up of a family, I was keyed up to this sort of martyrdom, by my love for my mother.

She thought it was “prostitution” for her mother to remain with her father; she was fired with a sense of self-importance:

My mother was young, she was only thirty-three; she was very beautiful … and she had long since ceased to love [our] father. Further than that, he was often very unkind to her, even to being abusive in his talk and more than that.… More still, she was deeply in love with another man. All this I knew.

When her father returned, he asked where her mother was. Cora was merciless. “I did not try to soften the blow,” she wrote. “I told him baldly, with what I now know was an hysterical strength and coolness, that she had left him.”

Dazed, he glanced around the room. He heard his sons weeping, looked into Cora’s face, and began to cry.

Eben Buzzell returned to his kin in Maine without much fuss. For a while it looked as if Clementine and her little brood were going to succeed. She
established a thriving hairdressing business. It was said that her own lovely red hair was the only advertisement she needed, and her business flourished. Soon she was making regular trips to nearby towns, taking orders for the frizzes, bangs and coils, puffs and switches, with which women transformed themselves. Cora quit school in order to help. She and her mother would hire a horse and buggy and set out to gather hair combings, returning home to wash the hair for the real work, which was fashioned on hand-operated equipment, a hackle and a header, through which the combings were unsnarled and made over. Her mother’s hands flew, weaving the fine strands of dead hair, locking it into place, literally weaving the hair on the instrument that looked like a harp.

Later Cora wrote that she cut her father completely out of her life. She remembered that her mother was madly in love and now she was free to become engaged to Gard Todd. “Not that she ever neglected us, we had our place, but all the thwarted years of her mis-mated life had to be made up for in the little time she had him for her accepted lover. I have never seen anyone so much in love as my mother was with this man.” They would meet in the late afternoon at a spot called The Laurels because of the lovely wild pink laurel that bloomed there.

One warm day in May 1882, Clementine was driving alone in her open buggy along a country road when something startled her horse. It shied and bolted, and she was thrown to the ground. Her head struck a rock. On June 3, one week before Cora’s nineteenth birthday, her mother died of wounds from that fall. She was thirty-seven years old. As she stretched her arms out in the darkened room, her last words were “I cannot leave my babies!”

Cora suffered such wild remorse that the family thought she would be harmed by her grief. All her life she remembered her mother lying in the downstairs room, where the funeral was quickly held:

her hands quiet for almost the first time in my memory, clasping some white lilies, after all that … she was forever locked away from me, from us all, from the daylight and the sunlight … from the lover who was now making a heaven on earth for her, from the life she was too young to leave; from the life she was too beautiful to leave … they shut her away, and I knew I should never see her face again, never, never, it could not be shown to me again … when they were closing her little last house away from me and my loving, adoring gaze.

The twins, who were nine, were immediately adopted by her mother’s sister Susan Todd and her husband, Gard Todd’s brother, while Cora, Bert, and Charlie set up housekeeping with little Georgia. They took an
apartment in Newburyport and filled it with their mother’s fine old furniture. One night, shortly after they’d settled in, a fire broke out and destroyed the building and with it every memento of their past. All Cora could remember was running through the smoke with Georgia in her arms, holding her rag doll.

After the fire the family was finally broken. Georgia was taken in by a childless couple in New Hampshire, and the boys, young as they were, were put to work. Cora wandered stricken from relative to relative, first in Massachusetts and then to Maine.

Cora finally settled in West Camden with Joe and Marcia Keller, cousins of her mother’s with three sons and no daughters, who took to her as if she were their own. They were generous, kind, and even-tempered. Their seventeenth-century farmhouse was painted a fresh white, with an attached barn and a larger cow barn out back, and apple orchards. Beyond the farmhouse were fields of herbs Marcia gathered for home remedies, and beyond them the sea. The Kellers gave Cora a distance from her past and provided her with a link to her mother’s kin.

But she had to work to earn her keep. She began to practice the hair work she’d learned from her mother. When she shut her eyes, she could still see her mother pulling and combing and weaving the silky strands of hair; she could almost hear the humming sound it made as it was worked into place.

Among her keepsakes was a bright pink flyer. “To the Ladies,” it read, “
CUSTOM HAIR WORK
! On short notice, in the best and neatest manner, in the latest styles and at the cheapest rates.” Below it said that Miss Cora L. Buzzell, formerly of Massachusetts, would be in Lincolnville Centre, Maine, on Monday, September 13, 1886, “For a short time only.” While she lived with the Kellers, she canvassed the surrounding countryside, from the small towns and villages of Warren, Union, Hope, Appleton, Searsmont, and Lincolnville to Camden.

All was not work, however, for among her flyers were tickets for “Miss Buzzell’s Concerts.” One night she met Henry Millay at a dance sponsored by the local grange, where she was chief musician. Henry Tolman Millay was the sixth of seven brothers of a farming family in Union, Maine. Tall, handsome, and broad-shouldered, he was a year younger than Cora, as fair as she was dark, as easygoing as she was intense, and there was never a time when he could not make her laugh.

Henry loved to fish in the ponds that lay like cups of sweet water between the hills surrounding Union. And he played a mean hand of poker. His blond hair was short, his face smooth and wide and open, with a fine mustache and blue eyes that rarely darkened. He had a knack for wearing
his clothes with a nonchalance that distinguished him. He was generous to her: from the beginning he bought Cora presents of books she adored and that he rarely read. He was not uneducated, but he lacked her appetite for self-improvement. Henry Millay was a charmer, and he liked to loaf.

On January 1, 1889, Cora began a diary (adding an “e” for elegance to the end of Buzzell). She was writing to Henry almost every day now; when she was not writing to him, he was likely to visit her on horseback. Marcia Keller made them molasses candy as they sat in the parlor playing High-low-Jack with the Keller boys. On January 9, Henry brought her an engagement ring. Five days later, the diary broke off. Two months after that, on St. Patrick’s Day 1889, they married in the Kellers’ parlor.

They settled at first in an apartment in Rockland, a small city on the coast of Maine. Henry took a job selling men’s clothing and worsteds. Within the year they’d moved into a smart two-family cottage with mahogany sliding doors between the parlor and dining room. In the parlor were Cora’s piano, a smoking set for Henry’s cigars, and an overstuffed chair big enough to hold them both. Cora had hemstitched and cross-stitched linen pillow shams and antimacassars in bright red to adorn every available surface. Henry’s contribution was a set of deer antlers. They both agreed their new place was entirely “D.E.”—damned elegant!

On November 1, 1889, Cora began another diary, this one given to her by Henry. She called it a “journal,” and on the first page she quoted her beloved Tennyson:

Break! break! break!
    On the cold gray stones, O sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
    The thoughts that arise in me.

In her first entry, she mentioned that
The Maine Farmer
had come with one of her poems in it, and that she did not feel very well and was taking iron medicine. From the beginning of her marriage she suffered constantly from those small illnesses, headaches, and fatigue. She recorded in her journal:

I do not enjoy taking it: but will for the sake of health; and to please Henry.

Cora was still troubled by the loss of her family. She yearned for Charlie’s company and fretted over Clem’s welfare at the Todds’. In that stuffy household no one danced or played fan-tan, pitch, or poker, and she knew that Clem, who was not yet eighteen, felt stifled there. Shortly after their move into their new home, they invited her to visit. Henry had to be on
the road during the week, and Cora, who could go along only sometimes, wanted company. By the time Clem arrived, their adored brother Charlie had shipped out on a cargo boat, bound for adventure.

Henry, with no sisters of his own, was suddenly surrounded by women. Clem adored him, and he came to think of her as his own sister. Together he and Cora taught her the reel dances they loved, the Portland and the Boston Fancy. Cora turned into a crackerjack card player. Her only flaw, according to Henry, was that she loved to win and couldn’t help but show it, whereas Henry played with an ease that appeared to be indifference. On weekends friends came to call for cards, or for sing-alongs. Henry’s specialty was a parody of “Down on the Farm.” His thumbs tucked into the armholes of his vest, his feet planted far apart, he would glance slowly around the room, grin, and sing. Clem, who’d come for a week’s visit, stayed with the young couple for eighteen months.