Savage Beauty (46 page)

Then the she who rages becomes the I who agonizes at this violation of her daughter:

He slinks like a whipped cur when he sees me. He acts as if he had shit in his breeches, or pooped at meetin’, as my good wholesome New England ancestors would have said. Of course he knows how I feel toward him. He has even acknowledged that he does not blame me, the slithering whelp! The spineless jelly-fish! But how anyone, favored of a goddess could slink from the gaze of an ordinary mortal, I cannot see. He should be so uplifted by her favors that he should transcend me and my attitudes, and be able to laugh in my face. I could like him more, or rather, dislike him less if he did, for I could have some respect for his taste.… She has stooped infinitely toward him, and she has not in any way raised him by it, not one atom.

She loses control completely; her physical revulsion is relentless:

She knows he makes me ill near to death—I can see his hands on her sweet flesh—when she is with him she is not even a woman—she has no right to consent—she cannot be in her right mind—she is a child being violated! O Christ! Why am I her mother! Why must I, of all the world, wish to spare her? Why am I so near that I must know? And I cannot be away from her and live, and if I stay I shall die. When he is with her my heart is hurt physically, it aches like a sore, and cries out against this outrage to my womb, and the nine months I waited for her. I would kill him if I had the courage.…

My God! Why is she so child-like! With all the appeal to me of a little girl, adolescent—and why is she so lustful? … I wonder if his hands are profaning her child-like structure now.… It is as if I were in the room. She does not always lock her door—I have blundered in there more than once and surprised her in his embrace—God damn his soul! … My baby! If I had let myself go freely, might it not have been better for her now? O Christ! Is she bearing what I had not the courage to bear, openly and unashamed? What my mother had not the courage to proclaim from the housetops, the burden of my premature birth—and God! How do I know what my grandmother did! And what she wanted to do and dared not. And he—is he but an instrument to work this out? Am I—my mother—her mother—her mother—to blame for him? To save her reason? Her balance—to prolong her marvellous gifts—Must it be? Let me be honest—I wonder if he brings back to me some of my own indiscretions—I wonder if she can remember, could she not picture some no more attractive who were allowed to fondle me—when she may have known—How do I know that some of the lovers I had hanging about me in the days of my breaking loose, and, before the re-adjustment had given me new balance—were not even more repugnant to her virgin young soul? How do I know? Does she remember? Is she bigger, and more generous than I am? Stumbling along, alert, alive never half satisfied, they may have seemed ugly quagmire, the man-holes I just skimmed over—I wonder if the real difference between us is that the added generation has given her a courage I never had, to be honest, even with myself—and all my feelings, temptations, appetites denied or gratified might not be declared to them—my babies—
Now
they need keep nothing from me—and I had no one who could help me, and understand.

After this remarkable outpouring, in which Cora tries to find some common ground for reconciliation among her own generation, her mother’s, and her daughters’, she jams back to her fury against this man, unabated: “I sent word to him to keep out of my way, and he had self-preservation enough to do it. The snake-headed fish.”

This is peculiar, even perverse. But the very excessiveness of Cora’s tirade reveals how damaged, how unbalanced their relationship has become.

Within two days, all was cast in a different light. On June 30, 1922, Cora wrote Norma, “Sefe … is lying down as she is very tired.… We have our tickets for London for Monday noon, July 3rd.… We expected to have been there some time ago, but several things have held us here.”

Millay was not simply tired or ill, she was pregnant. In less than a week she fled France with her mother for England. Daubigny—whatever Edna may have hoped for from him—remained in Paris.

2

As Edna and Cora crossed the Channel, they made plans to meet Dwight Townsend and her small daughter in London. Tess Root, Dwight remembered, would follow. “
The weather had been cold and rainy.… The Millays were both tired and sick; we could not wait to get to the country.”

They arrived in a downpour, “but after lunch the sun came out and
there was Shillingstone, exactly what we were looking for. A winding, unpaved street, a few shops and small houses, many with thatched roofs. The downs around the town reached up to the sky.”

They were driven across the fields in a tiny roadster to Shillingstone the following morning. “We packed in and Mrs. Millay sat up on the back of the rumble seat. We drove all day through south Dorset towns and the children shrieked at that witch-like figure sitting up there, her cropped gray hair blowing wildly.”

Tess Root and Dwight Townsend found a house that delighted them, with a garden and a fireplace and a piano. “And so we were settled in the perfect spot. Edna found a ‘hay shed’ at the foot of the downs and rented it to work in. Afternoons she came for tea or we walked up the downs. She and I had bicycles and rode and we talked by the fire, all the evening.” Now that they’d spent time together, Dwight found Edna even more astonishing than she had in Paris; “she had Latin poetry by heart, Shakespeare and a great deal of modern poetry at her fingertips.”

But in spite of the relaxed living in Shillingstone, Edna was not well. She was worried about finances and unhappy with her publisher. She had accepted a $500 advance for a novel which she was quite sure she would never write.

“
I have been sick as a dog for months,” Edna wrote to Edmund Wilson,

and so entirely convinced of the elaborate uselessness of everything, that there was nothing in the situation to get dramatic about and make a poem of, even. But little by little now I am getting back my health.…

Bunny, is it only when you’re tight that you want to be friends with me? I suppose so. And I don’t complain. I have no rights in you. But I do solemnly offer this pious pagan prayer: that one of these days you’ll become a dirty inveterate souse and bully your wife and beat your kids and kick your dog, and think of me with steadfast love.

Having heard of John Bishop’s wedding from “ye fatte Bunnye,” she sent Wilson these celebratory Chaucerian lines, ironic but no less true:

The poet synges and spylls abroad hiss breth
In prayse of prettye friends brought lowe by dethe;
Ah, me!—to lose a friend bye lyfe, I gesse,
Holds lesse of songs and more of bitternesse!

Prithee, in future houres, cher Bunnye,
Think on thy distant friend withe charytee,
That hath of thee, I sware bye the swete sonne,
No evyll thought, but many a wystful onne.

Edna told Norma she was getting better, but that she had been very sick. “
Mother is wonderful,” she wrote. “Every day we go for a long walk, either climb one of the downs or walk to some other little village and back.” She had become once more her child.

Mother and I have dandelion greens all the time. And you’d die at mother. This is what she cooked one day all in a pot together and served up to be et: dandelions, mustard, dock, pig-weed, clover, nettles and thistles. I put the clover in myself, making fun of her for cooking nettles and thistles. Some of the neighbors had told her nettles were good, boiling takes out all the sting … and the kind of thistle she gathers is called milk-thistle, it’s much gentler than the other kind, but that’s not saying much.

Edna didn’t tell Norma what was truly at stake in her long walks, her rides on horseback, her feasts of “greens” that Cora searched for and brewed for their supper: Cora had found
Culpeper’s
, a seventeenth-century herbal guide, in Dorset, from which she took pages and pages of extraordinary notes: “
Willow Tree … under the dominion of the moon. Leaves, bark and seed, used to staunch bleeding of wounds … to stay vomiting—Leaves bruised and boiled in wine
stayeth the heat of lust in man or woman
,” Cora underlined, “and quite
extinguisheth it, if it be long used
. ” Henbane, or caraway, under the influence of Mercury, all-heal and heart trefoil, hedge hyssop, and gentian, the leaves of which, either steeped in wine or bruised, were, “(
not to be
given to women with child).”

Cora was reading carefully and with a clear purpose, listing hundreds of herbs and flowers and their healing medicinal properties, searching for something—jotting down which time of year was best for brewing their seeds or roots, bark or blooms, under what signs, planets, and conditions they were most useful. The herb alkanet is mentioned again and again. In her notes,
Culpeper’s Complete Herbal
carried this description:

It hath a great and thick root of a reddish colour; long, narrow, hairy leaves, green like the leaves of bugloss, which lie very thick upon the ground; the stalks rise up compassed round about, thick with leaves.… It is a herb under the dominion of Venus, and indeed one of her darlings.… If you apply the herb to the privities, it draws forth the dead child.

Alkanet was the abortive Cora was searching for. Once she found it in flower in July, she was able to use it to cause Vincent to miscarry in the first few weeks of her pregnancy. Her mother, in other words, country-wise nurse that she’d been, aborted her own daughter.

There is a snapshot of Vincent from that time, standing in a wide meadow, eating an apple. Her hair is bobbed, curly, thick, and wild in the wind coming up from the downs. She wears the same striped jacket she wore in Woodstock, except this time the jacket will not close in front.

“
I cannot say that she had a miscarriage in Dorset,” Dwight Townsend says slowly, recalling events that took place half a century ago. “I cannot say that she did not. Edna and I would talk in the evening in front of the fire in Shillingstone. She would tell me more or less why she was promiscuous. I was so fond of her. And I tried to make sense of her, of it—this quality—of what she was saying. But it didn’t make any sense to me.

“I had never had a lover. Oh, yes, I had married. I had a child. But I had never had an affair. And it seemed, it just seemed to me, that is Edna—I just felt as if this kind of life produced such an entrancing person.… she tried to give me instructions. Once I remember her saying, ‘When a man looks at you you simply look back. Or ask him for something, for a match.’ And I said, ‘Edna, men don’t ask me for a match or for the time. And if I am going to the post office for a stamp, I come home with one. I am not met by a man.’ I did not have whatever it takes, whatever it is to arrest men. But she did. Oh, yes. She did! And could. And did!”

“
Norma.”

“Yes, darling?”

“The envelope you showed me, the one your mother marked with ‘Shillingston/the fits of the mother,’ with all those tiny pages of tissue-paper notes about herbs and witchcraft—that’s from
Culpeper
, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“I asked you whether or not Vincent told you she had an abortion in Dorset.”

“She didn’t tell me. Mother did. Vincent drank a potion Mother had concocted and walked and walked and walked. Later Vincent said, ‘How did you know?’

“ ‘Mother told me,’ I said. Vincent seemed surprised. ‘Mother told you?’

“Well, sure. Mother and I were pals.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“That’s all I know. Oh, yes, and she said the Frenchman looked like our father.”