Savage Beauty (49 page)

“I went up to the bed and threw myself on it. Suddenly everything cleared. What am I doing? You don’t
have
to see her.—If she’s happy. You love her enough. Then he came up, put his arms around me, and said he was sorry. He told me, ‘She made me come up. She’s never scolded me before,’ he said.”

Norma said pensively, “You know, we’d written these things together—‘Sentimental Solon’ for
Ainslee’s
, and ‘The Seventh Stair’—But it
had
been up to her, financially. Vincent was responsible.”

On Tuesday, July 17, Vincent and Eugen were in New York consulting with her doctors, who now insisted she enter the hospital the next day. The operation was scheduled for Thursday. Eugen wrote Arthur and Gladys urgently from the city: “We get married tomorrow morning at 12 at Croton.… You cannot be there?” Then he dashed off “God bless us all” as they raced back to Croton to prepare.

July 18, 1923, was a brilliantly sunny, hot summer day. In a photograph, Vincent, in a dark dress, is standing in the sun, looking down. She is clearly dazed and ill, her thin arm through Eugen’s, leaning into him, her head barely touching the top of his shoulder. Strapping, beaming, and anxious, with a cigarette in his hand, he seems almost to be holding her up. Norma was Vincent’s maid of honor, and Jan, Eugen’s brother, was his best man. Charlie was there, as well as Arthur and Gladys and Floyd Dell, who took the only snapshots of the wedding. It was a hastily assembled gathering of brothers and sisters and—with the exception of Gladys and the justice of the peace—lovers. Norma remembered that at the last minute she took mosquito netting from around the porch, and “I made her a lovely veil and train from it. Then we all stood up outside on the lawn before a great big house. And they married.”

Standing on the broad, grassy lawn behind Boardman Robinson’s house on Mt. Airy Road, Eugen slipped a ring on Edna’s finger. Someone placed a single red rose behind her right ear. “Then they got right in Gene’s Mercer and left for New York and the hospital. The point being that the only way Gene could be with her was by being married to her.”

Five afternoon New York newspapers covered the story of her marriage, and three put it on their front pages.

“Edna Millay Goes Under Knife”
“Famous Love Lyricist Belies Her Own Philosophy by Marrying”
      “Honeymooning Alone in Hospital”
    “Poetess Bride to Go Under Knife”

The newspapers stressed three things about her: that she’d married a “Wealthy New York Importer”; that she’d been successfully operated on for appendicitis at New York Hospital on West Sixteenth Street; and that her husband was “Considerably Older than Bride.”

Just before she was operated on, Arthur came to see her, and she said, “
If I die now, I shall be immortal.”

The day after Eugen knew she’d survived the operation, he wired his mother in Holland:
“MARRIED YESTERDAY EDNA ST VINCENT MILLAY GIVE ME YR BLESSING.”

Vincent’s first letter was to her own “
Dearest Mummie,” and Eugen wrote it for her “because though I’m getting big & strong, I’m still very lazy and do very little cooking, scrubbing, writing and other dirty chores.”

It was just the sort of letter to reassure Cora. She described her scar as a “transverse incision directly parallel with my waist line, about 7 inches long, above and an inch to the left and about 6 inches to the right of my celestial belly-button.” It would be, when she healed, scarcely visible. “So I can still be an oriental tummy-dancer, if I like and get you and me a lot of shekles in our respective old ages.” Eugen, she noted, was having trouble spelling. “That is what occurs when a plain business man marries a literary lady of colorful vocabulary and insubordinate intestines.” She kept up her banter: “Well I’m happily married to a kind and thoughtful man, a little bit slow in the head but all the steadier for that … (The hussy! don’t believe her. E.B.)”

She said she’d close now that Eugen was beginning to call her names. She signed herself for the first time Edna St. Vincent Millay Boissevain. But she couldn’t resist adding to her mother, “I hasten to sign myself as ever your devoted son,
Sefus
.”

She had not been operated on simply for appendicitis. Four days after her operation, Norma wrote to Cora to explain: “
They not only removed her appendix but straightened a prenatal twist in the intestine.… The intestine at this place near the appendix had … twisted and grown
together in one place—or grown to the appendix, I don’t know which—but it was straightened and fixed.”

Cora had asked “Two sweet questions about Gene,” which Norma now hastened to answer:

Well—he is an importer of sugar and a speculator or broker of same. He has a business of which he is the name and head—importing business. If he goes to the office once in a while—this is a joke he is with Edna so much—he will be able to support our Ed St. Bincent in the manner to which she is not accustomed but which she damned well deserves. He is quoted in all the papers stories of this marriage as “a wealthy Dutch importer” but that, between us, isn’t true—he has had several fortunes in his life and will doubtless make another, but he has enough to do anything they will want to do, keep a maid and a couple of cars (he just paid $600 to have the Mercer overhauled) and travel or buy a country place etc.
And
I
think
be able to pay the hospital and surgical expenses for his wife—which will be no mean item, my dear. This information is for you—he can pass as a “wealthy importer” if you want him to, I guess. His name is pronounced Bois-se-vain and the Bois is the French word for woods and is pronounced like bwa.… accent on the first syllable. It is a French name anyway but really everybody says it as “bwa-se-vain” so you had better too. Now you can say it over many times and get in practise. Haven’t you a cat you can name for Gene or something you can address once in a while?

It was a charming letter and certainly belied whatever tension had existed between Norma and Eugen just before the marriage. Cora was so relieved she immediately wrote to her sister Susie, repeating to her exactly how to pronounce her new son-in-law’s last name and adding that Vincent not only had a private room and two private nurses but “
a beautiful car, a big Mercer Gene gave her.”

Within a month of her operation Edna was recuperating back in Croton, where Tess Root Adams sent her a bouquet of wildflowers.

Tess, darling,—

No, they were not withered & I did not laugh,—all my childhood is in those bayberry bushes, & queen-of-the-meadow, or maybe you called it hardhack, & rose-hips. And cranberries—I remember a swamp of them that made a short-cut to the railroad station when I was seven. It was down across that swamp my father went, when my mother told him to go & not come back.

(Or maybe she said he might come back if he would do better—but who ever does better?)

It’s striking that at the moment of her own marriage, what she remembered was her parents’ failure.

CHAPTER 20

He is forty-three years old but it isn’t necessary for you to say anything more than he is “around forty.” He acts like a kid and is really marvelous looking. Handsome in a distinguished way with a beautiful smile. He is far from white—a dark tan where he has worked the garden in a batik cloth only about his loins has seen to that. He is the only man in whom Edna has ever been interested who will stand a show of making her a bully good husband.

—Norma Millay to Cora Millay, c. July 1923

E
ugen, drawn by Vincent’s fragile loveliness as she regained her health, photographed her again and again during those first few weeks of her recovery. She lay back against soft pillows, sunk indolently into a chaise longue on the sunny porch of his Croton house, her abundant hair curled fetchingly away from her cheekbones, her long slim arm outstretched as cigarette smoke played around her lips. The silk kimono Arthur had given her fell away from her breasts as she posed in the garden. In another snapshot, perhaps taken by Arthur, she looks grave and utterly beautiful as she poses against a batik throw. But in early October she was still weak enough for Arthur to have to help her correct proofs for her book
The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems
, which her new publisher, Harper & Brothers, would publish at the end of November.

Cora, who had remained in Maine during the entire period of Vincent’s marriage, operation, and recovery, was desperately anxious to see her. “
Darling Mummie,” Vincent wrote, “Just a little tiny note to tell you that I love you.—Sweetheart, how are you? … Write me about yourself. I have so many things to talk about with you.…—I can’t write much, because it still tires me, but I can love you just as much as ever, sick of well.” Her little spelling slip was telling, for Edna Millay never made spelling mistakes.

That fall Eugen found a tiny three-story brick house in Greenwich Village at 75½ Bedford Street, which he rented for a year and ten months at $200 a month. It was a princely sum to a young woman who earlier in the year was deeply in debt and staying with friends to economize. Then they managed a trip to Camden, where Edna repaid all her family’s debts. She wrote to Cora, telling her the enclosed $75 was to tide her over until she could visit them in New York.

It is
wonderful
to have the Camden bills paid,—but of course it has made quite a hole in my bank account, which I must get busy now & fill. Of course my lecture trip in January & February will do wonders for me. I shall clear nearly two thousand dollars, which will come in very handy.… I suppose it is a mean pride in me, but oh, I wish I could have done this before I got married!—because of course everybody thinks it is my rich husband who has done it, when in fact it is really I myself, every cent of it, with money that I made by writing,—nearly a thousand dollars, in all, since you went to Camden.

Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.

But of course it mattered enormously—enough that Edna forgot to send her mother the money she said she’d put in the letter. One month later she told her, “
Of
course
I want you to come!—I am getting pretty anxious to see you again, as a matter of fact, old sweetie.—And you
must
be here for Christmas.—This time I am enclosing the enclosure.—What a silly thing to have done!”

After the New Year they were settled enough to see people. She wrote to Edmund Wilson, teasing him:

Am I a swine?—Oh, but such a little one!—Such an elegant and distinguished one!—So pink & white! A truffle-sniffer, not a trough-wallower!

I love you just as ever. I would go driving with you in Central Park in an open Victoria in a howling blizzard in a muslin frock.

But, since there is so little snow-fall as yet, won’t you come to see me here instead—at 4 o’clock next Monday?

I will offer you a cigarette, just to be playful; and then I will give you a fine, sound, rosy-cheeked apple,—because my heart is really in the right place.

Not many women ever had played him so lightly, or ever would. Then she said, “Do come, Bunny, or suggest some other time. Wire me. Soon I shall depart this life or leave for Pittsburgh & points west on a reading-tour. I want to see you before I go. Let not the light tone of this communication put you off. I do want to see you.”

Immediately after seeing her, he wrote to John Bishop about it:

I saw Edna the other day for the first time since her marriage.… The operation she had during the summer on her intestines—for congenital stoppages—was apparently really rather serious and she doesn’t look terribly well yet. I found her drinking gin and reading William Morris on the top floor of her house, all alone and with really an air of having allowed herself at last to be attended to and put away and forbidden to see people. Her husband takes good care of her and her lousy rout of followers has been banished.—She is calmer than she used to be—and I really felt for a moment as if I were visiting a sort of voluntary prisoner who had crept away and given herself up to other people’s kindness.—Then she told me she was about to start on a month’s reading tour which, so far as I can find out, is to take in all the important cities east of Chicago! And she is going all alone. “I must keep clear of the people I know,” she said, “in the cities that I visit”—but—! She can never be caged for long, I know—never, never.… Her husband came in before I left. He seemed a very nice honest fellow—he is a Dutch importer, you know, a little older than she and not, I think, overwhelmingly clever. She was at pains to tell me, as if she were on the defensive at having married a businessman, how irresponsible he really was—“just like me”—but I am sure he is the steadiest importer in the world.—We are planning a grand party for her and you and me, detached from our respective husbands and wives, when you come back.—She left today on her tour.