Savage Beauty (5 page)

While Henry was gone, Cora and Clem would visit Marcia and ramble with her along the country roads and through the fields, harvesting herbs and wildflowers. They learned when to pick pennyroyal, tansy, camomile, yarrow, and boneset, and how to dry or soak and steep the great leaves of the mullein plant and the hairy stems of alkanet for their curative properties. They made ointments, decoctions, oils, and syrups carefully and kept them even more carefully. Marcia Keller, having no daughters of her own, took Cora out into the fields in the mornings when the air was clear and taught her all she knew.

Cora remained ambitious for her writing. She had poems in
Judge
and
The Maine Farmer
, and although she was not able to place her stories or poems outside New England, it was not for lack of trying. When she sent her story “Whippoorwill” to
Frank Leslie’s Magazine
in New York, her note of rejection came from Mrs. Leslie herself. She said it was “very pretty and well-written, but on account of its length” they could not take it. That was rejection blunted with praise. Cora kept the letter all her life.

Then, in the summer, she found she was pregnant. She was terrified: “
I was sure I was going to die.” Eventually she and Clem began to make baby clothes and to embroider the soft flannel garments and bedding, but Cora grew restless and found it hard to stay indoors. Local convention almost prohibited pregnant women from being seen. If after the fourth month the mother was startled, it was whispered that the baby was sure to be disfigured for life. Bad news was kept from expectant mothers for fear of its effect. So Cora did not know, until she found a telegram stuffed in Henry’s jacket, that her brother Charlie was in grave condition in New York at St. Vincent’s Hospital.

After shipping out on the
El Monte
while it was loading a cargo of grain in New Orleans, Charlie either had an attack of fever (which is what he said at the time) or was (as he later admitted) drunk. He lay down on a bale of cotton in the hold of the ship and fell asleep. When he awoke, he was trapped. Between the last day of January and the tenth of February, he lay pinned belowdecks; he couldn’t move, and his shouts went unheard. He had given up all thought of being rescued when, suddenly, a light began to grow in the blackness of the hull, “& I could see through the ship as though it was made of clear glass.” He felt free of his body and could see himself from a distance. It was not, he felt sure, delirium or a dream. “I was compelled to accept the fact that I had been in touch with the spirit side of nature,” he later wrote.

He was found unconscious and rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital, to the care of the Sisters of Charity in New York City. Newspapers around the country carried the story of the incredible man who had lived to tell the tale of his imprisonment. The varying accounts of his entrapment said he’d gone nine to ten days without food or water. They said he had died and been reborn.

His family knew no more than that he was working as a stevedore aboard the
El Monte
when, on the fifteenth of February, a Western Union telegram was sent to Henry Millay in care of Spear & May in Rockland:

CHARLES BUSSELL IS WELL ENOUGH TO LEAVE HOSPITAL.

SISTERS OF CHARITY.

When Cora found the telegram in Henry’s pocket, she fainted. Six days later, on February 21, Charlie wrote to them himself: “O Henry you don’t know how I long to see you all again for its something that I had given up all hope of doing but I am feeling all right now and will be at home as soon as I get through with this engagement.… it’s hard to kill yours truly.” To Cora he added a separate note, using her childhood nickname: “My Darling Sister Nell don’t worry about me I’m all right and at work be at home as soon as I get through here.”

But by then Cora had gone into labor. Restlessly pacing the floor, she complained of indigestion and asked Clem to call for Henry’s aunt Lucy, who was a practiced midwife. Henry ran next door to tell their neighbors and raced through the snow to fetch the doctor.

It seemed like hours before they heard a sleigh draw up to the house. When the doctor finally arrived, he told Clem to stay with Cora while he and Henry had a cup of coffee with Aunt Lucy. Clem tried not to show her fear as she passed a wet cloth across her sister’s lips. Meanwhile, Henry and the doctor fell asleep. After ten hours of labor, just before first light
broke, the doctor told Cora to push while Clem and Aunt Lucy climbed onto the bed to hold her legs down. Then, as the moist little head with a thatch of red hair plastered down like wet feathers crowned, the doctor stepped toward the tiny body as if to receive it and made a curious gesture with his hand to wipe something from its face.

A few minutes past six o’clock in the morning of February 22, 1892, exactly as the baby was being born, bells began to peal wildly. For a moment, everyone was startled. The baby reddened and howled. Then they realized that it was George Washington’s birthday as well as hers.

Clem wrote to Charlie three days later, “We have named the little one Edna Vincent Millay. Don’t you think that is pretty? … the Vincent is for the ‘St. Vincent’ Hospital, the one that cared so well for our darling brother. Nell would have called it ‘Vincent’ if it had been a boy.” They called her Vincent anyway.

She was born with a caul, which was why the doctor acted swiftly to slip the thin membrane from her face so that she could breathe. But that caul, considered a good omen by midwives, confirmed their belief that this child was gifted with eloquence and promised a long life of riches and fame.

CHAPTER 3

I
n the spring, when Vincent was a few weeks old, the Millays moved inland to Union, where Henry’s parents still lived. The move was suggested by the senior Millays, but why their suggestion was taken is not clear. There must have been some resistance, at least on Henry’s part, for he had said he would never consent to live on a farm again. His parents offered him a house in the center of town, close to the common. Around the leafy green were the single general store, the livery stable, the Masonic Temple (to which Henry’s brothers belonged but he did not), the common school, and two Congregational churches.

If Rockland was a small city, it was nevertheless a real city, with a certain bustle. There were people on the streets after eight o’clock—there were even sidewalks. Whereas Union, with a population of seventy-seven souls in 1892, was something less than a village. They rented a spacious old white frame house within an easy stroll of the common.

On a sunny day in May, Cora and Clem, with Vincent bundled in Clem’s arms, drove an open Concord buggy the several miles inland to Union.
They ambled along the dirt road, following it as it wound past the railroad tracks away from the coast toward the fresh green meadows in the west that marked Union. A freight train whistled as it sped by. Their mare snorted in fear and began to shimmy in the braces of her harness. Cora stood, bracing her feet against the buckboard, to gain better leverage as the skittish horse tossed her head and began to prance. Clem clasped the baby closer. Suddenly the mare reared. Cora licked the whip down across her rump as she skittered and reared again. She whipped her once, twice, and the mare bolted. Cora was thrown back into her seat, but she held fast to the reins and within moments brought the horse under control. It had been a close call, and each of the sisters, fraught with the memory of their mother’s fatal accident, was tearful and trembling when they reached Union. History, Henry told them blandly as he lifted each down from the buggy, does not repeat itself. Vincent slept soundly throughout the entire drive.

They were settling into their new home when Charlie came to visit. He had been appearing at the Globe Museum down on the Bowery in New York City, where he was advertised as “The Adventurer and Evangelist”:

Chas. A. Buzzell The New Orleans Stowaway, will relate his Awful Experiences while on board the Steamer El Monte for nine days and nights without food or water!

He swore he’d seen the spirit side of nature firsthand.

Charlie was still recuperating from his devastating entrapment, and Cora and Henry wanted him to stay with them until he had fully recovered. Now he, too, joined their family—it was a band of Buzzells, they joked among themselves. That summer and fall, Charlie and Cora, who had hundreds of songs by heart, sang together at the outdoor fairs—“Bold Jack Donahue,” “The Bride’s Lament,” and “These Hard Times.” Vincent would be placed in a hammock hung from the lowest branch of a tree in their yard, where she would croon or doze while they sang.

The Millays were a French Huguenot family who had come to America just before the Revolution from the north of Ireland, where they’d changed their name from Millais, or perhaps Millet, to Millay. William King Millay, Henry’s father, had married a black-eyed dot of a woman named Mary Jane Pease and bought a farm in Union, where they settled down to raise a family of seven sons to pick the rocks out of the fields and pile them into the walls that still surround their pastureland. “That,” Cora guessed, “is why Henry preferred not to farm.” Nevertheless, the Millays
raised tons of blueberries, and from Millay Hill on a clear day looking west you could see the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Due east lay the Atlantic.

William Millay was a converted Methodist and, Cora remembered, “as hard-shelled as any Baptist that ever braved the water.” Although he had enjoyed a glass in his youth and knew how to deal a deck of cards, “He never took another drink, was a solid and esteemed member of the church he joined at Union.” Henry was nothing like his father; neither he nor Cora joined the church, and what he liked best was to fish. “I can remember when he rowed me around some of the ponds in Union,” Cora wrote, “while I gathered armfuls of water-lilies.” It wasn’t much fun to go fishing with him because he wouldn’t let her talk, but she remembered all her life the time he took her with him to his favorite fishing hole “and put me far enough away from him not to disturb his sport, and I caught the biggest trout of the morning.” She said that in all fairness he was as pleased as she was, “though he did say, as he always did on the rare occasions when I won from him at cards, that it was beginner’s luck.” They were so different “that any crank on Eugenics would have said we were perfectly mated for the propagation of a family.”

Cora wrote a poem for her firstborn and called it “My Comforter,” a “Song to Vincent alone because she was all I had!”

Sometimes, when the day is dreary
  Filled with dismal wind and rain,
  Sometimes when the frame is weary,
  Filled with nervous ache and pain;
Then, across Earth’s darkest shadows,
  Comes Life’s dearest sweetest bliss
As with sweet red lips uplifted,
Baby whispers: “Onts a tiss.”

Sometimes when no sun is shining,
  And my head is bowed with grief

Someone comes on weak feet toddling,
  Someone gives my sleeve a tug,
And with eyes and arms uplifted,
Baby whispers: “Onts a hug!”

What is striking about the poem is not only that the mother admits to emotional bad weather so early in her marriage but that the baby, not her husband, provides what comfort she needs.

Three days after Christmas 1893, their second daughter, Norma Lounnella Millay, was born, taking her mother’s middle name for her own. She was as fair as her father and very like him, her mother always told her—except that Norma could sing before she could talk, while Henry couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

When the weather turned warm again, Cora took her two daughters to Newburyport for a visit. The girls were put to nap in an upstairs bedroom while the grown-ups went downstairs to talk. Before long they noticed the sound of racing feet, and Cora called up to Vincent, “Are you in bed, darling?” to which she answered, all too quickly, “Yes, Mamma.”

There was a horrible noise, and although no one could quite place what sort of sound it was, it sent a mother and three aunts flying upstairs. Facing them as they entered the room was the large bay window, into which Aunt Sue had placed an immense geranium plant. Now it was stripped of leaves, a trail of which led to Vincent, who sat astride two pillows, innocently humming and not looking at her mother. Norma was nowhere to be seen. Soon the throne of pillows began to heave and wobble. Cora raced to lift Vincent from the pillows, under which lay Norma, her mouth stuffed with geranium leaves. It became a family story—for soon the little girls were inseparable.

Henry did not seem able to keep work, although he remained well enough liked in Union to have been appointed its superintendent of schools during 1896 and 1897. But he wasn’t so good about supporting his wife and children. The Millays’ house was sold out from under them, and a neighbor across the street made room for them in one side of her house. Cora gave music lessons to help pay the meat bill.

Kathleen Kalloch Millay, their third daughter, was born on May 19, 1896. Cora had had three children in four years. Just three weeks shy of her thirty-third birthday, precisely the age her mother had been when she had fled from their father, Cora noted in her diary, “Henry not there when I am taken sick.… The doctor is there long before Henry is. Mr. Gales comes to Union at about this time.”

From the moment of his arrival in town shortly after Kathleen’s birth, there is more of Mr. Gales, the minister at the Congregational church, in Cora’s new diary than there is of Henry. Her small dark red leather notebook, the first diary she’d begun since 1890, the year after her marriage, was all about the weather and the Reverend Mr. Gales.

Sat. May 22.… Mr. Gales in just as we were eating dinner. Our dinner was real late. He was on his wheel and had a cap on, and looked real cute and boyish and happy.