Savage Beauty (54 page)

There were, of course, changes he suggested that she thought were grand, and at the close of this long letter she saluted their mutual effort: “Here … is to the great day when we listen to the opening bars of
IT
.” She signed it
LOVE
.

On April 14, she wired Deems:

KINGS MESSENGER ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE FOR THIS REASON THE WORD MESSENGER WAS BROUGHT INTO ENGLISH BYTHE NORMANS AND I AM WRITING MY ENTIRE LIBRETTO IN ANGLOSAXON THAT IS TO SAY THERE IS NOT A WORD IN THE LIBRETTO WHICH WAS NOT KNOWN IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER IN ENGLISH A THOUSAND YEARS AGO. I MEANT TO SPRING THIS ON YOU LATER AND TO KEEP IT SECRET FROM EVERYBODY ELSE UNTIL THEY FOUND OUT FOR THEMSELVES IF EVER. IF YOU MUST TELL METROPOLITAN BEG THEM TO KEEP IT SECRET. METROPOLITAN CAN CHOOSE BETWEEN SAXONS AND KINGS HENCHMAN.

By the end of May, she was working on Act III. But she’d have to send it to him “in small doses like this. My head is terrible, and has been for weeks. After I work for a while it gets crazy.” On June 10, Eugen wrote, sending four more pages by special delivery, telling Deems they were coming to town the next day “
and you will be able to talk it over. Don’t be nervous. She won’t take much of your time, although she is coming over expressly to see you.” She was desperately trying to keep the acts to less than forty minutes.

They met in New York, and Deems’s wife, Mary Kennedy, remembered her own irritation at being stuck in the kitchen making steak, trying to overhear their conversation rather than being a part of it: “
I remember that when she was ill—and this was during the precise period when she was to be writing the libretto—she would see us one at a time. First Deems and then me. But once when I was in the room alone, she said, ‘Mary, Deems isn’t going to wait for me to do it.’ And I reassured her that he would, and of course he did.”

2

“
Vincent’s illness,” Cora declared to a friend, “has been the first and almost only thing in my mind, that, and what I might be able to do towards making her comfortable here this winter, and towards getting her well.” It was February, and she had been living with them since November. Her devotion coupled with or even contrasted to Eugen’s must have been trying. For there is always in a marriage that sense of allegiance to a parent that needs to alter as the couple’s attachment to each other strengthens.

On Saturday, March 27, Cora received three letters: Abbie Evans, Vincent’s girlhood friend from Camden, invited her to Philadelphia for Easter; Kathleen’s first novel,
The Wayfarer
, had been accepted for publication and would be out in the fall; and Kathleen’s husband, Howard Young, had written to tell her that Norma had been fired from his play
Not Herbert
.

That night, after a dinner that she had prepared for their friends, the talk drifted into a religious discussion. “
Ugin and I got into an unpleasant wrangle,” Cora wrote in her diary,

which closed with his going to bed angry with me, and I with him. I had a talk with Vincent. She thinks I am all tired out, and of course I am. I am lighter in weight than I ever was since I was a child, I do not weigh as much as Vincent does—only 99 dressed—and she thinks I must accept Abbie’s invitation and go and have a change, and come back for a little visit before I go to Maine this spring.

The next day was no better: “
Unpleasant here today, Vincent did not come down to dinner, and Ugin had a rather stilted time of it, but he talked about my trip, insisting that I take it.” In less than a week, she was in New York.

In New Mexico, Arthur Ficke was becoming a proficient amateur photographer. He was especially fond of nude shots. It was to one of these photographs that Eugen referred in his letter of March 20:

We just received that beautiful picture Artie sent us. It is beautiful. No bloody amateur ever made, developed and printed that.… I’m going to send you these films I took of Edna: that is I will send them to you as soon as I find them. I put them away in a safe place where nobody could get them, but at the time I remember I did hope that I would be able to get them. I’m still looking for them and as soon as I catch them or trap them I will shoot them to you. In the mean time I’m sending you some films which we took the other day.… I’m sorry to say that there are hardly any of Edna, but she did not feel like being taken, and you know what girls are.

Edna, he said, was getting stronger,

but is as sick as ever, if you know what I mean. Did I tell you that we are getting a chiropractor here three times a week? I got him some snow-shoes, and taught him how to use them, and now he struggles here three times a week. He has not done any harm so far. We are going to try him another month, and if he does not make her worse we are going to give him the snow-shoes.

When Arthur continued to send his nude photographs, some of Gladys, Eugen assured him that they were safe at Steepletop. His own regret was that he couldn’t

take any pictures of poor little suffering Vincent, with her head in her hands. Besides, we have been handicapped by not being alone at Steeple-top, but having mother Millay with us all that time. I want to take them awfully badly. But it is difficult to be naked and abandoned with parents in the offing.

At last the opera was finished, except for revisions, and Eugen and Edna fled to Maine, to Cora’s cottage, for the month of August. But Edna’s condition persisted. After her stint with their snowshoeing chiropractor, Eugen wrote Arthur:

Vincie went on strict diet of linseed and two enemas a day. This lasted also for two months. We are now … motoring to Augusta, Maine, State hospital three times a week, over 120 miles of the most God forsaken roads that ever were conceived by the brain of man … for Xraying and Ultra violet raying of the back, front and toncils. Her head-aches are the same and her eyes are the same, and Abie’s Irish Rose is still running.

“
Dear, dear,” Arthur wrote his “Darling Kids,”

I wonder why our darling Vincie is having so frightfully prolonged a siege of eyes and head and everything! You will think I am crazy—but are you sure the trouble isn’t something with the mind rather than the body? Are you sure that psychoanalysis could do nothing for you? Maybe I’m wrong: I just wondered.

There is no record of any response to his suggestion.

Three weeks later Arthur wired “Eugene Millay”:

 … COME AND SEE YOUR LITTLE FRIENDS FOR A FEW WEEKS FREE BOARD AND RAILROAD FARE AND NATIVE BREW AND ARGUMENTS.

ARTHUR BROWN

Although Vincent had never been in the Southwest, her first order of business on arrival in Santa Fe was to ready the manuscript of
The King’s Henchman
(which was slightly different from the libretto) for Harper & Brothers. “It has been a terrible job, but it’s done now,” she wrote in December 1926. “All that’s left to do is a few odd jobs such as writing a synopsis for the front of the printed libretto, & correcting proof … dirty chores, but nothing more.” Then she was free to explore. Arthur was too ill to go with them, but Gladys was game. They took packhorses into the Grand Canyon, camping on the outer rim, and hired a boxy Ford to motor to the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert; later they went to an Indian dance ceremony in Zuni.

“
If we have good luck we shall have some corking photographs to show you when we get back,” she wrote Cora. They would also have some extraordinary photographs that they did not intend to show anyone, least of all Cora. The nude shots were not lascivious; among them were some of the loveliest photographs ever taken of Edna. In one, she is standing just inside the doorway of Arthur’s adobe house, wearing only prettily beaded slippers. Her hair is falling forward, and she is lifting a cocktail to her lips. Two others have a hilarious air: In the first, she is sitting with Arthur, reading at a small table and wearing a dark frock with white collar and cuffs. In the next, they keep precisely the same posture and expressions while reading, except this time they are both completely naked.

Once they returned to Steepletop, however, the climate for taking photographs
changed drastically, and Eugen wrote Arthur in a panic. Eugen’s nephew, who had been minding the house in their absence, had forced the lock on Vincent’s dressing table, inside of which was

a box containing all the photos of Gladdie.

Will you please destroy at once all the films containing Vincent. Also all your prints excepting 3 or 4 which you really consider artistic masterpieces. Otherwise we are going crazy. We suspect you of being a filmophile.

We are very happy that you have taken up wood-carving.… Please don’t send any more in letters. Often we get our mail on the way to Chatham and leave it in the car when we go shopping. Those photos become a constant care to us. We understand that you are long since beyond good and evil. You are “Der reine Thor” and cannot understand our earthbound anxieties! Nevertheless we beseech you to do as we request and write us swearing that you have done so.

3

The opening of
The King’s Henchman
was set for February 17. “
You will have to be in New York for that, darling,” Vincent wrote her mother. “It will be a great night.—Gene & I shall be staying with Florence.
^*
 … You’d better write & ask Normie if they can put you up.—There will be at least four performances, the 17th, the 28th, & two later.—But of course you’ll want to be there for the premiere.” At the end of her letter she made one thing clear:

I shan’t be able to give anybody free passes to
The Henchman
, of course.—I’ll be lucky if I get one for myself. But you’re rich, you’ve got lots of money, & in February you’ll have lots more; you can buy yourself a seat.—(Poor old sing, everybody ’fusin’ her, & makin’ jokes an’ everythin’)—Florence wanted to get a box & have Gene & me & one or two others, but we refused flat—We are going off & sit some place all by ourselves—unless for some reason it seems better to be with Deems & Mary.—You go with Kay & Howard, or Norma & Charlie—see?—You write & ask ’em about it now. I’ll make you a present of the ticket, if they’ll take care of you, tell ’em.

Lots of love, mummie. If anybody’s being mean to you, you tell me. (This is just a joke. I’m not hitting at anybody.)

Vincent

Only Kathleen didn’t find much humor in any of this. “
Mother Darling—” she wrote,

Here’s the check for thirty five from Howard and me—I telephoned Norma today, as she had never spoken of the letter I sent a month ago when I also wrote Edna about the first of the month idea—and she said she had sent twenty five before that when you wrote her.—So I take it they paid no attention to the first of the month or any other time during the month simply because they had sent twenty five in December sometime.

It wasn’t fair, Kathleen said, because Charlie and Norma were “both earning good money now—there is no reason for them not doing it.” Was this friction only about money, or was it cloaking more complex differences surfacing among the sisters?

As for the ticket, dear, Norma intends to go to the opening of Edna’s opera and so I am sending Edna’s check to her—for Howard and I are having to watch our step very closely now— … so we may not go to the opening when prices are high, but wait for the next performance—or we may go top balcony—where you wouldn’t want to be.

Edna was desperate for news about the opera. “
The first rehearsal must have been yesterday,” she wrote Deems. “I don’t suppose you were present—yes?—no?—If you were, & don’t dish me the dirt, I’ll be mad at you.”

On Thursday evening, February 17, 1927, at eight o’clock, the heavy golden silk curtain swayed and then rose on the first act of
The King’s Henchman
at the Metropolitan Opera House. The throb of a harp played the song of the harper she had written in January the year before:

 … Wild as the white waves
Rushing and roaring, Heaving the wrack
High up the headland; Hoarse as the howling
Winds of the winter, When the lean wolves
Harry the hindmost, horseman and horse,
Toppled and tumbled.…

The story, set in tenth-century England, was based on a tale from the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. It was, in fact, very like
The Lamp and the Bell
, except that this time the bond was between two men and not between stepsisters. The king, who is a widower, has sent his dearest friend and foster brother,
Aethelwold, in his stead to meet the lovely Aelfrida, whom he wishes to make his queen, provided she is as beautiful as word has it. Aethelwold, who has never been in love, says he is unfit to make such a judgment. In the first act the two men pledge their troth of friendship in an ancient Saxon rite with wine “In the cup of the Romsey nuns.” And together they sing their song pledging friendship until death: