Savage Beauty (61 page)

But what illness was she recovering from? In the one letter she wrote in her own hand that winter, her script was peculiarly slanted; it tipped severely downward to the right and almost ran off the page. She wrote in pencil, whereas she usually wrote in ink. Her margins were wildly uneven.

On January 30, she wrote to Vincent and sent her some poems that were very different in mood from those of
Little Otis
. She said simply:

I am sending the rough copy, of one I did today. I never thought out one line of it until after I went to bed last night, and it is just as it came to me. It is just because you gave me the “Little Mountain-Laurel-trees” that I am sending it to you as it is … because I am so happy that I am at work again, doing I think as good work as I ever did.

My little Mountain-Laurel-trees
So sturdy, in a row;
I loved the ones who set you out
And wanted you to grow;
Of course I love my other trees
So stately and so tall———
But I loved some Mountain-Laurel-trees
When I was very small.

…

My little Mountain-Laurel-trees
If you should ever grow
Where I was very sound asleep,
I think that I should know.
Then I needn’t dream of Cypresses
Where cold their shadows fall,
But of Mountain-Laurel-trees I loved
When I was very small.

Vincent received her mother’s letter Monday evening, February 2. When she read the last stanza, she burst into tears. “It seemed I could hardly bear it. Ugin tried to comfort me, saying that I mustn’t take it like that, that it meant nothing, her writing that way; and he was quite right, for she was feeling, you see, very happy. But I could not keep from crying.”

Two days later, just as they sat down for supper, a taxi pulled up with a telegram:

COME MOTHER VERY SICK ANSWER IMMEDIATELY TO ME

It was from her uncle Bert in Camden. They had the taxi take a return wire saying they’d be on the next train for Boston. Then they wired Norma. When they realized that the train didn’t leave Chatham until 1:30 in the morning, they decided to risk it and drive instead. Edna was afraid that they’d stall in the night with no one awake to help them; Eugen promised her he wouldn’t stall the engine. “
Ugin took along two bottles of champagne to celebrate her getting well. I also put in my bag at the last moment … a tube of Baume Analgesique, to rub her with in case she should ache anywhere. But she didn’t ache anywhere at all.”

It was a twelve-hour drive in the dead of night, in the middle of winter, and snow was drifting over the roads.

As we drove up the coast of Maine the sun came up, a most beautiful morning. I felt sure that she would never see the sun again. We came into Camden from Rockport by the back road, around the Lily Pond. And as we came down Chestnut Street I began to watch out for the house, just above Uncle Bert’s I knew it was, although I didn’t know just which one. And then suddenly I saw the door, and there was crepe on it.

She saw a mauve wreath fluttering on the door before her uncle Bert, who was still expecting them to arrive by train, could reach them to break the news. “Anyway, that’s how I learned she had died,” she wrote to Kathleen. “I can’t go on with this, sister, I’m so exhausted writing it. I’ll write again, as soon as I can.”

That afternoon, when Norma and Charlie arrived by train, the two sisters immediately wired Howard, Kathleen’s husband, in Paris:

DEAR HOWARD PLEASE BREAK IT TO KATHLEEN THAT MOTHER DIED SUDDENLY SHE WAS UNCONSCIOUS AND SUFFERED NO PAIN WE HURRIED TO GET TO HER BUT WERE TOO LATE GIVE KATHLEEN ALL OUR LOVE

VINCENT AND NORMA

“From the moment we got there,” Edna wrote Kathleen, “everything was done for her as if she were a queen, which of course she was.” A poem was still in the typewriter Kay had given her, and Edna told her sister that “I just put the typewriter in its box with the sheet of paper just as it was in the carriage, & left it at the cottage for you.”

The next day they wired Kathleen directly:

DARLING KATHLEEN IT IS HARD DECIDING THINGS WITHOUT YOU STOP MOTHER WAS JUST WORKING ON LOVELY POEM HAPPILY IMAGINING HERSELF BURIED UNDER BELOVED MOUNTAIN LAUREL STOP AT STEEPLE TOP FAR FROM HOUSE IS BIG SUNNY CLEARING COVERED WITH MOUNTAIN LAUREL NORMA AND I WANT YOUR ADVICE WE WANT AWFULLY TO HAVE THESE FIVE ACRES DEEDED OVER TO US THREE FOREVER AND BURY MOTHER THERE PLEASE CABLE IMMEDIATELY WHAT YOU THINK STOP WE ARE TAKING ALL HER THINGS TO COTTAGE WE FELT SURE SHE WOULD WANT NO SERVICES SAID BUT ARE INVITING HER FRIENDS TO COME IN TOMORROW MOTHER LOOKS BEAUTIFUL DARLING IT IS HARDEST FOR YOU ALL OUR LOVE GOES OUT TO YOU SO FAR AWAY.

VINCENT NORMA

Saturday night in Camden, Norma and Vincent decided they’d have a wake for Cora. “We thought she would like that. Norma and I wanted to watch up with her all night, but Charlie and Ugin wouldn’t let us, we were so worn out”; instead they dined in her regal company.

At about eight Charlie and Ugin came in with sandwiches and things for supper. We set places for you and Howard, too, and pretended that you were there. And we had two glasses for you and Howard, and poured into the six glasses the champagne we had brought for mother, and drank to her, and you and Howard drank to her, too. We always pretended that you were with us. And everything we did we did for you, too. Every time we went to look at her—and it was hard to keep away, she looked so beautiful, so peaceful and asleep—we would look at her for you, too, and say “This is for Kathleen.”

That night the two sisters cut three locks of their mother’s hair.

At last they received a cable from Kathleen in Paris:

AM KIND OF INSANE I GUESS IT IS TOO SUDDEN MOTHER AND I TALKED ABOUT IT AT COTTAGE I PROMISED HER SHE SHOULD BE BURIED IN NEW-BURY PORT WITH HER MOTHER BUT IT WAS MY IDEA NOT HERS AND AM SURE SHE WOULD RATHER BE AT STEEPLE TOP IT IS LOVELY IDEA PLEASE DO ANYTHING YOU THINK BEST STOP I EXPECTED RETURN JANUARY BUT WAS TOO SICK TO COME AND DID NOT WANT TO WRITE HER THAT STOP WE MUST NOT BE TOO UNHAPPY WE MUST REMEMBER IT IS THE WAY WE ALL WANT TO DIE PLEASE WRITE ME WHEN YOU CAN ALL MY LOVE

KATHLEEN

Now all her daughters were in agreement at last.

The snow began to fall steadily. Vincent and Norma wanted their mother to leave Camden “not by the back way up Chestnut Street and along the cost to Rockport,” Norma remembered, “but by way of the Camden we and she knew.” They all got into the long open Cadillac.

So, our little procession, we bareheaded, snow falling in our hair and on our faces, Charlie and I in the back seat and Vincent in the front with Ugin driving followed our mother in the great black van back up past the last house we had lived in, on Limerock Street, around to Chestnut and down past the house near the Post Office where we had lived and, turning left into Main Street, followed the street up and around the Elm Street school house we had all attended as children and on to Rockport. There our mother went on to Rockport where her first child had been born and so on to Steepletop.

It was as unconventional a leave-taking as their residence in Camden had been from the first. No one in that small seaside Maine town would ever forget any of them.

When the hearse reached West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, just across the state line from Austerlitz, it stalled in the heavy snow. The drifts were ten feet deep. Eugen and John Pinnie, their caretaker, brought the body up to Steepletop in a sleigh. Eugen wrote Lulu, who had left the little house, “
Steaming black horses, a soft, silent snowstorm, a swinging stable lantern on the side of the sleigh, over that beautiful road through the silent hills. Edna was on the doorstep to receive her mother’s body.”

The coffin was put in the large front room and surrounded with flowers. Eugene O’Neill sent an enormous spray of fiery red gladiolas and their neighbor Bill Brann a blanket of yellow roses for the coffin. They were going to dig the grave in the mountain laurel grove on the east side
of their property, but the grave site was on granite and it took far longer than they thought. “Four days,” Eugen wrote Lulu, “as we had to blast with dynamite. Then we buried her at night.”

Norma was sitting in the same spacious front room at Steepletop as the afternoon light began to fail. Her voice was low and clear and somewhat formal.

“
Vincent and I had our mother with us here in the living room in front of the door to the terrace, and as the blasting went on, with its always present significance, we became a little crazy, I guess.”

They began to sing to her the lullabies she had sung to them when they were small, “those lilting, rocking lullabies,” Norma said, closing her eyes.

“Mother had been here, by the door, for about a week … the blasting, blasting. Then, in the early evening, the deep rock crater was finished and the two crews succeeded in plowing our road after the last big storm. The horses were harnessed to the low sled, and, our lanterns swinging to light the road, we again followed our mother through the snow.”

The woods were dark by then. The workmen stood aside while the black horses, straining against their braces, pulled the heavy casket upon its sleigh to the grave.

First two men with lanterns, then the sleigh, then two men with lanterns, then Norma and Edna, Norma carrying a large basket with flowers, Edna with her gun. Then Charlie and I with lanterns. The grave is about 1 mile from the house. I had ten men digging a way through the snow for two days. We sent the men away, covered the coffin with flowers, and pine boughs, then I broke a bottle of champagne on the coffin, the way one does when launching a boat.

“We were,” Norma remembered, “we were, well, ready to bury our mother.

“The workmen just faded back into the woods. John Pinnie was there and, oh, perhaps a half-dozen men altogether.

“We were standing alone there, it seemed, Vincent and I. And we began to sing together, she the melody and I tenor, ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’ ”

Norma began to sing, her eyes shut now, her head down. Then she straightened and looked ahead of her.

“Our voices fit together as we sang. And then Gene, who had brought a shotgun with him, gave it to us and each of us fired off three shots into the western night. When we had each finished, Vincent asked if we would
mind if Gene fired three volleys for his own mother, for he had not been with her when she died, nor to her burial. And we did that, again each of us.”

Then they put her down into the blasted rock.

“It seems strange to think of leaving her here,” Edna wrote Kathleen, “—but she never minded being alone.”

PART SEVEN
THE GIRL POET