Savage Beauty (7 page)

Her sister Clem never stopped seeing this as a disaster:

Separation was Nell’s goal, and she told Henry to go and not return; this was a one-sided affair.… I was rebellious about this, and Nell never was allowed to lose sight of the fact that my loyalty to Henry was first, last, and always and that we, of her family, were firm in our opinion that she had … thrown away a life-time royalty of happiness, and deprived her little girls of their birthright of happiness, good cheer, and wealth of unselfish interest from him to them.

Clotted though her prose is with righteous certainty, Clem is clear: Cora
intended
to be separated from Henry, and he was powerless before her determination. Certainly her decision was also about money; he gambled, he didn’t provide.

2

By the end of May, Henry was writing to Vincent from a remote town called Kingman in the northern wilderness of Penobscot County, Maine, asking her not to forget him. She had written to him first.

Your papa ought to be ashamed of himself for not answering your nice letter sooner and I guess he is.… How does Norma get along at school I suppose she is getting to be a pretty good scholar and Wump I suppose is awful busy making mud pies. I want you to kiss them both for papa, and mamma too. Tell Mamma that papa … has got started to earning money at last.

By July his news was less reassuring: “Tell Mama she must not kill herself with work because her little girls are going to need her for a long time & Papa is earning quite a lot of money only he can’t get it very fast yet.” In letter after letter now, addressed only to his eldest daughter, E. Vincent Millay, he promises her that he’ll come back soon, for Thanksgiving perhaps or for Christmas, surely for her birthday in February. She was eight years old in November 1900 when he wrote the following letter. Norma and Kathleen were six and four.

It seems an awful long time to Papa since he saw his little girls, but he could not help it. If your Papa gets some money that he expects soon he is going to see his babies but he can’t stay with them long for he has got lots to do and he is not sure that he can go this fall. But he wants to O, so much.

He never came. Her father’s letters would remain the same throughout her childhood: he is far away and misses her. He does not write, and he is sorry. He is beginning to make money, but he does not have it yet. And he is sorry. The break between Henry Millay and his family was all but complete by the end of 1900, when Cora turned to the Kellers for refuge. They refused her: Marcia was too old, Joe said, to take on three little girls.

Cora left Union for Rockport, a village built on the steep edge of a cove on the Atlantic coast, where she managed to rent the upper half of an old house overlooking the harbor. She began immediately to look for work as a practical nurse, using the notes Clem had made while studying nursing in Newburyport. It looked as if she would succeed. Vincent began to write a novel, certain it would be published, although Norma, who was six, said skeptically, “I wish I thought it!”

Cora even found someone to help care for the children while she was away on cases and kept a working notebook that first year detailing her cases. She worked night and day wherever she could find work—in Rockland, Camden, and Rockport—usually for a dollar a day. Her cases ranged from recuperation from surgery and childbirth to several cases of typhoid fever, mysteriously plentiful in the coastal area.

She changed bandages and dressed wounds; she watched while her patients’ temperatures shot up to 108 degrees and their pulses raced. She dosed them with milk—warmed, iced, or laced with brandy. She gave them raspberry shrub, blancmange, powders, and tablets, and when she had to, she called the doctor. Some died, most lived. The single note of relief in the notebook is her entry on the reelection of the president: “McKinley. Rah! Rah! Rah!” Otherwise it is a record of unremitting hard work. She did not keep the news from her oldest daughter, who tried to write her the cheering little notes from home she asked for.

I thought I would write to you and tell you how I am I am getting along all right in school but in my spelling-blank I had 10 and 10 and then 9 and I felt auful bad because I thought I would have a star I am getting along all right and so is Norma and Kathleens cold is better now I went to practise and a boy called me a little chamipion and I asked him what he ment and he said because I was the best singer and I thanked him.

On February 13, 1901, just before Vincent’s ninth birthday, “Cora B. Millay of Rockport, County of Knox and State of Maine, respectfully” became a “Libellant against Henry T. Millay of Bangor, in the County of Penobscot and said State of Maine Libellee” and began divorce proceedings. She charged that he had “cruelly and abusively treated your libellant; that being of sufficient ability, or being able to labor and provide for her, grossly or wantonly and cruelly refused or neglected to provide suitable maintainance for her.” She asked to be divorced from him, to be given care and custody of their children, “and that he may be ordered to pay her a specific sum of money for the support of said children.”

On March 6, Henry was served with the divorce charge. In September, “the Libellee though called did not appear but made default.” Once again, Henry did not oppose Cora.

The girls were now their mother’s “little women,” and she cautioned them again and again against being or causing anyone trouble. There are no stories of their pranks or escapades when they were young. They didn’t get into scrapes for fear of upsetting their mother. Instead, she told them to be tidy, clean, and responsible, and they took her admonishments seriously. They were careful among their relatives, mostly aunts, not to reveal how they felt or what they in fact desired. The burden of this restraint fell most harshly upon the eldest.

“Keep your things in the box, so they will not be in the way. Keep your dresses hanging up,” Cora wrote to Vincent on a visit to her aunt Marcia Keller. “Don’t stay too long, for Marcia is not well. Of course you will be a little lady, and make your little visit one of pleasure to each one, if you can. Don’t make Marcia nervous.… Take good care of your clothes, for it is such hard work to get them.”

In August 1901, Cora was on a difficult case in Vinalhaven. She didn’t know how long she’d have to stay, but she promised that this time when she returned home she’d stay put

and do hair-work, for you will all be at school soon, and I can canvass for work if I need to. Be nice little girls while mama is away, and it will please her so much to hear it when she comes home all worn out for her little girls to love her and get her rested. Didn’t mama send home some nice shoes? Keep yourselves neat and tidy, and wash and change your clothes after dinner. Don’t go down town looking dirty.

That September, while Cora was still in Vinalhaven, Vincent wrote her a plaintive letter. She didn’t feel well; Norma and Kathleen didn’t either.
Exasperated by her vagueness, Cora fired off this note: “You said you were almost sick, and that made me anxious about you. I cannot write much now as I am very busy; but I want you to write me at once and tell me if you are well.… I am working awfully hard night and day, and cannot stand it if I have to fret about you.”

Cora raced home to find that all the girls had typhoid. She knew better than anybody how ravaging the disease was—there was no medicine that could touch the fever, nothing but alcohol baths and the desperate constant watching that Cora now began.

She sat by their beds in a vigil that lasted day and night. She dozed sitting up beside them, stroking their burning faces with wet towels, rubbing down their feverish bodies with ice. She was completely alone with the children, for the neighbors were afraid of catching the disease. She watched helplessly as their fevers raged from mid-September until the eighteenth of October, when each of the little girls was given up by the local doctor. It struck Kathleen, the youngest and most delicate, the hardest. All Cora could think of during the long vigil was the tiny starched dresses, “freshly ironed, three sizes, hanging there; and all the little petticoats, three sizes … starched and sticking out. Typhoid!—”

Their hair fell out, and at last, fearing their deaths, she summoned Henry, who did come, pleading with her to take him back. She promised to consider it, and later the girls remembered that he had been in the house. Then the fever broke. Cora wrote, “They lived, and that was all.” Exhausted, floundering, with winter coming on and without the stamina or the resources even to pack, Cora fled to Newburyport, Massachusetts.

3

It was Uncle Charlie and Jennie, his new young wife, who took them in and helped bring the girls back to health. It wasn’t easy. Kathleen had developed chorea, a disease of the nerves that left her five-year-old body in spasms of uncontrollable muscular twitching. Cora turned to Clem for help, but her nursing skills proved useless; the little girl was wasting away. In desperation, Clem later wrote, “We studied herbs, talked of herbs and dreamed of herbs,” for it was only with their use that the two sisters finally halted her disease. In a school photograph taken on Ring’s Island, across the Merrimac River from Newburyport, the recovered sisters stand among schoolchildren. Their cropped hair has just begun to sprout. A somber Vincent leans her head against another girl’s shoulder for support, while Norma, round-faced and smiling, alone looks nearly well. Kathleen, staring fearfully into the camera, her round eyes circled with dark shadows, her small mouth ajar, looks permanently damaged.

In Newburyport it wasn’t easy to find a landlord willing to rent to a woman without a husband or a job, with three small children in tow. But by the summer Cora had found a house of their own within sight of Charlie’s. Called the Coffin House, it was an old square frame house built in the 1800s on the banks of the Merrimac where Charlie clammed. Once elegant, it was now shabby and run-down, but it was there Cora brought what little they had from Rockport. To Vincent, however, the house and grounds seemed grander than anything they had ever had

and very romantic. The yard was infinite; in the back it ran right down to the marches; but in the front, it was infinite with something else … the pheasants eye narcissus, which I had never seen, and which I suddenly came upon in the grass there, was as much like a voice as a flower.… Years later I learned it was called
narcissus poeticus
.

Norma remembered the house with a spacious attic full of her mother’s books, “and Mother allowed schoolchildren to walk in and up to the attic to read,” a real privilege because Mrs. Millay had a larger and finer collection than the local library. But Norma remembered, too, that a local woman refused to permit her son to go to the Millays’ to read because she thought it improper for a child to enter a household where a woman lived without a husband.

“My mother began to have very bad headaches. We used to rub her head and put folded hand towels wrung out in vinegar and water, lovely and cool, over her forehead.” The little girls, young as they were, began to work folding and boxing Seidlitz Powders—a patent medicine for headache—to help their mother out. Sometimes, however, instead of sending the boxes on to be sold, Mrs. Millay used them herself. Norma said quietly, “Mother took lots of them because she had lots of headaches.”