Savage Beauty (8 page)

In the fall they moved again, to 78 Lime Street in Newburyport proper, closer to their great-aunt Susan Todd, and to Clem, who had been adopted by the Todds. It was on Lime Street that Mr. Gales once came to call. The only evidence of his visit is an angry page in Clem’s unpublished memoir. The aunts were sitting in the living room at the Todds’ when they heard Cora and Vincent’s voices laughing at the door, “but the third, evidently a male voice, was baffling. I opened the door just as Nell was reaching for
the knob.… I recognized the man instantly.” Cora hesitated as she introduced him, and Clem leaped forward angrily.

I explained that he was the sanctimonious cheat who had violated all rules of decency by trading on Cora’s love for music and her equal love for deep literary research, easing his duties on to her narrow shoulders, robbing the children and their father of her time and attention, for he was the very one of whom Henry spoke, when he said that the minister and the church were destroying his peace of mind and breaking up their marriage.

Clem stopped just short of the charge of infidelity.

Vincent stood behind her mother, watching silently. As Cora tried to speak, one of the Todds took Gales aside and told him he was not wanted in their home. They walked him back to Cora’s house, retrieved his bags, and put him on the evening train.

If there was any question that Vincent hadn’t known, or had been protected from knowing, her aunt’s suspicions, she certainly knew them then.

Newburyport, where the family would remain for the next three years, was no ordinary Massachusetts village. It had been a hotbed of reform and religious revivals in the nineteenth century and the seat of the abolition movement, which had begun there.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when women were supposed to be pious and submissive, when their primary energies were expended on domestic duties, the women of Newburyport had formed the first female associations in the country. A cross between benevolent and voluntary organizations, they fed the lives of the women who ran them not just with notions of being good but of doing something specific, of keeping accounts, of being involved with other women for the good of women. Newburyport had an orphanage, founded and managed by women, which decreed that only a single woman, twenty-one or older, could be its treasurer, thereby avoiding a husband’s legal right to control his wife’s money—no husband, they figured cannily, no control.

Imagine how this atmosphere of doing, being, and making affected the Buzzell family or the Millays. For while these women were domestic enough to have six children, as Clementine had, or even three within four years, they were clearly neither submissive nor weak. Clementine Buzzell did not minister to household peace—no matter what
Godey’s
magazine or
The Ladies’ Companion
advised; she was out in her buggy scouting for hair work immediately after her divorce. When Vincent Millay heard the stories of her grandmother’s lover—and her aunt’s accusations about her
mother’s friend Mr. Gales—she knew the women in her family had been headstrong, that they had had the courage or the grit to achieve their independence at whatever cost to themselves and their children.

There was one quality in Vincent’s nature that was left out of almost every family description of her childhood. It was not her talent, nor her ability to absorb the hardship she faced alone with her sisters, nor the balancing act she performed with her aunts. It wasn’t even that in her mother’s constant absence she must be good or that because others were helping them she must be grateful.

Only Norma talked about her sudden rages. Norma remembered having her mouth stuffed with geranium leaves, suffocating under the pillow Vincent had placed over her and then sat on. It hadn’t felt like a prank. Now, in Newburyport, she remembered Vincent in a fury: “I don’t remember why. But she ran outside and stuck a kitchen knife in a tree. We watched.” She remembered, too, a conflict of wills between Vincent and their mother. Vincent was banished to the basement until she would apologize. She refused. After what seemed like days to Norma, with no apology forthcoming, she and Kathleen stole downstairs to send her little boats with food and messages tucked inside. It was their mother who finally relented. “We used to say of Vincent that she had a bee chasing her. When she was bewildered by what she … I have to be so careful what I say. We had to calm her down a bit. Once in a while, when reality would hit her—something she couldn’t handle in her lovely way, then she was wild.”

Cora was ready to leave Newburyport behind her and head for Camden. She won her divorce that January, and Henry’s brother Bert Millay, who testified for her, told her if she went back to Camden, she might be given alimony. They stood in the courtroom while the judge asked Bert Millay if his brother Henry had abused her. “He has, shamefully,” he answered.

She was granted her divorce in an uncontested suit on January 11, 1904, “for the cause of cruel and abusive treatment” and awarded custody of the three children and a sum of five dollars a week for their support.

CHAPTER 4

V
incent began a diary she called
Rosemary
, in which she charted the upheavals of her domestic life and of her struggle to surpass the limits
of a Camden girlhood. If
Rosemary
provides the mementos of that girlhood, it also bears witness to Millay’s passionate interior life, which was never entirely bound to her family or at ease within her community. She started the diaries innocently enough at the suggestion of Ethel Knight, whom she’d met through the St. Nicholas League. But whereas Ethel kept her diary without missing a day, Vincent rarely kept hers with any regularity. From the beginning she felt her lapses signaled a lack of self-respect, and she chastised herself for them. She intended to be worthy of her own self-respect, and worthiness was linked to God. At sixteen she was serious, severe even, and somewhat self-important. She attended the Congregational church and was part of a girls’ Bible study group, the Genethod, the Welsh word for “daughter.” New England Protestant though she was, Millay was not much interested in self-surrender, either to God or to convention. Her greatest praise was reserved for the “God of Life.”

The Genethod was founded by her friend and Sunday school teacher
Abbie Huston Evans. Abbie’s father was Welsh, the pastor of the Congregational church that the Millays attended. “Abbie,” Martha Knight, Ethel’s sister, remembers, “must have been about ten years or more older than Vincent. She was tall with chestnut hair and … fragile. She had an awful funny gait; she sort of sidled. I remember Ethel once saying this rhyme at one of our meetings of the Genethod: ‘Do little souls go upward / when little bodies die?’ It was just a silly little rhyme she’d made up, and we all laughed. All but Abbie, that is. She didn’t like it. She was not frivolous. Oh, but Vincent could be. She had lots of spark and spunk; she fairly snapped.”

June 29 [1908]

I guess I’m going to explode. I know just how a volcano feels before an eruption. Mama is so cross she can’t look straight; Norma’s got the only decent rocking-chair in the house (which happens to be mine); and Kathleen is so unnaturally good that you keep thinking she must be sick. I suppose this is an awful tirade to deliver.… But it is very hard to be sixteen and the oldest of three.

That same day Cora promised her girls a picnic with their friends, with sardine and salmon sandwiches, bananas, fancy cookies, chocolate, and strawberry shortcake. Millay noted in her diary that she no longer felt as explosive as she had: “Scribbling must be wholesome exercise.”

By late June, the grass left uncut in the field behind their house was lush and high, and the Millay girls made up another game to play. They would run waving long, colored silk ribbons high above their heads and try to guess who held which color. From a distance all that could be seen was swirling ribbons above the tall grass.

At ten that night Vincent made her last entry about the party; it was important to her that it had gone well. It was not only that her mother didn’t often have the time or the money to give them; it was also that Vincent sensed the resentment in Camden toward her family’s way of doing things.

“
For instance,” one of her friends recalled, “giving parties is a lot of work for—well, for the somebody that gives them. So she didn’t have parties. Not our sort, anyway. And the point is, there was just no money. What they did was to make everything fun, I guess; make a game out of it.… I suppose their mother was responsible for this in them, too.”

In the face of tacit disapproval, they fortified themselves by pulling their family ties even tighter about them. They had no lights when their mother was away unless they trimmed and filled the lamps, no heat unless they tended the fire, and all that time Vincent drifted into another life in the world of books and dreams.

Ethel Knight remembered one night in particular when

Vincent opened the front door to three of her friends who had come to spend the evening. She wore a blouse of white muslin with cuffs and boned collar made of rows of insertion edged with lace. A full gored skirt came to the tops of her buttoned boots; a patent leather belt circumscribed a wide equator around her tiny middle; and a big blue bow spread its wings behind her head where her hair was fastened in a “bun.” Books were piled on the floor from a table Vincent had cleared for games and in the center was a plate of still warm fudge.

All too soon it was twelve o’clock, and the Knight girls had promised their mother to be home early. Still, they wanted just one more song.

So the girls gathered around the organ and the little room was filled with song. They retreated with “The Spanish Cavalier,” they saw “Nellie Home” and ended with an old favorite—

“There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my true love sits him down, sits him down”—

With a lighted lamp in her hand Vincent went to the door with her guests. Going down the walk they sang:

“Fare thee well, for I must leave thee.”

Ethel remembered how her slim figure stood in the doorway, her red curls shining from the lamp held high in her hands, her clear deep voice taking up the refrain that followed the girls down the hill:

“Adieu, adieu, kind friends, adieu.”

The plate of warm fudge, the glow of light around the slender girl, her rich voice ringing out against the Maine night, seem more properly the stuff of sentimentalized fiction than of real life. And fiction larded with autobiographical detail is exactly what Millay was writing in a novel she called
The Dear Incorrigibles
. The story begins with the mother, Mrs. Randolph, hanging up the telephone after a summoning call from a sick relative:

“I don’t know what I’m going to do! I’m sure, I don’t know what I’m going to do!” … “Well, neither do we,” Margaret remarked. Margaret was fourteen and accustomed to taking things cooly.

Mrs. Randolph is around only long enough to set the scene and leave it. “Of course I’ll have to go. But who will stay with you while I’m gone?” she asks. Katharine, who at sixteen is the eldest, solves the dilemma handily:

“Now, Muvver,” she said, cheerfully. “There’s not a thing that I can see to scowl about. What got you into trouble in the first place was your supposing right off that we couldn’t be left alone. Imagine a great big sixteen-year-old girl like me not being big enough to keep house for a little while. I should be ashamed if I couldn’t. Besides it isn’t as if we were all sole alone. Aunt Cass lives right next door.… Goodness knows we’ve aunts enough.”

This is the familiar Millay family scene recast only as to motive: Mrs. Randolph must leave her daughters not to earn money but to help a family member in need. It is a slender piece of fiction with a light, domestic charm and no great urgency. Katharine, the eldest, is somewhat bossy and prim, a little unsure of herself and vulnerable to being hurt. Margaret is a good deal like Norma—pretty and vain, lazy and good-natured. She is the only person who challenges her older sister. In
chapter 4
, Vincent introduces a fairy tale, the telling of which serves to bribe her youngest sister, Helen, into doing the dishes. It began:

Once upon a time there was a very beautiful princess who lived with her father in a palace surrounded by a lovely garden.

She had a gold plate to eat from, a gold mug to drink from, a gold chair to sit in and a gold bed to lie on … all the flowers in the garden to smell.

And yet she was not happy.

Why not? Because her father wants her to marry a scary old king whose kingdom “joined theirs on the left.” Stamping her foot in defiance, she refuses. Outraged by her disobedience, her father summons his wise men
to decide upon a fair punishment. Her chin is to turn green. But the king, whose daughter’s beauty reminds him of his dead wife’s, cannot bear their penalty. A subterfuge is worked out. The princess is to be
told
her chin is green, when in fact all the mirrors in the kingdom will be broken and no one, under penalty of death, is to tell her it has remained pink. She is given a week to reconsider her defiance. When she does not relent, her father suddenly realizes that she no longer considers herself his daughter. The novel breaks off here, abandoned and incomplete.