Savage Beauty (88 page)

Me
, with my Savile Row riding-breeches.…
Me
with my two Top Flight tennis racquets just
singing
for the court.…
Me
, who never show my face (or perhaps it’s my figure) in New York without having at least four attractive men of my acquaintance dialing their ’phones, to take me out.…
Me
, to be stuck in a loony-bin with a contingent of bulging old biddies …

Me
, with my old clothes by
Worth
and my new clothes by Bergdorf Goodman; me, with my tweeds by Henri’s of Bond Street and my hostess gown by Jessie Turner, waddling and hissing out of the dining-room in mad haste …

Me, a busy woman like me, with a score of interests and a dozen occupations, me, speaking over short wave to England for the British-American Ambulance Corps, me, speaking at dinner in the Waldorf ballroom for China Relief, me, up to the neck in work for the Office of Facts & Figures, the Red Cross, and a half dozen other organizations … sitting for two solid hours in your damned office … all because a little squirt of an M.D. in Great Barrington who wouldn’t know whether a baby were coming head-first or feet-first has apparently got it into what he doesn’t use in place of a head, that I am a congenital defective with criminal tendencies, an alcoholic, a drug-addict, and a generally undesirable member of our civic group! …

If I weren’t mad enough to spit, I might be amused enough to laugh, and I dare say by this afternoon I shall be getting a good laugh out of it.… And the further insolence of all such institutions,—the unmitigated gall to assert that …

Here she breaks off, but the damage is done. Her protest is wildly out of proportion—undermining the impression she’s trying to create of a healthy, attractive woman, too sought after, too elegant and revered—to what? “To be stuck in a loony-bin.” Her clothes, her reputation, and her occupation with war work make her far too busy to deal with the disturbingly simple questions the young doctor has asked: Why can’t she sleep at night? Why can’t she remember where she put her hat and coat?

Her defense was to proclaim that the Riggs Foundation made her “sick enough to chuck up.” It was “rank insolence.” It was “unmitigated gall.” It was “absurd.” It was also terrifyingly true.

When Norma realized that something was very wrong at Steepletop and offered to help, she learned that Eugen had joined Edna in taking morphine. “
Gene was to meet me at the train station. I saw him. And it just came over me: What do I do? What does a decent sister do? I thought, will I have to kill him? You know, it just came over me. He couldn’t see me. He couldn’t even look directly at me. Then I knew. He was on it, too.”

Norma described a scene in the front room at Steepletop when Edna threw her arms around her shoulders and said, “Oh, ours was just a childhood love.” Norma pried her fingers loose. “ ‘Oh, sure,’ I said to her, ‘of course. Just childhood!’

“But there were locks on all the doors now. And there was nowhere we could just quietly sit together and talk without Gene’s bursting in!

“ ‘Come on,’ I said to Vincent. ‘Let’s go somewhere, anywhere, where we can talk.’

“ ‘We can talk here, sister,’ she said. And then she just drifted off somewhere.
Where I couldn’t reach her.
I
couldn’t reach her anymore! Do you understand that? What it means? Then I thought: Well, I could kill him. I could kill Gene.”

On September 21, 1943, weak and unable to eat, Kathleen entered St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. A friend who went with her stayed throughout several hours of consultations and examinations. When the doctors couldn’t discover what was wrong with her, they decided to take X rays. As she was being wheeled out of the X-ray room, Kathleen became unconscious. She died without regaining consciousness.

Because the cause of her death was unclear, Kathleen was taken to Bellevue Hospital for an autopsy. Norma, who had tried to talk to Vincent on the telephone about it, wrote to her afterward, “
They found there that she died of acute alcoholism which is what is written on the death certificate.” They found “her heart was normal,” Norma said. “It is wonderful to know that no evil thing had started up again inside her.… I find I can’t go on from here into other things I want to say—this is a little document that is ended.”

The New York Times
ran Kathleen’s obituary on September 23, under a headline that dealt the final slight: “Kathleen Millay, Sister of the Poet.”

The only signal of Edna’s response to Kathleen’s death came exactly one week later, when she and Eugen began the first of an astonishing series of notebooks. Written primarily in Eugen’s hand, they provided a detailed record of the day, month, hour, and dosage of the drugs they were taking. They are among the most troubling and pitiful documents in American literary history.

The first notebook begins on Tuesday, September 28, 1943, and continues to Thursday, November 30. On the first day of their record keeping, “Vince,” as Eugen called her, was taking what appears to be a total of 3 grains of morphine, starting at 7
A.M.
, then at 8:10, 9:20, 9:40, 10:30, 10:45, 12:45, 1, 2:15, 2:30, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7:15, 8:15, 9:30, 10:30, 12, 1, 1:30
A.M.
, when she finally sleeps. On September 29, she takes 3⅜ grains, the next day 2⅝. If the dosages in 1943 were the same as they are today, 65 milligrams equals 1 grain (an initial 10 milligrams of morphine might reasonably be used to lessen the pain of a cancer patient). Edna Millay was taking an average of 195 milligrams a day.

“Never since I first began taking it have I felt so free of it, both mentally & physically, as today,” she noted on October 18 alongside her chart. Eugen’s hand added a more sinister note: “during day 4 nembutal lots of
codeine.” Nembutal is an analgesic barbiturate that makes one sleep. She was taking it as well as morphine; Benzedrine, which is an upper; and codeine, a narcotic for the relief of pain. She was, in other words, taking a cocktail of drugs, some contradictory in their effects but all of which must have left her ravaged.

There are strange notes in her hand: “What happened to that other ⅛ grain? Did it leak out?—they sometimes leak. I feel
sure
I didn’t take it. (Later) evidence. It leaked. The codeine hypo did the same thing. They had both been left slanting downward.” At the bottom of this page, in an apparent effort to account for the number of drugs she was taking, she wrote that it “is too much, but not discouraging, considering how many different kinds of pain I have.”

She was making some attempt to lessen her dependence on morphine. Near the end of October, a Dr. Cassel’s name is written in the index for the day before “insulin trial.” While the amount of insulin would double and more codeine be added, together with nervosine, which, she wrote, was an “anti-jitters” medication, pints of ginger ale, and more Nembutal, the amount of morphine doesn’t seem to lessen.

On November 12, she made the following note to herself:

Awake all night with sore throat:—no
fair
!—Last week it was a burned finger; the week before a sprained knee!—How am I to give up morphine when I need it all the time for one darned thing after another? It must be hard enough when it’s just a habit!—everybody says it is—everybody says it’s impossible, unless you go to a hospital and have nurses injecting insulin & hyoseine into you all day long!

According to her own notations, Millay was taking drugs the full twenty-four hours of the day. She no longer paused to sleep.

A few days after this, she fell sick. It may have been then that Eugen called for Norma. On November 6 and 7, he had written in his own notebook, “Misery loss of courage.”

Norma was unaware of these drug notebooks at that time. When Eugen summoned her to Steepletop that Thanksgiving, she went as quickly as she could. “Gene called me because he needed me,” she wrote Vincent afterward,

and, at first, we were almost getting somewhere—I wish it could have gone on but after a night’s sleep he got back in his stride and was belittling and unfriendly. He not only didn’t speak to me but couldn’t look at me. That was, of course, silly and not very helpful. If ever I saw anyone who needed help he did, and I couldn’t help because he wasn’t going to let me anymore. He said I mustn’t walk in on you anymore because you might be crying—all right—if you were crying that was just when I would care to look in on you—just when I
should
look in. I’m interested in why you must be crying. I’m sure I could
do
something about it. But his old jealousy cropped up.

Here the undated letter—which may never have been sent—broke off without a signature, and another, much longer letter began. Protective of Edna or controlling, Eugen was very much resented by Norma. The postman had just arrived with a letter from Eugen saying that Norma’s proposed trip back to Steepletop “
for a week, six weeks ago, is not feasible.” “Now
there’s
a bit of typical Steepletop that gets me into my subject nicely,” Norma wrote. Once again, Eugen was fending off a sister. But this sister wanted to help. The crucial thing is that Vincent, while staying offstage and protected, was always at the center of the drama. Norma’s letter continued:

It seemed impossible to me, you see, that you could be up there sick so long and really believe nothing could be done to stop your menopause distresses. You talk of black moods and hot flashes as though nothing could be done about them. That isn’t true.… Some research was done and a paper made of it for me on menopause and I also have notes on drug habituation.