Savage Beauty (94 page)

Other local people came to reupholster the couches and make slipcovers. “
She wanted something covered in green and white stripes with leaves through it from a sample book she had,” one neighbor recalled.

“She always stood straight up, that little bit of a thing. Up straight as a ramrod. After he died I came to call to see what I could do for her. She was standing in her bathrobe at the kitchen door. And she threw this at me right off, ‘Did you think I wasn’t going on?’ Again, that intensity! I didn’t know what to say. Then we started making big plans.”

No one had wanted her to go home to Steepletop alone. Her friends were very firm; they argued with her. They fought her, in fact. But she needed to have her way. At the turn of the year, in January 1950, five months after Eugen’s death, Edna told Norma how she’d managed. She was, she wrote,

stuffing myself with all the best proteins and taking my stinking vitamine capsules and my loathsome Liver-Iron- and Red Bone Marrow Extract. Well, baby, I must go now, and lift a three-inch beefsteak out of the deep-freezer to thaw for my luncheon; and, for my breakfast (I am writing this at 6 A.M.) squeeze the juice from five oranges and one lemon; boil the two eggs which my chickens were boasting about all yesterday afternoon.

She’d made recovery into a game. She had no appetite,

So I hit upon the bright idea of splitting myself into two personalities, one the patient, one the nurse. The nurse, now, cooks my meals, and sees to it that they are not only nutritious, but also appetizing and attractive. And she prepares my medicines with no repugnance.… As for the patient, she obediently, and also absent-mindedly, swallows and swallows.… Mrs. Somebody-Anybody got her name in this manner: when in Doctors’ Hospital, I made known to several friends who visited me there, my decision to return to Steepletop and live here all alone, they were appalled, and begged me not to try it. They all said, “But you
must
have
somebody
with you! You simply
can’t
be there without
anybody!
”
…

When, finally … I was here alone, and thought up my pretty schizophrenia; I named my nurse Mrs. Somebody-Anybody. She doesn’t know that I called her that; she wouldn’t like it. So to her face I call her “Mrs. S.A.” She thinks I mean Mrs. Sex-Appeal! And she
bridles
, my dear, she actually
bridles!

Don’t worry about me at all, either of you. To pretend that it is not agony would be silly. But I can cope.

In the spring, when Mary Herron asked her how she was going to bear up without Eugen, she said she was

plenty scared.… Shrinking from being hurt too much. Scared the way I used to be as a child, when I had to go to the dentist. In the days before they gave you novocaine.

I have already encountered the first dandelion. I stood and stared at it with a kind of horror. And then I felt ashamed of myself, and sorry for the dandelion. And suddenly, without my doing anything about it at all, my face just crumpled up and cried.

How excited he always was when he saw the first dandelion! And long before the plants got big enough for even a rabbit to find them, he had dug a fine mess, for greens. He used to say “pick dandelions”; and I would say, “Not pick,—dig.” And he would say, “Oh, don’t scold poor Uge—he does so his best.”

Alas, alas, and alas.

When Mary Herron offered to pay for the fresh butter Edna had asked John Pinnie to churn for her, Edna was outraged: “After all that you have done for me, and are constantly doing—no sister could have given me more tender care—”

We began to talk about what Norma called “
that last time” she and Vincent had seen each other. At some point in the conversation Norma had called Gene “a beautiful animal.” Vincent had said, “You, too, Normie?” Then she had fallen to the floor.

“I don’t remember what I had said. But it certainly shouldn’t have been taken that way. I wish to God I could remember what I said.”

Charlie slowly, thoughtfully, interrupted, “You said Gene was a beautiful animal.”

“It certainly shouldn’t have been taken that way. We would have killed each other. I had gotten where I just wasn’t taking anything. Vincent could really look right at you. You see, she took nothing lightly. She was wary. I tried to talk to her, and she left me and went upstairs. She had gone.

“Well, what am I going to do? She was highly sensitized at the time. And Charlie said he’d go up, and pretty soon they were laughing. And I came up, she threw her arms around me—‘I want only you, sister. You come back!’

“ ‘I
am
back,’ I said in her arms.—Of course, that’s borne out by the little scrap of paper [the will].

“But I couldn’t be Gene! She was a nervous wreck. Well, I’m a little more matter-of-fact. Well, dear, I don’t know what it is—we’re different. I don’t know what it was. And I was beginning to see that she could go on. You must remember that we had to earn a living. Then it was a whole year.”

Millay began to handle all of her own correspondence and not rely on Mary Herron, to whom she’d written, “
It’s time I stopped being such a baby.” She went to work to try to control Oxford University Press’s
Book of American Verse
—rather, she attempted, but failed, to limit its desire to anthologize only her very early work and her love poems.

Suddenly it was fall. She wrote to Margaret Cuthbert, inviting them to come anytime after September 1. “
When once I have the whole first year behind me, when I can no longer say to myself, ‘Only a year ago today he was still alive,’—then, something will have happened.” It “might perhaps give me something to lean against for the second year.

“However, I know nothing about it. I am exploring strange and uncharted country. I am the first one that ever lost Eugen.”

She’d promised a Thanksgiving poem to
The Saturday Evening Post
, and even though she scrapped the first version with only ten days to go, she managed to find the words she needed and finished it.

It was her first poem to see print since Eugen’s death. She wrote to Cass Canfield, “
It was going along well, I thought; but as things got worse and worse in Korea, I began to see that it was not the right poem for the occasion. ‘What,’ I asked myself, ‘would a few Indian war-hoops mean, and a
neighborly little scalping party,—to a nation dreading and awaiting the atom bomb?’ ” So she scrapped the first version of the poem “and sat there, scared frozen; the deadline only ten days off; my promise to deliver the poem long ago given to the
Post;
and not an idea in my head.… when I got so scared that I was fair frantic, there was nothing to do but relax, and start all over; and so I did. And almost at once the first lines of the new poem came into my head.”

Hard, hard it is, this anxious autumn,
To lift the heavy mind from its dark forebodings.

“Oh,” she told Cass, “I know that I am making a big fuss about a small piece of work—but it is so wonderful to be writing again!” Her point by the close of the poem is one that reverberated in her life:

the trained hand does not forget its skill …
Strength we have, and courage; an acetylene will.

She thanked Canfield for the money he’d been sending her. She’d been too busy worrying the poem along to have noticed, and then “the August slip came in.” It was “a great help to me. And it was kind of you to do it, without even speaking about it.”

“She had, don’t you see, this clarity of mind,” Canfield insisted. “Her verses, her poems were absolutely clear. There was always a clarity in her poems—no matter what she wrote about.”

Ragged Island—which a number of her good friends thought she might, even must, sell—she had no intention of letting go. “
As soon as I can bear it,” she wrote Tess, “I shall go back there.” Maybe even the next summer. In August 1950, remembering the August before, she added, “
No, my dear. Don’t bring me any lobsters. And don’t bring me any seaweed.”

Often she worked late. To Lena Reusch, her new housekeeper, she left this note:

This iron is set too high. Don’t put it on where it says “Linen”—or it will scorch the linen. Try it on “Rayon”—and then, perhaps on “Woollen.” And be careful not to
burn your fingers
when you shift it from one heat to another.

It is 5:30, and I have been working all night. I am going to bed.
Goodmorning—

E.St.V.M.

On the morning of Octobert 18, she wired Scribner’s that she would give them a quote for the jacket of Rolphe Humphries’s translation of the
Aeneid
. Then she settled down before the fire and made pages of small, clear notes in pencil, so unlike the wild, uneven hand with which all those earlier terrifying notes to herself had been written. She read late into the following morning, and, after carefully placing a glass of white wine and the bottle on the staircase, she went upstairs.

She turned the light on in her bedroom and smoked a few cigarettes. Perhaps she’d gone upstairs to take something to help her sleep, a Seconal. But although she was wearing her silk dressing gown and slippers, she didn’t go to bed. Instead she walked back to the dark staircase and stood at the top of the narrow wooden stairs in the old house. Something happened. Then she pitched wildly forward, falling, hurtling down the full length of the stairs to the landing. Her neck was broken in the fall.

All the lights were on in the house when John Pinnie came the next morning to do the chores. He put the mail on the kitchen table. “John saw the light on up in her bedroom,” Lena Reusch remembered. “He hadn’t seen her all day, and he went back into the house. I believe he said to fix the furnace, or maybe it was to lay the fire. Then John saw her. Her feet were down, and she was curled around at the landing of the stairs.

“John ran down to our house, and I sent him right down to … our neighbor below, and he called Dr. Wilcox. There was just John and I drove up to the house. And I stayed there until the doctor came. I didn’t think about it, or I would have run. Dr. Wilcox and John came, and they put her on the couch. And, oh, my, her slippers fell off.”

Dr. Oscar Wilcox, Jr., came to the house and pronounced her dead. He later wrote, “
I found her at the foot of the stairway from which she had apparently fallen.… She was lying at the foot of the stairway with a sort of dressing gown around her. I did not think she was retiring for the night but coming down stairs perhaps for something.”

Her head was resting on some magazines and letters on the landing, where there was a mark of blood and one notebook with the penciled draft of a poem. She had traced a ring around the last three lines:

I will control myself, or go inside.
I will not flaw perfection with my grief.
Handsome, this day: no matter who has died.

In her bedroom at the time of her death there were only two photographs. One was a snapshot of Norma and Kathleen taken in Maine. They are
hugging each other and smiling into the camera. They look young and pretty. “I sent this to her in Europe,” Norma remembered, “and she said she wanted to get right in between!” The other is in an elegant dark leather pigskin frame with a metal overlay of raised hearts and flowers. A little boy, dressed as a soldier, is standing in velvet breeches, holding a toy sword in his left hand. He is wearing a plumed helmet and a metal breastplate. His dark curls are long and fall below his shoulders, and there is lace on the wrists of his smart jacket and at his throat. He is a stocky boy with sad eyes and a mouth turned down like the rim of a cup. It is signed “Eugen Jan Boissevain.”