Afternoons with Emily Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2007 by Frank G. MacMurray Jr., Adelaide MacMurray Aitken, and Worth D. MacMurray

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  WARNER BOOKS

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07712-5

  All of the poems and letters attributed to Emily Dickinson in Afternoons with Emily were written by Emily Dickinson, excluding the letters that appear on pages 86, 95, 391, 450–451, and 467, which were written by Rose MacMurray.

  Dickinson poems and letters from the following volumes are used by permission of the publisher and the Trustees of Amherst College: The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, and The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1958, 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson.

  We met as Sparks—Diverging Flints

  Sent various—scattered ways—

  We parted as the Central Flint

  Were cloven with an Adze—

  Subsisting on the Light We bore

  Before We felt the Dark—

  A Flint unto this Day—perhaps—

  But for that single Spark.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Book I

  Book II

  Book III

  Book IV

  Book V

  Book VI

  Book VII

  Book VIII

  Book IX

  Book X

  Book XI

  Book XII

  Book XIII

  Epilogue

  A Note About Afternoons with Emily

  Prologue

  amherst

  may 19, 1886

  Today is an Emily afternoon: the distilled essence of a New England spring. There is a chilly sun, high pale cirrus clouds like cobblestones, and delicate wind breathing. The maples wave tiny banners in her honor, perhaps making more show and display than she would have approved. An impulsive breeze carries an apple-blossom spray — across the Dickinson meadow, past The Homestead, and into her open grave. Even my prairie springs have never been as beautiful.

  Sue, Emily’s sister-in-law, had told me about the explicit directions Emily had left for her burial, and I smile to see how carefully her sister and brother have followed them. Her wishes were precise, original, arbitrary, and inscrutable — like Emily herself. There was to be no church service, only a graveside ceremony. She had not attended a church service for nearly thirty years, and she loathed the lavish new building of the First Congregational Church. “God could never find his way in!” had been her comment.

  The mourners gather at The Homestead in silence. The white coffin is open in the parlor, surrounded by a bank of violets and wild geraniums, but those of us who knew Emily best choose not to intrude on her long privacy.

  Emily’s younger sister, Miss Lavinia Dickinson, always the least serene of the three Dickinson children, trumpets to each new arrival, “I put that spray of hepatica in her hand, to take to Judge Lord when they reunite in Heaven.” This was not in Emily’s plan. She might have liked the remembrance of her last great “love,” but she would have cringed at this delivery.

  She had requested that the six strong Irishmen who had worked on the grounds and in the stable of The Homestead in years past should be her pallbearers. Now they hoist her casket and carry it along the circuitous, symbolic route she had designed.

  A procession forms. We follow Emily out the back hall door — “my door,” we called it, left always unlatched. I wonder now if she had continued to leave it open, waiting for my arrival, which never came in those later years. I walk with the others as we go into the great barn just behind the house — then through the hay-sweet afternoon and out into the vivid spring garden beyond. There the gay crowding tulips greet us — descendants of the bulbs Emily and I planted together, in all those lost autumns. How the lilies of the valley have spread under the oak! There would be enough for a dozen brides today!

  At the Dickinson boundary we go cross lots to the cemetery, letting down fence bars as we go. I think of the last exquisite poem she sent me out of the blue, long after I had left Amherst, the very last:

  Let down the Bars, Oh Death —

  The tired Flocks come in

  I study the procession of mourners as we walk. There are Dickinsons and Norcrosses, Sweetsers and Curriers — all family. There are college and village people too. I see childhood friends, relatives, and correspondents — but no current friends, since none exist. I am amazed to see the scandalous Mrs. Todd, Austin Dickinson’s mistress, her body’s lush geography fashionably draped in more mourning crepe than any of the grieving family members. In spite of the relationship, an open secret for four years, Mrs. Todd, like most of this group, has never laid eyes on Emily; but the funeral is another chance for this shrewd little arriviste to establish herself among the Dickinsons. She is on the arm of her husband, Professor David Todd, and I wonder how he withstands the gossip. Conventional Amherst can be unforgiving.

  I search the group for Sue, Austin’s wife, and see her standing beside her philandering husband. Her shoulders stoop; I have heard that it was she who prepared Emily’s body. For today, the Austin Dickinsons fulfill their respectable and expected roles defined by family and social standing. Sue’s grief must only be exacerbated by the public humiliation of Mrs. Todd’s flamboyant presence. Emily’s participation in her brother’s sordid triangle had baffled and upset me when I had been informed of it. I never fully understood her stormy but enduring friendship with her brother’s wife, Sue. Now they were all together in the same room, the forced meeting contrived by Emily’s passing. I wonder if Emily would have enjoyed this layered drama, or would she have fretted at being upstaged?

  Of course, it might be said that I never fully understood my own relationship with Emily. Perhaps that question, more than any other, is why I am here, once again pulled inexorably toward her. All of these people believe I am here as Emily’s closest friend, that we’d been separated only by geography, and give me a deference I do not deserve.

  I am surprised by the outsiders: important men of the world following the casket. While Emily lived, she annoyed and evaded them with her equivocal letters, those maddeningly opaque expressions of desire and distance. I know she had met only one or two of them face to-face — yet her death appears to have been an imperious summons across New England. Personages have come to Amherst today, to walk bareheaded in the May wind. Their presence would have given Emily a delicious pleasure. The respected editor, Emily’s “Preceptor,” Colonel Higginson, gives me a knowing smile and a half salute. The other gentlemen ask him my name, and they bow gravely. I hope they are honoring me for my work on behalf of the nation’s children and not for my uneven friendship with Emily.

  We stand in a circle around the grave, and Colonel Higginson reads “Last Lines” by Emily Brontë. “No coward soul is mine” surely suits the English Emily, that stoic of the bleak Yorkshire moors. It hardly applies to our
Amherst Emily, who loved the poem but kept her own soul snug and safe among the ancestral portraits, crackling hearths, needlepoint, and well-appointed rooms of The Homestead. Colonel Higginson adds nothing of himself, nothing personal, no fond remembrance or anecdote, since this is only the third time he has met Emily.

  There is a prayer, a psalm, another prayer — and the circle breaks. I do not stay for talk after the burial, as I feel very strongly I am attending under false pretenses. Had Emily and I ever been true friends? Certainly ours was an unusual bond. Once our lives began to tangle into each other’s, it was difficult to resist her pull, until the final inevitable break. Emily and I as friends existed in a hothouse of Emily’s making, with little of the outside world allowed to creep in. All the steps I have taken to arrive where I stand today by necessity drew me away from the smaller and smaller space Emily allowed us to inhabit. Trying to fathom Emily was a hobby taken up by many. Perhaps, as it has been suggested, I was the one who had seen her most clearly. Yet I wonder how much she had concealed when deploying her stratagem of holding those who loved her “near, but remote.”

  I am rattled still by the obituary in yesterday’s Republican. Although it was unsigned, I am fairly certain that it was Sue Dickinson who had penned the words:

  As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship. . . . Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid . . . not because she was insufficient of any mental work or social career — her endowments being so exceptional — but the “mesh of her soul” . . . was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work. . . . To her life was rich, and all aglow with God and immortality. . . . She walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old saints, with the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer.

  So already the mythmaking begins. Emily too fine for the world? That was not the Emily I knew, not the Emily with whom I battled both in her presence and in my own mind, forming the arguments I hoped she could not refute. Nor was it the Emily who entertained, who made me laugh.

  I walk back to my house for the last time, through the village, through the drifting apple blossoms and memories. Tonight, I will sleep in my Amherst house one last time. Tomorrow, when I step on the train, I will be finally and forever relinquishing my ties here. The house will become the new home of the Frazar Stearns Center for Early Childhood Education and will pull me no more.

  I should finish my packing, but my mind remains with Emily and the paradox of our long friendship. She held me too close, yet she made me test and explore. She was demanding and selfish, yet she was permissive and generous. She clung to me, yet she also pushed me away. And yet. And yet . . .

  I will never again be what I was to Emily Dickinson, year after year — her neighbor and her friend, yet also her property and her creature. Once, I belonged to Emily; now, I belong to myself.

  To explain all this, I must go back to years I never knew, to the time before I was born. I lean back on the sofa; I close my eyes and I begin to remember.

  Book I

  BOSTON

  1843–1856

  My story did not begin when I was born; no one’s does. We are all the result of a thousand intersecting lives — when the chance action of some casual stranger sets Fate in motion. I exist only because a kindly teacher, on impulse, offered his book of classical myths to a serious little boy of seven. This small event of some ninety years ago eventually led to me, Miranda Chase — and to my sitting here tonight, recalling my life, tracing the path that led me to Amherst and to Emily, and then far beyond either.

  I am a true New Englander, with ten or twelve generations of New England forebears on each side of my family. John Latham, my mother’s ancestor, was one of the very first band of settlers that came to New England in 1620. The Chases, my father’s family, arrived with the Dickinsons in 1630. Even the proud Dickinsons, Amherst’s royalty, reached the stony shores of Massachusetts ten years after the Lathams. Emily knew this, but it always suited her to forget it.

  My father, Josiah Bramhall Chase, was born in Springfield, a small prosperous iron-smelting city in western Massachusetts, in 1795. All his life, Father was proud that his birthday, December 15, was on the same date the Bill of Rights had been ratified by our new Congress in 1791.

  My grandfather, Elliott Chase, was an engineer and chief metallurgist for the Springfield Foundry, which later manufactured most of the rifles for the northern armies of the Civil War. He was an imposing figure — influential, respected, and widely read. He patented four inventions that brought him a small regular income. He was admired for speaking fluent German and for entertaining metallurgists from abroad.

  My grandmother, Jane Stafford Chase, conducted a “dame school” in her house for very young children. She and her sister taught a generation of four-year-olds and are still remembered fondly. I have seen some of her teaching notes and plans; they are spirited and charming, a world beyond the joyless Puritan methods then in use. Although she died twelve years before I was born, I have always sensed her influence on my own work.

  My Chase forebears lived simply but comfortably. Their spacious white clapboard houses, set among splendid arching elms, were unadorned, not so much furnished as burnished. Whenever I visit the Chases or Staffords or Bramhalls around the valley, I am struck by how every plain surface — wood, metal, or glass — glows with care and pride.

  These families were judges and farmers and shipbuilders on the Connecticut River. They prospered, yet there was none of the casual luxury — the hothouse fruit, the crystal and silver trinkets, the fine gold-tooled morocco leather bindings — that I remember in Boston on Mount Vernon Street and that I now recognize as the visible tips of the concealed fortunes of my mother’s family. But my father and his younger sister, Helen, had one indulgence, one unlimited luxury.

  “Our roof was supported by books!” Father once told me. He recalled that books were everywhere — overflowing from shelves onto windowsills and into corners. Defoe lay open on a table; Scott and Fielding were stacked in toppling piles at each bedside.

  As soon as he began to read, Josiah Chase found the true passion of his life: a copy of Ovid, which his teacher had lent him, enthralled him with the myths of classical Greece. At eight, he began learning Greek after school. He stepped into Athens, sixth century BC, and never left it. At fourteen, he won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, competing among the most brilliant boys of New England. The routine was spartan, the leisure scant, the study demanding — yet my father always spoke of his years at Exeter as the happiest of his life.

  On his second day of school at Exeter in September 1810, Josiah Chase and another new student, Tom Bulfinch, met in Latin III and eyed each other warily.

  “Which were best, Greeks or Romans?” Josiah asked Tom.

  “Greeks, of course! ” Tom answered Jos. Thus began an extraordinary friendship — one that lasted more than fifty years and made them both famous. Tom Bulfinch, with my father’s encouragement and advice, wrote the seminal text The Age of Fable, while Tom served in the same capacity for my father’s first compendium and analysis of the great classical plays.

  Together the two young scholars worked side by side at the pace of a classical snail, never hurrying and never doubting their work would succeed someday. I can imagine the two leggy schoolboys, earnest and crack-voiced, building their shared dreams, piece by meticulous piece. I kept a few pages of Father’s earliest notebook, written at Exeter and annotated by Tom when Father was fifteen. The notes are blotted and swollen from having fallen in the Swampscott River after a forbidden swim. I still smile as I recall them: “Check on Patroclus’s shield. Look up ‘laurel’ (branch and leaf formation). Who was Phaëthon’s sister?” And the endearing confession: “The rest of these pages used for the tail of our kite, May 9, 1811.”

  After Exeter, To
m and Jos went on to Harvard together. They studied their beloved classics and graduated with honors in 1814. Then they shared a tiny yellow house on Linnaean Street in Cambridge. Tom eventually clerked in a Boston bank, and Father instructed in Greek literature at Harvard. He once confided that before every lecture that first year, he fingered his lucky Greek coin for the courage to face all those eager students. He blossomed in that venue, growing expansive on the lecturer’s stage. The devotion of his students long after they graduated was a testimony to the compassion and interest he demonstrated in his Harvard office. It was some time before that warming light shone on me, his daughter.

  Mythology took up most of Josiah’s and Tom’s leisure, and the related travel used up all their money. As the years passed and their ambition and diligence never faltered, their friends gave them ironic classical nicknames. Father was “Hercules” (for his heroic labors) and Tom was “Sisyphus” (whose stone kept rolling back downhill forever).

  Then it was 1840. Jos and Tom were middle-aged bachelors now, their great works still unfinished. Tom’s father, Charles Bulfinch, had just returned to Boston as an elderly laureate, having completed the U.S. Capitol. He invited Tom and my father, whom he treated as another son, for sherry on Thanksgiving Day.

  “You’d better bring that Greek coin of yours, Jos,” Charles Bulfinch told Father. “I have a Greek surprise for you.”

  This proved to be Miss Marian Latham, a Bulfinch neighbor on Beacon Hill. She was a small, stunning beauty, a startling replica of the nymph Arethusa, whose profile graced my father’s lucky gold coin.

  “I have your head right here in my pocket,” said my delighted father, taking out the coin to show her. There is no record of her reply to this startling and charming overture. I imagine she went on smiling, and my father went on staring. I cannot imagine them talking — that afternoon or ever. Actually, I have no memory of my parents in conversation.