Afternoons with Emily Read online

  Mrs. Austin sighed and returned to her chair. She refilled our glasses before she spoke again. “We have a famous friend in Springfield, very much in the public eye. He is a true gallant; every woman he meets counts him as a conquest. His wife is quite used to his foolishness and doesn’t really mind it. What she does mind is Emily believing his nonsense. Encouraging it. Exploiting it.”

  Mrs. Austin tapped the arm of the settee with some impatience. Emily’s behavior seemed to bother her as much as it did the gentleman’s wife. “Emily treats this gentleman like a beau, indeed, like a declared suitor! She is actually possessive about him, Miranda.”

  Then I realized Mrs. Austin was talking about Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bowles, but I remained silent. I could keep confidences too.

  “I know that Emily writes him often, although this didn’t used to worry me,” Mrs. Austin continued.

  So the letters I carried were not strictly secret. Perhaps Emily discussed them with Mrs. Austin; perhaps, once, Sue mailed them for Emily herself. That could explain why I was now necessary — Mrs. Austin may have tried to discourage Emily from writing so often.

  “They worry you now?” I asked.

  She didn’t respond directly to my question and instead circled around it. This was a trait she and Emily shared.

  “Some time ago, when Emily was visiting in Philadelphia, she went to church and heard a sermon, a very fine one, I gather. From her pew, then and there, Emily fell in love with the minister! Emily is always so excessive.”

  The back of my neck tingled. I had sent envelopes to Philadelphia, undoubtedly to this very person. But what did any of this have to do with Samuel Bowles?

  Mrs. Austin must have sensed my bewilderment. “For you to feel the full force of my concern about Emily’s . . . excesses . . . I need to go back a bit. Miranda, these extraordinary reactions are part of Emily’s nature. It is a pattern. Some years ago, a young cousin died of consumption. She and Emily had been friendly but no more than that. Yet after her death, Emily went into a morbid decline. She mourned for an unseemly long time, months and months. Has Emily spoken of her and this tragic loss?”

  “If you mean her cousin Emily, then yes, she has.”

  “Most of that friendship occurred in our Emily’s mind after the cousin was buried! She has these violent, inappropriate emotions all prepared, ready and waiting — and she just decants them onto whoever or whatever the situation presents.” She shook her head, then gave me a searching look. “Has she told you about young Ben Newton dying?”

  “Yes,” I whispered reluctantly.

  “That is another example of Emily exaggerating things.” She stood again and paced, as if this topic agitated her. I wished I could join her in her fevered perambulation, my own feelings were so stirred. But instead I sat, trapped on the settee.

  “Ben was a perfectly charming young lawyer in Mr. Dickinson’s office some years ago. He paid Emily compliments, gave her books, told her how talented she was. After all, she was the boss’s daughter! They had a flirtatious good time together, but he was never her Mentor, nor were they ever sweethearts.”

  I had to protest. “How can you be sure of that, Mrs. Austin?”

  “Because Ben married Sarah Rugg, that’s how I’m sure! Did Emily tell you that?” Mrs. Austin paused for a heartbeat. “I daresay she did not. Ben died two years later, and from the way Emily emoted, you would have thought she had been widowed. It was, well, embarrassing. There was talk in the village.”

  My head spun over these revelations of Emily’s distortions, but Mrs. Austin was not done with me yet.

  “Just a bit more, Miranda. Now we come to the present day. My friend in Springfield — the wife whom Emily offends with her dangerous make-believe romancing — has a friend in Philadelphia. This Philadelphia woman says that Emily is now writing to a minister, the very same one whose sermon she heard there. Emily’s letters to this man, I gather, are very emotional, very unsuitable. The actual word she used was ‘scandalous.’

  “Unless Emily stops her imaginary flirtation with Mr. Bowles, Mrs. Bowles will tell Mr. Dickinson about the letters to that Philadelphia minister. And then we’ll all be in serious trouble.”

  Intrigue upon intrigue. These adults were all behaving in such a complicated fashion. I wondered what kind of trouble Mrs. Austin was referring to and wondered as well what harm there was in letters. Emily never saw anyone — she must be the safest rival a wife could ever have.

  Then I remembered — Samuel Bowles was one of the few gentlemen Emily did see in person. And scandal of any type could be ruinous for the Dickinson family.

  “I do mail letters to Philadelphia,” I conceded. “Of course, I don’t know what they say.”

  “Does Emily say this man was her lover?”

  I shifted a little on the settee. This was not a conversation I wanted to continue. I didn’t want to betray Emily’s trust, yet Mrs. Austin seemed genuinely concerned. This was not idle, mean-spirited gossip — this was a family member trying to determine the nature of a family problem. “She uses different words.” There. Perhaps that would be sufficient.

  “But does she say they are somehow close, linked in a relationship?”

  “I think so,” I told her. “But I’m not sure from the way she talks.”

  “Do I not!” She laughed sharply. “Miranda, Austin and I believe she barely met the minister, has hardly even spoken to him. He is a perfect stranger to Emily!”

  “You mean she has invented the whole thing?” I was appalled. I knew Emily had flights of romantic fancy, but outright inventions were a different and serious matter.

  “Oh, she probably shook the minister’s hand leaving the church, but that’s all it was.”

  “But why do the letters matter so much?” I asked. “Emily writes many people, Mrs. Austin. She must write four or five letters a day. Anyone who knows her realizes that!”

  “They matter because I hear the letters to Philadelphia concern a very intimate and personal relationship. She writes about his teaching and guiding her, about him as ‘Master’ and she as his disciple.”

  I winced at these familiar phrases. “Th-that’s just how she puts things,” I said. I was still trying to diminish her fears about Emily’s erratic behavior. After all, I saw her every week; I would know if she was truly mad. “It’s harmless.” There. That sounded like a grown-up way to dismiss a child’s foolish fancy. “Things sound more exciting when Emily writes that way.”

  My hostess looked at me intently and sighed deeply, shaking her head. She rose in a swirl of crinolines and crossed the room to fetch me a little carved ebony chest.

  “I had hoped this would not be necessary,” she told me. “I see that I must show you some extremely confidential letters — to convince you that there are tremendous stakes here. That what she writes does matter. Read one or two, and you’ll see what I mean.”

  She opened the box and handed me one folded letter from among many — all in Emily’s unique script, like a spray of buds and leaves.

  Oh my darling one, how long you wander from me, how weary I grow of waiting and looking, and calling for you; sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so. . . .

  I was deeply embarrassed for us both and tried to return the box.

  Mrs. Austin was ruthless. “Read another.” She handed me a second piece of paper. I allowed my eyes to take in another paragraph:

  . . . sometimes the time seems short, and the thought of you as warm as if you had gone but yesterday, and again if years and years had trod their silent pathway, the time would seem less long. And now how soon I shall have you, shall hold you in my arms. . . .

  I wanted no more of this. I slammed the top of the pretty casket in anger and disgust and held it out to her.

  “You have no business reading Emily’s love letters. You shouldn’t pry. Even I know better than that.”

  “Miranda, try to understand.” Mrs. Austin looked into my eye
s and spoke so gravely that I could not doubt her. “These are my letters. Emily wrote these letters to me.”

  I couldn’t help it — my mouth fell open in shock. Could she be saying what I thought she was saying? This couldn’t be true.

  Mrs. Austin opened the box and handed me another letter, selected at random. Sure enough, this one named her:

  Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language. . . .

  I was young and unworldly, but I had enough vague facts and hints to recoil from this as from a spitting adder. Horrified, I turned to Mrs. Austin for explanation. “Do you mean . . . was she in love with you?”

  “No, my dear. Though certainly when Austin and I were engaged, she was crushed. She carried on as if we both had jilted her. No, I think hers was an unresolvable grief — one that comes from feeling unwanted, unloved, and left behind.”

  She took the box back from me and slowly closed the cover. “Now you see Emily’s style in letters. That is the way Emily writes to people. She could have written these same letters to anyone — word for word. She would always use this same passionate and possessive manner when she wrote to Austin, her own brother. It was even more shocking that she would address him this way.”

  “What is it you want with me?” I was numb from crossing and recrossing these unsteady bridges of worry. I wanted only to crawl away from this confusion, this sadness.

  “Well, I believe these old letters to me are exactly the sorts of letters she is sending to the minister in Philadelphia right now. Mrs. Bowles intends that Mr. Dickinson should know it.”

  “Mrs. Austin, this is . . . serious.” I put my head in my hands, feeling sick and faint. I could only imagine how Emily’s stern, patrician father would react.

  “My poor child, of course it is. You can help Emily, if you will.”

  I looked up at her. Her face was drawn with concern, and I suspected some of that worry was on my behalf. She understood that I was too young for this but that she had no one else to turn to as an ally.

  “You understand that Emily’s letters to Philadelphia can ruin her. That is why we need you to be watchful. We should not interrupt the steady stream of letters, of course; perhaps the correspondence will exhaust itself. We can be vigilant by making sure this infatuation advances no further. If she begins to speak to you of plans — or promises — from a beloved or intended, if she speaks of running away to Philadelphia to be married, you must come to me at once.”

  “But Emily sees no one,” I said, feeling a flicker of hope. “She would never do that.”

  Mrs. Austin gave me a sad smile. “It is never easy to predict what Emily would and would not do. Her fancy can take her many places — if only on paper.” She gazed down at the box in her hands. “And as we have seen, words can have consequences.”

  “What would Mr. Dickinson do if he found out about the letters?” I asked.

  “Miranda, he would stop at nothing! First of all, he would cut off all her mail — and you and I know that is her entire social life. Then perhaps he’d find a sort of attendant, a guard for Emily.”

  “No,” I murmured. I thought of poor mad Mrs. Rochester and her cruel keeper — and I shuddered for my friend. I found I had decided.

  “Mrs. Austin, you can count on me. I promise I will help you to help Emily!”

  On the way home, I felt my knees failing me. My head seemed loose from my neck, floating as I used to float in the kind waters of Learner’s Cove. I tried to think sensibly about Mrs. Austin’s revelations, which had to be true. Those ardent letters from Emily to “my Susie” and the fat envelopes I mailed to Philadelphia were past argument — but at that moment I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to go home.

  I entered silently into our kitchen, where Aunt Helen was making a pudding. She dropped the spoon and ran to hold me.

  “Miranda, you look — why, child, you’re burning up!”

  She settled me on the parlor couch, where the plush prickled, and brought me some cider. When I cried out in pain from the acid drink, we both remembered there were cases of mumps at the academy just before it closed.

  Because I was fourteen, I was much sicker than I would have been had I been a small child. I spent a swollen-faced, feverish fortnight, too dizzy to read much. I tried to think about Emily, and Monday afternoons, and Mrs. Austin’s terrible letters — but it was all as elusive and amorphous as algebra.

  I slept at odd times. I lay remembering the dolphins, who always looked so cool and tidy. At some point, I heard a steady thumpery, thumpery from the back porch; Kate was freezing coffee ice cream for me. When she brought it, the fever and my throbbing chipmunk face made it taste even colder and sweeter.

  By the third week in July, I was pronounced cured of mumps but was suffering from a severe case of convalescence. I was weak and wavering and indifferent to everything, especially myself. Even Mr. Harnett’s letters lay on my desk; I was too listless to respond.

  I felt like a balloon that someone had let loose, floating above a world that didn’t concern me. Not even the predicament of Emily’s letters could muster my attention for longer than a few disturbed moments.

  Then Aunt Helen announced, “Reveille for sleeping beauties!” She and Kate, with my father’s blessing, had planned a fortnight at the sea. They had even arranged for chitons for us from Madame Lauré. I was happy to join these plans without the effort of making them. I felt a twinge of guilt — I had just promised Mrs. Austin I would keep an eye on Emily. But there was nothing to do about this. I allowed myself to be consoled by the idea that at the age of fourteen, the decision to leave Amherst was simply not up to me. Grown-ups had arranged these things.

  We took the cars to Westerly, Rhode Island, and stayed in a gray farmhouse with stony pastures above a little tan beach. After my first swim — in clear water colder than that of Barbados, with slow unthreatening waves — I felt my energy flooding back. I was home again inside my body.

  I attacked the simple farm dinner, pleasing our landlady, and challenged Kate to a jacks tournament after supper. At bedtime, I gave Aunt Helen an extra kiss. She turned her pansy face up from her book, calm and loving. She was the very embodiment of a concerned parent; Kate and I had her interest and attention always. In a rush of feeling, I knew that I wanted to be this kind of mother.

  She tugged a strand of my hair. “You’ve had a very trying year, Miranda, whether you know it or not. You need a little time to catch up with yourself.”

  At the end of the two weeks we had planned, Kate and I begged to stay on at the sea while Aunt Helen moved Father and some of the Beacon Hill furniture into the new house in Amherst. Our aunt seemed relieved that we were old enough and arranged that our landlady would act as our chaperone, keeping all our imaginary beaux from seducing us!

  The interlude that followed was pure gold. I had the strangest sense that we were unattached to our pasts, not yet involved in our futures — simply living each blue and amber hour as it came toward us, as the waves crested and broke and fell on the beach.

  We were brown and salty and laughing, stuffed with corn and lobster, murderous in our jacks contests, voracious in our romance reading. Then at night we talked in bed in the dark till one of us dropped off midsentence. Nothing was kept back; we had no secrets. I learned a great deal in those whispered confidences.

  “Miranda, sometimes I worry about you and Miss Dickinson,” Kate told me one midnight when we were half asleep. “She asks so much of you. Is she jealous of your other friends?”

  “Emily, jealous?” I giggled at the idea. “Heavens, no — she thinks everyone else is too far beneath her!”

  “She’s so demanding, so intense. Is it worth it, trying to please her?”

  Kate wa
s right — Emily was both these and more. Especially in light of Mrs. Austin’s revelations, which so complicated matters. But in spite of this new information, I was not willing to give up my friendship with Emily. I wanted Kate to understand it. “You don’t see what she does for me,” I explained. “Not just her wit and our literary games. She’s taught me to speak and write and read better, and this is important for when I’m older. She is so clever and critical that it’s like taking a course in style! And I like her very much. I really do.”

  “Do you trust her?”

  “I know she can be unkind and untruthful — but she’d never hurt me, never.”

  “I wouldn’t let her. I’ll be watching.” Kate let out a sleepy yawn and rolled onto her side, away from me.

  I smiled in the dark at Kate’s loyalty. I knew Kate would defend me in any altercation, real or imagined.

  We never spoke of it, but we were fully aware that this seaside holiday idyll would not be repeated in our friendship. Kate was a young lady, finished with school, already in love; I was ending my childhood. Our real lives were waiting for us back in Amherst. But we still had another week of beach. We still had three more days. There was one day left.

  Then it was time to pack.

  Returning to Amherst, we found everything had changed, a little or a lot. It was summer while we were frolicking in the sea. Now it was autumn, and the first maple was frostbit into scarlet on my fifteenth birthday. Last year, we were tentative newcomers; now we were truly a part of Amherst. And the greatest change of all was that we had left the German professor’s ferns and plush, and now lived in our own house — with our own furniture, our own books and treasures.

  Uncle Thomas and I had spent spring days choosing the color for the outside. He had one inflexible rule: our choice must be part of the natural landscape all year long. I insisted that the shade be dark enough to set off the “Grecophilization”: the white portico and columns and pilasters that Ethan had designed for us.