Afternoons with Emily Read online

  Aunt Helen had long private talks with Cousin Daisy and Dr. Jackson — and, I imagine, with Father. Afterward she sighed and hugged me — and sighed again.

  “Someday we’ll be closer, Ara,” she promised. “Someday you’ll know your cousin Kate. She’s a bit older, but I know you’ll be friends.” This made me very curious about Springfield and Aunt Helen’s life. But not for very long. My own life was now peopled by all the characters brought into my nursery by Mr. Harnett.

  In geography, Mr. Harnett and I studied Captain Cook’s adventurous voyages. One spring morning in 1852, we were down on our hands and knees, creating the Pacific Ocean. My tutor was sloshing blue paint on a sheet, and I was following him with a stiff brush, making wave ripples. Suddenly, Father appeared in the nursery, looking stern and remote.

  “Ara, I want you to come with me to say good-bye to your mother.”

  “All right.” I laid my brush down carefully. “Where is she going?”

  “She has been gravely ill this month, and Dr. Jackson thinks she may leave us soon.”

  I knew this meant dying, and I was very interested. It did not concern me directly, for I had always considered “Mother” an honorary title in my life, but the closeness of death in the house intrigued me.

  I glanced at Mr. Harnett’s face; he nodded and I followed Father downstairs, where a serious nurse opened Mother’s door. The room smelled of medicine and something new — death, perhaps. She was lying on her chaise longue in a beautiful creamy lace peignoir with knots of blue ribbon. She was turned toward the chestnut tree blooming at her window. She was wasted to a shadow. Her skin was almost ethereal in its transparency, and her breath was so imperceptible, a rose leaf might have slept undisturbed on her lips.

  “I like to look at the chestnuts too,” I said, trying to find something to say, something we might have in common. “I have one at my window. I can look all the way down inside it. It’s like a little lace cave.”

  “I imagine it’s very like this one,” she said. “Chestnut trees are usually the same, I believe.” Then she turned toward us. All the blood seemed to have run out of her flawless face. She could have been a marble statue.

  There was a dainty piecrust table at her side, with her mirror and her medicines, and a pile of white cloths. I noticed the new Atlantic Monthly too, containing Father’s article about Theseus in Minoan art.

  “Did you like Father’s article?” I asked.

  “I haven’t read it yet. Did you want something, Arethusa?”

  I looked up at Father, uncertain, but his eyes gazed down at the floor.

  “Father says I should say good-bye to you,” I explained.

  Mother nodded very slowly, as if understanding this statement came to her from a distant place. “That was very thoughtful of him. Good-bye, Arethusa. Thank you, Josiah.” She turned her perfect head back to the window and reached for one of the cloths.

  Father and I both knew we had been dismissed. He took my hand to lead me out of the room, gave me an odd questioning look, then sent me back to Mr. Harnett.

  In the nursery, I was dismayed that Mr. Harnett had finished the Pacific without me. The thick paint dried very quickly; you had to work it while it was still wet. But Mr. Harnett offered me the challenge of doing the curving lettering as consolation, along with placing the islands with the haunting names. I felt his eyes on me as I faced the task with deep concentration, aiming for perfection and accuracy.

  Two things happened that night: I woke up with croup, and my mother died. I was soon used to the steam kettle and the strange noises I made in the croup tent, which Mr. Harnett told me sounded like Maine seals calling back and forth. My mother’s death was something more unusual, but my illness caused me to miss her funeral and interment.

  My life in no way changed. As far as I could tell, neither did my father’s. We had always operated in our separate spheres, one in which Mother was only a shadowy tangential fact, something one knew but not something one experienced.

  Not too long after this, Nanny Drummond confided to Cousin Daisy that at the age of seventy-five she was now past raising children. I had made her last several years in the nursery as easy as I could, often not waking her until afternoon and carrying our trays from the dumbwaiter myself. Still, I knew she was right.

  So the Latham family gave her a grand farewell tea at our house, in the double parlors. This was the biggest difference between before and after my mother’s death: we hosted an event. The family gathered en masse at the house. How curious they must have been. Some had never been inside; some I knew only from seeing them at holiday gatherings elsewhere.

  Nanny Drummond cried through most of the tea. Each of her “children” gave her a single rose — starting with Cousin Cabot Howe, who was nearly sixty, and ending with me. Then Cousin Daisy tied a ribbon around the bouquet with a rolled-up scroll in the bow. This was a copy of the family arrangement that would give Nanny a comfortable monthly income while she lived with her dear niece in Milton, and a handsome sum for the niece’s farm when Nanny died. I could tell from the approving murmurs that this ceremony pleased all present.

  With Nanny Drummond gone, I was mortally afraid of finding myself with another Miss Ellison as caretaker. I begged Mr. Harnett to speak to my father for me. It was arranged that Jenny, the downstairs maid, would sleep in Nanny’s old room and help me with baths and dressing. As to my dreary walks, Cousin Daisy solved that too. A remote Lowell connection had a crooked spine and had to walk a mile a day in a special brace. She was a sour spinster who loathed children, and I was a sulky nuisance who would have preferred a book — but nevertheless, most afternoons found Cousin Jane and me walking up and down the Beacon Hill cobblestones for an unspeaking hour. The rest of the day was gloriously mine.

  So for the next year or two, my life was shaped by Mr. Harnett and his lessons — our morning projects, our writing and Latin and French. When he went back to Harvard after lunch, I continued my related reading — although all books were joy. We decided to make a tremendous study of European history, starting with the Greeks and their colonies, because we agreed that everything good started in Greece.

  Soon these afternoons were occupied by the occasional social interval. When my mother died, Cousin Daisy became newly active with my Latham connections — making sure the families who forbade my sharing lessons paid for this slight in other ways. Now at least once a month I had a birthday party, or an outing to the theater or the circus, or a concert to attend. There were many entertainments available for well-off Boston children at that time.

  My studies with Mr. Harnett had made me better company and more confident in groups. Still, having been kept distant from my cousins for most of my life, I was awkward and stiff in social settings. My slight remoteness was matched by an uncertainty on the part of the others. Perhaps I was still tainted with the family secret, for despite my cousins’ new willingness to include me, Mr. Harnett was still my only true friend.

  We were just finishing Charlemagne on Good Friday 1853 when Jenny climbed the stairs to say that Father wanted to see us in the library right away, for an Easter surprise. Mr. Harnett and I stared at each other with raised eyebrows. This was mysterious.

  We went down to the library and discovered an amazing sight: Father and Uncle Thomas were waltzing madly about the room and singing a loud Easter hymn:

  The strife is o’er, the battle done;

  The victory of life is won.

  The song of triumph has begun.

  Alleluia!

  I could not believe any part of the fantastic scene, but Mr. Harnett gave a whoop of laughter and held out his arms to me. Had he guessed what had made them so astonishingly lively or was their extraordinary humor simply infectious? It didn’t matter — as we waltzed, Mr. Harnett steered me very nicely. The four of us sang the lovely hymn and danced around the library, bumping often. Then Uncle Thomas stumbled over the book ladder on wheels. He sat down very hard on the bottom step. The ladder started up — a
nd rolled him slowly along beside the shelves!

  We laughed so hard at the stately way Uncle Thomas rode his chariot that my father started to cry. I stood gaping at him. Father? In tears?

  “Ah, me.” He gave a shaky sigh, small chuckles erupting as he crossed to the sideboard. He poured us four sloppy glasses of sherry, and finally the explanation for this extraordinary scene came: “My compendium of plays has found the ideal publisher!” Father declared. “And Tom has finished his masterpiece!”

  “To our years of work, old friend!” Tom said, holding up his glass.

  We toasted their good news, made even better by being shared. I held up my glass and took a sip. It tasted warm and nutty, but it burned as it slipped down my throat. I decided the cheerful toasting and clinking of glasses filled with amber liquid was the best part of sherry.

  My proud father wanted to call out his news to all the neighbors on Mount Vernon Street, but Mr. Harnett could not seem to open the windows — so Father decided to take a little nap and try the windows himself later. We covered him on the daybed: he thanked us graciously. Next we put Uncle Thomas on the sofa with a blanket, clutching his completed manuscript to his chest like a crusader. Then Mr. Harnett and I went back up to our own floor and our own world, still laughing and singing, “Alleluia!”

  “Don’t forget this morning, my Ara,” said Mr. Harnett. “I want you to start laughing more than you do.”

  So of course I tried hard to do this, as I attempted whatever he asked.

  The rest of 1853 passed smoothly. Father told us that Uncle Charlie Sloan had died, and he was worried that the income left to Aunt Helen and my cousin Kate might not be enough. He went to Springfield once or twice, arranging that the Sloans receive a royalty from his book of plays, which was selling very well. We could afford the generosity; Mother’s income had passed to him, leaving us with more than we would ever need.

  My tutor and I studied the Dark Ages and the Crusades, and then we moved on to the Renaissance. We made a fine model of the Globe Theatre and staged scenes from Shakespeare. Mr. Harnett found us some all-purpose hand puppets that were easy to adapt to a particular role: a beard for Lear, a sword for Mercutio. Sometimes our productions turned into a rowdy roughhouse, but there was no one to hear our racket.

  The years passed quickly and productively, and by March 1856, I was a serene twelve and a half. There was an infinity to learn, and dear Mr. Harnett was there to see that I learned it. I saw no reason for my life to change.

  But he was a mysterious day or two late after Easter, and it worried me. When he reached the nursery, where I had made him a display of spring bulbs, he looked remote and distraught.

  He motioned for me to sit at the table and then took his place opposite me, as he had for a thousand mornings. But this time he took my hand, which unsettled me badly. He had always insisted that a tutor and his pupil should never touch — except for a hard good-bye handshake and a birthday kiss. And of course that once when we waltzed in Father’s library. His hand engulfed mine; it felt strong and warm, but I could sense an undercurrent I could not identify that frightened me.

  “Ara, I have to talk to you.” He began to speak, shook his head — then tried again. “My dear Ara, I must tell you . . . I’m moving back to New York.”

  I stared at him for a moment, trying to understand what he had just said to me. Then I cried out, “No, NO!” as if I had been stabbed through the heart like Mercutio. I pulled away from his grasp and covered my face with my hands. I wouldn’t listen to him, to his good news of his new school, his chance to teach as he had taught me, to use the lessons we had invented together, that he was finding another tutor for me, that he was not leaving for another few weeks. The more details he offered, the more I felt the crushing fact of reality. I wanted to drown him out, repeating “no” over and over, almost as a chant. I covered my ears and ignored the tortured, worried look on his face.

  He sat with me until I tired myself out. After making me wash my face, he began the lesson as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had changed. By the end of the day, I had almost forgotten Mr. Harnett’s terrible news.

  For several days, we operated in this pretend fashion. We worked together; I even occasionally laughed, as I knew it pleased my tutor. But underneath there was a dark sadness nagging at me.

  One day, Mr. Harnett brought a young man with him.

  “Ara, I’d like you to meet William Brooks,” Mr. Harnett said. The short man nodded and smiled.

  “Your tutor has told me a great deal about you, Ara,” Mr. Brooks said. His voice had a soft accent; he sounded like he was speaking around a mouthful of velvet. “I am looking forward to our working together.”

  “Mr. Brooks will begin next month,” Mr. Harnett explained.

  My eyes widened as the implication of this statement chilled and stopped my blood. He was Mr. Harnett’s replacement. The pretending was about to come to an end.

  I began to cry wildly, helplessly, uncontrollably, with huge, regular shaking sobs that took over my whole body. I sobbed from my feet up.

  Mr. Harnett asked Mr. Brooks to leave and then held me close, whispered a good-bye, and left; I believe he was crying too. I couldn’t stop until evening, until midnight. Then Jenny told my father, who must have sent for Dr. Jackson. Suddenly the doctor was in my nursery, bringing me a bitter brown drink.

  “Crying won’t bring your friend back, Ara, so you’d better sleep. Drink this, and you can rest a little.”

  I tried to tell Dr. Jackson why I was crying — but as I drank, he went away in a spiral. When I woke up a day later, I accepted my loss as fact. Mr. Harnett was gone for good, and the worst of my terrible, desperate grieving was over. But now I was hollow and empty, like all the days and weeks that lay ahead.

  At first, after Mr. Harnett left me, I would get up as usual and try to reenact my mornings with him. I would begin with our sonnet of incantation, although his voice never came to join mine. Then I used our old models and exercise books, trying to play both our roles. All the while I felt I was watching someone else do these things from a long, pale distance. So I stopped and I stayed in bed, reading our old texts but mostly sleeping.

  One day Cousin Daisy stopped by for a visit. I could see her distress over my condition, but I didn’t care. Mr. Harnett had gone away — that was all that mattered to me. I could overhear hushed discussions between her and Father outside my nursery door but couldn’t muster enough interest to eavesdrop.

  After Cousin Daisy left, Father came into the nursery. He seemed angry to find me dozing at two in the afternoon.

  “I want you up and out of bed — starting right now. Take a bath and wash your hair; Jenny can help you. Then come to the library.”

  I was ashamed at his instructions, having never aroused his disapproval or disappointment in such a way before. I followed his orders and reached the library a good deal cleaner. He looked me over and handed me a big folder.

  “Cousin Daisy feels it may be too soon to have you adjust to a new tutor,” he said. “She seems to think you won’t learn especially well in your current state. However, she . . . and I . . . both feel you need to have some activity. And perhaps a change of scenery might do you some good as well.”

  I nodded, not especially understanding but knowing some response was expected of me.

  “Therefore,” Father continued, “I want you to be my special secretary for children’s letters. I have received several hundred about The Great Plays, and each child deserves a proper reply. You can work right here on this big table. Those are your materials,” he added, nodding at the folder in my hands.

  Then he gave me a small worn book. “And I think you’re ready for the real classics now. Here is Chapman’s translation of The Iliad. Please start it here with me, so I can help you on the meter. This is the one Keats liked. ‘Much have I traveled in the realms of gold.’ It’s my favorite too.”

  The children’s letters were a good chance for practicing my penmanship �
� and The Iliad was a reunion of the complicated families of my nursery gods. It was unexpectedly vivid to me, as was my father’s presence. Working daily in his study among his prized possessions, I felt him there too. I was often seated at the table when he arrived home from Harvard, and as he settled into his own work, we’d chat about the day and our discoveries in ancient times.

  One day Father pulled down a large book of Athenian art, and he fingered the pages. His gaze went from a page in the book to me and back to the book. He studied me more carefully. He seemed to make a decision. “This has given me an idea,” he said. “I will ask my barber to come and cut your hair this afternoon.”

  This was quite unexpected. My father had never taken an interest in my appearance before. And I had been rather vain about my braids, because Mr. Harnett called them the “Golden Fleece.” Still, my braids seemed unimportant, and it would be a blessing not to have Jenny yanking at me every morning.

  Later that day, Mr. Macrae, the barber, arrived. He wore a white smock; he had an accent like that of Young Lochinvar — or Nanny Drummond. First he chopped off each braid at my shoulders, making me look like a captured Gaul. Then he took out some thin pointed scissors and studied a page in one of Father’s art books for a long time.

  “Do you think you can do that for us?” Father asked him.

  “Why not? The lassie’s hair is as braw as heather.”

  As he snipped, I studied the illustration he was copying: a smiling boy, running carefree on a vase. His hair was cut like a wreath, more or less. I admired his tunic and trousers — they seemed to make running quite a bit easier for the boy in the picture. The boy looked happy.

  “That’s it! Sir, you’re a true artist! That is exactly what we needed.” My delighted father beamed at Mr. Macrae and at my shorn head in the mirror.

  I could not think why either one of us needed short curls, but it did not matter much.

  Not long after, a letter arrived: my first letter ever, with my name in Mr. Harnett’s lovely spiked writing, like a row of tiny teeth.