Afternoons with Emily

by Rose MacMurray

Genres: Friendship; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In mid-19th-century Amherst, Emily Dickinson is famous both for her notable family and for her reclusive ways, and only Miranda Chase, a smart girl with big plans for her own life, is allowed to enter the budding poet's very private world. At first, their Monday afternoon visits involve discussing books over piping hot cups of tea, but when Miranda begins exploring her own yearnings -- for love, for an education, even for a career -- she discovers that being a friend of Emily's is not without its dangers. The very charisma that has inspired her becomes a web of intrigue, and to escape it, Miranda will imperil her reputation, her independence, and even her dreams. Drawing on letters, poems, and everything that is known about Dickinson's life, Afternoons With Emily is a vivid portrait of America's most famous poet, a coming-of age story that spans the Civil War, and a tale of two brilliant women who each chose to break with convention and live life on their own terms.

Release date: April 24, 2007

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 480

Sample

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.


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, Tom 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.


The Marian Latham Chase I knew was an elegant figure, rarely seen, who spoke only platitudes and stared with lovely vacant
eyes. My maternal grandmother, Eliza Cabot Latham, died in childbirth when my mother, Marian, was three. Many of my relatives
remember the pretty, lonely child growing up motherless in the big house at number 32. Even then, the weakness to which she
would later succumb had been present in the occasional gasping for air, the labored breathing as she slept, the flushed cheeks
upon exertion. But this was rarely discussed and certainly never outside the immediate family.


Marian Latham finished her classes and lessons at eighteen. She was considered “accomplished” — that is, she wrote a pretty
hand, sang a bit, and spoke flawless French. If she was remote, it was attributed to breeding, her stillness a quality to
admire in a future wife. Furthermore, she was a noted beauty, an ornament to Boston society — and an heiress to a great fortune.
Surely there must be a brilliant match waiting for such a belle! Yet at twenty-nine she was somehow still single. Her kindly
relations had scoured Boston for years, collecting partners for Marian at their parties. But these introductions seemed to
lead no further once the young eligibles learned that Marian’s delicate eyes and complexion were but early symptoms of the
inevitable declining health that lay ahead.


As a small child I wondered so often what she was thinking, what her secrets were. I soon learned that her secret was a terrible
one: tuberculosis, the disease whose diagnosis was a virtual death sentence. This stalker of health spared no one. Even the
rich and eminent — Chopin, Thoreau, Lanier, and Keats — were felled by it. Marian’s father was a known consumptive, a semi-invalid
who seldom left home. Marian herself was a “parlor case,” with an early history of coughing blood but with intervals of better
health and cautious activity. It is easy to see how my mother, already somewhat withdrawn by temperament and circumstances,
would be further distanced from the world by knowledge of her fatal disease. It was there in the house already, eating at
her father. Any morning it might turn and ravage her too. How could she ever be unguarded and carefree?


This was the situation in 1840 when my father, a stranger to Boston society, appeared with his proposal. What a sigh of relief
must have emanated from the tired Lathams! I can almost hear them now, congratulating each other.


“A capital fellow!” the Howes and Lathams and Curtises assured one another.

“From somewhere in the Connecticut River Valley . . . a bit older, but that Marian needs a steady hand. Harvard ’14, and on
the faculty there now. Mark my words, Marian will be fine!”


My parents were engaged in a fortnight and married just after Easter 1841. There were reasons for this modish hurry; my Latham
grandfather was seriously consumptive, and the engaged couple were not young. So the double parlors and the spiral stair at
32 Mount Vernon Street were hung with garlands of white lilac and crowded with relatives in silk and serge. The Chases, coming
from Springfield, never guessed how few festivals had graced the handsome house.


The bridal pair spent a week in Newport, in a house lent by a pious Howe cousin whose rectitude had been enriched by a hundred
years in the slave trade. Then they returned to Mount Vernon Street, and — after the round of family dinner parties to honor
the newlyweds — my father unpacked his books and settled into his father-in-law’s mansion.


If there were acquaintances who whispered that my father had sought to better himself by marrying up, they were mistaken.
He loved comfort and convenience and beautiful things, but he was incapable of scheming to achieve them. He loved to travel
and buy books and presents, but he had indulged himself in these ways when he was poor. Since he spent almost all his waking
hours in the Athens of Pericles, it is quite possible that he never noticed the ease and elegance of his new setting. He slept
on Beacon Hill, but by day he looked upon the agora from the acropolis.


Perhaps in my father, Marian had found the perfect partner. Wrapped up in his own world, he would never attempt to invade
or intrude into hers. And she would not make demands of his time or attention, leaving him to visit with the ancients. Neither
noticed or missed the daily interactions, the entanglement of lives that other marriages entailed.


My own story begins at 32 Mount Vernon Street, where I was born on September 16, 1843. I was installed on the fifth floor
— the “nursery floor,” up under the roof. My parents resumed their tranquil parallel lives, undisturbed. Father read and studied
and taught. Mother supervised her father’s servants; she dressed beautifully and skimmed French novels. Very occasionally,
they dined out.


If my parents ever asked to “see the baby,” then someone must have carried me in — all ribbons and shawls, like a squab on
a garnished platter. The rest of the time I was cared for by Irish nursemaids. At three months, I was christened Arethusa,
soon shortened to Ara by my grandfather, who I am told loved me dearly.


How I have searched my memory for the faintest trace of this gentleman! I retain only a huge, warm presence, a prickly kiss,
a sense of being welcome and valuable. It is family lore that he would have me brought down at breakfast every day. He would
hold me on his lap while he read the morning paper and tell me when to turn the page — and they say I never wriggled once.
Father must have observed this often, to tell it so well when I would ask him.


My first actual clear-edged memory is of Grandfather’s winter funeral — though the concept of death was meaningless to me.
I remember the great snorting black horses, wearing curling black feathers and silver jewelry; they stamped and steamed in
the cold. I remember the fresh, bright snow on the cobblestones and the quiet crowds of people in black. Their sharp shadows
were blue on the snow, violet on the pink brick houses. This was in February 1846; I must have been two and a half.


When summer came that year, the big house was suddenly noisy with hammers and saws. Jolly red-faced men came and went, shouting
and spitting in strange languages. I begged to see all this, and my bored nursemaid would take me downstairs to watch the
carpenters working. They were changing my grandfather’s old bedroom into a new room for my father’s books.


When the loud carpenters disappeared, the house settled back into dense silence. My father vanished into that study, barely
emerging. Sometimes I heard the heavy front door open and close; sometimes I heard the tall clock strike the hour calmly;
but usually my big house kept its unbroken quiet.


My lively, sociable relatives all lived nearby, up and down Beacon Hill, in high, bay-windowed houses like mine. My mother
seemed to me a whole other species than my brisk, busy, talkative cousins and great-aunts. I used to stand at the street windows
of our famous double parlor on the second floor. From there, I would see my aunts and cousins passing in carriages or crossing
to call on one another. They were always in twos and threes, talking earnestly. Sometimes they would look up and wave, but
they did not often stop. I never expected them to. My grandfather’s death, my mother’s isolation, the frequent doctor visits,
all spoke to one fact: we were dangerous. My family had a terrible disease, and the relatives did not want us very close.


I do not mean to suggest that my parents and I were complete outcasts in that family neighborhood. The relatives never abandoned
Marian; instead, there was a distance. It was simply that Latham plans did not often include the Chases. “Marian wouldn’t
enjoy it,” said the uncles. “Marian isn’t well enough,” said the aunts. “Arethusa probably shouldn’t exert herself, just in
case,” said the cousins.


There was and is very little known about the course, treatment, and prevention of consumption. My grandfather had died of
it, and after I was born, my mother’s illness flared up; she went from being a “parlor case” to a near invalid.


The Lathams told one another that Dr. Jackson saw Marian every week and that he always listened to my chest too. They reassured
themselves that we were being taken care of while firmly establishing among the connected families that I too either had or
would soon come down with consumption like my mother.


Cousin Daisy Powell was the family’s designated herald. Sixty or so, alert and stylish, she loved her duties of reporting
news and carrying messages among the relations. She was unfailingly kind to me; she always expressed an official family sympathy
and interest.


“We all want you to get better,” she assured me. “What did Dr. Jackson say about your health this week?”

“Not much. He always asks if I have spat blood.”

“And have you?”

“Not yet.” And I would search her face for a clue as to whether this was the right or the wrong answer. There seemed to be
an expectancy surrounding this question. I answered truthfully, and there did seem relief in my response, but the very routine
nature of the questioning reinforced the idea that coughing up blood was inevitable. My difference, my unique unhealthy condition,
was a fact, a given — like the Lowell cousins’ freckles. Being “not well” was as much a part of me as my fair braids or the
little hidden mole behind my left ear — or the secret that I did not really have a mother.


It was the task of one of the servants to take me for walks twice a day around the streets of Beacon Hill. Whenever I met
relatives, they would always ask about my health. Again I was reminded that I was frail and sickly — and I accepted this,
as children will. I had no basis of comparisons; I had never lived any other way.


Cousin Daisy was also the keeper of the web, the weaver of stray threads and loose people into the family tapestry. And in
my case, she assumed many of the duties ordinarily handled by a mother. She took obvious pleasure in overseeing my wardrobe.
Every fall and spring, she climbed to my nursery with little floppy books of cloth, accompanied by a sad, silent woman who
measured me. Usually we copied the styles of dresses I already had, but I was allowed to choose the colors and materials.
This selection was important to me; it was the only part of my life where I had any authority. I always looked for stripes,
which delighted me; they still do.


Despite the family taint, we were always included in the great family occasions: weddings and funerals, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
To do less would have been far more scandalous than the danger implied by the threat of consumption. I could also count on
seeing all the Lathams collected every New Year’s Day, when one of the linked families (never ours) took its turn giving a
reception.


The loud, crowded house would be alight with candles and crystals, fragrant with evergreen decorations. One of the half-grown
sons would stand importantly beside the candle-laden tree with a bucket of water at hand in case of fire. Every table carried
silver bowls of eggnog and salvers of sliced fruitcake. Jolly strangers who all knew m