Read Afternoons with Emily Online
Authors: Rose MacMurray
Afternoons with Emily
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
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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.
—E
MILY
D
ICKINSON
Contents
A Note About Afternoons with Emily
amherst
may 19, 1886
T
oday 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
M
y 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.