Chapter Text
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Who is she that cometh forth like the morning,
Fair as the moon, clear as the sun,
As fearsome as celestial visions?
- Song of Songs, 6:10
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Nov. 1, 1906
I have thought it to myself oftentimes enough before that nothing ever brings the flash twice, but lately I’ve been wondering if this is quite correct “all the way to the ground,” as they say in the American dime-novels; the truth may be that no one thing ever brings the flash to me twice from within the same particular detail, in precisely the same mood or from the same exact ordinal direction, a sort of moveable feast that finds its celebrant E. Byrd Starr the one who is changed at each new visitation rather than a thing prone to change within itself. Whitman’s learn’d astronomer would likely remind me how the stars only appear to set or rise in their courses due to the continual motion of our planet, after all, and to be sure there is always June, the Immortal. A three o’clock comes every night yet by six o’clock or seven so does sunrise.
And while June may be immortal I am presently mounting a poetical defense for this shorn, sack-clothed, discalced month we call November. Dearest November! Hasn’t anybody ever rhapsodized you properly? Valorous, subtle, wise, quiescent November! November of the diamond-dust frosts aglitter upon the scythed brown fields! November the year’s choral evensong, November who begins and so forbearingly keeps the regental fourth-watch wait of all creation!
Oh, but are exclamation marks an Early Victorian or a Renaissance Humanist excess, like italics? Surely not! The world does merit some astonishment and enthusiasm, in trade for its bountiful kindness. I have taken to carrying a two-cent notebook in my apron pocket and practicing a style of shorthand called Pitman so I can jot things down faster as they occur to me. I taught Dean some basic symbols of it while I was carving them into my jack-o-the-lanterns for Hallowtide and now he calls them my “faerieglyphs.” Isn’t that delightful!
Nov. 3, 1906
Alea iacta est! Today I spent twenty-eight dollars of the money I earned from publishing my story On the Shores of Aulis to fill out a purchasing slip for my new typewriter. The mail-order catalog lauds it as “perfection perfected, simplicity simplified,” meaning I will presumably receive an empty crate for my pains seeing as how one cannot box up a contradiction. Cousin Jimmy promises he will inquire each day for me at the post office until it arrives. I trialed two different endings for that story, but when Dean bought a copy — I think he had some choice words for the Shrewsbury Book Shoppe upon learning they didn’t stock Gunter’s Magazine among their periodicals, one of which was “vappous”; he took a waytrain down to Montague for it — he said my final scene between the father and the eldest daughter adroitly demonstrated a concept Kierkegaard termed “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” so I am happy it was the one I selected.
Aunt Elizabeth also posed me thoroughly by agreeing to let me add ten dollars and a bicycle to my catalog order, possibly because I explained how it will be a ladies’ bicycle with a drop-curved frame for accommodating long dresses and generally painted her a proud, noble picture of myself charging about the province astride my steed like the lady-knight Britomart seeking her Artegall. I neglected to mention my concurrent plans for some split-backed skirts and the obvious implication that, imitating Dame Britomart, I will be prankling at jousts and bashing my foes off their mounts in various tourneys. A laurel crown for my brow would be fine indeed but I will accept a few tilting-rings for my lance as a supplementary accolade.
(Then again, Aunt Elizabeth strikes me as the sort of austere, unflinching sovereign who several centuries ago would’ve donned a helm and plate-armor while riding through the squadrons of her army at Tilbury, sternly marshalling their spirits for battle, so she may in fact already suspect my intentions.)
Nov. 11, 1906
And Britomart’s gallivanting continues. I hitched up our gray mare to the old gig on Friday for a whirl into Shrewsbury — Cousin Jimmy has taught me how to drive her pretty well; “gee” means “turn right,” “haw” means “turn left,” and I find she listens gladly to my jabbering in that lingua ignota Ilse and I invented — so I could speak to Mr. Towers about whether he might let me onto his staff at the Times again as a jobber-girl or something of that ilk until I can draft up my proposal for a serialized novel. It could only be for one or two days a week, I admitted. I would’ve infinitely preferred to accept his offer of Mondays, and Tuesdays, since those have been the New Moon laundry-and-ironing days from time immemorial and it is incredible how a bedsheet can go into the washtub weighing five ounces but come out weighing five hundred pounds. This would have also been a craven forsaking of Aunt Laura, however, a deed wholly unworthy of a lady-knight, so I gritted my teeth while making Thursdays and Saturdays as my counteroffer. Butter-churning day! Brewing and bread-baking day! How sorely you will be missed.
As needed, therefore, I will be mainly responsible for helping Mr. Grady edit the articles: or eviscerate, spatchcock, and frizzle them, should occasion call for it. He sat me down right there in the newsroom and gave me a stringer-piece with the request to slice out every single one of its adjectives and adverbs to decide if its nouns and verbs were, in his parlance, doing their part towards justifying the piece's existence, and to swap them out with stronger substitutions if not. Quite the barbaric exercise! I will also be responsible for cleaning the ink rollers of the paper's big cylinder-press — its rods rotate with such a booming, redoubtable action I am a tad concerned the contraption will sniff out my fear, and move under its own resolve, and thus shall the promising young authoress be mashed flat onto the galley-tray like a broadsheet, an ignominious conclusion for her biographers to descant upon — and, when my bicycle arrives, delivering the paper to its subscribers or drumming up the interest of possible advertisers. And he would always happily welcome a poem or two from me, Mr. Towers added. He said he thinks of Owl’s Laughter whenever he hears the mated pairs calling a duet out in the larchwood.
That compliment moved me deeply, but at present I cannot decide how the public would receive a sonnet composed from the sparkling melodious virginal month of June to her silver-touched yet sportive-tricked bridegroom November. Pathetic fallacies are not en vogue.
Nov. 14, 1906
This week Aunt Laura and I have been making the New Moon candles, mostly with paraffin Aunt Elizabeth buys by the slab-pound and beeswax harvested from the new hives Cousin Jimmy helped me construct beneath our balm-of-gilead trees behind the dairy. I never knew the taste of honey could be so greatly influenced by which flowers the diligent handmaiden-bees paid their especial attentions to; this autumn they have produced an almost white, delicately minty honey prone to rapid sugar-granulation and associated with the pollen bestowed as tokens of favor by goldenrod and asters. I informed my bees I thought this was ingenious of them while I was wrapping their hives in tar-paper to keep them warm in the colder weather. Lofty John tells me the Catholics have appointed Saint Valentine as their patron intercessor for bees and beekeepers as well as for lovers, affianced couples, newlyweds, plague victims, epileptics, and travelers embarking on hazardous journeys. He must be an exceptionally busy saint but can at least direct some of those travelers' petitions to Saint Christopher, that staunchest braver of the river at full flood.
Aside from the paraffin and beeswax, however, there must always be one tall, scrumptious red bayberry candle for a burning on Christmas Eve. That is the candle I love making best. Dipping its braided wick into the wax I recalled a word from Aristotle I first encountered in Dean’s secondhand translation of the Physics he used at McGill: the word is “hylomorphism.” He had underscored it with a blue pencil and was endlessly considerate in his efforts to explain the meaning for me. Honorable man! I have been keeping it saved ever since for want of proper use, as it is one of those fancy scrapcloths of such a particularized shape that the moment you see a place for it you know nothing else will do the trick. Then it came to me, standing at the stove with my bayberry wax and its scents of clove and balsam, so I dashed a sentence down into my faeirieglyphs book:
They were two lovers whose adoration for one another seemed almost to form a third shape betwixt them, upright and shining and with the internal hylomorphic unity of a candle.
Is that comprehensible? To say nothing of whether or not it’s good! Perhaps "betwixt" is too high-falutin' when "between" would stand me the same reliable service. I must work it into a story and ask Dean what he makes of it. When I am choosing betwixt-between a book from the shop or lending library and that very same book off Dean’s shelves I invariably ask for the latter, since I like to look at which passages he has marked or made his notes about. Sometimes I even play a game of dropping the book — carefully! — down on its spine, to see which pages it falls open to as the ones I can presume he has read most repeatedly, or devotedly. In a study of Kantian aesthetics he lent me this week he bracketed the idea that beauty is a finality which involves no objective and can give us only the gift of itself.
What a flash that brought me! It made me think of the prism-rainbows suspended in seaspray and the crystalline geometries of a snowflake.
(Memo: flatter the newspaper’s cylinder-press by telling it how I think the way it moves is brave and swashbuckling, since it reminds me of a grasshopper accoutered in his big bold musketeer spurs, then possibly it will not regard me with killing intent.)
I have also been heckling myself endlessly over which plot I’ll try for my serialized novel proposal — it will be called a “pitch” when I present it to Mr. Towers, as if I am a nor’paw ascending the mound to close out a baseball game at Hanlan’s Point Stadium — since waiting for a divine impartation of wisdom to make the decision on my behalf is an inconsistent creative method recommendable only to the prophets. Even Elijah the Tishbite knew how small and still that voice can be! Dean mentioned to me in his annotations about A Seller of Dreams that figurative language must nonetheless turn along a literal axis, which is a theory I agreed with the instant I read it even if it had never been put to me in that way before. Any head of blonde hair could be compared to a sheet of beaten gold, for instance, but I would much prefer a likening to spun gold, or tilsent silk, or a gilded sunburst crown, as in the case of Ilse when her hair was cropped short. I heard the news from Dr. Burnley — he’s been advertising it to all of P.E Island — that in December Ilse will be at the Theatre Royal reciting selections from Frank Connor, Eve Brodlique Summers, Isabella V. Crawford, et cetera.
Madcap Ilse Burnley performing the poetry of Miss Crawford! I pity all the artistes of that city so soon to be outshone.
(Note that I did not say they are soon to be "eclipsed", since Ilse is a combustive type of heavenly body and having her swing into the narrow space between us and our neighborly, dusty moon would be calamitous. Therefore, yes, I think proving out my airy metaphors with some scientific pragmatism is good advice.)
Dean also tells me my allegiance to happy endings is admirable but he fears it may stifle me, since sometimes the natural shape of a story delivered to its foregone conclusion is by necessity a tragedy, or a disaster. One must not conflate the two. He said, for instance, how would Hugo have so effectively twitted the Classicist snobs with the hedonistic melodrama of Hernani if the beautiful Doña Sol and her bandit chieftain paramour had been permitted to live out the bliss of their wedding night, rather than dying absurdly on-stage by suicide together as they seemed so insistent upon doing despite their many other eligible options? I told him Doña Sol and Hernani were obviously a matched pair of Romanticist fanatics who would have been discontented by anything less than the matrimonial consummation of an on-stage double suicide and thus that ending should be considered a supremely happy one, at least for the two parties most immediately involved. Besides, I added, the character with whom I feel the most cathartic sympathy in Hernani is Don Carlos while he spends the first act’s second scene eavesdropping inside a broom cupboard and emerges near to expiring from the perspirative suffocation.
It similarly emerged then that I have never given Dean an unabridged account of the Mother Hubbard Boot Closet Incident, so we enjoyed an absurd afternoon in the orchard detaching tent-caterpillar eggs from the apple trees while I reenacted the three roles: Miss Potter, Mrs. Ann Cyrilla, and the cantering internal commentary of poor captive Emily. Dean lent his voice to the drama as my improvised narrator — no, no, we must not call her “poor Emily.” She has been very silly.
It was his musical, richly-intoned voice, too, the one he uses for reading aloud, and this juxtaposition made the scene that much more farcical. I’m sure the Classicists would have rioted.
Now I wish I hadn’t contradicted him on the question of happy endings. Dean’s way of looking at the thing may be correct and he has been so beautifully generous about my writing over these last several weeks, even my hack-work short stories by the dint of which I “pick up a few shekels.” I can’t perceive any change in them now, contrasted with the old ones he dismissed so easily, but he said my children’s story that appeared in the latest Youth’s Companion was an insightful work illumined by a sharp and sparkling yet kindly, gentle wit of the sort Thackeray praised as ideal. Those words from Mr. Dean Priest! He has assured me a woman who has my sense of humor can never be vain, yet I admit — here and here only — that I was so discomposed all the rest of the day, I put an entire one-quarter cup of powdered ginger into the tomato preserves I was cooking rather than a one-quarter teaspoon. Had I not noticed my error and sold the pint unaltered to Mr. Beatty I would by now have entered infamy as the New Moon Starr-Murray Murderess.
Dean has not yet mentioned to me when or where he will be going away for the winter, although in fairness I have not yet asked him. The season he was in Japan I took down an atlas from the sitting-room bookcase and used a length of purple thread to measure out the miles from Prince Edward Island to Honshu: six thousand, eight hundred, or thereabouts. It cheered me somehow to see that narrow strait within the Bering Sea where the vast here-there-be-dragon’d distances dividing the Old and New Worlds from one another are reduced to a mere fifty miles — my thought, entirely unscientific, was, I could walk that far in a day if I needed to, even if like Peter on the Sea of Galilee amidst the wind and storming waves it would first require me to swing both my feet over the side of my boat.
It is only three thousand and fifty miles from Blair Water to Paris but there is no similar geography to help me bridge this expanse, so it somehow feels farther. Or is the word “further”?
Nov. 17, 1906
It’s astonishing how certain poems and stories appear to me first by way of their titles, and I never ask twice what they ought to be called, whereas I suspect others do not have the slightest intention of ever revealing this same vital information to me. Very impolite! They would rather force me to throw out endless, increasingly outlandish guesses for their successive and impish rejection, like Rumpelstiltskin with the miller’s daughter.
(Dean says Rumpelstiltskin is among his favorite fairytales, along with the Snow Queen, while my proclivities tend towards Little Red Riding Hood and Tam Lin; usually the monster catches the maiden but every now and again the maiden instead catches the monster, so long as she remembers to holdeth him fast and feareth him not.)
For now I am giving my latest story the title Throne, Sceptre, Empire — I've been pickpocketing from Hugo this time, rather than Tennyson — and I also considered True to Faith and Vow. Perhaps stories, like children, can be christened with secret second or middle names, as an apotropaic charm against magical enthrallment? I've spent all Friday night into Saturday afternoon writing it and I think New Idea Woman’s Magazine in New York may want it once it’s finished. The premise is a bit simplistic but so far the love-talk has been superbly easy; composing the silly June-November sonnet must have limbered me for the task, not that I'm satisfied with the poem either. I've been struggling mightily with its third quatrain.
My short story’s protagonist — a young woman I have named Editha, and amused myself considerably by doing it — is preparing to make an entirely suitable and affectionate, jog-trot marriage to a clever, accomplished man in Montreal. After years spent away, she returns home to her fishing village on the Notre Dame Bay side of Newfoundland — I opened our atlas to a map of the continent and whirly-coptered a maple seed into the air while my eyes were closed, then looked to see how it landed; I am glad it wasn’t Devon Island, even if the challenge would’ve been invigorating — where her widower father keeps the harbor’s lighthouse. Editha has come home because she must retrieve a cedarwood hope-chest, filled from the time she was a child with the dowry trappings of her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother, her aunts and her older cousins. Quite by accident she encounters the sweetheart from her childhood — a beautiful, unforgettable, poor young man, a man who seems formed singularly for her in body, mind and soul — and he restores her, in the course of one innocent yet effulgent summer afternoon, to all the passionate and consuming happiness she has long since believed was lost to her forever.
And what can Editha do, faced with a choice between the volitional covenant of a human marriage or the irresistible magnetism of a celestial bond? What would those many bygone brides whose counterpane quilts and hemstitched linens fill the cedarwood glory-box advise her to do?
What indeed! Now I must find my way murlkins towards the story’s proper ending, which is another thing it usually feels as though the story is choosing through me rather than the more logical reversal: like Joan of Arc listening to her voices, I am tempted to write, her face all spirit, but the Maid of Orleans paid for the heeding of those spirit-voices with her life upon the pyre yet declared, to the last, that they had not deceived her, so within her pale young face I imagine there would be the resolution to some uttermost mystery I do not yet possess.
Nov. 18, 1906
Andrew and Uncle Oliver came for a Sunday luncheon today. It was roast beef with gravy, baked squash, browned potatoes, and Aunt Laura’s lavish chocolate cake, for which I made an icing of sugar and whipped egg-whites: and were I a woman better-trained in the domestic traditions of Agrippina the Younger I would’ve also had the foresight to sprinkle in some arsenic, for taste.
At the table Andrew remarked in a proprietary tone that our three lombardies are getting ragged-looking at their tops, and at any event lombardy poplars are an unfashionable, out-of-date tree. The real best thing would be to chop them down, he said. That nettled me into such a snit! As I went around pouring coffee I mentioned to everyone how several years ago a Dutch scientist in Java discovered a fascinating skullcap suggestive of the fact that certain structural fundamentals of the human face have been in continually-repeated use for more than one million years, then I asked Andrew if he thought perhaps the human nose or jawbone could profit by the same corrective modernizing improvements. An adjustment to the left or right, possibly?
“— But evidently that was too tacit a threat for the R.H.Y.M’s discernment,” I told Dean, when he visited later. This is likely one of the last evenings of the year it will be possible for us to walk out in the dusk; we wore our coats and our breath smoked blue-white against the air. “Oh, it’s too horrible to think about! New Moon will pass to Andrew when Aunt Elizabeth dies and I don’t suspect his new wife has much finer sensibilities than he does — I sat across from her at Mrs. Nickle’s quilting-bee in October and she opined to me that sunflowers are too gawkish and gaudy to be useful in a summer bouquet. ‘Useful’! Imagine looking at a flower of the field and having its usefulness be the concern whereupon you place your premium! I almost bit my tongue in half. Do you think she considers mourning doves a humdrum shade of brown? Does she complain about the wind for being off-key when it whistles through the eaves? I’m sure Andrew will want to fell the old orchard and drain our spruce field in the bargain, that thankless gormless tasteless ultracrepidarian ungulate.”
This insult was my finale to a pacing, raging rant and I finished it warmed all over as though I had just gone uphill at a dead-run charge with a fixed bayonet. Dean was leaning against the sundial while he listened and looked rather warm himself from the effort of suppressing his laughter. No doubt my use of “ultracrepidarian” also pleased him, given how I got it from a collection of essays on the works of William Hazlitt he lent me; he says he is similarly keeping the word “catawampus” cylindered into his six-shooter for the day when he takes a seasonal trip somewhere like New Orleans or Galveston. He avows it is one of the several words he never encountered before reading A Seller of Dreams.
“Beheading those three blameless damsel-lombardies would indeed be an act far surpassing common mortal ignorance,” Dean agreed. “It’d be a desecration — a hubristic affront. All the annals of Greek lore couldn't furnish an adequate punishment for it.”
“I can’t believe I was such a nearsighted fool! If I had married him New Moon Farm would've been mine. The lombardies, the orchards, the spruce field, the garden — ” such a horror washed through me that I actually slapped my hands to my cheeks like the figure in that Edvard Munch painting I saw once during an illustrated lecture “ — the garden! Dean! It will break Cousin Jimmy's heart if anything happens to the garden! What if Andrew doesn't let Jimmy and Laura go on living here after he inherits it? What if he decides the pansies are too purple?”
“Would he have heeded your wishes as Mistress Near-Rhyme on the subject of lombardy poplars? Or the precise intensity of purple regarded as seemly in a Viola wittrockiana?”
“Not at all. Andrew's the sort of man who proselytizes enthusiastically for Ephesians Five Twenty-Four while conveniently forgetting about that chapter's next few verses — but what would it have mattered, then? I could’ve simply killed him and hidden his corpse underneath the floorboards like in that story by Poe. Cousin Jimmy and those shameless purple pansies would’ve kept the Widow Near-Rhyme’s secret for her, certainly.”
“‘Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, and frame my face for all occasions.’” Dean made a show of turning up his coat-cuffs. “And if that’s your preferred mode of redress, Star, I’m acquainted with a mercenary in Damascus who could settle the matter at no cost or inconvenience to either you or your floorboards.”
The cast of his expression when he said this was so elatedly villainous I had to clop my lifted hands briefly over my face to smother down the unbecoming chortle it provoked from me. Ellen Greene once threaped me for the fact that I talk queer — and I act queer — and at times I look queer, or I look at things queerly — and I have always figured it was something a housekeeper or a stodgy teacher might've credibly told Dean when he himself was a child of ten. What a fellowship, what a peace it is to find somebody whose strangeness follows some of the same wrinkles as yours.
“Dean, I couldn’t allow that,” I said. “There’d be no sense in having the transgression of murder be on your soul as well as mine.”
“Your soul is worth preserving. By rights you should already belong to the citizenry of some brighter, more elevated world than this one. On my soul, I don’t imagine a few more moral indiscretions will make any difference — and from what I’ve heard about the devil, he’ll be excellent conversational company down in hell.”
“Will he? I think he’d be extremely boring company, especially for a man with your intellect."
"Oh? And why is that?"
"Because the devil's probably incapable of laughing at himself. Wouldn't that make sense? It’s a part of why his pride makes him its prisoner. The only place a truly original idea or a good joke can come from is heaven and everything else is derivative.” I came to stand opposite Dean’s place at the sundial. I bent forward. “At least promise me you won’t go signing any contracts with him, please. You’ve said my rhetorical arguments are as porous as cheesecloths and I’d have a hideous time extracting you from the legal complexities of a Faustian bargain.”
“You, my Star o' the Morning? Nonsense. You could just remind Old Scratch that the compact I’ve got with you against saying goodbye supersedes and voids all subsequent memorandums that might otherwise permanently separate us.”
He said this in a teasing tone and his eyes were as bright as will-o-the-wisps from the bandying fun of our talk; somehow, though, I didn’t like him saying it.
I've been hearing it for years now from Aunt Ruth and Old Kelly how Jarback Priest is a satanical, misshapen fiend, and Dean has always laughed at me a little whenever I’ve mentioned that I pray for him the same as I do for all my family and friends, but I often wonder whether hell as a place of wailing outer darkness where one will be finally, utterly alone wouldn’t be a far worse condemnation than the popular and populous fires of the pit, even if the latter conjures up more effective imagery than the former for scaring your parishioners bejeepersless in their pews. In my rare three o’clock convulsions of orthodoxy, though, the thought of Dean being cast into such a lightless place with nobody to talk to, forever and forever, hurts me unto the verge of tears, except I’m sure Dean would laugh at me for this too, like he would laugh — a little — if I ever told him I pleaded for a miracle that day on the crumbling ledge above Malvern Bay. Instead I reached to take his hands.
He was wearing a faded black pair of capeskin gloves while I was wearing a lumpish pair of mittens I have crocheted using a stitch called the alpine. Had our hands been bare I wouldn’t have done it, I don’t think, but when I raised my brows at him Dean only gave me another facetious, conspiratorial look before we stepped away from each other. A few minutes later I discreetly showed him where I had recently found three big tortoiseshell butterflies hibernating peacefully underneath the loosened bark of the eldest Princess, then I went into the house and Dean went home.
I have said it freely here that there is nobody in all the world whom I like so well as Dean Priest, for a friend, italic prohibitions be dinged. Now I am sure Dean knows it, and overall I am glad he knows it, yet I believe I would be equally comforted to have him as my ally or accomplice amidst any sort of thickly-plotted troubles. For all our intarsial oddities he can also think in different ways than I do and see things from different vantages. One plus one is certainly two, in mathematics, but there are other circumstances the mathematicians do not recognize in which two is two thousand times one.
Oh, but that spruce field! How will the wild strawberries grow there after it has been withered by the sun and ripped by the plough? To think of losing our tangled old orchard full of ivy and columbine flowers for welcoming the fairies — the garden with its geraniums and pansies and lilacs and asters and the stone bench — the beloved Three Princesses at the gate — the cellar cupboard with its never-empty jam pots, the gin jars of hot water in wintertime, the herringbone-sanded kitchen floor, the candlelight — the dead, departed Murrays, asleep in their graves beside the Blair Water in the hope of rising again, although Mary Shipley may require some dislodging persuasions by her husband and children — where can all the ghosts of one's past joys go when the places that held them are destroyed?
Nov. 21, 1906
I had a letter from Ilse today, entirely unexpected, not that Ilse Burnley is either expected or expectable — a Boston editor at Modern Woman pinched off that word from a rejected story he sent back to me yesterday, saying it was obsolete; fie upon thee, sirrah — by any being save her Creator, and I presume that even He, the angelic host, and the triumphant saints have probably enjoyed some cheerful laughs over Ilse’s antics. The letter was penned from her boardinghouse in Montreal and I am pasting it onto these pages, here, since when I die I should want it to be published. Otherwise, I worry something essential will be missing.
5 November 1906
Emily,
How goes the quest for immortality, you passerine inkling? I’ve had nary a line from you since May but Dad swears to me you’ve neither taken up the life of a vagabond in the Yukon nor eloped with the next reprinting of Aylmer Vincent — d’you suppose the doctor sneezed while he was registering the birth of a sweet little commonsense ‘Elmer’ and figured, better make the best of it? — nor have you meandered your way into a fairy-ring and been kidnapped. Good enough news for me, I’d say!
I’m sealing and sending off this note before the doing of it gives me the jim-jams too badly — could you be a dear and send me a copy of the poem you entered into that contest, at school, with the imbeciles for judges? “Wild Grapes”? I’m adding an early-life work by the future famous Canadian authoress E. Byrd Starr to my repertoire, naturally. It’d be a damned deuced fine way to give that grangerised brine-shrimp Evelyn Blake one good final poke in the eye.
But only if it suits you. I figured Old Carpenter could have a chuckle about it from whichever privileged theatre box-seat he’s been given in your vision of the joyous hereafter — or that’s how I picture the hereafter, myself, whenever I’m able to picture it. I like to place Mother down in the house’s front row at the very center but can never imagine what expression she's got on because the footlights get in the way of my view.
Emily, wouldn’t it be grand if we could play-pretend and be girls again together in the Islands of Enchantment for one more day?
Love, Your Friend, Always,
Ilse
I carried this letter up to my room and stared at it for a long while, an irresponsible thing because I should have been helping Aunt Laura and Aunt Elizabeth with the sweeping. Then I wiped my face with the backs of my hands — the imploration came to me again, oddly, as it did years ago atop the haystack: make me worthy of it — and I copied out the lines of Wild Grapes onto one side of a paper, just as they were without changing a word.
Onto the paper’s other side I wrote, and I transcribe it here so that I and perhaps posterity do not forget:
Ilse Burnley, ever since the moment you barreled into the fray with your clear, ringing voice and your fists at the ready in defense of the poor New Moon girl in her ghastly apron, I have known there was something ferocious and indomitable within your personality. If you recite Wild Grapes anywhere at all, for any audience, you will give to it a burnish and a blaze and a beauty that is entirely your own, and l want no credit whatsoever for any ovations it may bring you.
As I write this I am sitting here, looking out onto the trees of Lofty John’s bush where we once played, and as you advance towards the world-stage’s footlights with your mother seated raptly in attendance just beyond them I want you to know that as I do it, whenever I do it, I am believing in you, Ilse — hard.
With Love, Your Friend in the Islands of Enchantment and Atop the Haystack and on the Tomorrow Road into the Eternal Today, E. Byrd Starr.
But a thing within me kept on being agitated, and tautened, like a hidden tangle inside a skein. It wasn’t until evening that I understood why — Mr. Towers has learned from an associate at the Guardian that Perry Miller of Blair Water will be helping Mr. Abel try a case on the docket in Charlottetown: an aging spinster, a tiny rented room, and the landlord who has cheated her cruelly. Who hasn’t heard some variation of that same dull story? Cruelty may be intriguing or even informative but it can never be interesting. It is a very minor case, of no importance when viewed from a place on the Supreme Court bench, but it is certainly not unimportant to that impoverished woman who is putting her whole faith in the law and its balancing-scales to aid her, so I took another paper and I wrote:
Perry, I've got it on good authority that you and Mr. Abel will shortly be stepping into the arena for some combat. You've stuck close to my advice about the boots and tie and nails and handkerchief, haven't you? And Ilse's careful drilling on effective styles of debate? She'll give you an earful if you haven't! Do you know, after all these years I still can’t sit in the kitchen and look up into its loft without worrying I'll break into spasms of mirth, thinking about that time when you stuck both your head and your neck out for me to holler down the petty injustices of Miss Brownell. Bulls and bullying schoolmarms alike have never made you turn aside, and I don’t surmise there is a judge or jury in Canada capable of it, but please remember while you go forward to stand your trials that I am probably here looking up at that kitchen loft and, whilst trying not to laugh, I am believing in you, Sir Perry — hard.
And, potentially to keep him in his place, I signed it, From Your Friend, Who Is Sincerely Hoping You’ll Find Yourself a Wife With Brains and Proper Etiquette, Emily.
Have I never told either of them that, in those same words? It hardly seems possible.
Nov. 26, 1906
We have been enduring a spiteful pins-and-needles rain since Saturday morning and today Aunt Elizabeth dosed me liberally with cod-liver oil before I went out with a pack-basket to deliver everybody’s butter, milk, cream and eggs. By this stage in my development I have imbibed so much cod-liver oil that I informed Aunt Elizabeth I am more likely to bear children who have fish-tails than to die young from consumption; Aunt Elizabeth’s reply was that assuming they were well-behaved, respectful, honest Presbyterians, it would not bother her the tiniest particle if my merfolk Murray-clan progeny also had scales, webbed hands and fins to match, and I would be wise in assuming this same philosophic position because life makes a mother no promises. I told Aunt Elizabeth that in fact all humans probably have webbed hands during their earliest gestative periods but I would take the suggestion under advisement.
(Advisement! As if being a mother to children with tails wouldn’t be a challenge and therefore a grand adventure. I’d carry them down to the harbor on warm days and let them search for sunken treasures and pretty pebbles at its bottom. Conceding that point would’ve gotten me fed another spoonful of cod, though, and thus Emily Starr kept her peace — I must learn from Cousin Jimmy if any wives or husbands back in the Old Country were suspected of being selkies.)
After church yesterday Mrs. Fred Evans asked Aunt Elizabeth for a quart of buttermilk, so I brought it once I’d gone to see Old Jacob Banks. I also brought a jar of my aster-flower honey and some cherry jam I’ve prepared for Dean, which clearly I did not expect anything in payment for since they were thank-you gifts for those notes he gave me about A Seller of Dreams. Mrs. Fred Evans’s maiden name is Zenobia Priest but Dean calls her “Zeena” or “Madame Sphinx.” I admit this is not a deferential way for a brother to address his oldest sister but she does have a habit of looking at you in a shrewd, fatalistic way, like she is measuring you lengthwise for a coffin. She has one grown-up son who owns the dry goods store in Wiltney and Aunt Nancy says this younger Mr. Fred Evans is principal heir, by default, to nearly all his Uncle Jarback’s well-invested money, which came to Dean when he was twenty-four from an eccentric old cousin on his mother’s side of the family. The cousin made his fortunes as an investor in the Union Pacific Railroad and his emigrant son was killed about a year prior to Dean’s birth at some place in the United States called Gettysburg.
That young maverick Dean is a two-faced deceiver, reads the cousin’s last will and testament — or so Aunt Nancy claims. The sort of man who looks as if he’d faint from a bloodied nose and then uses his dying breath to make a jibe at his executioners like Saint Laurence on the red-hot gridiron.
I happen to believe this last part, even from so sensational a source as Aunt Nancy. All the rest of the Priests and half-Priests might have Dean’s same green eyes but none of them have got Dean’s tongue. His other sister in White Cross is named Theodora and his brother in Priest Pond is named Alexander.
Dean’s room is at the very back of Mrs. Evans’s house on its first floor. Such a busy, curiosity-cabinet room! Full of maps and porcelain vases and bronze astrolabes and carte-de-viste photographs and bird feathers and insects preserved in amber and dried date-palm leaves and pressed hibiscus flowers and books, so many books, packed three rows deep onto their shelves like soldiers in a phalanx. You can hardly pull the chair back from the desk; I saw this room once because I’d stamped around the house straight through Mrs. Evans’s summer-savory and plinked acorn caps at Dean’s window until he opened it, then I hollered at him for not giving me the slightest warning about how asunderingly sad the ending to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is. I told him it wasn't fair, that the Creature had only ever wanted to be wanted, that I had been weeping all night and I would never speak to him again.
This was an exaggeration. In fact I lasted a day before I needed to ask him whether oranges are called oranges because they are the color orange or if the color orange is called orange because oranges are orange. He told me it is the second option, given that our English word for the color derives from an Arabic word for the fruit.
But today I knocked at the house’s front door with my brogan boots because my arms were full and I stood on the covered porch waiting for Dean to answer. I didn’t mind. I have never minded it that he walks a bit slowly, especially when it is raining, or cold, or both. He related it to me once — with one of his unpleasant, scornful laughs, I felt — how in primary school it was a lively sport amongst his peers to topple gimpy, gallicrow Jarback Priest down into the deep snow, then wager how many attempts it would take him to writhe slipshod back onto his feet: although doubtless I earned it, Dean had added, still laughing, for all the demoniacal maledictions I heaped upon their cloddish heads in words they didn’t know and couldn’t half-pronounce. And he apologizes to me, when we go walking, if he needs longer than I do to step between the stones in a creek I want to cross or surmount a knoll where I want to gather ferns and mosses.
It makes me very unhappy to see him sneer at himself that way. What reason do I have to be impatient, pausing on the path to wait for him? Last week I spotted a wintertime larder of clover seeds and beechnuts some bustling deermouse has cached away into a vacant sparrow's nest, set amidst the latticed branches of a plum thicket and ornamented with a length of blue string the clever little bird had interwoven through her nest's dry grasses. How would I have ever seen it, had I not stopped long enough to look? If Dean were a man accustomed to progress at a more hurried pace he might very well have spared those magnificent farewell-summers on the bay shore a single appreciative glance and kept going.
“Star,” Dean said when he opened the door, “what are you doing out in foul weather like this? Attempting to seek a conference with the Weird Sisters?”
“Just your own sister, at the moment,” said I, giving him the buttermilk, the honey and the fruit preserves. I was wearing a gargantuan rubberised coat that once belonged to Uncle George, the West Indies voyager, and was streaming water as if I had been lately keelhauled through the gulf. I’m sure I made an elegant picture. “I’m nearly finished with that story for New Idea Woman’s Magazine. I haven’t got any further developments to share about my next novel, though — I might finally settle the matter by writing my plots onto different slips of paper and having Daffy pull one for me.”
“Hence your present disinterest in the Weird Sisters. Highland witches deal strictly in matters of fate while cats are more usually agents of destiny.”
I asked Dean what he thought the distinction was between or betwixt the two, based on their etymologies, and while he counted out sixty cents into my hand he said Destiny is more punctual about keeping her crossroads-appointments while Fate tends to do her work with sharper instruments: swords, or words, for example. So what about Foreordinance? I said, and we determined Foreordinance would be of the male persuasion and his military prearrangement of events in tidy formation still depends on our own individual choices to retreat or advance when confronting them.
Then as I turned to go Dean called out, to detain me, reaching for something in the house’s front passage, and without further prelude he handed me the absolute loveliest umbrella I have ever seen. I could take it, he said, since it was mine. Mine! The canopy was made from a brilliant red oilpaper with springy, flexible ribs of bamboo, bound intricately to its frame by dozens of tightly-sewn threads, and when I opened it there was a magnificent patterning of orange and golden chrysanthemums printed across it. Dean said he'd purchased it from a craftswoman in Kyoto who spoke English quite fluently and had explained for him how different patterns are worn or used in Japanese fashion to harmonize with the changing seasons: cranes for winter, wisteria and cherry blossoms for spring, dragonflies for summer, and so forth. Chrysanthemums are an autumn flower, the imperial flower. Their blooms can be eaten steeped in hot water, even if custom purportedly dictates one must say “what a shame” as he does so.
“I’m convinced the woman was concerned I’d be using it for myself and dishonor the beauty of her artistic wares by so doing,” said Dean, “but I described you to her and her fears were allayed.”
“Dean, I can’t take this. I’ll look ridiculous. This is something an empress ought to carry. A lady of the court, like — what was that poetess’s name you told me about? Izumi Shikibu.”
“Consider it an exercise in the Nicomacean ethics of friendship. If I can carry a bit of Blair Water’s recollected loveliness with me wherever I go, it should be plain reciprocity that I’d bring a bit of loveliness back here to you in Blair Water.”
He smiled at me and the lamp from the house’s foyer was on his narrow, avid features. It was one of his Dean smiles, the ones I like, rather than one of his Priest smiles I do not, yet the light picked out certain fraught lines through his face and seemed to tacitly disclose some private, persecuting experience of pain castellated behind it — oh, Mr. Carpenter’s pen would’ve certainly unseamed that descriptor straight from the nave to th’ chops! Who ever compared a man living within his own body to a castle? But I remembered the preceding days of soaking, pitiless cold and this may be why I said what I did next.
“You haven’t mentioned where you’ll be going for your annual migration this winter. Have you decided?” I swung the umbrella over my head. It crimsoned the air around me. “Somewhere warm and full of sunshine from whence you’ll be able to mock the rest of us sedentary year-rounders, I hope. The Caribbean? Southern Spain? You can send me citrus blossoms from the gardens at Granada.”
“The time’s never been right for Granada, yet. I haven’t got anywhere in mind — unless there’s some place you'd command me to go and some prize you want me to seek for you there, fairest lady. Blue poppies plucked from the heights of Nepal? Fire coral fetched from the depths beneath the Mariana Islands?”
He said it with the same smile, the one I have seen so many times before. I remembered that evening last year before he left when he asked, will you miss me, Emily? And why did I not simply answer him, yes? I have always missed you, I always miss you, I will always miss you when you go where I am not.
“Knightly rescuer,” I twirled the umbrella with my fingertips while dropping a curtsy in my raincoat, “I beseech thee to venture whithersoever the weather will be most pleasing to thy heart and comforting to thy spirits.”
“Do you? Forgive me, then, Star, but that is in fact a request to which I confess I can’t accede — I've never felt sunlight in any clime more agreeable than the luminosity of your conversation.” He took the door by its handle, preparing to shut it. A hobgoblin kind of gleam came into his eye. “That’s a mixed metaphor, somewhat, but I trust you’ll be merciful and not subject me to a pasquinade like you did with your report on that third candidate’s sermon at Saint John’s Presbyterian.”
Which hurled me back to earth and into the mire pretty quickly, I have to say. “— Dean! I never knew you read that!”
“I've read all your Times articles. ‘He committed every conceivable literary sin’ is an almost impressive accusation. Were you keeping a tally?”
“I didn’t mean to turn that version over to Mr. Towers! I told everybody it was a mistake!”
“No. A mistake would’ve been the substitution of ‘stigma’ with ‘stigmata’ — that was an entire five paragraphs, you vibrant euphoric being.”
Upon which counterpoint Dean shut the door. Impudence! I am never invited to come sit in Mrs. Evans’s parlor for any length of time, not for tea or lemonade or to warm myself at the stove. That is a great misfortune; Dean has a wrought-iron lantern he picked up from a Venetian palace and I’ve been wanting to have a look at it. Mrs. Evans seemed to like me better when I was a child, but not by much.
And now I’ve got the red empress-poetess umbrella. I presume Mrs. Price saw me passing by her window with it this afternoon; tonight I'm sure she won't sleep a wink due to her perseverative ponderation over its meaning and tomorrow she will slop around some porridge-sticky rumor about that sly Starr puss’s betrothal to a Japanese prince. Blessed Mrs. Price! She impresses me as the sort who is liable to strain out the gnat yet swallow the camel, so to speak.
For myself, tonight, I have been wondering about Destiny, and Fate, and Foreordiance, since the question has made me recall that sermon I heard and liked from the first candidate at Saint John’s Presbyterian. The best sermons tell us things we already know, I think — things we already know but do not behave or live in the everyday as if we know. He had traveled to the Holy Land and he explained for us how, from the Mount of Olives, one can look down and see clear across the Kidron Valley into Jerusalem, and therefore late on the night of Holy Thursday any man who happened to be awake, alone and waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane would’ve likely been able to see the line of lighted torches that was wending its way towards him; behind him lay all the sheltering, fugitive concealment of the Judean wilderness, the sermon concluded, yet there the man stood, and there he stayed.
I hope this rain stops tomorrow. It has been flooding into the dairy and my hens in their coop are half-drowned from it.
Nov. 30, 1906
A strange scene transpired today between Dean and I.
Naturally he and I have our lively spiels with one another all the time, our disputations and our dialectics on every possible topic whether fanciful or factual. After such talks I always have the sense that a freshet of clean air has been let into my brain, like when I learn a new just-right word for some emotion or experience I had heretofore believed was the human province of me, myself, I, and Emily-in-the-Glass. Dean tells me there is a Japanese word roughly transcribable from the hiragana as “komorembi,” meant to describe the kaleidoscopic green-gold effect of sunlight through leaves, and I wish the Old English word “uhte” had been carried forward into our modern lexicon. It seems imbalanced that there should be no ante-meridial equivalent of "twilight” to describe the hour wherein day has not yet broken, and there is still a mist upon the green pastures and the quiet waters, but a certain transmutation in the color of the air makes the landscape resound with an acclamation of what is about to take place, as it has taken place each morning for some four billion years by the geologists’ record yet can never be the same thing twice.
Most of that last sentence I should ascribe to Dean as well. We were reading Beowulf and comparing translations. How did Kemble manage to make the battle against Grendel tedious?
A time or three I have also walked away as Wingéd-Victory from a slight, playful tiff with Dean, feeling the all-over ticklishness of having been completely “given my road” in some minor disagreement, while it is likewise true that he can speak in such casually contemptuous ways — when he wants to — that it cuts a slash across my heart and I feel the sting for a week; this incident, meanwhile, had the texture of a quarrel, even if neither of us ever raised our voices. Now it seems so senseless I have difficulty countenancing it happened at all.
I had spent my morning at the Times marking errors in the galley-proof for Saturday’s publication and folding the printed sheets after they dried. There was a third-page freelance article about a shepherd in Derry Pond who has added a few fascinating creatures to his flock, ambassadors from South America who have the bundled coats of sheep, the alert ears of rabbits, the gracile necks of geese and the spitting proficiency of saloon patrons aiming for the cuspidor. These spectacular chimeras are called “llamas.” You needn’t pronounce the “L” twice. Dean has been to Santiago de Chile — he is the only person I’ve ever met who has sailed the Drake Passage, since even Perry and his father were never required to “tempt the Horn,” as the navy-men say; Dean swears it on my life that he was not seasick, though I don’t know as I believe him — and I was excited to ask him if he ever saw a “llama” while he was traveling there. What is their wool like? Should I buy a reel for Aunt Laura to knit? What colors could I dye it?
On Wednesday I had also presented him with Throne, Sceptre, Empire after finally discovering how it ought to be told, and I wanted to hear what he thought of it, so I was happy twice-over to meet him out walking as I drove the gig back from Shrewsbury. I knew it was Dean from a good distance because no other man in Blair Water has his same stride or bearing.
Whenever Dean walks along in silence with his head lowered I imagine his mind lifted up into the fiery or thunderous cloud of some preoccupying universal idea, like a student of the Lyceum, so I took care not to hail him too loudly lest I startle him. This was a day of stark colorless light and a fat, weightless snow with flakes like eiderdown was beginning to fall.
“Ahoy, wayfaring stranger,” I said, after I drew alongside him. “Where have you come from?”
“‘From going to and fro about the earth, and from walking up and down in it,’” answered Dean. His voice sounded a bit thickened as if by a congestion. “I just called at New Moon. Elizabeth told me you’d gone into town. I thought that was only Thursdays and Saturdays.”
“Yes, usually. I’m so sorry you had such a long walk for nothing!”
“It’s only a mile and a half, going one way.”
“Which makes it three miles going both ways, doesn’t it? Mr. Towers told me yesterday that I’d better run down today instead before this snow heaps up too high. He didn’t want me gadding about through it tomorrow and freezing like a soldier of Napoleon’s army — can I bring you the rest of the way home? Here. Climb up and take some of the blanket.” I offered my hand while Dean hitched his better leg onto the carriage-step and I hauled him up beside me to luff half the flannel blanket across his knees. The gig’s seat is not wide but Dean is almost as slight through his shoulders and chest as a squire-boy, so he didn’t crowd me much as I turned the mare around leeward down the road again. “What were you calling at New Moon about?”
“Your story.” Dean reached within a pocket of his brown greatcoat, which is badly frayed around the hem and collar. It has continually struck me as unusual that he does not dress himself like a man with money, excepting an engraved railroad pocket-watch he uses when we are timing how long it takes one of us to defeat the other at checkers. He says wearing velvet-collared evening cloaks and carrying an embossed derby cane would be like putting a caparison on a spavined mule. “You still want ‘the naked truth,’ is that correct?”
“Quite correct, thank you. As naked as Eve shaped from the rib of Adam.”
“And as Adam raised from the dust, I suppose.” He drew out my handwritten pages and I saw their margins were positively packed with editorial comments: a bonanza! All for me! I might’ve pounced a bit when possessing myself of them. “What made you think of the title, by the way?”
“You mentioned Hugo — Hernani — happy endings — some of his poems are in one of Father’s anthologies, so I looked them over — I’m not sure how exact the translation is.”
“Ah. À une femme. ‘I’d give, Girl, were I but a king, throne, sceptre, empire, everything’ — is that the one?”
“Précisément!”
By then I had more or less flung the mare’s drive-lines at him so I could read everything posthaste. Dean caught them from me — he is not an accomplished rider insofar as it concerns chivalric showmanship but he is a competent manager of carts and pack-animals. Visiting the city of Fez in Morocco one year he had the rented use of a puckish old jack-donkey who loved stealing the hat off his head, whenever Dean stepped close to bridle him, and they became such pals over the course of their six weeks’ quixotic adventuring that Dean offered the teamster two, then three times what the shaggy filthy knock-kneed little beast was worth in order to buy him. The teamster was a Frenchman by birth who only stared at Dean and said to his fellows, le bossu est un fou. Anyway, the Canadian Customs Bureau wouldn’t have allowed it.
A rabble-rouser wind cuffed me suddenly and I wrapped my scarf more tightly over my hair while trying simultaneously to keep the fluttering pages clasped against myself. Dean’s notes were very good, I thought, even reading pell-mell through them the way I did atop the gig’s high seat. He underscored for emphasis many of the sentences I had contended with the longest and added his roguishly encouraging, vaudeville-audience interjections to an early exchange of jovial insults between Editha and a curmudgeonly former classmate; he gleaned a certain symmetry I had not consciously ordered into my arrangement of the scenes where Editha inspects her hope-chest’s contents with those wherein she helps her father ignite the lighthouse’s beacon at dusk; he inserted fairly-reasoned criticisms about the narrative pacing and posed questions meant to help unburden my more convoluted paragraphs, or disassemble the scaffolding explanations I tend to hammer up around the themes in my pet-favorite passages; he hung an asterisk above my use of hylomorphic in that sentence about the lovers and the third thing burning, living betwixt them, though he had suggested "between" because sometimes ordinary words are best-suited for an expression of the extraordinary; I was scrunched down around my papers like a woman with a platter of petit fours when I turned the last page over to see that a diagonal, deliberating line had been drawn through the story’s final paragraph, corner to corner. I looked at him.
“Didn’t you like my ending?”
“Saying I ‘disliked’ it would risk misconstruing my motives for excising it.” Dean brought up a gloved hand to wipe the melting snowflakes from his face. “The story’s greatest profundity is in your delicate atmosphere of sustained sublimation — if you trim off that last part, your readers will each be left in contemplation to individually answer the question of how they'd act in your protagonist's position,” he said. “A clamoring and uproarious full-stop ending could never achieve the same effect."
I paused, stepping around to the problem's other side so I might view it from where Dean was positioned. The story’s ending is somewhat of a hurly-burly, maybe. Editha returns to Montreal with her hope-chest and one autumn night she is sitting at a looking-glass in her wedding veil, which she imagines she may give to a daughter someday, who may thence have a daughter who also has a daughter or possibly a niece or protegee or young friend whom she loves just as hugely — women joined together in unbroken interconnection, generation over generation, belonging to one another as warp to weft in a loomed cloth — and she observes the way her veil’s silver-threaded lace and seed-pearls make it look like a mantle of starlight: then next comes a break, followed by a paragraph of five brief sentences where Editha stands upon the deck of a ship being guided home by a signal-fire shining through the oncoming night — she steps out beneath a wide evening sky — she sees her one true love is hastening towards her, swift as a young hart upon the mountains with his arms open to receive her, and she runs forth to meet him.
I shuffled the loose pages back into order.
“What if I want the clamor, though? If I’ve got trumpets and timbrels in my vocabulary along with flutes and chimes I should practice making some noise with them,” I said. “I’m no more interested in being a William D. Howells or a Henry James than I am in being a Brontë or an Austen."
“Perish the thought. My God, I finally had to get out a pen and diagram several passages in The Wings of the Dove before I could even begin making sense of them. And you, as I recall, told me after reading Washington Square that you'd have run down Morris Townsend and gonged him around the head with a frying pan. Did I quote you accurately on the use of that denominal?" He gave me a look. I brought up my papers to conceal a smile like a baroness raising her fan. "Those novels have already been written once, E. Byrd Starr, and I'd say once is enough. Leave that suffering to the American Realists."
“Very good. All the more reason to keep my happily-ever-after — but on the subject of Realists, I’m still deciding which artistic movements I want to consider myself in allegiance with." I lowered the papers. "Can a writer be an Impressionist, or is that term strictly reserved for painters?”
“Why should you want to be an Impressionist?"
“I mostly like their reverence of light and shadow — it feels like a reverence, anyway — the lights and the colors you can see inside the shadows — the evident brushstrokes, and the movement, and — Dean, what’s the word I want? I’ve almost got the taste of it.” I dapped my fingers against my lips. “Not ‘abruptness.’ It’s got nearly the same definition as 'abruptness', but it conveys a clearer sense of — freedom, and elation, but also — volatility. And when you pronounce it the sound, well — opens. Like a firework.”
Dean drives in the English style with both lines gathered into one palm and he was sliding them left to navigate a long bend in the road. For a moment he tilted his head. “Spontaneity.”
“Spontaneity! Thank you very much — a vision of holy beauty shining out through spontaneous gaps in the mundane.”
“Like your ‘flash’?”
“My —? Oh! Oh — wait —” I fumbled to open my coat by three or four buttons and retrieved a pencil-stub from my vest pocket so I could scritch this notion down in shorthand onto the gutter of a page “ — yes, that may be the right idea. A skilled-enough Impressionist can make his viewers realize that the sight of a wheatstack at dawn in the wintertime ought to be treated as a metaphysical encounter."
“Certainly — when admired from a distance of ten or twelve paces. Up too close Monsieur Monet’s Stacks at Giverny series dissolves into a senseless cacophony, or at least that's how it was with the ones I saw hanging at the Musée d’Orsay the last time I was in Paris. But where did you see them, Star? I would never have guessed the art instructors at Shrewsbury High School were capable of perpetrating such an unconventionality."
“— It wasn't at school. I saw some pictures of them in Studio."
"Hm?"
"Studio. It’s a very exclusive fine arts magazine. There was an — article about them, this past April. It said they’ll be moving a portion of the collection to an institute in Chicago.”
I could speak no more than this. Why? Yet I knew. I had gone to Shrewsbury afoot and paid the price of a poem for those glossy, lavish four hundred pages, sitting myself down on the lower split-rail of a fence to sift distractedly through the magazine’s prints until I found the only one I wanted, behind a section dedicated to recent sales: Westerly Window, by Frederick Kent, Oil on Canvas. The painting was of several blue-flag irises bunched into a tall, slim greenish glass, on the sill of a half-shuttered window, sleek and flawless in its captivation of living detail down to the ellipsed sunlight passing through the glass’s water and a veining within the iris’s yellow-tinted sepals. And was there something I recognized in those changeful hues of purple? Not where the light touched them, no, but secreted between the flower’s upright standards?
Time and again, I have been given cause to wonder if there was anything serious in Dean’s old joke about perceiving my thoughts — the gods gave me that gift when they kept back everything else I wanted; isn’t that what he said? — and here I saw a cynical flicker pass through the thin line of his upper lip.
“Yet the Impressionist style suffers from an illusion kindred to the one afflicting Realism, in its way. Realism claims to discard sentiment by objectively portraying what King Lear would've called ‘the Thing Itself,’ set apart from an artist’s personal interpositions, and Lear’s Fool might have given his counsel against such a fallacy,” Dean said. “Meanwhile Impressionism risks allowing everything to grow distorted beyond recognition behind the lustrous haze of subjective sentiment, and thus the truth is brought no closer.”
“I’m — not sure I feel the same. The objective way of seeking truth through validation and evidence is certainly more reasonable, and more justifiable, but by itself it never demands anything too — absolute, from us. Does it? The subjective way of pursuing truth instead requires belief, which calls us to go beyond the point where evidence can bring us and therefore demands everything. Wouldn't that get you somewhere?"
“Thus, in your view, a Realist is the man who asks another ‘What is truth?’ whereas the Impressionist is a man who asks himself ‘If this is the truth, then what must I do?’”
“I — yes, I think so — and a person can choose to wash his hands of whatever answer he gets from asking that first question, maybe, but not the second.”
“Thus we arrive again at the superiority of concluding a story in the interrogative clause rather than a declarative one,” said Dean, with a nod towards my papers, then I saw another flick at the corner of his mouth. “Besides, I thought you told me you don’t want to be a mere scribbler of pretty stories.”
At this remark all the blood seemed to beat in me at once, shaking my body like the membrane on a drum. Dean had not returned the drive-lines to me and the wind had carded itself comb-wise through his hair in a fashion that showed the sweeps of gray layered into it. I remembered protesting once to Jock Kelly, you're too ridiculous. I'm not going to marry anybody. Mr. Priest is old enough to be my father.
“I don’t want to be — I’m not — ” I suddenly felt as if there were too many things in my hands, small fragile things I risked dropping to the ground at my feet; here I may have dropped one I very much did not want to “ — unless you’ve only been patronizing me lately because you remain unwilling to bruise the charming visions of a little girl.”
“I also recall saying it would be unwise for any of us to carry our childish dreams into maturity. You are not a little girl any longer and there’s no need for me to speak with you as though you were.”
“I recall what you said very well. ‘Childish dreams.’” I felt myself drop another fragile little bauble from between my hands and seemed to almost hear the rupture of its glass. “And I can’t understand what could’ve changed so much about my writing for you to have suddenly decided I’ve got some ability after all. My book was one thing — I knew you would give me the truth about it, and I knew I’d abide by whatever you said — but my stories, Dean — what is it that I’ve begun doing differently? Won’t you tell me? You always laughed at me, before.”
A faint, occluding color tinged Dean’s profiled face from his band-collar into his sparse cheeks. I stared. The only precedent I could recall as I watched him was his distracted dismay when I asked why he had lent me that mucky pig-sty of a book full of people treating one another so savagely; contemplating it now I feel only pity for desperate Maggie Johnson and her reprobate brother but at fourteen it appalled me to think there could be such behavior in the world, even if that world was the Bowery of New York.
“Star — ” Dean said “ — Emily — Emily, my Star, I was never laughing at you.”
“Yes you were, Dean.” Oh, how could he say such a thing and expect me to give it any credence? That was my thought. How could he tell me such a lie and sound so sincere while he did it? “I may lack your supernal gift for reading into people’s minds but by now I ought to be more than capable of reading what’s in your eyes.”
His jaw seemed to clench. “Is that so?”
My ears were ringing. What a question! I thought over all the poems and stories I have given him to read throughout these past few years, the labors of my very soul, and the way he has returned them to me with either his finely-parsed compliments or silence and his implicating, humiliating smile to suggest I have amused him and nothing more — that it is a cobwebbed, nice enough piece of work for the casual readership, a thing to be lightly enjoyed and lightly discarded, but surely there could be no greatness discoverable in it — no rose gardens, no pine forests, no rainbow-gold or mountain summits, nothing to stimulate and sting and inspire nor carry a consolation to the sorrowful across distance and time — achievements worthy of a novelist, or an author, possibly even a writer, but never, never, never of a storyteller.
I creased my papers to stick them away inside my coat along with my pencil stub. I closed the buttons.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’ve got to do whatever I decide is best. It’s my writing, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is. Who else could it possibly ever belong to?”
There was a reproachful misery in Dean’s voice as he said this and it left me so irately bewildered within myself that I could do nothing except sit there, unmoving, my nerves standing at electrified attention where our shoulders and knees were pushed into proximity. A preposterous comedy of human error! How stupid the two of us must have looked, jammed together on the jostling gig and riding in appalled silence with that glum, wet snow bedighting our faces; the entire incident took less than a quarter of the time I’ve expended in describing it. Past a fork in the road where Mrs. Evans lives Dean braked the gig, and shook away the blanket, and he flung himself off the carriage-step with such a heedless juvenile leap it made him stagger when he landed — and made me flinch to see it, as though I had been flecked with boiling oil — but when he reached the house’s steps to turn for one last look at me I sat forward and pretended I was fixing something with the mare’s singletree.
I only sat up once I heard the front door rattle shut. When I reached home I came up to my room and put away Throne, Sceptre, Empire into the same drawer where I am saving A Seller of Dreams. In the morning I will look at it again.
I've been crying a little over the devilish mess of it, just now, whatever good the tears will or won’t do me. I have longed so ceaselessly, so intently for Dean’s approval, and for him to tell me what I write is worthwhile — all else has seemed but dust and ashes to me, weighted against the silver-leafed coronet of that lone honor. And I want so madly to have him near me always, as my friend, the boon companion of my mind and a fellow hearkener after the random word — I want to arrange things in such a way that it ensures Dean can go on laughing without bitterness, all the rest of his life, like he once told me I’d taught him to do — I want to set my friendship like a signet on his heart and by doing so shield it from the various reviling, profaning uses the world has thus far made of it as carelessly and easily as it uses that cruel name — yet I sit here knowing, or suspecting, and dreading like death how it may lie equally within my power to deal him a wound that will plunge in some ways far deeper than the rest, and I find as well that it makes me want to beg oh God, please take it away from me.
Take it from me so that he might be spared the hurt I must cause him one day, this man who desires more from me than I am able to give him. I can’t hurt him, dear God, I can’t —
— but God, my God, Emily’s God in the flash, please let me somehow keep him all for myself anyway, even so, because I am unwilling to share him even with his own loneliness.
...
At this juncture any future biographers will come to a pause in the chronicled life of E. Byrd Starr, but its reasons will be explicable enough and they will be able to pass, decorously, over it; the later biographers, hailing from similarly later schools of historical and critical intersectional theory, will give it a bit more consideration.
Emily sets aside her pencil. She shoves back from her table to stare at what, through her, has been written. Beside her the radiance of a beeswax candle trembles like the yellow wings of a butterfly against her white, wet face where it floats, reflected, in the cold black glass of a windowpane: then she grips all the pages containing her entry for the 30th of November — something in the quality of the skirling, snowy darkness outside suggests twelve o'clock has not yet come and gone — and with the aid of an ivory-handled penknife she slices these pages loose from her blank-book’s stitched central binding. She crumples them together within her fists to lay them upon the fireplace grate. Opening a top drawer she next abstracts a sheet of paper bearing the fourteen lines of a sonnet, hatched with revisions, stares at the title — A Song from June to November — and rents it to pieces, scattering these across the grate as well. She carries over her candle, its point of flame hot against her palm as she kneels; a passing draft blows out the brief candle in a pirouette of smoke. A matchbook is on her mantelpiece, beside that lacquered jar of potpourri compounded from cinnamon and oak moss and rose petals and an attar-of-roses oil which a certain poet once wrote is the gift of screws as well as sunshine, yet this matchbook proves to be empty when Emily opens it. She puts it away.
There ought to be another matchbook in the kitchen, she knows, and if not she will borrow some of those banked-up embers from the stove. She can carry them in a hearth-shovel.
She whirls a shawl about her nightgowned shoulders as she puts a hand upon the lock of the bedroom that was once her mother’s. She halts. Is she being a ninny? Can’t the task be left for tomorrow morning? No. That would be impossible — unthinkable — unbearable, to have those insurrectionist, combustible words sitting there all night, near enough for her to touch — so Emily opens the door, up until the point where she knows its hinges will begin to whine, and slips out nimbly towards the stairs.
But although she is not as punctual as her younger sister Destiny, nor strategic as her elder brother Foreordinance, Fate with her shears is said to be patient, and there on the topmost step sits a mending basket Laura Murray has set down to entirely forget about for the third or fourth time this month. Her thought at each incident has been, my goodness. Elizabeth and Jimmy and I will be old people soon, won’t we? If we aren’t old already.
So goes time by.
Emily stumbles against the basket. She gives a quick inhalation like polite surprise as she plummets, headlong, down the steep stairs. Jumbled and incongruous things occur to her as she falls — I must get them; I have never seen farewell-summers of so rich a purple — then there is an incredible, savage agony through her right hand just before a moonless night rushes inward upon her, and the rest is silence.