SIXTEEN
Those two sisters living alone, their bond insoluble, their rebuff of conventions rock hard: to Higginson, who stepped inside the Homestead once again—it had been nearly thirteen years—the place was a living House of Usher, updated and New Englandly. The day was lustrous, calm, and gemlike. The morning haze had burned off, leaving the sky blue and hopeful, and the village was dressed for spring in bright green, violet, and wild geranium. But at the Homestead the long shades were drawn, and in the library sat a small white casket.
Inhaling, Higginson peered down at Emily Dickinson’s beautiful unfurrowed brow. He did not hesitate at calling her beautiful now. And as he sadly noticed, she was youthful too, without a gray hair or a wrinkle.
“How large a portion of the people who have interested me have passed away,” he mourned.
Higginson’s unusual friend had died just days before. He had received the sad news, likely by telegram, on the seventeenth. So many deaths: Helen Hunt Jackson not a year earlier, when Dickinson herself, upset, had contacted him to say Jackson had written she could not walk “but not,” Dickinson cried, “that she would die.” Now Emily herself was gone. He knew she had been ill, for earlier that spring she had told him she had been sick since November, “bereft of Book and Thought,” she had said, “by Doctor’s reproof.” But he had not thought, as Emily had said of Jackson, that she would die.
Of course he would go to the funeral. Emily herself had probably requested that her family invite him. She had stipulated everything: the simple service, the men who would carry her casket, perhaps even the soft white flannel robe in which Sue tenderly wrapped her. Vinnie scattered pansies and lilies of the valley on the piano and placed a sprig of violets at Emily’s neck, as she had done with their mother, along with a pink flower called Cypripedium, or lady’s slipper. She also set two heliotropes by her hand “to take to Judge Lord,” Higginson heard her say.
The funeral took place on Wednesday the nineteenth. The Reverend Jonathan Jenkins, who came from Pittsfield to offer a short prayer, and the Reverend Mr. Dickerman, pastor of the First Congregational Church, read from 1 Corinthians 15: “For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.”
Higginson then pulled himself to his feet, announcing he would recite a poem, the one Emily had often read to her sister: Emily Brontë’s “Last Lines.” It was “a favorite with our friend,” he added, “who has now put on that Immortality which she never seemed to have laid off.”
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven’s glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.
The poem seems a valediction to each of the mourners gathered there in the Homestead parlor:
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes cease to be,
And Thou were left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
THE HONORARY PALLBEARERS, including the president of Amherst College, bore the small coffin from the library into the hall and then out the back door, but per Emily’s express instructions, the men who worked for the Dickinsons over the years—Stephen Sullivan, Pat Ward, Tom Kelley, Dennis Scannell, Dennis Cashman, Dan Moynihan—conveyed the casket, high on its wooden bier, through the Dickinson meadow to the cemetery. It was the path through the meadow, thick with daisies and buttercups, that Miss Emily herself must often have taken to visit her parents’ graves.
Convulsed in grief and draped in black, a hollow-eyed Mabel Todd accompanied the small group to the cemetery, walking behind the family cortege. The air was iridescent, the white sun streaming on the mourners, who gathered around the open grave, which Sue had lined with a spate of flowers and green branches. “It was a never to be forgotten burial,” commented a family friend, “and seemed singularly fitting to the departed one.”
As the casket was lowered down and farther down, Mabel Todd took one last look. Emily Dickinson, she said, had gone back “into a little deeper mystery than that she has always lived in.”
SUE DICKINSON COMPOSED AN OBITUARY for the Springfield Republican. Printed on May 18, the day before the funeral, it addressed all the rumors flying around her sister-in-law; the rumors had flown around her sister-in-law for years. There was a great deal public about this private person, and Sue wanted to set the record straight. “Not disappointed with the world,” she wrote, “not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career—her endowments being so exceptional—, but the ‘mesh of her soul,’ as Browning calls the body, was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work.”
Emily’s writing and conversation were incomparable, she went on to say. “Like a magician she caught the shadowy apparitions of her brain and tossed them in startlingly picturesqueness to her friends, who, charmed with their simplicity and homeliness as well as profundity, fretted that she had so easily made palpable the tantalizing fancies forever eluding their bungling, fettered grasp.”
And in the end Emily eluded everyone. “Now and then some enthusiastic literary friend would turn love into larceny, and cause a few verses surreptitiously obtained to be printed,” Sue admitted. “Thus, and through other natural ways, many saw and admired her verses, and in consequence frequently notable persons paid her visits, hoping to overcome the protest of her own nature and gain a promise of occasional contributions, at least, to various magazines.”
One such was Wentworth Higginson.
THEIR FRIENDSHIP HAD BEEN BASED on absence, geographic distance, and the written word. They had exchanged letters in which they invented themselves and each other, performing for each other in the words that filled, maintained, and created the space between them. “What a Hazard a Letter is!” Emily had exclaimed to him. “When I think of the Hearts it has scuttled and sunk, I almost fear to lift my Hand to so much as a Superscription.” Yet she hazarded them for a lifetime and to Wentworth for almost twenty-five years.
He knew what she meant, albeit in his own way. “It is true of all of us that the letter represents the man, odd or even,” he observed. “It is, indeed, more absolutely the man, in one sense, than he himself is, for the man himself is inevitably changing, beyond his own control, from moment to moment, from birth to death.” What a hazard a letter is: quicksilver and irrevocable and frequently misunderstood. Yet somehow these two people, who lived in the intimacies and distances and secrets of words—somehow these two people created out of words a nearness we today do not entirely grasp.
Dickinson’s letters, all of them, blaze with a passion for sight and smell and sound and the enduring pleasure, whatever its cost, of friendship. The soul has bandaged moments, true, difficult to express, but there are points of contact, vehement, aflame, effulgent beyond words, that compel our entire being. That was her gamble. These are my letters to the World, she so famously said.
“Through the solitary prowess / Of a Silent Life—.”
And Higginson? For her he represented the dappled world. And he gave it what he had, glad to give and still shy of what he might have found had he dwelled, as she did, uncompromisingly inward. But there was much he had understood.
“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” she had once asked this kindhearted man. “Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude—.”
Two weeks before she died, still trusting that he, with his gift of sympathy, would understand, she in effect returned to the same question.
“Deity—does He live now?” she asked him. “My friend—does he breathe?”