Sister Emily's Lightship (29 page)

It was too soon.

And soon it was too late.

Somewhere a minute or an hour or a day or a week later, they figured out the difference in time.

“You're an old man when I am born,” she mused.

“I am dead when you are born,” he said.

But time has a way of correcting itself. Of making sense of nonsense.

And one minute or an hour or a day or a week later, Andrea turned a corner of a street off Grassmarket—dressed now of course as a young woman should—and she went in one step from streetcars to Suburus.

“Simon!” she cried, turning back. But Simon and his century were gone.

Andrea returned home but she didn't feel at home. The sky over Chappaqua had a dirty, smudged look. The air reeked. She could not bear the billboards along the highway nor the myriad choices of toilet cleansers and bath soaps at the super market.

She shut off her tv and sold her fax. She went shopping for long skirts and shirtwaists in second hand shops.

She told her customers that she had a great deal of back work to do and gave them the names of several other jewelers they might patronize instead.

She said goodbye to her three friends.

“I'm thinking of moving to Scotland,” she told them. She did not tell them where.

Or when.

Then she sold her parents' house, took the money in a banker's check, bought a ticket on Icelandic Air, and flew with a small suitcase of second hand clothes to Scotland.

The Royal Bank of Scotland was more than happy to open an account for her, and she rented a small flat in Leith.

Then she set to work. Not as a silversmith, not as a jewelry maker. She became a researcher, haunting the Edinburgh churches to see if she could find where Simon had been buried. To see if there was some mention of him in the town rolls.

Her search took her the better part of a year, but she had time.

The rest of my life if needed,
she thought. Her parents' house had brought in a great deal of money. It was not money that worried her. It was the rest of Simon's life she was afraid of.

Once she'd been through every cemetery in the city she was at a loss, until she remembered that Simon had once spoken of being an East Neuk lad. On a whim she went by bus out to Crail, the little fishing village Simon had mentioned.

It was a pearl of a village with a mercat cross topped by a unicorn in the center of the upper town. The tollbooth was a tiered tower with a graceful belfry. When she went along the shop row, passing a bakery and a butcher's, she was stopped by a glass-fronted jewelry store. It sold both new pieces—rather simple and not terribly interesting—and antique ware. Glancing up at the sign over the lintel, she was stunned.

MORRISONS JEWELRY SINCE 1878

Trembling, she went in.

You've guessed it now.

How the story ends.

But you are wrong again.

Andrea does not find Simon—for he is long gone and no amount of standing about in electrical storms can bring her back again in time.

Who she finds is the great great grandson of Simon Morrison who is also named Simon.

And that Simon, on hearing the name Andrea Crow, immediately gives her a job as a jewelry maker in the shop because it has been a family legend—accompanied by a notarized document—that some time in the new century such a young woman would come. Black curls, violet eyes, and a master jeweler's skill.

In his early thirties, this Simon looks nothing like old Simon. He has a roundness to his face and a sunny disposition. He does not so much make jewelry as sell what others make.

After half a year, he proposes and Andrea accepts and they marry, though Andrea explains that some part of her will always belong to old Simon.

This young Simon understands. It is, after all, part of the family tradition. Scots are big on lost causes.

Andrea's designs become popular in Scotland and then England and then the Continent. Neiman Marcus rediscovers her work. She and Simon have three children.

And in time they fall in love.

In time.

I
DWELL IN POSSIBILITY.
The pen scratched over the page, making graceful ellipses. She liked the look of the black on white as much as the words themselves. The words sang in her head far sweeter than they sang on the page. Once down, captured like a bird in a cage, the tunes seemed pedestrian, mere common rote. Still, it was as close as she would come to that Eternity, that Paradise that her mind and heart promised.
I dwell in Possibility.

She stood and stretched, then touched her temples where the poem still throbbed. She could feel it sitting there, beating its wings against her head like that captive bird. Oh, to let the bird out to sing for a moment in the room before she caged it again in the black bars of the page.

Smoothing down the skirt of her white dress, she sat at the writing table once more, took up the pen, dipped it into the ink jar, and added a second line.
A fairer House than
…than what? Had she lost the word between standing and sitting? Words were not birds after all, but slippery as fish.

Then, suddenly, she felt it beating in her head.
Prose! A fairer House than Prose
—She let the black ink stretch across the page with the long dash that lent the last word that wonderful fall of tone. She preferred punctuating with the dash to the hard point, as brutal as a bullet.
I dwell in Possibility.

She blotted the lines carefully before reading them aloud, her mouth forming each syllable perfectly as she had been taught so many years before at Miss Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.

Cocking her head to one side, she considered the lines.
They will do,
she thought, as much praise as she ever allowed her own work, though she was generous to others. Then, straightening the paper and cleaning the nib of her pen, she tore up the false starts and deposited them in the basket.

She could, of course, write any time during the day if the lines came to mind. There was little enough that she had to do in the house. But she preferred night for her truest composition and perhaps that was why she was struggling so.
Then those homey tasks will take me on,
she told herself: supervising the gardening, baking Father's daily bread. Her poetry must never be put in the same category.

Standing, she smoothed down the white skirt again and tidied her hair—“like a chestnut bur,” she'd once written imprudently to a friend. It was ever so much more faded now.

But pushing that thought aside, Emily went quickly out of the room as if leaving considerations of vanity behind. Besides the hothouse flowers, besides the bread, there was a cake to be made for tea. After Professor Seelye's lecture there would be guests and her tea cakes were expected.

The tea had been orderly, the cake a success, but Emily headed back upstairs soon after, for her eyes—always sensitive to the light—had begun to tear up. She felt a sick headache starting. Rather than impose her ailments on her guests, she slipped away. They would understand.

Carlo padded up the stairs behind her, so quiet for such a large dog. But how slow he had become these last months. Emily knew that Death would stop for him soon enough. Newfoundlands were not a long-lived breed usually, and he had been her own shaggy ally for the past fifteen years.

Slowing her pace, despite the stabbing behind her eyes, Emily let the old dog catch up. He shoved his rough head under her hand and the touch salved them both.

He curled beside her bed and slept, as she did, in an afternoon made night and close by the window blinds.

It was night in truth when Emily awoke, her head now wonderfully clear. Even the dreadful sleet in her eyes was gone.

She rose and threw on a dressing gown. She owed Loo a letter, and Samuel and Mary Bowles. But still the night called to her. Others might hate the night, hate the cold of November, huddling around their stoves in overheated houses. But November seemed to her the very Norway of the year.

She threw open first the curtains, then the blinds, almost certain of a sight of actual fjords. But though the Gibraltar lights made the village look almost foreign, it was not—she decided—foreign enough.

“That I had the strength for travel,” she said aloud. Carlo answered her with a quick drum roll of tail.

Taking that as the length of his sympathy, she nodded at him, lit the already ensconced candle, and sat once again at the writing table. She read over the morning's lines:

I dwell in Possibility—

A fairer House than Prose—

It no longer had the freshness she remembered, and she sighed.

At the sound, Carlo came over to her and laid his rough head in her lap, as if trying to lend comfort.

“No comfort to be had, old man,” she said to him. “I can no longer tell if the trouble is my wretched eyes, sometimes easy and sometimes sad. Or the dis-order of my mind. Or the slant of light on the page. Or the words themselves. Or something else altogether. Oh, my dear dog…” She leaned over and buried her face in his fur but did not weep for she despised private grief that could not be turned into a poem. Still, the touch had a certain efficaciousness, and she stood and walked over to the window.

The Amherst night seemed to tremble in on itself. The street issued a false invitation, the maples standing sentinel between the house and the promise of road.

“Keeping me in?” she asked the dog, “or others out?” It was only her wretched eyes that forced her to stay at home so much and abed. Only her eyes, she was convinced. In fact she planned a trip into town at noon next when the very day would be laconic; if she could get some sleep and if the November light proved not too harsh.

She sat down again at the writing table and made a neat pile of the poems she was working on, then set them aside. Instead she would write a letter. To…to Elizabeth. “Dear Sister,” she would start as always, even though their relationship was of the heart, not the blood. “I will tell her about the November light,” she said to Carlo. “Though it is much the same in Springfield as here, I trust she will find my observations entertaining.”

The pen scratched quickly across the page.
So much quicker,
she thought,
than when I am composing a poem.

She was deep into the fourth paragraph, dashing “November always seemed to me the Norway…” when a sharp knock on the wall shattered her peace, and a strange insistent whine seemed to fill the room.

And the light.
Oh
—
the light!
Brighter even than day.

“Carlo!” she called the dog to her, and he came, crawling, trembling. So large a dog and such a larger fright. She fell on him as a drowning person falls on a life preserver. The light made her eyes weep pitchers. Her head began to ache. The house rocked.

And then—as quickly as it had come—it was gone: noise, light, all, all gone.

Carlo shook her off as easily as bath water, and she collapsed to the floor, unable to rise.

Lavinia found her there on the floor in the morning, her dressing gown disordered and her hands over her eyes.

“Emily, my dear, my dear…” Lavinia cried, lifting her sister entirely by herself back onto the bed. “Is it the terror again?”

It was much worse than the night terrors, those unrational fears which had afflicted her for years. But Emily had not the strength to contradict. She lay on the bed hardly moving the entire day while Mother bathed her face and hands with aromatic spirits and Vinnie read to her. But she could not concentrate on what Vinnie read; neither the poetry of Mrs. Browning nor the prose of George Eliot soothed her. She whimpered and trembled, recalling vividly the fierceness of that midnight light. She feared she was, at last, going mad.

“Do not leave, do not leave,” she begged first Vinnie, then Mother, then Austin, who had been called to the house in the early hours. Father alone had been left to his sleep. But they did go, to whisper together in the hall. She could not hear what they said but she could guess that they were discussing places to send her away. For a rest. For a cure. For—Ever—

She slept, waked, slept again. Once she asked for her writing tablet, but all she managed to write on it was the word light ten times in a column like some mad ledger. They took the tablet from her and refused to give it back.

The doctor came at nine, tall and saturnine, a new man from Northampton. Vinnie said later he looked more like an undertaker than a physician. He scolded Emily for rising at midnight and she was too exhausted to tell him that for her it was usual. Mother and Vinnie and Austin did not tell him for they did not know. No one knew that midnight was her favorite time of the clock. That often she walked in the garden at midnight and could distinguish, just by the smell, which flowers bloomed and bloomed well. That often she sat in the garden seat and gazed up at the great eight-sided cupola Father had built onto the house. His one moment of monumental playfulness. Or she sat at the solitary hour inside the cupola contemplating night through each of the windows in turn, gazing round at all the world that was hers.

“Stay in bed, Miss Dickinson,” warned the doctor, his chapped hands delicately in hers. “Till we have you quite well again. Finish the tonic I am leaving with your mother for you. And then you must eschew the night and its vapors.”

Vinnie imitated him quite cruelly after he left. “Oh, the vaypures, the vay-pures!” she cried, hand to her forehead. Unaccountably, Carlo howled along with her recitation.

Mother was—as usual—silently shocked at Vinnie's mimicry but made no remonstrances.

“He looks—and sounds—quite medieval,” Austin commented laconically.

At that Emily began to laugh, a robust hilarity that brought tears to her poor eyes. Austin joined with her, a big stirring hurrah of a laugh.

“Oh, dear Emily,” Vinnie cried. “Laugh on! It is what is best for you.”