Amherst Read online

  “You think we do now?”

  “We try.”

  Here we are, trying. Everything we say has two meanings: one for the world and one for just us. He really has changed, but it’s hard to say exactly how, because he looks so much the same.

  But of course it’s staring her in the face: he’s no longer in love with her. She can no longer presume that he wants to please her.

  “When I read Mabel’s letters,” she says, “I almost envy her. Her love was so passionate.”

  “You think her passion was real?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Jack takes his phone out of his pocket.

  “See this? This is an iPhone Five. There was so much demand for it I had to wait six days to get it. Over those six days I was sick with excitement, I wanted it so much. Then I got it, and I was in heaven. Undoing the box, taking it out, peeling off the protective film, touching it with my fingertips, arousing it to life—it was all a sort of ecstasy.  Then by the next day it was just a phone again.”

  Alice laughs.

  “Jack has phone sex.”

  “But you get the point. You can have passion or you can have gratification, but you can’t have both.”

  He’s telling me this is how he’s come to terms with the past. We were too available to each other, and so the passion died.

  “So what are we supposed to do about it?” she says, answering both levels of their conversation.

  “Don’t ask me.” He gives his sweet rueful grin. “I do diagnosis. I don’t do cure.”

  There is one way to go. She thinks of Mabel and David, good friends who had sex. But she can’t do it. What would be the point? You can’t reduce sex to comfort.

  “You’re not planning on running away with one of your sexy students?”

  “No way,” says Jack. “Strictly off-limits. I’m just there to teach them Unit One, Aspects of Narrative.”

  “Aspects of narrative? That’s what I need. Maybe you should teach me.”

  He looks at her, saying nothing, smiling. That damn teacher trick.

  “What I mean,” she says, “is I need to know how to tell a good story.”

  “You’re the copywriter.”

  “You’re the teacher.”

  This is safer ground. Enough about real love. Stay with fiction.

  “Well,” says Jack, “I can tell you what I tell my students. All stories are defined by their endings. The ending is the story’s destination, and the point after which the story can’t continue.”

  Alice thinks about that. Is it self-evident to the point of banality, or is it rather original? She’s inclined to be struck by the fact that Jack has gone straight to the heart of her problem: she has no ending.

  “So do you think,” she says, “that you have to know the ending before you start?”

  “Start what? A story without an ending isn’t a story.”

  “Isn’t it?” says Alice humbly. “I was rather hoping I could just write the screenplay and find the ending when I got there.”

  “That’s how they made Casablanca. But it’s also how they made ten thousand really rubbish films.”

  “Maybe I’ll find an ending in Amherst. That’s what research is for, after all.”

  But she’s more insecure on this point than she cares to admit. How much should she plan her screenplay, and how much should she rely on the inspiration of the moment and let it grow all by itself? She prefers the organic method, having already written some pages of strange, almost hallucinatory prose, without any clear notion where they might belong in any greater structure.

  “Maybe I should show you my first draft when it’s done. You can do your lit crit on it.”

  Jack puts on a mock teacher voice.

  “Structure, voice, language, setting, time sequence, character,” he says. “I can do you the full service.”

  The bottle of wine is finished. Alice hears herself say, “Do you want to stay and have something to eat?”

  “No,” says Jack. “I have a pile of essays waiting to be marked back at my place.”

  She only fully understands that she wants him to stay when he tells her he’s going to go.

  “It’s good to see you again, Jack. It’s been too long.”

  He nods and smiles. They’re still side by side on the old sofa, with the books open before them. Might as well try what Jack calls men and women telling each other the truth.

  “So have you forgiven me?” she says.

  Silence. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe it’s all so long in the past for him that he can barely remember what he felt. But when he speaks at last, it’s as if it all happened yesterday.

  “Nothing to forgive,” he says.

  “I think I made you very angry. I’m sorry, I really am.”

  He closes his eyes, sitting there beside her, and says nothing.

  She can hear his slow breaths. She shouldn’t be doing this, but she can’t stop herself. She’s reeling him in from the past.

  “You never called,” she says. “You hated me. I don’t blame you.”

  “I didn’t hate you,” he says. “I was heartbroken.”

  So he’s back. The soft sound of his voice tells her so. Now she starts to be fearful again. If you break it, you own it. Am I ready for that?

  Footsteps on the stairs, a key in the lock. Megan to the rescue.

  Alice’s flatmate enters in a rush, shedding bags, coats, shoes, complaining of the rain, her lateness, the failure of her phone.

  “Can you believe, the fucking battery’s dead! I feel like I’ve died and been buried! Is there anything in that bottle? I need a drink. Actually, what I need most in the world is a pee.”

  And she’s gone into the bathroom.

  Jack stands.

  “When are you off on this trip?”

  “Soon. October the fifth.”

  “Let’s get together when you’re back. You can tell me all about it.”

  “I’d like that,” she says.

  She sees him down the stairs and out onto the street. They kiss good-bye, holding each other for a wordless moment in the doorway. Then she watches him lope away through the drizzle towards the tube station. Returning to her room she experiences a wave of sadness.

  What’s wrong with me? Maybe I’m like Emily Dickinson. Maybe I know too much and will never fall in love.

  3

  Mabel Todd did not like Amherst at all. After the busy social life of Washington, DC, where she had been something of a star, the little town in the valley of the Connecticut River seemed to be plunged in a perpetual twilight. There was the college, of course, but most of the faculty was made up of old men; David, her husband, was by far the youngest at twenty-six. The faculty wives dressed in dark colors, ate their suppers at six o’clock, and did not care for playing cards or dancing.

  David too was disappointed. He had accepted the position at the college on the understanding that a wealthy benefactor was to endow a new observatory. President Seelye told him on arrival that this was no longer a likely prospect. Also it turned out that David was expected to teach three beginning divisions of mathematics, as well as astronomy.

  “Then they must pay you more,” said Mabel.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” said David.

  “Oh, really, David! You should stand up for yourself.”

  David was a little man, not given to standing up for himself, but the truth was this quite suited Mabel. He adored her and he indulged her, and most important of all, he gave her absolute freedom.

  Sitting together by the light of a kerosene lamp in a room in the Amherst House on Pleasant Street, she allowed him to pet her. He fondled her and stroked her hair as if she were a favorite cat.

  “I should have thought you would be bored with me by now,” she said.

  “I’ll never be bored with my beautiful puss,” said David. “You know I can’t stop looking at you.”

  “That young Ned did some looking of his own.”

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nbsp; “Why wouldn’t he? Amherst has never seen anyone like you.”

  “You don’t mind, do you? I think you rather like it.”

  “I like everyone to look at you,” said David, taking her in his arms. “Aren’t you my blue sky? You know I kiss the floorboards where you’ve trod.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather kiss me?”

  So he kissed her, and then became eager, and she had to push him gently away.

  “It’s not the right time of the month. Not for at least a week.”

  “I’m counting the days.”

  Mabel counted the days too. She limited their lovemaking strictly to the fourteen days in the month when she would not get pregnant, and this had been successful, but for one failed experiment. She had got the idea that she was only fertile at what she called “the climax moment of my sensation.” This turned out not to be so. The result was a daughter, Millicent, now eighteen months old, left behind with Mabel’s parents in Washington, DC.

  Mabel was not made by nature to be a mother. There had been a time when this had dismayed her. She was aware that motherhood was a woman’s crowning achievement, but silently she believed that this did not apply to her. She was, she told David, too much of a child herself. Also they were new to Amherst and living in lodgings. Once they were settled in a home of their own, Millicent would join them.

  In the meantime, unpromising though it appeared, Mabel intended to make her mark on Amherst. She was given to what she called “presentiments.” She was filled with a presentiment that there was a great adventure about to unfold.

  “I shall do things that will be heard of,” she told David. “There’s so much in me, waiting to come out.”

  David believed her. Neither of them was quite clear what form the coming glory would take. Mabel had a talent for playing the piano, for singing, for painting, for theatricals.

  While she waited for her adventure, there were lesser goals to achieve. Mabel’s family background was modest, and she longed to rise in the world. She dearly wished for her own carriage. And she wished for her husband to be successful in his profession.

  “You must discover a new moon of Mars, and this time it shall not be stolen from you.”

  David had been at the telescope in the Washington Observatory when he had observed an inner moon of Mars that Professor Hall had mistaken for a tiny star. It was David who identified it as a moon, later named Phobos. But because Professor Hall had already measured it, the new moon was credited to him.

  “No more moons for me,” said David. “I shall make my name next year, with the transit of Venus.”

  • • •

  David’s teaching duties occupied him most of the day. Alone and restless, Mabel took to walking the lanes in the surrounding countryside, admiring the colors of the fall, and here and there plucking leaves to bring back to adorn their rented room.

  One day, while ambling along the Leverett road, she paused beside the neighboring stream to explore a copse of black alder. Hearing a carriage come to a stop behind her, she turned and saw a two-horse gig driven by a grave-faced older gentleman staring towards her. In the moment before he looked away, embarrassed to be discovered, she took in the frank admiration in his keen blue eyes. The gig then moved on up the road.

  Mabel was accustomed to admiration in men’s eyes and thought little of the incident. However, a week or so later, at a gathering of faculty and their wives, she recognized the grave-faced gentleman again. He reminded her a little of her father, not so much in his appearance as in the impression he created. She thought she saw in him her father’s patience and wisdom. From the posture of those round him, Mabel understood him to be a man of some distinction.

  “Who is that?” she whispered to David.

  “Why, that’s the treasurer, Mr. Dickinson. He’s the one who hands out the money round here.”

  “Would it help you if I were nice to him?”

  “It certainly would.”

  David introduced his wife to the grave-faced gentleman, who bowed and showed no sign that they had met before. Mabel was not so delicate.

  “I think you like to ride about the countryside in your carriage, Mr. Dickinson,” she said.

  “The affairs of the college are wide-ranging,” he replied.

  “I envy you. I have no affairs. My wanderings are without purpose. Unless you can call a love of nature a purpose.”

  “I can indeed,” said Mr. Dickinson.

  “Oh, you’ve hit the right note there,” cried a professor’s wife who had joined their group. “Mr. Dickinson is famous for his botanizing.”

  “I don’t think of it as botanizing,” said Mr. Dickinson, his eyes still fixed on Mabel. “I think of it as beautification. My ambition is to turn the town common from a swamp into a park. For that I need a great number of new young trees.”

  “And what species of tree do you favor, Mr. Dickinson?” said Mabel.

  “Our own native American species,” he replied. “Oak and maple, elm and laurel. Why look to foreign lands for beauty, when we can find it here at home?”

  Mabel smiled prettily, accepting this as an elegant compliment.

  “I like your treasurer,” she said to David later.

  “He’s a bit of a dry old stick,” said David. “But in this town, his word is law. They say in Amherst you can’t be born, married, buy a house, or die without a Dickinson in attendance.”

  Mabel made it her business to find out more. There was no shortage of gossip. The word was that Austin Dickinson and his wife Sue did not get on, and lived virtually separate lives. Then there was the mysterious sister Emily, who lived as a recluse and was known as the Myth.

  “Why does she hide herself away?” asked Mabel, intrigued.

  Some said she was mad. Others that her heart had been broken. Others still that it was all a pose, and typical of the Dickinsons, who thought themselves better than everyone else. The story was that Emily never left the house or received visitors, wore only white, and arranged her hair in the fashion of fifteen years ago, which was when she went into retirement.

  All this touched a secret part of Mabel’s heart. The more she learned about the Myth, the more interested she became. Here was a woman who lived not as society expected, but as she herself chose. Mabel too felt herself to be a rebel. Had she not named her daughter after the famous champion of women’s rights, Millicent Fawcett? The Myth was said to write strange poems, unlike any other. Mabel longed to read them, and to reveal herself as the only one to understand their meaning. And surely the Myth, alone in her silent room, was unhappy, as Mabel was unhappy.

  This was the deepest secret of all. To David, to all the world, she presented a cheerful front, going so far as to claim a particular talent for happiness. She would take trouble to find four-leaf clovers wherever she went, and press them in the pages of her journal.

  “There, you see,” she would say. “I have a right to be happy.”

  My perpetual blue sky, David called her. My sun and moon and stars.

  But when alone, Mabel told herself the truth. All was not well in her life. David adored her, but David was given to adoring young women. He had made her a full confession before their marriage. It had been a shock to learn that men could love more than one woman at once, and a further shock to learn that men had a taste for what she thought of as “animal coupling,” sex without love. But she was by nature a practical person, and she had learned fast. David had shared his sexual experience with her. It had pleased her to learn how to please him, and after a while she began to find pleasure in it herself. He was honest, and he was a skilled and devoted lover. This was much. But it wasn’t enough.

  Her father had taught her to love poetry and was himself a poet, though only in an amateur way. Through him and with him she had found a spiritual home in the works of the great poets, from Shakespeare to Walt Whitman. On long rambles in the countryside her father had confided in her, telling her of the higher realm in which men and women found their lasting reward.
Mabel was sensitive enough to understand that her father was a disappointed man. By profession he was a clerk at the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington, DC. His job was to prepare the tables of moon, star, and planet culminations, and to proofread the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. He did his work dutifully, but he felt himself to be so much more than a clerk. He was not a vain man: he was proud. Mabel drank in his pride in her childhood and swore to herself that she would not be crushed, as her father had been crushed, by the demands of a family. She would not be caught in the little cage prepared for her by the little world.

  Somewhere, she knew, there was a finer love than David’s waiting for her. There was a life waiting to be lived that was all-embracing in its intensity, that would satisfy all of her, body, mind, and soul. Somewhere there was a secret garden behind a locked door, if only she could find the key.

  “I would like to meet this Miss Emily Dickinson,” she told David. “I feel we could become friends.”

  “She sees no one,” said David. “That’s why she’s such a mystery.”

  “Why would she want to see people like the Conkeys and the Cutlers? She knew them once and found them to be without vitality, and chose to keep her own company. I have, I hope, some vitality left in me.”

  The Todds were invited to the Evergreens, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Austin Dickinson, but not to the Homestead, the house next door, where Emily lived with her sister, Lavinia. For now, the Evergreens sufficed. It was a handsome house, built in the style of an Italian villa, designed by the same architect as Mr. Hills’s house on nearby Triangle Street. Mrs. Austin Dickinson maintained it in style, giving evening tea parties almost every week. She was enchanted by Mabel.

  “You must call me Sue. You’re going to be such a favorite here, I can promise. Everyone’s talking about you. I do hope you won’t find us too dull.”

  “And I hope you won’t find me too shallow,” said Mabel, settling down at the piano. “I’m very young and ignorant.”

  She then proceeded to play, and the company went into raptures. Most enraptured of all was the Dickinsons’ son Ned, a sophomore at Amherst College. He declared himself to be Mrs. Todd’s admirer and offered himself as an escort whenever David was unavailable. His mother smiled on the association. It could do her callow young son nothing but good to come under the influence of a sophisticated married woman.