Amherst Read online

  He nods. “I’m a visiting professor whose visit has now come to an end.”

  “What was the course?”

  “Paradise on Earth: the Changing Image of Arcadia in Literature and Art.” He gives a little roll of his eyes, as if to mock his own pretensions. “Now referred to by Luis as Paradise Lost. Luis has never really got irony.”

  She wants to say, Your friend also warned me not to fuck you. There seem to be no rules here. She’s feeling dizzy.

  “So what will you do now?” she says.

  “Early retirement?” He speaks the words with his head on one side, as if trying them out for the first time. “I’m fifty-five.”

  “You don’t look it.” Then, embarrassed, she adds quickly, “I’m twenty-four.”

  This is ridiculous.

  “That looks about right,” he says.

  Alice drinks the coffee she doesn’t really want, staring at the book on the table without seeing it.

  Nick says, “So you know Laura Kinross?”

  It takes Alice a moment to realize he means Jack’s mother.

  “Yes,” she says. “I used to go out with her son.”

  “How is she?”

  “Fine, as far as I know.”

  Jack’s mother is settled in life, part of the unchanging background. It doesn’t occur to Alice to ask herself how she is.

  “She was my first love,” says Nick. “The one that got away.”

  “Everyone has to have one of those.” She has no idea what she’s saying.

  “Jet-lagged?”

  “Very.”

  She attacks her muffin.

  “So you’re doing something on Emily Dickinson?”

  She gives him the short version of her project. Nick listens attentively.

  “I’ve heard of the Mabel–Austin affair,” he says, “but I know very little about it. I’ve met the people who live in what used to be the Todd house. And of course the Dickinson houses are open to the public now.”

  “I’m going on the tour at eleven,” says Alice.

  “We live just down the road from the Homestead,” says Nick. “On Triangle Street. Emily’s buried in the cemetery half a mile up our road.”

  Then, sitting back, watching her sip her coffee, “So where are you staying?”

  “I’m at the Amherst Inn.”

  “How long are you here?”

  “Two weeks.”

  She catches a passing scent of the aftershave he uses, but fails to identify it. Together with the fragrance comes a sense of his physical presence: comfortable, assured, interested in her, but not troubled by what she might think of him.

  “Might you really retire?” she says.

  “Why not? Become a gentleman of leisure. All the great achievements of civilization—art, music, literature—have been created for the amusement of gentlemen of leisure. I would take it as a solemn duty.”

  “A solemn duty to be amused?”

  “Oh, you mustn’t think amusement is trivial. It’s the polar opposite of boredom. Boredom is the loss of interest, the loss of appetite, the loss of desire. When we become bored, we begin to die. When we’re amused, we’re alive.”

  Alice is silenced.

  “Forgive me,” he says. “I see I’m being too serious for breakfast time. Tell me about yourself. What do you do when you’re not researching screenplays?”

  She tells him about her job, and her flat in Hackney. Her life sounds trivial in the telling.

  “And there’s a boyfriend?”

  “Not right now.”

  “What happened to Laura’s son?”

  “Jack. He’s fine. We’re still good friends. I don’t know what happened. It just didn’t work out, I suppose.”

  “Who left who?”

  “It was mutual.”

  “Who cried?”

  “No one cried. Does someone have to cry?” It might have been easier if Jack had cried. “You can’t just go on drifting along, can you?”

  “It’s all about timing,” Nick says. “You can meet someone too early. And you can leave things too late.”

  A student who’s just entered the café stops by their table. She points one finger at Nick while with her other hand she brushes back a mane of blond hair.

  “You douche bag,” she says. “Why do you never get back to me?”

  Her voice is soft, almost pleading, in contrast to her words. Nick raises his arms in a silent eloquent shrug. The girl tosses her mane.

  “Why do I even ask?” she says, and sweeps away.

  Nick meets Alice’s eyes with a rueful smile.

  “You disapprove?”

  “None of my business,” says Alice.

  Before they part Nick says, “You must come over and visit us before you leave.”

  “Thank you,” says Alice. “I’d like that.”

  “My wife’s away in Boston at present. But I expect her back any day.”

  He draws her a map on a napkin to show where he lives: 35 Triangle Street.

  • • •

  There are five others on the tour of the Homestead. The guide is a brisk, handsome woman in her thirties, with short blond hair and lightly tanned skin. She introduces herself as Debbie.

  “We’re standing in what was the kitchen, in Emily’s day.”

  The room is now part ticket booth, part shop, the walls covered with shelves of books and greeting cards, decorated mugs, wall hangings, maps of old Amherst. Evidently there’s a thriving Emily Dickinson industry.

  From the outside the house looks like the photographs from Emily’s day. The hemlock hedge has been replanted. The square yellow front with its green-shuttered windows and its welcoming porch hasn’t changed. Emily’s conservatory has gone, but the surrounding trees still stand. A path still runs through the trees to the Evergreens, no more than fifty paces away, where Austin lived.

  But inside, the illusion fails. Emily’s ghost is long gone, driven away by information displays, white walls, the intrusive flood of daylight.

  “We are now entering what was the dining room,” says Debbie, leading the group into a space paneled with enlarged photographs. Here is Emily in the only known picture of her, at the age of sixteen: not at all what she looked like later, her sister, Lavinia, is said to have said. Too soulful, too pretty. The real Emily was not and never had been pretty, never expected to be admired, which is one reason why Alice loves her.

  They might not need me—yet they might—

  I’ll let my heart be just in sight—

  A smile so small as mine might be

  Precisely their necessity—

  Alice realizes that this must be the room in which Austin and Mabel conducted their love affair. How? Or to be brutally practical, on what? The floor? The dining room table?

  “Do we know how this room was furnished?” she asks.

  “Not exactly,” says the guide. “It was called the dining room, so we assume there were a table and chairs. But it was also used as a supplementary sitting room in the winter, when the parlors were closed off. There was a black horsehair sofa that stood here, we think.”

  Alice makes a mental note. Sex on a sofa. But she doesn’t raise the matter aloud.

  The group passes down the passage, across a hall, into the two parlors. There’s nothing in these bright, well-kept rooms that evokes the half-lit Victorian world. There’s a box piano that’s similar to the one believed to have stood where it stands. Somewhere in this blank space Mabel Todd played and sang, while Emily listened from beyond the door: but the exercise of the imagination proves futile.

  “Surely these rooms would have been darker?”

  “Yes, certainly,” says Debbie. “The wallpaper would have been darker. There would have been heavier drapes on the windows. But there wouldn’t have been much more furniture than we see here.”

  On up the stairs to the landing, where in a glass case, on a headless tailor’s dummy, there hangs a copy of one of Emily’s famous white dresses. The group gathers round it.
Alice hangs back. She can only think how frightened Emily would have been, to be trapped in a glass box.

  Some say she took to wearing white to announce herself as a bride, though the bride of whom or what remains obscure. But this is no wedding dress. It’s a practical everyday garment. What else was she to wear? Black? Unthinkable.

  Mine—by the right of the white election!

  And through the next door is her bedroom, the room in which she sat at her little maplewood desk, mostly at night, and wrote her poems. The room with the bureau drawer where the poems were found after her death, almost two thousand of them, so many more than anyone had guessed.

  No Emily here either; and yet she was here once. This is the view she looked at, through the front window. Except it isn’t. In her day the land across Main Street was owned by the Dickinsons, it was called the Dickinson Meadow, and hay was harvested there. Emily would have been able to see almost all the way down the meadow to the plot given by Austin to the Todds, where Mabel and David built the house they called the Dell. From the side window of this room Emily would have looked out and seen her brother hastening down the path from the Evergreens to his liaisons with Mabel in the dining room below. What did Emily think of that?

  Not seeing, still we know

  Not knowing, guess—

  Not guessing, smile and hide

  And half caress—

  And quake and turn away,

  Seraphic fear—

  Is Eden’s innuendo

  “If you dare”?

  The poetry makes Alice shiver. Whatever else she might have been, Emily was on the side of passion.

  The tour makes no mention of Mabel Todd. When it’s over and they’re back in the book-lined shop, Alice raises the matter of the notorious love affair. Debbie pulls a face.

  “We don’t talk about Mabel Todd very much,” she says. “She was something of a troublemaker.”

  “She came here, didn’t she?” says Alice. “For her meetings with Austin?”

  The guide realizes Alice is well-informed.

  “So it seems,” she says, and raises her fine eyebrows.

  “And Emily stood guard outside the door.”

  “It’s a disputed area,” says Debbie. “Have you read Lyndall Gordon’s book?”

  “Yes,” says Alice. “She suggests Emily was an epileptic. I can’t see it myself.”

  “I can tell you’re not signed up to Team Sue.” Sue is Austin’s wife, the woman wronged by Mabel.

  “I’m not sure I’m Team Mabel either,” says Alice.

  She tells Debbie about her planned screenplay. The others from the tour have trickled away.

  “We have to be grateful to Mabel,” says Debbie. “Without her, the poems would never have been published. But you can’t help feeling sorry for Sue. You know what really made her mad? She couldn’t stand the way Mabel demanded the love of two men. It just seemed to her to be unfair, and selfish, and greedy. But I guess that’s not how you’re going to show her in your movie.”

  “I don’t know yet,” says Alice. It’s gratifying the way Debbie takes it for granted that her work, still little more than a few ideas for scenes, will turn into an actual film. “I’m here to do the research.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At the Amherst Inn, over the road.”

  Her phone pings. It’s a text from Nick Crocker.

  New idea. Why don’t you stay in our guest suite?

  Alice feels herself going pink.

  “There’s a coincidence,” she says. “I’ve just had the offer of a guest room in someone’s house.”

  “Which house?” says Debbie. “I know just about every house in town.”

  Alice shows Debbie the napkin with the map.

  “That’s the Hillses’ house!” says Debbie. “You know Peggy?”

  “No. Nick Crocker.”

  Debbie stares at her.

  “You know Nick? From England?”

  “I don’t really know him at all. He’s more of a friend of a friend.”

  “And he’s inviting you to stay at his house?”

  “Yes.”

  Debbie bursts into laughter. Alice smiles and feels awkward. Clearly there’s something here she needs to know.

  “Sorry,” says Debbie. “I shouldn’t.” She arranges her face into a more sober expression. “It’s just that Nick Crocker is a kind of legend here in Amherst. I know a lot of women who’d die to be offered a room in his house.”

  “But I thought . . .” Suddenly Alice feels hopelessly naive. “I thought he was married.”

  “So?” Debbie’s face breaks into a grin once more. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m a happily married woman myself. It’s just that Nick Crocker’s . . . well, like I said, he’s a kind of a legend.” Then suddenly she looks concerned. “I’m not offending you, am I? I just thought, seeing you’re okay with Mabel and all, I thought . . .”

  She trails away. Alice hastens to reassure her.

  “No, I’m not offended at all. I’m curious. I had no idea. What sort of legend is he?”

  “You’ve met him, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he’s gorgeous, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “The legend is—” She stops, blushing. “This isn’t according to me, okay? I’ve never taken a shot myself. But from what I hear, he’s supposed to be—I don’t know what word to use—irresistible?”

  This is riveting stuff.

  “Like Casanova, you mean? He’s a great seducer?”

  “I don’t know that he has to bother with too much seducing. Women just go for him. I’ve seen it myself. Smart, mature, beautiful women turn to jelly in front of him. Didn’t you?”

  “No,” says Alice, not entirely truthfully.

  “Then you’re made of stronger stuff than most. And he’s asked you to live in his house! There’s no justice in the world.”

  A middle-aged couple come in, early for the next tour.

  “Don’t pay any attention to me,” says Debbie, touching Alice’s arm. “This is a small town, with too many people with time on their hands. You English girls have too much class to fall for that baloney.”

  She turns to the newcomers.

  “Welcome to the Emily Dickinson Homestead.”

  Alice leaves. She crosses the road to her rental car, parked beside the Amherst Inn, and sits in it for a moment, needing time to think. When Luis Silva said to her, “Don’t fuck him,” it had seemed an absurdity. But the more she’s told that other women desire him, the more desirable he becomes in her eyes. This is shaming. She has no intention of being added to the list of his conquests. He may be irresistible to others: she has some pride. And anyway, he showed no interest of that sort in her when they met for breakfast.

  Why not?

  If he seduces every woman he meets, why not her? It’s not that she wants it. He’s twice her age, he’s married, it’s out of the question. She recalls the girl in the café, a typical characterless blonde, the kind middle-aged men are supposed to chase after. How immature must he be, how insecure, to seek reassurance in the arms of girls half his age?

  The more she thinks about it, the less she respects him. There’s also some anger there. What about his wife?

  She sits in the car with her phone in her hand looking at his text. He barely knows her. Is this invitation premature? Or is it simply an act of hospitality to a friend of a friend?

  She looks again at the map. His house is so close she might as well take a drive past it, look at it from the outside.

  She starts up the car and swings it round to exit onto Main Street. The very next intersection takes her onto Triangle Street, along one side of the Dickinson property. Ahead on the right, in the spot marked on the map, on a rising eminence of lawn stands a grand wedding cake of a house, with pillars and porticoes, great projecting eaves, ornate balconies, and a glazed cupola on its top. She pulls the car to a stop and sits gazing at it in awe. It’s more than a house, it’s a mansion
. No shortage of rooms for guests there.

  A screen door at the rear of the house opens, and Nick Crocker comes out. Before she can drive away she realizes he’s seen her, and is waving to her. He’s beckoning her to drive in.

  This is embarrassing.

  She turns the rental car into the short drive, and pulls up in front of a large stable block. Nick comes over.

  “I was only taking a look,” she says, not getting out of the car.

  Nick doesn’t seem to mind.

  “I called Peggy to check,” he says. “She’s fine with it. She should be home tomorrow, she says.”

  Somehow this changes the situation. The invitation comes from husband and wife. And Nick is, or was, a teacher of literature, who seems to know something about Emily Dickinson. And the truth is Alice would be glad to save on expenses.

  “Are you really sure I won’t get in your way?” she says.

  “What way is that?” He’s smiling at her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  So she smiles back at him and tries not to think that her view of him has changed, and that all at once he’s become, oh God, irresistible.

  5

  The camera is focused on a pair of clasped hands, the fingers working over each other. Move up from the hands, to look out of the bedroom window onto Main Street below. A cluster of people are spilling through the gate to the Evergreens next door, onto the high path: Sue and Austin Dickinson, Mabel and David Todd. The faint sounds of farewells. The Todds depart, walking up the path, away from the Homestead.

  Quickly. Look after her as she goes. Perhaps she’ll turn and look back.

  I’ve become interested in Mabel. Is she beautiful? I need her to be beautiful.

  She does turn. She does look back. Yes, she is charming. This is as it should be.

  • • •

  “She sings quite beautifully,” says Vinnie as she serves out dinner. “Everyone says so.”

  Now it’s night, and the walls of the dining room are in deep shadow. An oil lamp stands on the table, illuminating Vinnie’s pinched features. She looks like a bird, but all her love is for cats. I need my sister, and I pity her.

  “And she paints charmingly, and I don’t know what else she does, but all Amherst is in love with her, as far as I can tell.”

  She takes her own food, murmurs a brief prayer, and begins to eat.