Savage Beauty (6 page)

The children had colds, the weather was foul, and Henry was beginning to grow stout.

Although Cora had not been a regular church member since Newbury-port, she was asked to fill in as an organist in the Congregational church, which had a splendid new pipe organ. It was a rarity in a rural community, and Cora loved to play it. Soon not only was she involved on Sunday, but she was made director of the church choir. But her diary records another sort of absorbing interest: Mr. Gales.

Sunday, [May] 23

Sermon on the threefold attitude of Christ: toward his enemies; toward the hypocrites; toward those who believe in him. It was good.… It was grand. Oh! he is a brave man, and a good one. God bless him and his work.… He spoke this morning before his sermon of a certain something that attracts people toward each other and causes them to seek the society of each other; of scholar for scholar, artist for artist, etc. I think it is true friendship. He called it elective affinity. I think there is such an attraction between us. He is my very dear friend.

Mr. Gales had begun to stop at the Millays’ every day. He asked Cora at first for suggestions for his sermons, then for her help in writing them. She was pleased to give him what assistance she could—it buoyed her spirit.

I told him how much good he had done me here.… I am beginning to think that it is not too late for me to commence anew and study and be something yet. I have started in on Logic. He lent me his. I’m afraid my mind is not adapted to it.
Henry says it isn’t
. He thinks everything of Mr. Gales, too.
So do the babies, dog and kitten
.

But not everyone in Union did. They said Mr. Gales dressed like an Englishman, which meant he wore dandified clothes, and although he was forty, he was still a bachelor. Local talk had it that the woman who laundered his shirts had noticed chewing tobacco in his pockets. There were even those who thought Mr. Gales was a sham and that Cora Millay wrote all his sermons. At last the church decided to call a meeting to decide whether his contract should be renewed. Cora was worried:

I am all excited up over this Church Meeting. It seems to be more than I thought! … Mr. Gales will have a hard chance to stay.… They can go to the Old Nick as far as I am concerned in it. Of course I am not the whole choir; but I’m the “Power behind the throne,” all right.… If I knew I’d lose every friend I’ve got in Union (outside of Henry and the babies) by standing by him, I wouldn’t budge.

Cora was going too far. She had no voting power in the church because she didn’t belong to it. However, a paper was drawn up by those who wanted him to stay, and Cora was asked to write it. Henry was late for supper one evening when the Reverend Mr. Gales came by. “I was a sight and so was the house,” Cora notes in her diary. “He looks as if he had been sick. He has a bad cold. He looks wretchedly, and I know he is feeling so.… I tried to keep him but he went about nine. I hated to have him go, he seemed so blue.” When Henry came home, he told her he thought the paper supporting Gales would work.

I got so worn out I had to take my case to a higher court.… I stole off upstairs long enough to pray about it. And I have felt better ever since. I prayed to God to strengthen him and not to allow him to go back one point on the high standards he has maintained, even if he has to go. But I can’t bear to think of his going.

The battle between Gales and those who wanted him ousted did not let up. “Henry says Mr. Gales enemies are making a hard fight. I’ve prayed until I would have tired anyone but God out,” she noted in her diary. Mr. Gales had come to represent to Cora all that was worthy and refined. If Union could not recognize his qualities, then it was the town that was at fault. “Went over to Choir Meeting … and acted like a fool. I was so dead tired I could hardly sit up. And I kept my tongue going like a mad- woman.… If this church lets Mr. Gales go now.… I’ve told everyone I’ve talked with that I should not sing if he went, and I won’t.”

Cora was losing her head. She stormed, she railed, at last she prayed. She felt charged with passion.

Then I went up into the pulpit, his pulpit, and knelt there and prayed for him. And as I knelt there it seemed as if I could see him standing there beside me, his earnest eyes and strong resolute face, and his uplifted hands.… and then I prayed for myself and for my friend and that he might be left to me.

The vote was taken, and Mr. Gales was dismissed. Before leaving, he gave her a book of poems,
The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell;
“To Cora Buzzell Millay from Thomas Gales” was all his inscription read. She kept the book her entire life.

Her last two diary entries were unhappy ones:

June 5:

Don’t feel very well. Henry home late. Went back to play cards. I went to bed.

Sunday, June 6

An unsatisfactory day.

Then she quit her diary completely. She had not bothered to make an entry for Kathleen’s first birthday, nor had she marked the anniversary of her mother’s death on June 3. Maybe, as her sisters came to think, Mr. Gales had preyed on a kind of discontent in Cora; his interest had suggested a life that was nothing like the one she shared with her husband, who favored cards and fishing. The Reverend Thomas Gales offered her solace and appealed to her intellect and to her restless and dormant faith in herself. It proved a dangerous awakening. It also sounds disturbingly like her mother’s doomed love affair with Gard Todd.

Edna Millay, who was five years old, knew none of this directly, but indirectly children know everything there is to know. They just don’t know why. They don’t even wonder why. Her mother taught her to read at five by studying poetry. She would always say, “Mother gave me poetry,” as if it had been a Christmas present.

What she called “My first encounter with Poetry” was a curiously physical experience: “I know that it knocked the wind clear out of me, and left me giddy and almost actively sick … when, on opening at random my mother’s gargantuan copy of Shakespeare, I read the passage from Romeo and Juliet about the ‘dateless bargain’ and Death keeping Juliet as beautiful as she was in life, to be his ‘paramour.’ ”

She called it delight. She fastened on the mysterious word “paramour.” Was it foreign? Was it
French?
Her entire little body felt itchy. The encounter was “truly terrifying.… It grew and grew in both my mind and my body until I became so giddy that I must surely have fallen had I not at the time been lying flat on my stomach on the attic floor.”

We can imagine her secretly climbing upstairs into the attic, for once without her sisters, where no one could reach her. As she reads she forgets time, holds her breath; she feels, she said, an

unearthly happiness which opened suddenly outward like a door, before me, revealing through the very tangible radiance in which I stood as if I stood in the path of the sun … even to the edge of nausea and over it, and dropping directly before me a bottomless abyss in which every colour of ecstasy moved like a cloud, now drifting close, now inexorably drawn away, and a wind from depths unthinkable puffing out my pinafore, and the tops of my doll-size slippers sticking out very black and conspicuous from the brink of the precipice into the air above the conscious void.

This is not, of course, a simple little girl; this is a woman remembering what she chose to recall of an encounter that left her stunned by beauty, sickened by loss.

Soon Vincent could read music as easily as poetry. “I was eager to learn,” she wrote later, “for I loved music more than anything in the world except my mother.” Since there was no piano but an organ in their home and she was too small to reach its pedals, her mother had to help her. They would sometimes spend hours together at the keyboard. “There was one chord in a piece which my mother taught me, which I could not get right,” she recalled.

We did not have the notes of it, it was something she knew by heart. I called her to help me with the chord, and she came in. She had been doing washing, and her hands, as she placed them upon the keys were very pink, and steam rose from them. Her plain gold wedding-ring shone very clean and bright, and there were little bubbles on it which the soap suds had left, pink, and yellow, and pale green. When she had gone and I was sure that she would not hear me, I laid my cheek softly down upon the cool keys and wept. For it had come into my mind with dreadful violence as she bent above me and placed her fingers upon the keys … that my mother could die; and I wanted to save her from that, for I knew she would not like it; and I knew that I could not.

Later she would also remember her mother sitting beside her bed after supper, in her black dress with its smooth tight bodice, her cuffs and high collar trimmed with black jet, reading to her from
Hiawatha
or
Evangeline
, or reciting it from memory, “for she knew the whole long poem by heart, the beautiful ‘Snowbound’ of Whittier, and quite unconscious that I was doing so, I learned much of it by heart myself.”

But where was her father in all this? What did she learn in his company? She didn’t seem to remember him at all.

“That’s not quite true,” Norma said. “I remember him coming from the back of the house through a door in Union. And I remember his presence,
which is nice. That the house was not just a house of women, then.… And I remember some of his samples—of wool and of worsteds. Scratchy. And hiding behind the door when Papa comes. And that he sang to Kathleen. There! That’s something, isn’t it? And Vincent said that he used to make Mother laugh.”

In a notebook Vincent kept in the cabin where she worked late into the night when she was older, she remembered him:

Yet, he was the one who made her laugh, for he was witty, out of a bland face;

He could send her into gales of laughter, and never crack a smile.

But his eyes—his eyes were very blue—would show a deep light Suddenly, like sapphires.

In the early spring of 1900, just before Vincent Millay turned eight, Cora sent Henry away.

Grace Whitten Thurston, who was then the Baptist minister’s daughter and a playmate, remembered when he left: “It made me feel bad that they didn’t have a father and I had. And I never heard them, any of them, mention his name after that. All I remember was he’d gone.”

Vincent wrote about his departure only once:

All my childhood is in those bayberry-bushes, & queen-of-the-meadow, or maybe you called it hardhack, & rose-hips. And cranberries—I remember a swamp of them that made a short-cut to the railroad station when I was seven. It was down across that swamp my father went, when my mother told him to go & not come back.

(Or maybe she said he might come back if he would do better—but who ever does better?)

What made Cora Millay send her husband away? Almost thirty years later she would write this brief note of explanation in a series of sketches she was making about her life:

I left him in 1900. And all my people were dazed. Why? Because unlike most people, I kept my mouth shut about the man I was living with.

I had not gossiped with them, or my neighbors. His brother Fred, one of the finest men I have ever met … told me he did not know how I had stood it for so long.

When Cora met Gales, she was thirty-three, the age her mother had been when she had fled from their father. Now, in May of 1900, she would turn thirty-seven, precisely her mother’s age when she had died. Her mother’s death stood as a benchmark in Cora’s life. Emotionally, it had locked her. But it had also charged her with an urgency that had nothing to do with being equitable, or careful, and everything to do with her desperate sense of loss. Did she fear that if she did not break with Henry Millay then, she never would?