by Charles Holdefer.
“Philip, do you know anything about Emily Dickinson’s elder brother Austin?”
He shook his head. “About as much as I do of baseball.”
She poured him more tea. “You see, Austin was supposed to go to the war. He was the family favorite, their golden boy. He married Emily’s childhood friend, Susan, and the couple lived next door to Emily and her parents. The Dickinsons were very close-knit, with their own little fiefdom. Everybody loved Austin.”
“Something bad is going to happen,” said Philip. “I sure hope so.”
“Well, it got sticky later when a young married woman named Mabel joined the fan club. She and Austin had an affair right under Susan’s nose, and it was very awkward in the community. Austin was no angel. But I’m talking about the war. The American Civil War. The Dickinsons were a very respectable Amherst family, defenders of the Union, their ancestors were Congregationalist clergy and they were abolitionists. They said all the right things. But Austin didn’t serve in the army. In those days, you could pay for a substitute. And that’s what the Dickinsons did for Austin. They paid five hundred dollars to an Irish laborer named Donahue to go in his place. This much scholars already know.”
“It wasn’t unusual at the time, I suspect.”
“Hear me out, Philip. Nothing much was known about Donahue. He died at the Battle of Chancellorsville. The guy’s a footnote. Or he was a footnote, because I’ve got something else. Inside a packet of letters that belonged to a soldier named Leahy I found another packet of letters that belonged to a soldier named Michael Donahue. He and Leahy served in the same unit. And this Donahue was Austin Dickinson’s replacement, it’s almost certain. And what makes this more than a footnote is that he received letters from Emily Dickinson herself—and these letters are of a highly personal nature.”
“Handwriting? You’re sure this checks out?”
“Yes, I am. I’ve downloaded facsimile editions of her handwriting and compared them. I’m no expert but it looks the same to me. More importantly, the style—the eccentric punctuation—the mind—it’s her all right. I know her work and I can hear her loud and clear. And there’s more.”
Philip clasped his hands behind his neck and smiled. “Do tell.”
“Dickinson had a vast correspondence. Her letters were full of poetry. These letters are no exception.”
“Really? Early drafts? New work?”
Holly nodded. “Both.”
“We’re talking cash value, aren’t we?”
“I suppose so. And there’s something else.”
Holly could see that he was truly interested now, and she felt an electric tingle at being able to share, finally, what she knew.
“Yesss?” he asked.
“Well, sometimes Dickinson is cast as a nutty spinster or eternal virgin who had her heart broken by somebody. It makes her sound a bit pathetic. Everybody knows she corresponded with an editor named Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and there’s been speculation about a possible lesbian infatuation with her sister-in-law Susan. After she died they found mysterious letters she wrote to someone she addressed as her ‘Master’ but no one knows if they were ever sent. Some critics find them kinky, but they’re an artistic pose, too. For decades, Emily literally didn’t get out of the house. Her room overlooked a graveyard, and watching burials was a source of distraction.”
“It is kind of pathetic.”
“No, it’s not so simple! Michael Donahue is a different case, that’s my point. These are love letters, plain as day. My theory is that Donahue was a laborer for the Dickinsons or someone in their circle in Amherst, and that’s how he and Emily hooked up. It’s already known that the Dickinson family had Irish maids. For a time Austin was a schoolmaster in the North End of Boston and taught poor Irish schoolboys who’d fled the potato famine. This much I know: something happened.”
Sister reached to my hair.
Found a straw!
“Where did that come from?”
So I continued — to lie.
“I don’t know.”
She might as well have reached into my soul.
Yours lovingly,
Emily
“What?” Philip said. “They were bonking in the barn? That’s what you’re saying?”
“I think so. It sounds like she loved him but maybe she dumped him because he was Catholic. Or maybe she didn’t dump him but he wanted to marry in the church and she wouldn’t do it, so he dumped her. The question of Rome comes up in her letters. Or maybe she still had reservations about the idea of marriage itself. And then Michael Donahue goes off to the war: why? To show his loyalty to the cause? Of course there’s the money and that could help his people back home, but why do it for his lover’s brother? To prove he’s worthy? Or was it another kind of statement to the Dickinson family, to puncture their high and mighty pretensions? To make them question their own worthiness? He was braver than the brother Austin. I’m still trying to figure it out.”
“He could’ve been thumbing his nose at them.”
“Exactly. But then he gets killed.”
“That is inconvenient,” Philip said.
“Of course, these unanswerable questions don’t matter as much as her poetry, her new poetry, but you know how these things work. This love affair gives the discovery a sensational angle, right? It will attract more attention.”
Philip gazed off into the air. “Hmmm. It’s a neo-imperialist rewriting of a bourgeois humanist liberation narrative,” he said. “An Irish mercenary is pure gold in this context. Plus there’s also a subversive element in regard to first-wave feminism, which is good or bad, depending on how you spin it, though maybe it could be queered into something more transgressive.”
“No!” Holly drew herself up. “You’re missing the point. You’re reducing all those questions to a careerist game. What else, Philip? You don’t really believe in literature departments, anyway. But that’s what people are going to claim, right? I mean people in universities.”
Philip smiled. “Who the fuck else cares?”
“I do,” she said. “And when I leave the university, which is pretty soon, I’m still going to care. There must be other people, too.”
Philip looked at her, still waiting. “So what is it you want?”
“To save her from everything you say.”