Savage Beauty Page 5

  (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?

  Her sister Clem never stopped seeing this as a disaster:

  Separation was Nell’s goal, and she told Henry to go and not return; this was a one-sided affair.… I was rebellious about this, and Nell never was allowed to lose sight of the fact that my loyalty to Henry was first, last, and always and that we, of her family, were firm in our opinion that she had … thrown away a life-time royalty of happiness, and deprived her little girls of their birthright of happiness, good cheer, and wealth of unselfish interest from him to them.

  Clotted though her prose is with righteous certainty, Clem is clear: Cora intended to be separated from Henry, and he was powerless before her determination. Certainly her decision was also about money; he gambled, he didn’t provide.

  2

  By the end of May, Henry was writing to Vincent from a remote town called Kingman in the northern wilderness of Penobscot County, Maine, asking her not to forget him. She had written to him first.

  Your papa ought to be ashamed of himself for not answering your nice letter sooner and I guess he is.… How does Norma get along at school I suppose she is getting to be a pretty good scholar and Wump I suppose is awful busy making mud pies. I want you to kiss them both for papa, and mamma too. Tell Mamma that papa … has got started to earning money at last.

  By July his news was less reassuring: “Tell Mama she must not kill herself with work because her little girls are going to need her for a long time & Papa is earning quite a lot of money only he can’t get it very fast yet.” In letter after letter now, addressed only to his eldest daughter, E. Vincent Millay, he promises her that he’ll come back soon, for Thanksgiving perhaps or for Christmas, surely for her birthday in February. She was eight years old in November 1900 when he wrote the following letter. Norma and Kathleen were six and four.

  It seems an awful long time to Papa since he saw his little girls, but he could not help it. If your Papa gets some money that he expects soon he is going to see his babies but he can’t stay with them long for he has got lots to do and he is not sure that he can go this fall. But he wants to O, so much.

  He never came. Her father’s letters would remain the same throughout her childhood: he is far away and misses her. He does not write, and he is sorry. He is beginning to make money, but he does not have it yet. And he is sorry. The break between Henry Millay and his family was all but complete by the end of 1900, when Cora turned to the Kellers for refuge. They refused her: Marcia was too old, Joe said, to take on three little girls.

  Cora left Union for Rockport, a village built on the steep edge of a cove on the Atlantic coast, where she managed to rent the upper half of an old house overlooking the harbor. She began immediately to look for work as a practical nurse, using the notes Clem had made while studying nursing in Newburyport. It looked as if she would succeed. Vincent began to write a novel, certain it would be published, although Norma, who was six, said skeptically, “I wish I thought it!”

  Cora even found someone to help care for the children while she was away on cases and kept a working notebook that first year detailing her cases. She worked night and day wherever she could find work—in Rockland, Camden, and Rockport—usually for a dollar a day. Her cases ranged from recuperation from surgery and childbirth to several cases of typhoid fever, mysteriously plentiful in the coastal area.

  She changed bandages and dressed wounds; she watched while her patients’ temperatures shot up to 108 degrees and their pulses raced. She dosed them with milk—warmed, iced, or laced with brandy. She gave them raspberry shrub, blancmange, powders, and tablets, and when she had to, she called the doctor. Some died, most lived. The single note of relief in the notebook is her entry on the reelection of the president: “McKinley. Rah! Rah! Rah!” Otherwise it is a record of unremitting hard work. She did not keep the news from her oldest daughter, who tried to write her the cheering little notes from home she asked for.

  I thought I would write to you and tell you how I am I am getting along all right in school but in my spelling-blank I had 10 and 10 and then 9 and I felt auful bad because I thought I would have a star I am getting along all right and so is Norma and Kathleens cold is better now I went to practise and a boy called me a little chamipion and I asked him what he ment and he said because I was the best singer and I thanked him.

  On February 13, 1901, just before Vincent’s ninth birthday, “Cora B. Millay of Rockport, County of Knox and State of Maine, respectfully” became a “Libellant against Henry T. Millay of Bangor, in the County of Penobscot and said State of Maine Libellee” and began divorce proceedings. She charged that he had “cruelly and abusively treated your libellant; that being of sufficient ability, or being able to labor and provide for her, grossly or wantonly and cruelly refused or neglected to provide suitable maintainance for her.” She asked to be divorced from him, to be given care and custody of their children, “and that he may be ordered to pay her a specific sum of money for the support of said children.”

  On March 6, Henry was served with the divorce charge. In September, “the Libellee though called did not appear but made default.” Once again, Henry did not oppose Cora.

  The girls were now their mother’s “little women,” and she cautioned them again and again against being or causing anyone trouble. There are no stories of their pranks or escapades when they were young. They didn’t get into scrapes for fear of upsetting their mother. Instead, she told them to be tidy, clean, and responsible, and they took her admonishments seriously. They were careful among their relatives, mostly aunts, not to reveal how they felt or what they in fact desired. The burden of this restraint fell most harshly upon the eldest.

  “Keep your things in the box, so they will not be in the way. Keep your dresses hanging up,” Cora wrote to Vincent on a visit to her aunt Marcia Keller. “Don’t stay too long, for Marcia is not well. Of course you will be a little lady, and make your little visit one of pleasure to each one, if you can. Don’t make Marcia nervous.… Take good care of your clothes, for it is such hard work to get them.”

  In August 1901, Cora was on a difficult case in Vinalhaven. She didn’t know how long she’d have to stay, but she promised that this time when she returned home she’d stay put

  and do hair-work, for you will all be at school soon, and I can canvass for work if I need to. Be nice little girls while mama is away, and it will please her so much to hear it when she comes home all worn out for her little girls to love her and get her rested. Didn’t mama send home some nice shoes? Keep yourselves neat and tidy, and wash and change your clothes after dinner. Don’t go down town looking dirty.

  That September, while Cora was still in Vinalhaven, Vincent wrote her a plaintive letter. She didn’t feel well; Norma and Kathleen didn’t either. Exasperated by her vagueness, Cora fired off this note: “You said you were almost sick, and that made me anxious about you. I cannot write much now as I am very busy; but I want you to write me at once and tell me if
you are well.… I am working awfully hard night and day, and cannot stand it if I have to fret about you.”

  Cora raced home to find that all the girls had typhoid. She knew better than anybody how ravaging the disease was—there was no medicine that could touch the fever, nothing but alcohol baths and the desperate constant watching that Cora now began.

  She sat by their beds in a vigil that lasted day and night. She dozed sitting up beside them, stroking their burning faces with wet towels, rubbing down their feverish bodies with ice. She was completely alone with the children, for the neighbors were afraid of catching the disease. She watched helplessly as their fevers raged from mid-September until the eighteenth of October, when each of the little girls was given up by the local doctor. It struck Kathleen, the youngest and most delicate, the hardest. All Cora could think of during the long vigil was the tiny starched dresses, “freshly ironed, three sizes, hanging there; and all the little petticoats, three sizes … starched and sticking out. Typhoid!—”

  Their hair fell out, and at last, fearing their deaths, she summoned Henry, who did come, pleading with her to take him back. She promised to consider it, and later the girls remembered that he had been in the house. Then the fever broke. Cora wrote, “They lived, and that was all.” Exhausted, floundering, with winter coming on and without the stamina or the resources even to pack, Cora fled to Newburyport, Massachusetts.

  3

  It was Uncle Charlie and Jennie, his new young wife, who took them in and helped bring the girls back to health. It wasn’t easy. Kathleen had developed chorea, a disease of the nerves that left her five-year-old body in spasms of uncontrollable muscular twitching. Cora turned to Clem for help, but her nursing skills proved useless; the little girl was wasting away. In desperation, Clem later wrote, “We studied herbs, talked of herbs and dreamed of herbs,” for it was only with their use that the two sisters finally halted her disease. In a school photograph taken on Ring’s Island, across the Merrimac River from Newburyport, the recovered sisters stand among schoolchildren. Their cropped hair has just begun to sprout. A somber Vincent leans her head against another girl’s shoulder for support, while Norma, round-faced and smiling, alone looks nearly well. Kathleen, staring fearfully into the camera, her round eyes circled with dark shadows, her small mouth ajar, looks permanently damaged.

  In Newburyport it wasn’t easy to find a landlord willing to rent to a woman without a husband or a job, with three small children in tow. But by the summer Cora had found a house of their own within sight of Charlie’s. Called the Coffin House, it was an old square frame house built in the 1800s on the banks of the Merrimac where Charlie clammed. Once elegant, it was now shabby and run-down, but it was there Cora brought what little they had from Rockport. To Vincent, however, the house and grounds seemed grander than anything they had ever had

  and very romantic. The yard was infinite; in the back it ran right down to the marches; but in the front, it was infinite with something else … the pheasants eye narcissus, which I had never seen, and which I suddenly came upon in the grass there, was as much like a voice as a flower.… Years later I learned it was called narcissus poeticus.

  Norma remembered the house with a spacious attic full of her mother’s books, “and Mother allowed schoolchildren to walk in and up to the attic to read,” a real privilege because Mrs. Millay had a larger and finer collection than the local library. But Norma remembered, too, that a local woman refused to permit her son to go to the Millays’ to read because she thought it improper for a child to enter a household where a woman lived without a husband.

  “My mother began to have very bad headaches. We used to rub her head and put folded hand towels wrung out in vinegar and water, lovely and cool, over her forehead.” The little girls, young as they were, began to work folding and boxing Seidlitz Powders—a patent medicine for headache—to help their mother out. Sometimes, however, instead of sending the boxes on to be sold, Mrs. Millay used them herself. Norma said quietly, “Mother took lots of them because she had lots of headaches.”

  In the fall they moved again, to 78 Lime Street in Newburyport proper, closer to their great-aunt Susan Todd, and to Clem, who had been adopted by the Todds. It was on Lime Street that Mr. Gales once came to call. The only evidence of his visit is an angry page in Clem’s unpublished memoir. The aunts were sitting in the living room at the Todds’ when they heard Cora and Vincent’s voices laughing at the door, “but the third, evidently a male voice, was baffling. I opened the door just as Nell was reaching for the knob.… I recognized the man instantly.” Cora hesitated as she introduced him, and Clem leaped forward angrily.

  I explained that he was the sanctimonious cheat who had violated all rules of decency by trading on Cora’s love for music and her equal love for deep literary research, easing his duties on to her narrow shoulders, robbing the children and their father of her time and attention, for he was the very one of whom Henry spoke, when he said that the minister and the church were destroying his peace of mind and breaking up their marriage.

  Clem stopped just short of the charge of infidelity.

  Vincent stood behind her mother, watching silently. As Cora tried to speak, one of the Todds took Gales aside and told him he was not wanted in their home. They walked him back to Cora’s house, retrieved his bags, and put him on the evening train.

  If there was any question that Vincent hadn’t known, or had been protected from knowing, her aunt’s suspicions, she certainly knew them then.

  Newburyport, where the family would remain for the next three years, was no ordinary Massachusetts village. It had been a hotbed of reform and religious revivals in the nineteenth century and the seat of the abolition movement, which had begun there.

  In the first decades of the nineteenth century, when women were supposed to be pious and submissive, when their primary energies were expended on domestic duties, the women of Newburyport had formed the first female associations in the country. A cross between benevolent and voluntary organizations, they fed the lives of the women who ran them not just with notions of being good but of doing something specific, of keeping accounts, of being involved with other women for the good of women. Newburyport had an orphanage, founded and managed by women, which decreed that only a single woman, twenty-one or older, could be its treasurer, thereby avoiding a husband’s legal right to control his wife’s money—no husband, they figured cannily, no control.

  Imagine how this atmosphere of doing, being, and making affected the Buzzell family or the Millays. For while these women were domestic enough to have six children, as Clementine had, or even three within four years, they were clearly neither submissive nor weak. Clementine Buzzell did not minister to household peace—no matter what Godey’s magazine or The Ladies’ Companion advised; she was out in her buggy scouting for hair work immediately after her divorce. When Vincent Millay heard the stories of her grandmother’s lover—and her aunt’s accusations about her mother’s friend Mr. Gales—she knew the women in her family had been headstrong, that they had had the courage or the grit to achieve their independence at whatever cost to themselves and their children.

  There was one quality in Vincent’s nature that was left out of almost every family description of her childhood. It was not her talent, nor her ability to absorb the hardship she faced alone with her sisters, nor the balancing act she performed with her aunts. It wasn’t even that in her mother’s constant absence she must be good or that because others were helping them she must be grateful.

  Only Norma talked about her sudden rages. Norma remembered having her mouth stuffed with geranium leaves, suffocating under the pillow Vincent had placed over her and then sat on. It hadn’t felt like a prank. Now, in Newburyport, she remembered Vincent in a fury: “I don’t remember why. But she ran outside and stuck a kitchen knife in a tree. We watched.” She remembered, too, a conflict of wills between Vincent and their mother. Vincent was banished to the basement until she would apologize. She refused. After wha
t seemed like days to Norma, with no apology forthcoming, she and Kathleen stole downstairs to send her little boats with food and messages tucked inside. It was their mother who finally relented. “We used to say of Vincent that she had a bee chasing her. When she was bewildered by what she … I have to be so careful what I say. We had to calm her down a bit. Once in a while, when reality would hit her—something she couldn’t handle in her lovely way, then she was wild.”

  Cora was ready to leave Newburyport behind her and head for Camden. She won her divorce that January, and Henry’s brother Bert Millay, who testified for her, told her if she went back to Camden, she might be given alimony. They stood in the courtroom while the judge asked Bert Millay if his brother Henry had abused her. “He has, shamefully,” he answered.

  She was granted her divorce in an uncontested suit on January 11, 1904, “for the cause of cruel and abusive treatment” and awarded custody of the three children and a sum of five dollars a week for their support.

  CHAPTER 4

  Vincent began a diary she called Rosemary, in which she charted the upheavals of her domestic life and of her struggle to surpass the limits of a Camden girlhood. If Rosemary provides the mementos of that girlhood, it also bears witness to Millay’s passionate interior life, which was never entirely bound to her family or at ease within her community. She started the diaries innocently enough at the suggestion of Ethel Knight, whom she’d met through the St. Nicholas League. But whereas Ethel kept her diary without missing a day, Vincent rarely kept hers with any regularity. From the beginning she felt her lapses signaled a lack of self-respect, and she chastised herself for them. She intended to be worthy of her own self-respect, and worthiness was linked to God. At sixteen she was serious, severe even, and somewhat self-important. She attended the Congregational church and was part of a girls’ Bible study group, the Genethod, the Welsh word for “daughter.” New England Protestant though she was, Millay was not much interested in self-surrender, either to God or to convention. Her greatest praise was reserved for the “God of Life.”