by Stringfellow Forbes

“I got so I could hear his name” (293) and “Did Our Best Moment last” by (393) Emily Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

What you have to understand about small towns is that everyone knows everyone. Small towns in Virginia, in 1951, that is. That kind of small town. They all knew your parents and your grandparents, and they know how your ancestors behaved in the Civil War and how they survived the Depression. They know who died in the war that was just over and who came home in what kind of shape and who moved to other states, a kind of betrayal. There is a common idea of the character of every present-day representative of a family and even if that idea is not at all true, it resides in the collective consciousness of the town.

For instance, Mac Brown was always perceived as a football player; they first noticed him when he played, they remembered that he had used his height and bulk carefully, so as not to hurt other smaller high school boys, though he was obviously tough and could have blasted through them. I think now that the worst thing that could have happened to Mac would have been if one of those boys had hurt him because he grew up to be a careful sort of person. But the football image was the constant in the town’s perception of him. The time I speak of was twenty years ago, and though I trust my impressions, I am a different person now living in a different world. And with a far deeper understanding of life.

Then I was a girl of fifteen, that awful age no one wants to be. I didn’t know who I was except as others seemed to see me. I thought grown-up life must be a series of identifiable and significant events, such as the plots of novels are made of, and wondered why I never saw any evidence of that. Once, though, something did happen and I was there. There was drama and there were consequences.

It involved Tony Rosa, who was a barber and not one of the people we knew all about. His full name was Antonio Rosario, and he had married into our town. Tony was a good barber, quietly agreeable, always busy. He was a volunteer fireman, and he just about ran their Christmas food donations. Anyone could ask for help and he would go. Once when the local run flooded out of its banks, he brought two cows across by beating them into the water and holding onto their tails until he was pulled to the other side. No one knew how Tony Rosa understood so much about cows, and he didn’t explain.

He was also a good golfer. (And yes, there was a golf course at a nearby private school; fees from outside players helped with the school’s budget.) So the other men sort of adopted him, shortening his name to make it sound more like one they might have been hearing forever. Tony was hefty and tan, with gray in his hair. He had a gray mustache, something else different about him that the men accepted. Every Wednesday morning the barbershop was left in care of the second-chair barber, and Tony went out for golf, and every Sunday, too, he played. He didn’t go to Mass, as his buddies didn’t go to church, in the summertime.

Tony’s wife was called Dammie. She was local and had been in the Waves during the war and had come home with Tony. She was a quiet, cheerful woman with very curly hair. In the summers she made extra money by cleaning and polishing white shoes. Brown and white wingtips and spectator pumps were popular. Dammie would use a cotton-wound tip dipped in white polish to clean the holes in the dark leather and they came out looking new. Otherwise she was a ferocious housekeeper and a terrible cook. So it was said. She cleaned the shop twice a day, and when I stopped in to pick up my mother’s white shoes it was fresh and full of light and of the quiet talk of men in a man’s place.

That summer twenty years ago when I was fifteen, Miss Lewis wrote and produced a play. You have to know Miss Lewis to understand how she could do such a thing. A little plump woman with untidy hair that never stayed in its bun, she had taught English in the high school just forever. Every soul in town had been in her classes. She made us read aloud. Just passing your eyes over the words would not put them into your heart, she told us. You have to hear yourself say them and then you would understand why the writer was giving them to you. We all had to do it and we knew it, and so we read and she made us be serious. Her response to our efforts was always fiercely positive. Years later she could be heard to say to the gasman, “You read that Romeo exactly right, like an adolescent who has just found himself.” I would have thought he had found Juliet but now I know what she meant. He had found an anchor to attach himself to, the idea of rebellion for the sake of love.

We didn’t read just Shakespeare. She marked passages in Faulkner and Hemingway, Yeats, Auden. A favorite of hers was Jane Austen and we came to understand the world of manners our parents had inherited and wanted to pass on to us. We didn’t live that way but we saw that it could be done and that courtesy maybe had its uses. Miss Lewis taught us a lot. One of the farm boys copied the lyrics of some cowboy songs and presented them as poetry he was familiar with. We received them with the same fragile dignity the boy was showing and our teacher smiled. Most of us liked Frost the best, but we had wide exposure for a high school class.

That summer Miss Lewis said, “We have such a nice little auditorium at the school and it’s not being used. So let’s do this play I have.”

She was busy all over town, rounding up her cast. It was to be about Emily Dickinson. We all thought maybe she would play Emily herself because there were certain parallels of maiden lady and literary tastes, but she chose Catherine Forrest, the pretty church organist who taught music in the grade school and was so shy. Mac Brown was to be in it, as well as my father.

My father was a doctor, not the only one in town but a busy one, and that meant that we didn’t see much of him at home, and when he was there, he was often asleep. Consequently, there was great competition among the four of us children for his attention. I didn’t feel that we knew our father very well, to tell the truth, and I was attracted to the idea of seeing him in a new way and being with him while the younger ones stayed home with our mother.

He was to play the judge that Emily was supposed to love. For him, I think this play was a sort of vacation, the rehearsals gave him the excuse to refer his evening patients with small emergencies to morning office hours.

Mac Brown had to be persuaded and I knew that because I heard Miss Lewis talking to him. Mac had lost his wife in the winter two years ago when Cal Jenkins, a no-good drunken hired hand out at the Willis place, ran an intersection on County Road 29 and plowed right into her old car. Miss Lewis pointed out to Mac that he had only a few lines. She would talk him through it, she said, and she knew he could do it because he used to read so well in her English class.

There were lots of bit parts of villagers, maids, gardeners, tradesmen calling at the back door. Gossips were to make a sort of Greek chorus. Tony Rosa was in charge of props and Dammie was to be a girl cousin. I was to make the crash of thunder with Sim Nelson, who would beat a thunderous drum afterwards. I liked Sim and maybe Miss Lewis knew that when she put us together. However it happened, Sim was another reason I was glad to do it. Summer was not for rehearsing and showing up on time, but Daddy would be going and everyone else would be there too, so I went.

There was a lot of confusion at first, with people uncertain where to wait until time to go on, all of us holding scripts in our hands and asking questions. Miss Lewis sent some of the men next door to the grade school and they brought back small chairs from the first grade that wouldn’t take much room and we were all given a place to be where she could always find us. There was a prop table, and Tony was asked to arrange every little thing so it could be picked up when needed. Miss Lewis would not go on the stage itself; she seemed to have a superstition about being there. So she spoke to everyone in their places, helping them to understand, and she stood next to Sim and me to watch as they rehearsed.

“This is not meant to be a true representation of Emily Dickinson’s life,” she said to all of us at the beginning. “I wouldn’t quite dare do that. The poems are so short and oblique that it is hard to know just what actually happened to her, but I think you will see that the two poems we are using are definitely love poems and I am guessing the rest. Whether I have the right to presume to show the mysteries of Emily Dickinson’s heart...” She looked unhappy for a second, then she said, “We know—we think—that she loved a man who had been her father’s best friend. And he loved her. But that love came years after these poems were written, so there must have been someone else much earlier. It was someone who died. And that’s all I’m going to say.

“Here are the poems, not all of the stanzas, just enough for this play.”

I have lived with these verses for so many years that I can recite them and I say them to myself often still. I looked them up to be sure I got all the odd capitalizations and dashes right. I find that if you just read them, making pauses at the dashes, they are quite clear.

* * * *

I got so I could take his name—

Without—Tremendous gain—

That Stop-sensation—on my Soul—

And Thunder—in the Room—

—

I got so I could walk across

That Angle in the floor,

Where he turned so and I turned—how—

And all our Sinew tore—

* * * *

At the end Miss Lewis used another poem, which I won’t give now.

We began. I was so conscious of Sim sitting close to me that I couldn’t pay attention. I knew he was looking at me and it made me afraid and finally it made me mad, and I ignored him. Well, that did it. Sim Nelson was not used to being ignored, so he looked all the more. In desperation, I began to follow the story on stage.

They were to have company for lunch. Emily had made rolls and she came into the dining room saying she had put them in the oven. She wanted to set the table herself. Her sister and a maid tried to help, and Emily went around the table changing what had just been done. Catherine, who was Emily, was coached to move quickly, changing direction often, gliding off away from anyone who made her angry and speaking in a rapid breathy voice.

“You will be wearing a white dress and whether that means virginal or bridal or pure in a religious sense or it might even mean blankness, we just don’t know,” Miss Lewis explained to Catherine. “But you can be sure it means self-conscious. This is a woman who no longer leaves the house. She puts her poetry in a drawer and often won’t meet company, even when they have come especially to see her.”

The visitors arrived, a woman relative named Lavinia and her daughter and the daughter’s young man, to whom she is engaged. That was Mac. He mostly stood around looking handsome. He was to be dressed all in white, like Emily, Miss Lewis said. Lavinia had published a little cookbook and she was full of herself, telling how the newspaper man had begged for her recipes and how the printer had sold fifty copies the first week. She was coy with Emily, asking, Didn’t Emily write little verses sometimes and why didn’t she try to publish a book and offering to help. Emily just held her mouth tight and spun more and more rapidly about her preparations. Emily had published only seven of the hundreds of poems she had written.

It was in the second scene, after the lunch, when Emily saw Dammie and Mac together that the thunder happened. The engaged pair were to just stand face to face together in the hall, nodding as she said something we weren’t to hear. Mac was to hold Dammie in a light embrace, that was all. No kissing or caresses, but that intimacy was implicit in their future together. And Emily was to turn just so in the next room and there would be the beautiful young man, with his beautiful bride-to-be. Emily realizes the force and sweetness of physical attraction and the thunder happens.

When Tony brought me the big square sticks I was to slap together, I said they seemed sort of heavy. “Yes,” he said, “but I tried two sizes and these make the best smash.” So I got a good grip and slammed them together and it was deafening. When Sim came in just after with a series of bams on the drum, people jumped.

We found we had to practice outside behind the building, Sim and I—how many bams on the drum, how to make them instantaneous after the lightning clap—and right away Sim wanted to kiss me. I told him no. I was still angry and offended because he had looked at me so closely. But when he said I was pretty, I was so shocked I kissed him first. After that we forgot the practicing.

We had a month. Toward the end we rehearsed three nights a week. Not because the play wasn’t going well. Everyone knew their lines; Catherine began to understand how to look plain and how to throw away chances to be noticed because Emily would have thought attracting notice beneath a woman of her subtlety. At the end of the play Emily stands watching her cousin leave with the beautiful young man and Catherine’s face was, with each run-through, more tragic. Miss Lewis was coaching us into realization of the actual people each actor was supposed to be, and when someone was obviously doing that well, the rest had to try harder.

As rehearsals went on, we marveled at Dammie. She had put up her curly hair and taken off her glasses. She began to look charming, a little untidy in the most natural way. Mac had shed his nervousness and he was the calmest one among us, prompt with his lines, ready for his entrances, sure in his delicacy with Dammie. Afterwards, we all knew that we had conspired, that we had seen what was happening and told ourselves it was just the play. But we loved it, we wanted it, and we didn’t see the danger.

On the day the printed programs were passed out, we were stunned to see our names listed so plainly and reality jumped a notch. I heard Mac talking to Dammie, “It says here your name is Dawn Marie.”

“Yes, but my baby brother couldn’t say it.”

“That’s a shame. It’s such a pretty name. People are always mispronouncing, always making nicknames. My name is actually Macon.”

“Yes, I remember. And it says so right here.”

“Well, I won’t call you Dammie anymore.”

“Mac’s not so bad, though, is it?”

“If you say so.”

We had a dress rehearsal, and Miss Lewis made sure no one sneaked in who wasn’t in the cast. Because in such a small town, there was only one full house available and she guarded the secret of her story.

Then came performance night. The auditorium was full and we began. At first, there was whispering in the audience, I guess about who was doing what, how our neighbors appeared as actors, how they spoke unnaturally or inaudibly or with affectation. Some of the actors were almost too self-conscious to function at first, paralyzed by the exposure. But Catherine, with her gasping tripping about and, oddly, Mr. Davis, the grocer as a grocer making a delivery, were so natural that the others relaxed and became who they were supposed to be. The thunder made the whole audience leap in their seats, and then it was over, the visitors had departed, and Emily recited the final poem.

* * * *

Did Our Best Moment last—

‘Twould supersede the Heaven—

A few—and they by Risk—procure—

So this Sort—are not given—

—

Except as stimulants—in

Cases of Despair—

Or Stupor—The Reserve—

These Heavenly Moments are—

—

A Grant of the Divine—

That Certain as it Comes—

Withdraws—and leaves the dazzled Soul

In her unfurnished Rooms—

* * * *

But left on the stage with Emily at the end was the old Judge, my father, and he comforted her, nervous bundle that she was, barely able to hold still, almost fighting him off, so wrought up was Emily/Catherine. And I saw my father as his patients must have seen him, kind, concentrating his attention and his care. I thought it strange and wrong that it wasn’t just his family that knew him like that. My heart twisted. I hadn’t known how much of that kindness was needed, and how much he had to give.

There was applause and applause and we were shaken out of our dream of the story and reminded of who we were. We were all exhausted, but proud that we had left those selves to do Miss Lewis’s idea of the riches and poverties of a New England spinster who was a genius all alone in her bedroom, writing with pen and ink on sheets of paper she then hid. Sim was hugging me and we too had to take a bow. The uproar went on for a long time.

Then it was over and I was putting the big square sticks back on the prop table, saying, “Here, Tony,” and watching him watch Dammie going out the stage door with Mac’s arm around her. I saw Tony turn wildly to follow, grabbing one of the sticks and swinging it up. I knew then, knew too much had happened in that play, knew that it had not all been make-believe, knew that Tony was on the brink of losing control. I burst loudly into tears, right in his face, and he stopped.

The piece of wood was aloft and it had to come down. He hit the drum with a crumping noise. Sim leapt to caress it, and I lost interest in him forever. With more desperate looks toward his wife, Tony raised the stick again, moved toward Dammie and Mac, then turning toward me and my howling, struck himself a great blow on the forehead, and crashed to the floor.

My father was there, of course, and he knelt beside Tony’s head, calling to me to fetch his bag from the car. Dammie at last looked back and saw Tony lying there all bloody, and came halfway toward us. Mac stood absolutely still in the doorway. Miss Lewis groaned and ripped her hair down and bent forward as if to put Tony on his feet, to undo his desperation. I left then on my errand.

* * * *

I am a lawyer now and over these long years, I have pondered this story. There was a crime here but I don’t know whose. The consequences tell us something, though.

Mac Brown got in his car that night, still in his white clothes, and started driving without even going home. He drove right to Wyoming and he is still there. Dammie went with Tony and my father to his office and then to the university hospital because Tony had damaged his brain and his left eye. A year later, he moved her to New York and they never came back. Miss Lewis got an offer from a college in Richmond and taught there until she retired. She sold her mother’s house when she inherited it, and she hasn’t often been back to town. Catherine Forrest married Mr. Spears, the science teacher, two months later and cared for his three motherless children the rest of her life.

I found my teenage calling as a girlfriend of one boy after another and partied for too many years. I was married and now I’m not, but I had sense enough to finish college and, after the divorce, to let my father send me to law school. I have moved back to town, where I find that people think that feminine sympathy, not lawyerly skill, of which I actually have plenty, will naturally lead to justice in the courtroom, so they come to me with their troubles.

I went into law because of Tony Rosario, because even at fifteen I could see genuine despair and decency and loss and weep aloud. I thought that maybe I had a talent that way, that maybe I could ward off some people’s troubles, as I had with Tony, if I armed myself with rules and certainties. I grew up that night but it took me a long time to admit it.

I haven’t had a moment that left my soul dazzled in my unfurnished rooms. Dazzled souls are not my thing. Moments, though, perhaps are, like the moment when I saw Tony’s intent to kill. And if Emily’s kind of moment does come, I will recognize it and maybe there will even be some muffled thunder in the room that I would never have heard if it hadn’t been for Miss Lewis and that shy genius dressed in white.