Afternoons with Emily by Rose MacMurray

Author:Rose MacMurray [MACMURRAY, ROSE]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780316077125
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

Book VII

AMHERST AND NEW YORK

1861–1863

Voltaire wrote that for days after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the streets of the city had been full of people shocked and numb, moving aimlessly through the rubble. I understood what he had described. I was living it.

Davy left letters for Father and Aunt Helen, so I did not have to explain to them what had happened. I thought this very courteous to all of us. Aunt Helen cried and told me I should cry too. “You shouldn’t bottle up your feelings,” she advised me. “It’s unnatural. You should let your grief out at a time like this.”

I knew she would not believe me if I told her what I really felt: nothing at all.

“It will still be possible to have a life together, if you decide to marry eventually,” Father said, doing his best to be comforting. “It will just start later, when you are older. Which I see as a very good thing,” he added brusquely. I believed his gruffness was a mask to cover his own feelings, and I did not take offense.

I did everything mechanically: I got up, I dressed, I ate. I went to school and came home, worked on my education paper, and went to bed. My mind, desperately searching for ways to avoid the threatened agony, finally settled on intellectual activity. I was surprised how Davy’s advice to speak my mind had freed me to write as myself — as Miranda Chase. I had never taken my own opinions seriously enough to put them in writing before — and once I started, I found I had a great deal to say.

I spent endless hours at work, at study. After some days, I realized what I was doing and why I was doing it. I was a coward. I was like Davy when he said good-bye, when he announced his decision and then could not see me again. I literally could not bear our parting — so I decided, on some level of my heart or mind that I did not control, to avoid feeling pain by feeling nothing at all. I did not choose this, did not plan it — but it happened, and in a small way, I was grateful.

Once, shell gathering at Learner’s Cove, Lettie and I found a little gray mollusk that was unfamiliar to us. It was of the pectin family but seemed to have a foot like a clam. It was a live shell — that is, the creature was viable in its tiny fortress. We opened it carefully, trying to identify it — and were appalled to see it lying exposed, writhing and shuddering, a half inch of agony and terror. We closed it instantly and buried it carefully at the water’s edge.

“That little fellow,” said Lettie sadly, “he is needing that shell!”

For the first five years of my life, I was safe in my own shell; no one could get at me to hurt me. Then I risked opening up a chink in order to receive the gift of learning that Mr.

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