Excerpts from Pierce
Day died so young that I was still abroad in the work when the evening freight from Chico bore his coffin into the Oakland station. Iron horse of apocalypse. May 1, 1888. Alone in the gloom are two silhouettes, the figuration of grief itself I would say—except that the shapes lacked difference, were not husband and wife in embrace. Different only in size, the shapes are identical, like an object shadowed by its echo. Black dresses fitted at the bodice and balanced above by mantillas and below by belled skirts. Hourglass run dry of sand. 1888, and death has brought the first son home. The daughter turns with a snap; her mother more slowly. Had Mollie heard me come over the planking or had she sensed the approach of the woman her husband never mentioned or was she simply careful with grief. Or experience. I never learned. "My name is Emma Dawson. I am a colleague of your husband's at the Examiner. I don't expect there is any help I can be. But in case…" Three shadows shaped alike are laid out in the glare of the overhead bulb. Death's daughters. Mollie raises her mantilla and Hellen follows suit. Faces heart-shaped; fine-pored. Auburn hair. What marked a distinction between the women was only the ready, stilled set to the eyes of the daughter, as though resolution had already replaced expectation in a face otherwise twelve.
Father's fistic maxim was: First punch of the first round, daughter, nail him right between the eyes; establish who owns the ring; set the ref. to counting. The ring in question proved to be Mr. Bowles's crammed pantry of an office on the second floor of the Republican building in Springfield.
March 14, 1869
Father would be proud. I got the job. His way. Right between the eyes, Father. He may print and even encourage puling pap from lady poets, but Mr. Bowles wants his reporters tough as claws.
He imagines to catch me off guard by launching the first punch (as though Father were in his corner). 'Tell me, Miss Dawson, and I mean the question less harshly than it may sound, what would you bring to the Republican that we don't already have?" Ready, but calmly, the first shot. "I would offer pieces free of errors in basic grammar." O dearest diary, I know why cousin Emily thrills to those sapphire eyes. "Grammatical errors that appear in the paper regularly, Miss Dawson—before your arrival, that is?" "More frequently than so powerful an organ deserves." "For instance? Such recall may seem unfair of me to ask for, Miss Dawson, but if our errors are so numerous…" "Not unfair at all, Mr. Bowles. The Literature and Arts Department said of Colonel Higginson: 'No writer like him explores their sylvan haunts with the foot of a child, the eye of an artist and the heart of a woman'." I believe Mr. Bowles at this point is wondering if I can possibly understand Father the chance I'm taking, since a Literature & Arts review of a major figure like Col. Higginson was almost surely written by either Mr. Bowles himself or Dr. Holland. His smile spreads slowly. "Yes?" "Mr. Bowles, how can a writer, singular, have their haunts? Why not simply delete the 'their'?" With a suddenness that would have hurt my face if his hand had held a quirt, he flicks yesterday's edition off the rolltop and thrusts it at me. "One swallow doesn't make a summer, Miss Dawson." I lift not a finger. The pages depend from his hand. I say quietly: "Page 3, column one, the Mr. Twain piece." Was he bluffing by now I wonder? I would like to know. For certain he proceeds with slow ceremony to open the paper and raise it to read. "Yes?" as he lowers the sheets just enough to sight over the top. Quietly I quote from memory: "As a lecturer we are of the opinion that Mark Twain is a first-class failure'." I wait, until irritation drives him to repeat—but with a switch in pitch!—"yes?" "So far as I can understand your reporter, sir, 'we' are not 'a lecturer,' nor 'a' anything. The lecturer is Mr. Twain, and basic grammar would require, 'as a lecturer, he is a first-class failure'." The referee is still counting Father.
After we sidle into Revere Street through an alley not to be commemorated, Father stops immediately. "Look over daughter. Number 33." It takes her a moment to distinguish one elegant townhouse from its neighbors. Granite three-story facade; across the second story a narrow, iron-wrought balcony supported in the center by Corinthian columns that frame a fan-lit doorway. On the balcony stand three women. "The coven. His witch of a mother, guarded on the left flank by his sister, Anna, and on the right flank by Annie, his brand spankin' new wife. An Irish lass. Haggarty. Construction. Big Venus for so wee a Cupid." The ladies are perfectly dressed, and perfectly still. "His ma (she hears 'maw') is insatiable. Can't wait to offer up her lamb." She can't allow this slur on Col. Shaw's commitment. "And I suppose, my daughter, you've sat in the Parker House bar and heard young Shaw talk like the rest of his fancy pals about 'sambos' and 'shadows'?" She knows better than to contest evidence from a source so unimpeachable as a tavern. "That mother wields her son like a saber." He feels resistance persisting in her silence. "Then explain to me, please Miss, why striplin' Shaw turned down Governor Andrew's first offer of the command? If this young abolitionist's credentials are so impeccable. Can you imagine the stare that Francisissy impaled himself upon when he returned from McClellan's camp and told Mrs. Medusa of her son's refusal? I bet he dreaded a lot less telling the governor." Perfectly still, the three ladies abide. Not like wax manikins, as Father said later on the way to the wharf. Nor stuffed like trophies on a wall, as he persisted on the way back here. To her they are suspended—their lives like your breath held as the doctor begins his examination. To her they are rapt in glory. And it comes. The fifes and drums of Patrick Gilmore's Irish marching band announce the regiment entering into Revere Street.
So aptly named, Revere, as though Col Shaw's fate was already articulate, the street having been renamed in 1782 for another hero on horseback, as though "freedom of choice" is only what we Americans have not yet acknowledged as foreclosed. A form imposed. The old story. Father saw beyond Col. Shaw to his mother, but not beyond her to that vast plot which he, more than anyone I have ever known [even Mr. Bierce], believed language to be.
Before she is ready, the triangle of ladies has formed into a diamond, has found sudden completion in the appearance—yes the reality—of the little brother. Col. Shaw passing beneath that balcony is captured, for an instant of repose, forever upon the retina of her recollection. He has raised his shining saber and touched it to his lips. And passed on. Down storied Revere Street. The MAN in eMANcipation.
That his path of glory lead to the grave seemed inevitable to more than just myself at that moment. In her reply to my two notes—my ecstatic homage on the evening of May 29 and my tearful commiseration after Battery Wagner two months later—his sister Anna wrote: "When Rob, riding at the head of his force, looked up at us and kissed his saber, his face was as the face of an angel and I felt perfectly sure he would never return."
Father bursts her reverie and points back up at the balcony. Four is again the number, but now it is a woman who abides "there in the background. The saber-toothed old Granny with all the dough," for completion.
Suddenly Father's scenario is disrupted. "Mr. Dawson. Now this is a surprise." Turning round with Father she sees three men. "Mr. James, sir. And a fine mornin' to you." Eyes of a mad priest. Or an abandoned child? "Dwarf on a stick, like a roasting sausage," Father snarls later on our way to the wharf. "Never worked a day in his life. Father built the Erie Canal. Second richest man in North America, they say, after Astor. Pegleg idles away in beatitude, penning mystical tracts nobody reads, and lecturing to sparse halls dotted by Transcendental old maids and Swedenborgian couples without children. Closet drinker. Told me one afternoon at Mrs. Malone's that when he was in the third grade, third grade mind you, daughter, he'd grab a penny gin from the corner bootblack on his way to school, and another comin' home. "Allow me to introduce my sons," Mr. James has said immediately, "My eldest William, and his mother's favorite, the angel of the house, Harry." Father reciprocates with her names and she shakes hands first with the spark-eyed, fine-featured elder brother whose goatee hides a chin that she suspects he fears weak; then with the younger brother whose quiet, full eyes assure safety. "My two youngest laddy-bucks march with Col. Shaw. They're itching for a fight. Mother Mary stays home in Cambridge with our Alice whom today finds nervous." "His older sissies are itching to scratch, no fight in them you can tell," Father fumes when the Jameses reappear at the wharf. She replies: "The distant eyes of a desert saint. Is that it father?" "He's mad enough for Ahab, he is daughter. But his peg leg ain't ivory. And there's no harpoon." Her look must be incredulous. "Oh no daughter? Well while you were preening before the laddies he told me he sometimes wishes that God would strike his wife and children out of existence. Yes? Out of existence, by way of lightning bolts. Because he loves them so much, of course." To her silence he adds, "Also said somethin' in Latin, 'dulchay et' somethin' and what an honor to have sons to defend one's country." She will not correct Father about the Latin. So she simply quotes "'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.' From Horace. 'It is sweet and right to die for the fatherland'." She does not add that Virgil also presents the sentiment. "Pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis." But in Virgil it may be ironic. Aeneas is running wildly downhill toward what he assumes is the death that will free him from the horror of Troy' s destruction. "Furor iraque mentem praecipitant."* She wonders whether Mr. James chooses Horace over Virgil because he finds no irony in sending sons off to die for the sins of rich men—"the interest of bankers" is Father's fine pun—or whether he feels this simple mick would respond best to a direct appeal to feeling. [And thus a double putdown of Father: sonless and ill-taught, poor Paddy] In the meanwhile, Father is answering a question she never would have asked. "Why he doesn't fight himself is answered conveniently by his dowel, sure enough. Didn't your Doctor Johnson say something about patriotism being the last recourse of the wastrel?" Scoundrel, Father, scoundrel.* And isn't he too old Father? Way too old to fight?
*Give Classical citations… frenzy and rage drove him headlong.
*Cite in Johnson.
I have already indicated how momentous this meeting with the three Jameses was for me—how Mr. Henry Sr. would encourage my writing with an ineptitude I could not fault. Rather than wishing that his daughter were a son, this father wished that his daughter was me! Mr. Henry Jr. would inspire my writing—in manifold ways—with a corpus of fiction that eventually exceeded anything produced by any child of this republic [even Mr. Melville] and with magisterial essays that announced in a single sentence all that I have lived for professionally. "In the arts, feeling is always meaning."*
*Cite HJ passage.
History records that Colonel Robert Gould Shaw succeeded in reaching the parapet of Battery Wagner. Built of palmetto log revetments, Battery Wagner was the largest and most formidable earthworks fortification in the world—protected on the flanks by the Atlantic Ocean and Mortimer's [mort time's] Tidal Creek, it could be attacked only from the south, where it was guarded by a sea-fed moat. Sustained Federal bombardment had reduced the walls in some places to rounded mounds of sand, but not a single Confederate canon was disabled by the fusillade and only a handful of the thousands of defenders were killed. Col. Shaw, having formed his regiment into two lines, led the front wing toward the breaches in the wall. Scrambling up the sandy slope he reached, as I have said, the parapet. There he stood for an instant, etched upon the smoke, saber pointing to the heavens—which he himself then ascended to as his body fell forward into the fort.
What Father was thinking I realize I have never known, thinking, I mean, at any moment, and with regard to any issue. Is it a daughter's lot not to think for herself, let alone about herself, but to devote her consciousness to scrutinizing the inscrutability of a man's mind? Surely Father would say no, would say his entire effort was to teach me to think for myself. He did love me you see. But I have wondered, having devoted [wasted] so much effort in precisely this type of scrutiny. One year to the day after Colonel Shaw reached the parapet at Battery Wagner, another young Federal officer stood atop a still more formidable escarpment. Missionary Ridge. Different in [almost] every way from Col. Shaw, Lieutenant Ambrose Gwinett Bierce, poor, uneducated, the second man to volunteer from the state of Indiana, could trace his lineage back to the same Mayflower that brought the Shaws to Massachusetts Bay. The difference between the two young men was that Mr. Bierce abominated his past. What was he thinking that afternoon of July 23, 1863, when General Grant turned to General Thomas and said, "My right flank is lost, my left crushed, but I will not retire until I have tried her in the middle." Before the acropolis of granite whose protuberant canon and rifles and bayonets prompted many a private soldier (and many a military expert then and since) to say "she's impregnable," the vast host of Federal regulars, battle-tried veterans of Shiloh and Stone River and Chickamauga, the Army of the Tennessee, awaited word to move forward. "'As far as the rifle pits' were General Grant's final words," Mr. Bierce recounted to a rapt young reporter twelve years later, in a San Francisco gloriously new to her. "General Thomas handed me the order." That morning, he said, eight lieutenants had waited astride their mounts to carry orders from the Knob that lifted off the floodplane before Missionary Ridge. "By three o'clock only three of us were left." Sweeping the rebels from the rifle pits at the foot of the ridge was easy enough. "But once in the pits we were hogs in slaughter pens. The grays were firing straight down the slope into us. What cover could there be from behind?" Up to the day he vanished, Mr. Bierce insisted that he did not lead the blue force up Missionary Ridge. He said it was the men themselves who chose to take their bullets in the chest and started up the defiles. "Who's done this," General Grant is reported to have shouted to Thomas as his cigar flew. "If this fails someone will pay." What Mr. Bierce cannot deny is that he was the first Federal officer to reach the crest of Missionary Ridge and that his saber pointed the way on toward Georgia and the inevitable rematch at Kennesaw Mountain, where his skull would be opened. "What was I thinking, Miss Dawson, at that 'glorious moment'? A moment so glorious that General Hooker had already lost 3,100 men on the right and General Sherman 2,950 on the left and we were destined to lose over 4,000 in the center?" I maintain my silence. And he—our relationship is brand new in 1875—does proceed to answer my question. "I was not thinking Miss Dawson. I was laughing." The Federal troops positioned before Mission Ridge (as Mr. Bierce quite correctly referred to the granite escarpment where the Jesuit fathers had constructed a mission in 1673 and compiled the first dictionary of the Cree tongue) had followed tradition and nicknamed the enemy's major ordinance after the Rebel generals's wives. "Mrs. General Bragg" and "Mrs. General Hardee" and "Mrs. General Pope" and on down the command. "Well, after the grays were driven off the crest, several of our infantry spotted the canon and confirmed our control of the moment by leaping astride the barrels." He is laughing again, echoing now in my recollection the laughter of 1875 that reverberated from 1863. "Astride the barrels, you should have heard the privates screaming. Falling off, rolling round, holding themselves. Because of course the cannon, after seven hours of engagement were red hot, name them for whatever ladies you will."
Vanish he did too, of course, like Robbed Shaw and Father Faithless. What were they thinking? These three heirs of Ares? Each in his gesture of self-determination affirms man's peculiar option to choose life and cease. Father agreed that Col. Shaw looked celestial that May morning in 1862, but he added that to look so angelic a man so young must be very, very angry. I have wondered. And you I have wondered on too, Father. What were you thinking? And what was she thinking, the young diarist who sounds so naive—"My memoir will dramatize what America truly means"—after half a century has altered her America beyond recognition, and recent men have [with copious experimentation*] managed to produce a war surpassing even hers in horror. What America truly meant that day… a people on the march for and toward an ideal presumed to be a destiny. Was it only a destination? I have wondered, as I did not on July 4, 1873 when I loaded mother onto the transcontinental railroad at Boston's South Station and headed west, quite assured that we were listed on Destiny's Manifest. Was Manifest Destiny, as Mr. Bierce said, only a trick of land speculators and their politicians, of slaughterers of buffalo and Indians. Father would have agreed with Mr. Bierce [who seconded his distrust of bankers]. But… then… in the early 1860s, Father spoke of our destiny more than once, said "our American failures count more," we being unique among the world's nations because we were conceived in aspiration and born as an ideal. This from Father who hated the Boston Brahmins in their teeth. America: on the diarist's May day, elite and common stood together in the fine light.
But what is the implication for women, of women, in a military remedy to human anguish? Ares as our answer? How we cheered on our bafflement, as the "color line" was complicated by the negroes's blue column filling Boston's blue-blood corridors. These negroes were to find their destiny not in death at Battery Wagner (where they fought with unquestioned courage) but in Jim Crow waiting down the road to shadow the decades of dimming hope. America: the emancipation of us all: This is what the young diarist meant, surely. For what is America but the impending realization that we all are slaves until we are all free? Was it really as Father said: all for the interest of bankers? That couldn't have been it, been all of what you were thinking, Father, in planning our May day, and in reacting to it. Was your aberration on July 4, 1862 the inevitable result of your planning on May 29, or did something go wrong with our day? It could not have simply been Mr. James. Was the day supposed to contain your rage, or purge it? Or did the day fail to contain the rage that broke free on its own? Whatever you were thinking Father, for certain you robbed me and mother as cruelly as the Abolitionists robbed Anna and Annie Shaw. And weren't we three supposed to be on the same side? A family, Father?
*This interpolation indicates the ED is still rereading and revising her ms after the First World War has ended! She never gave up hope of completing (and publishing?) her memoir. (ed)
(9:40 pm) Thank heaven for another night of horror. Garrote the throat of song. Why would cousin Emily include Father in the invitation—the College's annual Parnassus Night will of course call forth versifiers unworthy of the lyre. She knows Father's thirst for the vulnerable, she's seen his glee as Sue martyrs even established poets at the salon; did she intend to ruin an evening of promise, an evening she lacked the courage to contribute to by risking her own verse in public? Surely what set Father off was Mr. Sweetser's topic. "The Drunkard's Lament" as a poem was learned in its range of allusions, sonorous in its scansion, and even, profound in its sentiments. To chortle and snort in the middle of the reading! And then have to clamber over seven people whose folding chairs scraped the auditorium floor like gunfire!! Visibly shaking with not entirely stifled laughter as he exits not too rapidly back up the center aisle!!!
(11 pm) Beyond belief. Though additional horror cannot be precluded of course. She had almost found solace in The Mill on the Floss* when
"I'm out of rye
I think I'll die
Unless you buy
me BOOZO."Then a crash that shakes—she means literally shakes—our frame house. Into the subsequent silence Mother does not rush from her room, tear down the stairs, and prostrate herself upon the fallen form. This is no temperance melodrama, dear diary—though in the very realest way she wants to tear the stairs down and remain safe above with mother in our second story, our separate tale, forever. Then, warble is the only word for it. Trilled almost, the silence:
"The Drunkard's Content
or
Sweets 're Sweetser
In Relentless Meter
I'm out of rye
I think I'll die
Unless you buy
Me BOOZO.
Pick any brew
In Timbucktoo
So long as you
Won't REFUZOO."And inevitably,
"Till thirst I slake
No more I'll spake
Just bow and take
A SNOOZOO."
Not even sighing from Mother's room. From the landing she sees him lying, spread eagle, on the foyer floor, eyes closed. And pooling out from the back of his head like a halo is blood nowhere.
*George Eliot's novel (1860) presents the doomed love of Maggie Tulliver for Stephen Guest; Maggie's fraught relationship with her brother ends in the drowning of both siblings. We cannot help noticing that the embrace of drowned lovers is a recurrent image in ED's ms. (ed)
I am clarified by an image.
I see the stars themselves of heaven descending to armor Adelina, as majesty kneels. Imagine Mr. Bierce: Alexander II, father of all the Russians, bends before this daughter of America. This immigrant. What I see is that the beauties of Klemp have nothing on my beauty. Adelina, you are cloaked in all your stones like his lapidary ladies in their settings of gilt and their garments of mosaic, living fire secure in the wall like notes upon the staff, more perfect in their enameled harmony than a Nile princess patient upon her sarcophagus. I see my beauty this way: mantled before the footlights with every gem of Christendom, safe within color folded round her like the polychrome wings of Venetian angles, safer even than a father's arms. Invulnerable, Adelina, because a father brought to perfection the talent he'd brought into this world. Vulnerable otherwise as every girl, you are wrapped now out of time. Everyone is watching, but she need not move. You say the gems flash as cold as her eyes, Mr. Bierce; you say in such settings she is all the deader. I say she's all the dearer. I say everyone is watching, and she need not see.
A life of devotion. I say, safe at last.
Sacramento is where she appears, framed in the hall gloom, "untouched by morning and untouched by noon." No meek member of the Resurrection, this. She is the Resurrection. August 1, 1875. I arise from the enveloping chair beside Mother's bed and come toward my One through the searing heat. It is more than a decade since Boston. It is no time at all.
Our one room faces west toward Capital Square where the dome of the new State House is under construction. Mrs. Mandible's Lodging House for Ladies. The only woman reporter at the Bee, I cover what passes for cultural events in the Sacramento valley, and, more to my taste, distill from East Coast and European dispatches the major events in theater, dance, open, and gallery life. I'm also in charge of the tit-bit called "Timeless Words." Twice a week I force-feed the populous with poems I translate from Spanish, Italian, French, or German authors they've never heard of. Occasionally I relent and include a nostalgic morsel from Mrs. Felicia Hemans or The Sweet Singer of Michigan. My own poetry I sell to the paper's Sunday Magazine, their ten cents a stanza bringing my weekly income to around three dollars. Mother kept saying she was just sure I could earn more singing.
The door is already open, to tempt a cross-draft. Adelina's finger starts to her lips, but she sees that my haste will not disturb Mother. Like the angel in Ghirlendio's Annunciation or Salome in medieval manuscripts, my feet do not touch the floor.
She glows in pale yellow linen. For our Features editor I translate the articles on fashion (at a quarter a piece) that the Bee buys from Reuters, so I recognize immediately the bon goût the style boulevard. Between my two work dresses I've chosen the one less expressive of my inky lot. Only now do I realize that mauve is penitential. Hers is certainly from Worth's. He did her bridal gown, and remains the Marquis' favorite couturier (marriage has enabled him to commission Worth gowns for his mother, Adelina wrote cattily in 1871.) Her tiny, flat-crowned hat tilted forward on the forehead, her purse, gloves, and boots, all are white. I swear she is not perspiring.
You can see right through the great dome. The girders define its promise against the devouring sky, but there are no courses of masonry to fill the emptiness and confirm the breast-like amplitude of curve that Western man hungers for.
"It looks like a bustle."
She is smiling softly. "Or our hoops of the recent years. I had, one I'm sure, so large. In our Paris hôtel not one armoire could fit it in. It stood in the corner of my dressing room one whole season."
"You called it 'Saint Peters'?"
"'Les Invalides'!"
Style bouffant bustle full-blown with draped overskirt and train, bodice short-waisted, crowned with a jabot. Paris perfect. Not garments
But raiment,
Not depths to penetrate
But a shape to venerate,
Style pas unique
Toujour classique
Is the antique cameo at her throat from her mother-in-law? Certainly it is her own shining hair that gives the chignon its ample dome. Picture perfect, she looks down toward Mother lying quiet as a doll. "At first there was a growth in her left bosom. Too many babies, she said to my Papa. Gradually it took all her chest over. You can have a cancer of the heart, you know."
"I know."
"There is nothing they can do."
I know.
For a moment the declining sun hangs amid the dome's girders like a bloody spider. Or is it bleeding?
I say, "What she did give you, besides your voice, Adelina, were your dreams, a shining sign. The diva's head thrown back, the miracle of sound holding the audience in thrall, and then the bouquets showering down. You drank in such a mother from the age of two, there in the wings."
"You are of course correct, Fanny Emma."
"And if her eyes didn't always pause and mirror down when she swept past you, they showed you something more important, perhaps, than love. You saw them fixed forward on some vision of achievement, la gloire… la perfection, that you drank in. It has buoyed you on." Mother's cheeks, already parched, have virtually vanished in the twilight.
"I understand what you are saying, Fanny Emma."
I look out across Mother's silhouette, wasted flat yet breathing still, and see my One projected on the sky, as upon my retina. The waist diminutive (without stays) between the 'basqued' bodice and the belled skirt. Hour-glass her form. But here no sand falls.
September 27, 1919
Now would be the perfect time to write her biography, for Adelina dies today, you see. The word will be flashed from her unpronounceable Welsh castle via her personal telegraph—the distraught (but secretly relieved, Mr. Bierce [and Father] would say) husband tapping out the truth himself—to 'a stunned and saddened world.' And San Francisco will inhabit mourning on the morrow. For a moment. But I know now: Her heart has stopped.
Yes at this hour her heart has stopped. Persistent engine. Perfection is what she was. Fierce heart. I guess I love best the one story Father didn't ruin that morning at the Amherst Inn. 'No sir,' I remember her saying, 'I was never born on the stage. Or even the green room. On stage began mother's pain. Oh yes. But the reporters don't want to believe I was born beyond the footlights in the bed of my parents, like all crying babies.'
Yet the reporters were right, too. Adelina did live her life in magic space. That night in Sacramento when we talked into the sunrise about our mothers devoured by their tumors she said, 'Night after night I watched her from the dark making fabulous love, hidden in the wings as the foots flared and the black-maned, tall man rose up with "Che Gielida Manina" before kissing her to trembling. Her closing eyes, as the boards shaking with applause brought the trembling to my legs.' Night after night Adelina beheld the transformation. The mother already grown heavy, losing tone to gravity after eight babies and years on the road, this angry wife I see who has raged at the butcher's bill and has ducked out for the theater before the landlord arrives for the rent, I see her settling in at the dressing room altar, triptych with mirrors and flowers and votive candles. Transformation, transfiguration, transubstantiation: the Catholics know that beyond desire lies structure. Rouges and mascara, and brilliants aflash in her now disciplined hair, and lifts for the bodice, and a splendor of satins and velvets to hold the wariest eye. And with the crown settled she arises as Stella Dora or Mary of Scotland or The Queen of the Night. And into her radiance you come, Adelina, and you find in her eye the far-off attraction to glories that you will prefer to love. Yes I know, she said to Father in East Hadley in 1861, 'At the theater I love so everything—makeup, sets, music, everyone from the call boy to the diva. As a child, after they brought me home from the theater and put me into the bed, I got so quietly up and by the light of the night lamp I played the opera myself. My Papa's cloak with the red lining, and an old hat and feathers of Mamma's, were my extensive wardrobe. I acted, danced, twitted—barefoot but so draped—all the operas. Nor, sir, was the audience wanting. My doll Edgardo and I used to play also the people, applauding and flinging myself nosegays, which I had manufactured, by no means too clumsily, I assure you, out of mother's press cuttings all crumpled up.'
Otium
