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Authors: Nancy Milford
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“must have been about ten years or more older than Vincent. She was tall with chestnut hair and … fragile. She had an awful funny gait; she sort of sidled. I remember Ethel once saying this rhyme at one of our meetings of the Genethod: ‘Do little souls go upward / when little bodies die?’ It was just a silly little rhyme she’d made up, and we all laughed. All but Abbie, that is. She didn’t like it. She was not frivolous. Oh, but Vincent could be. She had lots of spark and spunk; she fairly snapped.”
June 29 [1908]
I guess I’m going to explode. I know just how a volcano feels before an eruption. Mama is so cross she can’t look straight; Norma’s got the only decent rocking-chair in the house (which happens to be mine); and Kathleen is so unnaturally good that you keep thinking she must be sick. I suppose this is an awful tirade to deliver.… But it is very hard to be sixteen and the oldest of three.
That same day Cora promised her girls a picnic with their friends, with sardine and salmon sandwiches, bananas, fancy cookies, chocolate, and strawberry shortcake. Millay noted in her diary that she no longer felt as explosive as she had: “Scribbling must be wholesome exercise.”
By late June, the grass left uncut in the field behind their house was lush and high, and the Millay girls made up another game to play. They would run waving long, colored silk ribbons high above their heads and try to guess who held which color. From a distance all that could be seen was swirling ribbons above the tall grass.
At ten that night Vincent made her last entry about the party; it was important to her that it had gone well. It was not only that her mother didn’t often have the time or the money to give them; it was also that Vincent sensed the resentment in Camden toward her family’s way of doing things.
“For instance,” one of her friends recalled, “giving parties is a lot of work for—well, for the somebody that gives them. So she didn’t have parties. Not our sort, anyway. And the point is, there was just no money. What they did was to make everything fun, I guess; make a game out of it.… I suppose their mother was responsible for this in them, too.”
In the face of tacit disapproval, they fortified themselves by pulling their family ties even tighter about them. They had no lights when their mother was away unless they trimmed and filled the lamps, no heat unless they tended the fire, and all that time Vincent drifted into another life in the world of books and dreams.
Ethel Knight remembered one night in particular when
Vincent opened the front door to three of her friends who had come to spend the evening. She wore a blouse of white muslin with cuffs and boned collar made of rows of insertion edged with lace. A full gored skirt came to the tops of her buttoned boots; a patent leather belt circumscribed a wide equator around her tiny middle; and a big blue bow spread its wings behind her head where her hair was fastened in a “bun.” Books were piled on the floor from a table Vincent had cleared for games and in the center was a plate of still warm fudge.
All too soon it was twelve o’clock, and the Knight girls had promised their mother to be home early. Still, they wanted just one more song.
So the girls gathered around the organ and the little room was filled with song. They retreated with “The Spanish Cavalier,” they saw “Nellie Home” and ended with an old favorite—
“There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my true love sits him down, sits him down”—
With a lighted lamp in her hand Vincent went to the door with her guests. Going down the walk they sang:
“Fare thee well, for I must leave thee.”
Ethel remembered how her slim figure stood in the doorway, her red curls shining from the lamp held high in her hands, her clear deep voice taking up the refrain that followed the girls down the hill:
“Adieu, adieu, kind friends, adieu.”
The plate of warm
June 29 [1908]
I guess I’m going to explode. I know just how a volcano feels before an eruption. Mama is so cross she can’t look straight; Norma’s got the only decent rocking-chair in the house (which happens to be mine); and Kathleen is so unnaturally good that you keep thinking she must be sick. I suppose this is an awful tirade to deliver.… But it is very hard to be sixteen and the oldest of three.
That same day Cora promised her girls a picnic with their friends, with sardine and salmon sandwiches, bananas, fancy cookies, chocolate, and strawberry shortcake. Millay noted in her diary that she no longer felt as explosive as she had: “Scribbling must be wholesome exercise.”
By late June, the grass left uncut in the field behind their house was lush and high, and the Millay girls made up another game to play. They would run waving long, colored silk ribbons high above their heads and try to guess who held which color. From a distance all that could be seen was swirling ribbons above the tall grass.
At ten that night Vincent made her last entry about the party; it was important to her that it had gone well. It was not only that her mother didn’t often have the time or the money to give them; it was also that Vincent sensed the resentment in Camden toward her family’s way of doing things.
“For instance,” one of her friends recalled, “giving parties is a lot of work for—well, for the somebody that gives them. So she didn’t have parties. Not our sort, anyway. And the point is, there was just no money. What they did was to make everything fun, I guess; make a game out of it.… I suppose their mother was responsible for this in them, too.”
In the face of tacit disapproval, they fortified themselves by pulling their family ties even tighter about them. They had no lights when their mother was away unless they trimmed and filled the lamps, no heat unless they tended the fire, and all that time Vincent drifted into another life in the world of books and dreams.
Ethel Knight remembered one night in particular when
Vincent opened the front door to three of her friends who had come to spend the evening. She wore a blouse of white muslin with cuffs and boned collar made of rows of insertion edged with lace. A full gored skirt came to the tops of her buttoned boots; a patent leather belt circumscribed a wide equator around her tiny middle; and a big blue bow spread its wings behind her head where her hair was fastened in a “bun.” Books were piled on the floor from a table Vincent had cleared for games and in the center was a plate of still warm fudge.
All too soon it was twelve o’clock, and the Knight girls had promised their mother to be home early. Still, they wanted just one more song.
So the girls gathered around the organ and the little room was filled with song. They retreated with “The Spanish Cavalier,” they saw “Nellie Home” and ended with an old favorite—
“There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my true love sits him down, sits him down”—
With a lighted lamp in her hand Vincent went to the door with her guests. Going down the walk they sang:
“Fare thee well, for I must leave thee.”
Ethel remembered how her slim figure stood in the doorway, her red curls shining from the lamp held high in her hands, her clear deep voice taking up the refrain that followed the girls down the hill:
“Adieu, adieu, kind friends, adieu.”
The plate of warm
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