Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [100]
How did Mabel Todd bring off the feat of keeping two husbands happy at the same time, as well as the even more difficult feat of fending off public opinion? As the affair went on, Mrs Todd did incur suspicion and snubs, but conspicuous hymn-singing and wifely devotion gave these the lie. Then, too, Austin’s unassailable public standing protected her along with him. So, although her reputation felt precarious, she managed to avoid exposure, unlike New England’s most famous adulteress. In the seventeenth-century setting of The Scarlet Letter an A marks the bodice of Hester Prynne, exposed on the public scaffold. What Mabel shared with Hester Prynne was secret defiance: ‘What we did had a consecration of its own,’ Hester assures her lover, as Mabel assured Austin. No stab of guilt comes off the page in Mabel’s letters and journal. She had no sympathy for Sue once her hold tightened on Sue’s husband; on the contrary, she considered that a woman of Sue’s ‘low’ background had no business with so fine a husband. It remained a continued annoyance that Mrs Austin Dickinson had the right to ride out in the Dickinson carriages, while she, Mabel, the wife without the sign, had no carriage of her own nor was like to have. When Austin took her for drives it had to be along back roads.
Once, when Austin had told Sue that there was no time to drive her, she and Ned, in the Dickinson sleigh, came upon the lovers strolling along a back road. (It was 20 December 1883, the day after they’d made love for the third time.) Austin had brushed off the awkwardness as amusing - too amused to notice the consternation of his son when he could not protect his mother. His mother did observe Ned’s distress, and packed him off on holiday, saying ‘all will be well’ and Papa would write to him.
So long as nothing was said to disturb Austin at home - and nothing was said - he felt content. His comforts were seen to and he observed with satisfaction a little air of discouragement that this would make the slightest difference to his detachment. He was teaching his family a lesson. They had not got him ‘under’ and this assertiveness, which Mabel had urged, he brought her as an offering. She called him her ‘God’, her King, the granter of her ‘nobility’, the transformer of her soul - so she claimed, adapting the local script of spiritual drama. Austin had promoted her to a higher platform not open to the masses who were suitably policed by law and religion. ‘Conventionalism is for those not strong enough to be laws for themselves, or to conform themselves to the great higher law where all harmonies meet,’ this lawyer decreed in private, determined to justify adultery as heaven-sent in his own case.
This was no ordinary affair, the pair assured each other; they were amongst the world’s great lovers: Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Héloise, Chateaubriand and Madame de Récamier. Mabel’s ‘dream of a perfect manhood / That I realize in you’ never failed to enchant Austin; while Austin declared himself already ‘through the shining gates’. As the pair polished their self-styled roles as king and queen of ‘pure’ love, it never occurred to them that they were leaning on a servant. For the assignations at the other house relied on the service, the fires and discretion of Maggie Maher, whose Catholic confessor would have condemned the adultery. Maggie’s witness to what was taking place, and for how many hours, would not be forgotten.
Meanwhile, Mr and Mrs Dickinson lived on in the festering silence of The Evergreens. Separation was not an option for a wife with no income of her own and Austin would not have agreed to a visible split. Ned longed to assuage what she bore. ‘Such superhuman efforts to keep up & cheerful, for those around her, mortal eye never witnessed,’ he reported to Mattie, away at boarding school. ‘I would willingly lay down my life for her.’ He too was ill and suffering in the winter of 1885, at the