Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [101]
What remains unknown is whether there was any link between the stress at The Evergreens and the poet’s insufficiently explained collapses into long periods in bed. Was the tie between Emily and Susan strained by the newcomer in their lives, knocking and knocking at the door of the Homestead in order to make love to Susan’s husband in the safety of his sisters’ home? The Dickinson sisters were dependent on Austin. How dependent they were, and in what ways, remains in question - it’s a question pertinent to Emily Dickinson’s position. Austin paid their considerable bills (almost as much as those of The Evergreens) and took care of their finances as their father had done. It was customary for Austin to have tea at the other house after his day at the office. At this time, he took to visiting ‘Em’ and ‘Vin’ two or three times a day, and told a gratified Mabel that he and his sisters would ‘talk you over - always . . . you are the constant theme’. He did speak of sisters in the plural. If so, Emily could hardly have been blind to the affair. To what extent did she cooperate or, like Lavinia, condone? She and Lavinia certainly took in Austin’s emotional shift from The Evergreens back to the Homestead: as though their brother had never left home, they agreed.
The facts of Vinnie’s complicity and the acts of adultery in the Homestead have been available since the correspondence of Austin and Mabel was finally published in 1984, a century after the affair began. Yet the question of the poet’s stance has remained unasked. This happened because Dickinson legend has kept the poet untouched, oblivious to her brother’s affair. The time has come to recognise her inevitable part in the family feud. What did it mean to an experienced fender-off of intrusion to find Mabel Todd occupying the dining room in the Homestead? To add to the intrusion, this happened to be the room where the poet had a second writing table, at a corner window shaded by honeysuckle.
Downstairs at the Homestead, and Emily’s conservatory: the layout at the time when adultery made itself at home.
The lovers’ alternative venue was the library. This was the room Emily had to pass through en route to her conservatory. Next to her room upstairs, this was her space, central to her daily life. But for two to three hours of a morning or afternoon the lovers might be there. The door would be closed. This means that during these hours the three women who lived in the house could not walk freely downstairs, particularly Emily, who was determined never to meet Mabel. It’s one thing to flee the ‘donkeys’ of the town; quite another to evade a person who frequents the main rooms of the house, coming through the front door into the hallway, opening and closing doors at any moment. In one or other of those rooms to the right of the hallway a fire would be lit.
The lovers did not make use of the parlour, running the length of the house, to left of the hallway. That was Emily’s domain when the Judge came. Occasionally Mabel entered the parlour to play the square piano that Mr Dickinson had bought for Emily. She played Bach, Scarlatti and Beethoven, and sometimes she lifted her voice and sang. The trained voice, resonant with the vigour of a fulfilled life, reached into every cranny of the house. She sang, she said, for Emily, whom she pictured seated, all attention, on a step of the staircase. Afterwards the poet sent in a glass of wine, and with it either a piece of cake or a rose, and sometimes also a few lines of verse. Mabel liked to think the verse impromptu, called out by her own voice.
There were, then, these non-encounters. Emily’s successful avoidance of Mabel means that she could not have been uninformed of her visits. For her policy to work as it did, there had to be some sort of understanding. To Mabel, the fact that Austin discussed her in the Homestead implied that his sisters accepted the affair. Or did it? Vinnie certainly, at this stage, was charmed by Mabel and bent on obliging her brother. If Vinnie felt compunction about Sue, her conduct