Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [107]
Abbie’s reply gave cautious grounds for hope. Emily searched the paper for news each day, hoping silence boded well. Then, on 8 May, Austin read aloud to his sisters a report on the Judge: he had survived the crisis. At once, Emily dashed off a letter:
Monday
Dear Abby -
. . .Were our sweet Salem safe, it would be ‘May’ indeed - I shall never forget ‘May Day.’
All our flowers were draped [in mourning] -
Is he able to speak or to hear voices or to say ‘Come in,’ when his Amherst knocks?
Fill his Hand with Love as sweet as Orchard Blossoms, which he will share with each of you - I know his boundless ways -
As it was too much sorrow, so it is almost too much joy -
Lovingly,
Emily
By the 14th, Lord had recovered enough to hear from her directly: her ‘rapture’ at his ‘return’. ‘The fear that your life had ceased, came, fresh, yet dim, like the horrid Monsters fled from a Dream.’ At the age of seventy it seemed sensible to retire. His health deteriorated during 1883 and, aware that he was slipping away, Emily Dickinson - cut off in Amherst - longed for a last opportunity to break through his reserve. In a rare poem addressing him, she fights like a biographer against the ‘reportless Grave’: it’s a matter of urgency to find the right question that will ‘still’ - ‘still’ she repeats - ‘wrest’ from him what she needs to know:
Still own thee—still thou art
What Surgeons call alive—
Though slipping - slipping—I perceive
To thy reportless Grave—
Which question shall I clutch—
What answer wrest from thee
Before thou dost exude away
In the recallless sea?
Lord died in Salem on 13 March 1884. His last words to Emily were ‘A caller comes’. She inferred it to be ‘Eternity, as he never returned’. At the first ‘dart’ of grief she ‘hardly dared to know’ her loss, ‘but anguish finds it out’. She was in a ‘place of shafts’.
If the sun came out after rain, it barbed her loss afresh. There was no escaping the heartless renewals of nature. Outside the robins sang, but the poet, writing to Mrs Holland, can summon only ‘a drooping syllable’. In the past ecstasy had come as though it pervaded all existence, but now she realised ‘he [Judge Lord] was the cup from which we drank it’. To be an ecstatic with no access to ecstasy was to feel deprived of life. ‘Abyss has no Biographer—’, she called across the years to Sue’s sister, Martha Gilbert Smith, who had suffered in silence when they were young. No words were adequate, only Mark Antony’s cry, ‘My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar.’ She comments, ‘I never knew a broken heart break itself so sweet - ’.
There was no consolation in formal religion. The ‘waylaying Light’ of her visions had removed her from doctrine and official versions of the supernatural. ‘When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him,’ she said. ‘When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is “acquainted with Grief,” we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.’
Mourning provided an excuse for the Homestead to close the door to Mabel. The lovers had to go elsewhere - but where? The Todds’ room in their boarding house was out of the question. Austin’s law office was out of bounds to Mabel (though at the start of the affair she’d found reasons to drop by, compelled by the drama of risk). In the spring of 1884 Mabel cast her eye on the Lessey estate, graced by columns, trees and two acres on the far side of Lessey Street, curving behind the Homestead. Mrs Lessey was ill, and in late May Mabel’s expectations were met: Mrs Lessey was no more. Acting swiftly, the Todds took possession of the Lessey house in June. The lease was for a year. Mabel borrowed from the bank in order to revamp the property, requested