Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [108]
Mabel’s interiors had curtains from woven wall-hangings and rather tired ostrich feathers in vases. An upright piano stood in a corner of the parlour with a cover laid loosely over the stool. Rush mats, gathering dust, covered the floor; bits of crocheted lace adorned the mantel. Though Mabel was dainty about her own clothes she despised housekeeping, and so pleased was she to have a servant - and so inexperienced as an employer - that she did not inspect too closely. She informed her mother proudly that the servant had all cleaning finished by the time the Todds sat down to breakfast. The effect was a mite tatty in contrast to the spotlessness of The Evergreens (where, David Todd used to complain, he’d felt obliged to wipe his feet all the way up the garden path) or the crisp whites of the Homestead. In the Todds’ bedroom tacky curtains drooped from conspicuous rails. More ostrich plumes, ragged with age, were tucked behind a nondescript painting of the seashore.
One Saturday in mid-June, while Emily was baking a loaf cake with Maggie, she saw ‘a great darkness coming’. She blacked out for many hours until, late at night, she woke to find Vinnie and Austin bending over her, together with an unfamiliar physician, Dr Fish. Emily gave out that this was the first time in her life that she ‘had fainted and lain unconscious’. She had certainly never lost consciousness for that alarming length of time. The doctor called it a revenge of the nerves. Her sister was sick differently, Lavinia told their cousin Clara Newman Turner, the elder of the two orphans who had lived at The Evergreens and who was therefore familiar with family ills. There were headaches, vomiting and convulsions - signs of more than one disease. Some have suggested hypertension; kidney failure, known as Bright’s disease, was the diagnosis at the time but new evidence - drugstore prescriptions from 1883 until 1885 - suggests that the invalid was treated also for epilepsy. A chronic sickness would have complicated whatever ‘different’ disease she had contracted.23
From childhood, Dickinson had contemplated mortality. During the next weeks of faintness and weakness - sometimes in bed, sometimes in a chair - mortality now became her companion, as attached as Gib: ‘The little boy we laid away never fluctuates, and his dim society is companion still.’ As for the future, it remained the mystery on the other side of death. She kept an open mind:
The going from a world we know
To one a wonder still
Is like the child’s adversity
Whose vista is a hill,
Behind the hill is sorcery,
And everything unknown,
But will the secret compensate
For climbing it alone?
After eight weeks she could reassure her Norcross cousins that she was ‘now staying’. At this time she told Susan all she’d meant to her:
Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory—
Both in one package lain
And lifted back again—
Be Sue—while I am Emily—
Be next—what you have ever been, Infinity—
From a formative age they had shared a language untrammelled by falsehood: ‘No Words ripple like Sister’s—’, she’d written to Sue. ‘Their Silver genealogy is very sweet to trace—/ Amalgams are abundant, but the lone student of the Mines [the poet] adores Alloyless things—’.
When Sue sent a cardinal flower to the recuperating invalid, Emily flashed back: ‘Except for usurping your Copyright - I should regive the Message, but each Voice is its own -’.
Would Emily join her, Sue asked, in supplying material for a forthcoming biography of Sam Bowles?
Emily agreed. ‘Go to Mine as to your own, only more unsparingly -’. She foresaw the result would be ‘like a Memoir of the Sun, when the Noon is gone’ (exactly what the biographer, George Merriam, produced: a faded composite of fact). In private Emily shared the living memory with Sue: ‘You remember his swift way of wringing and flinging away a Theme, and others picking it