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. . . No vacillating God

Ignited this Abode

To put it out—

This feeling letter to Sue ends,

Remember, Dear, an unfaltering Yes is my only reply to your utmost question -

With constancy -

Emily -

Given the clash of interest between Sue Dickinson and Mabel Todd, it’s telling to compare Emily’s assents to Sue with the emphatic negations of her latest riddle for Mabel.

While in danger, and almost too weak to write, Emily had roused herself on 19 July to confront Mabel. This was the only letter she managed to write during her dark passage when death stood by. Defiance was on her mind. It consists of two sentences and four lines of verse about the last stand of the Greeks at Thermopylae. A lone group of Spartans [the Dickinsons] who are about to die at the hands of the Persian invader [Mabel Todd], and whose stand will make them ‘the Deathless’, declare their purity of purpose: nothing now can stain their spirit, not the ‘Dart’ of an enemy spear, nor the uncertainty of the afterlife. The stain comes from ‘an adjourning Heart’ [Austin’s withdrawal from his family]. Again, there’s no sure answer to this riddle, but the fact that Dickinson sent this message to Mabel alone suggests the speaker’s distress over a brother whose heart is removed from his family. It’s there the damage will be found: not her own sickness, not the advance of mortality, but estrangement. Her accompanying verse points to emotional betrayal:

Not Sickness stains the Brave,

Nor any Dart,

Nor Doubt of Scene to come,

But an adjourning Heart—

During Dickinson’s bout of sickness she was healed by the opposite: the fellow-feeling of her Norcross cousins and a neighbour, Nellie Sweetser, who offered ‘precisely the tenderness most craved’.

In October 1884 the Todds threw open their new residence to seventy-five inhabitants of Amherst, who were offered a lunch of chicken salad. Mrs Loomis came for this event and was as amazed as Mabel could have hoped, yet worried. To a mother who had scrimped all her life, the grandeur of the Lessey house and grounds was disturbing. How could Mabel afford this on her husband’s salary? Who had funded it?

It didn’t take Mrs Loomis long to deduce that Mabel had acquired a protector. At once she summoned Mabel’s father from Washington. Appalled questions drew in Austin Dickinson, who gave Mr Loomis his lofty assurance that nothing was amiss. It’s inconceivable, he protested, that a gentleman of his standing and probity could corrupt their daughter. The problem lay with the Loomises, who had fixed on adultery where there was nothing but friendship.

Meanwhile, Emily Dickinson signalled in her own way with warm notes to the Loomises. Careful not to mention Mabel, she expressed her ‘trust’ in their sense of ‘Right’. These are not riddling letters. Her warmth to these strangers signals how firmly she sides with them in their battle for their daughter’s virtue.

At least twice Eben Loomis confronted Austin, who was taken aback to be considered ‘a sneak, and an improper person, given to mischief, and treachery’. To Mabel, Austin confided his distaste for ‘vulgar minded people’ who think too much of the body. Outwardly he practised the accommodating politeness of one whose patience is tried:

My dear Mrs Loomis

If it may afford you the least satisfaction to supplement our Sunday afternoon talk by any word unspoken, any question unasked, or unanswered then, any new thought - you may command me for such time as you will, after 5 o’clock this or tomorrow ev[en]ing.

Very sincerely,

Wm A Dickinson

In truth, Austin was somewhat put out to hear of an informant (probably Grandma Wilder, who had been staying with the Todds before the Loomises arrived). He used a lawyer’s tactics, requiring the kind of evidence that could prove an allegation in court, unpicking evidence and continuing to manoeuvre Mr Loomis into a defensive position. If Austin is spied late at night with Mrs Todd on the porch, if he comes back day after day through an inconspicuous door,