Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [110]
He formulated Mabel’s denial: ‘There is nothing to the whole of it, beyond the fact that we are earnestly interested in each other . . . if he [her father] has heard differently, he has heard wrongly.’
Eben Loomis, not taken in, sent Mabel a ‘terrible letter’, which she probably destroyed. It left her gloomy for weeks. For all that, Mabel kept up her hymn to Austin as her God; his love a sign God loved her. Defiantly, the lovers assured each other of their purity.
Mr and Mrs Loomis left Amherst on 5 November. Dickinson wrote to them: ‘Parting with Thee reluctantly, / That we have never met . . .’. How different had been her parting words to an un-met Mabel as an intruder laying a ‘snare’.
Grandma Wilder remained behind at the Lessey house and reported on Mabel to her parents. Restricted by surveillance, the lovers were forced to return to the Homestead. Again this shift took place while Emily Dickinson had another bad spell, from October 1884 to January 1885.
‘The Dyings have been too deep for me,’ she explained, ‘and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come.’
Death had always been a mystery the poet longed to solve, the undiscovered country she’d seen Sam Bowles and her father enter. She had wondered where they were, and had coursed to the verge of ‘boundlessness’ when Gib died. Wanting to take Sue with her, she was unable to do so at a time when Gib’s father, isolated by grief, slid finally and irretrievably into Mabel’s waiting arms. The quarrels of the last year deepened into a permanent rift: on one side, Susan, Ned and Mattie; on the other, Austin, served by Vinnie. The rift manifested as rows between Sue and Vinnie, and in late January Sue’s confrontation with her husband, when she had ripped the wallpaper of the hall in The Evergreens.
‘NO NEWS’, Ned reported the following morning to his sister Mattie at boarding school. The ironic heading is in decorated capitals. Ned conveyed his news with joking discretion: he had been called in to assist at ‘the fall of the old reigeime [regime] - A reluctant consent was obtained by Father’. Ned’s spelling is erratic, his hand unformed with a childish roundness belied by his sardonic ironies. He had what would now be recognised as a kind of dyslexia that becomes more pronounced under stress. Word formation and spelling were wildly disrupted by the rows Ned was too discreet to specify. It was an ‘unpleasant’ day, damp and moist. Joking platitudes issued from Ned’s nib: ‘What can’t be cured must be endured. No use crying over spilt milk. Ha Ha never say die.’
Close to midnight he wrote to his sister once more, unable to conceal his wretchedness any longer. Their parents had turned ‘wild’ at a troubled letter from Mattie delivered to The Evergreens during the day. Ned begs her to stop wailing (in her letters from school) because their mother can bear no more. ‘When you see the Dearest thing in all the Earth slowly being destroyed by cruelty & no way in God[’s] world to prevent it, & have to wear a smooth front all the time, then you know what it is to endure.’ Would that he could take what Mother had to bear upon his shoulders, he would be ‘more than thankful’.
Three days later, Ned saw the hall ‘in that most forlorn of all conditions’. On 28 January he had spent the day stripping the last of the marital decor. The new wallpaper did not signal a genuine revolution, more an obligation to paper over the split in the household. ‘As for news the same applies as has applied heretofore. We’re out. Very out.’
As Ned sickened that winter there was little comfort in a note from next door where Aunt Emily ‘gasps out’ that she has managed to get up. They are ‘the Cripples’. His father ignored the deteriorating health around him. His was god-given love, on a par with Dante and Beatrice. He was proud to side with them.
David Todd’s tolerance puzzled