Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [111]
Mabel took care to keep her husband in play. Her next move was to bring in a Boston cousin: plump, well-kept Caroline (Caro) Andrews, her rump encased in a striped black taffeta skirt. It rustled as she walked. Glossy black braids crowned her head and a wide collar of lace, edged with a frill, covered her shoulders. Caro was the daughter of a Congregational minister of Cambridgeport, and before her marriage had been on the editorial staff of a magazine. Bored with marriage to a wealthy merchant, she was typical David Todd prey. He immediately took up with Caro, whose apt middle name was Lovejoy. She came to stay on 16 April 1885 and that very evening David invited her to his observatory, while Mabel ‘fixed the furnace’ and entertained Austin. Caro and David, she notes, ‘came back very late’. The following day, her diary goes on, ‘David & Mrs. Andrews, Mr. Dickinson & I had a lovely drive all morning. Windy & fresh.’ In the evening Mabel had a ‘tremendous’ little conversation with her husband and then the following day, while David took Caro away until five in the afternoon, Mabel had another conversation with Austin in the Todds’ parlour. This involved ‘Revelations’ she does not reveal, but it appears that a ‘strange relation’ with Caro ensued, which Mabel dared not write out except to say (in her more reflective journal) it was ‘more remarkable & almost unbelievable than any novel I ever read or dreamed of’. Mabel’s excitement was such that she hardly ate. The editor of the lovers’ letters has suggested a four-way relationship, and it looks as though attraction developed between the two women. Caro’s visit, Mabel goes on, activated ‘the whole beautiful rounding-out of some halves of things’. Caro then invited Mabel to accompany her and her husband when they sailed for Europe in June 1885.
Before leaving Mabel handed over Millicent and Grandma Wilder to Mrs Loomis, who passed through Boston en route to New Hampshire for the summer. The quayside saw a bitter exchange between Mabel and her mother, followed by a ‘dreadful’ fifteen-page letter in which Mrs Loomis reproached her daughter for selfishness, stubbornness, vanity and meanness to her child in cheap boots while Mabel sailed out in customary style. Mrs Loomis deplored not only Austin but also Lavinia as ‘cynical, carping, irreligious people’. Mabel told Austin that since the letter every breath was an agony. She decided to pretend it never came. All Austin could offer was ardour: ‘I kiss you all over.’ Then, a longer letter than usual from Emily Dickinson reinforced the Loomis accusations with warnings to ‘Egypt’ from ‘America’. It was written on 31 July and boldly enclosed in a letter from Austin. He’d hoped, he told Mabel, to prove the worth of her character by showing Emily her farewell letter: ‘I shall let Emily read it sometime, when it comes right.’ It never did come right.
That summer, while Mabel toured Europe, the Lessey lease came to an end and Austin supervised the transfer and storage of Mabel’s sofa, chairs, dresses and pictures in his sisters’ home. Austin assured Mabel that Emily liked to see her oil paintings of flowers and grasses.
When Mabel steamed towards Boston harbour on her return from Europe she had to choose which man was to meet her first. She gave priority to her husband, and it wasn’t only a gesture of wifely correctness: ‘How I will kiss you & caress you when I once more get you within reach!’ Mabel stirred his anticipation. ‘How you shall feel all that I think now about you from afar.’
To Austin, nine days later, she was a little apologetic: ‘policy considered’, she must put her husband first. She sent Austin, too, his boost. She will write twice more ‘- and then - oh! then!’
Accordingly, when the ship docked in Boston on Sunday 13 September she spent the night with David Todd, who left at dawn to be on time for a Monday morning class at Amherst, while Austin’s dawn train from Amherst to Boston