Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [113]
Meanwhile, the lovers again took advantage of Emily’s increasing sickness to settle in once more downstairs. In January 1886 Austin arranged an assignation in a note to Mabel, careful as ever not to mention her name: he asks if his ‘client’ would accept an appointment for 2.15 p.m. in his sisters’ library? Vin, he says, consents, though the wording leans to the negative: ‘there is nothing in her case to interfere with my seeing my client in the Library after Lunch if our business seems to require it’. He has satisfied himself that Emily is not too sick for this to happen.
Mabel replied with an unsigned note, dated 14 January. ‘I will come at 2 & risk it. I think I can arrange it well. At any rate I’ll come.’
A follow-up note from Austin to Mabel conveys a measure of coolness on Vinnie’s part. ‘Vin is sort [of?] nervous - Things are edgy [?] over there.’
A daytime assignation would not have been invisible from The Evergreens, and could have contributed to Ned’s outrage. On 17 January 1886 he had another seizure.
The next month, as Emily worsened, Mabel offered Austin a return to youth. She spoke of spring, buds, blossoms. Renewal would come, she promised, if they could be permanently together, if there were no one to ‘say us nay’.
Even now, Mabel tried to soften Emily with yet another gift. On 11 February she painted a bronze plaque with thistles and dispatched it to the Homestead four days later. Emily’s first answer, from her sickbed, was a hyacinth, but ten days later she rallied to her most brilliant rebuff. It was only half a line: ‘Or Figs of Thistles?’ The clue to this riddle is the complete line from the New Testament: ‘Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?’ No nourishment, then, from thorns or thistles forced down her throat. This is Emily Dickinson’s last and most cutting thrust at Mabel Loomis Todd. She dealt her pretty words like blades. Did Mabel get it? She certainly noted the adder’s tongue sent over from the Homestead, though she was politic enough to claim an unblemished friendship with the poet. Dickinson herself foresaw a doomed stand, yet to make the stand in the face of death was a Thermopylae of her own.
If Emily cultivated adulterous emotions for a forbidden ‘Master’, did this affect her response to her brother’s outbreak into active adultery? An answer lies in her Shakespearean retorts to Mabel. Here, there is sympathy for the ‘entangled’ Antony, the susceptible Roman whose command is tarnished by his affair with the enemy queen, Cleopatra. There is sympathy too for the worked-up Othello.
Another question: how did the ensuing clash strike the poet, whose collapse during 1884 coincided with the height of its impact on her family? She did live long enough to know that what had happened could not heal. All the same, loyalty to her brother did not stop her reaching out to Sue: ‘The tie between us is very fine, but a Hair never dissolves.’
There were short breaths of empathy in her messages to Sue: ‘Emerging from an Abyss, and re[-]entering it - that is Life, is it not, Dear?’, and then the last pencilled notes to Sue made their way across the grass: ‘How lovely every solace! . . . Thank you, dear Sue - for every solace -’. Her health gave out with the break-up of the family, compounded by a succession of deaths that cut too deep. ‘Because I would not stop for Death—/ He kindly stopped for me—’, so she’d set the scene when she was young, undercutting irony with triumph: ‘The Carriage held but just ourselves—/ And Immortality.’ In her last illness she spoke differently of ‘the great intrusion of Death’. Some gardens, she observed, were willing to die in autumn: ‘I do not think that mine was - it perished with beautiful reluctance, like an evening star -’. She died on 15 May 1886, when she was fifty-five.24
The next day was a Sunday; Mabel appeared all in black in the church