Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [114]
Susan prepared the grave with fragrant boughs but did not attend the funeral, aware that Mabel would be there. Higginson, who came, sensed something ‘pure and strange’ in the atmosphere of the Homestead as a more elevated House of Usher. (In Poe’s ominous tale, the House holds a dead sister and living brother who are conjoined in overwrought family affinities in a home poised on the edge of ruin.)
Mabel saw Emily Dickinson for the first time in the open coffin at the funeral. There were violets at her throat and Vinnie put two heliotropes by her hand ‘to take to Judge Lord’. The poet looked young for her years, her red hair untouched by grey and no wrinkle on her beautiful brow. Mabel, costumed again in black, looked haggard in her role as prime griever for so dear a friend.
In fact, this death opened the way for Mabel to acquire her plot of land. The handover went ahead after the funeral on 19 May. The deed is dated 8 June 1886. It’s made out as though the Todds were buying the plot for $1200, but it was a gift. By 14 June contractors were standing by, and the following month Austin sent Mabel $100 ‘as per request’, assuring her (on college treasurer stationery) that she could request more as needed. This followed a wail from Mabel that building was held up because the cost had climbed to $300 more than the original estimate. At some point Austin gave her a further $1500 from the Dickinson coffers, waving gratitude away: ‘Don’t say a word.’ He’d already cut a private road through his father’s meadow, an eastern extension of Fowler Place (named in honour of his grandfather; now Spring Street), bisecting what had been an open stretch in front of the Homestead. There, in the second half of 1886, the Todds’ house sprang up. Painted red, it stood out on the meadow. Austin had pictured a modest cottage but Mabel had other ideas. She called it ‘a little house of thirteen rooms’ and gave it a cottagey name, The Dell, as though it were tucked away in the small ravine (known as ‘the dell’) at the bottom of its garden. In fact, the house was three storeys, with a striking geometric design: a wide half-moon window beneath the roof echoed in the curve of its wide entrance. Mabel’s desk, a gift from Austin, stood at a big south window looking towards the Holyoke hills.
A back stair had been planned to provide outside access to the second storey. Polly Longsworth, who edited the lovers’ letters, saw that ‘some kind of ménage à trois arrangement was contemplated’ when Austin, Mabel and David spent Sunday evenings together at the Lincoln house. There are ten occasions during 1886 when Austin adds ‘with the witness’ to the parallel lines in his diary, and the witness - it can only have been David - reappears in Austin’s diary of 1888 (the diary for 1887 has not survived). Like ‘client’ as cover for mistress, ‘witness’ uses a familiar legal word as cover for their experiments with voyeurism. Mabel’s diary corroborates these Sunday evenings in her own code. She leaves the church choir between eight and eight-thirty, goes home and ‘up to bed at once’.
David often said that he loved Austin ‘more than any other man’, and Austin said more or less the same when he described ‘a sort of unspoken sympathy’ that seemed to grow up between them: ‘He has seemed to lean upon me - and confide in me beyond anything I have known among men, and I make a point of looking after him.’ Reciprocal benefits - Austin improving David’s position without being asked; David yielding up his wife to what he persisted in seeing as light diversion - underpinned a deepening tie between the men. There’s no knowing