Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [115]
An outside stair could have allowed a lover to avoid the inconvenient child at The Dell, but Austin was all too evident. Afternoon assignations meant the silent presence of Millicent Todd, home from school. ‘Hello, Child,’ Austin would say, and then he would lead Mamma upstairs while she murmured ‘my King!’ Then they would close the door. Millicent felt his ‘awful omni-presence’ as much upstairs as when he was visible. Her later fragments of autobiography recall Austin’s spare, erect figure, tall and awesome with his red side-whiskers and wig of coppery hair standing out like a halo around his austere face. He wore a long gold chain about his neck and soft kid shoes cut to fit his narrow feet. On his head was a brown velvet cap that he left at The Dell; Mamma kept it in her music case in the back parlour. His lofty manner meant less to Millicent than her sense of him as ‘the somewhat terrible center of the universe’. This was not to be questioned, Millicent said, ‘but I felt the weight of him and carried it throughout my childhood’. All that time, he hardly acknowledged her existence. This is what she told herself, discounting Austin’s attempt at a tease when he would return her ‘straight look’. A smile from him was unthinkable. Yet the active contempt came from the opposing camp when Millicent encountered the other inhabitants of The Evergreens.
Mrs Dickinson and her daughter would pass the child with heads high. Millicent sensed the snub had something to do with Mamma. She tried to avoid them, and if her way lay along their part of Main Street, she walked - stiff-faced, with solemn eyes - on the opposite side to The Evergreens (the paved side for public use). Nothing was explained to the child who longed to protect Mamma and rescue her from the hate seething about them.
Only the recluse had reached out to Millicent. Though adamant about Mabel, she did see the child and once, in a letter to Mabel, pointed to her familiarity with ‘the quaint little girl with the deep Eyes, every day more fathomless’. Millicent was welcome to enter a side gate and trot through the back door to the apple-green kitchen. There, a cookie or flower was put in her hand. She was only six when the poet died, and later, when Millicent became her mother’s champion in the ongoing feud, all she could recall was the fiery hair in a brown chenille snood, with tassels swinging behind each ear, as Emily Dickinson bent towards her.
10
LADY MACBETH OF AMHERST
‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’ - Mabel set out the name on an envelope with a photograph of herself, taken ten to fifteen years earlier when she had been about fourteen.
Obviously the way to become Mabel Loomis Dickinson was to marry Austin, but there was what Mabel termed ‘an obstacle’ in the shape of the present Mrs Dickinson. Her elimination was not an idle fantasy. Mabel had long had a ‘presentiment’ of future distinction, and in November 1885 - two years after she became Austin’s mistress - it revived. She trusted that the day was to come when she would take a public role as consort to Austin.
Mabel’s campaigns intensified and speeded up in the wake of Emily Dickinson’s death, as though Emily’s stand did have some effect in holding her back. From Emily she’d had warning after warning that an invisible Dickinson saw through her moves. Once Emily was buried, Mabel got the land and house, but she wanted a stronger powerbase. The fact that she called Austin her ‘King’ casts something of a Lady Macbeth light on what Mabel willed to happen.
She devised her campaigns away from Amherst: the farther away, the more ambitious her dreams. It had been in Europe in the summer of 1885 that she’d planned a house of her own on a plot carved out of Mr Dickinson