Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [116]
When she left on a journey to Japan in 1887, Mabel infused Austin with a promise of deathless love. Her farewell letter on 5 June promises to be together for ‘eternities’ because ‘it is in the great foundations of things that you and I shall be mated’. His nerve must not fail. ‘Impediments’ (his wife and children) would kill what was ‘not of God, partaking of His everlastingness’. Austin should now grasp the ‘glories’ ahead, and have no doubts.
‘No, sweetheart, we are one for always - I know it, and I trust in Him - and you.’
She looked to an act of God, in line with Austin’s belief that their tie was God-given, ‘pure’. With God on the lovers’ side they must now secure ‘positive’ not ‘negative’ happiness. Mabel was adept at transforming definitions of this sort. Austin must be convinced that their thriving affair was a lesser joy; that it was a ‘negative’ way-station en route to a ‘positive’ union, and to achieve that ‘positive’, a public tie, Austin was pressed to let his wife fade, as surely she would if she were made to feel the lethal force of rejection. Mabel’s pressure is slant, subliminal; she wanted it to become a purpose Austin would make his own.
It’s unclear how David Todd would have accommodated to ‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’, but it would be in character for Mabel to convince him, once again, that her plans were to his professional advantage.
In a tensely expectant state, Mabel felt herself advancing towards her destined part, planted permanently in The Evergreens and acknowledged by everyone in town.
From the start, Mabel had transformed the ‘Sister’ and ‘Mother’ who was Sue into the ‘great black Moghul’. The image distanced Sue, as though she were alien to her own home and town. It also blocks pity for Sue in black, the figure in mourning. Mabel, dressed in white, had struck Austin as a beacon of purity on the piazza of the Lessey house, as he had come towards her by night. An angel, Austin had said, enraptured to think she was waiting for him. Mabel was ‘pure white’ and ‘thinking no evil’, he assured her, when her mother and grandmother criticised the vanity and selfishness they associated with her shame. While her mother spoke, Mabel gazed out of the window at the rain weeping ‘in sympathy’.
For a long time after Gib’s death Sue hardly went out, but when she did Mabel reported her to Austin as ‘parading’ in the town, as though it were pushy to show herself at all. Her black dress loomed, an emblem of moral darkness. So Mabel put it to Austin, who inclined his ear to a lover who looked like an innocent flower - like the flowers she painted on her person: a daisy on her bodice, rosebuds on her sash.
Sue’s visibility troubled Mabel. Protected only by the dignified reserve of the Dickinson family, Mabel feared for her reputation. To forestall or damp down gossip over Sue’s ending their friendship, Mabel put it about that Sue was faithless: a person who wooed friends, only to drop them. Such rejections were arbitrary. Nothing to do with Mabel, who had been too trusting, one of Sue’s social victims. This slander was to stick: to this day Sue is made out to be untrustworthy, a manipulator inflicting damage.
Another tenacious slander played up the family tensions present before Mabel arrived on the scene. Austin and Sue were still sharing a bed at least a year before Mabel’s arrival, but there were certainly tensions signalled by the change in Austin’s behaviour following his father’s death. He became withdrawn, sombre, forbidding pleasure and resentful of Sue’s sociability, her ‘scintillation’. In her youth Emily had foreseen an ascetic strain in her brother, a recapitulation of their father, and to balance her brother Emily had encouraged his attraction to Martha Gilbert and the over-riding passion for Sue. But as Mabel had it, she’d come upon this dysfunctional family and found it in her to comfort Austin who’d had the misfortune to marry a