Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [119]
Mabel’s dark intent shows its face for an instant in November 1885 when she asks Austin, ‘what can we do?’ It appears a rhetorical question in the context of Mabel’s threat to die if she has to wait too long to fulfil her ‘presentiment’. The tone is delicately balanced between resignation and covert challenge: would he ‘do’ something to prevent her dying?
A month later, Austin still had made no move. This is how Mabel came to advise on the minutiae of goodbyes and greetings at The Evergreens: hints on how to wither the life of his family.
During the last months of Emily’s life Austin hesitated to leave Amherst, but he did make it twice to Boston. After he left The Evergreens on 15 December 1885 it occurred to Mabel that she had neglected to orchestrate his farewells to his family. He should be chilling their hearts, not indulging in family rituals: a touch, it may be, a pat on the arm, a wish for his safety, a promise of kindness on his return. In Boston again the following March, six weeks before Emily’s death, Austin received Mabel’s renewed strike at family customs. One such custom was to correspond when Austin and Susan were apart.
‘You will not think it necessary to write [from Boston] to anyone but me in this town? Will you? I meant to have spoken of my hope that you would not . . .’. A day later, Mabel reminds Austin that her directive about farewells ‘holds just as intensely strong about the kind of greeting you get on your return. Please don’t have it . . .’.
As these tentacles reach into The Evergreens, Mabel pictures herself as passive in God’s hands: it’s God who creates their love, she tells Austin. The soar of Mabel’s voice lifts them off the ground. This is the master-chord of her campaign, tuned to her lover’s surrender to the Lord’s will in accord with the prime drama of his milieu. As Mabel returns rave for rave, translating Austin’s passion into her own eloquence, abundant inward fuel steams from ‘that little star of a presentiment which never wholly leaves me’. She splurged her savings on a sealskin cape like Sue’s, which Mabel had long coveted. The slur of blackness forgotten, Mabel’s emergence in the black cape was a token of the identity in which Mabel’s imagination dressed herself.
The black cape means more than fashion. It’s a sign of Mabel’s continued eye to Sue. Closer to hunger than to love, there’s a possessiveness like that of a stalker or obsessive fan, potentially dangerous to its object. Mabel was fixed on the Dickinsons: on the kingly authority of Austin Dickinson, on the genius of the poet and more instinctively on Susan whose brain, enhanced by reading, had fitted her to join this family. The danger to Susan Dickinson was Mabel’s need to be her. It’s more than a simple wish on the part of a mistress to change her status; there’s a compulsion to take on the very being of the person she wants to eliminate. If Mabel’s imitation is more sinister than the shallow narrative of the femme fatale, what narrative does she devise? Her urgings are softer than Lady Macbeth’s, not so forthright, not so commanding: a Lady Macbeth with the passive manner of nineteenth-century womanhood. Her wish at this point is still covert: when, oh when, will Austin remove the obstacle?
This didn’t happen. Nine months later Austin can be found participating contentedly in summer activities with his family. In July 1886, unknown to Mabel, he accompanied Susan, Mattie and Ned on an overnight jaunt to arrange a vacation in Ashfield, Massachusetts, a lovely drive through the Berkshire hills; there was a picnic at Mount Sugarloaf in Sunderland; and Austin invited the same party and Lavinia (recently bereft of Emily) on a long evening drive to Leveritt (where he and Mabel had made love a month earlier). At his wife’s invitation, Austin joined his family twice at Ashfield in August, and over Mabel’s objection he went back a third time to help them home.
He told her bluntly, ‘You’ve made a mistake.’
She grovelled at once. Fearing to lose him, her abjection was overwrought.