Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [122]
‘She has promised to do this,’ he reassured Mabel.
Accustomed to his sister’s compliance, Austin trusted that this would happen after his death. The understanding allowed him to leave an impeccable will with no questionable obligations to a mistress. He merely left two paintings to Mabel Loomis Todd, as to a friend with whom he shared a taste for art.
Disappointed of a public claim, Mabel’s thoughts now turned to the West.
The frontier was the American answer to trouble. Huck Finn lights out for the Territory, and back in the seventeenth century Hester Prynne, condemned for adultery, tempts her one-time lover, the Puritan minister, to find liberty together in the wilderness, away from a punitive society. ‘I want to rush away into liberty with you,’ Mabel had suggested to Austin towards the end of 1885, at a time when Emily was too ill for him to take off. Earlier that year, he’d had a similar fantasy when Mabel had been in Europe. If he’d gone with her, he said, ‘I doubt if we should have returned’. If he’d thought about it in time he might have laid his situation ‘clearly’ before his sisters.
Could the lovers take off in the opposite direction? This idea became a possibility in November 1887 when Austin went west and south to look around. Behind him in the far past were pioneering forebears, old Nathaniel Dickinson in the seventeenth century and great-grandfather Nathan and great-great-grandmother Thankful Dickinson in the eighteenth century, but migration was not for Austin, any more than it would have been conceivable for his father. It had finished off his grandfather to leave his native place for Cleveland, Ohio. As Austin travelled from Cleveland and Columbus to St Louis, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Tennessee and Birmingham, Alabama, he was sending home almost daily letters informing Sue, in sharp barks, of his movements. To Mabel he continues in the vein of love letters, deferring comment on his impressions, but to Sue he opens up, as to a wife solicitous for her husband’s well-being: he hasn’t slept a wink due to a howling baby. He favours Sue with Western menus: a haunch of black-tail deer, hunter’s style. Here he is from Wichita, Kansas: ‘a great nasty, horrid human hoggery . . . My whole nature recoils from it.’ How appalling to find an all-wise Creator had made human beings so degraded and ignorant. ‘The wild hogs . . . that haunt the woods and stand in the shallow streams here seem not out of place - but the wretched mass of humanity - ’. Leaving Wichita on 15 November phrases erupt into dashes along his almost illegible lines. ‘Dante’s inferno is nothing -’. There’s chagrin to find how unsuited he is to a life beyond the perimeter of Massachusetts.
‘I wouldn’t give a volume of Emerson for the all the hogs west of the Mississippi,’ he told Sue. Emersonian individualism was often co-opted to back commercial greed. Here Austin rescues individualism with the fearlessness of his sister.
Mabel had no idea of this correspondence, nor how decisively Austin’s home thoughts put an end to running away. They show him turning to Sue as part of his habitual life - the life to which he will return. It was not what Mabel would have wished to hear.
Failing to bring off Sue’s demise, failing to establish a recognised claim in Austin’s will and failing to convince Austin to abandon his home, Mabel remained dissatisfied as the wife without the sign. There had to be some visible sign, and this time it was to be a Dickinson baby. In February 1888 this unmaternal woman resolved to conceive another child. The code phrase was ‘the experiment’. Mabel’s concern for her reputation was such that pregnancy would have been out of the question had David not agreed to pass off the child as his own. He would have been convinced, once more, that the