Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [123]
When the plan for conception went into action Austin was nearly sixty and ‘frightened’. His children were grown up. Mabel, on the other hand, was only thirty-one and a child would have been a tangible fruit of their love. They were inordinately cast down in March, when conception didn’t happen in the first month. They talked to each other of ‘failure’, and ‘disappointment’ ate into Mabel’s morale when, despite hot baths to relax her body before their attempts, for month after month nothing happened. They agreed to go on with ‘the experiment’, but without much hope. Mabel became depressed in the course of the year; God, it seemed, had turned away.
Susan Dickinson, meanwhile, sustained a wifely correspondence with Austin while she and their children vacationed that summer at Claremont House in South West Harbor, Maine. She stressed how ‘safe’ they all were, as though their safety mattered. She was in the company of the Amherst elite, Mrs Seelye (wife of the college president) and Professor Stearns (ex-college president), and would be even more content were Austin to join their party. Her only cause for concern was Austin alone at home - even if he wasn’t lonely. ‘I am forevermore lonely[,] that goes without saying.’ This one flash of sadness does not press him too hard. As a solicitous wife she won’t trouble her husband, though she owes it to their past not to deny her continued attachment. If the likelihood occurred to her that, in their absence, Mabel would sleep with Austin at The Evergreens (as she indeed did), Susan ignored it. This path between honesty and diplomacy is delicately judged - for their children’s sake if not her own. There’s a reassuring message about the children. Mattie had written to him, and ‘Ned and Matty send their good-night with mine - Sue.’
So it happened that instead of this wife withering in a freeze emanating from her husband, it was the mistress who grew thin and dejected. To supplement David’s salary she took on music pupils and taught art at the Convent, the school run by Mrs Stearns (the widowed daughter-in-law of Professor Stearns). A photograph of Mrs Todd with her pupils shows her a little wasted in a row of robust schoolgirls.
On the evening of 22 October 1888 David Todd came home with what Mabel called a ‘thunderbolt’. It was almost certainly what she always dreaded: some slur on her reputation. ‘I was crushed’, she records in her diary. ‘Cried all night.’ Mabel was sure it emanated from her ‘enemies’ at The Evergreens. God, she thought, should really take away ‘that heavy incubus’ who weighed her down all the time. ‘I should do it if I had unlimited power.’ For the first time she allowed herself to resent Austin’s unwillingness to exert his power on her behalf: ‘how very easily it could all be straightened and made perfect’.
She continued to brood over this and a month later sent Austin her most urgent plea to act against his family:
Thanksgiving morning [29 November] 1888
. . . It almost seems to me as if there is a faint little shadow between us today - for the first time in six years. . . . I do trust you - fully, firmly, even when your judgement seems to me overcautious. I have hoped for changes to better us all these years. They have never come, but a steady pull, down in the other direction. Is it any wonder that I am eager for you to attack the fatal cause of it all?
. . . I urge you to save me . . . I see it becoming daily more impossible for me to live in the little town which is yours. I see myself more and more alone, and I know that it is all merely the deliberately planned result of a hatred and a threat made and begun many years ago. I see power over all this lying idly in your hands,