Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [140]
Lavinia was a fame-seeking fool, Austin exploded to Emily’s publisher, Mr Hardy.
But Austin’s heart condition and failing health changed the balance of power. For Mabel it meant an end to kingly protection. Lavinia, freed from her brother’s rule, burst into action. This sister who had been in the background, tending others, advanced with unexpected aplomb towards the footlights of a public confrontation. From now on Lavinia Dickinson was centre stage.
As Austin lay dying in the summer of 1895 he sent a message of gratitude to David Todd. For twelve years Austin had believed in the primacy of his tie with Mabel, and Mabel’s letters had endorsed this belief. Only once did Susan shake it. She pointed out that while Austin had rejected all physical and emotional attachment to his marriage, Mabel had not done so with hers. What Austin had taken to be no more than the dutifulness of wifely devotion continued to be, for David, an active tie. So Susan argued: Mabel claimed two men and ‘had the best’ of both their lives. In reporting this to Mabel, Austin owned to the awkwardness he was made to feel. He had no adequate answer. Nor did Mabel offer one.
During Austin’s last weeks, confined to bed at The Evergreens where Mabel had no access, Lavinia still acted on the lovers’ behalf, trying to carry letters from Mabel undetected by the rest of the family. Austin died on 16 August, when the Todds were away in New Salem, near Shutesbury, where David delivered a speech on the Dickinson dynasty.
In contrast to the relief at The Evergreens - an end to the daily pain inflicted by a father and husband who’d withdrawn his love - the Todds were shattered. ‘My best friend died tonight, & I seem stranded,’ David cried out in his diary, ‘he touched and forwarded everything.’ The funeral, on 19 August, struck him as the saddest day of his life. Millicent, aged fifteen, never forgot her mother’s inconsolable weeping and pleas for her husband to fetch the love letters from the vault. Secrecy now compelled her less than what she needed: to make Austin’s love known. Austin was never persuaded to make her ‘Mabel Loomis Dickinson’ - in effect, to go public. Once he’d gone, she was prepared to defy opinion in a new role as Austin’s widow, an open rival of Susan Dickinson, back in her blacks.
So here is Mabel in a black dress, black cape and black hat. With a black mourning veil over her face and her lover’s ring on a pointed finger when she draws off her gloves, Mabel goes about as Austin’s rightful mate. Lavinia remonstrates in vain: ‘It’s degrading to Austin.’
‘Austin wished it,’ Mabel says. ‘It was a promise between us.’
To flaunt her ‘widowing’ is, of course, provocative: insulting to Susan, embarrassing to her own husband and altogether indiscreet. Is this the woman who’d left Amherst in the winter of 1889-90 to avoid the whispers? Her public conduct in the late summer of 1895 reveals her as less than calculating: it’s natural to her to extend a genuine loss and grief in turns and costumes. Mabel’s all too manifest widowhood recalls her haggard appearance at Dickinson’s graveside in May 1886. The theatricality to which she rose on occasion is not to say it was all an act.
Before Austin’s funeral an acute and genuine anguish had thrust her into a dramatic scene. Defying the prohibition against her entering The Evergreens, she slipped inside while the family dined (in a room to the left) and dashed through the red hall, turning right, into what the family called ‘the dying room’, the dark old marital bedroom where the body lay. Here is her diary entry for Monday, 19 August 1895: ‘My Austin is going to Wildwood [cemetery] - that is, his dear, dear body is. I kissed it a