Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [142]
To consider Mabel’s allegiance to one man or the other may be the wrong question. She never compares husband and lover in the way of Hester Prynne or Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina. Here is an unclassifiable phenomenon: not quite the femme fatale, not quite the gold-digger, and not so much the social climber as to leave her husband in order to cling exclusively to her ‘King’. The constant in her history, far back, is that ‘presentiment’ combined with contempt for the domestic destiny of lesser women. Mabel’s ambition, confirmed by an array of talents but starved of means, came nearest the bone. Money therefore meant a lot to her.
Alerted to this, Austin had wished Mabel to inherit the Dickinson meadow. In the 1890s it was open land where corn grew - apart from the Todds’ plot which, as Vinnie stressed later, had been ‘cut out’ of what was now her property. Back in November 1887, when he’d made his will, Austin had assured Mabel she would benefit by his death since he’d arranged for Vinnie to hand over this stretch of seven to eight acres.
Austin covered his defection from his family with an impeccable will that left The Evergreens to his wife and the meadow to his sister. On the face of it, he was the responsible husband and brother. But Austin’s plan was otherwise: to do his family down, and to use his sister to carry this out. The promise he extracted from Lavinia required her, in effect, to take over the moral burden for disinheriting his children of this ancestral land. Lavinia’s niece and nephew, Mattie and Ned, were bound to be outraged, and Susan too on their behalf. Inevitably their anger would fall on Lavinia. Emily, it will be remembered, had stood by their nephew, assuring him there would be ‘no treason’. ‘. . . Ever be sure of me, Lad.’ If Lavinia acted on her brother’s wish she would be at war with these, her closest relations and neighbours - hard on a lonely woman. It’s unlikely Austin troubled himself to see beyond a scheme that shielded himself and Mabel from the scandal of an overt bequest of these proportions. He was, after all, accustomed to use Lavinia to further his affair.
When Austin’s heart was giving out in the early summer of 1895 he had done the Todds a final favour. On his last legs he had staggered over to The Dell in order to verify David’s survey of an adjoining strip of land including a great maple tree, the land Mabel wanted most. Austin had already landscaped and planted this strip as though it were part of the Todds’ plot. His final intention is unknown: could this have been a fall-back if Lavinia would not yield the whole meadow? There was nothing on paper apart from the private promise Austin had given Mabel in November 1887. Lavinia had not signed it, so Mabel depended on Lavinia’s assent to an instruction from her brother eight years earlier.
6 October 1895. Austin has been dead seven weeks. Mabel decides it is time to show Lavinia the letter from Austin: his private addendum to a will for an estate of nearly $34,000. It’s not like Austin’s other letters. He states their names: the letter is headed ‘Mrs Todd’ and signed ‘Wm A. Dickinson’ with an air of legal formality. Written in pencil, though, and unwitnessed, it has no legal validity. It’s designed to weigh with Lavinia alone. After the funeral a moved Lavinia had seemed to agree to this bequest, yet the weeks pass and nothing more is said.
On this Sunday morning Mabel goes to see Lavinia with the letter and Lavinia refuses to hand over the meadow.
Vinnie is ‘utterly slippery and treacherous’, Mabel fumes in her diary. Austin always said so, always ‘had entire contempt for her’ but ‘he did not think she would fail to do as he stipulated in this’.
Mabel had too much self-command to permit frustration to interfere with plans. If one plan failed she put a variation on the