Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [148]
Maggie’s testimony opposed this claim. She had heard Mrs Todd ‘often’ speak of her work on the poems as ‘a labor of love’. When the royalties for the first volume arrived Miss Lavinia had handed the bills and money to Mrs Todd in the dining room.
‘Is that right, Mrs Todd?’ she’d asked, and Mrs Todd had expressed herself ‘satisfied’ with what Miss Lavinia had shared.
Maggie described working at The Dell over a three-month period, when she had been there helping the Todds every day from three in the afternoon until eight in the evening ‘by Miss Dickinson’s wish’. She was not paid for this work: ‘I always told [Mrs Todd] I wanted no compensation; that I was doing it because she was editing Miss Emily’s poems for Miss Dickinson.’ Austin used to call between five and six, when Mr Todd would be in college. ‘I would see [Mr Dickinson] coming; I never let him in. He generally came in at the side door . . . Mrs Todd let him in.’
‘Did you observe any act of intimacy between Mr Dickinson and Mrs Todd?’ Hammond asked.
‘I remember at one time when Mr Dickinson brought some laurel to trim Mrs Todd’s front hall stairs, and he placed the laurel there for her in a large vase, and she put her arms around him and kissed him and said, “You dear old man”.’
Another scene had them embracing and kissing upstairs, ‘on the second landing’, as seen from the landing below. Maggie testified also that Mrs Todd had been alone with Mr Dickinson at The Evergreens when his family was away in 1893. He had asked Maggie to bring over lunch at one o’clock. She hadn’t seen Mrs Todd but had heard her singing at the piano. Three hours later Mrs Todd had stopped by to see Miss Dickinson, coming from the direction of The Evergreens.
‘Did you ever hear Mrs Todd say that she was not allowed by Mr Dickinson’s family to come to that house?’ Hammond interposed over sharp objection from Bumpus.
‘I have heard her say she was not allowed to go there. She would say that she was very sorry she couldn’t go there, and she didn’t know why she couldn’t. Miss Dickinson would answer to her, “You know the reason why.”’
Maggie’s most pointed testimony was that the pair had often been alone together at the Homestead. ‘They met very frequently; probably three or four times a week, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the forenoon, either in the dining room or the library. Sometimes for three or four hours just as their consciences allowed them. They met alone; the door was shut.’
She also recalled scenes when Mrs Todd had run out of funds: ‘I recollect another time she wanted to see him to get some money and she waited in the kitchen until she saw him come across from his house. They both went into the library, and an hour later she went home.’
Bumpus, with constant objections, did his best to obstruct what Maggie was saying, but she proved a careful, precise witness, not saying more than what she had observed. Bumpus could not block her acid remark as to what the consciences of the lovers ‘allowed’, since this moral opinion was embedded in a factual answer. No lawyer could have turned a defter phrase.
Hammond once more pressed Maggie ‘whether or not at any time at Miss Dickinson’s house you saw any act of intimacy between Mr Dickinson and Mrs Todd’.
Maggie recalled a scene that took place in 1891. The lovers hadn’t seen her, though she’d been no more than a foot away. ‘They came from the dining room to the kitchen. I was in the next room, which we call the wash-room, with the doors open. She put her arms around him and kissed him.’ They did this in silence. ‘They had been in the house about two hours.’
‘Did Miss Lavinia Dickinson know that Mr Dickinson, her brother, and Mrs Todd were in her house in the way you have stated?’ Bumpus demanded when it was his turn to cross-examine.