Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [151]
‘Have you ever been accustomed to give attention to your own business and the care of your own property?’ Mr Hammond, acting for her, asked.
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘Did you and your brother and sister sign a deed of that original [meadow] lot to Mrs Todd?’
‘Yes, sir. My sister was not living.’
Mr Hamlin, acting for Mrs Todd, objected. ‘I don’t see what relation this has to this matter.’ But it did, for Miss Vinnie had revealed two vital facts: one, that Mabel Todd had already received a plot of Dickinson land. Two, Miss Vinnie made it clear that Emily’s death preceded the transaction. Her lawyers had prepared this trail towards a trap as yet out of sight.
One eyewitness at the trial was Mary Jordan, an early Vassar graduate who taught English at Smith College in Northampton. She thought Miss Vinnie ‘ridiculous’, exactly as Vinnie had intended in her role as helpless dupe.
‘Miss Dickinson, is not this your signature [on the deed]?’
‘Yes - that is to say, it’s my autograph. I understood that someone in Boston wished my autograph, and thought that was what I was doing when I wrote it.’
‘Can you confirm that this case is about a release?’
‘Isn’t that business?’ Miss Vinnie asked in a wondering voice. ‘I know nothing of business.’
‘Did you not know that this was a contract?’ Offered the more familiar term, Miss Vinnie batted it back.
‘Isn’t that business, too? Father always attended to business.’
‘Miss Dickinson, did you never employ labor?’
‘No.’
‘Do you mean that you never hired servants?’
Miss Vinnie appealed to Judge Hopkins. ‘Does he mean Maggie?’
Judge Hopkins was seen to contain his mirth. Yet professional men respected gentlewomen like Miss Vinnie. The quaint unworldliness of the New England spinster was as she should be. Endearing. Unpretending. Her crape mourning veil reminded the court of her loss: her brother’s death had left her alone and unprotected.
Across the courtroom Mabel, in a stylish black hat surmounted with two white birds’ wings, thought Lavinia looked absurd. In her later years, reminiscing to her daughter, Mabel recalled Vinnie’s white, wrinkled face and wide mouth - too wide when she opened her mouth in wonder, showing too many teeth, some not her own. Mabel kept her lips even, as a lady should. She carried herself as tall as she could, like the New Woman of the day: a towering goddess whose upswept, puffed-out hair balanced a big hat, and whose arched bosom, like a straining bow, overhung a cinched waist. Taking her cues from Washington society, she didn’t see that Miss Vinnie’s indifference to fashion upstaged her. To a New England judge it declared a confidence in who she was, an authenticity and independence beyond the range of worldly cleverness.
Her junior counsel, Henry Field, remembered Miss Vinnie ‘distinctly’ in after years when he himself became a judge. He’d feared cross-examination might confuse her. ‘But not at all. On the witness stand she appeared perfectly natural and composed, not in the least bit disconcerted by an array of opposing Counsel and a Court-room filled with curious spectators.’ Thirty-four years later he reminisced to her niece:
On the witness stand she appeared to be just what she was, a gentlewoman of breeding, refinement, culture and perfect manners determined to tell the truth as she saw it.
As I recall it she was slight and delicate and on the witness stand made me think of one those little red porcelain miniatures in a gold frame.
Vinnie’s masterstroke was to express herself as the innocent she was assumed to be - and, to some extent, was, though not entirely in this instance. Her innocence recalls Emily Dickinson’s ‘Daisy’ role. Where Emily performed in