Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [155]
On 3 April Judge Hopkins delivered his verdict. The deed Miss Dickinson had signed without understanding was held to be void. The court ordered Professor and Mrs Todd to return the land to Miss Dickinson. The judge also ordered the defendants to pay the costs of the trial: $49.55.
Public opinion in Amherst on the whole favoured the judgment. Miss Vinnie may not have told the truth, townsfolk said, but she had a right to dispose of her property as she wished.
Mabel was astounded. ‘Something was done in ways other than in court,’ she suspected. The verdict ‘kills me daily’ she wrote in her diary later in the month. ‘I cannot seem to get out from under it.’ Lavinia had lied, while her own defence had been strong - so strong, she heard, that Harvard Law School used it to illustrate how a case weighted with truth and evidence on one side can go the other way. Mabel Todd felt with justice her right to recompense for the extraordinary effort of the last decade and the feat she had performed in bringing Emily Dickinson permanently before the world. In court, Miss Vinnie had deliberately minimised what Mrs Todd had achieved. Mrs Todd had ‘asked’ to do the work of copying. ‘She asked the privilege of it’ and Miss Vinnie thought Mrs Todd sufficiently rewarded. ‘I knew that she thought it would be for her literary reputation to do it, and it made her reputation.’ As far as Miss Vinnie was concerned, the largesse had been hers.
Mabel Todd had combated the copyist image with evidence of her evolving expertise on the Dickinson papers. She had explained to the court all she had done to order undated manuscripts, to transcribe a difficult and changing hand, to persuade and co-opt Mr Higginson, to struggle with printers who ‘could not conceive as possible Emily Dickinson’s use of certain characteristic words’ and, finally, to promote the first volumes of Emily Dickinson with talks and readings, each and every time to excited applause. All this Miss Vinnie had dismissed when she told the court, ‘the poems got there on their own legs’.
With Ned and Mattie literally behind her, Vinnie took the high ground, a Dickinson grandee waving away a presuming flunky. It was nothing less than a denial of the destiny Mabel Todd had fulfilled.
After the tongue-lashing from Taft on the last afternoon of the trial, Mabel left with head high and took herself off to tea with Mrs E. P. Harris, who was part of a circle who shared her outrage. Mrs Stearns and Mrs Washington Cable (wife of the Southern writer of local-colour tales) had supported her throughout the trial. Others criticised her for showing her face. The Todds responded in fighting mode. Early in May, they instructed their lawyers, Hamlin & Reilly, to take the case to the state Supreme Court. Who would lose in the long run was yet in question.
A Supreme Court judge called Field was another to back away from an adulteress. His excuse for resigning from the case was that Caro Lovejoy Andrews (Mabel’s cousin and David’s sometime bedmate) had told him so much that he could not judge independently. As it happened, his place was taken by one of the great legal figures of the American scene. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, son of the poet-doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Bostonian and Harvard graduate, was soon to be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. In September 1898 he presided over the Todds’ appeal at the sitting of the state Supreme Court in Northampton.
Holmes made two astute observations. One was that Mrs Todd was too busy. Miss Dickinson appeared passive in the face of Mrs Todd’s ‘multiple’ initiatives: getting the blank for the deed, filling it in, rounding up Mr Spaulding. The court noted the style of a social call arranged and managed