Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [157]
He is stifled further by the ‘smooth front’ the family has to present, pretending that nothing is wrong. Part of the angst of the trial is to lay the adultery trail without a public disclosure that would dishonour an errant father. Austin’s death had opened up a prospect of peace for a brief space before the woman who’d ‘brought a sword into the family’ started on her next round of initiatives: exposing Aunt Emily to public sneers and defrauding Aunt Lavinia.
Some of this Ned confided to a trusted friend, Theodore Frothingham, in coded words, taking care not to mention names. Ned warmed to Frothingham for hearing him out ‘without making a row’. He writes in a mocking tone designed to make light of things, unlike the heavy ardour of his father. ‘It rains too hard for scandals in high life, and the town alas has no low life.’ So fond are these letters to Frothingham, they appear lover-like. But whatever he may have felt for Frothingham, at the age of thirty-six Ned was drawn to Alice (Alix) Hill, who had been Mabel Todd’s assistant for Poems: Third Series. Mabel’s diary shows them together almost daily, working, cycling and talking till two in the morning when Alice stayed the night.
Alice had a pale face and watchful expression like the young Emily Dickinson. She too had a strange, warning look about the eyes, though not so widely spaced - more hare than kangaroo. She wore a ruff about her neck, completely hiding it in the way Lavinia longed to hide that voice-funnel her sister had exposed in the scooped neck of the 1840s. Unlike Mabel’s eye-catching headgear, Alice wore a flattish hat, dipped to the side with a modest plume towards the back. The effect was quiet and self-contained.
Ned hoped his mother and sister would welcome so dear a girl into the family. Just before the trial, in January 1898, they agreed to receive Alice, but their correctness fell short of enthusiasm. The visit left an uncomfortable silence at home. Ned declared to Frothingham he’d marry even if it hurt ‘the world’, while his troubled mother confided to Frothingham that ‘the dear boy is rather too happy to be wise just now’.
Susan Dickinson was against the marriage for reasons we can only guess. Was it resistance to a girl who was friends with Mabel? Was there a fear that Ned might pass on epilepsy if he had children? Or fear for ‘the Dickinson heart’? There may have been a consensus in the family that Ned was physically unfit for more than his quiet post as a college librarian. Mattie was less resistant to Ned’s marriage than her mother and Ned liked to think: ‘When the pinch comes, Sis can always be counted on to do the square thing.’
Susan took a tough line. At the end of January 1898 she exacted a promise from Ned not to see Miss Hill for three months. In this manner Ned was deprived of happiness at just the time he went through the ordeal of the trial. Obviously Susan hoped that separation would weaken the tie, but the stress of capitulating to his mother’s demand, compounded by the humiliating publicity of the trial, impaired Ned’s always precarious health.
Angina hit him in mid-April as the end to Susan’s interdict approached. His agony was terrible. Two and a half weeks later, on 3 May 1898, poor Ned’s heart stopped.
Strangely, the date on his tombstone is a year earlier: May 3, 1897. It can’t have been a mistake because, in after years, Mattie kept up the fiction of the earlier date. This suggests that the altered date was deliberate. Ever since his early twenties his mother’s care had consoled Ned for his father’s rejection. Susan’s coldness following her encounter with Miss Hill in January could have been too much for him. Either