Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [163]
This belated cry takes us back to Mabel as a bride, expecting to purify her husband. Her defeat, in the early years of marriage, had been her ‘justification’ for an attachment more elevating than David could conceive. To Mabel there could be no doubt: ‘Austin was mine, mine and he is more mine now than ever before.’ By this she meant his incursions from the afterlife ‘where free winds blow that were never felt on earth’. To claim him so completely was to re-enact Dickinson’s poetic drama of deathless love with its attendant pain. ‘The scars,’ Mabel said, ‘cover my soul.’
This has been a story of secrets and explosions, culminating in the scandal of the trial. Where the loaded gun in the life of Emily Dickinson had been concealed, Austin showed no compunction in blowing up his family. There was no end to this, for Mabel shot off fresh slanders against Susan Dickinson: she was a drunkard like her father; she had an affair with Bowles; and then, too, she was a prude: ‘Sue hated anybody that should fall in love. Thought it was disgusting.’ Susan’s resistance to Mabel’s plans had long made it a fight to the death. ‘Why God lets [Sue] live and go on, I cannot see,’ Mabel exploded at the start of the new century: New Year’s Eve, 1900.
Mabel did have reason to resent the ‘killing’ injustice of Susan’s attempt in 1901 to have her name removed from the title pages of Emily Dickinson’s poems. David threatened litigation and the press stood by Mabel. David assured her that her name was ‘irrevocably’ associated with the poems, but there remained ‘a constant fight’ against ‘the wickedest woman who ever lived’.
The slander became crazed after Susan died, in 1913 when Mabel had a stroke while swimming: she claimed that an evil hand - none other than Sue’s - had pushed her down. And, sure enough, it was the ghost of Sue who retarded her recovery. The stroke - mere ‘sunstroke’, Mabel gave out - left her too handicapped to play the piano or speak in public. Millicent was brought up to hate and revenge, she remembered in her notes for an autobiography she never completed. For Millicent, as for Martha Dickinson Bianchi, their mothers’ wrongs called out to their daughters to take up arms.
15
TWO DAUGHTERS
Two daughters remained from the defeats of the first generation. Millicent Todd and Mattie Dickinson each bore wounds in their growing bones. Each tried to heal herself through a life of her own. Professional careers beckoned able women of their generation. Could they leave the feud behind or would loyalty to warring kin compel further action?
As a child, Millicent Todd was pained by what she knew. It was what she must not be seen to see and never, but never, mention. In any case, a girl in the 1880s had no words for it, as she sat in the Dickinson buggy between Mamma and the towering column of Mr Dickinson holding the reins. One stretch of road in the Pelham hills was imprinted on Millicent’s memory and recorded in one of her many autobiographical typescripts: the fragrant pinewoods on one side of the road; a blueberry patch on the other. It was as though the positions of each plant and each cloud in the sky pierced her consciousness when Mr Dickinson and Mamma leant towards each other behind Millicent’s stiffly arched back, stilled by tense elbows. Her eyes were fixed on the quivering ears of the horse ahead.
Mr Dickinson never bent down to see her solemn face and round brown eyes, watchful beneath a black fringe. He did not appear to know her name: at the Dickinson Homestead he called her ‘the child’ to his sister Miss Vinnie, whom Mamma visited so often that, one day, when Millicent herself is old, she will say ‘my early childhood