Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [166]
As the years passed, Aunt Emily saw less of Mattie than she saw of her brothers whom Aunt seemed to love unreservedly. At fifteen Mattie was keener to visit her responsive piano teacher Mrs Todd, whose cuffs racing up and down the piano were painted with flowers of her own design.
Mattie was shaping contentedly in this chrysalis when it was ripped away. Her pious, reproving father fell in love with Mrs Todd, crossed his ‘Rubicon’ and cut off his family. Mattie, still a schoolgirl in love with her teacher, found herself included in Mrs Todd’s slurs on ‘the Powers’, thus punished for standing by her mother. To her father his two remaining children no longer felt to him as children. The dead Gib, he decided, was the only child he’d loved.
Aunt Emily called her teasingly ‘our martial Mattie, / Flag and Drum in one’. When rows split the family Mattie was not weak like Ned, and she was not, like her mother, ‘bridalled’. Mattie had therefore less to lose by cutting behaviour to Mabel Todd. Years later, when Mabel counted her scars, she declared that no one was as bad as Susan Dickinson except Mattie ‘who is worse in all ways’.
It happened that Aunt Emily felt a warmer stir of kinship when Susan showed her Mattie’s studio photograph at the age of eighteen. ‘I knew she was beautiful; I knew she was royal; but I didn’t know that she was hallowed. ’ Why didn’t she know? Why should Mattie have ever appeared to her unhallowed? Following this affirmation was a note of caution: Aunt Emily still hoped that Mattie might be ‘saved’, but warned that salvation of the mind precedes that of the soul. Emily Dickinson never sent Mattie a poem nor shared her feeling as in notes to Ned. Mattie was not included in her audience.
For the next decade, until Mattie was twenty-nine, her father was sealed off, while she felt the hot breath of harm upon her life. Then came some kind of breakdown, followed by marriage to a confidence man and his drain on her inheritance. Yet she knew her mother cared for her, and she cared for her mother devotedly, anxiously, hardly daring to go out after Susan began to fail at the age of eighty.
When Susan died nothing was said of her intimacy with Emily Dickinson. It devolved on Mattie to revive this in The Single Hound: Poems of a Life-time, a selection of the dazzling poems Susan had received from the poet. Mattie published this volume to record the ‘romantic friendship’ of the ‘dear dead women’. Dickinson’s poem of c. 1858, ‘One sister have I in the house, / And one a hedge away -’, was entitled ‘To Sue’ and appears on its own like a dedication. It follows Mattie’s biographical preface about a poet who had been visible only to those ‘who dwelt with her behind the hedge’.
This remarkable preface lights up the poet: her bronze hair worn low in her neck, half-covered by the velvet snood; her cheek velvety-white with no vestige of colour; her long upper lip over regular little teeth ‘like a squirrel’s’. We see her lift up her hands when she jokes or scores a point. Her palms flash in triumph. We see, for a moment, her gesturing vivacity, and we see too her complicity with children. Her eyes ‘smoulder’ when a child feels wronged. When Mattie’s too small to go to church she’s left at the Homestead with her aunt, who stuffs her with sweets and cookies. At the age of four Mattie already knows it’s naughty.
Her aunt’s scrapes fascinate Mattie as a child. Tender to flowers but not to cats, Aunt Emily drowns four ‘superfluous’ kittens in a barrel of pickle brine in the Homestead cellar. Judge Lord happens to be visiting Mr Dickinson when the putrefying corpses make themselves known. Mattie’s focus is the ease of Aunt’s escapes: she would take to her room until quiet was restored. No repercussions. Old Mr Dickinson did not reproach Emily, as though this man of deliberation and policy had reason to calm her or permit her to calm herself.