Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [168]
On the other side of town, on a hill near the college, Millicent Todd moved her mother’s camphorwood chest to a purpose-built ‘barn’ beside Observatory House. Her father, increasingly unstable and given to aberrant behaviour, had lost his job and the Todds had to vacate their home. Millicent did the packing because the stroke had lamed Mamma’s arm. Mamma never mentioned what was in the locked chest, nor did Millicent ask. The Todds then settled in Coconut Grove in Florida.
Millicent felt responsible for her damaged parents and resolved to pursue graduate studies so that she could support them in old age. Ever studious and intrigued by remote parts of the world where she had accompanied her father’s expeditions, she began a doctorate in geography at Radcliffe, the sister college to Harvard. Her private life remained unsettled. In her twenties her ties were mainly with women, culminating in ‘a passionate attachment’ to a companion in Germany who proved ‘brutal’. Millicent had needed to wrench herself away. In her thirties she hoped to find a man who could rouse her, but the tameness of academic admirers left her cold. She would not permit even a pressure of the hand.
After America entered the First World War, Millicent volunteered for service abroad. Fluent in French, she was sent to Base Hospital 27 at Angers. At thirty-eight, in the uniform of the American Expeditionary Force, there was no sign of the uncertain shadow-being laid down in childhood. Miss Todd’s mouth showed a straight line under the brim of an unbecoming black hat. She proved efficient, humorous and able to converse in German with prisoners of war. From eight in the morning until ten at night she was ‘humbled’ by the sights and sounds of young men who were returned from the front maimed, with backs blistered, their minds shell-shocked, their eyes blown from their sockets and, perhaps worst of all, their lungs burnt out by mustard gas.
One sergeant called Joseph Thomas, wounded at Château Thierry, was told that he would never walk again; helped by Miss Todd, he did. She felt for him ‘a wild, reckless emotion, over which reason had no power’. He told her that he’d served in a regiment of engineers for two years and came from a military family, the son of Surgeon General Thomas in the Philippines, and grandson of General Thomas in the Civil War.
After the Armistice she stayed on as a lecturer in Grenoble with the United States Education Corps. In the summer of 1919 hundreds of American soldiers on furlough attended her course on the geography of France. She published a book on this subject, co-authored by the professor of geography at the University of Grenoble. The idea behind all this was an entente intellectuelle between two allies.
During these post-war months Millicent became engaged to Joseph Thomas. His kiss, sealing their future, was unlike anything she had ever experienced. ‘That was, for me, the climax of my life.’ Then, without a word, he disappeared. As she searched for him it became plain that all he’d told her was a lie. Eventually she tracked him down to Muskogee, Oklahoma. He didn’t want her. It was ‘utter annihilation’.
She turned to work, and then to an academic of her own age, Walter VanDyke Bingham, a founder of industrial psychology whom she had known seven years earlier. She had been with him to a winter carnival at Dartmouth (where he’d taught). He had been in love; she, not. Since then he had investigated aptitudes at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He was long and lean, a good-tempered man with a benevolent smile breaking into long lines on either side of his mouth, the bottom half of which had a full jaw like a whale. He had the communicative skills of whales, and sang his whale song to Millicent about caring for his kind. It reverberated benignly through her solitary sea. In Maine during the summer of 1920 they rowed around Hog Island to the side facing the open ocean, and here he asked her to marry him. She was emotionally dead, she confessed. He didn’t seem to mind.
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