Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [169]
In December 1920 she married him. Bingham, unlike her father, was a moral being. It felt a privilege to live with someone so good. Millicent was, all the same, her father’s daughter in her scientific pursuits. In 1923 she was the first woman to gain a doctorate in geography from Harvard. She walked through the Yard, solemn and unsatisfied in her academic gown. A degree was not really what she wanted.
What did she want?
Could she yet give meaning to her existence, and could this be achieved only if she freed herself of her unruly parents whose needs pressed ever more insistently upon her? David Todd was deranged and too disruptive to be on the loose. He was put in Bloomingdale Asylum in 1922, then moved to various other institutions, none suitable. Hard on Millicent when her father with a white beard gazed at her, as it were, from behind bars: it was Millicent’s fault, he said. She must release him at once. To look at him he seemed all there, with his stocky energy and the light of scientific curiosity alive in his eyes. He still had designs on the sun: how to capture its corona without the occluding clouds that had frustrated his many expeditions? In the mid-twenties he co-opted a pilot to take him and his photographic equipment above the weather. A photograph shows him smiley, hopeful as ever, preparing to board a fragile plane. He sent his daughter on scientific errands to friends here and there, but the friends turned out not to exist.
Meanwhile, Mabel Todd lived on in Florida, in fashionable Coconut Grove. She was now affluent after her years as star of the lecture circuit and she had the further support of wealthy Arthur Curtiss James, the yacht-owning sponsor of David’s second expedition to Japan. Her beautiful house, Matsuba, had three great arches opening out on a palm-tree garden. Too handicapped to play the piano herself, she invited others to perform. A photo in 1922 shows her poised on a step in black lace with a pointed hem showing off her still-fine ankles. Her black hat is festooned with black lace at the edge, casting a shade of allure.
Millicent, in a plain summer dress and floppy hat, positioned on a step below, silently disparages her mother’s get-up. It’s a throwback, she thinks, to the dressiness of the nineties. As Mabel aged she remained beautiful, even more so, redolent of old-fashioned charm. The society photographer Bachrach captured this as she sits, facing the camera with all her old poise, a black velvet band about her throat and her unbobbed hair pinned up with combs and barrettes as though in an effort to tame its abundance. She had a new partner, a painter called Howard Hilder. Come summer, Hilder would drive her Buick all the way from Florida to Maine where Mabel had a second home on Hog Island.
Mabel made light of her lamed side. Millicent was astonished by the undimmed glow, this readiness, as though a leg that wouldn’t move, a hand that could not hold, an ear that could not hear and teeth that clashed like china presented no problems. As though it did not matter that Mabel could no longer play the piano nor paint nor travel in her old intrepid way. As though Hilder were not inferior to the males who had buzzed around her blue-sky youth. Millicent frowned at Mamma’s unwillingness to face facts. She was ashamed of her mother’s hold on life, she owned to herself. ‘It revolts and disgusts me.’
Nearly a quarter of a century had passed since Mabel Todd finished with the Dickinsons. She buried defeat in a recess of consciousness, unwilling to articulate the truth even to herself, let alone to her daughter. The truth she buried was this: the Dickinsons had their victory because, when it came to a public contest, lovely, gifted, industrious Mabel who had worked many years to bring recognition to Emily Dickinson was silently but effectively branded a scarlet woman.