Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [32]
Over the following four months, while Martha was away, Sue was drawn into friendship with Emily: two girls of nineteen who were inwardly unlike their society. Each recognised in the other the molten emotions of transformation: Sue, newly converted and reaching out to a heaven that held her sister; Emily freshly in touch with what Emily Brontë calls ‘the God within my breast’. Again, Emily was ‘in love’ as she sat beside a friend on the doorstep of the Dickinson house.
When Martha came back to Amherst in December 1850 she and Sue bonded so inseparably that Emily teased them as ‘twin-Martha’ and ‘twin-Susie’. On the day of Martha’s return, Emily feared to intrude an ‘unwelcome face’ on their reunion, even as she pleaded with the Gilberts not to forget the Dickinsons’ invitation to join their own ‘little world of sisters’ - not excluding the angel face of ‘dear Mary - sainted Mary’. How could they resist? It was not only grief that opened the hearts of the Gilbert sisters; they were unhappily placed with their brother-in-law, a business-man with a company called Sweetser & Cutler. Vinnie’s diary, recording a visit to the Cutlers on 27 February 1851, finds that one word can sum up Mr Cutler: ‘dreadful’.
Mr Cutler looked on his wife’s sisters as unwanted dependants. He was tight-fisted, and their sense of oppression was almost physical: the Cutler house was stuffy, over-heated to a degree that Sue longed to escape. She resolved to support herself and found a post teaching mathematics at a private school, Mr and Mrs Archer’s Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies at 40 Lexington Street, Baltimore.
Like Emily, here was a young woman filled with possibility, but where Emily was expressive and exhilarating - merry to the point of hilarity - Susan was sober, a reserved Jane Eyre aware of an orphan’s position as visitor in others’ homes and therefore very careful, very proper. There were two plots open to her: she might marry or she must earn her living as a teacher, the course her superior brain seemed to dictate. Her distaste for Mr Cutler, followed by Mary’s wreckage ten months after her wedding, were hardly inducements to marry. Sue, buttoned up to her tight, white collar, her shining hair pulled back from the straight line of its centre parting, ignored family protests and signed up for the 1851-2 school year.
Where Emily was ‘bold’ in spirit, Sue was bold in action. In the summer of 1851 there was as yet no railroad to Amherst, and it was an arduous journey - a girl of twenty travelling alone, protected only by her barrier of mourning and propriety - as, stage by stage, she made her way south to Maryland. She faced an unbroken year away from twin-Martha, since they could not afford to meet during school vacations. The pay for women teachers was less than for men. She could save next to nothing, Sue found, once the costs of board, lodging and laundry were deducted from her earnings.
Emily offered a lifeline in her frequent letters: an unbreakable bond between two women on the biblical model of Ruth and Naomi. ‘You won’t cry any more, will you, Susie, for my father will be your father, and my home will be your home, and where you go, I will go, and we will lie side by side in the kirkyard.’
Emily’s appeal was this breath of intimacy - friendship to the death and beyond, renewed by acts of memory: the doorstep, the evergreens overhead and their cultivation of reverie in line with Emily’s favourite book, Ik Marvel’s Reveries of a Bachelor (at twenty Emily thought it hardly worth living if ‘Ik’ - as Donald Grant Mitchell styled himself - should stop turning out novels). Her letters to Sue keep up a bombardment of longings, refusing to conceal their absurd violence. In October 1851, when Sue had been away about three months, Emily let loose a humorously jealous attack on