Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [35]
Virulence was a family joke, drawing in ‘the folks’, as Austin and Emily called their parents. As a lover, Austin put aside this vein. A man, he thought, had to adopt an overwrought manner towards a candidate for romance: he spoke like a languishing knight and wished ‘Lady Susan’ to play fairy-enchantress. What Emily called Austin’s ‘very high style of rapture’ was so fixed that even in the presence of tart sisters and a practical mother he clung to his notion of a creature who must be fed nonsense till she’s netted. The less his overtures appeared to engage Sue, the louder and more persistently Austin roared out romantic platitudes.
If it was Emily’s parallel fancy to possess Susan, it never occurred to brother or sister that they competed; on the contrary, they saw in their responses to Sue complementary affirmations of their choice. Austin was content to assume ‘spiritual converse’ between his sister and Sue. True, of course, but Austin might have been surprised by the ardour of Emily’s letters. Nor would he have realised how her intimacy would have compensated for his own effusions.
While Sue was away for the school year, Emily and Austin took on Martha Gilbert as a sort of understudy. Although she and Sue continued to wear identical black dresses, with tight white collars pinned with the same oval brooch at the throat, their looks belied their twinning. Martha had slanting, rather attractively narrow blue eyes and a delicate mouth. Her centre parting was less straight, her hair softer than her sister’s severity. Susan had heavy, dark eyes and plush lips. Her features were almost thick, the sort of dramatic handsomeness that was to become fashionable in the twentieth century when women put on trousers: womanhood veiled by the masculine guise. Sue seemed to inhabit a space between the sexes, a shade away from masculinity. Her coolness would have been all the more provocative clothed in the demure, doll-like corset and full skirt of the 1850s. Provocative, too, the sheath of black, in which she moved, an unpierced seal of grief.
All the while Austin was writing to a remote Susan he encouraged her sister’s shy responsiveness with letters, drives and a bracelet of scented beads from Boston - Martha’s blue eyes were alight, Emily reported to her brother. That month, September 1851, Austin writes to thank ‘Mat’ for a bouquet she sent him and reminds her of a ride ‘too pleasant to seem real’. For the next forty years he kept the drafts of these letters. Though Austin always preferred Susan, it was comforting to induce a response in her ‘twin’ and to ready Mat as first reserve at a time when Sue appeared to prefer a career. Emily too took comfort in Mat’s proximity and encouraged her attraction to Austin, suggesting it would do him good - away in Boston - if they kept him alive in their hearts with constant talk. At the same time she stoked her brother’s interest.
‘She thinks a great deal of you,’ Emily confided. ‘Martha loves you, and we both love Susie, and the hours fly so fast when we are talking of you.’
A month later she told Austin, ‘I give all your messages to Mat - she seems to enjoy every one more than the one before . . .’. And so it came about that what had been a three-cornered tie became four-cornered in the course of 1851-2: Emily and Austin entranced with Susan; Martha entranced with Austin; Susan not entranced with Austin and drawn more by Emily’s irresistible intimacy.
With Mat so plainly in love, Emily could broach a subject Sue had avoided - physical desire - as she and Mat sat close together on the front door stone one light evening in early June.
Afterwards they shared ‘a bit of Heaven’ as they walked ‘side by side’ westward along Main Street ‘beneath the silent moon’ a short distance towards Martha’s home in Amity Street, a continuation of Main Street on the other side of town. Talking led each to dream of ‘that great blessedness’ of a permanent union ‘by which two lives are one’. The possibility came close; it seemed almost upon them: ‘how it can fill the heart, and