Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [36]
Curious, emboldened by Mat’s responsiveness, the next day Emily took this up with Sue. ‘You and I have been strangely silent upon this subject, Susie, we have often touched upon it, and as quickly fled away, as children shut their eyes when the sun is too bright for them.’
Having ventured thus far, Emily now probed further. ‘I have always hoped to know if you had no dear fancy, illuminating all your life, no one of whom you murmured in the faithful ear of night - and at whose side in fancy, you walked the livelong day; and when you come home, Susie, we must speak of these things.’ Did Sue secretly respond to Austin, as Mat did? Or did Sue draw back in fear? ‘Oh, Susie, it is dangerous,’ Emily acknowledged. ‘It does so rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up.’ Her willingness to share the fear tempts Sue to reveal a more troubled state than Mat’s romantic love.
‘You have seen flowers at morning satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will now need nought but - dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace - they know that the man of noon, is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him.’
Susan did not enter into this fantasy. What Emily’s letters recall of their confidences as they’d sat on the door stone was, in fact, stone: two young women of twenty-one left cold by gallantries.
‘I guess I’m made with nothing but a hard heart of stone,’ Emily had said, ‘for it don’t break any, and dear Susie, if mine is stony, yours is stone, upon stone, for you never yield . . . Are we going to ossify always, say, Susie - how will it be?’
In a lowered voice Emily had proposed a different dream, ‘a big future waiting for me and you’.
This is what the grasses growing at the corner of the door stone had heard, trusty grasses who would not tell. In April 1852 Emily sent Sue ‘a sad and pensive grassie’, not quite so glad and green as when they used to sit there. She imagined how some spruce plantain leaf won its young heart away and then proved false. In her herbarium she had crossed a tall plantain leaf with a frail stalk of a flower, arranging the two to resemble a courting couple: the leaf upright and dominant; the flower bent. The flower’s small triangular head is so pliant it’s about to drop. It’s like a nineteenth-century lady’s head with flowerets on either side and furry filaments, exquisitely delicate. The leaf is broader, especially in the torso, and narrow-hipped.
Men meant marriage, and marriage meant childbirth, and childbirth could mean death. One strain in Sue’s and Emily’s tie was their absorption with death: Emily stamped with the graveyard under her window; Sue stamped with Mary’s fate. For Sue it was a brand of nature’s betrayal: the agony and mortality in wait for dream-filled girls at the end of the romance road.
Not surprising, then, if Sue shrank from contact with the ‘man of noon’; not surprising if Emily confessed ‘I so love to be a child’ when childhood friends, now in their twenties, succumbed to what womanhood would do to them. Contact with their own sex was safe. Sitting close and sharing beds was normal in the nineteenth century. Women often spoke like lovers to each other, endearments tripping off their lips, with no sense of deviance. It was easy for Emily to hold Sue, as she says, ‘to my heart’; or to crack time away with her little whip till she brings Sue back. Freely she cries out against the weeks she must get through: ‘I need her - I must have her, Oh give her to me!’
Desire, anger, the whip and ambition too: these were emotions good young women were not supposed to feel. Her beckonings to Sue and Martha, as to Jane Humphrey before them, drew them into her arena