Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [39]
In the summer of 1854 Austin was about to take his final examinations at Harvard Law School. His professional qualification would have raised the prospect of firming up his plans. These are likely to have included a prospective date for a wedding, since by now he and Sue had been engaged for over a year. It was during this summer, while Austin was still in Cambridge, that Sue fell ill with what her doctor diagnosed as a nervous fever. She lay prostrate, too feeble to dress and unwilling to eat.
To Emily, it was an inflated drama. She mimicked Mrs Cutler’s anxious voice asking her to relay an important message to Austin: ‘Sue has eaten broth twice today and a chicken leg - She designs eating a wing tomorrow.’
Harriet Cutler and other fussing females had assigned Austin the role of ‘missing Saint’, Emily told him, ‘and as none of them speak of you . . . without plentiful tears, I have considerable work to arrange my emotions’.
Emily’s comedy rides over Sue’s frame of mind, at the centre of the clamour around her. No symptoms are mentioned, and the illness appears to be some sort of breakdown. There’s a strain and restlessness in Sue, not to be satisfied by Emily’s calling and calling to her to be her ‘darling’. Sue could not be healed by the prospect of future sistering - Emily’s share of Austin’s trophy.
A suggested cure was for Sue to join her brothers in the area of Grand Rapids and Grand Haven on the shore of Lake Michigan. Sue hesitated between her need to get away and guilt on Emily’s account.
‘Sue - you can go or stay,’ Emily told her, dreading her loss in line with former friends who had backed away from Dickinson intensity. ‘There is but one alternative - We differ often lately, and this must be the last. You need not fear to leave me lest I should be alone, for I often part with things I fancy I have loved, - sometimes to the grave, and sometimes to an oblivion rather bitterer than death - thus my heart bleeds so frequently that I shan’t mind the hemorrhage . . . Perhaps this is the point at which our paths diverge.’
Once Sue left, Emily had to disguise the rift. When the good folk of Amherst enquired after Sue, she was obliged to invent vaguely plausible answers. Yes, Susan had reached Michigan safely. Yes, Susan was better every day. Six months passed and still Sue kept her distance. Emily wrote twice, in her usual vein. To write felt futile, like bringing a thimbleful of dew to quench ‘the endless fire’. Not once does she enter into Sue’s collapse. Was this tact? Or was Emily too loyal to her brother to want to know? Sue kept these letters but remained silent, like Jane Humphrey before her. Emily wondered if Sue’s departure could be permanent.
Elements of the Dickinson legend appear in these letters of 1854: a bereft and disappointed persona developed, it appears, before she became a poet. Added to this persona is the ‘old-fashioned’ air enacted in a final letter to Abiah Root, in which Emily declines an invitation to visit. ‘I’m so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.’ In place of the tart young woman she was, Emily constructed this caricature complete with spectacles, work basket, and pussycat. Already, at twenty-three, she was rehearsing the part of retiring quaintness, beloved by posterity.
Austin went west in December 1854 to seek out Sue and explore the possibility of starting a legal practice in Chicago. On Austin’s return, Emily pressed him with questions, as she relates in a humorous letter to Austin’s adored in late January 1855.
‘How did Sue look?’
‘As she always did,’ Austin answered shortly.
‘What was she wearing?’ Two months after her engagement to Austin, Sue had taken off the black dress she had worn for nearly three years, and acquired a white dress, a white straw hat with a ruched ribbon, and a mantilla of fawn silk. Emily had noticed