Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [40]
‘I never did notice what people wear,’ said Austin flatly.
‘Did Sue wear a basque?’ Vinnie prompted.
‘She did have on a black thing.’
‘What did she say of me?’ Emily badly wanted to know, not having heard a word for half a year.
Austin remained vague. ‘She said I must tell you everything.’
‘A message?’
‘No.’
Emily sighed over ‘a good-for-nothing fellow’ who, a moment later, would be firing off raptures to Sue. A new wedding date had been set for the following autumn. Conceivably, Sue had joined her brothers, hoping to take refuge from pressure. But since her brothers offered handsome handouts on her marriage to a promising young lawyer of good family they are likely to have encouraged it. Her brothers’ wishes would have weighed with Sue in the way such wishes weighed with any unmarried girl who did not want to become a permanent financial burden on her family. Everyone but the prospective bride wanted this marriage, and Sue returned to her Amherst fate in February 1855.
That month, Mr Dickinson wished his daughters to join him in Washington. From 1853 to 1855 he served in Congress, representing his district of Massachusetts as a conservative Whig. In new clothes, Emily felt like a reluctant peacock in borrowed plumes. As a stranger at Mr Cratchett’s boarding house, amid the turmoil of the capital, she was ‘unwell’. Again, silence as to symptoms. Whatever they were they excused Emily certain gaieties, though she and Lavinia did meet Christopher Dawes Eliot, who shared rooms with her father. From these rooms at Willard’s Hotel the pair were in the process of founding the anti-slavery Republican party.9
After three weeks in Washington, in March the Dickinson sisters went on to Philadelphia to stay with friends called the Colemans. Since Emily rarely left home there has been huge interest in this episode, though almost nothing is known beyond the fact that, while there, she encountered the Revd Charles Wadsworth, then pastor of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church. It was his habit to withdraw from his congregation by way of a trapdoor after a theatrical sermon, an insistent solitude that Christopher Benfey likens to Hawthorne’s gloomy minister who isolates himself behind a black veil.
Emily was attracted to these trappings of solitude. ‘You are troubled,’ she ventured to say to this man sixteen years her senior.
‘My life is full of dark secrets.’ He shivered as he spoke.
She was impressed with the vehemence of sorrow, and even more with secrets. Later, by letter, she confided to him a ‘sorrow’ of her own. He had no idea what the ‘affliction’ of ‘Miss Dickenson’ could be, conveyed with so much emotional urgency, but offered his sympathy and prayers.
In October 1855 Emily was ecstatic to receive a visit from Jane Humphrey. Jane had returned to Amherst before taking up a post at an elite Massachusetts school at Groton. To see her again revived all the acuteness of Emily’s attachment: ‘Jennie - my Jennie Humphrey - I love you well tonight, and for a beam from your brown eyes, I would give a pearl.’ It made her weep to think of the friends she had lost, ‘the longing for them’ - all those ‘who stray from me’. At nearly twenty-five, it was coming home to her that all her efforts to develop an alternative life based on women’s friendship were doomed in the face of an economic system based on marriage. Should she contrive to kiss a joy as it flies, or exert a firmer hold?
‘I try to prize it, Jennie, when the loved are here, try to love more, and faster, and dearer, but when all are gone, [it] seems as had I tried harder, they would have stayed with me.’
Holding still to the intimacy of their past, Emily urged her once more to renew their tie. ‘No day goes by, little One, but has its thought of you, and its wish to see you. When shall you come again?’ Tenderly, calling her ‘my Child’, Emily made a final plea for words: ‘will you write me instantly?’
Jane never replied. She went on teaching until 1858 - ten years in all - and then resigned when, at twenty-nine, she married.
Deacon