Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [5]
‘What have I done?’ she asked herself in her journal.
Her sturdy, fair-haired husband was more hopeful. David Peck Todd had been lured by a hint that a donor stood ready with $300,000 or more to build a new observatory. It was a wily hint, for President Julius Seelye of Amherst College had judged correctly that Todd was an ambitious man without means. Then, too, to be approached by what had been his own college had appeared to Todd in a flattering light. So, when the new astronomer presented himself at the start of the academic year, he was disconcerted to find himself cast not as a rising star, more a workhorse carrying three extra courses in mathematics and making do with an outdated observatory.
His young wife was free of burden. Amherst House, where the couple lived, was a boarding house, so Mabel had no domestic duties. She had long had a presentiment of a special fate: some stardom of her own, yet to emerge from her array of talents. These included a command of Washington card-dropping etiquette. Where Washington was blithe and elegant, Amherst appeared plain and critical, apart from Mrs Stearns, a welcoming widowed schoolmistress who had lived in Bombay and furnished her house with carved teak and Eastern embroideries.
The newcomer had light brown hair and warm, reddish-brown eyes. Though not tall, she had a distinctive presence, thin nosed, extending an immaculate white glove with a sidelong smile and the dressiness of an urban beauty maintaining standards in what appeared to her a negligible village full of retired clergymen and elderly academics.
Mabel Todd, in flounces over tight lacing, her fine, floppy hair elaborately coiled and puffed out to balance her hat, was invited everywhere, and ready to choose whom to favour. She was taken with ‘regal’, ‘magnificent’ Austin Dickinson and his wife’s dark poise, set off by a scarlet India shawl, when they called on the Todds at Amherst House on 29 September, later than the town’s lesser inhabitants. Behind Austin’s back, children mocked his auburn wig and sniffy stride, tapping his cane as he went, but such was his dignity that no child would have dared to look him in the face. As a trustee and the treasurer of Amherst College, Austin Dickinson was influential, not to be overlooked in view of the fact that the appointment of David Todd was on a trial basis.
Mabel wore her thinnest white dress for her first call at The Evergreens on 3 October 1881, an event she recorded in her journal. She was entranced with the house: its Italianate design, its intellectual refinement, the abundance of books and pictures, the grace of Susan Dickinson’s small hands, her literate talk and her husband’s polished sarcasms. And whenever Mabel called at The Evergreens she saw next door, planted on a rise, the Homestead where Austin’s sister, a poet-recluse, lived with a more accessible younger sister called Lavinia. It was said that the recluse had not left the house for the last fifteen years. The town spoke of her as ‘the myth’, but The Evergreens had the privilege of intimacy.
Susan (‘Mrs Dickinson’, as Mabel addressed her) liked to read aloud:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses—past the headlands,
Into deep Eternity—
Extraordinary utterances of this kind had been sent across from the recluse. Mabel’s new acquaintance had a large collection of unpublished poems.
‘Her talk and her writings are like no one’s else,’ Susan Dickinson said. The poet was ‘quick as the lightning in her intuitions and analyses’.
Susan Dickinson described ‘Emily’ as a genius no one had recognised. ‘She seizes the kernel instantly, almost impatient of the fewest words by which she must make her revelation.’ Mabel caught fire. She thought