Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [51]
No letters to Emily have survived. Those to The Evergreens are scrawled fast, almost illegibly, in a large, cramped hand, as though he were coiled in upon himself as he raced in his many directions. Why so forthcoming a man should have picked an unforthcoming wife like Mary is hard to understand. Bowles was unusually adept at drawing women out. Mary may have presented the hardest challenge and he may have been won by his own success with unpromising material. Sadly for Mary, such efforts did not survive marriage. She became a poor creature, asthmatic and so constantly giving birth that she took to the role of chronic invalid, vying with her husband for attention.
Mary Bowles had a washed-out face and a thin plait tightly coiled, like a platter glued to the back of her head. The side hair was flattened to her forehead like colourless drapes. A photograph exudes unhappiness, not a passing mood but a gutted self. Because she felt unloved and therefore unlovable, Mrs Bowles was prickly in company. Late in 1858, Emily had been at the gate to greet her when Bowles had brought his pregnant wife to visit Sue and Austin. It had been meant to cheer her. It hadn’t. Bowles’s correspondence with The Evergreens reveals the surge of emotional excitement he exercised in contact with others, and the trouble this caused in his marriage. Mrs Bowles was forced to hear Sue’s answering claims for ‘the higher life of humanity’, as befitted an admirer of Maggie Tulliver.
‘I cherish you for keeping up my faith and hope in the higher, future woman!’ That’s the encouraging way Bowles spoke in letters to Sue Dickinson.
Mrs Bowles felt her deficiency. With an animated woman her husband would be all attention, resting his head on one hand and stretching out the other to touch hers. His wife’s misery left him a little guilty from time to time, but not so guilty as to change his ways.
‘I have made [women] shed many tears,’ he owned, ‘hated myself for it, - and that was not the least of the wrong they did me. A man does not enjoy hating himself.’
Mary Bowles was conspicuously ungrateful towards her pale cousin, Miss Whitney, who came to nurse her for long stretches. Maria Whitney was the same age as Emily Dickinson, born in November 1830, the daughter of a Northampton banker, Josiah Dwight Whitney, and related to Mrs Bowles through the Dwights. She had the intelligent eyes of a reader, large, grey eyes with a steady, rather sombre expression and level brows. Her hair was drawn back over the tips of her ears in a clean line, setting off a decided chin above a narrow, round collar. Sam Bowles rewarded Miss Whitney with his usual attentions, and it was whispered that she was in love with him. Mrs Bowles had reason to be jealous, for her cousin carried herself with sophisticated elegance. She was Europeanised in a serious way, having made a study of Old High German and steeped her mind in the German higher criticism of the scriptures. Her two bachelor brothers were professors at Harvard and Yale, and eventually, when Smith College was founded, she became its first teacher of French and German in the spring semester of 1876. Soon after, she and Emily Dickinson would begin to exchange heartfelt memories of Bowles.
Maria Whitney was attached to the house she shared with her brothers, adjoining the old house of Jonathan Edwards in Northampton. But duty compelled her, as a single woman, to be on call whenever married people had need of help. When she left Mrs Bowles to nurse another needy member of her family, Sam Bowles said: ‘Her going has been a trial to me.’ She had left him bereft, he complained to the Dickinsons, ‘a day of torture and blueness’.
At The Evergreens his gaze had followed Sue’s schoolfriend Kate Scott Turner (‘the late flirtatious widow’) who came on another visit. He hoped to meet her again and, to Austin, mulled over the moral question of pursuit.
‘Mrs Bowles is very liberal at her government. Would it be fair to take advantage