Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [80]
Then, on the first anniversary, with grief as cutting as ever, Mrs Dickinson had a stroke that left her paralysed. She would need to be nursed for the rest of her life. A line from the Psalms echoed in Emily’s head: ‘He giveth to the beast his food and to the young ravens which cry.’ Their mother had only to sigh and Emily heard it, which meant that she no longer shut her door unless Vinnie were there, feeding, washing, combing. Responsible Vinnie, knowing ‘no shadow - brave - faithful - punctual’ was ‘spectacular as Disraeli and sincere as Gladstone’. Emily’s hyperboles set domestic affections above politics, even George Washington. If his name came up, she flashed back, ‘George Who -?’
Vinnie, she said, was more hurried than Presidential candidates and ‘in more distinguished ways, for they have only the care of the Union, but Vinnie the Universe -’.
Tenderness was the only God whom Emily was prepared to know, a faith for a household of women. While Vinnie undertook the hands-on care, Emily read to her mother, fanned and encouraged, so that it seemed to her she had hardly said, ‘Good morning, Mother’ when she heard herself saying, ‘Mother, good-night.’ As the years passed it was a relief each morning to find that timid face awake on the pillow.
The sisters had sufficed for each other before their father’s death. Emily had explained to Mrs Holland what Vinnie meant to her: ‘She has no Father and Mother but me and I have no Parents but her.’ Now the sisters stood closer than ever. They had long relieved their mother of household care, with the help of an Irishwoman, Margaret (Maggie) Maher. She too called Mrs Dickinson ‘Mother’. Warm and wild and noisier than the Dickinsons, ‘the North Wind of the family’, Maggie alone was in the poet’s confidence about the booklets in the bedroom chest. She agreed to secrete them in her trunk.
By the 1870s, the existence of poems in the Homestead had got about and Miss Emily had begun her long career as ‘the myth’. Curiosity grew about the recluse, the kind of talk that would captivate Mabel Todd when she arrived in Amherst. House guests continued to stay: for one their father’s sister, Aunt Elizabeth, tall, imposing in royal purple, leaving behind her an atmosphere of court martial. In her forties she had married a tame widower. ‘Eagles have the right idea,’ she said to her miserable stepdaughter. ‘They push the eaglets out of the nest.’ Aunt Elizabeth was now Mrs Currier, but called privately ‘Aunt Glegg’ (after Maggie Tulliver’s carping aunt in The Mill on the Floss), her bossiness so invasive that visits had to be borne as a joke. Aunt’s heels clunked up and down the stairs. There was no stopping her. But no one would detect poems in the servant’s room.
In business matters the sisters now leant on their brother, who took over his father’s partnership in the law office. He had already taken over his father’s post as treasurer, a position commanding all college decisions. Austin Dickinson’s appointment in 1872 was not uncontested, but when it came to finance he proved able. He sorted out his father’s accounts and landscaped the college grounds. Like Emily, he had botanical taste and expertise.
Another man to rely on was Mr Dickinson’s old friend Otis Phillips Lord, a judge in the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Lord had studied law at Amherst just before Emily was born and during the first eighteen months of her life. He had graduated in 1832, a classmate and friend of Cousin Zebina, and Amherst had conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1869. He was married to Elizabeth Farley, a high-minded descendant of John Leverett, president of Harvard.