Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [81]
Since Lord had known Emily all her life he did not hesitate to enquire after her health in a fatherly way. She was dreaming of her father every night (always a different dream) and prone to forget what she was doing during the day, ‘wondering where he is’. This absence of mind may have troubled her sister, since it was with Vinnie that Lord raised his concern: ‘. . . Knowing . . . how unwilling [she is] to disclose any ailment, I fear that she has been more ill, than she has told me. I hope you will tell me particularly about her.’ Unsure what her sickness was, he wished Vinnie to report fully, though he respected Emily’s reticence on the subject.
‘Emily never thinks of herself,’ he remarked to Vinnie in March 1877. He thought her an angel, like his wife, who had rheumatism and other ills. Mrs Lord died in December 1877, on Emily’s forty-seventh birthday.
Over the next few months she turned to the handsome widower - not as a father but as a suitor of sorts. Later, a granddaughter of Dickinson’s confidante Mrs Holland suggested that Lord’s tenderness had ‘long been latent in his feeling for her’. Dickinson expert Christopher Benfey has asserted this possibility more strongly, suggesting the attraction went back to the summer of 1862 when Otis Lord came to Amherst as Commencement speaker.
Eighteen years her senior, his grey hair was shading into white; his expression calm and contained - not a man to exact attention, though his grave and upright bearing subdued others, not only the guilty, as he passed judgement. To Susan he looked forbidding, casting gloom over guests at The Evergreens; stern ‘as the Profile of a Tree against a winter sky’, Emily ventured to say. He appeared as rigid as Mr Dickinson, but she had a way with elders of this sort, breezing through their barest branches. Her amusing darts disarmed men of law who were accustomed to wither lesser beings; the drafts of her letters to Lord are witty, confident, open (not coded like letters to ‘Master’) and playfully physical - hardly the way modest women were meant to behave. Gossip had it that Susan had been taken aback to break in on the supposed recluse, the image of whitefrocked chastity, in the Judge’s arms.
Three people claimed to have heard Sue deplore that embrace: one was Mabel at the start of their friendship in 1881; another was Mrs Halls, an Amherst neighbour; and the last, the Judge’s niece Abbie Farley. Emily, the niece is reported to have said, had not ‘any idea of morality’. She was bound to take this view for Miss Farley, aged thirty-five, was the Judge’s heir. She and her mother, Mrs Lord’s sister, were due to inherit jointly $23,000. Together with another niece on the Farley side (due to inherit $10,000), they kept house for the Judge. If he remarried he would have new claims.
‘Little hussy’, Abbie fumed over a copy of Emily’s Poems decades later when her own chief heir, Mrs Stockton, questioned her about the celebrated poet Abbie had once known. By then Abbie Farley had become Mrs West, elaborately dressed and married into a leading Salem family. ‘Loose morals,’ Abbie remembered. ‘She was crazy about men. Even tried to get Judge Lord. Insane too.’
‘I went there one day, and in the drawing room I found Emily reclining in the arms of a man’, Susan reportedly warned the Todds when Vinnie asked them to call. Mabel Todd had had no reason to distort this report. There’s a gap here, something unsaid that remains in question. Did Emily’s demonstrative ease lead Susan to suspect an improper spark while Mrs Lord had been alive? Was Susan jealous? In succumbing to marriage, one consolation for Sue had been Emily, who had knit herself to her friend and ‘Sister’. Yet now, improbably,