Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [88]
Though Mabel left the Conservatory after two winters, she emerged with a trained voice and sufficient brilliance in playing the piano (she could play by ear) to stand out in social gatherings. Back in Washington, she was co-opted by a society hostess to ‘receive’, a role she performed with verve.
Predictable as Mabel’s narratives were (the incidents in her journal build towards conquest or applause) she did have the sensibility to look up to her father: his reading, his preference for poetry. All the same, she fell in with her mother’s wish that she better herself. The obvious route was to marry well, and here Mabel met an obstacle to her sense of destiny. Pretty, well-dressed and accomplished, she appeared everything potential suitors could desire when they encountered her in Boston or at seaside resorts where she, her mother and Grandma Wilder shared one room. At Casco Bay in Maine men were happy to dance and flirt with her, but no sooner did they detect poverty than the most princely amongst them melted into the distance.
One rainy June day in 1877 when she met her father at the Almanac Office he introduced her to a young colleague by the name of David Todd. He saw a devoted daughter in an old blue raincoat, clasping her father’s arm. When she smiled her mouth curled to one side. Mabel was away over the summer and when she returned in November she and Mr Todd met again at the home of the astronomer Simon Newcomb, on the north-east corner of N and 11th street, where Todd lodged. She noticed that he had nice teeth, even though the set of his mouth was too straight a line.
It was a relief to have a genuine suitor, even if he had no money. Her parents were less taken with Todd - her father was disturbingly silent - but Mabel persuaded them this was her man. During her absence, in August 1877, Mars came close to Earth and it had been Todd who recognised that a point of light near the red planet was an unknown satellite. When Mabel met Todd again he was in the afterglow of this discovery, and appointed over her father to a position as professional astronomer. He had a bent for mechanical gadgetry - Newcomb called it ‘celestial mechanics’ - and planned to develop recent advances in photography to record the movements of the stars, especially the eclipse of the sun. He had recently rejected another opportunity that might have suited him better: his contemporary, Thomas Alva Edison, an employee at Western Union in Newark, New Jersey, was trying out his early electrical experiments and Todd might have joined his team of young assistants, but he could not resist the world’s most advanced telescope at the Naval Observatory in Washington.
Then, too, he was not a team man. At college he had not joined a fraternity. His lack of social life may be explained by the fact that he was up at night, observing the stars, and slept during the day, but as an excuse it rings less true than a private disturbance: the break-up of his home as a result of his mother’s mental illness. He related to other men only as mentors and preferred the company of women.
David Todd was a short man who appealed to women. They sensed how much he liked them in every way, most of all physically. When he scented readiness, he could bring it on. It was his way to take on well-off, married women, those who were bored with their husbands yet had no intention of leaving them. Such women could be relied on to make no claims. With Todd it was not a matter of discrimination - he had a taste for what Mabel would later call ‘low’ women - but he took care to preserve his respectability. For this reason marriage was the best cover.
Some hint of Todd’s promiscuity may have been what worried the Loomis parents, and made them resist him in unspoken ways that Mabel meant to withstand. Although she had flirted a lot, she believed in the ideal of girlish purity. Her fiancé’s expertise awakened her senses and she surrendered to him before