Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [90]
A contrasting scene took place when the Todds were alone in their two rented rooms at Amherst House. At night he undressed her on the Turkey rug before the fire, then wrapped her up to keep warm while he put hot bricks in the bed. In the morning there was baby talk and play as David spread her clothes around the fire and then brought her grapes, figs and apples to eat in bed. Their child never interrupted these pleasures: it was convenient to leave her behind in Washington with her doting grandparents.
So it was that Mabel succumbed in the face of infidelity, a signal of acquiescence that was to have consequences both for Mabel and for those whose lives she was to change, because acquiescence cut her off from her upbringing and innocence. Where the Jamesian wife eats of the tree of knowledge and is not corrupted, Mabel Todd ate of the tree of knowledge and contrived not to find the fruit bitter.
‘At first I used to suffer’, she would recall eleven years on, having accustomed herself to her husband’s habit ‘of falling immensely in love with someone else, & having a very piquant time out of it’. She had to accommodate a husband who remained ‘absolutely blind to matters of morality’. David Todd’s infidelity was a blow she concealed, even in her journal, for a long time.
The faithful of Amherst would have welcomed David Todd’s direct descent from Jonathan Edwards who, as a minister in Northampton, had led a Puritan revival in the 1740s. New England had reeled from his sermon on ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’.
Cutting a slight figure and unassuming in manner, Todd grew a beard to frame his face and, soon after his arrival in Amherst, began to cultivate the jutting ends of his moustache and curl them down towards his lips. He encouraged his wife to flirt; it diverted him, and provided tacit support for his conquests. But while Todd assumed they were two of a kind, Mabel continued to crave fidelity. This was the initial appeal of Austin Dickinson. When they met, she looked into his blue eyes and saw a man ‘who could be forever trusted’.
As a portionless girl, it had pained Mabel to see admirers back off at fashionable resorts; now that she was safely married, men vied to waltz her around Washington ballrooms when she paid her parents a two-month visit in the spring of 1882. Her slanted smiles and light curves warmed their pulses, while her manners assured them she was a lady. The artistic novelty of her clothes invited admiration: a white camel-hair dress with satin shoulder panels and cuffs on which she had painted a design of sweet-peas. ‘I have simply felt as if I could attract any man to any amount’, she exults in her journal. Disempowered by her husband’s susceptibilities to other women, she felt ‘bottled up’ and restless until she retrieved her power in what seemed to her an ‘innocent’ way. She was too ambitious not to see the limitations of ballroom conquests: ‘feverish like a caged eagle’, she sighed ‘for more worlds to conquer’.
Her two-year-old daughter Millicent accompanied her return to Amherst in June. To Mabel’s disappointment, the child was not pretty. Millicent’s mouth was a straight line, unlike her mother’s charmingly curled lips. When Millicent smiled her lips remained closed over her teeth. All the way to Amherst, Mabel prepared Millicent to meet the youngest child at The Evergreens, Gilbert (Gib) Dickinson, aged seven. Excited at the prospect