Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [93]
‘Why should I!’ Austin put it to himself. ‘And why shouldn’t I!’ He often posed questions in this exclamatory way. ‘Where is the wrong in preferring sunshine to shadow!’
He had no plan to bed Mabel. Austin’s desires were contained by moral refinement. Mabel found herself treated with ‘the most delicate courtesy’. The Dickinsons were respectful to women and the family habit was lifelong commitment. When Austin had crossed his ‘Rubicon’ the previous September he switched to an unknown narrative, one he would have to invent as it went along (in somewhat the way his sister invented a secret narrative). Austin’s new drama would depend on the character of his leading lady, especially her sexual character.
Mabel responded to men with alacrity. It was apparent in the way she moved and had her being, and it was part of her charm that her alacrity was graceful, never gross. Millicent’s conception had proved to Mabel that her fertility peaked on about the eighth day of her menstrual cycle - that is, uncommonly early - so that she had no fear of pregnancy if lovemaking took place during the final ten days of the cycle. David Todd called this her ‘auspicious’ period and planned his travels around it. For all the sexual confidence she exuded, Mabel had not slept with any man besides her husband. This together with Austin’s purely romantic intentions towards Mabel would have permitted him to assure himself that nothing improper was on the agenda. He believed that God alone could have brought on this passion stirring behind the disapproving curve of his mouth.
As his father’s son he continued to quell laughter. One evening, when Judge Lord was a dinner guest and Austin in bed with a cold, Vinnie convulsed the party with her imitation of the church choir at its grimmest, singing ‘Broad is the road which leads to death’. Austin rang his bell and sent along a message to remember, please, this was Sunday!
Neither the austere Austin nor his reclusive sister in her neat, white dress with practical pockets would have appeared likely to invite passion in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Emily, aged fifty-two, in the arms of her father’s friend in the Homestead parlour; Austin, aged fifty-three, reaching out to Mabel’s warm, waiting hand as they trod past their proper destination, the gate of The Evergreens: neither scene could have been conceivable during their father’s rule.
Austin’s secret bond with Mabel was similar to Emily’s earlier idea of a ‘Wife without the Sign’. A wife without the sign is precisely how Mabel came to see her relation to Austin Dickinson, but in its first phase, from September 1882 until early December 1883, any label would be misleading. Legally, Austin’s response to Mabel and hers to him could not be construed as active adultery, however intense their emotions. The correspondence of Austin and Mabel, like Emily’s letters to ‘Master’, avoids names. Not for nothing are these members of a legal family. Where their father was wholly cautious, Emily and Austin cultivated a blend of caution and abandon. Emily, in her epistolary character, sleeps with ‘Plantagenet’ who is (or is soon to be) king. Austin becomes ‘my King’ to Mabel. These outbreaks of sister and brother seem linked in some way with the Dickinson dream of royal descent. To follow Austin’s shift from romance to adultery, it’s necessary to go back to the year their father died.
In November 1874, five months after Mr Dickinson died, Austin and Susan conceived Gib. Susan was almost forty-four. The long gaps between their three children suggest her continued reluctance to give birth - eight years had gone by since