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By Root 546 0

the second child, Mattie, was born. At some point in that year Emily sent Sue a number of consoling notes, without saying why Sue needed solace, but pregnancy would have upset her. That autumn and winter of 1874-5, Austin’s sisters first saw he had become a vacant shell. Sue herself could not cure her husband’s hollowness, yet his heart did fill towards the child born to grieving middle age. Everyone adored Gib. ‘Our’ child, Emily said, for he consoled them all. She rejoiced in what she called his ‘soar’. He was the child she might have had, ‘panting with secrets’, wordplay, repartee. She loved his retorts when Aunt Vinnie questioned him about her cat.

‘Weren’t you chasing Pussy?’

‘No - she was chasing herself.’

‘But wasn’t she running pretty fast?’

‘Well, some slow and some fast,’ said Gib beguilingly.

‘Pussy’s Nemesis quailed,’ Emily reported to Susan. ‘Your Urchin is more antique in wiles than the Egyptian Sphinx.’

Aunt Emily had red flowers in bloom. Gib raised his hat and asked if he might smell them.

‘Yes, and pick them too,’ she said.

When he declined to pick, it seemed a sign of the blood royal: ‘Tudor was not a Beggar’. Her fancy ignores the realities of Tudor greed: the stinginess of Henry VII and the acquisitiveness of Henry VIII. So long as the child was royal.

When Gib was eight, rows between his parents rent The Evergreens. They began in December 1882, when Ned told his mother what was going on between his father and Mabel Todd. She was a flirt, Ned said. Sue’s coldness surprised Mabel when she visited on the evening of 5 December, yet the following day Sue accompanied Mabel to observe the Transit of Venus through the telescope at the college observatory. No one in the party could see: Venus was obscured by clouds. Meanwhile, Mabel turned up the volume to Austin.

‘Oh I love you thrillingly,’ she wrote in secret, ‘I give you a kiss such as we know at this moment.’ It would be ‘easy’ to prove her love if he were with her.

‘It was no fault of yours or of mine that I could not take this in at first,’ Austin excused his caution. ‘My experience of life was too firm & encrusted to permit it. It contradicts everything, revolutionizes everything.’ At this moment Mabel’s declaration arrived: ‘Great Heavens, my darling, I am transported by it, almost overpowered. We love.’

Face to face once more during a stolen meeting on 11 December, Mabel said it was ‘wicked’ to have to postpone their bliss. ‘What do you suppose I am dreaming! I want you . . .’.

This Monday message followed a weekend of renewed friendship with the Dickinson women: on the Saturday Mattie had stayed overnight with Mabel at her boarding house, after which Mabel had spent all of Sunday with Sue at The Evergreens and then slept the night there.

She was in Washington again for Christmas and came back to Amherst on 6 January 1883. David Todd, returning from California, intercepted her train. The following day, the Todds called at The Evergreens, expecting their usual welcome. Austin was away and Susan Dickinson alone rose to greet them, her politeness so frozen it withered Mabel even as civilities flowed.

‘The evening was too horribly chilling’, Mabel complained to Austin the following day. His wife had been ‘cruel’ and ‘pitiless’. She’d wept ‘the bitterest tears’ into her pillow. ‘What new thing has occurred to make everything so dreadful?’

The chill was so pointed that Mabel was obliged to ask the reason. There followed a ‘frank’ talk on 13 January. Mabel would have reassured Susan, not without truth, that she loved her own husband. She commended Sue’s manners. Both managed to speak civilly to each other.

For a short while Mabel’s protestations of innocence soothed the situation. On Saturday 20 January Sue and Mattie called on Mabel and they all went for a sleigh ride in the afternoon. That evening Mabel sang once more at The Evergreens. Mabel was convincing because she believed in her script from the moment it took shape in her mind. So she disarmed Susan, though not completely, since Susan, aided by her daughter, kept her eyes open. Their