Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [97]
Susan was confounded by such unhesitating frankness. It took her a while to rally.
‘She told me she was to spend a few days in Boston before going to Hampton and I concluded you would see her.’
‘Yes, I said I did.’
When Susan continued to hold out against courtesies to Mabel, Austin felt called upon to deliver blows on love’s behalf. On 12 July, in an outburst of chivalry mixed with self-pity, Austin fired off a series of blasts against his family. He demanded that they welcome Mabel in an agreeable manner. ‘I cannot but believe they will,’ he reassured her.
‘I suffer for every wound you have received from my family, but for the time have seemed powerless to prevent them,’ he excused himself, and then a torrent of resolve burst out. ‘What strength I have however will be pitted against any more of them. I will straighten the matter out before the summer is over, or smash the machine - I had rather be under the wreck than under what I am. There would be several other broken heads, certainly, and I would take the chance of coming out on top.’
Vinnie pitied her brother, who wasn’t strong. Missing the ‘shine & affection’ Mabel had brought into her life, she was up in arms on Mabel’s behalf: ‘I think if the real reason for your absence was known, there would be great indignation,’ she had written to Mabel on 30 April. By July she succumbed to the lovers’ slander of Sue: ‘The same terrible influences prevail about me,’ she wrote to Mabel. A plan was forming for Susan and the children to return to Shutesbury for their summer vacation and Vinnie declared that she could not wait for Sue to go: ‘I shall sing amen all the day of freedom,’ leaving Austin as ‘our guest’ at the Homestead.
At Shutesbury there was an accident. Gib fell backwards out of a wagon and was dazed with a headache the next day. Then, early in October, Gib went down with typhoid. His fever rose. The child seemed to have no resistance to the disease, and as he sank rapidly on the night of the 4th Emily, with a lantern, crossed the grass for the first time in years. The smell of the sickroom activated her sickness and she collapsed at three in the morning. Gib died a few hours later.
Over the next six weeks Austin had no wish to live. Susan, in blackest mourning, no longer cared to save the marriage, no longer cared about anything. To escape the gloom of The Evergreens Austin went to sit with his sisters, so bleak himself that Vinnie sent for Mabel.
She was at this moment the star of Amherst following an amateur production of A Fair Barbarian, based on the recent novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. On Thanksgiving Day, 29 November, she reminded Austin of what she had to offer in contrast to his sad wife.
‘I thank God that my part in your life has been a joyous and helpful one,’ she said. ‘I rejoice more every day in the immensity of the love which you have given so magnificently. You have made me grander and nobler every day . . .’.
‘Yes, darling,’ he agreed, ‘I have something to be thankful for . . . this sad day, with my boy gone, and except for you, alone. I have you. Would to God I had you close - in my house, at my hearth, in my arms! Would not this be too much? Would it! . . . We have indeed come to the holy of holies . . . We were made to give joy to each other.’
Further contact brought them ‘before the veil of closest intimacy’. For a few more days Austin held off as he turned his face from death to life: ‘All my business must be to keep the white heat which engulfs my being from flaming in the surface.’ White Heat. It’s his sister’s phrase. Her volcano seethed underground, erupting in poems. Her brother’s volcano, activated by the burdens he inherited from his father, erupted when Mabel offered to restore him. She was saving his life, he said, and central to this rescue was sexual consolation.
Mabel’s actions were considered, not impulsive. She had to feel justified, and this habit of firming up her position in advance (as when she conceived Millicent) banished other considerations. Accordingly, Mabel planned