Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [99]
‘Perhaps the dear, grieved Heart would open to a flower, which blesses unrequested, and serves without a Sound.’
Hopelessness, she told herself as much as Sue, ‘has not leave to last’ because it would close down the Spirit. As yet they were moving in the dark, like boats at night loaded with grief - two boats on no discernible course.
Austin, meanwhile, took the course Mabel offered. Three times, when he left his office towards evening on 13, 17 and 19 December, the lovers took over at the other house before Mabel boarded a train on the 20th to spend Christmas in Washington.
‘My life has a sort of consecration now, & all outward things seem changed,’ she reflected in her journal. Austin had ‘recovered from the blow enough to live for me . . . His love for me is something sacred; it dignifies me & elevates me.’ A starring ‘me’ takes the stage, radiating the character and emotions her lines give her. It’s a script for a threesome including a contented husband in a ‘peaceful & satisfying’ marriage.
Offstage, silenced for the time being, was her one-time friend, the wife she’d ousted.
III: MABEL’S REIGN
9
EMILY’S STAND
Where does Emily Dickinson stand when the feud breaks out? With her sister a go-between for their brother and his mistress, is it possible for the poet to maintain a neutral or unknowing position?
From the consummation of her brother’s romance at the end of 1883, and through 1884 and 1885, most assignations take place in the poet’s house: about twelve a month, usually between two and four-thirty in the afternoon, often followed by a call in the evening - Austin calling on the Todds. It’s not explicit, but these calls would be attentions to David as well as to Mabel, reassuring David that Austin has no intention of detaching his wife. On the contrary, he reaches out to David with friendliness and favour. There’s a singular atmosphere of propriety and graciousness in the conduct of this three-way attachment, but, more than that, the calls are affirmations of an unfailing after-sex glow noted in both Austin’s and Mabel’s diaries. ‘Never eaqualled [sic]’, Austin comments, and another time, ‘the most perfect ====’.
The lovers are both keeping records: Austin’s parallel lines in his diary, Mabel’s single line in hers. On Sunday 3 January 1886 Austin reports, ‘at the other house 3 to 5 and + =====XXX’.22 Mabel’s diary adds the fact that they’d made love before the fire in the dining room . ‘A most exquisitely happy and satisfactory two hours’.
All the while Mabel continues to sleep regularly with her husband, and until late in 1884 she sustains a practice of numbering these occasions, starting with number 1 in the new year and leaving off at 75 at the end of August. David’s diary excludes his own love life. It’s a record of work, reading (Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Thoreau’s Walden and George Eliot’s Letters) and church (he loved the organ, especially Bach). As an experienced womaniser he’s discreet, but it’s also likely that sex, much as he enjoys it, is peripheral to ambition - common in those who use the chase and conquest as fuel for political or intellectual power. David was not lying to Mabel when he said that sex on the side didn’t matter.
Lovemaking with both men quickens over a few days each month, which must be the safe days of Mabel’s cycle. The precision of Austin’s records allows him to remind Mabel of the time as well as date of one scene, the early afternoon of 7 August 1884: ‘we met at the other house just after two, and had two sweet hours there ===== . . . How simple the great things of life are! and with the right conditions, how easy to be had.’ Recalling this a year later, he’s moved to call her ‘my sweet wife’. She wore his ring on her wedding finger, having moved her wedding ring to her right hand. Mabel’s diary adds another assignation at the Homestead in the evening: ‘Went to see Lavinia