Susan and Emily had remained keen readers of George Eliot. For Emily only one word could do justice to Middlemarch: ‘glory’. She cast George Eliot as ‘the Lane to the Indes, Columbus was looking for’. The great novelist died in December 1880 and Emily watched for her biography with such intentness — ‘like a vulture’ — that she wrote to a Boston editor, Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers, to ask when it was due. It was during this watching time that Mabel Todd, an unashamedly ambitious young woman publishing scenes and stories, burst upon Amherst. Her trained voice broke upon the stiff parlours of the New England country town. Her solos soared above the church choir. Mabel’s full-bodied sails made straight for the Indies.
To come from Washington, to bear a cultivated air of the capital, may have caused a stir in a quiet provincial town, but this brightness faded out a tough reality: Mabel had no money and, for all her ambition to rise in the world, she had married an unmoneyed man. Her parents had always lived on the verge of indigence. Throughout her childhood, Eben and Mary Loomis could not afford to buy a home of their own, nor could they afford to rent an apartment. Mabel grew up in the cramped space of a boarding-house room — one boarding house after another.
Eben Jenks Loomis had been a farm boy held back by lack of opportunity. He’d craved education and why it had not been available to him at a suitable level remains unknown. The gaps in what Mabel writes about his background suggest some misfortune that she kept under wraps. Eben’s father, Nathan Loomis, had been no ordinary farmer; he wrote about agriculture and may have felt obliged to experiment. He was also a mathematician and one of the original (human) computers* of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac† after Congress authorised this in 1849. Eben’s sister Collette had been amongst the first women to go to college. So the Loomises valued education, and in the past it seems there had been the means to pursue it.
Eben did manage one or two mathematics classes at Harvard’s Lawrence School, but these were external classes designed for practical use, not the theoretical learning reserved for Harvard undergraduates. Then, too, external students had to pay, and Eben couldn’t. During that time in Cambridge he heard lectures by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Louis Agassiz, celebrities of poetry and science who spoke so closely to him that afterwards he recalled them as his companions. After that, he was employed as a clerk in the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington and there he remained for fifty years, calculating planetary movements and minding the records. He didn’t have the education to rise beyond a senior clerkship, though his family called him ‘Professor Loomis’ and he didn’t object. He did feel professorial in his attachment to astronomy; he had a nature that yearned to lift up his eyes to see more than might meet the ordinary eye; he quoted and wrote verses; and had a Whitman-like air of the unworldly seer. He was that kind of American, a seeker and dreamer, and though he once took a walk with Whitman (during Whitman’s stay in Washington in the 1860s), Eben was not footloose and not one of the roughs, which is to say that he had a tidy wife.
Mary Alden Wilder Loomis came from a prouder family. Her mother, Grandma Wilder, a widow who lived with her daughter, was wheeled out as a descendant of John Alden, one of the Mayflower pilgrims. Grandma’s husband had been the Revd John Wilder, the minister in Concord, Massachusetts — home to Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts and the less blithe Hawthorne — during the town’s Transcendentalist heyday. Grandma Wilder had been friendliest with the Thoreau family and remained on visiting terms with Thoreau’s aunts, placid Aunt Jane with a close cap over her white hair and sharp Aunt Maria, whose wide cap was festooned with purple ribbons over a ‘front’ of dangling curls. The sisters liked to recall how Thoreau had made the most of robust home meals during his experiment in stripping existence to its essence at Walden Pond. Thoreau himself had invited Eben Loomis to join his expedition to the Maine Woods, and he’d held baby Mabel in his arms before handing her over with a relieved groan. Mabel could recall the velvety biscuit the Thoreau sisters put in her hand when the Loomis family visited them in Boston’s Bowdoin Square.
The Concord connections fed reminiscent stories on the part of Mary Loomis, who was not always truthful. She was apt to embroider the past: Grandma Wilder, it should be known, had been the belle of society before she married a clergyman, and the line of Mr Loomis could be traced ‘straight back … to Richard Coeur de Lion’. No mention of the unmarked progenitor, one Joseph Loomis, who arrived in Boston in 1638. It was Mrs Loomis rather than her husband who contrived an appearance of gentility. Their only child, Mabel, was beautifully dressed, for Mrs Loomis was skilled with her needle, and so winning was this child that her parents could deny her nothing. They struggled to save and occupied meagre rooms so that Mabel might have three winters at Miss Lipscomb’s school in Georgetown, where girls were modelled as sprightly, mannered Southern ladies while they took in a curriculum of astronomy, chemistry and geometry.
The Loomises then scrimped to send their daughter to the Boston Conservatory of Music. Grandma Wilder, who accompanied Mabel as chaperone, introduced her to another Concord figure, Louisa May Alcott. Mabel was astonished by Alcott’s humorous admission that she had never had a lover. Pathetic, Mabel thought; from the age of fifteen she’d found it easy enough to attract admirers, with her soft, slightly projecting lower lip and arched upper lip so that her mouth lay appealingly open. Seven years after the publication of Little Women, Mabel would have been alert to Alcott’s fame but the novel was not for her. She had only contempt for domestic women and no intention of being ‘little’ or unnoticed; not for her the hidden life of goodness, appealing to women of the preceding generation who shared George Eliot’s faith that half the good in the world is done by those who lie in unvisited tombs. Henry James’s cousin Minny Temple, writing her selfless letters to James in 1869–70, was another devotee of George Eliot. Neither Minny Temple (in her twenties) nor Emily Dickinson (in her forties) was ‘little’ of course — James recognised in Minny a ‘grande nature’, great enough to be his model for an American girl who will ‘affront her destiny’, while Dickinson saw herself as ‘Queen’ — yet neither expected to advance onto the platform of public action in the manner of New Women of the next generation.
In 1874 Mabel, at eighteen, was taking shape on the cusp of a new era when women began to emerge from domestic seclusion into politics or the workplace or, in her case, performance. Propriety dictated that it had to be a ladylike performance. The theatre, her natural arena, would not have entered her mind. To play or sing in drawing rooms, excelling beyond the range of an ordinary Miss, was her first ambition.
At the Conservatory, Mabel lamented when her parents could not pay for courses in harmony and theory required for a diploma. Later she wrote a story about a singing girl whose parents can’t afford the ‘extras’ girls of less talent enjoy but whose private diligence wins out. Her voice grows ‘stronger and clearer, filling every corner … with bird-like music’. Conscious of ‘repressed power’, Mabel’s heroine longs for ‘an opportunity to exercise it’. When the opportunity comes, ‘the audience almost held its breath, until with a last cadenza of thrilling purity, she ceased in a tumult of applause which speedily became an ovation’.
Though Mabel left the Conservatory after two winters, she emerged with a trained voice and sufficient brilliance in playing the piano (she could play by ear) to stand out in social gatherings. Back in Washington, she was co-opted by a society hostess to ‘receive’, a role she performed with verve.
Predictable as Mabel’s narratives were (the incidents in her journal build towards conquest or applause) she did have the sensibility to look up to her father: his reading, his preference for poetry. All the same, she fell in with her mother’s wish that she better herself. The obvious route was to marry well, and here Mabel met an obstacle to her sense of destiny. Pretty, well-dressed and accomplished, she appeared everything potential suitors could desire when they encountered her in Boston or at seaside resorts where she, her mother and Grandma Wilder shared one room. At Casco Bay in Maine men were happy to dance and flirt with her, but no sooner did they detect poverty than the most princely amongst them melted into the distance.
One rainy June day in 1877 when she met her father at the Almanac Office he introduced her to a young colleague by the name of David Todd. He saw a devoted daughter in an old blue raincoat, clasping her father’s arm. When she smiled her mouth curled to one side. Mabel was away over the summer and when she returned in November she and Mr Todd met again at the home of the astronomer Simon Newcomb, on the north-east corner of N and 11th street, where Todd lodged. She noticed that he had nice teeth, even though the set of his mouth was too straight a line.
It was a relief to have a genuine suitor, even if he had no money. Her parents were less taken with Todd — her father was disturbingly silent — but Mabel persuaded them this was her man. During her absence, in August 1877, Mars came close to Earth and it had been Todd who recognised that a point of light near the red planet was an unknown satellite. When Mabel met Todd again he was in the afterglow of this discovery, and appointed over her father to a position as professional astronomer. He had a bent for mechanical gadgetry — Newcomb called it ‘celestial mechanics’ — and planned to develop recent advances in photography to record the movements of the stars, especially the eclipse of the sun. He had recently rejected another opportunity that might have suited him better: his contemporary, Thomas Alva Edison, an employee at Western Union in Newark, New Jersey, was trying out his early electrical experiments and Todd might have joined his team of young assistants, but he could not resist the world’s most advanced telescope at the Naval Observatory in Washington.
Then, too, he was not a team man. At college he had not joined a fraternity. His lack of social life may be explained by the fact that he was up at night, observing the stars, and slept during the day, but as an excuse it rings less true than a private disturbance: the break-up of his home as a result of his mother’s mental illness. He related to other men only as mentors and preferred the company of women.
David Todd was a short man who appealed to women. They sensed how much he liked them in every way, most of all physically. When he scented readiness, he could bring it on. It was his way to take on well-off, married women, those who were bored with their husbands yet had no intention of leaving them. Such women could be relied on to make no claims. With Todd it was not a matter of discrimination — he had a taste for what Mabel would later call ‘low’ women — but he took care to preserve his respectability. For this reason marriage was the best cover.
Some hint of Todd’s promiscuity may have been what worried the Loomis parents, and made them resist him in unspoken ways that Mabel meant to withstand. Although she had flirted a lot, she believed in the ideal of girlish purity. Her fiancé’s expertise awakened her senses and she surrendered to him before their wedding. Given the mores of her society and background, this had to be an act of trust on Mabel’s part. In their engagement photograph she looks like a trusting, furry little dog with doggy brown eyes. What reassured her was the ambitious core to David Todd, and his assent to her sense of destiny.
She expressed ‘a strong intuition’ that her life would be ‘full of romance and uncommon adventure … There are capacities in me, I know, which I’ve not yet begun to feel … I shall yet do something which will be heard of — that I know.’ It meant she would never give herself to domestic trivia — a bold declaration at the time and for almost a century to come. Here David Todd excelled: he encouraged plans for her own significant future.
What he revealed of his sexual history came as a shock, so much so that David scissored out a good many entries in his diary for 1878. Uncomfortable rumours led him to hasten the date of the wedding. As a bachelor he may have been less careful than he became. There were three daughters in the house where he lodged and as a single man he’d been well placed to make up to one or other before Mabel caught his fancy; it would explain why their father, the influential Newcomb, did not offer David a permanent post — why, we might ask, did David move to a low-grade post in Amherst when he had a patron in the capital?
Mabel didn’t enlighten her parents but confided to her journal, in unusually muted tones, her hope that David would turn faithful. She intended to ‘purify’ him with her love. Voicing her disgust with loveless sex, she gave him a biography of Madame de Pompadour. So, when David renewed his philandering after their marriage, she might have left him had she not found herself pregnant. She had been determined to prevent this and her account of her failure to do so (in her journal and a ‘Life of Millicent’) shows her flair for writing about sex with ease and finesse.
When they conceived Millicent (named after the British suffragist, Millicent Fawcett), ‘it was not at all from uncontrollable passion’, but to prove a theory of contraception. Mabel expected to be fertile only ‘at the climax moment of my sensation — that once passed, I believed the womb would close, & no fluid could reach the fruitful point’. A parallel theory was that the womb closed after menstruation, so that on the eighth day of her cycle a woman would be safe. Accordingly, on 15 May 1879 the Todds took themselves upstairs after breakfast to test these theories, with Mabel, as she records, receiving ‘the precious fluid at least six or eight moments after my highest point of enjoyment had passed, and when I was perfectly cool and satisfied, getting up immediately, thereafter, and having it all apparently escape’.
So firmly did she hold to these misguided ideas of contraception that she refused to recognise her pregnancy until the fifth month, when she could no longer ignore her thickened waist. During these first months she tried various forms of abortion: vaginal suppositories of belladonna and morphine, jumps and prolonged immersions in boiling baths, all the while telling herself and her doctors that menstruation had stopped for other reasons. The doctors accepted her version, against all medical indications. (One physician of fifty years’ experience, her uncle Dyer Loomis, responded to her complaints of nausea by prescribing quinine for a supposed residue of malaria in her system.) Her persuasiveness with these doctors is characteristic of the power she could exercise over others: it’s the power of conviction conveyed with an irresistible combination of eloquence, tact and the lift of her head and breast as she sailed confidently into consulting rooms.
As well as their child, there were three other reasons to remain with her husband. First and foremost is the traditional reason of dependence. Mabel had nothing to live on: she did love her parents and, like women before her, would not have wished to become a burden. She was proud enough to keep David’s affairs from them. Then, too, David convinced her that he was committed to their compact to promote her professional future along with his. At the same time, he pressed home his skill as a lover who was also her husband, sealed by letters signed ‘l/h’ [‘lover/husband’]. Was there a trial of wills in a scene where David drew Mabel towards his own practice, a reverse of the scene in The Golden Bowl in which the wife of an adulterous husband resists his embrace? This wife sees that if she does not resist ‘she should somehow give up everything for ever’. Every throb of her being prompts her to give way but, unlike Mabel, she does hold out and achieves ‘the feat of not losing sight of what she wanted’ — that is, fidelity.
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 of a friend so much older than herself, Millicent could not stop talking about ‘Gildud’. But when the two were introduced Millicent was struck dumb. Mabel would have liked to see female wiles: was Millicent coy? But the child’s huge black eyes were hesitant. She was silent in company, waiting to judge whom to trust. Mabel found reserve strange; it was not her way to hang back. Millicent would have to be taught a more pleasing vivacity. After another speechless encounter with ‘Gildud’, Millicent began to cry. How could she disappoint this beautiful Mamma? Missing ‘Muggler’, her grandmother, Millicent clung and fell ill. Mabel, impatient to take up an invitation to stay with the Dickinsons during the Commencement festivities, hired a nurse.
‘I have not the quality of motherhood sufficiently developed,’ she excused herself. ‘I do not in general care for children.’
Released, she shot off to The Evergreens. Whenever there, she saw a house and way of life that was everything she might have wished for herself, had she made a better marriage. As an orphan without funds, Susan Gilbert had once been in a weak position but had married a gentleman who could bestow on a wife all the advantages of his family. Sue had flourished. She grew prize flowers, turned out elegant feasts, invited out-of-town thinkers to The Evergreens and was rearing three children: Ned (Edward), nearing twenty-one; Mattie (Martha), aged fifteen; and little Gib. Sue continually praised Mabel as a model to Ned and Mattie, who were soon running over to see Mabel every day. Mattie was attached enough to spend the night once or twice a week and Ned undertook to improve Mabel’s waltz in the latest style. Whenever she came to The Evergreens there was a whirl with Ned in the hall while Mattie played the piano. Though still a boy, he was graceful in his attentions to his sister and mother, and extended these graces to Mabel who was charmed to find a ‘knight errant’ in the Dickinson family. Triumphantly, her journal records his declarations and her replies.
Ned told Mabel she had his ‘every thought’. It made him restless, inattentive in class. After his family went to bed he would go downstairs to the library and commune with Mabel’s photograph, as he confessed to her in the direct manner of the Dickinsons.
‘Oh! Mrs Todd, I’m afraid I love you, and what shall I do?’
‘I’m very fond of you,’ Mabel assured him.
‘Ah, what you are kind enough to call your affection for me is nothing for you to give; but I love you as you love your husband.’
‘I don’t know but I ought to be stern and disagreeable,’ Mabel offered. ‘To cure you.’
‘You could not cure me.’
Accustomed to flirtation, Mabel was a little taken aback by Ned’s emotion, all the more so because he was so innocent. Since he meant no harm, he thought love could not be wrong.
Once, dressed in velvet pantaloons and riding boots, Ned was visiting Mabel when Mattie’s red hat appeared at the window. Mabel dashed outside to head off Mattie, so that Ned might slip away.
Susan, mean while, went on thinking it a fine thing for her son to have (as Mabel put it to herself) ‘a brilliant & accomplished married lady for his friend’. She did feel some unease over Susan’s blindness. It would take years for Ned to get over this, Mabel realised, and she was honest enough to admit to herself, ‘I am vain & selfish enough to be glad.’
Tiring a little of Ned’s needs, Mabel cast her eye on the Squire, a more challenging figure. When Mabel glanced at Austin Dickinson she saw his superiority. Tall, sour, contemptuous, he felt no need to prove himself. Mabel’s history had sharpened her sensitivity to social codes and hierarchies. As much as the Dickinsons were drawn to Mabel, she was entranced by them: the uprightness of their ties and intensities; their family pride; their challenging, interrogative tones; the rhetorical questions they put to themselves as they trod the paths of introspection; their strength of will — flaunted, not kept like her own under wraps; their witty sarcasms; their fine horses and carriages; and the narrative paintings Austin had selected for his walls.
Susan had come into all of this. Since Susan had no money of her own and her father had been bankrupt, Mabel fancied a simplified scenario: Susan, she assumed, had lifted herself from low origins to the top of Amherst society. Every time Susan’s rise crossed her mind her origins sank lower in Mabel’s fancy until she came to believe that Mr Gilbert had been a despicable stable-keeper. Mabel both admired and envied Susan’s rise. Her welcome into the Dickinson family had been secured by her friendship with Austin’s extraordinary sister, and this was still alive. Mabel could sense it in the way Sue spoke, the exhilaration of her bond with the unknown poet. When Susan exhibited some of the gems amongst her collection of poems Mabel was quick to value what Susan had been privileged to see in all its rarity, and this privilege put Susan on a different plane from the society women Mabel had imitated and courted. Her wish for social acceptance found in the Dickinson family a surprisingly unobstructed and fertile place.
Here Mabel’s ‘presentiment’ put down its roots. A fancy became a possibility, then intention, to seed herself in Susan’s place. It was not long before an alien plant reared against the pale New England sky. One of the tendrils it put out curled around the heart of Sue’s grown-up son. Physically, it was a weak heart, having to withstand the stress of seizures. One took place on 24 May 1882 just before Ned turned twenty-one. His mother cheered him with a party, much to his father’s annoyance. Austin frowned on the disruption. He loathed jollities. Ned, turning away from his father’s down-turned mouth, took Mabel riding.
Sue then invited the Todds to join the Dickinsons in the country during their summer vacation in Shutesbury. On 26 July, at five in the morning, Austin drove Mabel and Millicent in his carriage, leaning over to converse above the child who sat speechless between them. At Shutesbury Susan organised a picnic for young ‘philosophers’. The scene recomposed in a studio photograph shows Mabel as a figurine shepherdess in white with bunched panniers, a tucked bodice buttoned to a round collar and sleeves to her elbows. An enormous white hat shadows her face. Susan sits at the centre of her party, her dark hair drawn back, rounded, maternal. Her arms are folded around Gib with his angel face and fair locks. Her face, in profile, is turned towards her children. On her left is Mattie, fresh-faced in a round hat with a fan on her lap, while Ned lies on the ground at her feet. Both have racquets. David Todd is natty in a straw boater pulled over his eyes.
At another of Sue’s picnics, Mabel and Austin, watching the sun set, drew close until, for a second, she brushed against him. In late August, the obliging Mabel sang in The Evergreens’ drawing room. The family sat rapt, even ‘the Cynic Austin’ (as Emily called him). On the evening of 8 September he sat with Mabel on the loggia until late. It was a small but significant step to acknowledge their feelings on 11 September as they lingered in the rain, on the glistening sidewalk outside the gate.
In November, while David Todd was away at the Lick Observatory in California — he was recording the Transit of Venus and sporting with the wife of a colleague — Mabel was in and out of The Evergreens, almost one of the family. Susan kept a bed made up for her and Mattie, turning sixteen, had piano lessons with Mabel, who exulted in a letter to David that the Dickinsons had ‘thrown open to me their home, their horses, & their hearts with a truly touching and magnificent generosity’.
As quietly as she had lived, Mrs Dickinson died next door and Mabel attended the funeral at the invitation of Austin and Lavinia (Emily did not appear). Her participation in their loss brought her closer to Austin. Touching hands and looking deep into the other’s eyes, they would mark that November as their private anniversary.
Intensity was sharpened by a degree of danger. So far, her husband’s partiality for Mabel had pleased Susan. After the funeral, when the Revd Mr Jenkins teased Austin for his alacrity in seeing Mabel home, Sue said that she was only thankful there was someone Austin actually liked. Romance did not occur to her, still less the rivalry building up between father and son. When Ned took Mabel for a row on Freshman River, Austin brought out his carriage to escort her home. And when Ned took Mabel to hear a preacher in Northampton on a Sunday night, 19 November, Austin went after them.
‘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 love-making 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 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 vigilance daunted the lovers who could no longer meet with any safety.
In a secret letter to Austin, delivered by Vinnie, Mabel confessed ‘an immeasurable feeling of wrath’ when she thought of Ned, ‘the one person to whom it was all due in the first place’. As frustration grew, blame spread from Ned to his mother and sister, whom Austin and Mabel called privately ‘the Powers’. Their enemy was plural, with Susan cast as the ‘leading Power’, fortified by Ned and Mattie.
Ned and Mattie were drawn into the struggle between their parents. They stood by their mother as their father withdrew his love. Austin made it a test of allegiance; as he saw it, Ned and Mattie failed to choose him. Gib, who was not expected to understand the issues, was exempt from this test. Turning from his elder two, Austin loved his youngest the more; he told himself that Gib alone cared for him.
While Ned’s revelation was still new, Austin justified his love in heavensent terms. Their love, he told Mabel, was a holy thing, a holy of holies they agreed. Mabel played back this script. Austin’s language is banal compared with his sister’s, but Mabel’s ready fervour built up this drama.
‘I trust you as I trust God,’ she told Austin in March 1883. This was a time of trial for all concerned. Whenever Mabel ventured out she found Sue and Mattie in her path, so watchful there was no evading their surveillance. Austin smuggled a message to Mabel: ‘I am famished for you.’ Anxious and impatient, Mabel felt a dual deprivation because she was losing the bond with Sue, whom Mabel admitted to Austin she still loved.
‘I do — she stimulates me intellectually more than any other woman I ever knew. She is fascinating to me. I would do any thing to make her like me again. She has such pretty feminine hands and wrists, and she had some very pretty little quaint bracelets last night. I could have kissed them at any moment.’
What fascinated Mabel above all was Susan’s friendship with the recluse. Mabel’s repeated insistence that the poet was her ‘friend’ has the sound of a rival claim. She was accustomed to have her way, and as her annoyance swelled rivalry displaced regard. This adversarial role of ‘the Powers’, with three members of the family campaigning against the godly pair, allowed Mabel to cast herself as victim. In fact, Susan was now in a weaker position as an unwanted wife than as a dependent girl thirty years before.
Back in the 1850s, Vinnie had joined forces with Emily in persuading Susan Gilbert to marry Austin. Now, Austin expected their assistance in deceiving Susan. What Emily thought of this remains to be seen. Vinnie, meanwhile, provided the necessary cover. She permitted Mabel’s love letters to be addressed to her and delivered through the sisters’ post office box (number 207), to which no one but themselves and their brother had access. Usually Austin collected the mail and delivered it to his sisters, but if Austin was away or unavailable Vinnie was responsible for finding the letters from Mabel and passing them on. Vinnie also undertook to pass on letters in the reverse direction, from Austin to Mabel. He uttered the same fervid love-calls as to Susan in the 1850s and Mabel played them back with unflagging eloquence.
Mabel befriended the go-between. To Vinnie, in need of company, the warmth of these overtures was irresistible. From Mabel’s point of view, friendship with Vinnie was vital. If Mrs Todd, as Vinnie’s particular friend, was often at the Homestead, and Austin continued to pay his brotherly calls, no one could object if these legitimate visits happened to coincide. So it was that on Valentine’s Day 1883 the lovers converged before the fire in the dining room (warmer than the parlour and used as a sitting room in winter). Possibly Mabel’s presence was observed because three days later, when Mabel appeared at The Evergreens, Susan’s ‘utter coldness (combined with unimpeachable courtesy)’ reasserted itself. The atmosphere was so icy that Mabel thought several times she would have to leave.
Austin now had to face Susan’s protest. She interrupted another tryst at the other house (as the Homestead was often called) on 27 February, when she sent for Austin to escort her to a college event. ‘After which, a night of it’, Austin noted in his diary. Upholding Susan was the sanctity of the marriage vows and Austin, who shared her faith, would have found it hard, in principle, to disagree. Trained to introspection, they were accustomed to question secret sin. Susan was versed in the classics of moral debate and Austin was temperamentally a moral being like his father. This was the challenge Mabel had to confront in her smuggled letters.
After the first chill, on 15 December 1882 her voice took on a strange timbre, as though she were reporting an impersonal fact: ‘It is months ago now that you heard some one say she had come to stay.’
‘I have come to stay’, Mabel repeated after the freeze, on 17 January 1883, and a third time on 28 January: ‘As I told you long ago — I have come to stay.’
It was as simple as that: she was immovable, like a rock in restless waters.
‘I came to stay,’ she reminded him yet again in April.
There was no going back to his wife. If Austin did soften to Susan’s protests or acts of kindness, he could find himself in Mabel’s power. He would go all his days in the shadow of their secret: their deep looks into the other’s eyes, the shady drives along back roads, the kisses and pressures of the hand they had exchanged. There was no overt threat. Mabel’s commitment shone with promise. All the same, there was a claim. Austin Dickinson was too astute a lawyer not to recognise his danger.
Bad as this was for Susan, she had one effective weapon: she cut Mabel socially. In a small community this could not go unnoticed, and Mabel was quick to feel the hurt. Not only personally, for Mabel was wary of damage to a lady’s reputation: once disfigured it would be hard, if not impossible, to retrieve. To prevent public notice of Susan’s snub Mabel was forced to leave town. In mid-March 1883 she retreated to Washington.
From there she sent Susan a box of arbutus in mid-April. No thanks came. Instead, Susan rebuffed her by sending money to pay for Mattie’s past piano lessons.
Mabel did not allow her chagrin to show. ‘I am sorry that you have given money for what was only a pleasure to me,’ she replied. ‘You have done for me that which no number of lessons could repay, & I hoped you would allow me the satisfaction of this slight return.’
To Austin alone Mabel showed her mettle: ‘This week will not last forever, not this month, nor this year. I came to stay; and sometimes you will look back upon all these days of pain with exultant, triumphant happiness in their entire banishment from your life.’ In the meantime, he must compel his family to keep up a façade of outward courtesies. ‘I should like to have [the members of your family] call, at least with an appearance of cordiality. I think they will do this. But I am very anxious to have nothing occur to cause an open ceasing of all civility. That I could not bear.’
Susan must have refused, since Mabel stayed away from Amherst for six months. Not for a second did Mabel waver; her letters urged Austin to defy his family for the sake of happiness to come. What he had to endure in the way of ‘nervous tension’ as he tore his family apart was, she promised, a ‘portal’ to bliss. In June she passed through Boston en route for Hampton Beach in New Hampshire and there — after a separation of three months, with another three months to go — Austin met her.
The lovers’ pretence of nothing between them came to an end with this assignation in the summer of 1883. Abruptly Austin exchanged the tactics of secrecy for confrontation. On the morning of 29 June he walked with Mabel for several hours on Boston Common. Afterwards he was ready to have it out with his wife, as he confided in a letter to Mabel. On his return to Amherst that evening the presence of a visitor silenced the couple, but at breakfast next morning Susan faced him squarely.
‘Did you see Mrs Todd?’
‘Certainly,’ said Austin who had expected the question. ‘That is what I went to Boston for.’
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 adultery with her husband’s consent.
On 10 December they discussed this prospect until the early hours of the morning. Neither saw it as infidelity. There were two considerations for David Todd. He had been disappointed with the donkey work assigned to him by Amherst College. Restless with ambition, he meant to use his technological inventiveness, particularly in the developing field of photography, to lead research on the sun. The first act Austin had performed for Mabel had been to exercise his power to David Todd’s advantage. A letter to Todd in Washington bombards him with patronage, including support for Todd’s wish to absent himself from teaching in term-time for the purpose of research. At the same time the patron allows himself a sly dig.
My dear Todd,
Why don’t you speak, and say something! Where are you! What are you about!
Are you going to California! And when! If not, why not! And what then!
Trustee meeting yesterday — and you go on to the new catalogue Ass[is]t[ant] Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Observatory.
Is that better!
My October greetings to Mrs Todd, and with them assure her from me that the Comet is only a vain show got up by imps … The Astronomy is all very well as gymnastics for the imagination but we come home to Moses and the prophets.
Pleasant remembrance to Mrs Wilder [Mabel’s grandmother] also and a straight look for Millicent.
Cordially
Wm A Dickinson
Austin had not only secured Todd’s promotion but also a raise to $1000 a year, no great sum — less than the $1500 some part-time teachers received at nearby Smith College — but a distinct improvement on what Todd was earning. So Todd was not displeased to find a benefactor in love with his wife. He believed that his own benefit was his wife’s prime motive in taking the romance further. It did not escape him that Austin had more power at Amherst College ‘than all the Trustees put together’. There was no end to possibilities and promotions in the treasurer’s gift.
As Todd always came back to Mabel, so Mabel, he trusted, would always come back to him. He saw in her plans a mirror of his own exploits. What Todd did not see was the intensity of attachment in Austin Dickinson. David Todd never saw the passionate letters, only those written for his benefit in Austin’s hearty voice. In reality, Austin and Mabel were about to consummate an alternative marriage. With Austin, Mabel could repudiate ephemeral love, returning in her own way to her parents’ ethos. The depth of emotion she evoked in Austin compensated for her husband’s lightweight attachments, an inexpressible humiliation visited on the early years of her marriage. Since she couldn’t trust a ‘sweetly unmoral’ spouse, she felt justified in taking a lover who was a moral being. Part of Austin Dickinson’s appeal was his high-toned fidelity. To switch his marital attachment from Susan to herself was an unprecedented act on his part.
Austin might not have contemplated adultery had it not been for Gib’s death. Shattered, his spirit close to death, he came to see physical love as a comfort when home was comfortless. His wife had withdrawn into grief. This blanked-out figure in black did not appear to him a woman he had once loved; she had become something bound up with death, against whom he had to pit himself if he were to live.
So, on the evening of 13 December 1883 Austin, aged fifty-four (the same age as Mabel’s father), and Mabel, aged twenty-seven, met in the dining room at the other house; they shut the door; and in front of the fire they fell on a black horsehair sofa. Emily, Vinnie and the servant Maggie kept out of the way until the lovers opened the door and left. On his way home Austin noticed the grass between the houses appeared as green as in spring. In the deepest winter of his being life sprang up in all its promise, while back at The Evergreens his wife appeared a ‘great Black Moghul’.* The label served to obliterate Sue’s local identity, and denied her bereft state, for though ‘Black’ was the mourning she continued to wear for a long time, ‘Moghul’ distances Sue as a foreign potentate. She was pitied by her remaining children and by a broken Emily, who sent note after note.
‘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.
* Together with Benjamin Pierce of Harvard. Their work began in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
† A table showing the places of a heavenly body for every day of a given period.
* Moghul or Mogul is derived from the Mongol empire in India, and ‘Great Mogul’ was a sixteenth-century phrase used by Europeans for the emperor of Delhi who ruled over most of Hindustan. In the seventeenth century the phrase came to mean an autocratic ruler. Dickens used the word in this pejorative sense: ‘your sister comes the Mogul over us’. A picture of the Great Mogul was on the wrapping of the best playing cards, and since Susan gave card parties Mabel could have seen the image there.