White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  But like her, Austin disliked change in his immediate environment. He avoided confrontation. He hated going to court. And in time he blamed his wife for his aimless sense of failure, carping at her frills and furbelows and the empty life she and the children were leading. Ironically, his petulant eccentricities were themselves extravagant and expensive. He could not see the hypocrisy; instead he believed himself misunderstood. His one true solace was Gib.

  Less conflicted in her attraction to rank and style, Sue gadded about town in the Dickinsons’ fine double carriage, snug in the comforting folds of her sealskin coat. Consorting with the elect, she snubbed the rest. At the sumptuous Evergreens, she entertained such eminent guests as Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, the sculptor Daniel Chester French, and Frederick Law Olmsted, whom Austin consulted on town beautification. Ralph Waldo Emerson once sat in her armchair. It was like “meeting God face to face,” she later reminisced. (Emily evidently declined the privilege.)

  Sue’s high-handedness earned her a reputation as “socially ambitious”—“perhaps a little too aggressive, a little too sharp in wit and repartee,” one Amherst chronicler observed. To a New England villager, this was a cardinal sin. “Sue saw no one as a child or a young woman,” sniped a rival; “she always longed for good society but was too obscure and too poor to have any. All this explains her wild craze for people and celebrities.” Regardless, her teas and musicales and receptions were locally famous, and invitations were greedily sought. One was invited for half past six, supper was usually served just after seven, and if the guests were few—only eight or so—they sat in the walnut-paneled dining room under a delicately carved ceiling. Sue scattered yellow flowers on the sideboard and in wintertime set fresh roses in vases throughout the parlor, where the party assembled if the number was large. Divided into groups of three and four, they pulled up to little tables while servants carried the oysters and coffee aloft on small trays.

  Or she engineered bashes that lasted past eleven o’clock. These were remembered long afterward by friends as “rare hours, full of merriment, brilliant wit, and inexhaustible laughter, Emily with her dog, & lantern! Often at the piano playing weird and beautiful melodies, all from her own inspiration,” Catherine Anthon told Mattie. “Your dear Mother also—so witty and intellectual, & uncommon in every way—.” Amherst undergraduates similarly glowed over the memory of Mrs. Dickinson, “a really brilliant and highly cultivated woman of great taste and refinement.” And though she drew inward in later life, disappointed and aggrieved, in her eighties she was eager to learn about Einstein’s theories.

  Emily Dickinson’s strong tie with Sue survived Sue’s marriage, the birth of Sue’s children, and Sue’s ascension on a social ladder that Emily herself disdained. If the salonnière sought the approval of the many and the eremitic poet preferred her privacy, so be it. Envious neighbors later speculated that, with little flourishes of Jamesian cruelty, Sue deeply hurt Emily, but as usual the evidence is scant, and it seems, rather, that Sue continued to appreciate her sister-in-law—she always had—for despite their physical proximity, Emily consistently showered her with notes and letters that, gathered together, tell of friendship, empathy, forgiveness, and sheer delight.

  According to Sue’s daughter, both women were busy with household tasks and saw each other when they could, arranging private conferences in the back hall of the Homestead. Writing forged a lifelong connection between them. “The tie between us is very fine,” Dickinson said toward the end of her life, “but a Hair never dissolves.” And of all the extant poems Dickinson heaped on friends, she addressed more to Sue than to anyone else.

  Dear Sue—

  With the

  Exception of

  Shakespeare, you

  have told me of

  more knowledge

  than any one living—

  To say that sincerely

  is strange praise—

  What knowledge did Sue supply? Did it include the sexual? Dickinson’s early notes and letters to Sue, churning with unmistakable passion, ripened in later years but were not less affectionate, admiring, or pointed; Sue was, as Dickinson characterized her, the sister a hedge away:

  One Sister have I in our house—

  And one, a hedge away.

  There’s only one recorded,

  But both belong to me.

  ….….

  I spilt the dew—

  But took the morn;

  I chose this single star

  From out the wide night’s numbers—

  Sue—forevermore!

  Doubtless there were the frustrations, mishaps, miscommunications—pundits can be right—that exist in all families. “But Susan is a stranger yet—/ ,” Dickinson wrote Sue some time in the 1870s.

  The ones who cite her most

  Have never scaled her Haunted House

  Nor compromised her Ghost—

  To pity those who know her not

  Is helped by the regret

  That those who know her know her less

  The nearer her they get—

  THE HOMESTEAD, THE EVERGREENS, the dirt path in between; summers and winters and the yeasty-sweet fragrance of baking bread; Mrs. Dickinson’s helplessness and infirmity, Vinnie’s care and Emily’s kindnesses; the circus that came to town (“I feel the red in my mind”) and those flying, febrile visits from Judge Lord—externally, life in the gentle hamlet ran in a reliable groove, except, that is, for the occasional civic misfortune, like the fire that razed the wooden buildings downtown in a single night as if a hellion, raging after freedom, had broken the rules of village decorum.

  David Todd and Mabel Loomis, engagement photograph, 1877.

  “THE THINGS THAT NEVER can come back, are several—/ ,” Emily Dickinson sent her poem to Elizabeth Holland, recently widowed: “Childhood—some forms of Hope—the Dead—.”

  She might have added the dependable surface of everyday routine.

  It was in the fall of 1881 that a good-looking young couple from Washington, D.C., swooped down on bucolic Amherst. David Peck Todd was the new professor of astronomy, come to teach at the college and run the observatory, and with him was his adorable wife of two years, Mabel Loomis Todd, whose ample social skills were an undeniable asset. A good pianist always willing to perform in public, Mabel was also a trained soprano (she had studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory) and a budding artist who dabbled in watercolors and oils and exhibited her works with a burning urgency that bordered on the desperate. “I think everyone will exclaim over it,” large-eyed Mabel once confided to her diary on finishing a painted panel of poppies. “I do feel so much power & genius in myself, struggling for utterance in any way, of which these little pictures are hardly the loophole for it to peep out.”

  This was a woman thirsty for attention. In Amherst she would find it.

  That her father was a clerk at the United States Nautical Almanac Office in Washington did not stop her from claiming that he had rubbed shoulders with Alcott and Thoreau and Whitman or that her mother was descended from Priscilla Alden. But Mabel herself had not yet collected her literary giants; that would come. And even though her mother had preferred a more illustrious match for a daughter with such genius, in 1879 Mabel married David Peck Todd, whom she said she loved. Sober, smart, steady, and to Mabel sexy, he appreciated his new wife’s multiplying talents, and as Mabel also noted, was a direct descendant of Jonathan Edwards.

  An assistant at the Nautical Almanac Office and Observatory in Washington, David Todd expected to rise toward his well-scrutinized stars, and with Amherst College offering what appeared to be a good opportunity—with the potential for an observatory in the offing—the couple placed their young daughter with Mabel’s parents and set out for Massachusetts. Meant for finer things, Mabel hated housekeeping and drudgery, and despite her considerable attraction for her lover-husband, as she called him—her journal brims with accounts of their lovemaking—she had been disconcerted by her pregnancy. “My l
ittle one will, I feel, be always secondary to my husband in my life,” she admitted with a touch of prescience.

  Primed for adventure, the convivial twenty-five-year-old—born the same year Austin and Sue were married—leaped into the center of the town’s social life, the Evergreens, where she could play whist or perform Scarlatti, sing Schubert, and chat brightly with the crème de la crème. Having been “taken in” at once by the marvelous Dickinsons, Mabel was particularly smitten with the darkly beautiful Sue, gloriously arrayed in a scarlet shawl, who “stimulates me intellectually more than any other woman I ever knew,” Mabel rhapsodized. Sue was the hub around which all things orbited, and Mabel wanted to be everything Sue was, to have everything she had.

  And Sue, appreciating Mabel in the ways that Mabel needed appreciation, placed her new friend at the center of the Dickinson picnics and lawn teas, their games on the grass and their noisy outings to Shutesbury or Sunderland Park during the dog days of summer. Or she invited Mabel to the Evergreens, and the grateful younger woman was soon passing part of every day there, either teaching Mattie to play the piano or merrily letting the love-besotted Ned, only five years her junior, waltz her about the dance floor.

  Without much thought to the possible consequences, Mabel received Ned’s tokens of admiration with schoolgirlish pleasure: his bouquets of garden roses, his peremptory calls, his companionship on those languorous horseback rides through the countryside. She consented when he asked her to wear his father’s enameled fraternity pin; after all, she reasoned, more status was attached to the pin of one’s father than to one’s own. Sue, who considered Mrs. Todd an excellent escort for her untried, untutored son, suspected nothing, or so Mabel gathered. “She thinks it is such a fine thing for her young son to have a ‘brilliant & accomplished married lady for his friend,’ & likes to have him pay me attention.” But Mabel was fully aware that Ned, a serious chap declaring himself to be forever devoted, vowed he would never marry if he could not have Mabel, which he could not. “I could twist him around my little finger,” she gaily said; “he would go off and kill somebody if I bade him.”

  When the disconsolate Ned died of a heart attack fifteen years later, he was in fact unmarried. And townsfolk gossiped that he never recovered from his infatuation with Mabel Todd, who, rapidly tiring of him, suddenly broke off what she called “their little affair” as soon as she could replace him. In pain and anger, Ned dashed to his mother to confess everything, which by that time included more than Mrs. Todd’s dalliance with him. The irrepressible Mrs. Todd had set her cap for Austin, and Austin had succumbed.

  It had happened during those heated summer days when the regal Austin Dickinson, his bearing somber and aristocratic, his ice-blue eyes fixed on Mabel, stole away with her from the group picnicking at Sunderland Park. They leaned on the old rail fence, gazing out at the far-reaching view, aware of the smell of new-mown grass and each other close by. Ned suddenly seemed unfledged and virginal (Mabel’s word), and besides, as Mabel confidently declared in her diary, “dear” Mr. Austin Dickinson “is so very fond of me.” She was right, and on an indolent September evening they fell into each other’s arms—or crossed the Rubicon, as Austin martially called their declaration of love. (Consummation came later.) Mabel blazed with self-congratulatory pleasure: “to think that out of all the splendid & noble women he has known, he would pick me out—only half his age—as the mostly truly congenial friend he ever had!” Soon the couple were stealing away, wildly exhilarated (yet another of Mabel’s phrases) by those dreamy walks back to the Todds’ boardinghouse or out on the river road above South Deerfield in the Dickinson carriage.

  When apart, they resorted to pen and paper. “It nearly broke my heart to go through the day yesterday with only that passing sight of you,” Austin wrote Mabel on one occasion; on another: “I love you, I admire you, I idolize you. I am exalted by your love for me.” On still another: “The sun cannot shine without you, the birds can make no melody. The flowers have no other beauty nor perfume—all is a meaningless waste. I love you darling, with my love, & my love is timeless & sleepless—cannot be divided—insatiable.”

  As for Mabel, over and over she claimed she trusted Austin as she trusted God. “The way in which you love me is a consecration—it is the holy of holies,” she cried, elevating their longing for each other far above the commonplace or customary. No longer would she be fickle or flirtatious; no longer would she need to be: “The greatest proof I have ever had that I am different from ninety-nine others, & that my girlish hope—that I had something rare in me—was well-founded, lies in the great, the tremendous fact that I own the entire love of the rarest man who ever lived.” Professing her feelings without guilt, she seemed without the slightest concern that her infatuation might interfere with or otherwise compromise her relationship with her husband, to whom she remained naively staunch. Sue would soon accuse her of taking the best of two men.

  That same torrid fall, 1882, David Todd had left Amherst for three months on an astronomical expedition to the Lick Observatory in California, and though Mabel was initially to accompany him, at the last moment David went alone. He should never have gone so far for so long, he reputedly admitted years later. Mabel had missed him for a while. “Ned has been very devoted—more so than ever,” she wrote in her journal. “But my only real joy in staying is because Mr. Dickinson is here, & looks out for me & has me on his mind.” By the time David returned, Austin Dickinson, though not yet Mabel’s physical lover, was portraying himself to the impressionable Mabel as the victim of a loveless misbegotten marriage with a woman who frequently refused him sexual intercourse and who so profoundly dreaded childbearing that she had aborted four pregnancies before Ned was born; and having tried to abort Ned, too, he morosely continued, she had caused the boy’s epilepsy. Austin could by his own lights then reasonably ask, “Where is the wrong in preferring sunshine to shadow! Does not the unconscious plant lean toward light?”

  It would take another year of intense verbal foreplay before Mabel and Austin consummated their affair, and when they did, they chose the dining room, windows shut, blinds closed, of the ancestral Homestead.

  WHAT DID EMILY KNOW? “Emily always respected real emotion,” Mabel Todd’s daughter recalled, adding that Emily was glad that her brother found some comfort in his abject life. But that’s a self-serving answer. Vinnie, on the other hand, knew a great deal. Captivated by Mrs. Todd and perpetually distrustful of Sue, Vinnie had been enlisted early in the clandestine romance. Mabel folded her love letters to Austin in envelopes addressed to Vinnie, which Austin surreptitiously picked up at the post office when fetching his sister’s mail. After reading them and destroying the originals, he tucked copies of the letters into a large envelope that he handed to Vinnie. “If anything happens to me,” he instructed her, “Burn this package at once—without opening.”

  Emily kept her distance, much to Mabel’s frustration. During her first months in Amherst, Mabel had heard delicious stories about Austin’s batty sister, the one called the Myth by locals. “She has not been outside of her own house in fifteen years, except once to see a new church, when she crept out at night, & viewed it by moonlight,” Mabel breathlessly informed her parents. “She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful. She writes finely, but no one ever sees her…. Isn’t that like a book? So interesting.” Sue read Mabel some of Emily’s strange, powerful poems. “All the literary men are after her to have her writings published,” Mabel bragged with a touch of envy.

  But Sue had warned Mabel about the Dickinson sisters. “‘You will not allow your husband to go there, I hope!’” Sue reportedly counseled. “‘Because they have not, either of them, any idea of morality…. I went in there one day, and in the drawing room I found Emily reclining in the arms of a man. What can you say to that?’”

  Sue’s cautionary tale probably had less to do with Emily and Judge Lord, the apparent target of Sue’s disapprobation, than with her unformed suspicio
ns about the ubiquitous Mabel, but in any event Mabel did not enter the sacred precincts of the Homestead until the fall of 1882. Before Austin would cross another Rubicon, Mabel would have to cross this one.

  Vinnie finally invited Mabel to the Homestead, where Mabel enthusiastically played the old Dickinson piano and sang in her warbly soprano for the strange creatures who listened from afar. The enfeebled Mrs. Dickinson heard the music from her room; Emily was of course invisible. “It was odd to think, as my voice rang out through the big silent house that Miss Emily in her weird white dress was outside in the shadow hearing every word, & the mother, bed-ridden for years was listening up stairs,” Mabel puzzled in her journal. “When I stopped Emily sent me in a glass of rich sherry & a poem written as I sang. I know I shall see her,” Mabel concluded with the blinkered brightness of youth.

  Shortly after her musical introduction at the Homestead, Mabel painted Emily a picture of the flower commonly known as the Indian pipe, or ghost plant. A sturdy growth that, lacking chlorophyll, never turns green, the all-white Indian pipe was an inspired choice and doubtless a tribute to the legendary sister of her soon-to-be lover. Emily was touched. In thanks she slipped a copy of her “Humming Bird” poem (“A Route of Evanescence”) into the folds of her thank-you note. “That without suspecting it you should send me the preferred flower of life, seems almost supernatural,” she told a rapturous Mabel. “I have just had a most lovely note from my—I may call her—dear friend Miss Emily Dickinson,” Mabel wrote in her journal, flushed with what she considered unmitigated success. “It fairly thrilled me—,” she added, “which shows that my susceptibility to magnetic friendships is not entirely confined to men,—as I have occasionally thought of myself.”

  Mabel Todd would never lay eyes on Emily Dickinson, not even at Mrs. Dickinson’s funeral a month later.

  EMILY NORCROSS DICKINSON’S DEATH, at seventy-eight, was a shock to her two daughters even though, since her stroke, they had long expected it. No one was more surprised at her own grief than Emily. She had lost a compass she had not known she needed. And their years together had changed their relationship. She no longer resented or mocked her mother, as she had when she first contacted Higginson. “The great mission of pain had been ratified—cultivated to tenderness by persistent sorrow, so that a larger mother died than had she died before,” she explained to her Norcross cousins. But she herself had become a larger daughter. To Elizabeth Holland she elaborated: “We were never intimate Mother and Children while she was our Mother—but Mines in the same Ground meet by tunneling and when she became our Child, the Affection came—.”