Amherst (12 page)

Austin was now fifty-five years old. His face was pouchy and lined, his body had lost the firmness of youth. Mabel Todd, so vital, so young, could love him for his mind. But if he were to invite her to touch his body, might she not recoil?

Fortunately Mabel understood this. She too was proud and protective of the nobility of their love. But David had taught her a great deal about the nature of men, and she had no intention of allowing her intimacy with Austin to fall short of the fullest
physical expression. She knew how the bond of sexual love held David tight to her, and she wanted the same with Austin. She wanted to please him as no woman had ever pleased him before, knowing that if she succeeded in this, he would love her forever.

She was happy to let matters proceed slowly, because she was aware of all the obstacles Austin had to overcome in his own mind. Also there was a piquancy to this
time before
which she sensed gave their love its particular intensity, its pure gemlike flame. But one can’t be sighing and longing and holding back forever.

One evening in February, in the dining room of the Homestead, she said to him, “I dreamed last night that you kissed me. Do you know, you have never kissed me?”

“And how was it, in your dream?”

“It was just like yourself. Tender and true.”

“I must ask my dream self how he goes about such a thing. It’s been so long since I attempted it, I would hardly know what to do.”

“There’s no secret to it,” said Mabel.

She took his hands in hers and stood up, drawing him to follow her. Then she turned her face up to his. She was smaller than him, and he had to bend to reach her. His side-whiskers tickled her cheek. Then his lips brushed hers.

Ashamed of his awkwardness, he moved away again.

“I’m no better than a boy of sixteen.”

“Come,” said Mabel. “Come back to me. Tell me you love me. Just not with words.”

She drew his face to hers once more, and let her lips gently nuzzle his, making the smallest of movements. Little by little he relaxed, and his lips moved in response. In this way, wordlessly, they whispered their love to each other.

Then he kissed her cheeks, and her brow, and her closed eyes.

“I adore you,” he murmured. “I worship you.”

He was frightened by the intensity of his feelings. They swept through every part of him, taking possession of him. He was filled with wonder and gratitude.

“I give all I have and all I will ever have just for this moment.”

Mabel accepted his love joyously. Here was a passion that transcended all other attachments. She rejoiced to know that she had awoken in this good and noble man a power of loving that made his life complete. And through him, through his love for her, her own life now had meaning.

While they kissed in the dining room, was Emily in the passage outside? Was she on the stairs? There were moments when Mabel thought she heard the rustle of a skirt on the far side of the door.

9

The dark of the passage, moving towards the closed dining room door. Nearer now, faint sounds become audible from within: the hiss of clothing, the hiss of breath.

Hands reach up to touch the panels of the door.

I listen. I hear. I feel.

Does he touch her? Does he feel her?

•  •  •

Later, in the bedroom. The only light in the room is faint moonshine through the windows. The silver glow reflects in a dressing table mirror. Indistinct in the frame there stands a shadowy form, hand touching cheek.

My cheek is warm.

•  •  •

The pen writes by the light of an oil lamp. Follow the writing, letter by letter:

Seraphic fear

Each night I die, each morning I am born again.

Bright light falls on green plants. A spray of glittering water bursts from the rose of a watering can, throwing a sudden rainbow in the little conservatory. I call this my Garden of Eden. Vinnie approaches, birdlike, ever present.

“Do you believe in the Fall, Vin?”

She shakes her head, says, “I’m not clever enough for that.”

“I don’t believe in the Fall. I find no snake in the grass.”

“Sue will have nothing more to do with Mrs. Todd.”

That makes me smile. I speak of original sin, the great lie invented by priests, and Vinnie speaks of Mrs. Todd.
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires
. Blake’s garden of love is filled with graves.

“Austin will not be bound,” I say.

Vinnie thinks I speak of Sue and the wagging tongues of the village, but I speak of briars, with their lacerating thorns. The crown forced onto the bleeding head of a savior long ago. Only he failed to save me, so I mean to do the job myself.

“Austin,” says Vinnie, awed, “is in love.”

“And Mrs. Todd too? Is she in love with Austin?”

Vinnie looks perplexed. The question has not occurred to her. If a man deigns to offer a woman his love, the woman is honored and grateful, and gives her love in return.

“She could never allow his attentions if she were not.”

“Perhaps,” I say, “she’s an adventuress.”

“An adventuress!” Vinnie is shocked. “I hope not! Poor Austin!”

“Happy Austin!”

I believe Mrs. Todd to be an adventuress. I have an adventure for her.

10

Alice sets out for Yale early in the morning, to be at the Sterling Memorial Library as it opens at 8:30 a.m. It’s still dark, and a deep mist hangs over the roads. She drives slowly. By the time she reaches the interstate at Northampton, the sun is rising and the mist lifting, but the traffic is building up with the morning rush. All through Hartford her progress slows to a crawl. Such immense roads, and so little movement.

Her mind is full of Mabel and Austin, and the puzzle of how to tell her story. It seemed so simple when she pitched the outline to her stepfather and his producer, back home in the summer. But it’s turning out to be more complicated than she bargained for.

“It’s the ending that defines the story.” All very well for Jack to pronounce in his teacherish way, but real life doesn’t go in much for endings, other than death. And even death can leave you up in the air. Contemplating the way Mabel’s great love affair unfolded, Alice finds herself helpless in the face of brute dates. Austin died in 1895. Mabel lived on for almost forty more years, half
a lifetime without her great love. What sense does that make of a life?

One answer is that life makes no sense. Things just happen. This is Nick’s view of the world. You do what you want, insofar as you’re able, and then you die.

Every instinct in Alice rebels against this conclusion. Somehow, somewhere, there’s a way to tell Mabel’s story that grants dignity to her passion. In the Sterling Memorial Library Mabel’s letters and diaries are stored. There are far too many documents to read all she wrote, but in the course of this coming day Alice hopes to find a key that will open a door, or perhaps a key that will close a door, and so permit the final credits to roll.

The interstate delivers her with a disconcerting suddenness into the heart of patrician Yale. She finds herself cruising past immense nineteenth-century buildings separated by wide green lawns. She leaves her car in a parking lot on College and Crown. It’s coming up to nine in the morning as she walks back up New Haven Green with its two island churches, past Bingham and Welch, grand complacent halls built in an age when privilege was a virtue. Little Amherst College, founded by Emily’s grandfather, is humbled by the comparison. Here in Yale is the full pomp of learning.

A sharp, cool sun shines on the campus, lightening its somber air. She passes through the Phelps Hall arch and crosses the lawn within, following the map she has printed from Google. So out onto High Street, across Elm Street, to her destination.

The Sterling Memorial Library towers above her, its two great arched doorways, topped by even taller stained-glass windows, rising up to a pinnacled façade: a veritable cathedral of knowledge. How the founders must have believed in the power and glory of
the written word! It seems almost quaint now, an act of touching folly, like the building of the pyramids.

Inside the library, Alice is directed to the far end of the shadowy nave. There a narrower hallway runs off to the right, past the Music Library, to the Manuscripts and Archives Department. She presents her identification, deposits her bag in a locker, and passes through to the inner room where her requested documents await her. They stand numbered on a trolley: nine boxes from the Todd–Bingham bequest. Here are Mabel Todd’s letters and diaries, and Austin Dickinson’s letters to Mabel. The very notes they sent each other with such secrecy, now made available to a stranger from across an ocean who is hoping to understand a little of the love that burned so brightly, a hundred and thirty years ago.

She opens Box 94, which contains letters from Austin: each letter folded in a protective outer sheet of paper. The pen strokes are faded now, the nib lines narrow in the vertical, broad in the horizontal, the bars of the
T
s hurrying over the other letters to reach the next word. She can read
My dear Mrs. Todd
, but his hasty handwriting is hard to make out.

She opens a box of Mabel’s letters. Mabel writes in a big looping script which is far easier to follow. Her letters too begin in the same oddly formal way:
My dear Mr. Dickinson
. But there among them, as if to give the lie to such respectability, she finds a scribbled note from Austin:

Vin—If anything happens to me burn this package at once without opening. Do this as you love me.

Most of the letters have no salutation and no signature, though often there’s a date and a time.

From August 1884:

Now I am going to sleep with the crickets’ mysterious song for my lullaby, and your divine love for my canopy and safeguard. Oh! I love you, and I love you, and my soul is in your tender keeping. Tuesday 10:45 p.m.

Alongside one letter lies a slip of paper on which is written:
A M U A S B T E I L N
. Alice knows from her reading that this was the way they merged their names, one letter at a time, to make visible their union. And here it is, the paper on which Mabel nested the curling letters, with the date, December 9, 1888. It’s stored with a sheet on which is written out a love poem of her own devising, that she called “P. S. First”:

You are all that I want to live for,

All that I have to love,

All that the whole world holds for me

Of faith in a world above . . .

Not quite Emily Dickinson, but Alice is moved by it even so. This was the paper Mabel held steady with one hand. These curls of ink were laid down by her pen, to express the overflow of her heart. There is an innocence about it that defies cynicism.

She opens Box 46, which contains Mabel’s diaries. She takes out a stiff-boarded marbled notebook, and reads from 1881:

What is there in me which so attracts men to me, young and old?

And later, from November 11, 1883, her birthday:

Twenty-seven! I! It seems impossible—in most things I feel like a child—in fact it always seems to me that I’m eighteen, and I suppose I act so.

It becomes clear that she used her diary to send messages to Austin.

Monday 25 May 1885. I am going away, and here is this book for you to read—full of everything under the sun—but reaching at last the real peace and joy and unutterable happiness in my life—in you, Austin, whom I love so that I am lifted solemnly to God by it—so that, as you said yesterday, neither of us can ever be lonesome again. Oh darling, darling!

She must have handed it to him to keep while she was away, on one of her periodic visits to her parents and daughter in Washington. If so, he would have taken care to hide it where Sue could not find it, most likely in his law offices in town.

Alice reads on, not attempting to follow every page, taking out volume after volume, immersing herself in the living moments in which Mabel poured out her love. She stays at the library table among the boxes all through the middle of the day, not breaking for lunch. Sometime in the early afternoon she comes upon a small copper-colored booklet, on the cover of which is printed a title, “Footprints,” over the author’s name, Mabel Loomis Todd. Inside she reads that it’s a reprint from the
Independent
, September 27, 1883. The print is laid out one narrow column per page, for forty-four pages. She reads the story from beginning to end.

It is of course Mabel’s own love story. She has chosen to tell it
from the point of view of the man. The heroine charms him “by her beautiful combination of lighthearted girlishness and deep womanly feeling.” There’s no suggestion of physical attraction: this is the story of soul meeting soul.

It’s absurd in its plotting, with its brief shadow on their love and its brisk and convenient removal. It’s sentimental and heavily reliant on the pathetic fallacy: “The heavens, which had been as brass, became a tender blue . . . The sea had fulfilled the promises he used to hear in its most hopeful songs, and had brought him this magnificent happiness.” But take it as a love letter, and Alice finds it touching. How Austin must have treasured it!

Strange to think it was published in a New York newspaper for everyone to read. Did Sue read it?

She returns the booklet carefully to its box and continues with her explorations, making pencil notes as she goes. Just as she begins to think of packing the archives away, so that she can drive back in daylight, she comes upon a passage in one of Mabel’s diaries that makes an impression on her. She copies it out in its entirety.

6 February 1890: I had a passionate longing to be loved for my own individual aroma, not because I was a bright and pretty woman, of whom there are many similar, equally attractive. If I should die David would soon marry again. But I am the one woman for all time to Austin, I, just myself, and because it is I.