Amherst (18 page)

She sailed from Boston on the
Pavonia
, for Queenstown, Ireland. She was to be away for three months. Austin found her absence unbearably painful. He poured out his love and longing in letters that chased Mabel from Dublin to London and Paris.

Another of these most perfect of fine days—and you not here. What are days, for now! I don’t want any of them—they are a burden—there’s no life or meaning in them. They are as blank as this paper untouched by pen, ready to be filled—may hold everything or nothing. There’s nothing
for
them to hold but you, my darling, my beloved. I would rather they were all blotted out till you are back. I see David as it happens in the daytime, and go over every evening for a while, as regularly as before you walked off, that morning of the fourth. We talk some—each, I think, feels nearer to you through the other than in any other way.

Austin and David became close over this time of Mabel’s absence. They shared Mabel in memory just as they had shared her
in person. David told Austin how he had first met Mabel, before he even knew her name.

“She was standing with her father outside the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington, wearing an old blue waterproof. It was raining. I think I loved her from that moment.”

It was a precious memory to David, and in describing it he offered it to Austin, so it could become his memory too.

David spoke of Mabel’s father, and how she revered him.

“I loved her for that.”

That led them to talk of their own fathers.

“Ah, you should have met my father,” said Austin. “He was almost a god to us. I don’t believe I ever saw him smile. I certainly never dared to touch him. Not until he was dead, that is. I kissed his cheek as he lay in the coffin.”

“And now you and I are both fathers.”

“Am I a father?” said Austin, shaking his head sadly. “Now that Gib is gone, I feel as if I have no place in my own home. Ned and Mattie are Sue’s children, not mine.”

“Do you ever think,” said David, “how your life might have taken a different course, had you chosen one road and not another, had you opened one door and not another?”

“Every day,” said Austin. “The old dream of what might have been.”

“You’ll laugh at me,” said David, “but when I was a boy I had a great passion for church organs. We worshipped in the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, and they had a Hook and Hastings organ there. I was allowed to pump the bellows.”

Austin looked wonderingly at his friend, touched by the eagerness in his eyes.

“Church organs!”

“I couldn’t tell you why. The grand sound, of course. But it was
the mechanism that fascinated me. I have a natural bent towards engineering, I think. You’ve heard of Thomas Alva Edison? He invited me to join him in his workshop. I must’ve been just twenty years old. I was very tempted. But I had just discovered astronomy, and in the end I took that path.”

“My path was always laid out before me,” said Austin. “I had a notion before I was married that I might go west, and make a career in Chicago. But my father offered me a partnership in his law practice, and built Sue and me a house next to his, and so I stayed. My father was very taken with Sue. I think it was her he wanted to keep by him more than me.”

He shook his head as he remembered.

“I look back on my life and I wonder at myself. How can I have known so little?”

“But you were happy with Sue in the beginning, surely?”

“In the beginning, perhaps. But somewhere in my heart I knew we were wrong for each other. I was young, and she was pretty, and lively, and even Emily was in love with her then. All my family loved her. Who was I to disagree?”

He lowered his voice.

“Sue never accustomed herself to a wife’s duties, if you understand me. Never. I remember once she called it low practices. That side of our marriage—well, it’s hardly been a marriage.”

“My dear fellow!”

“You can imagine what Mabel means to me.”

“More than imagine. I know for myself.”

“Of course you do.” Then after a pause, “How extraordinary it is that we two can sit here and say such things.”

“Extraordinary, and yet the most natural thing in the world.”

“A lesser man might feel jealous.”

“Mabel loves me,” said David. “Nothing has changed. Her love for you takes nothing from me. We’ve always given each other absolute freedom.”

“And you’ve never regretted that freedom?”

“Never.”

“To be absolutely clear, you know that Mabel has given me what Sue was unable to give.”

“Of course. She asked my permission.”

“She asked your permission?”

“Mabel and I have no secrets from each other. We never lie to each other.”

“And what she asked—it doesn’t disturb you in any way?”

“Perhaps there’s something missing in me,” said David. “I’m well aware that as the husband I should huff and puff over my wife’s honor, or my honor, or some such imagined slight. But the truth is my wife is beautiful, and I see no reason why another man shouldn’t enjoy her beauty. I’m proud that you love her.”

“Well,” said Austin, “you’re a finer man than I.”

What David did not tell Austin was that he found the idea of Mabel’s love affair arousing. Sometimes when alone in his bedroom he conjured up the familiar image of his wife’s naked body and introduced Austin by her side. Then while he stroked himself, he imagined Austin making love with Mabel. In this fantasy the picture of Austin was hazy; he could hardly say if he was dressed or not. The entire focus of his attention was on Mabel, gladly receiving another man’s love. He could see her face, her cheeks flushed and her lips parted. He could hear her rapid breaths, and her panting voice saying, “Love me! Love me!” At the height of her passion he heard her habitual cry, a high wordless note, and as he did so he too would reach his climax.

•  •  •

Mabel’s long trip drew to an end at last. Austin’s eager impatience rose to a fever pitch.

I have been reading lately of some of the famous loves of history—but find no parallel to yours and mine. Antony and Cleopatra. Abelard and Heloise. Chateaubriand and Madame Recamier. And others. Heloise loved as well as you. What other!—and what man, as I love you! What a fool Abelard was! And Antony. Madly in love with Cleopatra—but with the opportunity before him, marrying Octavia instead, for political policy. I love you, darling—all I am I am yours—for time—and for Eternity. Soon my arms shall be tightly around you. We shall not speak, we shall be too full—we shall be each other’s and we shall know that we are beyond all possible power to separate. Forever and forever . . .

Mabel arranged her two reunions with husband and lover by letters from Paris, taking both into her confidence. She asked Austin not to come to the Cunard wharf when the ship docked but to meet her in her Boston hotel, the Parker House, the next day. This was for the sake of appearances. It would also give her one night with David, to whom she wrote:

David dear—
dear
, DEAR, how I will kiss you and caress you when I once more get you within reach! How you shall
feel
all that I think now about you from afar.

All went according to plan. Mabel’s ship docked early on the Sunday morning of September 13, 1885. David met her, and spent that night with her at the Parker House. Then as David took a
train back to Amherst, Austin passed in the opposite direction, arriving in Boston at 9:40 a.m. on Monday. The lovers were blissfully reunited.

At home once more in Amherst, the Todds began to look about them for a permanent house of their own. They had moved from the Lessey house to the Lincoln house, but this too was on a short lease. Austin suggested that he make available a strip of land on the far side of the Dickinson Meadow, across Main Street from the Homestead. There Mabel and David could build a home.

One evening when Mabel and David were alone together, drawing up plans for the house they would build, David said, “Of course, this will be Austin’s house as well.”

“You mean because we are to build on his land.”

“No, my darling. I do not mean that.”

“He can’t leave his family, dearest.”

“He has left his family. His spirit lives with us. And when we have our new house, his body will follow.”

Mabel kissed him in her gratitude.

“Best of husbands! How can I ever repay you?”

“I think we three could be happy together,” said David. “While you were away, Austin was very kind to me.”

“I know you’ve become good friends. That makes me so happy.”

“I would like us to be closer still.”

Then Mabel saw the look in his eyes and she understood him.

“You would like to share our love.”

“You know I adore you,” said David. “You know I love to look on you. Why should I not see more?”

“Would you like that, my darling? Would you like to see me in another man’s arms?”

“Does that shock you?”

“No,” said Mabel, tilting her pretty head on one side. “I think I like the idea, though I’m sure it’s wrong of me.”

“Why wrong? To be loved by one man and admired by another.”

“And that would give you pleasure?”

“More than I can say.”

“Well, then. I shall speak to Austin. I can’t answer for him. But we’ve come so close, we three. Why not closer?”

Mabel found she was enchanted by the proposal. She understood and rejoiced in the desire both men felt for her. To have both desiring her in the same place at the same time . . .

She twined herself round David, nuzzling her face against his.

“Am I a creature without morals, darling?” she murmured. “Sometimes I’m terribly afraid that I must be. A decent woman would be shocked. But somehow I’m not shocked at all.”

“These decent people,” said David, “who knows what they get up to behind closed doors?”

“I’m afraid all they do behind their closed doors is gossip about their neighbors. Really we should throw open our doors and let all the town watch! Then they’d have something to talk about!”

Over the weeks that followed, Austin visited Mabel in the Lincoln house most Sunday evenings. There, as he recorded in his diary using a special symbol, he and Mabel made love. On ten of these Sunday evenings, as the diary also recorded, the lovemaking took place “with a witness.”

•  •  •

In the winter of 1886 Emily Dickinson’s illness became acute, and in mid-May she died. She had been ailing for over two years, but her death nevertheless came as a shock. She was fifty-five years old.

Her funeral service took place in the library at the Homestead.
Colonel Higginson, a leading man of letters, and one of the few to whom Emily had sent samples of her poems, read out a verse over the coffin: not by Emily herself, but by her namesake Emily Brontë.

No coward soul is mine,

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:

I see Heaven’s glories shine,

And faith shines equal, arming me from fear . . .

Mabel, one of the mourners at the back of the library, listened in irritation. Emily’s faith did not armor her from fear, she thought. Why tell lies over her coffin? A single line from her own poems contained more truth than this pious prating.

There followed a simple religious service. Then the coffin was carried out of the back door and across the meadow to the West Cemetery.

Vinnie, now alone in the Homestead, ventured into the room where Emily had lived and died. The room was neat and tidy, just as Emily had left it, with little to show for the life that had so recently found there a sanctuary and a port of embarkation. From here Emily had set sail on the journeys of the mind that she had recorded as her impetuous dash-filled poems. The little desk where she wrote was in its place. But where were the poems?

Vinnie had no idea what she was looking for. It was possible her sister had destroyed her writings as she completed them, keeping only the very few that satisfied her critical eye. She had left no directions, and no instructions. So Vinnie looked where she could.

The two top drawers of the chest contained folded clothing. The bottom drawer was harder to open, because it was heavier,
and packed tight. But open it Vinnie did, and so discovered an astonishing hoard. Emily had written far, far more poems than anyone had ever guessed. They were packed in little bundles, each bundle tied with string, in their hundreds.

Vinnie took the poems out, and laid them on the floor, and was overwhelmed. Here before her lay her beloved sister’s legacy. Vinnie was convinced of Emily’s genius, though she was quite unable to say in what that genius lay. All she knew, as she gazed on the piles of papers, was that someone with more confidence than herself must undertake the task of getting the poems published.

She turned first to Colonel Higginson. Higginson found Emily’s handwriting hard to read. He wasn’t at all sure the eccentric poems would ever find a publisher. They were clumsily constructed, at times almost illiterate, and disfigured by ugly dashes. Moreover, he was extremely busy. The upshot was that he would look through the poems, but only if someone else made fair copies first, and organized them into some manageable order.

Vinnie then carried a box of the poems over to Sue. Sue understood that for Vinnie this was a sacred mission, but she herself had long ago lost her early admiration for Emily. She suggested that perhaps a modest private publication could be arranged. Having agreed to go this far, she then did nothing. Vinnie became increasingly agitated, and finally cornered Sue on the matter.

“My dear Vinnie,” said Sue. “There’s an immense amount of work to do here; I can make very little sense of half the lines. We would have to pay quite large sums to print the poems. And you must see that all we could do then is give them away to our friends. This isn’t the kind of thing the public cares for at all.”

“So you mean to do nothing?” said Vinnie.