Amherst (3 page)

“I shall do things that will be heard of,” she told David. “There’s so much in me, waiting to come out.”

David believed her. Neither of them was quite clear what form the coming glory would take. Mabel had a talent for playing the piano, for singing, for painting, for theatricals.

While she waited for her adventure, there were lesser goals to achieve. Mabel’s family background was modest, and she longed to rise in the world. She dearly wished for her own carriage. And she wished for her husband to be successful in his profession.

“You must discover a new moon of Mars, and this time it shall not be stolen from you.”

David had been at the telescope in the Washington Observatory when he had observed an inner moon of Mars that Professor Hall had mistaken for a tiny star. It was David who identified it as a moon, later named Phobos. But because Professor Hall had already measured it, the new moon was credited to him.

“No more moons for me,” said David. “I shall make my name next year, with the transit of Venus.”

•  •  •

David’s teaching duties occupied him most of the day. Alone and restless, Mabel took to walking the lanes in the surrounding countryside,
admiring the colors of the fall, and here and there plucking leaves to bring back to adorn their rented room.

One day, while ambling along the Leverett road, she paused beside the neighboring stream to explore a copse of black alder. Hearing a carriage come to a stop behind her, she turned and saw a two-horse gig driven by a grave-faced older gentleman staring towards her. In the moment before he looked away, embarrassed to be discovered, she took in the frank admiration in his keen blue eyes. The gig then moved on up the road.

Mabel was accustomed to admiration in men’s eyes and thought little of the incident. However, a week or so later, at a gathering of faculty and their wives, she recognized the grave-faced gentleman again. He reminded her a little of her father, not so much in his appearance as in the impression he created. She thought she saw in him her father’s patience and wisdom. From the posture of those round him, Mabel understood him to be a man of some distinction.

“Who is that?” she whispered to David.

“Why, that’s the treasurer, Mr. Dickinson. He’s the one who hands out the money round here.”

“Would it help you if I were nice to him?”

“It certainly would.”

David introduced his wife to the grave-faced gentleman, who bowed and showed no sign that they had met before. Mabel was not so delicate.

“I think you like to ride about the countryside in your carriage, Mr. Dickinson,” she said.

“The affairs of the college are wide-ranging,” he replied.

“I envy you. I have no affairs. My wanderings are without purpose. Unless you can call a love of nature a purpose.”

“I can indeed,” said Mr. Dickinson.

“Oh, you’ve hit the right note there,” cried a professor’s wife who had joined their group. “Mr. Dickinson is famous for his botanizing.”

“I don’t think of it as botanizing,” said Mr. Dickinson, his eyes still fixed on Mabel. “I think of it as beautification. My ambition is to turn the town common from a swamp into a park. For that I need a great number of new young trees.”

“And what species of tree do you favor, Mr. Dickinson?” said Mabel.

“Our own native American species,” he replied. “Oak and maple, elm and laurel. Why look to foreign lands for beauty, when we can find it here at home?”

Mabel smiled prettily, accepting this as an elegant compliment.

“I like your treasurer,” she said to David later.

“He’s a bit of a dry old stick,” said David. “But in this town, his word is law. They say in Amherst you can’t be born, married, buy a house, or die without a Dickinson in attendance.”

Mabel made it her business to find out more. There was no shortage of gossip. The word was that Austin Dickinson and his wife Sue did not get on, and lived virtually separate lives. Then there was the mysterious sister Emily, who lived as a recluse and was known as the Myth.

“Why does she hide herself away?” asked Mabel, intrigued.

Some said she was mad. Others that her heart had been broken. Others still that it was all a pose, and typical of the Dickinsons, who thought themselves better than everyone else. The story was that Emily never left the house or received visitors, wore only white, and arranged her hair in the fashion of fifteen years ago, which was when she went into retirement.

All this touched a secret part of Mabel’s heart. The more she learned about the Myth, the more interested she became. Here was a woman who lived not as society expected, but as she herself chose. Mabel too felt herself to be a rebel. Had she not named her daughter after the famous champion of women’s rights, Millicent Fawcett? The Myth was said to write strange poems, unlike any other. Mabel longed to read them, and to reveal herself as the only one to understand their meaning. And surely the Myth, alone in her silent room, was unhappy, as Mabel was unhappy.

This was the deepest secret of all. To David, to all the world, she presented a cheerful front, going so far as to claim a particular talent for happiness. She would take trouble to find four-leaf clovers wherever she went, and press them in the pages of her journal.

“There, you see,” she would say. “I have a right to be happy.”

My perpetual blue sky
, David called her.
My sun and moon and stars.

But when alone, Mabel told herself the truth. All was not well in her life. David adored her, but David was given to adoring young women. He had made her a full confession before their marriage. It had been a shock to learn that men could love more than one woman at once, and a further shock to learn that men had a taste for what she thought of as “animal coupling,” sex without love. But she was by nature a practical person, and she had learned fast. David had shared his sexual experience with her. It had pleased her to learn how to please him, and after a while she began to find pleasure in it herself. He was honest, and he was a skilled and devoted lover. This was much. But it wasn’t enough.

Her father had taught her to love poetry and was himself a poet,
though only in an amateur way. Through him and with him she had found a spiritual home in the works of the great poets, from Shakespeare to Walt Whitman. On long rambles in the countryside her father had confided in her, telling her of the higher realm in which men and women found their lasting reward. Mabel was sensitive enough to understand that her father was a disappointed man. By profession he was a clerk at the Nautical Almanac Office in Washington, DC. His job was to prepare the tables of moon, star, and planet culminations, and to proofread the
American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac
. He did his work dutifully, but he felt himself to be so much more than a clerk. He was not a vain man: he was proud. Mabel drank in his pride in her childhood and swore to herself that she would not be crushed, as her father had been crushed, by the demands of a family. She would not be caught in the little cage prepared for her by the little world.

Somewhere, she knew, there was a finer love than David’s waiting for her. There was a life waiting to be lived that was all-embracing in its intensity, that would satisfy all of her, body, mind, and soul. Somewhere there was a secret garden behind a locked door, if only she could find the key.

“I would like to meet this Miss Emily Dickinson,” she told David. “I feel we could become friends.”

“She sees no one,” said David. “That’s why she’s such a mystery.”

“Why would she want to see people like the Conkeys and the Cutlers? She knew them once and found them to be without vitality, and chose to keep her own company. I have, I hope, some vitality left in me.”

The Todds were invited to the Evergreens, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Austin Dickinson, but not to the Homestead, the house next door, where Emily lived with her sister, Lavinia. For now, the
Evergreens sufficed. It was a handsome house, built in the style of an Italian villa, designed by the same architect as Mr. Hills’s house on nearby Triangle Street. Mrs. Austin Dickinson maintained it in style, giving evening tea parties almost every week. She was enchanted by Mabel.

“You must call me Sue. You’re going to be such a favorite here, I can promise. Everyone’s talking about you. I do hope you won’t find us too dull.”

“And I hope you won’t find me too shallow,” said Mabel, settling down at the piano. “I’m very young and ignorant.”

She then proceeded to play, and the company went into raptures. Most enraptured of all was the Dickinsons’ son Ned, a sophomore at Amherst College. He declared himself to be Mrs. Todd’s admirer and offered himself as an escort whenever David was unavailable. His mother smiled on the association. It could do her callow young son nothing but good to come under the influence of a sophisticated married woman.

Sue was sharp-tongued, and funny, and in her company Mabel began for the first time to think that she might find life in Amherst bearable. Sue’s husband was more of a puzzle.

Austin Dickinson took very little part in his wife’s gatherings, which he called “Sue’s sprees.” He was in his office in town, or visiting his sisters in the house next door, and only appeared at parties to look grave, and pay his respects to the guests, and take himself off again. Each time, when Mabel was present, she believed that his eyes turned in her direction, and lingered there.

Then one day he actually deigned to address her.

“I recall that you claim a love of nature, Mrs. Todd.”

“I do indeed,” said Mabel. “It’s a sad day for me that doesn’t include time spent under an open sky.”

“Ah, an open sky. Sadly, my concerns lock me too much in rooms. I must catch my glimpses of the sky through closed windows.”

“You’re not a prisoner, Mr. Dickinson,” said Mabel, greatly daring. “You can leave your rooms anytime you wish.”

“Am I not a prisoner?” he replied. “There are times when it seems to me I am.”

As he spoke, the gaze he fixed on her told her that he admired her. This gave her courage.

“You should join in our little entertainments more,” she told him. “It would lift your spirits.”

“To what purpose?” he replied. “Am I to be taunted with joys I cannot taste?”

Mabel was astonished. It was as if he had drawn back a curtain and revealed to her the truth of his heart.

“Forgive me, Mrs. Todd,” he said. “I’m poor company for youth and beauty.”

Sue now came to Mabel’s side, and was loud with mock astonishment.

“What, Austin still here! What have you done to him, Mabel? Have you nailed his boots to the floor?”

“I’m telling him he should be more sociable,” said Mabel.

“More is a relative term,” said Austin. “Given that I have indeed spent
more
time among you than is my usual habit, I will now return to my desk.”

He gave a small formal bow and left.

“I frightened him away, didn’t I?” said Sue, taking Mabel’s arm. “What am I to do with him? He’s such a long face. Why must he always go about in a gloom?”

“I suppose he has business on his mind a great deal.”

“Business! A man can say no, can’t he? Is he the only man in Amherst who can do anything? No, the truth is he’s become comfortable with this melancholy. I think he believes it makes him appear distinguished. Well, I can’t be doing with it. A man should show some spirit once in a while.”

•  •  •

One day in the July after the Todds had come to Amherst, Sue Dickinson invited Mabel and David to join a group of family and friends on a picnic. The destination was Shutesbury, a good eight miles away, and they would go in two carriages. To Mabel’s secret gratification, Austin turned out to be one of the party. Ned Dickinson escorted the carriages on horseback, along with two friends, William Clark and Brad Hitchcock. Ned’s siblings, fifteen-year-old Mattie and seven-year-old Gib, rode in the carriage with their mother.

Sue had already chosen the site for the picnic, on a well-grazed hillside meadow that commanded a famous view. Here they laid out rugs and spread themselves round the wicker hamper and pointed out to each other the hills in the distance, disagreeing over which was Mount Tom and which was Mount Toby.

Austin stood about for a while, looking as if he meant to take himself off somewhere on his own. But then quite suddenly he sat himself down, legs crossed, on the far side of the hamper from Mabel and David Todd.

“Mr. Dickinson,” Mabel said, smiling at him from beneath the brim of her wide straw hat, “you don’t have the air of a man who’s accustomed to sitting on the ground.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Austin said. “I much prefer to stand. But if I were to stand, how would I talk to you?”

“You would talk down, of course, as is proper. And I would look up to you, in awe and admiration.”

“Not awe, I hope.”

“But you don’t object to the admiration?”

“I’m grateful for any attention you’re kind enough to bestow on me, Mrs. Todd.”

Mabel dimpled prettily.

“Then I shall dare to ask you to do me a favor,” she said. “I would like to be introduced to your sister, the poetess.”

Austin looked grave.

“Emily does not receive visitors,” he said.

“She would receive me,” said Mabel, “if she knew me.”

She trembled a little as she spoke, all too aware of her presumption. But how else was he to know that she was not like the others?

Austin gazed at her in silence, clearly taken aback. Mabel caught Sue’s eyes on her, her curiosity finally aroused. She retreated into light chatter.

“What nonsense I’m talking,” she said. “Ned, give me some of that lemonade. Is someone going to cut up the bread, or are we to tear it, like lions? Except I suppose lions don’t care for bread. Animals don’t go in for baking, or cooking of any kind, don’t you envy them that? How much simpler our lives would be if we ate everything raw.”

“I have some eggs here,” said Sue, “but I’m afraid we like them hard-boiled.”

Later, restless, Mabel began to stroll up and down the meadow. Shortly she found Austin by her side.

“You like to walk, Mrs. Todd.”