by Julie Dobrow
Discreet as Mabel and Austin thought they were being, there was at least one person who noted their growing closeness. “Ned got a little jealous because I seemed to prefer his father,” wrote Mabel to David. “[He] went to his mother & told her I was an awful coquette, and that I had allowed him [Ned] to fall in love with me, and now I had left him, & was doing the same thing with his father. . . . I suppose Ned told her all sorts of things about me, with embellishments, so she began to watch me a little and I felt it and was very uncomfortable.” However, she continued, “I heartily admire Mr. D & had never for a moment tried to flirt with him. He likes me very much, & likes to go out with me & do things for me, & it makes him very angry that such a construction should be put on it. But of course I do not give any cause for watching. My demeanor is perfect. . . . I hope when you come back, & every thing settles into its old routine, that this nonsense will be forgotten.”15
While Mabel’s attempt to throw David off track might have temporarily succeeded, Ned’s warning aroused Sue’s suspicions. Where she had previously dismissed her husband’s attentions to young Mrs. Todd, she now looked at their relationship in a new light. The long carriage rides Austin took no longer seemed innocuous. Quite suddenly, it seemed to Mabel, Sue’s attitude toward her shifted. Mabel’s notes to Austin began to query him about how the “Home atmosphere” was, and then, more directly, she wrote him that his wife’s coldness to her “was dreadful, but I should not have cared so much if I could have thought it accidental, or natural. Of that I am not in the least certain.”
Days after that, Mabel began referring to Sue (and later to other members of her family) as “the Powers”: “the ‘Powers’ did not give us [the chance for a sleigh ride] together.” Notes replaced rides, and then as they tried to defuse the situation, even the notes became scarcer. “Do you know, I have come to look for your daily note as for the bread of life,” wrote Mabel. “I do not know what I should do if it failed me.”16 It seemed that old routines would not be resumed and “this nonsense” would not soon be forgotten.
Mabel returned to Washington to spend Christmas with Millicent, her parents and her grandmother, borrowing money from Austin to get there. Her time in D.C. was filled with her usual flurry of social doings. But any holiday joy was tempered by a feeling of anxiety as Mabel worried about what was going on back in Amherst. Her diary records that she had sent notes to Sue and to Mattie, perhaps in an effort to defuse tensions and normalize relations. She wrote a single lengthy letter to Austin over the course of a week in which she alternately told him of her hesitancy in writing to him and her great desire to communicate her love: “I do not know whether or not I shall dare to send these words to you. One moment I think I will, and the next it seems impossible. You will understand why, I am sure. . . . The thought of you is joy always. And yet I am very much troubled . . . I only know I love you & that any kind of note in your writing is joy. I love you. I love you.”17
Austin was more circumspect in his communications. Though he’d sent her two notes that Mabel received in places she’d stayed along the way, he did not write her at the boardinghouse where the Loomises were living until the end of December. At that point he addressed a very formal note to “My dear Mrs. Todd,” in which he told her of his family’s comings and goings and concluded with the elliptical line, “Hope you are having the most delightful time and that your health is better, and to be better.” In a postscript he gave her Lavinia’s address, which she presumably already knew, a clear though coded suggestion that she should send any letters to him care of his sister.18
When David notified Mabel about his travel plans for returning from the west coast, it became apparent to her that he might, in fact, arrive in Amherst before she did. She implored him “to be very, very cordial to Mr. D. for he has been as true as steel” and to be “very sweet” to the rest of the Dickinsons—“Ned included”—when he saw them. “Get yourself on a very happy basis with the family by the time I come . . . and keep me informed of your every movement.” She reminded David of her love for him. And, she stated, “Mr. D. says there will be no difficulty whatever about your getting five hundred dollars more on your salary next year,” and added, lest David forget, “He is poised to do every thing possible for you, in all ways.”19
David’s letter back to Mabel might also have made her keen to protect her incipient relationship with Austin. It contained insinuations that he was “getting on quite well with some of the ladies” he met in California, who were “very agreeable to me.” In addition, Mabel no doubt would have felt some dissonance when, in a letter a few days later, David suggested, “You see, I have an idea, darling, that we are going to make our final home out here, and you will not then regret having spent this last season at Amherst.”20 Of course, at that point Mabel was not regretting her decision to have come to Amherst in the least. In fact, she could not wait to return.
As 1882 drew to a close Mabel wrote a longer and more reflective entry in her diary, as had become her custom. Indeed, 1882 had been a banner year, one that she realized would change her life. Although she was clearly concerned about what might await her when she returned to Amherst, Mabel’s abounding optimism and sense that she remained the star at the center of her universe prevailed. It was already winter’s start but she somehow found one of her seemingly omnipresent four-leafed clovers to mark the date. “I am glad this is such a big four-leafed clover on this page. I shall take it over into my new diary and let it there mean more success and happiness than it has ever. I am in a bout of complication these few days.” She went on, “But I awoke feeling free & happy and I know everything is going to turn out delightfully. Things always do for me. The day is perfect and promising everything for tomorrow.”21
At the beginning of 1883, Mabel was reunited with David—and with Austin. She recorded in her diary that she felt “safe & protected again, & my soul was filled with joy” to see David, for he was “my darling, my beloved.” But in the same entry she also noted her delight that Austin came over the evening she returned. Just a couple of days later after she and David had spent an evening at the Dickinsons’, Mabel suggested to Austin that she had been extremely distressed at the “horribly chilling . . . cruel atmosphere.” Mabel was likely reacting not only to whatever snubbing she felt from Sue but also to the fear that her own social position in Amherst might be jeopardized without the largess of her primary mentor.
The loss of Sue’s respect and friendship must have felt a considerable blow. Perhaps even when Mabel first sensed Sue’s changed attitude toward her and her altered position in the constellation of the Dickinson household, she also realized that Austin’s position would remain unchanged. Mabel told Austin she had “wept the bitterest tears I have shed for years.” She went on to say that her feelings for him remained constant. In fact, she insisted, “I am the same to you as ever. Please do not ever lose sight of that.” She wrote, “I truly think that my lighthearted and careless exultation in life has gone for always—I am going through a most bitter experience and it has suddenly changed me from what was almost a child’s irresponsible joyousness into a woman’s somewhat sad and somber outlook on life. . . . I have grown years in the past few weeks and it does seem to me now that I can never look at anything just the same I used to do.”22
It’s clear from her private writings that Mabel felt her entitlement to happiness in life had been deeply compromised by Ned’s turncoat actions and Sue’s subsequent jealousies. “I am not very happy just at present, I am sorry to say,” she recorded at the beginning of February 1883. “I always count time of sadness as so much lost of my life. It is my right to be happy.”23 Mabel never took responsibility for the situation; her diaries never mention the irony of Sue’s having introduced Mabel to her home, to her town, to her son and to her husband.
From that point forward, Mabel lived and justified her life invested in two primary relationships. On the one hand, she maintained her marriage with David, continuing to write in her diaries an
d journals entries such as “David and I spend hours talking with each other. We think of nothing definite and do very little. It is such a joy to be together” and “all the time my dear David and I are very happy and tender and devoted companions. My married life is certainly exceptionally sweet and peaceful and satisfying, and his nature is just the one to soothe and rest me.”24
Theirs was a seemingly functional relationship. Mabel supported David in his work, assisting him by copying his scientific records, helping him to write reports and articles (indeed, she probably ghostwrote a number of things he bylined), and accompanying him on many astronomical expeditions around the world, across a period of many years. Mabel always hoped that he would enjoy more success than he ever did. They clearly maintained some kind of sexual relationship as documented by the symbols in Mabel’s diaries, and on at least one occasion—after the emotional relationship with Austin had begun but before any sexual relationship had commenced—had a pregnancy scare: “It wasn’t a little child, after all. And I am glad, for I would rather do that important work intentionally. I am light-hearted and happy,” Mabel concluded.25 And for Mabel, David provided stability and an ostensibly acceptable public veneer, despite the whispers.
It was clear to Mabel that her relationship with David in no way matched the depth of her love for Austin. “I love my dear David inexpressibly,” she wrote in her diary in January of 1883, “but I am not in a whole-souled way cheerful of it.”26 Certainly David’s continuing infidelities with any number of women over the years contributed to Mabel’s ongoing justification of her own unorthodox relationship with Austin. As she opined in her journal in 1890, “I do not think David is what might be called a monogamous animal. While I know he loves me to the full of his nature he is not at all incapable of falling immensely in love with someone else and having a very piquant time of it. . . . But I am the one woman for all time for Austin, I, just myself because it is I. There is something unspeakably solemn in the giving up of a man’s soul like that.”27
Elsewhere Mabel drew a distinction between her behavior and David’s: “I have discovered that I can be loyal. I can live for an ideal. If I were to be separated from him [Austin] for ten years I should still be the same as the day we met that I am now. I should know that no distance nor time could make me other than his whole life to him, and I am his equal in loyalty. I can never flirt. I can never have any little affairs on hand. My life is holy since he came into it.”28 For Mabel, loyalty had more to do with her relationship with Austin than her relationship with David. And her relationship with Austin was noble and enduring, whereas David’s many flings were often with women whom Mabel considered to be unworthy and transient. But they had an understanding about each other’s other relationships, and it worked. Or at least it seemed to at the time.
In a journal entry from 1885, Mabel tried to explain her different feelings for these two men in her life. “David is to me just as dear as he ever was. I have not changed toward him one particle, & he knows it. But if a part of my nature, of which I had not heretofore suspected the existence, has grown & expanded into proportions to fit the universe, whose fault is it if I find a nature to respond to every bit of that great new growth? . . . Austin has descended to the deepest depths of my soul.”29
Mabel often referred to Austin as “my master” or “my king.” In so doing she did not mean that he was the superior and she the supplicant—rather, she honestly believed Austin’s love for her to be “truly noble” and that this, in turn, dignified and elevated her. And in 1889 she acknowledged, “Nothing stirs me from him [Austin], or alters my conviction for one moment that he is my absolute mate for all eternity. My dear David gives me all he has, but Austin’s is a kind of love which David does not know. . . . The situation is certainly most exceptional. I understand it, and I appreciate both my dear men. I know what one is, I know what the other is, and two entirely separate sides of my nature go to them.”30
In addition to the intellectual and spiritual appreciation Mabel had for Austin, she also most clearly appreciated him in a physical way. Her journals contain innumerable mentions of Austin’s “clear eyes of heaven’s own blue” or his “proud and strong countenance” or his “lips I love to distraction.”
“What is the matter that I miss you so? I unutterably long for the sight of your face, for a touch of your soft, soft hands, for anything you might choose to say in your splendid voice,” she once wrote to Austin, conveying the powerful physical attraction she felt for him.31
In Austin, Mabel knew she had found her true soul mate, someone who did not judge her but revered and worshiped the person she was inside and out. He was the person who most completed her in every way. When Austin wrote her in 1890, “you are a splendid woman—you don’t half understand and appreciate your power and your qualities, as compared with other women. It is so native to you to be charming, fascinating—satisfying, you think nothing of it,” Mabel responded, “You are right—I do not quite estimate myself sufficiently.”32
Beyond simply feeding Mabel’s sense of self-importance and concurring with her own opinion about the boundlessness of her potential, Mabel believed that Austin understood her as no one else did—with the possible exception of her father—and that they were able to inspire each other as no one else could. “He calls out always my highest, and meets me exactly at all points of sensitiveness and delicacy and fineness and intensity and strength. He says we get, and will get, all we can together here, but that to eternity he looks for the fullest blossom of what has so wonderfully budded here. He knows, and I know, what Heaven means to us both.”33
The language that Mabel and Austin often used to describe their love in their journals and in their letters to each other was frequently akin to the religious fervor that had swept the country earlier in the nineteenth century during the Second Great Awakening. In one journal entry from 1884, Mabel offered perhaps the fullest explanation for her love for Austin, how it differed from any other love and why she felt it to be an almost religious experience for her:
But the greatest proof I have ever had that I am different from 99 others, and 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. And the thing which makes it certain that nobody ever approached him is not only that he is noble and strong and true in character nor that he is impressive in look and manner (the finest looking man I ever saw), nor that he comes from a staunch old New England family, nor that he is sensitive and tender and lovely, nor that he loves nature exquisitely—nor even all these dear things together. But emphatically that his nature is lofty and spiritual beyond that of any one I ever met, unless it is my blessed father. And he shows me my highest always. . . . But Austin Dickinson has re-awakened my almost dormant longing for God, my latent wish for a nobly spiritual life. . . . My whole soul is stirred, and I can never again be shallow or frivolous. . . . He is heaven-sent. It is beyond words.34
Indeed, their love letters to each other over the years used language that furthered this pseudo-religious fervor; they believed that their relationship was destined, and that in its exquisite purity it was above and beyond the bounds of socially accepted morality. Austin wrote to Mabel, “Conventionalism, is for those not strong enough to be laws for themselves, or to conform themselves to the higher law where harmonies meet . . . [we are] part of one existence forevermore.”35
Mabel and Austin also believed their love superior to the love of anyone else. Austin wrote of this highly idealized state in a letter to Mabel: “Was ever woman to man what you are to me! Was ever man to woman what I am to you! Was ever ideal so completely realized as mine in you and yours in me! . . . Such mutual desire, such mutual gratification! It is no where portrayed. It is ours alone—ours to keep.”36 A quarter of the way through their years together Mabel also captured this sentiment in her journal: “I have read a great many stories, and I have had a good many love letters, and I have heard
a good many lovers talk, but I never heard or read or imagined such a wonderful . . . or so divine a love as he has for me. No souls were ever so united, no love story approaches it.” She maintained this attitude well after Austin died, once scribbling on an envelope a list of “famous lovers,” including Romeo and Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, Antony and Cleopatra, and then penning an essay in which she compared her love for Austin to those great lovers of history: “Once in a while, in a generation perhaps, a human love is born to last into eternity; a love unmoved by vicissitude, strength and by pain, made steadfast by separation, and in which the thrill of newly awakened passion never fades, but becomes the accompanying measurement of a growing and perfect oneness which death itself has no power to dissolve.”37
Thus commenced a dynamic within which Mabel and Austin’s relationship not only survived but thrived. Because of the general reluctance to engage in open discussions about anything sexual, in American Victorian-era marriages “unofficial divorce, and therefore technical bigamy, were not uncommon,” writes historian Stephanie Coontz.38 Though Austin probably felt the desire to leave his marriage, he didn’t have to. For Mabel, the situation was different.
Throughout the course of their thirteen years together, Mabel experienced a life of constant pain and marginalization in being the Other Woman. Austin’s vaunted position in Amherst shielded him from being an object of overt scorn, but Mabel had no such protection. She lived a life of perpetual hope that she and Austin would someday be able to live life together openly, but perennial frustration that they could not.
As winter turned to spring, Mabel wished that Sue’s attitude toward her would also begin to thaw. She wrote in her diary that after the initial coldness she had experienced, Mabel felt that she needed to put some distance between herself and Sue so that relations could be stabilized. She spent most of the spring of 1883 in Washington, and then spent the summer months in Hampton, New Hampshire, with her parents and Millicent. During these periods she corresponded with Austin in letters sent care of Lavinia, and during the summer Mabel traveled to Boston to meet him on several occasions. Her letters to Austin reveal her ongoing distress with the situation, along with her hope that things would become more comfortable. “It is true I have suffered terribly,” she complained, “and I can hardly bear to think of again placing myself where I may have renewed cause for pain.” A couple of months later she said, “I would give anything if I were coming back to an entirely serene environment.”39 In her journal, Mabel recorded both David’s and Austin’s assurances to her that Sue’s anger seemed to be subsiding: “David said that Mrs. D. was lovely again, extended her hand pleasantly to him again, and talked cordially. And Mr. D. says everything is going to be all right for me. He will make it right. I suppose it will be long before things are back on a really trustful, friendly basis. But I am sure if there are no more accidents, that they will get back at last.”40