by Julie Dobrow
Mabel’s diaries, however, suggested that while there were some renewed social events at The Evergreens during the time she spent in Amherst in the late spring and fall of 1883, relations had hardly normalized. She resumed giving Mattie piano lessons and she attended some social events at the Dickinsons’, almost always in the company of David or Grandma Wilder. But the majority of her diary entries show that Mabel was more often at The Homestead than The Evergreens, where she would sing and play for Lavinia and Emily, who continued to listen from behind a door. This was clearly where many of her assignations with Austin took place. Writes Polly Longworth, “The Dickinson sisters not only were aware of their brother’s intimacy with Mabel, they became accessory to it.”41
The stresses of keeping her love for Austin secret in the small town weighed heavily on Mabel. But the more Austin told her about his marriage to Sue, the more justified she felt in her relationship with him. “Mr. Dickinson has told me a great many things since I last wrote, and he is more absorbed in me than I can write. It seems he and his wife have not been in the least happy together although for the sake of appearances and the children, they have continued to live together. Notwithstanding the utter lack of love between them, the fact that he is so interested in me has stirred her far beyond the power of words to express. And she makes it pretty dreadful for him at home. . . . Mr. Dickinson’s life has been barren and I understand him thoroughly.”42
Mabel continued to blame Sue for how she had “abandoned” Austin. “She has gone her own way all these years, & never tried to keep him, doing all the time things morally certain to do worse than alienate him from her . . . the greatest joy in life lay beside her for years, & she never moved to retain it, even pushed it from her. Now it has left her irrevocably.”43
Mabel recorded in her journals over the years all of the things that Austin purportedly told her or alleged about Sue: that she did not stimulate him intellectually; that he felt her social aspirations and materialism made her shallow; that her anger was volatile and unpredictable; that she trended toward shrewishness; that her father had been an alcoholic; that her fear of childbearing had caused her to abort and to attempt to abort pregnancies and made her physically distant from him; that Ned’s epilepsy was a result of her attempts to abort her pregnancy with him; that she was snobbish and pretentious in ways that were both distressingly obvious and out of alignment given her working-class familial roots.
Mabel’s perceptions of Sue’s character also clearly influenced Millicent’s ideas in later years. In Millicent’s 1945 book Ancestors’ Brocades, she wrote that Sue “assumed an attitude of lofty aloofness scarcely deigning, as she drove about town in her barouche, to acknowledge the greetings of her former schoolmates . . . pretense and pose came to be her most notable characteristics.”44
Mabel once stated that Austin had told her he felt like he was “going to his execution” upon marrying Sue. Mabel put some of the darkest “revelations” about what she said Austin had told her in an envelope labeled “Austin’s statements to me,” in which she wrote, among other things, that Sue was responsible for Austin’s “entire disappointment in all so-called married life, destruction of various children” and “carving knife thrown at you & other fits of diabolical temper.” There were some allusions Mabel made that suggested Sue, like her father, might have had a problem with alcohol. Though she begged Austin to write these things down as a kind of insurance policy for her should anything ever happen to him, he apparently never dared commit such thoughts to paper. Or if he did, they were destroyed. More likely, though, for some reason Austin never thought that this was as important to do as Mabel did. He wrote in early 1884, “Yes, my darling, I did promise you that sometime I would put into your hands the story of my life to use as a shield, if ever, when I am not here to answer for myself any attack should be made upon my love for you, or yours for me, or our relations to each other. And yet is it not better and nobler that I say nothing which involves any other, reflects upon any other! . . . Is it not better to begin with my meeting you and for the first time feeling clear sunshine!”45
Mabel also recorded the insinuation that Austin had “begun to feel, as I know, that it does not do for persons of entirely different social grade to marry”—this with regard to an assertion that Sue’s father had been a “common farmer” and tavern owner. Despite her own meager economic circumstances, Mabel, of course, believed herself of the same “social grade” as Austin because she had roots going straight back to John and Priscilla Alden.
Mabel also wrote on several occasions that she believed Austin was very disappointed in his two older children, whom he thought of as socially ambitious and as materialistically vacuous as their mother. But Austin’s feelings for little Gib were different. This was the child in whom Austin invested all of his hopes and dreams. When eight-year-old Gib contracted typhoid fever in the fall of 1883, Austin was frantic. Mabel recorded in her diary, “I went to see Miss Vinnie. Her brother is almost killed by his anxiety and distress—oh! I pity him so.” Gib died the next day. Mabel wrote, “My heart is breaking for [Austin]—oh! That dear man, how he is suffering.” Weeks later she reflected, “The Dickinsons have had a great sorrow in the death of little Gilbert, and no one has seen anything of them. Of course I have seen my dear friend Mr. Dickinson often. . . . Mr. Dickinson nearly died too. Gilbert was his idol, and the only thing in his house which truly loved him, or in which he took any pleasure. He said he should wish to die if it were not for me—I am the only gleam of light in his horizon.”46
Gib’s death may have been a watershed moment in Austin’s relationships with the two major women in his life. Rather than turn to Sue in their shared moment of grief, he turned to Mabel. And he never turned back.
In December 1883, Mabel and Austin took their relationship to a new level. They consummated their relationship in a rendezvous that occurred in The Homestead. The actual date is not entirely clear: noting indications from Mabel’s and Austin’s diaries that they met at The Homestead, as well as a symbol in Austin’s diary, historian Polly Longsworth cites December 13 as the most likely date. Longsworth also states that the date was marked by Mabel and Austin with a neologism: “AMUASBTEILN”—the intertwining of the letters of their names. However, the piece of paper with this neologism held in the archives at Yale is dated December 9. It is possible that the neologism was created as a romantic gesture signaling the couple’s intent to become more deeply involved rather than actually marking the date on which they did. Longsworth suggests that this tryst occurred “with the knowledge of David Todd, who was fully aware of the depth of feeling between his wife and Austin, and was not alienated by it.”47
MABEL AND AUSTIN INDICATED THE DEEPENING OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH A NEOLOGISM.
There is a fair amount of evidence that David not only countenanced his wife’s relationship with Austin Dickinson but that he actually enabled it. Starting in the fall of 1883, there were many times when David suggested to Austin that he accompany him into Boston when Mabel was already there, and encouraged Austin to join the Todds in Chicago in 1893 at the World’s Fair. David acted as a courier, bringing Austin’s letters to Mabel and Mabel’s to Austin. And on the evenings when he knew that Austin was with Mabel in the Todds’ home, David signaled his return late at night from the observatory by whistling a tune from the opera Martha. This was a routine Millicent knew well, but whose significance she claimed did not occur to her until much later in her life.
Certainly David recognized Austin’s real and potential role in helping to advance his career and knew that as treasurer of the college, Austin signed his paychecks. But more than that, he seems to have truly respected Austin. David and Austin spent time together when Mabel was away and each wrote admiring things of the other in their respective diaries and letters. The delicate balancing act going on in Mabel and David’s marriage of allowing each other enough space for other relationships, continued in earnest.
Starting from the time that Ned
Dickinson tipped off his mother and Sue began to monitor Mabel and Austin more closely, the lovers began to use new strategies and new rationalizations for their deepening relationship. David’s complicity helped. Historian Polly Longsworth points out that in 1885 when the Todds moved to a rented home on Lessey Street, entries in Austin’s diary reveal that he spent much time there, both alone with Mabel and also with Mabel and David, together. He referred to it as “the third house.” Longsworth goes so far as to suggest that in Austin’s diary from this period of time his apparent symbol for having sex (==) is frequently accompanied by the phrase “with a witness”—however, since Millicent was also living there at the time it’s not clear exactly whom Austin meant nor what, if anything, that “witness” had witnessed.48
Mabel and Austin had rendezvoused first at The Homestead and then starting in 1887, at Mabel and David’s house, The Dell. This house was built on a piece of land that Austin gave them on the other side of what was then known as Dickinson Meadow, with funds that he had fronted them and a design he had suggested—including a back staircase with direct and discreet access to the second floor. It was there, as Millicent recalled in one of her “Reminiscences,” that Mabel and Austin spent many long evenings together “by the upstairs fire alone, behind locked doors by the hour.”49 Mabel’s diaries from these years are peppered with notations like, “a dear friend at 9:30 for a few minutes” or “I had a call in the afternoon, and again in the evening, so it was a pleasant day.” Her diaries continued to be the more public record of her life and meetings with Austin, while her journals expounded in great detail her feelings for Austin and about the ongoing highs and lows of conducting their hidden relationship.
As time went on, Mabel became increasingly bitter about Sue’s place as Austin’s wife when she believed herself to be Austin’s true wife in the context of eternity. Sue did what she could to marginalize Mabel by excluding her from social activities and by asserting her rightful role about town as Mrs. Austin Dickinson in ways Mabel found objectionable. Both Sue and her daughter, Mattie, found innumerable ways to snub Mabel or to make life generally unpleasant for her. Mabel’s journals are filled with comments comparing her own relationship with Austin to his relationship with Sue, who “was not made to understand him.”50 Increasingly both Austin and Mabel disparaged Sue, referring to her as “the great big black Mogul” (referencing her long period of dressing in mourning for Gib) or as the “incubus.”
And of course, they believed their love was beyond the bounds of any conventional social mores. Mabel wrote to Austin, “Your love has completely mastered me . . . I recognize your supremacy and with it the most thrilling gratitude to God for this greatest gift. I spiritually lay my hand in yours with a peace I never knew before. I know God loves us—I know he has an infinite tenderness for us, and for the rare love he has made.”51
Mabel came to believe that a love given by God trumped any law created by mere mortals to govern relationships. Writing of a biography of George Eliot she’d read in 1885, Mabel opined, “What possible spiritual difference could it have made whether or not a lawyer had spoken the necessary words of release . . . the law of God to me is so far higher than calfskin and parchment, and God and men do not always think identically. Far from it. When two noble natures receive each other . . . they [rise above] the confusion and mist which men throw over life, and know clearly that each is the fitting and perfect complement to the other . . . this is undoubtedly revolutionary doctrine, but so was the first thought about abolishing slavery.”52
This notion was tested mightily when Mabel’s parents came to visit in the fall of 1884 and first began to suspect the true nature of their daughter’s relationship with Austin Dickinson. Mabel was so upset by her parents’ insinuations that her life and reputation would be ruined should she continue to go on private carriage rides with a married man—even a man of Austin’s impeccable credentials and reputation—that she couldn’t bring herself to expound too much about it in her journal, including mention of a few “terrible talks” with her mother. But she also let Austin know: “People in general are fools—there is no denying that. . . . If people only realized that the more they try to keep lovers apart, the more they brood upon and think of each other. . . . I am most weak-mindedly near to tears all the time. . . . But I can remember—and I know what is coming, and so I can bear. And only you can know the sorrow; my own!” Austin replied, “We are not to be frightened—we are not of that cheap stuff. We are not afraid of the truth. . . . And is love anything to be ashamed of? Our life together is as white and unspotted as the fresh driven snow. This we know—whatever vulgar minded people, who see nothing beyond the body—may think. . . . God forgives us if there is in that any wrong, but our love for each other will give up life for our love. I would do this over and over again.”53
After Molly and Eben returned to Washington, Grandma Wilder, who stayed on to help with Millicent, filled them in on Mabel’s continuing visits with Mr. Dickinson. Eben wrote to Mabel that her actions had caused her mother to “take to her bed from sorrow” and “were killing her.” Mabel was furious. She confided in her journal her anger at Grandma Wilder’s surveillance and betrayal and at her mother’s prejudices. “My mother and father have heretofore held a standard of life and morals far above mine, but through Mr. Dickinson I have jumped at one bound to a plane far above even theirs,” she wrote. “I feel that, now, for the first time in my life, I have emerged from the mists in which every young person’s life is encased, and can see myself and life clearly. My emotions and ambitions are all handed and made infinitely higher. And this through and by a man . . . whom they beg me not to associate with so much because he is a married man.” Mabel continued this diatribe against her parents with the further justification that Austin was someone who “has always lived his life as honored as no one else ever was before, not since his illustrious father and grandfather and great-grandfather, who have always held every office of trust and responsibility in town. But that is not it . . . every one knows that he has been wretchedly disappointed in his domestic life, and all universally respect him.” She concluded by writing of how her mother’s “cruelly low” criticisms of her relationship with Austin held little sway because their “doctrine of love” was on a different plane than the love of anyone else.54
While both Austin and David urged Mabel not to care so much—indeed, to cut off all relations with her mother—Mabel could not quite bring herself to do this. Instead, she complained about her mother in letters to Austin and in her journal. In one journal entry she delineated the charges Molly had made in a long letter to her: “She denounces me in every way. . . . Every phase of my life comes into her general scourge. Millicent has not clothes—her boots were of the cheapest, while when I was a child no money was spared on me—I am inordinately vain, abominably selfish, as weak as water & only stubborn. This, after pages of abuse of my dear Austin, & his sisters—cynical, carping, irreligious people.” What seems to have hurt Mabel the most was the knowledge that through her relationship with Austin, she had caused her mother “the most agonizing suffering.”55 Eventually Mabel apparently reached an accommodation with Molly; though the two would never agree about Mabel’s relationship with Austin, her mother backed off her direct criticisms and leveled them in a more veiled way that mitigated direct confrontation.
Even when relations with her parents seemed to have calmed, they were mostly writing her with ostensible concerns about how much she was doing and how tired she appeared in recent photos she’d sent to them—Molly and Eben apparently were trying another tactic in appealing to Mabel’s vanity. When Mabel had the opportunity to spend the summer of 1885 traveling in Europe with her cousin once removed, Caro Lovejoy Andrews, and her husband, John, Mabel jumped at the chance to remove herself from Amherst.
Molly and Eben certainly encouraged Mabel to go. In one of Molly’s typical letters, written in tiny, almost indecipherable handwriting, with many words underlined multiple times and sentenc
es accentuated by exclamation points, she urgently wrote Mabel, “What we have to say is, you MUST go to Europe with Caro . . . it is greatly needed in your case. . . . Your father says, ‘don’t fail to tell her she must go now before it is too late! For her pictures show the nervous strain she daily goes through!!!’ Leave everything, make any arrangements—only—GO—and may God take and keep you from all harm!”56 Molly knew that any suggestions about the diminution of Mabel’s appearance and putting words into the mouth of her beloved father would resonate with her.