by Julie Dobrow
On July 18, Austin finally had enough strength to meet Mabel at The Homestead for a short time. “He seems very weak & it almost broke my heart,” Mabel noted. His racing heartbeat and difficulty breathing alarmed her greatly.8
The Dickinsons’ family doctor called in a specialist from Boston to examine Austin and determine the cause of his continuing illness. Dr. Knight was “not very encouraging,” diagnosing problems with Austin’s heart. Austin told Mabel, who dutifully recorded that the outer walls of his heart were too thin and could not properly send blood to his lungs. At the end of July, the Dickinsons brought in a second nurse from Boston to aid in his care.
In her writing, Mabel described the fear and panic that almost paralyzed her and prevented her from focusing on her work or anything else. She tried to enjoy the beautiful summer days but could not; she learned how to ride a bicycle and went out riding for longer and longer periods of time, trying to distract herself with exercise. Yet, at the end of the day, writing in her diary, Mabel gave voice to her true feelings: “All day on and off I wept and cried, I rode and tried to read to ease my mind and went to bed almost spent with grief [and] fear . . . O Austin, my Austin!”9 Mabel’s word choice was not incidental, alluding to Whitman’s 1865 poem “O Captain! My Captain!” about the death of Lincoln. After all, she believed Austin had been her own emancipator, freeing her to pursue love and her own ambitions in new ways.
Desperate to help her ailing love, in the beginning of August, Mabel traveled to Boston, and from there, to Wayland, to consult a faith healer. She wrote that throughout the journey she was “completely broken up” and “I begged God to save him.” She explained the circumstances that “undermined Austin’s health” to the faith healer, Mr. Bishop, who found the case was “most transparent” and suggested he help Austin with “absent treatment” for three days. (The belief that healing through the prayer of nonmedical practitioners gained many adherents in nineteenth-century America.) Mabel felt sure that she had “struck the right thing.” Her faith restored, she claimed, “I feel strong for him—he will get well!”10
She wrote to Austin about this meeting, and sent the letter care of Vinnie. “What I have been through since the day, July 18, when you were last out and saw me, no human being can ever know. Even you, my beloved king, can scarcely tell my suffering.” She told Austin of the “terrible day when I heard things that stopped my breath, and I besieged God with frantic entreaties to save you, or else kill me too.” But after her visit with Mr. Bishop, “It was the first time in my life that God ever spoke to me,” she said, “but He did that time, and told me you would get well. . . . I have solemnly promised God that when you are well again, and I feel your beloved arms around me again, and I know I have you safe, that from that hour I will live up to the best and highest there is in me, and make you happy as I never did before.”11
Mabel was heartened when Austin seemed to rally a bit right after this “absent treatment.” He slept better; he seemed to be breathing more easily.
On August 12 she noted, “My darling is much better. Dr. Cooper says it’s the first time he has been able to say so with confidence. I solemnly thank God.”12
Feeling somewhat reassured but thoroughly exhausted from the continuous anxiety, the heat, and the “effort to keep my mind tranquil for [Austin],” she consented to go with David on a short excursion to an event in nearby New Salem, where he had been asked to represent Amherst College. They departed on August 15. They returned to Amherst on the evening of the sixteenth. But they were too late.
There is a one-sentence entry in Mabel’s diary on Saturday, August 17: “My God, why hast thou deserted me!”13
The day that Austin died, fifteen-year-old Millicent wrote in her diary that the doctor “told us to one hour or so that he had died at seven o’clock. Mamma is nearly dead and told Arthur [Curtiss James, a close family friend] that she has had her death.” Millicent understood both her mother and her father were intensely shaken and in deep mourning. The next day she noted, “This has been one of the very saddest days that I have passed in my life. Mamma has been crying all day and papa has cried some and has looked so sad that I have been perfectly bewildered. It seems to be a universal grief.”14
Throughout her long life, Millicent saw the death of Austin Dickinson as “an all-engulfing disaster,” whose ripples indelibly affected her and her parents. It also heightened the feud between the Dickinson and Todd families. Millicent believed that while Austin was alive, he “carried” all the members of his family and kept their incipient tensions in check. “Without his controlling presence, they were all unleashed.”15 And, as she wrote in 1945, Austin’s death had one other important consequence: it “brought about a stalemate which blocked publication of a large part of the poetry of Emily Dickinson.”16
When she was approaching the end of her own life, Millicent went back and read her mother’s diaries from the fateful year of 1895. The day Austin died, Millicent wrote, “put an end, among other things, to my childhood.”17 Mabel’s prolonged state of mourning and insistence on wearing black, as an ersatz widow, caused people around Amherst to whisper even more. (Mabel, for her part, wrote, “the whole town weeps for him but I am the only mourner.”) Millicent may also have felt that her childhood ended after Austin’s death because Mabel, slowly but with certainty, began to shift her dependence on Austin into reliance on Millicent.
“He was a strong man, strong in his convictions, strong in loyalty to his ideals, strong in his likes and dislikes, strong in words and in action,” stated the writer of Austin’s obituary in the Amherst Record. “He looked upon the town of Amherst as one of the most beautiful places in the world and was ever seeking to add to its natural beauty and alert to anything that might menace it.”18 Under the headline of “Amherst Loses a Strong Man in the Death of W. A. Dickinson,” the Springfield Republican noted Austin’s death was “due to overwork” and that “William Austin Dickinson, the most influential citizen of Amherst . . . was a strong and forceful personality. He had an open, frank and vigorous way of speaking to and looking at the world that commanded respect and confidence from the moment that he appeared . . . but his nature was all gentleness and refinement. . . . No man in Amherst has done more to beautify the town than Mr. Dickinson.”19
All of Amherst shut down on the day of Austin’s funeral. Millicent observed in her diary, “Mr. Dickinson’s funeral was at three o’clock but neither Mamma nor I cared to go.” She added, “I have never seen mamma in any such condition as she is now, and as for papa, he looks so sad and mopey.”20 What Millicent couldn’t fully articulate at the time was that Mabel would not have been welcomed at the funeral. She also did not know that her mother had already said good-bye to Austin privately. Longsworth writes, “at noon that day Ned Dickinson had quietly let [Mabel] in at a side door, while Sue and the rest of his family were at the dining table, so Mabel could say goodbye to Austin and place in his casket a token of their love.”21
“I am utterly crushed and heart broken. I have had my first true grief; and it is so overwhelming and stupefying that I do not realize how completely I have had my death-blow,” wrote Mabel that evening. She continued:
My Austin has left his dear, beloved body, and gone, I do not know where, but away, out of sight. I kissed his blessed cold cheek today and held his tender hand. The dear body, every inch of which I know and love so utterly was there, and I said good-bye to it, but all the time I seemed singularly conscious that my Austin himself was out in the sweet summer sunshine, more light-hearted and blithe and strong and happier than he has ever been before since he was a boy. But oh, the tragedy of it, and the unthinkable bitterness to me! . . . There never was such a love, as his for me and mine for him. I have lived in and by and through and because of him for thirteen years; every breath I drew was for him; no success or praise or gain seemed anything until I had told it all to him, and we had talked it over and put it away in our mental reserves of pleasantness.22
Mabel’
s tortured journal entries for the next several days and weeks outlined her belief that Austin had worked himself to death because he would never take a vacation if he could not take it with her. She insisted it was Sue’s unrelenting grip on him that had shortened his life, keeping him from true happiness. “While the crickets sing tonight, my master, my mate, my king, lies up at his dear Wildwood, at peace, at rest, after a life that was actually sucked out of him for forty years, and in which I was the only bright spot. One of his doctors told him he had no organic disease of the heart, but he had a ‘tired heart.’ Tired! He was tired to pathos . . . I alone knew the pathos and from where it had emanated.”23
A bright red Columbia bicycle arrived at the Todd residence on the morning of August 17, 1895. There was no card attached, no envelope, no clues about who had sent it. “I have never known who gave it to me,” Mabel wrote in her journal a few months after the bicycle arrived, “and the man in Springfield from whom it was bought refused to tell me who ordered it—said he had promised not to tell. It is a most curious thing.”24
Millicent observed that day, “This morning a most beautiful elegant Columbia bicycle . . . came and nobody knows anything about it. Mamma is crazy to find out who sent it and she wonders if dear Mr. Dickinson did.”25
MABEL SPENT HOURS RIDING THE NEW COLUMBIA BICYCLE THAT MYSTERIOUSLY APPEARED THE DAY AFTER AUSTIN’S DEATH. SHE EVEN RODE IN HER MOURNING ATTIRE (DETAIL).
Mabel was convinced that Austin had purchased the bicycle for her. However, Austin died the day before the bicycle was delivered to her home and he had been sick and housebound for many weeks before that, nearly constantly attended to by his family.
For months after Austin died, Mabel wrote in her diaries and journals about the long bike rides she took by herself throughout the Pelham hills that surrounded her home. “All I can do is ride,” she wrote. “I really think [the bicycle] saved my life, for I never should have ridden again if it had not come,” she reflected, “but such a beautiful present seemed to make it incumbent upon me to ride, so I did.”26
But even these long rides, which must have taken great effort given the late summer heat, the hilly terrain and the fact that Mabel was cycling in the long skirts of the day, weren’t enough to curb her sorrow. Everything she saw and smelled and heard reminded her of Austin: “the warm mellow silences, the insects in the grass, the scent of tobacco and corn, and above all the sound of crickets at supper-time . . . I hear them and my heart breaks anew.” Three months later the pain wasn’t any better. “My heart cries out to be with him . . . I am overwhelmed with grief . . . I cannot breathe for sorrow, I sit in the pastures and talk to Austin. I cry and cry and cry. What CAN I ever do?” Mabel wrote that Austin took her former “zest for life with him.”27
A few months after Austin’s death she reflected, “It does not grow in the least easier. In fact, I think the wear and tear of every day life makes his absence constantly harder. . . . I feel adrift, rudderless . . . the reality of his absence is so crushingly constant.”28
It took Mabel many weeks to gather Austin’s letters and put them in a tin box in her vault for safekeeping. The velvet hat he had left hanging on a peg at The Dell remained there as long as Mabel lived in that house: “I still leave it where he always kept it—and when I have been away the first thing I do is go and kiss it and hold it to my cheek, the moment I get back,” she wrote. She wanted to be buried with that hat in her hands.29
Months later, Mabel recalled how she and Austin spoke often of being together in Wildwood Cemetery. In fact, she wrote more than a year after Austin’s death that he had wished to be buried not just beside her in adjacent plots, but with her, right next to her in the same coffin. He had struggled to orchestrate this, even considering willing Mabel his body. But he died before he could take any such steps.30
Poignantly, she recorded the words to a joint prayer she and Austin had uttered. “We had a little creed which we said together, alternately, and had, for years: ‘For my beloved is mine, and I am his, what can we want beside? Nothing!’ the last word in unison. He and I, with the noblest emphasis on his part and the deepest belief on mine. I begin it now, half mechanically from habit, and he always seems to take it up as he used to.”31
Though still grieving, in the fall, Mabel threw herself back into her work. She resumed giving some talks to publicize Emily’s Letters, and in September, the month after Austin died, she took up editing the third volume of Emily’s poetry alone, Colonel Higginson’s own illness preventing him from collaborating. She also began writing and editing five other books at the same time. “Thank God for work!” she wrote, “IT is my salvation. I have never been so rushed in my life; and if it were not for that very fact I should probably be dead—or crazy.” As she worked steadily on editing the third book of poems, Mabel found some solace in the words of Austin’s sister:
We learn in the retreating
How vast an one
Was recently among us.
A perished sun
Endears in the departure
How doubly more
Than all the golden presence
It was before!32
Sometime in the year after Austin’s death, Mabel made the acquaintance of Dr. Albert Josiah Lyman. Lyman, minister of the South Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York, was making a name for himself by speaking on such topics including “new thoughts on salvation after death.” In 1897, Mabel engaged in an extended correspondence with him about her love for Austin, her grief, and questioned how her life might productively continue without him. She admitted in her journal that she probably should not keep Lyman’s letters since they were about Austin and her continued connection to him, but she copied extensive passages from them. “No one can help you much. No! only two. One is yourself. And the other is the one whom you loved—and love. For a part of his soul is in you now and if that can not help you, then he is deprived of his own,” Lyman wrote.
Lyman told her that pain was not at odds with the spirit of life, but that she needed to endeavor to find that spirit again. He convinced her that she had the special gifts to do this: “All your letters, dear my friend, confirm my thought of you as one form of God. . . . It is impossible for a woman’s soul to harness love and sorrow together to become the chariot of the mind’s nobler resolve. It might be difficult for most women—I will not believe it is impossible for you.” And in another letter, Lyman urged her to “Let work be the wing that carries you over the monstrous stretches. There will come occasional peaks, where your feet will touch ground, rock under you, sky over you, sunlight on you. Then you can fly again.”33
Dr. Lyman’s letters convinced Mabel that she had more of life to live. They fed into her belief in her natural “brilliance” and her many gifts. They also managed to convince her that death was not the end of her relationship with Austin; in some way—perhaps one that she could not touch—he was with her, still.
Mabel and Austin had always been certain that they would be together for all eternity. They wrote innumerable letters to each other about their conviction that in the life beyond, they would be united. After Austin’s death, there were times when Mabel was certain that she felt him with her, and other times when she just couldn’t sense his presence. “There are days when I am distinctly conscious of him, of his intimate presence—when a glowing certainty that he is with me and fills me wholly for a time, and buoys me up,” she wrote at one time, and at another, “Well, my beloved Austin, there is no need to say goodnight—you do not go away at all. I feel you here in me, enfolding me, this instant. You know how eternally I love you.” But on another date she penned, “Austin is in heaven, and so heaven is where I want to be—and it is full and sweet there, and it is home. My home is Austin only, and so I am hurrying to get there. . . . I am lonely to suffocation, in spite of feeling distinctly at times that he is close to me. I long to touch him, to hear his deep voice. His body lies in Wildwood, but that is not where he is. If only I knew where his soul had gone, i
f only I could speak to him! Oh Austin!”34
For many years to come, Mabel would wonder where Austin was and how to reach him. On New Year’s Eve in 1900 she wrote poignantly:
I know that when my beloved Austin died I came into the strangest and yet most sweet and normal relation to the unseen. And if I had or had known how to follow it up I should have heard him speak to my inner sense. I even did, as it was; and certain sentences from him were borne in upon me most singularly. At times I have felt him very near I have KNOWN he was with me. And then I felt like the grub down in the water which dimly sees the gorgeous butterfly above in the sunshine but cannot talk to it. Yet knows it was once a companion and will be again. Or like the prisoner in thick stone walls, who hears his friend knocking, but cannot understand what he is trying to say through the impassive granite. Something is between I cannot break down. But if I only knew how, I could hear him. It is my fault, not his.35
To try to break down this wall, Mabel turned to the supernatural.
Mabel had always been superstitious and interested in the occult. In addition to her constant collecting of lucky four-leafed clovers, she put horseshoes in her homes and believed in the magic of rainbows. Despite her own authorship of several papers and books about astronomical phenomena, she believed that the universe could not be explained by scientific principles alone and that larger forces beyond humankind were at work. Mabel had a more than passing interest in theosophy (the philosophy of religion founded by spiritualist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875) that included beliefs about reincarnation; she retained some of their publications including a booklet entitled “Scientific Evidence That the Dead Still Live.” She was fascinated—even a bit obsessed—by the story of the Salem witch trials. She frequently wrote and spoke about witchcraft or supernatural events in her lectures; had gone to a faith healer in her desperate attempt to make Austin well; and starting around the turn of the century, she began to pay periodic visits to palm readers and to mediums. Several years after Austin’s death, still desperate to reach him, Mabel traveled to a place others had suggested she might be able to do so.