by Julie Dobrow
Just when Millicent seemed better, Mabel’s mother fell ill, and Mabel and David moved her parents to a home near them. Mabel’s journals reveal her conflicted feelings between her sense of duty to her mother, her desire to make things easier on her father and her own distaste for caring for the mother toward whom she had felt more than a bit of resentment over the years. “I am getting at my wits’ end,” complained Mabel, “and almost sick with a score of responsibilities, both mental and physical. But I make long and cheerful calls on Muggy [Mabel’s nickname for her mother] every day, tell her all amusing things, take her books of photographs and postcards, one at a time, which she delights in, and work in every way to have this a happy year.”10 Her mother’s final illness lasted ten months, into the sweltering summer.
By mid-September, Mabel was beside herself. “I feel like a wreck,” she admitted, “and I am on the verge of dysentery all the time.” Her mother finally passed away on September 20. “Poor little Muggy,” Mabel wrote, “her tumultuous, volcanic enthusiastic, appreciative, happy, disappointed, prejudiced, intense, sensitive, affectionate life was over. We shall understand one another much better when we meet again.”11 To the very end, Mabel’s relationship with her own mother remained conflicted and unresolved.
But Mabel would find no respite. In 1911, David became ill and was diagnosed with painful, life-threatening kidney stones that had to be surgically removed. Then Mabel’s beloved father began to decline precipitously. After several weeks during which Eben’s strength seemed to wane and he had “faintish turns,” he suddenly became worse and it was clear that his heart was failing. “My beloved father is dying tonight, and I am sad, sad. I love him so dearly—and we have been always such comrades all my life! . . . His beautiful eyes already see a light that never was on sea or land, and I am lonely, lonely, already.” Eben was buried beside Molly, in a plot at Wildwood Cemetery just up the hill from where Austin, Ned and Gib already lay. Mabel penned in her diary, “We went to Wildwood, flowers, sunshine, and we left him on the east slope he loved so well . . . the house is so empty. I want him so much.”12
Reflecting on this time a few years hence, Mabel recalled, “My mother’s really terrible final sickness, lasting ten months, my darling Millicent’s endocarditis after diphtheria, David’s illness & operation & then my blessed father’s death—all had worn me more than I knew—and I lay in my long chaise . . . day after day, not even caring to read—singular lack!—except an attic full of family letters, & my mother’s collection of an epistolary life-time.”13 But in truth, this was just the impression she wished to leave, for Mabel had kept herself as busy as she was able to during this time—writing and giving lectures. She also engaged in a new pursuit—acquiring land.
Mabel found the idea of purchasing land to preserve it from development compelling. In 1909 she bought land in Pelham, just outside of Amherst, determined to save it. “Pelham Knob,” as it was known, was where she and Austin had walked many times. Mabel wanted to preserve both a part of Amherst history and Austin’s legacy; it was a way of keeping him alive.
Then that same year, on a trip off the coast of Maine in Muscongus Bay, Mabel first laid eyes on Hog Island. Millicent later wrote “The Story of Hog Island,” in which she described Mabel’s new mission: “My mother . . . was a woman of wide interests and talents artistic, literary, civic and social—but most of all she was interested in the world of nature and in the preservation of forests and their wild inhabitants. As it happened, a short time before their visit . . . one of the strips of forest on Hog Island was cut. . . . There were threats that the entire island might be similarly cut over. My mother was shocked. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed, ‘they must not destroy any more of it! This island is too wonderful, it must be preserved, what CAN we do about it?’”14
Later in 1909, Mabel embarked on a complicated scheme to buy up the island by having her friends purchase some parcels, while she and David purchased others. By the end of the year, Mabel and her associates were finalizing the deeds. The Todds eventually gained majority ownership of the three hundred-acre island, a manifestation of Mabel’s belief in the sanctity of the environment, which she stated came to her from her father and underscored her shared love of the natural world with Austin and Emily.
MABEL AND DAVID IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
Because of the various eclipse expeditions, and the financial uncertainties and family illnesses they faced, the Todds were delayed in starting to build their own camp on Hog Island until 1915. Once the camp was finished, Mabel and Millicent spent many long summers on Hog Island and it became an important place for them. It was on Hog Island that mother and daughter began the editing that led to the reissue of Emily Dickinson’s letters and a new volume of poetry.
Mabel’s relationship with David was also starting to change, and it would have many lasting ramifications that would confront her with uncertainty, transition and ultimately great loss.
“For thirty-three years I have absolutely refrained from putting on paper one single thing which under any circumstances could do my dear David any harm,” she wrote in November of 1911. “I have even allowed misrepresentation and reproach to attach to myself, to be thought the gay and flirtatious one of the two; and never a word, written or spoken, has come from me to show that I had the faintest justification for anything I have been supposed to do. If I should write out the facts it would be appalling!” Next, the words “David” and “unmoral” are crossed out in dark ink.15 Just what the facts were, or what this “unmoral” transgression was, we will never know for sure, because either Mabel or Millicent cut several pages from the journal. What is clear is that David’s serial indiscretions were becoming less discreet, and that his behavior was becoming more erratic.
In May of 1913 an event of cosmic proportion occurred in Mabel’s life: Sue Dickinson died. Mabel inscribed in her diary, “Poor old Susan died last night. A very curious nature, full of (originally) fine powers most cruelly perverted. She has done incalculable evil, and wrought endless unhappiness. At times she seemed possessed of a devil—yet could be smoothly winning and interesting.”16 Mabel told Millicent years later, “She was my most bitter enemy, no one in the world except possibly her daughter Mattie held such unchanging hatred toward me as she. After a fashion I felt a bit relieved and freer in my mind and occupations for her departure. For several days, even weeks, I was much more completely myself than before.”17 It felt like the end of an era to Mabel.
Less than two months later, at the beginning of a very hot day in July, Mabel decided to go swimming at the Amherst College pool after doing some errands. She felt a bit odd as she walked up the hill but assumed it was just the heat. She dove into the pool, felt awful, climbed out, and then, as she recalled years later, “remembered no more.” She had had a stroke. Millicent reported that the very first thing Mabel said when she regained consciousness several days later was, “Sue has finally got me.” Her mother was certain that it had been the ghost of Sue Dickinson that came up behind her, pushed her into the pool and caused the blood vessel in her brain to burst.18
Toward the end of her life, Mabel retold this story to Millicent, along with other memories of her years in Amherst and relationships with members of the Dickinson family. Millicent typed these up in three separate manuscripts that Mabel edited in pencil, and placed them all in a folder she labeled, “Scurrilous but True.” Mabel recalled that on that hot summer day in 1913, “It was distinctly an unfriendly push or hand laying-on which startled me. I got into the pool feeling more and more under the hatred of some near-by influence, and I swam up to the end of the pool, ninety feet away, becoming there very helpless—very different feelings from any other I had ever felt . . . completely in the power of any unfriendly influence being exercised against me.” She concluded, “I could not help feeling certain she [Sue] had stricken me in her pleasure to be able to work her will upon me.”19
“Everything in the world changed then,” said Millicent, years
later. “It was Mamma’s stroke that sealed the doom. . . . The entire family ended in me and so, of course, there was nothing for me to do but stay and do what we could to get her well again.”20 This was a turning point for everyone; the roles had reversed and Millicent became the caregiver for her parents. Toward the end of her own life, Millicent thought back on this time and wrote of “the fatal year, 1913. I was visiting the James’ in Newport, when the telegram came telling of my mother’s stroke. That tightened the cord so fast, it was never loosened again.”21
For a time, Mabel was paralyzed on her right side, could not walk, and had no use of her hand. Millicent did all she could for her mother, including noting for Mabel in her diary some of the milestones of her recovery: the day she managed to cut her steak with her right hand, the day she played a scale on the piano, the day she dressed herself, the day she walked across the room with “barely a limp.”
With her typical determination and resilience, Mabel soon graduated from a wheelchair to a cane to being able to walk independently, though her right foot never regained full function. “As fall days became cooler I began to feel my normal energy awakening. I determined to walk. I would not be wheeled about—except for the luxury of it—I gradually got to three or four miles a day,” she recounted. Mabel taught herself to write again with her left hand (“I wrote too—but oh!—fitfully”22) and was eventually able to regain enough motion in her right hand to write with it, and then relegated almost all writing to typing, as she was never able to recapture her former penmanship.
A few months after Millicent had moved back to Amherst to help care for Mabel, she met a young academic named Walter Van Dyke Bingham. He invited her to the Winter Carnival at Dartmouth College. Walter, a psychology professor, was smitten with Millicent as soon as he met her. The feeling was not mutual. Though Millicent’s journals and diaries contain only the occasional reference to Walter, such as “Bingham could make no impression,” Mabel noted a number of times he came to lunch or took Millicent out to tea. At one point, Mabel wrote, “Professor Bingham has turned up again. His devotion is pathetic, since I suppose she will not accept him.”23
It was true, Millicent had little to no interest in Walter, nor in much else. “I have no joy. I never laugh. Pretty soon no one will enjoy me—it is a blank ahead. There are but three things a woman can want supremely—a man, a child, a faith. I have none of the three.”24 Millicent filled her journal with pages asking why she couldn’t find someone to marry, and questions about whether it would be acceptable to marry someone whom she did not love. She found it all disheartening. And so, disappointed yet again in love, worn down by the deaths of her beloved grandparents and the care of her mother, Millicent eventually resolved to turn her energies elsewhere.
WALTER VAN DYKE BINGHAM. ALAS, POOR WALTER: MILLICENT REJECTED HIS EARLY ADVANCES.
Luckily for Millicent, another astronomical expedition soon came along. It surprised neither Millicent nor David that just a year after her stroke, Mabel was somehow well enough to board the SS Rotterdam, bound for Denmark, en route to Russia. Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia only weeks before, but the Todds thought it unlikely to affect their travels. Looking back on this many years later, Millicent wondered, “How could I have consented? My mother, dragging her foot and partially recovered from her stroke, my father was possessed by the pursuit of eclipses. So off we went in pursuit of that shadow to cross Russia in August, 1914.”25
Mabel kept only the sketchiest and most sporadic diary entries on this journey, but Millicent retained an extensive travel journal. They traveled as far as what was then St. Petersburg, Millicent noting, “everything was all right. We saw no sign of war.” But at the Kiev railway station, a messenger came running up to them and handed David a note in French, suggesting that the Todds should travel no farther. The next day Germany declared war on Russia.
Millicent wrote, “in the grey dawn of Friday the 7th of August an astronomer from a far country, marooned in a great city by the impending war, arose to finish his calculations of the sun’s total eclipse he had come thousands of miles to see.”26 The Todds made a hasty and perilous journey out of Russia. Eventually, they were able to get to Stockholm, where they boarded a steamer bound for Britain, dodging German U-boats on the way. The frightening journey ended safely in Liverpool, where the family was able to board a boat headed for Boston. They landed in the fall of 1914. “We went back to Amherst soon. I immediately came to the conclusion that although my mother had been so gallant about this experience—she had come through it so beautifully—I thought more than ever that I was going to have to be the support of my father and mother before very long,” wrote Millicent.27
Millicent agonized about whether she needed to stay in Amherst to take care of her increasingly needy parents, or if she should go to Harvard for her graduate degree. Feeling that she needed to be involved in “a pursuit of systematic learning, the forging of a point of view, focused so that I could become a teacher and support my disintegrating parents,” Millicent began graduate studies in geography, which also included coursework in geology and anthropology, at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, in 1916. Surely, Millicent believed, she had now found her path.
In a tribute to David, his former student Charles Hudson later wrote, “Perhaps it was the thought of these disappointments, lost opportunities over which he had absolutely no control, which in his last years unsettled his brilliant mind.”28 Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, David Todd’s behavior became more and more concerning to all around him. In Millicent’s tortured thoughts about her father’s descent into mental illness, she often attributed it to his thwarted genius, as well as to his general dependence on Mabel and her social skills, and to “the impact of Austin Dickinson.”
After a series of cloudy eclipses, David began to turn his professional attention to other endeavors, including an attempt to contact the “intelligent life” he was convinced lived on Mars. Not surprisingly, these efforts were often met with derision from his colleagues. At this time, he also became less reliable about attending meetings or even teaching his classes at Amherst College, often disappearing without explanation.
Though it is difficult to know exactly from the sketchy notation and coded language both Mabel and Millicent used to describe David’s behavior, what they observed certainly seems manic. He was awake much of the night and slept at odd hours for short intervals. He engaged in reckless sexual behavior, irresponsible spending and had periodic unexplained absences. His significant mood swings were frightening to behold.
In May of 1917, Amherst’s president, Alexander Meiklejohn, wrote Millicent to say that her father had been given “an indefinite leave of absence.” The Todds were asked to “vacate [Observatory House] at once.” Millicent reflected that this, along with the increasing numbers of young men she knew who were being drafted and the news of the growing war overseas, paralleled how confusing and unsettling everything in her own life then seemed. “Life will never be the same again,” she wrote.29
The year 1917 proved to be one of significant upheaval. David was “retired” from Amherst College; Mabel made the momentous decision to leave Amherst and move to Florida, where Arthur Curtiss James (the multimillionaire who had financed some of David’s expeditions) enabled them to purchase an elegant home in Coconut Grove; and Millicent, torn between continuing her graduate studies at Harvard and “the call to ‘make the world safe for democracy,’”30 decided to put her education on hold and joined the war relief effort. As she packed up Observatory House for her parents, Millicent knew that this was the end of an era in Amherst for her family. She recognized her parents’ reluctance to have anything thrown out as part of a desire to retain the past. But she could not understand why her mother insisted upon the special care she should take in ensuring that the mysterious, locked camphorwood chest be moved but not opened.
CHAPTER 10
“SINCERELY, JOE THOMAS” (1918–1919)
“Just as vib
rant as love can be”
Looking back on her life in a 1959 interview, Millicent reflected, “I don’t know how to tell people of this modern generation about our feeling about that war. There was a feeling of such consecration—a feeling of such tremendous idealism—uplift. We felt that if there was anything that we had in the world that we could offer to help the country to win that war it was all too little.”1
Though the “Great War” had been raging on European soil since 1914, America didn’t formally enter the fray until April of 1917. Now intent on entering the war, the United States had to staff it. The passage of the Selective Service Act drafted close to three million American soldiers; by 1918 about ten thousand men were sent off to France every day. Belief in the righteousness of the cause ran high and Millicent increasingly felt that she needed to demonstrate her support not just through words but through some kind of action.
Opportunity knocked when the YMCA put out a call for volunteers to aid the war effort by staffing canteens that would, in the words of General John Pershing, “provide amusement and moral welfare” to American soldiers. For the first time ever, the Y opened its doors to women. More than five thousand American women went to France to support American troops, assist at hospitals for the wounded and provide educational programs for soldiers. A YMCA recruiting poster from the time depicts a robust-looking woman, dressed in black with a stylish cape and hat, wearing a tie, extending a cup of coffee in one hand and holding a book in the other. She appears supremely capable, intelligent and ineffably kind. It was exactly the sort of image that resonated with Millicent.