After Emily

by Julie Dobrow

  Though the New York Times got her name wrong (“Mary L. Todd, Authority on Emily Dickinson,” read the headline) and the New York Herald Tribune’s headline seemed somewhat off-center (“Mabel L. Todd is Dead; Writer on Astronomy, Shared Husband’s Career in Planet Research; Edited Emily Dickinson’s Poems”), other newspapers printed more thoughtful, accurate, and Mabel-centered obituaries. Writer, editor and well-known literary critic Nathan Haskell Dole authored an obituary in the Saturday Review:

  The useful, colorful, magnetic life of Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd ended suddenly Oct. 14th. Up to the last moment she had been busily engaged. . . . A man who was helping her asked if there was anything more he could do. “Yes,” she laughingly replied, “more than a million things.”

  “A rather large order,” he said, “but I will begin and we’ll finish them somehow.” A few moments later she fell to the floor, her earthly work was done.

  Hers was an indefatigable energy. With all her scientific interests, Mrs. Todd continued to cultivate her gifts as a painter and a poet. . . . But her most distinctive service to literature was in connection with the poems and letters of her friend and neighbor, Emily Dickinson. . . . It seems incredible that this ever youthful and vivacious spirit should have passed from our midst. But her memory will live.36

  And the Amherst Record printed several remembrances of Mabel, including an homage by Millicent, entitled “A Friend of Amherst.” Millicent’s lengthy obituary began, “For nearly 40 years, while she lived in Amherst, she was its devoted friend and was identified with its activities in a multitude of ways.” The tribute concluded, “While she lived in Amherst it was hard to think of the town without her.”37

  Despite keeping meticulous records—as well as all the bills—for Mabel’s funeral, Millicent wrote little about it. In a series of interviews taped by J. Donald Sutherland in the late 1950s, she recalled, “She was buried in Wildwood Cemetery, not far from the grave of Austin Dickinson and facing the Pelham Knob which she had bought to save the great hemlock forest on its crest.”38

  The only other aspect of Mabel’s funeral Millicent chose to record anywhere was a brief mention of her decision to keep her father from attending it. At the time she wrote, “We could not have run the risk of having him there. Mamma couldn’t have borne it.” Of course, it was Millicent who could not bear it. In 1959 she remembered, “He did not forgive me that I did not let him attend her funeral. It was just that I could not bear to think of the possibility of him making a spectacle of himself in the presence of her body and that of a churchful of Amherst neighbors.”39

  Millicent contemporaneously recorded one other memory. “Such a weird experience,” she wrote in her diary a few days after Mabel’s funeral. She and Walter had returned to Wildwood with a man who would do the engraving on Mabel’s tombstone. Millicent spoke with them, then wandered down the hill by herself, away from the graves of her grandparents and her mother, toward the Dickinson plot. “I went off in the darkness and put my hand on Austin’s boulder, and stood on Sue’s recumbent stone. The Amherst of my childhood lying silent all around me, as the leaves dropping, one by one.”40

  In the months after Mabel’s death, Millicent, named sole heir to her mother’s estate, faced innumerable decisions and enormous unresolved issues. “Mamma died leaving mountainous problems to be settled from Maine to Florida,” she recorded in notes from one of her psychiatric sessions in 1942. She recalled in 1959, “The 1930s was a decade of real disaster, beginning with the death of my mother . . . and I was left with problems which seemed so inextricable that I didn’t know really just how to begin.”41

  First there were the properties in Florida (Mabel had purchased a second, small home for rental income), which Millicent had to make ready to rent because she needed funds to repair the two houses so they could be sold. Millicent also had to attend to a “storehouse full of papers which had been, some of them, drenched in a series of hurricanes.” Matsuba, she noted, “was completely filled with every kind of memorabilia and archives and curios, [enough] for a museum.” (Indeed, Mabel had dreamed of establishing just such an institution; in an undated letter to Charles Green [the first director of the Jones Library in Amherst] she pondered whether the Amherst Historical Society might be willing to provide a separate room for “my entire collection of wonderful curios from all over the world.”)42

  That wasn’t all. “There was the barn full of papers in Amherst and the books, and there was the partially owned island in Maine,” as well as eighty acres of land Mabel had purchased outside of Amherst. And then there were the innumerable Dickinson projects Millicent and Mabel had discussed—to publish the remainder of Emily’s unpublished poems, to tell the story of how their publication came about in the first place and to try to tell a more authentic narrative of Emily’s life than Mattie’s presentation of it.

  Millicent knew that while some of these problems required her immediate attention, the most meaningful, which would necessitate years of effort—and though she didn’t know it at the time, legal wrangling—was her promise to “set it right” by publishing Emily’s remaining work and preserving her true legacy and image. While crafting Mabel’s legacy and image, Millicent would be doing the same for her own.

  The summer after Mabel died, Millicent spent weeks on the island, meticulously making a detailed inventory of all Mabel’s possessions. Millicent recorded mundane household items as well as trinkets from around the world. She delineated each item of clothing, each handkerchief, each book and magazine. She made lists of the shells and buttons collected in various drawers and bowls and containers, and of the various bottles of perfume. There were the many projects in which Mabel had been engaged just the summer before, just as she left them, frozen in time: the unfinished scrapbooks, drafted literature about Everglades National Park, a partially written article, correspondence not yet finished.

  And there were artifacts that Millicent found so poignantly affecting that they brought her to tears. She wrote of them separately from her methodical lists:

  a tan silk handkerchief with a black and yellow border, the emotions of forty years were stirred—vague, powerful, indefinable . . . the lamp, freshly filled, by the light of which she has read aloud almost the whole of Dickens, summer after summer . . . a basket containing a moth-eaten hearth-brush. Ah, that hearth-brush! Can it be only what it seems? What would happen if I were to burn up the remains of that little hearth-brush which Mr. Dickinson gave to mamma more than forty years ago? . . . Every link with the past, or rather, every chain that binds me to it cries out “NO.” I seem to see mamma’s liquid brown eyes beseeching me not to burn it . . . that brush is a symbol.

  The vases she found throughout the Hog Island home affected Millicent most of all. “Nothing so accentuates her absence as these empty vases, everywhere. . . . How poignant all these evidences of her belle-like quality.”43

  Yet Millicent was not paralyzed with grief. If anything, the process of making these lists made her ever more determined to move forward. While thinking about what her mother would have most wanted for her beloved camp and the beloved island she had saved from the loggers, Millicent struck upon a novel idea. She would turn the island into a camp that would become “a laboratory for the teaching of conservation to grown-up people.” This, she felt, would be a most fitting tribute to Mabel and something Millicent could do to aid the cause of preserving “what we have left in the way of wild nature,”44 an imperative Millicent felt had been passed from her grandfather to her mother to herself.

  In addition to attending to the real estate and the mountains of papers and objects Mabel had left behind, Millicent was also now David’s sole caretaker: “My father, the most distressing insoluble problem—oh, the humiliation and agony of it! It was bad enough in the twenties when he was in confinement. But when he was not—after Mamma’s death—it was worse.” David’s manic states became ever more pronounced, and despite his periodic pleas to have Millicent grant him greater freedoms and keep him out
of restrictive institutions—and her periodic willingness to indulge him, “sometimes even when I knew his request was foolish”—it became ever more apparent that he needed care that was far beyond her ability to provide.

  Toward the end of 1933, David was living outside of an institution but ostensibly under the care of a paid attendant in upstate New York. Millicent traveled to see her father and take him to Lake Ridge, the town in which he’d grown up. When she arrived, though, the housekeeper informed Millicent that the man she had engaged to care for her father was “in fact, a drunkard and this is no place for [David] to be.” Her father required significantly more care and supervision than he was getting.

  David was not sleeping. He lashed out at people unpredictably. He was unreasonably attached to certain activities, in which he obsessively engaged—reading through a dictionary front to back, entering a contest to come up with a new slogan for a beer, developing theories about what would enable eternal life. He had somehow lost track of the few possessions he’d had with him.

  Despite these alarming signs, Millicent still thought that David did not need to be locked up in an institution again. But by the end of her visit, she became convinced that “this was the only thing to do.”

  Millicent took David to a cemetery in which some of his relatives were buried. Along the way she tried to engage him in conversation about their life in Amherst. David told her about all the work he and Mabel had done on Emily’s poetry—“it took hours and hours of my time”—and launched into a discussion of the role Austin Dickinson had played in their lives. “He was a wonderful man, and I loved him more than any man I ever knew,” David said, before bursting into tears. “Sometimes it all seems like a ghastly dream. . . . It all might easily have been so different. I want to shut a trap door on the whole thing and get up above it.”45

  In the cemetery, things escalated further. David suddenly turned to Millicent. He “walked up the path between the white marble headstones of his ancestors, wheeled about . . . and lifting his cane in the air began such an invective and denunciation as I have never heard even from his lips. ‘You’re not my daughter, do you understand? Such lying deception—low-down, skunk—don’t come near me as long as you live. I cut you off forever, do you understand that?’” David cursed at her, using language that she primly declined to record. Stunned, Millicent reeled from hurt, surprise and confusion. David’s insinuation was further evidence of his deteriorating mental state, because it simply wasn’t true.

  Then, the manic episode ceased as suddenly as it had come on. Shaken, Millicent brought David back to the house where they were staying. She wrote that evening she “put a chair against my door as there was no lock . . . instinctively afraid of what he might do at night.”

  As horrible and frightening as the previous afternoon had been, the next morning was worse. When David came down to breakfast, he immediately began interrogating Millicent about what she had done with her mother’s wedding ring—why had she buried it with Mabel rather than giving it to him?—and his pension—why was it going directly to Millicent? She had no right to touch his money. David went on, “Does that jackass husband of yours still call you ‘little one’—in that sickly sweet voice that Mamita liked so much? Colonel Walter Van Dyke Bingham, yes, I know him—he sickens me.” And then David screamed, “Don’t ever dare to darken the door of the house I’m in again. You’re not my daughter!”

  But then he “stretched wide his arms, ‘come darling, come’ he sobbed, ‘I loved your mother so—and you I love you because I loved her,’ and tried to kiss me on the mouth, and thrust his tongue into my mouth with all the accompaniments, and filled me with such horror and loathing that I was faint and nauseated.” Millicent froze with revulsion and fear. In writing about this horrific episode later, she concluded, “I never before had such a realization of his insanity—and when I could conquer my loathing—such a heart-breaking pity for him.”46

  After these incidents, David Peck Todd was never out of restrictive care again. Millicent wrote to Arthur Curtiss James, whose special trust was helping to pay for David’s care, “Oh, I don’t need to tell YOU what the wear and tear is all the time. It is like the dripping of water on the forehead, one drop at a time, which after a time becomes a form of torture.”47

  In the five years that followed, Millicent and Walter had David committed to mental facilities in Vermont, New York, and Virginia. In 1939 his physical health began to decline as precipitously as his mental health, and Millicent removed him from an institution and placed him in a private home with round-the-clock nursing. Though there is neither mention nor record of this in Millicent’s many files about her father’s illness and care, an article in the Journal for the History of Astronomy stated, “It seems, alas, that he suffered from paresis, the end-stage of syphilis. He spent the last years of his long life . . . in hospitals and nursing homes, scheming ways to achieve ‘eternal life,’ but also horrified at the prospects of the Sun’s splitting in two and bringing about the end of the world.”48 David died on June 1.

  Millicent had his body moved to Amherst, where Alfred Stearns, president of the Amherst College Board of Trustees, led a memorial service. “Dr. Stearns called him a genius, a man of vision, whom the Philistines laughed at because they could not understand him.” David was laid to rest beside Mabel in Wildwood Cemetery. On David’s tombstone, Millicent had inscribed:

  IN LOVING MEMORY OF

  DAVID TODD

  19th March 1855–1st June 1939

  Professor of Astronomy in Amherst College 1881–1920

  Firmament showeth His handiwork.

  There is also an engraving of an eclipse, the sun’s corona clearly visible on the stone—clearer, ironically, than David had ever seen it.

  Millicent wrote in a special “diary” she had made for her father’s final arrangements, “I could not believe that it was the last time I should clean up after him—that this departure was for good and all.” She noted, “at sunset we went back once more to the cemetery to look at the mound of flowers . . . and we placed iris on the graves of my grandparents and a wreath of dark purple leaves on both my father’s and mother’s. And then as evening fell, we made our way out among the great fallen trees [left in the wake of the previous fall’s tremendous hurricane]. One in particular, an oak at least three feet across the trunk, lay prostrate, no one having the courage so far to attempt to move it. I could not help thinking of it as a symbol.”49 It was Austin Dickinson’s “millennial oak”—a massive fallen tree that could not be moved and blocked the path to David’s newly dug grave.

  In 1937, Millicent developed a case of type 3 pneumonia, a very severe infection that results in death in more than half of those who contract it. “I was taken by the grace of God and my husband’s persistence to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research . . . they only took cases of pneumonia and heart disease which had been given up by doctors. I was put there and for ten days, they later told me, they thought each breath would be my last.” She was placed in a special isolation chamber with experimental breathing apparatus and medication.

  Millicent recounted that after she pulled through, Walter told her about the point at which he knew that she would recover. “Walter wanted to see if my mind was working at all, because I apparently was gone. He said, ‘You remember that article that you wrote for the American Museum of Natural History?’ I replied, ‘yes’ and he said, ‘Well they have sent you a check for fifty dollars,’ and I replied, ‘Oh, how very nice.’ That was that.” He told her the same exact thing on the next two successive days, and on the third Millicent replied to him, “Yes, how about those two other checks?”50

  But this near-death experience was not without lasting consequences for Millicent. Perhaps she realized this had happened to her at almost precisely the same age at which her mother had her first stroke. In any case, the illness made her even more hyperaware of every real or perceived symptom that she experienced for the rest of her life. She became a hypochond
riac. She kept thick files filled with her letters to countless doctors recounting numerous ailments. Another folder is stuffed with prescriptions Millicent received. “Pneumonia shattered parts of my personality,”51 she freely admitted to her psychiatrist—and recorded—a few years later.

  Part of Millicent’s posthospital recovery was spent in the quiet of her camp on Hog Island. While there, in the beginning of September 1937, she received word from Walter back in New York that their apartment had been robbed. “Walter thinks they disturbed no papers,” she typed in a separate series of notes she kept. “They opened every drawer, every closet, every chest, every trunk, whether locked or unlocked, mauled over the contents and took only jewelry, he says. But that he does not know, of course. He wants to put the best possible interpretation on their intentions—think of it, the intentions of such criminals!—so, not knowing what was in anything, he says they took nothing in the way of books, MSS, journals, diaries, etc.” Millicent immediately began berating herself and noting the sad implicit ironies: “Strange, I who am so over careful. Who have always locked everything, protected everything, almost to absurdum, so that it is a byword with my friends. I who have been led around by the nose by things and the care of them, so that my whole family . . . all have given me their worldly affair to watch, strange that it is I who have been guilty of this negligence.”52

  The reward Millicent and Walter offered for information leading to the arrest of the robbers never yielded any clues, nor were any of the stolen objects ever recovered. The experience left Millicent feeling incredibly violated and vulnerable. “Why is it that I feel so crushed?” she wrote. “The realization that . . . I should not have left the things there? No, though I should not have. That I shall miss them? No, though I shall. That those to whom they were to be given are deprived? No, though they will be. That the precious things are now in the hands of those who not only do not appreciate them, they defile them with their touch. Ah, that is getting nearer to the truth.”53