A sharp, cool sun shines on the campus, lightening its somber air. She passes through the Phelps Hall arch and crosses the lawn within, following the map she has printed from Google. So out onto High Street, across Elm Street, to her destination.
The Sterling Memorial Library towers above her, its two great arched doorways, topped by even taller stained-glass windows, rising up to a pinnacled façade: a veritable cathedral of knowledge. How the founders must have believed in the power and glory of the written word! It seems almost quaint now, an act of touching folly, like the building of the pyramids.
Inside the library, Alice is directed to the far end of the shadowy nave. There a narrower hallway runs off to the right, past the Music Library, to the Manuscripts and Archives Department. She presents her identification, deposits her bag in a locker, and passes through to the inner room where her requested documents await her. They stand numbered on a trolley: nine boxes from the Todd–Bingham bequest. Here are Mabel Todd’s letters and diaries, and Austin Dickinson’s letters to Mabel. The very notes they sent each other with such secrecy, now made available to a stranger from across an ocean who is hoping to understand a little of the love that burned so brightly, a hundred and thirty years ago.
She opens Box 94, which contains letters from Austin: each letter folded in a protective outer sheet of paper. The pen strokes are faded now, the nib lines narrow in the vertical, broad in the horizontal, the bars of the Ts hurrying over the other letters to reach the next word. She can read My dear Mrs. Todd, but his hasty handwriting is hard to make out.
She opens a box of Mabel’s letters. Mabel writes in a big looping script which is far easier to follow. Her letters too begin in the same oddly formal way: My dear Mr. Dickinson. But there among them, as if to give the lie to such respectability, she finds a scribbled note from Austin:
Vin—If anything happens to me burn this package at once without opening. Do this as you love me.
Most of the letters have no salutation and no signature, though often there’s a date and a time.
From August 1884:
Now I am going to sleep with the crickets’ mysterious song for my lullaby, and your divine love for my canopy and safeguard. Oh! I love you, and I love you, and my soul is in your tender keeping. Tuesday 10:45 p.m.
Alongside one letter lies a slip of paper on which is written: A M U A S B T E I L N. Alice knows from her reading that this was the way they merged their names, one letter at a time, to make visible their union. And here it is, the paper on which Mabel nested the curling letters, with the date, December 9, 1888. It’s stored with a sheet on which is written out a love poem of her own devising, that she called “P. S. First”:
You are all that I want to live for,
All that I have to love,
All that the whole world holds for me
Of faith in a world above . . .
Not quite Emily Dickinson, but Alice is moved by it even so. This was the paper Mabel held steady with one hand. These curls of ink were laid down by her pen, to express the overflow of her heart. There is an innocence about it that defies cynicism.
She opens Box 46, which contains Mabel’s diaries. She takes out a stiff-boarded marbled notebook, and reads from 1881:
What is there in me which so attracts men to me, young and old?
And later, from November 11, 1883, her birthday:
Twenty-seven! I! It seems impossible—in most things I feel like a child—in fact it always seems to me that I’m eighteen, and I suppose I act so.
It becomes clear that she used her diary to send messages to Austin.
Monday 25 May 1885. I am going away, and here is this book for you to read—full of everything under the sun—but reaching at last the real peace and joy and unutterable happiness in my life—in you, Austin, whom I love so that I am lifted solemnly to God by it—so that, as you said yesterday, neither of us can ever be lonesome again. Oh darling, darling!
She must have handed it to him to keep while she was away, on one of her periodic visits to her parents and daughter in Washington. If so, he would have taken care to hide it where Sue could not find it, most likely in his law offices in town.
Alice reads on, not attempting to follow every page, taking out volume after volume, immersing herself in the living moments in which Mabel poured out her love. She stays at the library table among the boxes all through the middle of the day, not breaking for lunch. Sometime in the early afternoon she comes upon a small copper-colored booklet, on the cover of which is printed a title, “Footprints,” over the author’s name, Mabel Loomis Todd. Inside she reads that it’s a reprint from the Independent, September 27, 1883. The print is laid out one narrow column per page, for forty-four pages. She reads the story from beginning to end.
It is of course Mabel’s own love story. She has chosen to tell it from the point of view of the man. The heroine charms him “by her beautiful combination of lighthearted girlishness and deep womanly feeling.” There’s no suggestion of physical attraction: this is the story of soul meeting soul.
It’s absurd in its plotting, with its brief shadow on their love and its brisk and convenient removal. It’s sentimental and heavily reliant on the pathetic fallacy: “The heavens, which had been as brass, became a tender blue . . . The sea had fulfilled the promises he used to hear in its most hopeful songs, and had brought him this magnificent happiness.” But take it as a love letter, and Alice finds it touching. How Austin must have treasured it!
Strange to think it was published in a New York newspaper for everyone to read. Did Sue read it?
She returns the booklet carefully to its box and continues with her explorations, making pencil notes as she goes. Just as she begins to think of packing the archives away, so that she can drive back in daylight, she comes upon a passage in one of Mabel’s diaries that makes an impression on her. She copies it out in its entirety.
6 February 1890: I had a passionate longing to be loved for my own individual aroma, not because I was a bright and pretty woman, of whom there are many similar, equally attractive. If I should die David would soon marry again. But I am the one woman for all time to Austin, I, just myself, and because it is I.
This is the passage that is on Alice’s mind as she heads back up the interstate to Amherst. It’s no answer to her puzzle over how to end her story, but it is something important nevertheless. It’s the beginning of a whole new line of thought about the nature of Mabel’s love affair, and more than that, about the nature of romantic love itself.
What if we seek love not because we long to be discovered by another, but because we need to affirm ourselves? This makes it a very different enterprise, and one that is not negated by the death of the lover.
Alice is excited. New ideas swarm in her brain.
I, just myself, and because it is I.
Mabel was seeking to know herself and believe herself to be uniquely valuable. She was driven to assert her own worth against the greater meaninglessness of life. Did she delude herself? In her extreme need, did she fabricate a noble passion, and then call upon it to give her life a glory it otherwise lacked?
There’s something else here, something more. Alice knows it, but her mind can’t quite grasp it. To say that romantic love is a form of egotism is merely banal. She has held in her hands all day the relics of a passion which transformed several lives. It’s not good enough to mock the claims of the lovers, to know better than they knew themselves what they were feeling. They used the words of their day to give voice to their emotions. “I am to him the holy of holies,” wrote Mabel in her diary. “The inner sacred temple.” No use snickering over the unconscious sexual imagery. Something true and powerful is at work here. What if it’s something bigger than love? What is there that’s bigger than love?
She reaches Amherst with enough light left in the sky to enable her to find her way home through the still unfamiliar town. This time she succeeds in making the turn off Route 9 onto Pleasant Street, and so down Main, past
the Evergreens and the Homestead.
The house on Triangle Street appears to be silent and empty. Thirsty, she explores the fridge for something to drink. She finds a carton of apple juice. She’s sitting at the kitchen table writing up her notes when a young woman appears, her cheeks flushed, her long blond hair disheveled.
“Oh, hi,” she says. “Great. Apple juice. Just what I need.”
“I didn’t know Nick was home,” says Alice.
“Yeah, he’s home.”
The young woman gulps her juice and stares at Alice.
“Oh, right. You’re the English girl.”
“Yes,” says Alice.
“Well, I gotta run. Nice to meet you.”
And she’s gone. Alice hears her bare feet pattering up the stairs.
She tries to return to her notes, but she’s distracted. The nameless young woman is about her own age, maybe younger. Attractive in a simple-enough way. If she wants to spend the late afternoon with Nick, and he with her, that’s their business.
So why does it piss me off ?
She’s embarrassed by her own reaction. It makes her seem prudish—or jealous, which is worse. She doesn’t like finding she thinks the worse of Nick for his casual approach to sex. It’s not as if he’s pretended to be any other than he is.
The fact is she can’t make Nick out. He doesn’t add up. One minute he comes across as sensitive, even wise; the next minute he’s acting like a jerk. Surely there’s a disconnect between reading Emily Dickinson and having sex with students?
Noises from the hallway. Voices on the stairs, a door opening and closing.
Then Nick comes into the kitchen.
“I didn’t expect you back till later,” he says.
“I don’t like driving in the dark,” says Alice.
“So how was it?”
“It was good.”
He gets himself a beer from the fridge. Drinks from the bottle.
“You met Marcia.”
“Apparently. She didn’t introduce herself.”
“She said.”
“She said she didn’t introduce herself?”
“No. She said she met you.”
“I’m sorry if I was in the way,” says Alice.
“Not at all. She wanted to know about you.”
“What about me?”
“What you’re doing here. All the way from England. How I know you.”
“How well I know you.”
“That too.”
“I hope you were able to reassure her,” says Alice.
“Up to a point,” says Nick. “Marcia takes a fairly simplistic view of these things.”
“That no girl can resist you?”
“That what can happen usually does happen.”
“And I’m sure with Marcia it does.”
As soon as she says it, she regrets it.
Nick finishes his beer in silence.
“Sorry,” says Alice. “None of my business.”
“So tell me about Yale. Did you get what you wanted?”
They start to talk about Mabel and Austin, and pretend the crackly little exchange didn’t happen. He’s interested in all she has to say. Telling him makes it take on a shape in her mind.
“The more I read Mabel’s diaries,” she says, “the more I get the feeling of what it was she was really looking for. The strange thing is, I’m not sure it was love at all.”
She reads him the passage she’s copied out: “ ‘I had a passionate longing to be loved for my own individual aroma . . .’ It’s more than wanting to be loved. It’s as if she wants to know she exists.”
“Is that something bigger,” says Nick, “or something smaller?”
“It’s bigger. It has to be bigger.”
She can see him thinking about that.
“You think it’s smaller?”
“No,” says Nick. “I’m wondering about something else. You know how we’re always looking for hidden motives and deeper drives? We’ve been taught to take it for granted that what people say they want is just a cover for something else, for some more potent, unadmitted need, like sex or status or identity. I’m thinking now how that carries an assumption with it, a sort of hierarchy. At one end are all the little desires, and at the other end is the big engine that drives the train. Sorry, my metaphor’s collapsing. A train isn’t a hierarchy, is it?”
But Alice is interested.
“Do you mean the little desires might be as significant as the big ones?”
“I don’t know,” says Nick. “I’m just not as respectful of Big Theory as I once was. It doesn’t seem to be the way I lead my life.”
“How do you lead your life?”
“I think I lead it moment by moment. A chain of tiny impulses and decisions. I’m not sure they add up to anything greater than themselves. Or rather, if you add them all up, you don’t get one single big thing, you just get a bag full of lots of little things.”
Alice is disappointed. He reads the look on her face.
“Look, it doesn’t matter. Let’s get back to Mabel and Austin.”
“No, I want to get it,” says Alice. “It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t bother to try to make sense of our lives.”
“Like, make a screenplay of our lives.”
“No, that’s something else.”
But suddenly it seems to her it isn’t something else at all. Why should her attempt to make sense of her own life be any different from turning Mabel’s life into a story?
“So you don’t think your life makes any sense?” she says.
“I don’t even know what that means,” he says. “I’m not disagreeing with you. I just can’t make that sum add up anymore. My life is in too many pieces.”
“Okay.” She thinks about that. “So it’s all random. Doesn’t that do your head in?”
“Not anymore,” he says.
“Everything is just for nothing?”
“Or for itself.”
“Oh, okay, I get it. You live from moment to moment, meaning you just do whatever you feel like. Live a life of passing pleasures.”
Like sex with Marcia.
“Does that seem so worthless to you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
And she doesn’t. She wants there to be a journey and a destination, but maybe that’s just childish. Like wanting there to be a father God and a life after death where all the sacrifice finds its reward.
So what about love? Is that just one of the little pleasures that fills our dwindling store of days? She wants to ask Nick what love means to him, but somehow it feels too personal. To him or to her? So she asks him about Mabel.
“Do you think Mabel was fooling herself ?”
“No more than any of us,” says Nick. “I like the idea of being loved for . . . what was it? Her individual aroma.”
“I’m beginning to think she was just seriously insecure. She’s forever writing about how attractive she is, and how men can’t keep off her.”
“What was her relationship like with her father?”
“Oh, her father loved her, if that’s what you mean. He adored her. But he was a disappointed man. One of those self-made intellectuals stuck in a job inferior to his talents. He was a clerk in some office attached to the Naval Observatory. Mabel always called him Professor. I think he may even have given himself the title, but he wasn’t a professor. Do you think that might have affected her?”
“Fathers matter to daughters,” says Nick. “Doesn’t your father matter to you?”
“My father’s a selfish womanizer who never wanted me in the first place,” says Alice.
“Oh, boy,” says Nick.
“So what? My mother loved me. I have a fantastic stepfather. I’m fine.”
“I believe you.”
“I suppose you think Mabel had a father thing for Austin?”
“Don’t you?”
“Yes,” says Alice, “but I hate the way Freud’s made us all reduce relatio
nships to these corny stereotypes. You’re the one who wants to junk Big Theory. Couldn’t she have fallen in love with him because he was a fellow spirit?”
“So you still want to believe in love. For a while back there I thought you were moving on.”
“Moving on where? To some sad little conclusion that love is just a bundle of neurotic itches that we want to scratch? I don’t like that. Do you like that?”
“No,” says Nick. “I don’t like it. Just like I don’t like Santa Claus being my dad in a false beard.”
Suddenly a real personal detail. Alice is disarmed.
“Did he really do that? Your dad?”
“Yes, he did. He kept the beard in a bottom drawer in a chest in the passage where we hung our coats and lined up our Wellington boots.”
“And you found it.”
“There you go. End of innocence.”
He’s grinning as he says it.
“I don’t believe that,” she says. “I bet you knew already.”
“Yes, I knew. I recognized his special dad smell. Cigarettes, coffee. His individual aroma. No false beard could hide that.”
Alice thinks how she never knew a special dad smell. It was always her mother who snuck her stocking onto her bed the night before Christmas. She thinks how much she loves her mother, and suddenly she misses her with a terrible ache.
“I do want to believe in love,” she says. “Don’t take it away from me.”
“I could never do that, Alice.”
He hardly ever calls her by her name. There’s no need when there’s only the two of you in the room. The effect is unexpected, as if he’s touched her.
“I don’t want to think love’s just egotism,” she says.
“It would make a rotten screenplay.”
“And a sad life.”
“That happens whether you like it or not,” he says.