EMILY DICKINSON IN LOVE: The Case for Otis Lord

2. The Wildest Word

j 2 j THE WILDEST WORD n the evening of May 16, 1886, the body of the fifty-five-year-old Emily Dickinson lay in an open coffin in the library of the family home in Amherst. Three days before, she had lapsed into a coma, the latest of several such attacks. After some sixty hours of terribly labored breathing she died. The medical diagnosis , identified eighteen months previously, was Bright’s disease. Among the few mourners in the spacious room was Vinnie Dickinson, still shaken by the sudden loss of the sister who for all of Vinnie’s fifty-three years had been her closest friend. Holding in her hand a sprig of fragrant heliotrope, she came tearfully up to the small white casket and gently laid the purple blossoms in Emily’s clasped fingers. “To take to Judge Lord,” she murmured to her unhearing sister. (One of those fingers bore a dainty gold ring with coral stone, and on a wrist was a bracelet inscribed with the cryptic name “Little Phil,” both given to her by that same Judge Lord. Before burial, by her sister’s order, they were removed for preservation at home.) In speaking the words she did, Vinnie wasn’t particularly guarded. They were plainly heard by at least one listener standing nearby, T. W. Higginson, who that night entered the little incident in his diary. Though he might have recognized the name as one well-known in the state’s legal circles, neither Higginson nor anyone 19 j else outside the Dickinson family would have understood its true significance. Otis Phillips Lord, longtime friend of the Dickinsons, had died of a stroke some two years earlier. At his death a childless widower of seventy-three, he had been for many years one of the best known public figures in Massachusetts (outstanding lawyer, several times a state legislator, speaker of the state House of Representatives for one term, twice a candidate for the U.S. Congress—missing only because he clung to his old Whig principles when that party was dying—an admired judge of the superior court, and finally a justice of the State Supreme Court). Living a life exactly the opposite of the reclusive Emily’s, Lord had known constant public embroilment, a lot he’d deliberately chosen . He also lived at a considerable distance from Emily, residing most of his life at Salem, just north of Boston and some hundred miles from Amherst. But neither the marked difference in temperament and circumstances nor the many miles between had kept the two apart. During the seven years of his existence as a widower—his wife of many years died after a long illness in 1877—up to his own death in 1884, Lord and Emily had shared a love that was fully committed and devoted on both sides. Nor had the tie been much of a secret, at least not with the Dickinson family and among a few of Lord’s close relatives. Into Lord’s “childish heart of rigorous justice,” wrote Martha Bianchi, Emily’s niece, in her 1924 biography of her aunt, “Emily flashed as an unconscious aurora on a polar night, and their friendship was of the most deep and lasting quality.” Only infrequently, however, had the two met during those seven years and only when Lord visited Amherst, which he did on perhaps ten or a dozen occasions. But letters flew constantly between them, for a while on a weekly basis. The twenty letters bought from Fuller, as Austin well knew, represented less than a tenth of the number actually written to Lord by Emily. Most or all of the others had, by the day’s unvarying custom, been returned to the sender on Lord’s death, and were destroyed by her. The Unmasking 20 The Wildest Word 21 Though not wishing to pry into their dead sister’s private life, both Austin and Vinnie on reading the Fuller letters could not help wondering again about the answer to a question they had often silently asked themselves. How far had the affair with the widowed Lord gone? Had it been one of emotion only, restricted to affectionate embraces, or had there been true physical intimacy? During Lord’s visits to Amherst, as Vinnie and Austin could recall, the two had often been alone, a circumstance later specifically set down by Austin’s daughter. While the others went...