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don’t appear at all as she does at home & she does not make but very little trouble—When I wish you come for her I will let you know . . .
    John Cody and other Dickinson sleuths read this as a clear sign of the little girl’s deprivation and distance from her mother. But Aunt Lavinia’s remarks reveal more about herself than about the two Emilys. She had a new stepmother and was never comfortable around her. She was in love with her own first cousin, Loring Norcross, and would marry him the following year, but alliances between first cousins were practically forbidden, and her own alliance was frowned upon by all her relatives in Monson. She wrote to her sister about Loring:
    Emily—no wonder you are astonished to hear—of the attachment between cousin Loring & myself—You expressed your surprise when I was at A[mherst] you recollect—One year ago I thought of no such thing but I know that now my heart is devoted to him. . . . I have had many sorrowful hours—for we are connected & we have been brought up together . . . If I love him, It is sufficient—& I have banished those doubts & fears—Whether it be right for cousins to marry or no—
    And so it was important for Lavinia to have Elizabeth around; the little girl distracted her from her dilemma over Loring, and allowed her to become a kind of mother, or at least a motherly aunt. And she writes on June 11, just after her Elizabeth had been returned to the Homestead.
    I cant tell you how lonely I was—it seemed so different & I wanted to weep all the time—the next Morning after Emily was gone I saw a little apron that she left & you cant think how I felt . . .
    Aunt Lavinia was the deprived one, who suffered the loss of not having Elizabeth —note how she calls her Emily again once the little girl is gone. Emily Dickinson was much too young to understand Lavinia’s predicament and stubborn will. She would love Aunt Lavinia all her life, and love Lavinia and Loring’s children, Frances and Louisa—Fanny and Loo—and would board with them in Cambridge when her eyes bothered her. She wrote some of her warmest letters to Fanny and Loo, called them her “little brothers,” and no matter how landlocked she was in her “Pearl Jail” at the Homestead, she never denied them anything on their visits to Amherst.
    But Aunt Lavinia also provided a kind of symbolic key for the future poet. By marrying her first cousin, Lavinia would guard her maiden name—she remained a Norcross. It must have been a magical quotient for Emily Dickinson. Of course, she never found a first cousin of her own. And there wasn’t one to marry. But it had to give her some delight.
    When Aunt Lavinia died of the Norcross disease—consumption—in 1860, Emily wrote the following to Loo:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  “Mama” never forgets her birds—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Though in another tree.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  She looks down just as often
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  And just as tenderly,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  As when her little mortal nest
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  With cunning care she wove—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  If either of her “sparrows fall”,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  She “notices” above.      [Fr130]
    Dickinson could just as well have been writing about her own mother—I’m sure the two sisters were “entangled” in her mind. Andwe have to rid ourselves of the negative notions that have fallen upon Emily Sr. and threaten to wipe out whatever little traces we have of her, as if the poet’s father had such significance in her life and Emily Sr. had none. Habegger calls her a woman with a“relatively inelastic spirit.” Sewall speaks of“this fluttery, timid woman.” Lyndall Gordon, in Lives Like Loaded Guns, pretends she didn’t exist at all:“the mother, the