Louisa (7 page)

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T
HEY
SAID
GOODBYE
to each other at the end of May. To his father, John Quincy expressed relief at returning to The Hague. “At
length I have been released from a situation, equally remote from all public utility and all personal satisfaction,” John Quincy wrote. To his mother, he was more honest: “Albeit unused to the melting mood, I found the separation not a little painful.”

To Louisa, he was tender, and so was she to him. She gave him a miniature to remember her by, along with the promise of her love. “An evening full of delight and of regret,” he wrote in his diary just before leaving. “Took my leave of all the family with sensations unusually painful.”

So he went
. He had been stringent and clear; she would have no say about when their separation would end. She did not know whether she would marry him “in one year or in seven.” She was left to wait.

5

T
HEIR
BETROTHAL
was
neither an end nor a beginning. Louisa drifted through the days. A storm blew in just after John Quincy sailed for Holland, and she was left to wonder whether his ship had wrecked. A portrait, which he had spent his final hours in London sitting for, arrived at Cooper's Row; he had wanted to give her some reminder of him. But the presence of the painting only made her more nervous. He had left her in doubt, and her doubt colored what she saw. She studied his portrait and thought the image did not match the one in her mind—his complexion was wrong, his body too large. In his expression, she thought she could detect some misgivings.

His first letter
came soon after the portrait, and it offered her the tenderest expressions of his devotion. He described his reluctance to go, how it tore at him—how he was “half anxious” to reach his boat and “half fretting, at the consciousness of an involuntary wish that I might be too late.” In tones that seemed to mean it, he reassured her that their separation would not be long. In fact, he would give up his public career and devote himself to her and their home. He would take, he wrote, “the earliest opportunity” to write to America. “If I can procure any prospect that will enable me to indulge the wishes of my
heart, I shall cheerfully resign a career of public life which can offer nothing satisfactory to ambition, and which forbids the professions of that private happiness, the first object of my hopes and which you only can confer.”

He said everything kind. She should have been calmed, but instead she was stricken. It wasn't what he said that so upset her; it was that he had written at all. A letter from him required her to respond with a letter of her own. “Terror which assailed me at the idea of answering it,” she recalled. She had no experience with writing, and no real desire to gain any. Nothing had happened in her life since he left, she thought, and she had no art with which to say it. She could bring herself only to tell him that she was persuaded that her letters would be boring. It was torture even to say that. She was embarrassed. “I felt my folly and my insignificance,” she would remember.

Her memory did
not exaggerate. She waited a month after his departure before sending her first words. When she finally wrote, the rush of her words produced the tremulous high note of a vibrating nerve. The opening sentence of her second letter (the first letter has been lost) read:

So totally incapacitated do I feel myself for writing were it not through fear of giving you pain I certainly should indulge my avowed aversion to it and decline the task but judging of your feelings by my own think it incumbent on me to avail myself of every opportunity of testifying my affectionate esteem for you I yesterday received yours of the 17 instant in which you desire my opinion of your picture I approve the likeness tho' the complexion is much too dark and the figure altogether too large I have lately been introduced to a Mr. and Mrs: Gore of Boston who say they should never have known it but I cannot allow them to be such competent judges as myself who finds the original too deeply engraven on my
heart to admit of a mistake in the likeness Oh Philosophy where art thou now without thy aid my present sensations will carry me beyond myself and far exceed the limits of my paper.

The second sentence was: “I will therefore quit this subject.”

But she did not know what else she was supposed to say.

It had been six years
since she had left school. She may have tried reading John Milton's poetry as a child, but her reading now was ranging and undisciplined. She was, it's clear, well versed in the conventions of popular die-for-love stories, and in the epistolary conventions those encouraged. So was the younger children's governess, a devotee of romantic novels—many of them written in the form of correspondence—who buffed and polished Louisa's letters to make them “most elegant.” The result was an inelegant mess; the language was stilted and formal, and at first tight and childish. Louisa's favorite subject, indeed her only real subject, was how much she hated to write.

But she tried to mold herself into whatever he wanted. She studied his letters for clues of what he expected from her. She parroted his lessons about fortitude. “As I have very little
natural philosophy
I must copy yours,” she wrote. She repeated what he said about the corrupting influence of Europe, correcting her course as she went in order to conform to his little lectures. “Kindly undertake to teach your Louisa, how to avoid such errors in future,” she said.

She was determined
to learn. She intended to start reading, too, so that she might “lessen the immense distance” she sensed between her mind and John Quincy's. A woman's education, however, was not supposed to look like a man's. Her father rented a small house in Clapham Common, a fashionable area dotted with pretty parks south of London, and sent Louisa, along with the youngest children, the governess, and two servants, there to practice running a house—ordering servants, presiding at dinner. (It may also be that her parents wanted to
separate their spirited and rivalrous older daughters, perhaps for their own sanity.)

There was no way
for her to bridge the distance between Clapham Common and Harvard. Nor was it possible for their correspondence to make Louisa and John Quincy truly intimate. She had yet to find her own voice, and he did not know how to adapt his to address her. There were misunderstandings. When she congratulated John Quincy on the probability that his father would be elected president of the United States that November, for instance, he responded by confessing the pressure he felt. “The more conspicuous he becomes in the world, the more incumbent it will be upon me to prove myself not unworthy to be his son,” he wrote and added, “I
must
not be unworthy of my father or of my Country.” She took his forthright words as a rebuke against herself for asking the question. Too wound up to grasp the poignancy of his situation, and by extension her own, she could only see herself blunder. When he was honest and revealing about himself, she took it as a reproach against her own conduct or character. And he, in turn, quickly became more distant, more didactic, and more stern.

Still, the two maintained the conventions of lovers' correspondence. They sent each other the regular expressions of swooning love and tender devotion. They were trying. Then something upset the routine, the fiction that all was fine. John Quincy was appointed minister to Portugal. She heard the news before he did, near the end of July, because it came through her father. She was, in fact, the first to tell him. She pretended to congratulate him, but her tone was anguished. Another appointment meant more years apart. Portugal meant a longer distance. Joshua's plans to return to the United States soon meant that she would have to go with her family, putting an ocean between her and her betrothed. If he planned to travel through London on his way to Lisbon, she wrote to him, she wanted him to take a different route. She could not stand the idea of seeing him and then separating again.

The news shook him
out of the fantasy he had been constructing of moving back to America quickly and abandoning his public ambitions. He had provocatively told his parents that he would relocate south for a life of literature, leisure, and domestic bliss (not unlike a Johnson). But he was not willing to give up the dream altogether. He told Louisa that he would take her with him to Portugal, instructing her to prepare for the trip and to be ready to leave quickly. The Johnsons flew into activity. She needed passports. He wanted a ship. She must have a trousseau. Yet there was also a hint in his invitation that all was not well between them. He cautioned her that when she went to a European court, she would have to “suppress some of the little attachments to splendor that lurk at your heart, perhaps imperceptibly to yourself.” She heard in those words the suggestion that he thought she was vain, impressionable, shallow. She was hurt and said so. She was not wrong about his suspicion—though in fairness, neither was he wrong; she did like luxury. But she knew what he was implying: he wasn't quite sure that she was fit to be a republican American minister's wife. The insinuation riled her, which he disliked. Their correspondence grew sharper—softened only slightly by offering surrender. “Between us two, my lovely friend let there be peace,” he wrote.

“
If possible teach
my rebellious heart gently to acquiesce without murmering,” she wrote to him.

It wasn't possible. The insinuation against her character and her overwrought response was a scratch, another small wound, another reason for her to nurse her sense of being slighted and for him to have reservations. Soon he was backtracking, mentioning vague complications that would keep him in Holland for months longer. With sadness, and with some private relief, since she had been scared to leave her family and move to a strange place, she packed away her new gowns. Then John Quincy backtracked further. In fact, he wrote, he would be compelled to go to Lisbon without her. His tone grew distant, and the little homilies about correct conduct and republican
principles grew longer and more persistent. She read these as signs that he did not trust her; he thought she would embarrass him.

She tried to convince
him he was mistaken: “I knew not why of your having erroneously supposed me dazzled with what you style rank.” But she vacillated between being indignant and suspecting she'd done something to deserve it. Anxiously, she studied herself—her actions, her faults, her memories of the conversations that had passed between them—to see what she had done wrong. It was true that when they had sat together on the sofa, they were surrounded by the kinds of fine things that you would find in a prosperous merchant's house. It was true that she wore silk sashes and ostrich feathers, gloves and curls, and that she had told him he must dress handsomely for her. Now he appeared to hold those things against her. Luxury was corrupting, and she would be corrupted. She would be impressed by titles. The lifestyle that she would want would be expensive to maintain. She tried to persuade him that she preferred “domestic felicity to the alloy of
ambition
or
parade
,” but nothing she said could convince him that she was not delighted by balls, duchesses, and pretty things. To defend herself, she fired off an accusation that he was the one who was ambitious. The misfire was bigger than she could have known. To an Adams, ambition was craven, and to be accused of it, especially in the context of a European court, was a grave insult. She might as well have called him un-American.

Meanwhile, John Quincy's parents
were launching salvos against Louisa from the United States, and those shots started hitting their mark. Abigail was bewildered by his choice of bride. Louisa was accomplished in “music dancing French &c.,” Abigail—the self-proclaimed “farmeress”—unflatteringly conceded. She was pretty. She was lovely! But was she an
American
? “Some fair one has shown you its sophistry, and taught you to admire!” Abigail wrote. “Youth and beauty have penetrated through your fancied apathy, and you find yourself warmed by one and invigorated by the other; as you tell me
that the enthusiasm of youth has subsided, I will presume that reason and judgment have taken its place. I would hope for the love I bear my country, that the siren, is at least
half blood
.”

John Quincy still blamed
his mother, though, for her role in forcing him to leave Mary Frazier. Her words may have had the opposite of their intended effect—he would defend his heart's right to choose. He pointed out that if he waited for a choice that would satisfy all her requirements, “I should have been certainly doomed to perpetual celibacy.”

The elder Adamses
shifted their approach. Louisa was surely a worthy woman, they wrote—they thought of her as a daughter already—but John Quincy must not bring her to Portugal. A European court would ruin her. She would be unfit to be a wife when it came time to return to the United States. Their motivation for saying these things was not punitive, and actually, they would change their minds and urge him to marry before he went. Their advice reflected their own experience. John Adams had been a foreign minister in Europe, and its corrupting influence was a common attack against him. He was called a monarchist, a lover of courts and court style, a corrupted republican. It was a devastating and unfair charge (though it was true that he had a taste for titles), and it was deeply damaging to his political career. Despite this—perhaps because of this—they turned around and made the same charges against Louisa. “Is there not great danger of her contracting such inclinations, and habits as to endanger her youth and inexperience, as to unfit her for the discharge of those domestic duties?” Abigail wrote. “Who can answer for her after having been introduced into the dissipations of a foreign court?”