Marmee & Louisa (17 page)

Not long afterward, Abigail became quite ill, perhaps as a result of another pregnancy. Nearly forty years old, Abigail was pregnant for the eighth or ninth time and could not care for her children. She sent Anna to the family of an uncle, Dr. Charles Windship, the widower of Abigail’s sister Catherine.
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Lizzie returned to Grandpa May’s house. Louisa went to stay with unnamed relatives in Cambridge, where she missed her mother terribly, according to letters she sent home. Abigail was apparently too sick to write, so Bronson replied, “You want to see us all I know. . . . Be a good Girl and try to do as they tell you.
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You shall see us all in a few days. You was [
sic
] never away from home so long before. It has given you some new feelings.”

Abigail must have recovered her health and sent for the girls in the winter, because the entire family left Boston in April 1840 to fulfill Bronson’s dream of moving to the country. The five Alcotts settled into a rented cottage on more than an acre about a mile from the village of Concord, near a bend in the Concord River. Bronson dubbed the house Dove Cottage after Wordsworth’s country home, dug a garden, and aimed to farm like his father.
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“Abba does all her [house]work and the children all go to School in the village close by,” he wrote to his mother.
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His wife, seven months pregnant, now seemed “as energetic and heroic as in her best days,” he informed Samuel Joseph, who was so accustomed to the Alcotts’ requests for money that he had mentioned to Abigail that his own funds were short. In a recent letter to Abigail that Bronson may
have seen, Samuel Joseph had referred to Bronson’s “poetical wardrobe.”
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Perhaps embarrassed, Bronson tried to reassure his brother-in-law that he would repay his debts. “Again I have planted myself,” Bronson began, “and . . . I feel . . . more assured of the fitness of my present position than ever, to fulfil[l] the great ends of life. . . . Debts, I will pay in all honour whensoever I may.
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I regret chiefly that your wonted generosity, must for the present, be so slimly requited. . . . I am not insensible to these favours of friends. I wish, sometimes that God had withheld some portion of the gifts with which he has blessed me, so that I might dwell in closer sympathy with the outward interest, and enter with a keener delight into the secular labors of men. O’ it is the hardest of all trials to be sundered from your kind.” He went on, “I fear you have suffered from [your] generosity. But I knew not how to prevent it. [My] time of Public Favor has not come.
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 . . . The Saints are popular in Heaven alone: on Earth they are held in low esteem.”

In June, anticipating Abigail’s confinement, Bronson sent Louisa back to Boston to stay with Abigail’s father, who now lived at the corner of Washington and Oak streets downtown. Her older and younger sisters were allowed to remain at home, apparently because their father found them more pliable than Louisa. “Two [children] make peace,” he explained to nine-year-old Anna; “three [b]ring discord.”
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Louisa ached for her mother and resented being with Grandfather May while everyone else in the family was at home. On June 24, to her dismay, she missed Lizzie’s fifth birthday. Her father wrote to her, “We all miss the noisy little girl who used to make house and garden, barn and field ring with her footsteps.” His advice to his forlorn seven-year-old was to “be good, kind, gentle, while you are away, step lightly, and speak soft, about the house [because] Grandpa loves quiet, as well as [do] your sober Father, and other grown people.”
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It is not clear that this gave Louisa any comfort.

A month later, when Samuel Joseph paid Abigail a visit in Concord, Louisa was still in exile in Boston. Abigail gave birth to her and Bronson’s fourth daughter, again at home, on July 26. They named the baby after her, and called her Abby May.
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Two of Abigail’s teenage nieces, Elizabeth Willis and Louisa Windship, came from Boston to help her for several days.
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In early August, after nearly two months away, seven-year-old Louisa
finally took the stagecoach from Boston home to Concord. She did her best to help Marmee, the name that she and her sisters often used for their mother, with the baby, and she joined Anna in keeping house. That autumn Louisa gathered apples for winter as her father cut lumber for neighbors. She and everyone else knew her family was in dire straits. They had no money to pay December’s rent for Dove Cottage. “The cares of the household are too great for the anxious housewife,” Abigail observed.
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In these months she felt “an exquisite sense of weariness,” she wrote in her journal. She had become a beast of burden, “a noble horse harnessed in a yoke and made to drag and pull instead of trot and canter.”
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Learning of their plight, Emerson leapt in with an invitation. The Alcotts could join the Emersons in their large house near the center of town, as Henry David Thoreau had done for several years. Emerson envisioned Concord as a sort of university in which he, Bronson Alcott, the naturalist Thoreau, and other learned men could “have poets & the friends of poets & see the golden bees of Pindus swarming on our plain cottages & apple trees.”
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Bronson loved Emerson’s idea, but Abigail said no. She was devoted solely to her husband and children, as her mother had been, and she did not wish to live with anyone else. “Everyone burns their fingers if they touch my pie,” she explained in her journal. Employing a different metaphor, she added, “I cannot gee and haw in another person’s yoke.”
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To pay the rent, she promised to take on more sewing and repair more neighbors’ shoes.

Her father, at age eighty, died that winter, on February 27, 1841. Samuel Joseph was at his bedside at the end and brought Abigail the news. He told her that just before dying, Joseph May murmured, “And now you must let the old man go.”
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Samuel Joseph embraced him and said, “Father, you shall!”

Joseph May’s estate of about $15,000—equivalent to $300,000 in 2000—was divided in seven equal parts.
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One part each went to his three surviving children, the children of his three deceased daughters, and an adopted daughter named Louisa Caroline Greenwood, who had lived and cared for him in his last years.
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Bronson’s many debtors, to whom he owed more than twice his wife’s inheritance, immediately sued the May estate.

Joseph May had predicted this. Any money that came to a woman was legally her husband’s, he knew. As his nephew Samuel E. Sewall, the lawyer, explained the law, marriage “conferred on the husband the absolute ownership of all the personal property which his wife had previously owned, and of all which might after marriage come to her. . . .
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She, on the other hand, if she survived him, had no absolute right to any part of his estate, except a life interest in one third of his lands. Her earnings were his. She could not make a gift or a will, bind herself by a contract, or bring an action in any court without his joining in the suit.” So to protect Abigail’s inheritance, her father had instructed his executors, Sewall and Samuel Joseph, to serve as trustees, or guardians, of her portion, which was intended, according to his will, for Abigail’s “sole and separate use, without the control of her husband or liability of his debts.” As a result, her portion of the estate immediately went into probate, where it was protected but inaccessible to her for several years.

In the spring of 1841, five-year-old Elizabeth was the only Alcott child still attending the Concord school. The others were needed too urgently at home. Louisa “plies her hands nimbly with her Mother” at sewing, Bronson observed, “or flies like a bird over the garden.” A woman who met the Alcotts around this time remarked that Louisa “is a beautiful little girl to look upon, and I love her affectionate manners.
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I think she is more like her mother than either of the others.”

Abigail, conscious of Louisa’s quick mind and deep thoughts and the brevity of her formal education, encouraged her daughter to write. “I am sure your life has many fine passages well worth recording,” Abigail advised the child. “Do write a little each day, dear, if but a line, to show me how bravely you begin the battle, how patiently you wait for the rewards sure to come when the victory is nobly won.”
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Louisa began composing little rhymes like the ones her mother often read aloud. Her earliest extant work is a poem, “To the First Robin,” which she likely began that spring in their garden when she was eight years old.

Welcome, welcome, little stranger,

Fear no harm, and fear no danger;

We are glad to see you here,

For you sing “Sweet Spring is near.”

Now the white snow melts away;

Now the flowers blossom gay.

Come dear bird and build your nest,

For we love our robin best.

As “To the First Robin” indicates, Louisa and her sisters had happy times at Dove Cottage. Years later, in “Recollections,” she remembered those Concord days as “the happiest of my life.” According to a story later told to Louisa by her mother, Mr. Emerson and Miss Fuller called on her parents one afternoon that summer or fall. As her father and the guests stood on the doorstep of the cottage, discussing education and how to raise “model children,” Margaret Fuller, who “had no patience” with Bronson after her experience at the Temple School, guessed he was referring to his own children.
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“Well, Mr. Alcott,” she said, “you have been able to carry out your methods in your own family, and I should like to see your model children.”

The Alcott girls were playing at a distance from the house. A few minutes later, in Louisa’s telling, “a wild uproar approached” and “round the corner of the house came a wheelbarrow holding baby [Abby] May arrayed as a queen; I was the horse, bitted and bridled, and driven by my elder sister Anna, while Lizzie played dog, and barked as loud as her gentle voice permitted. All were shouting, and wild with fun, which, however, came to a sudden end as we espied the stately group before us; for my foot tripped, and down we all went in a laughing heap; while my mother put a climax to the joke by saying, with a dramatic wave of the hand,—‘Here are the model children, Miss Fuller!’ ”

Despite these gay moments, Louisa’s father was not well. Realizing with despair that he could not make a living even as a farmer, he fell into another depression.
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“If his body don’t fail his mind will,” Abigail reported to Samuel Joseph. “He experiences at times the most dreadful nervous excitation.”
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It seemed to her that “his mind [was] distorting every act however simple into the most complicated and adverse form. I am terror stricken at this and feel as if I would rather lay him low than see his once sweet calm, imperturbable spirit experiencing these fluctuations and all the divine aspirations of his pure nature suffering defeat and obloquy.”

Despite everything, she still loved Bronson. But nothing she or the girls did for him seemed to help him. “Why are men icebergs when
beloved by ardent nature and surrounded by love-giving and life-devoted beings,” she wondered in her journal in August 1841.
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“Why [does he] so much take, take, [and] so little Give! Give! Women are certainly more generous than men. Man receives, enjoys, argues, forsakes. Man reasons about right. Woman
feels
right. Love is with her instinctive, eternal. With him it is pastime and passion.”

In response to her growing anxiety, Samuel Joseph found the Alcotts a “fine house and farm” near his family in South Scituate.
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Now it was Bronson’s turn to refuse. “I do not feel ready to accept them now,” he said. He told Abigail that the only reasonable course that remained for him was to cross the ocean to meet his English friends. Emerson—who had just buried his five-year-old son, Waldo—offered Bronson four hundred dollars to cover his passage to England. Eager to make the solo journey, Bronson convinced his unmarried, twenty-four-year-old brother Junius to take his place in Concord, boarding with Abigail and the children while he was abroad.
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In a letter Bronson apprised Junius of the living situation he could expect at the Alcott cottage: “Here are my wife and children, my house, library, friends, garden . . . all at your profit or service, and you can read, meditate, labour or converse, as you shall incline.”
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This was Bronson’s role for himself—to “read, meditate, labour or converse, as you shall incline.”

Abigail disliked her husband’s plan to leave her and the children but saw no other option. To comfort herself, she quoted the Apostle Paul, “I will hope all things, believe all things.”
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She spent the final weeks of winter “preparing my husband’s wardrobe for his voyage.”
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She packed his trunk with loaves of Graham bread, pots of applesauce, apples, and crackers. Anxious about having to assume sole responsibility for four children with no income, she struggled to summon “all the important and agreeable reasons for this absence.” She prayed “these trans-Atlantic worthies will be more to him, in this period of doubt, than anything or anybody can be to him here.” She knew that his “wife, children, and friends are less . . . [to] him than the great ideas he is seeking to realize. How naturally man’s sphere seems to be in the region of the head, and woman’s in the heart and affections!”

Decades later, Abigail would recall this “period in my life [as] more full of hardships, doubt, fears, adversities; struggles for my children, efforts to maintain cheerfulness and good discipline, under poverty and
debt, misapprehension and disgrace” than any other. In hindsight her actions would seem to her “Heroic.” Despite her determination to sacrifice for her husband and children, she often felt weary and troubled. “It seems to me at times,” she had confessed to her brother during Louisa’s early childhood, “as if the weight of responsibility connected with these little mortal beings would prove to[o] much for me.”
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She could not help but wonder with “earnest inquiry . . . Am I doing what is right? Am I doing enough?” Now, as she anticipated an indefinite future without husband or income, she wrote in her journal, “Oh how great a task this is. . . . It is with a trembling hand I take the rudder to guide this little bark alone.”
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