Marmee & Louisa (31 page)

Bronson, on the other hand, began an eight-month trip to the West in September 1856. From Connecticut he wrote to ask Abigail to consider another position as matron of a water-cure establishment, which in that state, he thought, might pay $1,500 a year.
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Abigail, of course, could not leave Lizzie, who continued pale and weak. Over the coming months her three healthy daughters scattered, Anna to her Syracuse job, Louisa to Boston to write, and Abby May to study art while boarding in Roxbury with her adoptive aunt, Caroline Greenwood Bond. Left alone in New Hampshire, Abigail and Elizabeth were “the poor Forlornites among the ten-foot drifts” of snow, in Louisa’s words.
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Throughout that long winter Abigail had a great fear that Lizzie might die, and an urgent need to provide her family a home.

In Syracuse just before Christmas, Anna departed the May house in a coach driven by Dr. Hervey B. Wilbur, her uncle’s friend who ran the city asylum where she taught. “The poor child left in quite good spirits outwardly,” Lucretia reported to her son at Harvard.
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“I do believe from all accounts she will be happy [at the asylum] and have some first rate comforts, nice bathing establishment house, warmed by a furnace, and she will not be so much obliged to stint her washing, as she always has done. She has improved wonderfully & yr father says the Dr. [Wilbur] . . . feels he has no common girl.” Several months later, during Bronson’s stay in Syracuse on his trip home, Lucretia described Bronson as “fussing” and arrogant. “Very few come up to Mr. Alcott’s mark,” she told Samuel Joseph.
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As Bronson left the house one day to deliver one of his conversations, Lucretia was “afraid his audience will be very
small. . . . I suspect from what I hear [from other ladies] that very few are interested in his manner or matter.” Even Samuel Joseph admitted that Bronson’s “manner fidgets me.”
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In Boston that spring, Bronson asked Samuel E. Sewall to help him find and rent “a comfortable house (including my garden of course).”
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Abby May, “the family genius,” wished to live in Boston to study art. Louisa was already in Boston at a boardinghouse. She was proud of having “done what I planned” that spring, “supported myself, written eight stories, taught four months, earned a hundred dollars, and sent money home.”
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Now she planned to “keep house” and do sewing for her cousin Thomas Sewall, on Beacon Hill, “while his girls are away,” Bronson informed Abigail.

Filling in as a domestic servant for her rich relatives made Louisa more poignantly aware of the social distinctions of gender and class. Poor people served rich ones, and women of all sorts served men. In “The Lady and the Woman,” a work of realistic fiction she published in the
Saturday Evening Gazette
in 1856, a young woman named Kate Loring succeeds in freeing herself from these restrictions, as Louisa herself dreamed of doing.
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Kate, who merges in herself both “masculine” and “feminine” virtues, is nevertheless able to win the love of a desirable gentleman who at first sees women as only tender, submissive “ladies.” Kate describes to him her revolutionary vision of womanhood: “I would have her strong enough to stand alone and give, not ask, support. Brave enough to think and act, as well as feel. Keen-eyed enough to see her own and others’ faults and wise enough to find a cure for them. I would have her humble, though self-reliant; gentle, though strong; man’s companion, not his plaything; able and willing to face storm as well as sunshine and share life’s burdens as they come,” equal to any man. Having displayed her courage during a flood by saving a house from destruction, with “a face glowing with exercise, eyes brilliant with excitement, garments dripping, and hair fluttering in the wind, Kate came into the full glaze of the light lit up to guide her home.” At the end of the story Kate and her husband clasp hands for their journey “upward, side by side.”

Louisa, amid her own sorry life as a seamstress and maid, occasionally allowed herself secretly to “wonder if I shall ever be famous enough for people to care to read my story and struggles.” Thinking of Charlotte
Brontë, whose biography she had just read, Louisa wrote, “I can’t be a C. B., but I may do a little something yet.”
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In the summer of 1857 the entire family, including Bronson’s elderly mother, who lived with them part of that year, reunited in New Hampshire. Anna and Louisa were disturbed to find Lizzie still so thin, pale, and sluggish.
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Anna decided to stay to help Abigail rather than return to her job in Syracuse. In July Samuel Joseph visited “Auntie and Uncle Alcott and the girls,” he informed a son.
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Bronson planted and tended a garden, with which he hoped to settle local debts. He promised Anna and Louisa that by fall he would arrange permanent housing for the family.
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In contrast to his overweight, exhausted, nearly blind wife, Bronson at nearly sixty years of age was fit, “venerable of appearance and possessed of a majestic voice and an utterance remarkably fluent.”
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He enjoyed “a modest fame . . . his acquaintance was wide, and rapidly expanding, [and] he had long been closely associated with persons of high distinction,” including Henry James Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Greeley, and Walt Whitman.

Over the years of her marriage Abigail had often left to stay with relatives soon after her husband’s return from a long trip, and this year was no different. Following the family visits in July, she took Lizzie to stay with relatives and the family of Wendell Phillips in mansions on Boston’s North Shore, where she hoped her daughter would be cured by the sea air, frequent baths and carriage rides, and daily walks.
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In August, perceiving Elizabeth’s “brightening prospects,” Abigail anticipated several more weeks there and in Boston before she and Lizzie returned to New Hampshire.
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But Lizzie’s condition worsened. Unable to walk more than a few steps, she took to her bed. This hastened their removal to Boston, where Abigail consulted medical experts, to no avail.
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She spent her days at Lizzie’s bedside in Hannah Robie’s chamber on Beacon Hill, or reading to Lizzie in the Sewalls’ parlor.

Around this time Thomas Sewall offered Abigail’s husband a house lot in Malden, but Bronson demurred: Concord “is the place to plant ourselves.”
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In a letter to Bronson, Abigail repeated her reluctance to return to a town where they still had unsettled debts.
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She felt “anxious and divided in mind” about Concord.
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She begged Samuel Joseph for “some aid in the way of leaving Walpole honorably,” without debt, but he was slow to respond because of family illnesses. Louisa and Anna also
argued against another move to Concord. But their father promised, “I can take care of these matters if you will trust me for once a little.”
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Abigail’s “reluctances would be overcome,” he said, “in two or three years” when he could provide them “a good home” in Concord.
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Living with their father in New Hampshire, Louisa and Anna filled in for their absent mother, assuming a traditional female role. They alternated “keeping house,” Bronson reported to his wife, behaving like “friendly competitors.
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 . . . Our housekeeping conducts itself neatly under the[ir] alternate weeks’ administration, serving us to the old comforts and bountifully, at bed and board,” he wrote. “The absent matron would plume herself admiringly, to see how tidily and punctually all things are managed, by her serene substitutes—the newly initiated house-maids two, and who contrive to see company proudly and visit besides—the Artist maiden [Abby May] playing her part handsomely [in these] hospitalities.” Bronson was accustomed to receiving his wife’s “summons to dinner” and other meals, which Louisa and Anna apparently endeavored to imitate. “Anna is the assiduous housekeeper,” Bronson went on, “and keeps her Guests in the best humour with her table and chambers. I find her consulting [your cook]books, and her bread and cakes are excellent. . . . Such order and tidiness it does one good to witness. All the private virtues and accomplishment are embosomed in this modest maiden, and await their times.” When not keeping house for their father and grandmother, the two sisters, now in their mid-twenties, wrote, acted in, and directed plays in the Walpole Town House. Seventeen-year-old Abby May was usually exempted from housekeeping, perhaps because her father hoped her work might someday support them.

In early September Bronson visited Concord and set his sights on a house next door to Hillside, which the Hawthorne family now occupied. It was a dilapidated, seventeenth-century house surrounded by shade elms and butternut trees that backed up to an orchard and twelve acres of woodland. “All this I can have for $950,” which he expected from Emerson and other friends, he informed Louisa and Anna, “leaving your mother’s investments untouched,” a promise about which Louisa felt as skeptical as her mother.
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Bronson continued, “I will take the reins a little more firmly in hand.
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 . . . You may rely upon me for supports of labour and money. . . . [I] shall command the respects of your mother’s connexions, and the family all the more favours they may have in their hearts
to bestow.” He begged his grown daughters, who had likely conveyed to him their frustration at his improvidence, “Let me be the central figure of the Group, and try our family fortunes so, for a little time. . . .
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Please give me my last chance of redeeming my goodsense and discretion.” Louisa and Anna’s responses do not survive.

A week or two later Bronson purchased the old house, which still had a tenant and needed extensive renovations, “with Mother’s money,” according to Louisa’s journal.
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Bronson wrote, “I . . . close my bargain with [the owner] Moore for the place, the papers to be drawn by S.
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E. Sewall. Sup at Thoreau’s and sleep at Emerson’s.” He decided to call it Orchard House. Louisa and Abigail would give it a different name. To them it was Apple Slump.
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Louisa said privately, “I never want to live in it.”

Abigail, still boarding in Boston, finally consented to move back to Concord. Lizzie, if she was dying, would want the family together, her mother was aware. As the new house was not yet habitable, Abigail rented half a house near the Concord Town Hall, on Bedford Road. In October all six Alcotts reunited there. Anna and Louisa helped their mother care for their mostly bedridden sister, who had been seriously ill for two years.
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Louisa turned twenty-five in November. “I feel my quarter of a century rather heavy on my shoulders just now.”
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She seemed to lead “two lives. . . . One seems gay with plays” at the theater, the other “very sad,—in Betty’s [Elizabeth’s] room, for though she wishes us to act, and loves to see us get ready [for plays], the shadow is there, and Mother and I see it.” Louisa often felt that she and Abigail saw the world in similar ways. Watching her at Lizzie’s bedside, Louisa was reminded that Abigail had lost all three of her sisters. “Betty loves to have me with her, and I am with her at night, for Mother needs rest.
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Betty says she feels ‘strong’ when I am near. So glad to be of use.”

“Anxious and restless” about money for basic expenses, Louisa considered taking a job as a governess in Boston.
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Her parents discouraged her. Abigail needed Louisa’s help, and Bronson considered the position beneath her. “I don’t relish ‘the Governess’ in proud people’s palaces for any child of mine.
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There is no better blood nor more noble, to pride upon in any family in Boston . . . than flows in her own veins and holds itself to the old nobilities still.”

So Louisa stayed home. Sometimes it seemed she was alone with
her parents. Her two healthy sisters were distracted, she sensed, one by her art studies and the other by the courtship of a young man. There is no evidence of earlier courtships, although Louisa and her sisters were close friends with many young men. Louisa and Anna often joked about being old maids, for at twenty-six and twenty-five they were already much older than the typical bride.
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Their cousin Charlotte May Wilkinson, five months younger than Louisa, was already pregnant with her second child, having lost her firstborn, Margaret, at nearly age two. But a young Concord man, John Pratt, the tall, steady son of a farmer and horticulturalist, had recently been calling on Anna, who was dark-haired like Louisa and Abigail, with large, thoughtful blue eyes and a warm manner. John Pratt, his sister, and the Alcott sisters were members of the Concord Dramatic Union, which staged plays at the local Unitarian Church. It was obvious to everyone that even as Anna continued to keep house for her family she was moving toward a future with someone else. Louisa was not happy to think that Anna might wish to leave home and marry. For Louisa the very idea brought on “lamentations.”
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In the fall a doctor informed Abigail that Elizabeth might not survive, which focused the attention of the entire family. If Lizzie lived, Bronson observed, “It would be like a resurrection from the dead.”
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A few weeks later, though, he headed west as usual to give conversations as far away as Chicago and St. Louis. Stopping en route in Syracuse in early November, he stayed with the Mays. Samuel Joseph—who reassured Bronson that the Orchard House purchase felt “right”—was preparing to spend several weeks at a water-cure spa at Skaneateles Lake, thirty miles south, where his son Joseph was recovering from an unidentified illness.
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Samuel Joseph’s “parishioners, seeing him worn from preaching and his family trials, kindly sent him to spend some weeks with Joseph, and get leisure, rest, and the benefit of the water cure,” Bronson informed Abigail. “Rest is the one thing needful for him, but the Sewall and May ingredients seem hostile to each other . . . so there is neither rest nor repose.”
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Lucretia, who had difficulties with her only daughter, Charlotte, had developed “a nervous weakness” similar to depression, according to a granddaughter. “After her health began to fail, in her need to be alone and out-of-doors” Lucretia often walked northeast on James Street from her house into the countryside, “carrying an Italian grammar as she sat at rest on the farm fences.”
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