Marmee & Louisa (45 page)

But ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung
,

A miracle was wrought;

And swift as happy thought

She lived again,—brave, beautiful, and young
.

Age, pain, and sorrow dropped the veils they wore

And showed the tender eyes

Of angels in disguise
,

Whose discipline so patiently she bore
.

The past years brought their harvest rich and fair;

While memory and love
,

Together, fondly wove

A golden garland for the silver hair
.

Abigail was buried on November 27, 1877, at Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery beside Lizzie’s grave, where she had spent many hours. “Here I wish to be laid,” Abigail had written in her journal several months earlier.
¹²³⁸
“Although I often say it is of little consequence where we are finally laid in the flesh, for all is dust, and earth must receive our corruptible part; yet, I must own a preference . . . to rest among our kindred . . . even if we are insensible to the fact. After that the birds of the air, the dews from heaven, the Stars above us, even the snows of winter, are beautiful to contemplate as our companions in their seasons. The daisies will not forget to smile above me, and the sweet clouds of heaven moisten their throats with tender rain. Who can fear death and its consequences, if they have repented their sins, hope to be forgiven, and trust all to that power which created, sustained us here, and provides such beauty in the natural world to the end.”

Lizzie was no longer alone, Louisa noted after the burial.
^1237
1239
She and Anna arranged a private memorial service at Anna’s house the following day, at which Emerson sat beside Bronson and Lidian Emerson sat by Louisa and Anna. The Reverend Mr. Foote of King’s Chapel read the Church Burial Service, and from Scripture the Unitarian minister Cyrus Bartol said her eulogy, and Garrison spoke fondly of “my first acquaintance with her and her saintly brother.”

Not long after her mother’s death, Louisa received a letter from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Noting that Louisa “must feel
identified
for ever more” with her “venerated Mother,” Peabody recalled their friendship in the 1830s.
¹²⁴¹
“I lived with your mother in perhaps the most intense period of her suffering experience of life,” Peabody wrote, “and feel as if I knew the heights & depths of her great heart as perhaps only you & Anna can do. For a few months we were separated by stress of feeling in most tragic circumstances—and she doubted my friendship. . . . But God gave me an opportunity to withdraw the veil & I have in her own hand her written expression of her conviction that I was
true to her
& her deepest worth
at that very time
.”

Peabody attempted to sum up Abigail’s character. “I have never known a great[er], more tender, more self-sacrificing human being; & it was all pure moral force &
character
for she owed nothing to the Imagination. . . . It was the tragic element in her that she could not
escape
on
that wing
[of imagination] the full painfulness of
experience
—There
was no froth on the cup of life for her. It was all the reality down to its very dregs.” Abigail displayed “uprightness & downrightness and plain speech—
but an infinitely tenderer heart
—such a heart as needs
the winged horse
which for fresh air takes daily excursions into the Ideal. . . . In all the time & especially the many years of the first part of the time I knew her she was too much without the ‘Rose of Joy.’” Finally, Peabody addressed the relationship between mother and daughter:

It was for you, dear Louisa, in these later years—indeed ever since you grew up, to gather these roses for her & crown her old age with them. You
understood
her—the first person perhaps who ever did sufficiently to do justice to her—Let me congratulate you—“Many daughters have done virtuously—but thou excellest them all.” . . . I do not think I ever enjoyed anybody’s fictions as I have enjoyed yours. I have enjoyed it in imaginative sympathy with both your father and your mother, but especially with the latter.

Louisa, staying with her father at Anna’s house during those bleak early winter days, felt alone as she never had before. The person she loved best in the world was gone. “A great warmth seems gone out of life,” she wrote in her journal in December, “and there is no motive to go on now.” She felt adrift, almost as though she were a widow. Lacking the familiar, immediate goal of giving her mother material comfort, she said, “My duty is done. . . . No one understood all she had to bear but we, her children. I think I shall soon follow her, and am quite ready to go now she no longer needs me.”

Chapter Seventeen

Stay By, Louie

A
bigail’s death reverberated in the London boardinghouse where May would receive the news a few weeks later, in a letter that Louisa wrote only hours after it occurred.

Sunday Eve Nov. 25th

Dearest May, Our Marmee is at rest after two months of pain and weariness as hard to bear as pain. A happy end, thank God! . . . Such sweet peace on her face now I wish you could see it. . . . I gave her a good-bye kiss for you. Yesterday she pointed up at your picture & said smiling “Little May,” & nodded & waved her hand though only conscious at moments, then she looked up at us so sweetly & put up her lips to kiss us.

I wish I was with you my darling for I know how hard it will be to bear alone this sorrow, but dont think of it much till time makes it easier & never mourn that you didn’t come. All is well & your work was a joy to Marmee. . . . God bless you dear, yr Lu.

May Alcott was now thirty-seven, long past the ordinary age of courtship for that period and “more than ever left behind in the race for matrimony,” she had written to her family less than a year earlier.
¹²⁴²
In the days after she learned of her mother’s death, however, May grew close to a young Swiss man, Ernest Nieriker, who occupied the same boardinghouse.
¹²⁴³
Ernest, who worked in a bank, was twenty-one years old. May told him she was only twenty-eight.
¹²⁴⁴

May had never seriously considered marriage, apparently, although she had been through what Anna referred to as her “75th love affair.” Like Louisa, May feared that marriage would make her as unhappy as Abigail had been. But now Marmee was dead, and time and distance separated May from home and family. After a brief courtship Ernest asked May to marry him. In February 1878, less than three months after Abigail’s death, May agreed.

She made a conscious decision to marry a man unlike Bronson. As May explained, “I think how [Abigail] married for love & struggled with poverty & all possible difficulties & came out gloriously at last, all the stronger and happier for so mastering circumstances, & this gives me courage, hoping her example will always be a safe guide for me.
¹²⁴⁵
In my case it will be easier to be brave, because Ernest is a practical, thrifty business man; he is young, ambitious, with real faculty, instead of an impractical philosopher.”
¹²⁴⁶
A philosopher is “a man up in a balloon,” Louisa once said, “with his family and friends holding the ropes, trying to haul him down.”

The Alcotts learned of May’s engagement only days before the wedding, which occurred on March 22, 1878, in London. No member of May’s family was present. Somebody told Elizabeth Peabody that the Alcotts “do not seem to . . . like the marriage.”
¹²⁴⁷
Louisa sent the newlyweds a gift of one thousand dollars and observed in her journal, “May is old enough to choose for herself, and seems so happy in the new relation that we have nothing to say against it.”
¹²⁴⁸

May and Ernest began their married life in a spacious Paris apartment with a studio in which she painted and taught, with a
femme de ménage
to manage the housekeeping.
¹²⁴⁹
It was hard for Louisa to imagine May’s married life, and when she did, it made her sad. “How different our lives are just now!” she thought.
¹²⁵⁰
“I so lonely, sad, and sick; she so happy, well and blest. She always had the cream of things.” Her jealousy toward Anna had evaporated with John’s death. Now she felt resentment toward her sister who was happily married in France. Louisa hoped to visit May and Ernest, but did not yet feel strong enough to travel. Most of all, she missed her mother. “I need nothing but that cherishing which only mothers can give.”
¹²⁵¹

Her father asked her to join him in reviewing Abigail’s journals and letters, many of which he had never read.
¹²⁵²
With Louisa’s help, he planned
to “compile from [Abigail’s] journals and letters a memorial worthy of her character.” Aware that “biography is not in my line,” Louisa spent months in 1878 rereading her mother’s papers, her father at her side.
¹²⁵³
Bronson found the experience unexpectedly painful.
¹²⁵⁴
Abigail’s accounts of him and their marriage filled him with shame. He had not known how unhappy she was. His “heart bled at the evidence of a long struggle for the first time clearly revealed,” Odell Shepard wrote.
¹²⁵⁵
Bronson observed that Abigail’s papers “admit me, as daily intimacy hardly did, into the very soul of my companion, and . . . the memories of those days, and even longer years, of cheerless anxiety and hopeless dependence.”

He decided to burn some of his wife’s papers, particularly those that embarrassed him. There is no way to know the content of what he destroyed except to infer that it was less flattering to him than what survives. He also edited some of her papers and copied in his own hand portions of them to fill gaps in his own journals, which he intended to publish.
¹²⁵⁶
“I copy with tearful admiration these pages,” he wrote, “and almost repent now of my seeming incompetency, my utter inability to relieve the burdens laid upon her and my children during those years of helplessness. Nor can I, with every mitigating apology for this seeming shiftlessness, quite excuse myself for not venturing upon some impossible feat to extricate us from these straits of circumstance.”

Unable to excuse himself, Bronson took consolation in the knowledge that his wife had found great happiness in her children. “Ah me! But it is past now.
¹²⁵⁷
It is a sweet satisfaction that in her latter years she found in her daughters, if not in her husband, the compensations that fidelity to principles under the deepest tribulations always bring about and nobly reward. Under every privation, every wrong, and with the keen sense of injustice present, the dear family were sustained, the fair bond was maintained inviolate, and independence, a competency, honorable name, and even wide renown, was given at last. And but for herself this could not have been won.”

Like her father, Louisa rewrote portions of her mother’s personal writings and burned some of the originals, as she had burned some of her own papers and manuscripts, she revealed to a friend. “I . . . burned up a bushel of [my] diaries long ago fearing biographies when I was gone.”
¹²⁵⁸
Abigail’s extant journal for 1842 displays some of Louisa’s and Bronson’s emendations. On November 29, 1842, Abigail had written of
Bronson, Lane, and Wright, “They all seem most stupidly obtuse on the causes of this occasional prostration of my judgment and faculties . . . [and are guilty of an] invasion of my rights as a woman and a mother.” Bronson crossed out the word “all.” Louisa, who wept when she read this passage, scribbled “Poor dear woman!!” on the margin of the page.
¹²⁵⁹

Louisa wrote inside the cover of another journal, “Leaves from Mother’s diaries left me by her to use as I thought best. I looked them over and burned up all but these pages to be used for a life [biography] by and by. Burn these up if I die.” More than thirty years earlier Abigail had observed, “I have serious objections to a Diary to be inspected after death, even if it could . . . help with exactness and truth.” Pasted into another journal is a note she wrote on January 1, 1874, “To my Louisa! Beloved daughter—I place at the disposal of your judgment this, and all other of my Diaries; to keep for reference—or to destroy for safety—my hopes, fears, aspirations, have been uttered fearlessly—believing this utterance, or prayer or complaint should be known only to that power which can restore, protect, or relieve. May you Survive me, to consummate to perfection the work of Life you have so nobly begun, so successfully pursued, to generously share with those whose exertions have been thus far pursued with less success or reward. May you have good health as you have the good heart to live and love,
Long! Long!
[from] Marmee.”

Another family member, probably Anna, later added the warning, “Do not loan this book or allow any use of it for publication. Keep in the family
always
, or
destroy
.” A note on a bound volume of letters from Abigail to Samuel Joseph says, “Some [of Abigail’s] letters have been destroyed by family as unnecessary and unsuitable for others’ inspection—reflecting hardships and troubles often of a very personal nature.” For the reader frustrated by this destruction and alteration of Alcott family documents, it may be some consolation to read in
Little Women
of Jo March’s rage at her younger sister for burning a manuscript Jo has just completed. “You wicked, wicked girl!” Jo shouts at Amy. “I never can write it again and I’ll never forgive you.” Ironically, if not for
Little Women
and the renown it brought the Alcotts, they might have left all their personal papers intact.