Marmee & Louisa (47 page)

The following year Louisa moved into a lovely townhouse, No. 10 Louisburg Square, on a private garden square that replicated the tree-lined streets of the charming town in which Abigail was raised. In the early nineteenth century “proximity to a garden or other well-groomed green space made a building site highly desirable,” according to Michael Rawson.
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Nine or ten servants helped her care for her “two babies,” Lulu and Bronson, who never recovered from his 1882 stroke. With “both [of them] looking for me at once,” she mused in 1883, “I feel like a nursing ma with twins.”

Meanwhile, in Syracuse, her cousin Charlotte’s husband, Alfred Wilkinson, who with his brother Forman ran a banking and investment
firm called Wilkinson Brothers, was charged with grand larceny.
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The Wilkinsons had swindled more than half a million dollars, creating a “sensation in the city, as it had been supposed that their high social standing would protect them” from prosecution. Charlotte felt “utter surprise, shame, bewilderment, humiliation, and self-blame” to learn that her husband was “picked up in the street and brought home by kind strangers” because he had been “drinking too much and too long.”
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She locked up her “table silver when not in use lest he sell it for whiskey.” To support herself and her seven children, Charlotte opened a boarding school for girls in her home. Alfred was convicted of grand larceny but escaped imprisonment, presumably on account of family connections.
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Louisa’s terse notation in her diary for July 28, 1886, was “A. Wilkinson dead. Relief to all.”

In Boston, Dr. Lawrence, the homeopathic practitioner to whom Louisa had given a loan, still provided her with therapeutic massage. The doctor’s touch reminded Louisa of her mother. “I have felt like an orphan ever since my mother went & with her the tender, protecting care which had been about me all my life,” Louisa wrote. “Nothing takes its place.” And yet, she added, “My mother is near me sometimes I am sure, for help comes of the sort she alone gave me.”

Louisa paid tribute to Dr. Lawrence in the novel
Jo’s Boys
, which she finished in 1886 on Beacon Hill.
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Nan, a “scientifically inclined” pupil of Jo’s husband, cauterizes a dog bite suffered by Jo’s son and treats him with homeopathic medicines. The adult Nan is a homeopathic practitioner and women’s rights advocate. Dr. Lawrence, who studied at Boston University School of Medicine and graduated in 1885, worked closely with Conrad Wesselhoeft, the eminent homeopathic physician who treated Louisa for twenty years. Wesselhoeft, whose father had started the famous Brattleboro Water Cure in Vermont, was a graduate of Harvard Medical School and founder of the BU medical school.

It was Wesselhoeft to whom Louisa dedicated
Jo’s Boys
, the last of the
Little Women
series. The figure of a dead Marmee hangs over the novel. Family portraits in a gallery at the mansion of Plumfield School hark back to Abigail’s first family. “On the right, as became the founder of the house, hung the portrait of Mr. Laurence, with its expression of mingled pride and benevolence. . . . Opposite was Aunt March,” in “her plum-coloured satin gown,” and an “amiable simper on lips that had not
uttered a sharp word for years.” In “the place of honour, with the sunshine warm upon it, and a green garland always round it, was Marmee’s beloved face, painted with grateful skill by a great artist whom she had befriended when poor and unknown. So beautifully lifelike was it that it seemed to smile down upon her daughters, saying cheerfully, ‘Be happy: I am with you still.’” The three adult March “sisters stood a moment looking up at the beloved picture with eyes full of tender reverence and the longing that never left them; for this noble mother had been so much to them that no one could ever fill her place.” A child was heard singing the aria “Ave Maria,” as Marmee used to do. Louisa brought her March saga to a dramatic close at the end of
Jo’s Boys
, when her narrator envisions “an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that” it can never be found.

Louisa, at only fifty-three, could no longer write. For more than two decades she had suffered from an unknown medical condition involving severe headaches, musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, vertigo, rheumatism, and rashes. Now she had severe dyspepsia with symptoms of gastrointestinal obstruction. She believed this mysterious condition resulted from mercury poisoning, a theory suggested to her in 1870 by an English doctor she had consulted in France. He had attributed her symptoms to the calomel administered to her in 1863 to treat typhoid fever.
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Medical experts now reject this theory because mercury is known to remain in the body no longer than about a year. “Mercury poisoning could not have caused her long-term complaints,” two doctors who studied her records wrote in a medical journal in 2007. “We propose instead that Alcott suffered a multi-system disease, possibly originating from effects of mercury on the immune system,” an autoimmune disorder such as systemic lupus erythematosus.
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Lupus is more common in women than in men, affects multiple organ systems, and is consistent with Louisa’s symptoms.

That fall, unable even to care for herself, she left Anna in charge of Bronson and Lulu at Louisburg Square and moved into Dr. Lawrence’s nursing home. At the Highlands, “a quiet retreat in Roxbury . . . entire rest, and care might give her the one chance of recovery that remains,” Anna told a friend. The convalescent home was in a large house with a mansard roof and cupola on Dunreath Place, off Warren Street.
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Dr. Lawrence supervised Louisa’s diet, read to her, and gave her daily massages
and baths. Louisa occasionally rode to Beacon Hill to see her sister, nephews, father, and Lulu. Anna wrote to her twice a day, “morning & evening,” and often brought the children to see her, bearing “flowers, books, and home news.”
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In the early summer of 1887, Louisa asked her cousin Samuel E. Sewall, who was retired from his law practice but continued to manage trusts, to draw up a new will. As the author of twenty-four books and hundreds of stories, she had a huge estate. Her royalties alone during the two decades after
Little Women
were equivalent to more than $2 million in 2000.
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Sewall arranged for her to adopt her younger nephew, John Sewall Pratt, so that he could renew her copyrights, which he would hold in trust. The income from the trust would be shared equally by him, Frederic, Lulu, and Anna. “John Sewall Pratt is now my ‘legal son,’” Louisa said at the will signing. “A very easy process.
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I think I’ll take a few more nice boys. Cant have too much of a good thing.” She forgot to ask her elderly cousin what would happen “if John should die after me & unmarried what can he do about the copyrights? Adopt a child I suppose. . . . What a funny muddle a little money makes!” Dr. Lawrence witnessed the signing of the will, at which time Louisa canceled the long-ago loan to the doctor and her sisters.

Louisa’s affairs settled, she took a vacation, accompanied by Dr.
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Lawrence, in Princeton, Massachusetts. She stayed at the Bullard Mountain House, overlooking Mount Wachusett, which Abigail had pointed out to her from Fruitlands forty-four years before. From the lodge she wrote a touching letter to her two nephews. “I have tried to spare you any probably future trouble which may arise from complications in regard to my money.
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If my wishes seem not unwise or impossible, I know you
will
respect and carry them out. Should conditions now unforeseen arise, I leave it to your judgment to arrange otherwise, believing the living can often judge better than any foresight of another ‘gone before.’ And my dearest boys, pray continue to be near each other, and live in harmony and good brotherhood, for the sake of MOTHER.” Anna, for her part, despaired at the prospect of losing the last surviving member of her first family. “I have little hope,” Anna told a friend, “that [Louisa]will ever be well.
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 . . . She will not return home for a long time I fear. The household worries try her nerves, and she is better alone,” but this “has been one of the saddest experiences of my life.”

In October, when a new edition of
Flower Fables
minus some “plentiful adjectives” came out, Louisa longed to send her own mother a copy, as she had always done with each new book. Instead she sent the book to her mother’s closest living female relative, Abigail’s adoptive sister Louisa Greenwood Bond, who had been present at Abigail’s final birthday a decade earlier. “I always gave Mother the first author’s copy of a new book,” Louisa explained to her aunt Bond.
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“As [you are] her representative on earth, may I send you, with my love, the little book to come out in November? The tales were told at sixteen to May and her playmates; then are related to May’s daughter at five.”

A doctor who was treating Louisa’s ailments with plant-based remedies reassured her in November, “All is well.”
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“Now the oyster will go into her shell again,” Louisa said to him.

“You mustn’t call yourself that when you’re doing so nicely. We will have some more fine books in a year or two.”

“Do you honestly think so? I never expect to be well again, only patched up for a while. At fifty-five one doesn’t hope for much.”

Just before Christmas Louisa wrote to her friend and fellow author Mary Mapes Dodge, “I mend slowly but surely, & my good Dr.
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says my best work is yet to come. I will be content with health if I can get it.” On New Year’s Eve she wrote again to ask Dodge to consider publishing in her children’s magazine a “well-written . . . pretty good” story by “my little cousin” Valentine, the thirteen-year-old daughter of John Edward May.
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This “grandchild of S. J. May” was a “bright lass who paints nicely & is a domestic little person in spite of her budding accomplishments . . . [who] longs to see it in print.”

Louisa “improved all winter,” Anna wrote hopefully to a friend, although her sister looked thin and frail.
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“We let ourselves hope.” Louisa felt her only remaining hope was God, who had been revealed to her through poverty and pain, she wrote to a friend. She believed that the last veil separating her from God’s love had been rent by sorrow when her mother died. Now, whenever she cried for Marmee, she felt God’s presence. Faith “needs no logic, no preaching to make me SURE of it.
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The instinct is there & following it as fast as one can brings the fact home at last in a way that cannot be doubted.”

On March 1, 1888, Louisa took a coach to Louisburg Square to see her eighty-eight-year-old father, who appeared to be dying. In his bedroom
she knelt so her head was near his. “Father, here is your Louie.
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What are you thinking of?”

“Going
up
,” he said. “Come with me.”

“Oh, I wish I could.” Her oldest wish was to unite her father and mother in repose.

“Over all these years, serenely prosperous . . . still rises that dead image of my mother, still echoes that spectral whisper in the dark.” These words, written in 1863 while she studied her mother’s journals, conclude the story “A Whisper in the Dark”—which Frank Leslie paid forty dollars to publish pseudonymously in his
Illustrated Newspaper
—about a young woman victimized and enslaved by an older man. Sybil, the narrator, is a “willful,” passionately independent, orphaned teenager who learns that her late father—like Abigail’s—wanted her to marry her first cousin, Guy. Sybil says to Guy, who has offered to host parties for her, “I don’t care for society, and strangers wouldn’t make it gay to me, for I like freedom.” The teenage Abigail had written, “I never cared much for society. Parties I disliked.”

Intrigued by Guy, Sybil resolves to “try my power over” him. Like the adolescent Abigail, she is moody and rebellious. “What right had my father [to] mate me in my cradle? How did he know what I should become, or Guy? How could he tell that I should not love someone else better? No! I’ll not be bargained away like a piece of merchandise, but love and marry when I please!”

Before the cousins’ relationship is resolved, Sybil’s middle-aged uncle, Guy’s father, who covets her inheritance, attempts to marry her himself in spite of their thirty-year age difference. She rejects him. Furious, he locks her in her bedroom, drugs her into unconsciousness, and imprisons her in a distant mansion. She awakes in a locked, barred room. Her hair is cut off, as Louisa’s had been during her bout of typhoid fever. “For many weeks I lay burning in a fitful fever, conscious . . . and rose at last a shadow of my former self, feeling pitifully broken.”

Sybil hears a voice whispering at her door, and muffled sounds from the room above hers. She thinks her uncle has imprisoned someone else, too. Allowed to roam the mansion, she is drawn upstairs to the mysterious room, which is locked and guarded by a hound dog. The room
“haunted me continually, and soon became a sort of monomania, which I condemned, yet could not control, till at length I found myself pacing to and fro as those invisible feet paced overhead.”

On Sybil’s eighteenth birthday her uncle comes to claim her and her inheritance. Unable to flee, she resolves to kill herself because the “death of the body was far preferable to that of the mind.” Briefly left unattended, she returns to the mysterious room, now unlocked. Entering, she finds on the bed the body of her mother, whom her uncle also imprisoned. Sybil feels she has discovered herself: “It was a room like mine, the carpet worn like mine, the windows barred like mine. . . .

An empty cradle stood beside the bed, and on that bed . . . a lifeless body lay. . . . An irresistible desire led me close, nerved me to lift the cover and look below. . . . [T]he face I saw was a pale image of my own. Sharpened by suffering, pallid with death, the features were familiar as those I used to see; the hair, beautiful and blond as mine had been, streamed long over the pulseless breast, and on the hand, still clenched in that last struggle, shone the likeness of a ring I wore, a ring bequeathed me by my father. An awesome fancy that it was myself assailed me; I had plotted death, and with the waywardness of a shattered mind, I recalled legends of spirits returning to behold the bodies they had left.