The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (16 page)

“But how? So much of it seems to be human nature. Inevitable.” Louisa was surprised to hear such a pessimistic statement come out of her mouth. Sometimes she felt so overwhelmed by managing her own existence, there wasn’t anything left for other matters.

“That is why we have laws. Without them, the country becomes the sum of its citizens’ impulses. We must make sure the laws represent the best of us, what we should always strive to be.” The tall weeds and scrub of the field brushed his shins and fanned away.

“But in Georgia, the law says one man can own another.”

“Then we must change the laws. Or break them. ‘An unjust law is no law at all.’ ”

“Saint Augustine?” Louisa asked, smiling to herself that once again she had underestimated Joseph’s knowledge of letters and ideas. “Do you mean you believe we will go to war?” She thought about that a moment. “I think I would like to fight. Do you think they would let me?”

Joseph smiled. “Those rednecks wouldn’t stand a chance against you. But perhaps it won’t come to that. There are other ways to take action. Do you know about what some folks have been doing over in Ohio? And right here in New Hampshire and Massachusetts? A secret transport operation. Helping slaves get to Canada.” The expression on his face looked strangely familiar: eyebrows pulled high, mouth taut with the passion of his argument. It took her a moment to realize why she recognized it—it was just like an expression she’d seen in the mirror many times.

Louisa nodded. Everyone in Concord knew that Henry Thoreau was involved, though they never spoke of it. At night he guided the runaways through the dense woods, giving them food and finding them a place to hide when the daylight came. Most thought what he was doing was courageous but dangerous. He
was
breaking the law, after all, even if the law was wrong. Once, when she was about twelve, he took her out walking near his cabin to find where the scarlet tanagers were keeping their nest. The sun shining through the trees made a mottled pattern on the pine needle floor. Henry placed her palm on the cool, mossy side of a dead tree trunk.

“This is how they
know
,” he’d said.

She’d lost her last baby molar the night before and the tip of her tongue rooted around in the empty space. “Know what?”

“Which way is north.”

Joseph put his hand on her elbow and it wrenched her back to the present. “The most dangerous thing we can believe is that we are not the authors of our fate. God gave us reason, conscience. We must use it. To say that our life, our world, just
is
the way that it is, that we do not play a part—I think it is the worst kind of cowardice.”

Dark circles began to appear along Joseph’s shoulders. The light shifted like a lamp turning down and the sky opened. They turned around to see how far they had walked. The tent was a hundred yards away, and they saw the man at the entrance pull the flaps closed and cinch the rope to keep the wind and water out. The crowd that hadn’t made it inside in time huddled just inside the entrance to the tent of marvels. Louisa felt goose bumps crawl across the back of her neck as the wind whipped over it. Joseph looked east. A gray barn slumped against a hill, its roof sinking in the middle from neglect. He motioned to her and they ran toward it. She felt the heels of her boots sinking into the mud and arched her feet as high as she could to run on her toes.

The wet hay in the doorway was slick beneath her feet, but a few steps inside, it was dry and rustled as they walked over it. Her hair was soaked through under her flimsy bonnet and she felt droplets crawling along her scalp. She longed to unfasten her chignon and shake the water out but she was self-conscious.

“Where do you suppose our sisters are?” Louisa asked, looking out across the field to the circus tent.

“Somewhere where their curls will stay dry.” Joseph sat on an overturned crate and pulled an apple from his pocket. Louisa realized she was ravenous. He plucked his knife from his other pocket and unfolded it, pressing the blade into the fruit’s russet skin. “Would you like some?”

She felt suddenly alarmed by how comfortable she felt around him and busied herself with untying her bonnet. Throughout the day they had become increasingly easy around each other. Louisa had forgotten to monitor her words and expressions. She wondered if she had grown too familiar with him. “No, thank you.”

He grinned. “Yes, you would. I
saw
you looking at it.”

Louisa felt her cheeks flush and turned away. “You must be mistaken.”

“You are a puzzle to me, Miss Louisa. It seems we circle each other, become friends, speak openly . . .” He carved the core out of each of the four quarters. The rain droned on outside, forcing him to raise his voice to be heard. “But then—suddenly, it seems to me—you pull away. And it’s as if we are strangers again.”

He was exactly right, of course. She didn’t know what to say and didn’t dare look back at him.

“There’s only one thing for me to do, and that’s to stop paying any attention to the things you say.” He pulled another crate from the stack and set it on the floor next to his, then pointed at it. “Sit,” he ordered, an amused smile on his face.

Louisa smiled in spite of herself and relented. When she lowered herself onto the crate, she felt the small of her back press into the damp fabric of her dress. She suppressed a shiver. “It’s only that . . .” She scanned his face and noticed a bump on the bridge of his nose where he must have broken it as a child. She longed to touch it. “I believe you are a puzzle to me as well.”

He handed her a piece of the apple. “What do you want to know?” She chewed a fragrant bite. “What were you like as a boy?”

“Just about the same, I suppose. Only shorter.” He grinned.

“I think that grin comes from the devil himself.”

“My mother used to say that to me. She never could stay mad if I was smiling at her. Even the time I stomped out all the beets in her garden. I disliked beets more than any other food. Still do.”

Louisa hesitated. “What happened to her? Your mother.”

“I was to have another sister. When Catherine was just three. But our mother died giving birth to her and the baby died a few days later. Her name was Elizabeth.” He examined his palms. “Like my mother.”

She felt something open in her chest and her eyes grew damp. “Forgive me—I shouldn’t have intruded. . . .”

He shook his head. “It was a long time ago.”

Louisa didn’t know what to say. She put her hands on her knees, then clasped them together, worrying the skin around her thumb-nails.

He touched her hand. “Anything else you’d like to know?” She looked up into his eyes. They seemed almost to be challenging her.

“I think I know it all now.”

Joseph hesitated, his forehead creased. “You nearly do, though there
is
something else. . . .”

“Nearly is just fine, I think,” Louisa said, dropping her gaze back to her lap, hoping to ease his worries.

The rain pummeled the side of the barn; the noise was deafening. They sat so close together their shoulders nearly touched. Joseph leaned toward her and she felt the fabric of his shirt make contact with her sleeve. He turned to face her, then reached up and swept his index finger across her cheek, along her earlobe, down her hairline to the nape of her neck. The toes of his shoes touched the outside edge of her left boot. She kept her eyes on the dark shape they made in the hay.

“Are you cold, Louisa?”

She tried to breathe. “No,” she whispered, just as a chilly shiver cascaded down her back. She thought of the poem:
This is the touch of my lips to yours . . . this is the murmur of yearning.

Joseph grinned again, amused by her stubbornness, and she looked up at him. A moment of delicious tension passed and she thought of the circus tumblers suspended in midair, their bodies arched, coiled like springs.

Joseph took a breath and spoke. “I wonder, do you think . . .” He looked away, raked his fingers through his hair, then looked back at Louisa. “Do you think I might kiss you?”

Her eyes widened and she felt her body arch away from him before her mind had time to catch up. “This is . . . I . . .” she fumbled, trying to regain her footing.

Joseph’s face fell and contrition came over it like a cloud. “I’m so sorry—please, Louisa, forgive me for overstepping . . .”

Louisa shook her head quickly, the way one might to scatter the remnants of a dream. Her face was hot with mortification. She didn’t want him to apologize. She wanted to retreat in time, wanted the chance to react some other way, but she knew she couldn’t. Her mind raced in search of a diversion. “Don’t you think we should check on Catherine and May? This is a terrible storm.”

The rain pounded the saturated ground outside and the barn seemed to sway in the wind. Joseph joined Louisa in the doorway and looked out to see the darkest part of the sky receding to reveal a pale blue patch.

“I believe the storm has nearly wrung itself out, and I’m sure the girls are safe inside the tent.” He folded his hands in a gesture of prayer. “If I promise to be very, very good, will you stay just a little while longer? ”

Louisa examined Joseph’s face—the arched brows, the beguiling grin. The awkwardness that had passed between them a moment before was melting away. In spite of herself Louisa smiled, then nodded. She turned back into the dim interior of the barn, where the air was sweet with the scent of hay, and Joseph followed.

 

 

 

W
hen Mr. and Mrs. Alcott and their two older daughters were invited to dine at the Suttons’ to celebrate the harvest, Louisa faced her scant dress options with a slightly heavy heart but dignified resolve. She’d simply make the best of what she had, borrowing an expensive shawl sent to May by an aunt. For Anna, on the other hand, the situation was grave. Louisa could see that she felt this was her chance to make a good impression on the Sutton family, and particularly to sustain the impression she hoped she’d made on Nicholas. Louisa reassured her sister that it was her pink cheeks and dark eyes he was after, not the quality of her dress fabric. Those were the sorts of details noticed only by other women, Louisa told her. And
they
would be jealous of Anna, no matter what she wore, since she was so kindhearted and wise that no man could help falling in love with her.

“If only my sister’s good opinion could act as decree!” Anna proclaimed as the four of them set out, finally, for the Sutton house.

This time of year the imposing trees on Washington Square blocked a pedestrian’s view of many of its buildings. Some of the trees were hundreds of years old, with foliage so thick, hardly any light came through. Consequently, the Alcotts did not see the façade of the Sutton home until they were nearly upon it. It sat on the corner of Westminster and River Road, set apart from its neighbors by a regal white fence and gate that now hung invitingly open.

They were received by an efficient, unsmiling servant, who ushered them through the entryway, which faced the back side of the ascending staircase, rising from the rear toward the front of the first floor. Louisa tried not to gawk at the elaborate carving work around the ceiling, up the banister, and along the arches between one room and the next. The entryway and first parlor walls were covered in a pale blue paper featuring majestic-looking pheasants. She could sense her sister’s surprise at just how well off Nicholas Sutton might be.

Charles Sutton stood in the center of the parlor with his thumbs hooked on his suspenders, a corpulent figure with scarlet cheeks and a bellowing laugh. Margaret had told Louisa and Anna that Mr. Sutton was born in Boston to a well-known family who built ships for the navy. The War of 1812 had the Suttons building ships faster than the British could fill them with cannonballs. By the time Charles’s father passed away, he had amassed quite a fortune. Though Charles knew he was fortunate to have been born into such wealth, he had always felt his father pressured him into taking over the family business, when in truth Charles had little interest in matters of money and commerce. As an act of somewhat cowardly rebellion, considering the man it intended to irk was dead, Charles took the money with him and left Boston for the New Hampshire countryside. No one was quite sure what he did with his time now. He was said, depending on whom you asked, to be alternately writing poetry, tinkering in his workshop with a machine that boiled water without fire, or chronicling the migration patterns of New England bird species. Perhaps it was all three. People only knew that there must have been quite a bit of money to sustain his family on no income.

He had caused quite a scandal soon after his arrival in Walpole in 1830 by falling feverishly in love with the governess of his neighbors’ children, a working-class girl from Dublin named Clara McCarron, who, shrewdly, did not waste time marveling at her good fortune and agreed immediately to be his wife. Hence, their children, Nicholas and Nora, who came along in quick succession, had a most unusual New England upbringing of sensitivity to all economic classes and watered-down Catholicism, though Mrs. Sutton did not hold fast to it. She was a practical sort of person, and she reasoned that if the Divine Father had cast this loving and quite wealthy man in her path, He
must
have wanted her to marry him. The small matter of his being a Protestant could be overlooked.

Nicholas wore a butternut frock coat over a silk waistcoat secured with steel buttons. An Albert chain looped around one of the buttons and connected to the watch in his pocket. He stood off to the side with the newly engaged Samuel and Margaret. They seemed to be floating just a bit above the ground, glancing every few moments at each other with a look of pure pleasure. A similar expression crossed Nicholas’s face when he saw Anna enter the room. He had the features some described as “black Irish”—dark hair and countenance with clear blue eyes—but Anna’s appearance lightened his features. He glided over toward the Alcotts, taking her hand.