The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (18 page)

Abba could plainly see that Louisa was troubled but mercifully let her be. Louisa went straight up to bed. It wasn’t until she pulled the light cotton summer blanket up over her head that she finally let the tears flow. She drew a mournful breath, taking care that Anna should not hear her. Images of the last few weeks thronged her mind. How, she wanted to know, could Joseph have sat with her at the picnic as he did; how could he have come to call on her to talk about Whitman, speak to her as a close friend in the barn during the rainstorm—ask to kiss her!—and not
once
mention that he was to become engaged, soon, to a girl she knew. To the sister, Louisa realized with horror, of the man Anna might very well marry. Louisa wiped angrily at her eyes. Would she spend the rest of her life watching the man she thought she might—she hesitated even to use the word, it sounded so foolish—
love
, live as husband to a sister-in-law?

But after a few minutes more of the crying, she was through. She had been raised to believe that being denied the thing we think we want the most can make us strong and wise in ways we cannot imagine. If Louisa had anything, it was a will of iron. Once she made up her mind to do something, it was as good as done, and nothing could dissuade her. And so she made up her mind then to slough away these feelings, for as quickly as they had emerged, they could be discarded, she reasoned, and she could be free of sadness.
I cannot wish him ill,
she thought.
If he is happy, then all the better for it, and I shall be happy too, in my own way, in my own time.
But even as she told herself this, the sentiment rang hollow.

Louisa didn’t fall asleep until the early morning hours, and soon the harsh light of dawn was slicing into her dream. Before she was even conscious she felt her whole body resist waking. The events of the previous night appeared in her mind like a trout surfacing in a stream. But the awareness came before she could stop it. She sat up when she heard a soft clink of something striking the window next to her bed. She looked over at Anna, who lay curled in the sheets. Louisa heard the sound again and this time saw a small stone make contact with the glass.

She slipped out of her faded nightgown and into a work dress that was in need of laundering. She pinned up her hair as she descended the steps to the front hall, smoothing the curls around her forehead flat. The bright sun stung her eyes as she pulled open the heavy door wide enough to peer out. Joseph stood with his hat in his hand. He wore the wilted white shirt from the night before, his cravat hanging untied around his neck.

It took a moment for her to summon a voice from her throat. “Why are you here? ”

Joseph’s eyes were red. Sandy whiskers colored the skin around his mouth. “I needed to speak with you.”

“Have you been up all night?” She eyed his face carefully, wondered if he had been drinking.

“Yes. I was waiting until morning so I could come to see you. I would have come last night, but I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I’m sorry you came all the way here,” Louisa said as she began to close the door. “But I can’t talk now.”

He stuck his hand through the narrow opening and grabbed her arm. “Wait.”

She opened the door a few inches and sighed. She noticed he wasn’t as tall as she had thought. In fact, he was about her height. She stood level with his mournful eyes.

“Please, Louisa.” Desperation flashed in his eyes. “Give me a chance to explain.”

“Joseph, you owe me no explanation. This is happy news for you and your family. You have my congratulations.” All around them birds chirped an irritating chorus.

Exhaustion showed on Joseph’s face. “But you don’t
understand
,” he snapped.

Louisa felt her humiliation harden into an anger that raced up the back of her neck. “I understand
perfectly
,” she said, pointing her index finger at his chest. “I understand you had your fun with me while you could. I understand that you aren’t who I thought you were, and now you want me to tell you it’s all right. Well, I won’t.”

“But it’s not—”

“—and if you do not leave the property this instant, I am going to scream for my father.”

Joseph opened his mouth to speak but hesitated. Louisa’s eyes shone, daring him to test her. She pinned her lips into a slim line. He tipped his head down and pressed his hat slowly back on, his palm lingering on its crown a moment, as if he had to muster the energy to lift his head. Louisa watched him walk slowly down the path, then pressed the door closed and secured the latch.

 

 

He came back in the afternoon,
when Bronson was tucked away in his study and Abba had gone to the orchard to trade her plum jam for summer apples. Louisa was sitting in the dormer near her bed reading and looked up from the page when a movement on the front path caught her eye. Joseph wore a clean shirt, white linen, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. A book was tucked between his brown forearm and his ribs. She ducked out of the window and backed onto her bed. Anna sat in her rocker by the other window, plucking at a square of embroidery.

“Anna,” Louisa said as the knock sounded below. “Joseph’s at the door.”

Anna looked up, surprised. “Do you want to see him?”

“No. Tell him . . . tell him I’m ill. Or that I’ve gone out. Yes, tell him I’ve gone out.”

Anna appraised her sister with a sympathetic frown. “Oh, Lou, what he did to you is . . .”

Joseph knocked again.

“Hush about that. Go—before Father hears him and comes out of his study.” Anna hesitated a moment before she draped the embroidery over the arm of the chair and hurried toward the steps. Louisa closed her eyes and listened to Anna’s dress swish across the floorboards.

She heard voices drifting up through the open windows below but couldn’t make out what they said. Soon the heavy door closed. Louisa lowered herself to her knees and peered over the bottom of the window just in time to see Joseph traverse the last few feet of the path and exit the front gate. He looked back at the house and Louisa dropped her head out of sight. She climbed back onto the bed and took up her book.

It took all her strength not to look up when Anna came in.

“Well,” Anna said, standing in the center of the room. “Don’t you want to know what he said?”

“Not particularly,” Louisa said.

Anna rolled her eyes. “I tried to give him a piece of my mind, Louisa.” Anna sat back in her rocker. “But he looked so . . . bereft. I tried to ask him why, why he didn’t tell us about . . . Nora, his plans. But he just shook his head. Said he had to talk to you.”

Louisa finally raised her eyes from the paragraph she’d been scanning for a full minute without comprehension. “We have nothing to say to each other.”

“I know. He wanted me to give you this.” She extended her arm toward Louisa, offering a book with a letter tucked in its front pages.

Louisa didn’t put out her hand. “Burn it.”

“But don’t you at least want to see what it says? Perhaps there is
some
explanation for what happened.”

“I can imagine no satisfactory explanation for lying. Can you?”

Anna shook her head. “No.”

Louisa crossed her arms. “I think we must see people for who they are, not who we wish they might be. It is hard now, but it will be for the best in the end. You know I’m not one for a fairy story.”

“You used to be,” Anna reminded her.

“As the verse says, ‘When I was a child I spake as a child’—but the time comes to put away childish things. Some people disappoint. But not my sisters,” Louisa said, taking Anna’s empty hand. “Never my sisters. And for that I am grateful.”

Anna bit her bottom lip. “What if
I
were to read it, and then, if it contained anything other than what we already know, I could tell you about it?” she ventured.

“You wouldn’t dare. Give it to me.” Louisa slid the square of paper out of the book, then lit the candle at her bedside and held the corner in its flame. She tilted the paper until two sides were engulfed, then laid it in a tin tray she sometimes used to bring tea up to their room in the afternoons. The flame flared as it consumed the fibers, then subsided into the orange perimeter of the ashes. “There,” Louisa said. “Has Father made the fire in the parlor yet?”

Anna shook her head. “Not the book. Louisa Alcott—how can
you
burn a book?”

Louisa sighed. “All right, I won’t burn the book.” She reached for it but Anna hugged it to her breast.

“I don’t believe you.”

“No—I promise. I won’t do anything to it. You can have it if you want. I just want to look at it for a moment.”

Anna handed it to her. Louisa traced the small cover, then opened it and drew her finger across Mr. Whitman’s portrait on the frontispiece. The copy was identical to Mr. Emerson’s—same green cloth binding, same stamped letters of the title depicted as if they sprouted roots and leaves. The only difference in Joseph’s copy was an inscription on the flyleaf:

Over the ensuing weeks,
the letters continued to come every few days. After Louisa insisted on burning the first few, Anna made sure to intercept the mail and tuck the letters into her sewing basket, safe from her sister’s wrath. She didn’t open them, for they weren’t hers to read, but something tugged at her, convinced her to save them in case Louisa had a change of heart.

As she made her way each day through the work that kept her hands busy but left her mind free to roam, Louisa tried hard not to let it drift back to that morning when Joseph stood on the front steps, tried not to remember his lips forming the word
please
as he begged her to listen to his explanation. But many times she could not resist and then the pictures flooded the space behind her eyes and she heard the word repeating in quick succession until it sounded like the call of a weary warbler beseeching his mate.

But Alcotts did not succumb, no matter the burden. There might not be a thing to do except struggle to wobbly feet and stand in the torrent, but sometimes that was enough to wear the torrent down, to coax out its final pathetic gust. In the end, an Alcott, though raw, bruised, and worn, was still standing. Louisa was determined that this would be so. She threw herself into the activities of daily life, hoping somehow
motion
could erase the blackboard of her memory in long quick strokes. But in her secret heart she despaired: why did anyone want to love anyone, if this was what came of it?

To keep from brooding, Louisa began work on a new volume of stories, a follow-up to
Flower Fables
, imagining she would finish it and be off to Boston at last. She cringed at her juvenile subject—Christmas elves—but it seemed prudent to stick with the formula that had worked before. She dutifully locked herself in her room for hours at a time, a basket of apples by her side, to work on it. The stories were slow going and she had no guarantee they would bring income, but when she sat by the fire in the evening in her ink-stained apron, her hand aching from clutching the pen all afternoon, Louisa felt rich in other ways. May had offered to do the illustrations and she worked at rough sketches in the evenings after dinner while Anna and Louisa scrubbed and shined in the kitchen. Louisa thought the drawings lovely, though she felt exasperated that once again her youngest sister had found a way to avoid helping with the chores.

Louisa knew that it was Anna, steady and reliable as always, who continued to do the lion’s share of housework, despite her preoccupation with Nicholas Sutton. He continued to work on his house with the help of his father, Samuel Parker, a couple of uncles from Boston, and, Louisa realized, his brother-in-law-to-be, Joseph Singer. Together they measured, sawed, and hammered boards into place in the late summer heat. Though Nicholas had yet to speak to Bronson, he had pledged to Anna that he would do so soon. He wanted to wait until the house was finished, so they could marry promptly and take residence. As usual, Bronson had his head in the clouds and did not in the least suspect he would soon be asked for his eldest daughter’s hand. Anna felt she could scarcely contain her excitement, but she didn’t express it. She thought of all the sorts of faces that existed in the world—fat, thin, round, dark, white, or freckled—and guessed that heartbreak looked the same on every one of them. One could spot it from a mile away. The last thing Louisa needed to hear about was Anna’s expectation that she would soon become engaged.

 

 

The opening night
of the play approached, but the cast had not rehearsed nearly as much as Louisa knew they needed to. One week Walpole saw the worst thunderstorm anyone in town could remember, and all the young people were needed at home to help clear downed tree limbs and sweep up broken glass. Then the boys called off a rehearsal to spend time on the construction project. Fall was on its way, and Nicholas wanted to be sure the house was ready for the winter well before it came. Just as it seemed they would get back on schedule, May came down with a terrible cold and said she couldn’t bear to know they were all together having fun without her. So Louisa called off rehearsal once again.

Finally, just days before opening night, the cast gathered at the Elmwood to devote themselves to their roles in
The Jacobite
.

“I’m so pleased we’re all finally here,” Louisa said as the group filed into the attic. The anticipation of seeing Joseph had rattled her nerves, and she resisted the impulse to scan the room for him, dreaded the possibility of awkward conversation. “We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I know if we can just buckle down and really
work
today and tomorrow, we’ll be ready for Tuesday’s performance.”

May and Harriet passed around copies of the play and the paper rustled as the cast flipped through the pages to their various parts.