The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (33 page)

“Those trains kill people all the time,” Louisa said, with her hand to her brow.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Joseph said. “To answer your question, I did go on to New York that night. My cousin Edward was surprised to see that the rooms he’d secured for us would be occupied by just one very dour young man, but he took mercy on me and asked few questions. I spent three dark weeks roaming the streets of the city before I found a job working as a carpenter’s assistant. The work was hard but I was happy to have something to do.”

Louisa listened intently, feeling a rush of guilt at being the sole cause of his suffering.

“Catherine was planning to join me in the city, but I was scarcely making enough money to feed myself. I knew I couldn’t go on that way much longer. I wasn’t sure what I would do, but then Nora wrote me a long honest letter. She confessed she had suspected my heart belonged to someone else. She didn’t know it was you, of course. . . .”

They exchanged a lingering glance. “She said she knew I didn’t love her, at least not the way a husband
should
love his wife. But she also knew I was struggling in New York and said that, if I would come home and merely try, even just for a little while, she would give her best efforts to making a happy home for us. I was heartsick and she showed me true kindness. So I went back to Walpole.”

“Of course you did, and what a good decision it was!” Louisa said, a bit too cheerfully. Part of her felt she should have been the one to comfort him, though of course it was a silly thought. He wouldn’t have needed comforting if it hadn’t been for the wounds she herself had caused him.

“I went reluctantly, but soon I accepted what my life became. God blessed me with her. Nora was a good wife and a wonderful mother.” His eyes met Louisa’s and he held her gaze a moment, as if he needed to be sure she understood what he was about to say. “The things I felt for you never went away, Louisa. They never even faded. But life moves on. The page has to turn.”

Louisa nodded. She knew the truth of his words. As old and used up as she felt, merely sitting near Joseph now enlivened her spirit, and the intensity of all the old wishes rushed into her heart like a melted spring.

Louisa wondered what to do now. It seemed cruel to ask him for the letters, but she couldn’t let these memories cloud up her thoughts and get in the way of her object in coming to Walpole this one last time. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until something was done about the letters to keep them from getting into the wrong hands. She had never been a patient woman, and age only made her less so.

“Joseph, I came today because of articles like the one you read,” she said, pointing to the clipping from the
Boston Herald
. “Though I doubt very much that my life could be of interest to anyone, reporters come around Orchard House weekly, along with scads of young women, wanting to interview me, to take my picture. Most of them mean well and simply want to know about the writing. They want to know whether I’m Jo.”

He smiled at this and she returned it with a little roll of her eyes. “Well, aren’t you?” he asked. “I recognized an awful lot of you in her character.”

She nodded. “Yes—it’s true, and I’ve never denied it. But some of these readers don’t have the decency to respect my privacy. And I get the distinct feeling they’re waiting for me to die so they can dig freely through my papers and turn little fragments of thought into full-blown stories that could hurt my family. And yours.”

“Why would they care about me? Everything is so far in the past.”

“Don’t you see? They want to know who is the real-life Laurie. They all believe I am Jo, so they assume Laurie must be out in the world somewhere. They have investigated my sister May—they know
she
did not marry him, as her counterpart Amy did in the story.”

Joseph nodded. “I always wondered why you made Laurie marry Amy in the end.”

Louisa groaned and placed her face in her hands. “You aren’t the only one!”

Joseph laughed. “Old wounds?”

“You write to please an audience, but they can turn on you—suddenly. They all wanted Jo to relent and marry Laurie, but it wasn’t in Jo to do it. Those little girls never could understand that marriage is not the only thing a woman might do with her life.”

“Let me make sure I understand. The young man who pursued you, who denied, pined for you, who walked around with a heart like a broken wing clutched up to his chest for months—you’re afraid these meddlesome young readers will think I am he? I can’t
imagine
why.”

Her eyes met his and she gave him a sly smile. “Some of them are very narrow-minded. One must exercise patience.”

Joseph chuckled at this. “So—am I? Am I Laurie?”

Louisa looked at him a long moment. “When I was in Paris the year before I wrote
Little Women
, I met a young man named Ladislas, a Pole. He was just nineteen, so full of spirit.” Louisa took a breath. “When readers—and reporters—ask me who inspired Laurie, I tell them he did, for he is out of their reach. But that isn’t the truth. Ladislas only reminded me of
you
. When I created Laurie, it was you I thought of.”

“Well, I am quite honored,” he said. “Laurie is very likeable. I think I can speak for an entire country of little girls when I say it would have been nice to see Jo experience a change of heart.”

“And all I can say is that Jo would have ceased to be Jo if she had agreed to marry Laurie.”

Joseph furrowed his brow. Louisa could see that though she wished to change the subject, he didn’t want to let it go. Perhaps he had held these questions in his mind for a long time. “But she marries the professor in the end—how is that any different?”

“Eventually I gave in to the pressure of my publisher. He felt if Jo didn’t marry
someone
, I’d be letting down my loyal readers. In his eyes, as a spinster, Jo would have been a tragedy. I could hardly agree, of course, given my own situation. If it had been up to me, she would have stayed happy and free, writing stories and traveling the world.”

“Like you.”

“Perhaps. But not so old and tired.”

Joseph flashed a knowing smile. “One of the most shocking things about becoming an adult is the sight of your heroes growing older as well. For some reason we seem to think they should be frozen in time.”

“Well, they aren’t, and I have the gray hair to prove it.” She paused, willing herself to lead the conversation back to her purpose, though she dreaded it. “And that’s why I came here today. I have to try to protect my family, and your family, from learning anything . . . anything we’d rather keep to ourselves.”

“I see.”

Louisa took a breath. “I feel silly asking this question—undoubtedly they are long gone—but do you still have any of the letters I sent to you?”

He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it and walked back to his desk. He carried the wooden box from his drawer over to her chair. “See for yourself,” he said.

She pulled the small stack of papers out of the box. Most were clippings from the local newspapers about her books and her involvement in suffrage speeches and conferences. Beneath those, her eye caught the familiar pattern of the stationery her uncle sent her as a Christmas gift several years in a row. The box slid forward on her lap and she heard a soft thud against the wood. She reached in and grasped an object, felt the cool steel of its three long teeth.

“My comb,” she whispered, looking up at him. He nodded slightly. “How in the world did you come to have this?”

“Do you remember that day we had the picnic by the river, and we all went swimming? You left it on the rocks.”

Mock mortification crossed Louisa’s face. “Wasn’t I the picture of impropriety. Prancing around with my hair undone.”

“Thank God for that impropriety.” Joseph closed his eyes. “I can see it clearly in my mind at this moment. You looked like a mermaid with that hair fanning out in the water. My God, what a beauty.”

“Your memory has edited out all the facts, my friend. My sister Anna was the beauty.”

Joseph looked at her a moment and shook his head. “You never
could
see it. But that only made you more appealing.”

She reached into the bag she’d carried on her shoulder from the train. “These are your letters,” she said, holding up the sheets of paper. “And the
Leaves of Grass
you gave me. You wrote an inscription.” She opened to the flyleaf.

Joseph held out his hand and she gave him the book. He fingered the gold words on the cover, admired the liberty Whitman had taken with the type, depicting roots and leaves growing from the letters as if they lived.

Louisa watched the tender way he held the peculiar little book that bound the two of them together. “I finally had the chance to meet him,” she said. “Just last month, in fact.”

Joseph’s eyes widened. “Well, fame does have
some
rewards, then, does it not?”

She nodded and gave him a playful grin. “I’ve met the president too, you know.”

“Well, I am impressed. Was Whitman the way we imagined him? A loaf and a brute?”

“Not at all. Perhaps age has mellowed him. My father and I had tea with him in Concord. Mr. Whitman wears a long white beard. Walks with a cane.” Louisa recalled the way the gentle poet had asked her father endless questions about his work, Emerson’s, Margaret Fuller’s. Whitman had shown no ego and offered sincere compliments to them all.

“Did you tell him you blamed his poetry for causing you to fall madly in love with me?”

Louisa smiled more broadly than she had in a long time. Joseph meant the coy comment as a joke, but hearing him say those words aloud—“fall madly in love”—pried opened her heart. All the inexpressible things they felt for each other that those verses allowed them to share, they could
talk
about them—they could own them now after all this time.

“I told him I never knew poetry—mere words on a page—could wreak havoc until I read his.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“Well, my father was certainly puzzled—he didn’t know what I could possibly be talking about. Whitman looked very wise and kind and said, ‘Tell the truth and you can start a fire.’ I felt he was looking right through me.”

Joseph marveled at the poet’s words for a moment, then looked nervously at Louisa. “What is it that you want us to do with these letters?” His fingers tightened around the book, as if he were afraid of what she would suggest.

Louisa glanced at the fireplace, where the spent logs emitted a pale glow. “Burn them.”

Just the suggestion of it seemed to wound him as much as if the deed were already done. “Oh, I don’t think I could.”

Louisa held up her hand. “I know—it’s awful. But please, let’s not be sentimental about this.”

“I don’t consider it ‘sentimental’ to keep a token of—”

“Do you want your son to find these letters someday and
wonder
whether his father was unfaithful to his mother?”

Joseph closed his eyes and sighed.

“We are lucky that he hasn’t already stumbled across them,” she said softly.

Louisa caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the far wall and recalled the trepidation she’d felt standing at his front door when she first arrived. Joseph seemed to study her for a moment. She could see he thought she looked much older than her years, could see he was realizing her fears about what would happen after her death did not represent some far-off eventuality: She was dying.

Louisa carried on, desperate to convince him. “You have to believe me that these people will stop at nothing. My life is no longer my own. I must do everything I can to keep them from finding out about . . . what we had. They will make it into something tawdry and hurtful, and I couldn’t bear that.”

His heart cracked open like an egg. “All right,” he said, nodding to the stack of letters in her hand. “But not the book.”

She sighed. “I suppose the book on its own, should it be found, doesn’t reveal very much. But you’ll have to keep it here.”

Joseph nodded and crossed the room to place the book on the shelf next to his desk. Louisa rose from the chair and lowered herself down in front of the fireplace. She felt the heft of the fire iron up to her elbow as she swung it into the pit. Joseph reached for a length of the cedar he and Timothy had chopped the day before when the temperature had turned cold.

He knelt down next to Louisa and laid the log on the freshly stoked coals. The wood was dry, and the flames climbed slowly along its fibers. She waited until the fire was high, then looked up at Joseph. He held her gaze. The apprehension that had clutched Louisa’s lungs like a vise suddenly released its hold and her eyes filled as she experienced the pleasure of a full breath. What they felt for each other would be safe now; it belonged to them alone. He gave her a slight nod. Louisa cast the papers into the fire and nearly gasped at how quickly they disappeared. Joseph placed his hand on her arm and they watched the smoke that carried their secret billow up the chimney and out across the pale New Hampshire sky.

 

 

 

My sincere thanks go to the graceful and brilliant Marly Rusoff and her associates, Michael Radulescu and Julie Mosow, who have worked tirelessly throughout this process. I am equally grateful for my editor, Amy Einhorn, whose masterly editorial skill and enthusiasm from day one have made this a better book, and for the work of her patient assistant, Halli Melnitsky. The team at Putnam is second to none. Thanks especially to Dorian Hastings, Catharine Lynch, Alaina Mauro, Meredith Phebus, Melissa Solis, Lisa D’Agostino, Krista Asadorian, Meighan Cavanaugh, Mary Shuck, Stephanie Sorensen, Claire McGinnis, Kate Stark, Lydia Hirt, Christopher Nelson, and Ashley Tucker.