Louisa (36 page)

4

T
HE
H
EALTH
OF
George's body
and mind, the eccentricity of his manners, and his erratic, passionate approach to life had worried Louisa and John Quincy for years. Neither knew quite what to do or how to help him. John Quincy was watchful, demanding, and stern with his sons. He saw them in his own image and expected them to mold themselves to him, as he had molded himself to the model of his father. From Russia, he had written his young children long pedagogical letters about how to be moral and great. They were expected to be industrious and irreproachable. When George struggled, John Quincy instructed him to keep a diary and to send him pages; he sent George pages of his own as examples. He told George to study a letter written by his grandfather John Adams at the age of twenty, hoping “to stimulate you to
perseverence
in the cause of virtue, by reminding you of the blood from which you came.” The reminders were oppressive. As a freshman at Harvard, at the age of sixteen, George once described a dream in which the face of his father appeared behind the image of an attractive girl. “Remember, George,” John Quincy's voice said in the dream, “who you are, what you are doing!”

Louisa was more forgiving
and more overtly encouraging (although
she also had a tendency to lecture). In a novella she later wrote, she described a character she based on George as a “poet and enthusiast” with the “imagination of a German sophist and a heart as simple as a child.” To some extent, she saw herself in her oldest son. She was closer to him perhaps than she was to anyone else; she felt they understood each other—which made her worry. She cautioned him more than once against his romantic tendencies, his habit of “soaring into the regions of poetry and fiction while idolizing a shadow of your own creating.” She knew of what she spoke. “You will smile my dear son and say my mother is a fine theoretical preacher, but miserable in practice it is too true.”

In his response to that letter, George laid his character bare on the page. “If there be pain in ‘a too sensitive mind' there is also pleasure,” he wrote, gentle but grave. “It enjoys as richly its peculiar treasure as it suffers deeply its appointed sorrows; and I have always thought that imagination which was formed in early youth . . . a blessing rather than a curse; but life is supposed to begin to wane at twenty-five and the effervescence of youthful blood to be diminished from that time; this imagination must therefore be repressed and life regarded as it is. What mine may be it is impossible to tell; that I must form an artificial character or be forever nobody, is clear.”

He was trying
not to be “nobody.” But he was failing, and he was haunted by his failure. “Dr. Huntt says he looks sick and worried,” Louisa reported to John Quincy soon after John Adams's death. They did not know just how sick and worried he was. George, now twenty-five years old, was living in Boston. He had moved there to study law with Daniel Webster in 1823 and was admitted to the bar a year later. In August 1825, he had begun a diary, trying to take his father's instructions and admonitions to heart. He began with a “Table of Duty”:

VI.
Rise—analysis of Blackstone

VIII.
Office—Journal

IX.
Law

I.
Various compositions

III.
Literature till X.

What he loved was literature—but also cigars, friends, and women of whom his parents would not approve. He was in debt, which his parents did not know (but would soon find out). Following his father's habit, he began each diary entry with the time of his rising—which was never six in the morning. “Arose late this morning in consequence of retiring late last night. . . . Accustomed to smoke after breakfast I shall employ that time in reading Raithbys Letters on the Study of the Law,” he wrote on day two. That diary lasted for all of three weeks.

On December 31, 1825
, George started the diary again. “The necessity of a return to a more satisfactory path of life is so evident that I consider the coming year as a crisis in my life requiring vigilance severe and uncomplying over those vices the germ of which has been planted by past irresolution and has recently alarmed me by its gradual expansion,” he wrote. “I close the year in melancholy feeling: its course cannot meet approval from a strict and scrutinizing conscience.” This time his diary began with a look back to his childhood, at the years of being shuttled throughout New England while Louisa and John Quincy were in Russia. “Could my life have been passed with [my parents] its present results would have been probably very different but it was not to be; my Father's public employments imposed duties which compelled him to be often absent from his children and left him when with them little time for their instruction,” he wrote. He looked back on his life with disappointment—not unlike his mother.

He had so much promise. Everyone said it. He was handsome, with dark curling hair, full sideburns, a strong chin, and his mother's deep brown eyes. In 1825, only twenty-four years old, he had been asked by the town of Quincy to deliver the annual Fourth of July oration. That year, 1826, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of
Representatives, expected to follow in the footsteps of his father. But his moods were volatile, and his emotions ran hot. He had become engaged to Mary Hellen against the family's wishes, and while he was living in Boston he had written her beautiful love letters, but only rarely. Her subsequent break from him and attachment to his brother John had affected him in ways that his family could only guess at. They tried to measure the difference between the equanimity of his conversation and the feverish glint in his eye. Louisa complained of his addiction to cigars but made no mention of his heavy drinking. There were other stresses, which his mother cautioned him against; she worried over the character of the company he kept and was desperate for him to marry a woman in his social class. She sensed he was looking for women outside of it. He hid so much.

He could not hide
, though, how much his father unnerved him. The cumulation of his grandfather's death, his father's arrival, the public pressure upon him, and his private worries overwhelmed him. By early September he was sick, confined to his room in Boston. The immediate complaint was a toothache, but Louisa blamed John Quincy for their oldest son's trouble. George “was not treated with the kindness and consideration which his exertions merited,” she wrote in a chaotic letter to Charles, “and laughed and sneered at because he was not able to bear the exposure to rain, and every species of bad weather as well as those who fortunately for them are more strongly constituted.” Her scrawling handwriting was a mess upon the page, betraying her own agitated mind. George's dejected spirits, she said, “have impressed him with an idea that he is unfit for the society of the duties, for which other men are born.” Charles knew she wasn't exaggerating, and he knew she was right about the effect of his father on his older brother. “George knows nothing of the character of my father,” Charles had written in his diary in 1824, two years earlier. “He does not appreciate it and can not look upon him with any thing but fear. This is the
true fault of his character, he is always afraid of men of a certain decided cast of character, he cannot associate their images with pleasure, he has an indescribable and involuntary awe of them.”

When George fell
ill, some sharp words must have passed between Louisa and her husband, because she moved out of the big house in Quincy and into Hamilton's Hotel in Boston—perhaps to be closer to her son, but also, it seems, to avoid the paternal mansion. On September 13, she took George to Nantasket beach, on a long spit in Massachusetts Bay, for three days. John Quincy remained behind in Quincy. She and George, not yet fully recovered, returned to Quincy, but a day later, John Quincy walked in and found her packing to leave for Washington.

Accompanied by their son John, she made it only as far as Boston before abruptly sending John back to Quincy to give her husband a message. In that letter, she asked him to tell her where she should go. It may be possible to guess at the answer she wanted: she wanted him to tell her that he wanted her to come back; he wanted them to be together. Instead, John Quincy told John to tell Louisa “that I wished her to go wherever she thought it would most conduce to her health and comfort, and if she would let me know anything she wished me to do, I would do it.”

She immediately became too ill to go anywhere at all.

The doctor who attended her in Boston went to Quincy the next day. “I enquired of him, what he thought of the state of my wife's health,” John Quincy wrote in his diary the next day. “He said he believed there was disease in the right ovarum that it was irremediable and would occasionally be very troublesome; but he did not consider it as dangerous to life. . . . It was the occasion of great nervous irritability and excitement, but transient in its paroxisms. I took this opinion of him, because she herself thinks the disease mortal.” While she thought she was dying, the doctor's diagnosis, more or less, was that she was a woman.

So she remained in a hotel in Boston, confined to her bed. John Quincy came to see her the following day. “She conversed with me on family subjects of painful interest,” he wrote in his diary. He left her at the hotel, returning to Quincy—as she wished, he wrote in his diary, to take care of George. A week later, he returned to Boston and spent the morning by Louisa's bedside. He spoke openly with her about the future. “I told her my dispositions for the future, after my seclusion from public life,” he wrote in his diary. His plans had “the approbation of my own heart, and upon which I must hope for aid and encouragement, which the world will not give.” No doubt, he wanted her aid and encouragement. She was supposed to give it without his needing to ask. Everything in their history and culture suggested that as his wife, he had a right to her support. It angered her that his right was greater than hers.

 • • • 

B
Y
LATE
O
CTOBER
, Louisa and John Quincy were together back in Washington. (It was not unusual for the sitting president in those days to spend the summer and early fall months away from Washington.) Louisa's health was better, more or less, and she was a little chastened. “Let us mutually obliterate this summer from our memory,” Louisa wrote to George, “or rather let it be stamped on our minds as a warning for the future, to lead to good. With energy of character, fixed principles, and faith in the mercy of divine Providence, there is nothing too difficult for the mind of man to achieve, and we are called upon to act, not to debate for the latter begets a habit of irresolution which leads to imbecility if not to ruin.” George would have recognized her reference to Hamlet.

But there was no undoing anything, not by mother or son. There was no arresting the pattern that had begun. The following summer, events almost replayed themselves. In June 1827, a letter arrived from George saying that he had suffered “a succession of colds and
rhumatisms” and had fallen and hurt his hip. Louisa burst into tears when she read it; by evening, she was packing for Boston. When she arrived, she found George weak, “miserably wan and pale and his debility is excessive. This is not imaginary,” she wrote to John Quincy. The opium he was taking, as the doctor ordered, could not have helped.

A month later
, with George doing better, John Quincy wrote to say that he was planning to head north for his annual summer vacation in Quincy. “Perhaps we will meet on the way,” he said. She responded sharply in a letter written on their anniversary that made no mention of the occasion. Likewise, he did not acknowledge the anniversary in his diary.

She left Massachusetts before he arrived, overlapping with him for one night in New York, at the City Hotel near Trinity Church. It was not an intimate reunion. The group included not only Louisa but Thomas Adams's daughter Abby, her nephew Johnson Hellen, John Quincy's valet Anthony Giusta, their servants John Kirkland and Jane Winnull, and all three sons: George, Charles, and John. It was the first time the family had been all together in more than a year and a half, since John Quincy's inauguration in March 1825. Most of John Quincy's time in the city that evening and the next day was spent visiting with prominent New Yorkers. That afternoon, the family broke up again. With a sinking feeling, Charles saw how his parents barely interacted. “My mother does not appear either in good health or spirits,” he wrote in his diary. “My own feelings inclined to great melancholy on seeing what I think to be the future prospects of our family. My father seemed excessively depressed.”