Marmee & Louisa (25 page)

Included in her duty: for several days in January and February 1847 she and Bronson hosted an escaped slave on his way from Maryland to Canada. A brief conversation while giving the runaway his breakfast one morning provided Abigail a “meeting [with] God . . . short but real.”
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Decades later Louisa recalled that the young fugitive ate meals with the family, joined them before the evening fire, and cut and piled their wood.
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Her father, perhaps still uncertain about antislavery, had recently called Garrison “the most intolerant of men,” lacking in “comprehension of the whole truth.
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He does not see it.”

In Concord Louisa fell under the spell of her father’s friend Henry David Thoreau, a Harvard graduate and native of the town in his late twenties who was living, in Bronson’s words, as “a hermit by Walden Pond.”
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Thoreau often took Louisa and her sisters on nature walks in the woods around the pond, pointing out and describing plants, trees, and animals. “Arrowheads and Indian fireplaces sprang from the ground” when Louisa accompanied him.
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“Wild birds perched on his shoulder. His fingers seemed to have more wisdom in them than many a scholar’s head.”

Fourteen-year-old Louisa boarded with friends near Boston for part of the summer of 1847, while Anna studied music, French, and German and kept school at home for her younger sisters, Emerson’s two girls, and a nine-year-old second cousin, Edward May, who boarded with the Alcotts.
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Edward was a son of Abigail’s cousin Samuel May Jr., an abolitionist Unitarian minister in Leicester, Massachusetts, whose father was Colonel May’s only brother. Abigail, who had acquired a keyboard instrument called a seraphine, gave the children regular music lessons, as her mother had done for Abigail and her sisters.
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In the fall of 1847, Anna, who was sixteen, took a teaching job in Walpole, New Hampshire, where she could board at no cost with an uncle and cousin. Benjamin Willis, the prosperous widower of Abigail’s sister
Eliza, had with his twenty-three-year-old married daughter Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) Willis Wells and her husband settled comfortably in southwestern New Hampshire.
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While Louisa understood the need for Anna to live elsewhere, to earn money, she always preferred that her sister stay home. “I miss [Anna] dreadfully,” Louisa wrote in her journal, “for she is my conscience, always true and just and good.”
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The family was divided even further at Christmastime, when Abigail decided to send twelve-year-old Elizabeth to Boston, where their relative Hannah Robie could feed and care for her in more comfort than Abigail could provide. Robie, now nearly sixty, kept chambers at the homes of her nephews Thomas Sewall in Boston and Samuel E. Sewall in Melrose. Lizzie’s departure particularly distressed Abby May. At the Concord train depot on the day Lizzie left, seven-year-old Abby May waved good-bye to her “with tearful eyes, and a sadness at the heart,” her mother observed.
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As Abby May, Louisa, and Abigail returned from the depot in a coach, the child said forlornly, “There is no pleasure now for me in this old, ugly house.”

Of the family, only Bronson now loved Concord. Abigail derided “cold, heartless, Brainless, soulless Concord.”
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Their house there was chilly and in need of repair, and she had borrowed so heavily from local merchants that she had no credit. Years later in a burlesque, Louisa mocked “one of the dullest little towns in Massachusetts” as a “modern Mecca” offering “apples by the bushel, orphic acorns by the peck, and Hawthorne’s pumpkins, in the shape of pies . . . at philosophical prices.” The lodgings of Concord, she wrote, were “filled with Alcott’s rustic furniture, the beds made of Thoreau’s pine boughs, and the sacred fires fed from the Emersonian wood-pile. . . . Telescopes will be provided for the gifted eyes which desire to watch the soaring of the Oversoul, when visible,” over the Concord River.
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Bronson, unlike his wife and daughters, was indifferent to the family’s diaspora. “Families must swarm sometime. And it is well for [Anna and Elizabeth] to seek fields of richer thyme than grows about the Old Hive, and fall to honey-making for [them]selves,” he added, apparently without irony, “since all true and lasting enjoyment must be sipped from the cup by [one’s] own exertions alone.”

Abigail, of course, did not agree. A child of seven or twelve or even a teenager should not be expected to sip from the cup of her own exertions
alone. A parent’s exertions were essential. Having exhausted the generosity of her relatives and friends and having concluded that her husband would not work for money, she finally determined to go to work herself.

At the end of 1847, in conversation with Lidian Emerson, Abigail learned of an opening for a matron at a new water-cure establishment in Maine.
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The water cure, or hydrotherapy, was a treatment for various ailments by means of baths, soaks, and wraps in hot or cold water, often from a natural spring or stream. Scenic resorts in rural villages across the country offered the cure, as it was commonly called, catering to a wealthy, mostly female clientele. Rapidly expanding railroad lines, which had started in Boston in 1833, made these resorts accessible from major cities.
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Prominent figures who sought the cure included Harriet Beecher Stowe, Julia Ward Howe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Wendell Phillips, Garrison, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Lidian Emerson had visited “Dr. Shattuck’s Water Cure” in Waterford, Maine, in August while staying there with her husband’s brilliant and eccentric aunt, Mary Moody Emerson.
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“Nothing would please me better” than working for the cure, Abigail said to Lidian. “What I wish for myself is to be at the head of a water cure.”
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Abigail believed in water’s healing powers. “If I cannot afford to feed the children, I can wash them, which is almost as essential to health.”
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Ralph Waldo Emerson, at his wife’s behest, wrote to the proprietor of the spa. “Our neighbor & friend Mrs. Alcott possesses the energy, experience & economy which the office demands.
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 . . . If there is a place of this kind to be filled, Mrs. Alcott is ready & willing to undertake it; and, if you desire it, will come to Waterford at any time, & spend a week at the House. . . .”

In April 1848 Abigail met in Boston with the spa’s physician, Dr. Kitteridge. She said the job appealed to her. Her only reservations were “family cares, and the difficulties of removal.”
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Her youngest daughter was seven, the spa more than a hundred miles away. At nearly fifty, Abigail felt herself growing fat, lazy, and somewhat blind. But she did not say that to Dr. Kitteridge. She would take the job. No longer willing to “submit to this life of unproductiveness,” she determined that “
Action
is a duty.
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Doing
is coextensive with Being.” For a trial period of three months, the doctor promised her a salary of five dollars a week, plus room and board.

Louisa resisted this plan as soon as she learned of it. She did not want her mother to leave. Louisa would rather do more sewing and seek other paying work in exchange for keeping their mother at home. Anna, who at seventeen was still teaching in southern New Hampshire, wrote to Bronson to suggest that they sell Hillside and reunite in Waterford, Maine. That way the family could be together.

Bronson replied with his characteristic fatalism. “By some chance as yet unforeseen, we may some or all of us drift even to Waterford hills, but that seems less likely to be our destiny.
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 . . . I honor the good Mother for this brave deed. . . . All Saints and Angels will accompany and bless the dear woman.” Considering his own contributions to the family coffers, he added, “Would that some Power as propitious might task my Gifts, and fill my hands too with work and my table with bread. But ’tis not thus with me and I submit to the decrees of fate.” Admitting that he was not moved “to any work beyond myself,” he concluded with a quote from Milton, “They also serve who only stand & wait.”
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A few days later, on May 10, 1848, Abigail boarded the train to Boston, accompanied by Abby May and a sixteen-year-old “imbecile” from Nova Scotia named Eliza Stearns. For two years Eliza’s parents had paid Abigail to keep and care for their daughter, who was too burdensome to leave with Bronson. Abigail hoped the girl might benefit from the water cure. From Boston the threesome traveled north to Portland and thence to western Maine.

Louisa and Elizabeth, finally home from her winter stay with Hannah Robie, remained at Hillside. Someone had to keep house for Father. In June, about a month after Abigail’s departure, Louisa received word that her mother missed her and desired her “company and services.” Fifteen-year-old Louisa responded by promising to “fly” to her mother in Maine.
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Chapter Nine

Mother, Is It You?

O
ne night in late May, not long after she moved into the water-cure spa, Abigail had a dream that she was home with her girls. In the dream Lizzie was seated at the piano, weeping because Abigail wasn’t there to help her find a certain note. Louisa was outside, running up the lane toward the house, her long dark hair blowing up behind her. “Mother,” Louisa screamed. “Mother? Is it you?” Abigail woke from the dream in tears, feeling guilty for being so far from her girls.

The sun had not risen outside the bedchamber that she shared with Abby May and Eliza Stearns on the top floor of the spa’s dormitory and refectory building, across the lawn from the house that contained the healing baths.
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The girls were still asleep.

At four each morning Abigail roused Eliza, helped her downstairs, and packed her into wet sheets, one aspect of the cure. Then she raced “through the long passageways to the baths” for her own “plunge” in the water. Returning to her room, she dressed herself and read or wrote beneath a window overlooking a lake and the foothills of the Mahoosuc and White mountains.

By 5 a.m. Abigail would be downstairs organizing the kitchen, seeing the glasses “nicely cleaned, the knives in order, etc.” She swept the drawing room, dusted, arranged music books, “unpacked” Eliza, waked, washed, and dressed Abby May, and “set” the two girls “to walking” outside. It was now about six in the morning.

As matron of the spa she was responsible for overseeing all meals. Each one, she wrote in a letter to home, was a tableau “like a scene in a theater.”
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The gathered diners represented “all tastes, all habits, all opinions and divers[e]
notion
alities, as well as
nation
alities.”
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After breakfast each morning she tended to curtains, bed linens, slops, and floors. Before the midday meal she gave Eliza Stearns another wet sheet and put her to sewing or cleaning. At half past twelve she supervised dinner. Then she met with Calvin Farrar, the founder and proprietor of the spa, and a medical expert, Dr. Fisher, to discuss the patrons’ dietary needs. She mended and washed linens and gave Eliza a third wet sheet and “wash-down.” She enjoyed a late afternoon walk, supervised supper at six, and listened to Dr. Fisher play “sweet music” on the parlor piano or took “a little ramble” before collapsing into bed.

Her letters included accounts of her dreams. Like her Puritan ancestors, she saw dreams as windows into truths not otherwise accessible. She often dreamed she was home. In one dream she stood outside Hillside with her husband discussing an “observatory” he wished to erect there. She feared he was too attached to the property, which they could not afford to maintain. “Don’t do anything to make this place more attractive,” she said in the dream. “I want to find a different home for the girls.”

Bronson replied “jocosely”—a word that came naturally to Abigail, even while asleep—that she should not worry because “young girls are very apt to find homes for themselves.” Again she awoke in tears.

Despite her anxieties, Abigail made her mark on the resort. Within weeks of her arrival she felt she was “the bone, sinew, and great aorta of the water cure.” A travel writer who visited in June to write a newspaper article about the spa provided an objective opinion: “Mrs. Alcott [was] the greatest thing that ever happened to ‘down East’ . . . and the Waterford Cure House.”
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According to a neighbor in Concord, Abigail was now “a handsome, genial, four-square woman” in her late forties, “quiet and fascinating,” and a talented producer of “pies, puddings, root beer, and pea soup.”
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Less than a month into her stay at the Maine resort, however, Abigail realized the environment was not suitable for children. On a visit to the nearby home of her friend Ann Sargent Gage, a doctor’s widow who had Boston roots, Abigail discussed the nature of her concerns.
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She had
observed spa employees engaged in inappropriate behavior, perhaps of a sexual nature, with patrons in the baths. She did not trust one doctor in particular. A different sort of doctor, she told her friend, “would give dignity and character to the Establishment, the lack of which hitherto has I find been a hindrance to many who wished to enjoy ‘the Treatment.
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’ ”