Marmee & Louisa (41 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Welcome to My Fortune

S
hall I stay, Mother?” Louisa cried, embracing Abigail, who had come to Beacon Hill to see her “girls” off to Europe. They were standing on the doorstep of the brick house on Pinckney Street where Louisa and May lived. The sisters, ages thirty-seven and twenty-nine, were about to “leave the nest,” as Louisa put it. With Marmee’s help they had spent a day packing their trunks. Now, on the morning of March 31, 1870, relatives gathered to say good-bye.
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Their parents and young cousin Louisa Wells, a granddaughter of Abigail’s sister Eliza May Willis, were there, along with John Pratt, who would accompany his sisters-in-law as far as New York, where they would meet Alice Bartlett, their traveling companion, and begin their ocean voyage. Samuel Joseph, who was staying in Boston with his son John Edward’s family, soon arrived with his niece Lizzie Wells, the mother of Louisa Wells. There were hugs all around.

Louisa couldn’t shake the idea she might never see her mother again. Even if Marmee survived, Louisa—like Margaret Fuller—might not return. She “broke down,” said, “We won’t go,” and held her mother tight.

“No,” said Abigail. “Go!” She struggled to let her pale, gaunt daughter go. “And the Lord be with you.”

Louisa released her mother and walked away, but “till I turned the corner she bravely smiled and waved her wet handkerchief.”
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For Abigail,
who had educated her girls, boosted their confidence, and encouraged them to explore the world, it was still agony to let them go.

Abigail and her brother parted that morning for the last time, it appears, although neither of them could have known it then. “At 11 I took leave of them,” Samuel Joseph noted in his journal, “and walked across the Common to the AUA [American Unitarian Association] Rooms, 42 Chauncey St.
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There I lingered.” Thinking his daughter and son-in-law were renovating his house on James Street Hill in Syracuse, he had spent several months in Boston, but he would soon return home to discover his lovely wood house razed and replaced by a new brick edifice. Several years earlier Charlotte’s husband had mentioned to Garrison that he intended “pulling down the old house, and erecting a handsome edifice,” but Alfred was not so explicit with his father-in-law.
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The new house was “fearfully modern,” according to one of the Wilkinson daughters, “in that it had a bathroom, but only one, off my mother’s dressing room behind double doors for fear of the emanations of silver gas from the pipes which in those days had no traps.” Charlotte tried to make her father comfortable by giving him a study near the front door “so the miscellaneous lot who came to consult with him after his retirement—such as an ex-abolitionist, people interested in libraries (he founded the Syracuse Public Library), a couple who wanted to be married on the Friday the 13th of May by Dr.
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May—need not disturb the family life.” Samuel Joseph donated thousands of documents concerning abolition to Cornell University so “the purposes and the spirit, the methods and the aims of the Abolitionists should be clearly known and understood by future generations.”
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He told his friend Andrew White, Cornell’s founder and president, that he hoped to leave the university his cherished oil portrait of his long-ago ally in school desegregation, Prudence Crandall. He had only one condition: Cornell must open its doors to women. As a result, Cornell began enrolling women that year, a shift that may have inspired Louisa’s decision some years later to transform her fictional boys’ school, Plumfield, into a coeducational university.
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Two days after Louisa and May’s departure from Boston, Abigail learned from John Pratt that her daughters had arrived safely in New York, met Alice Bartlett, and sailed for France. Their ship was
The Lafayette
, named for Aunt Q’s old friend. “Let me gratefully acknowledge
the propitious weather which prevails for my darlings—especially the poor invalid, Louisa,” Abigail wrote in her journal.
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“Calm, bright, warm, Spring odors in the air; cheerfulness on every aspect.”
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“Poor invalid” or not, Louisa was America’s best-selling author, as Niles informed Bronson that spring. No author anywhere had earned so much as Louisa earned that year. Her new juvenile novel,
An Old-Fashioned Girl
, came out on the day she sailed to Europe. Twelve thousand copies were already sold.
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In Syracuse her uncle Sam read the book cover to cover and remarked, “It is destined to a popularity almost as great as that of ‘Little Women.
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’”

In a comfortable hotel in Dinan, a walled medieval town in Brittany, Louisa turned back to her task of describing just how she felt to her mother:

April 27, 1870 . . . I hope to stop aching soon. None of us are homesick yet but I often long for my marmee in the night when I fuss over my poor bones,

Adieu. Love to all. Your Lu.

April 29 . . . My Precious People . . . Stow away the $3000 [royalties for
An Old-Fashioned Girl
] when it comes and live on it as cosily as you can. Don’t scrimp, Marmee; have clothes and good food and be as jolly as possible. Then I shant feel as if I was the only one who was spending money.

May 25 . . . We have . . . had fun about the queer food, as we don’t like brains, liver, &c. &c. A[lice] does, and when we eat some mess, not knowing what it is, and find it is bowels or sheep’s tails or eels, she exults over us.

July 31 . . . I am so tickled to wake every morning after a long sound sleep that I can’t believe it is
me
 . . . I can walk and ride and begin to feel as if a chain of heavy aches had fallen off and left me free. If this goes on without any [physical] break-down for a month or so I shall feel as if my trip was a brilliant success, and be satisfied if I never see Rome.

The trip was going well, far better than the trip with Anna Weld. In Vevey, Switzerland, in August, May wrote to Abigail from their large hotel room overlooking the lake, “As I lie in my bed till late these fine mornings, I imagine I heard mother saying at the foot of the stairs, ‘Come girls, morning glories all out, and a beautiful day, breakfast nearly ready, come do get up for these are the most [lovely] hours of the day.
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’ So I call to Lu, in remembrance of home, but we don’t get up.”

At four one morning in the Swiss Alps, as Louisa and her companions left a village in a horse-drawn carriage and cart, the traveling party seemed to her “something between a funeral and a caravan.”
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It was “exciting, the general gathering of sleepy travelers in the dark square, the tramping of horses, the packing in, the grand stir of getting off; then the slow winding up, up, up out of the valley toward the sun, which came slowly over the great hills, rising as we never saw it rise before. The still, damp pine-forests kept us in shadow a long time after the white mountain-tops began to shine. Little by little we wound through a great gorge, and then the sun came dazzling between these grand hills, showing us a new world.”

As was her habit, Louisa recorded many of her dreams and sent them home to her mother. Feeling healthier than she expected and perhaps guilty about being away from home so many months, Louisa enjoyed a particularly “droll dream” in Vevey.
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In the dream she was home in a Concord that felt strange. On the walk from the train station a familiar house was missing. Turning the corner, she “found the scene so changed that I didn’t know where I was.”

Orchard House was gone. “In its place,” she wrote to her mother, “stood a great grey stone castle with towers and arches and lawns and bridges very fine and antique. Somehow I got into it without meeting any one of you, and wandered about trying to find my family.” She came upon their neighbor Mr. Moore “papering a room” and inquired about the whereabouts of his house. Thinking her a stranger, he replied, “Oh! I sold it to Mr. Alcott for his school, and we live in Acton now.”

“Where did Mr. Alcott get the means to build this great concern?”

“He took the great fortune his daughter left him, the one that died some ten years ago.”

“So I am dead, am I?” she thought, feeling “so queerly.”

“Government helped build this place,” Mr. Moore continued, “and Mr. A. has a fine College here.”

In wonderment, Louisa glanced into a mirror “to see how I looked dead.” She saw “a fat old lady with grey hair and specs, very like E.P.P.,” Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a woman her mother’s age.

Through a “Gothic window” she observed hundreds of boys “in a queer flowing dress roaming about the parks and lawns, and among them was Pa, looking as he looked thirty years ago, with brown hair and a big white neckcloth.” He seemed “so plump and placid and young and happy.” She nodded at him “but he didn’t know me.” Grieved to be “a Rip Van Winkle, I cried, and said I had better go away . . .” In the midst of this “woe” she woke up.

She analyzed the dream for her mother. She had just visited a lovely boys’ academy in Vevey, which inspired the college. At a Swiss salon she had gotten a “top knot,” talked about her gray hairs, and “thought how fat and old I was getting.” She had shown friends a picture of her father, “which they thought saintly,” she said.

“I believe in dreams,” she went on, knowing her mother would understand. “I can’t help thinking that it may be a foreshadowing of something real. I used to dream of being famous, and it has partly become true. So why not Pa’s College blossom, and he yet young and happy with his disciples? I only hope he won’t quite forget me when I come back, fat and grey and old. Perhaps his dream is to come in another [heavenly] world where every thing is fresh and calm,” while “I was still in this work-a-day world, and so felt old and strange in his lovely castle in the air. Well, he is welcome to my fortune, but the daughter who did die ten years ago [Elizabeth], is more likely to be the one who helped him build his School of Concord up aloft.”

Louisa fulfilled a waking dream in early November when she arrived for the first time in Rome. It was in Rome that Margaret Fuller had written war dispatches, worked as a nurse, fallen in love, and given birth to a child. Louisa did not expect so much of the city, no doubt, but part of her may have hoped. She would celebrate her thirty-eighth birthday in Rome, as Margaret Fuller had done not long before she met her Italian lover.

While Louisa and May settled into a six-room apartment with a servant girl on the Piazza Barberini, a crisis occurred at home. John Pratt,
who had felt poorly for a few months, took to his bed with a bad cold. He developed pneumonia and on November 27 he died in Anna’s arms. He was just shy of forty years old. They brought his body from Maplewood for burial in Concord on November 29, Bronson and Louisa’s birthday. “It was a heart-breaking funeral,” Ellen Emerson said, “all the more so for the calmness of poor Annie. . . . Freddy [age seven] sat at his mamma’s feet. Mrs. Alcott didn’t come, and kept Johnny [age five] at home with her.” Bronson was in St. Louis on a winter tour that took him as far as Chicago and did not end until the following March. Anna moved into Orchard House, where her mother could help with the boys and solace her in her loss.
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Louisa learned of John’s death weeks later, at the end of December, when she read about it in a newspaper article in Rome. She immediately wrote to her cousin Lizzie Wells, asking her to “fill my place a little till I come [home].
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 . . . My heart is very anxious about mother & I ache to go to her, but winter, distance, health, & my duty to Alice [Bartlett] hold me till April. I think God will keep my Marmee for me because I couldn’t bear to miss my Good bye & the keeping of my promise to close her dear eyes. Annie says she [Abigail] is not well & so I dread another loss before I have learned to bear the last.”

The sad news from home impelled Louisa to finish another book for children, “that John’s death may not leave A[nna] and the dear little boys in want.
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 . . . John took care that they should have enough while the boys are young, and worked very hard to have a little sum to leave, without a debt anywhere,” unlike her own father. She had “promised [herself] to try and fill John’s place if they were left fatherless,” and now she found that writing and thinking of them provided “comfort for my sorrow.” The novel
Little Men
was for her nephews, Freddy and Johnny, “the little men to whom [the author] owes some of the best and happiest hours of her life.”

This book, which she wrote in a room overlooking a Bernini fountain, was set at Plumfield, a school for boys run by her fictional alter ego Jo and her husband, Friedrich Bhaer. Plumfield is often seen as a nod to Fruitlands but may have had another inspiration. About a year before Louisa began writing
Little Men
, a school for orphaned and troubled youth had opened in Salem, Massachusetts. Called the Plummer Home for Boys, it was funded and named for Caroline Plummer, a wealthy,
intellectual spinster who at her death in 1854 had left large bequests to Harvard for a professorship in Christian morals and to Salem for a Farm School of Reform for Boys. Louisa may have read about the school’s opening or known of Miss Plummer though a relative or friend. Several years later her sister May would be close with a “Miss Plummer,” perhaps a daughter or granddaughter of one of Caroline Plummer’s seven male Plummer first cousins.
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Louisa’s nephew John Sewall Pratt in 1909 would marry Eunice May Plummer. And reformers kept abreast of each other’s activities. Susan B. Anthony, who worked closely with Louisa’s uncle Sam, objected to the Plummer School’s exclusion of girls.
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“Whether in kitchen, nursery or parlor, all [girls] alike are shut away from God’s sunshine,” Anthony wrote to a friend in Boston. “Why did not your Caroline Plummer of Salem, why do not all of our wealthy women leave money for industrial and agricultural schools for girls, instead of ever and always providing for boys alone?”