Marmee & Louisa (44 page)

In October, renewed by her quiet summer, Louisa traveled to Syracuse to participate in a women’s congress held by the Association for the Advancement of Women. She stayed with Charlotte and Alfred, who now had seven children, from seventeen-year-old Fred to ten-month-old Abby May, including a thirteen-year-old daughter called Jo, who had been named “Josephine May” after her grandfather, Colonel May. At the women’s congress in the Syracuse opera house, “hordes of beaming girls all armed with Albums and cards” to sign begged Louisa to sit on the stage so everyone could see her.
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She signed autographs and answered questions but would not be “exhibited.” With her cousin Charlotte she “finally had to run for my life.”
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Louisa spent part of that winter in New York City. More than ten thousand copies of her new novel,
Eight Cousin
s, were already in print.
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Her health, according to her father, was “permanently restored.”
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Rose Campbell, the heroine of
Eight Cousins
and its sequel,
Rose in Bloom
, which came out the next year, is a young woman blessed, it seems, with no parents and surrounded by male cousins who treat her as their equal. At the conclusion of
Rose in Bloom
Rose is happily married to her first cousin Mac, a more satisfying resolution to familial courtship than Abigail May and Samuel Frothingham experienced. Louisa herself attended a “co[u]sin dinner” one evening that winter at a relative’s “fine” Upper East Side mansion.
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Louisa May Greele, “Mrs. John Sewall, E[dward B.] May, Alf[red], Lotty [Charlotte] & myself with the Goddards [her great-uncle Samuel May’s relatives], made up the set,” she wrote to her father. The meal entailed “seven or eight courses, canvas back ducks & green peas, venison & French messes, five kinds of wine & coffee & cigars.” Most amusing to Louisa, relatives “who used to . . . [call her] an ‘odd, grahamish, transcendental, half educated tom boy’” now greeted her as “Dear Louisa, old trump” and “My cousin the genius.” She decided she felt closer to her Sewall relatives—the family of Abigail’s mother—than to her May ancestors, as she explained in a letter to her “Blessed Marmee . . .
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Sewalls wear well & I like the breed better than the May.”
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Back in Boston in the spring of 1876, Louisa and her friend Maria Porter were seated in pews at the Old South Church as the abolitionist Wendell Phillips gave a stirring lecture on the need to save “this sacred landmark” from destruction. Old South, where many of Louisa’s ancestors had worshipped and sung, was also the site of Judge Samuel Sewall’s
public repentance in 1697 for his actions during the Salem witch hunt. Louisa, “her face aglow with emotion,” whispered to her friend, “I am proud of my foremothers and forefathers, and especially of my Sewall blood.
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Even if the good old judge did condemn the witches to be hanged, I am glad that he felt remorse, and had the manliness to confess it. He was made of the right stuff.”

Two years earlier Louisa had taken her mother to visit another historic site in the city, King’s Chapel. “A tablet to Grandfather May is put in Stone Chapel,” Louisa noted in March 1874, “and one Sunday A.
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M. we take Mother to see it. A pathetic sight to see Father walk up the broad aisle with the feeble old wife on his arm as they went to be married nearly fifty years ago. Mother sat alone in the old pew a little while and sung softly the old hymns. . . . Several old ladies came in and knew Mother. She broke down thinking of the time when she and her mother and sisters and father and brothers all went to church together, and we took her home saying, ‘This isn’t my Boston; all my friends are gone; I never want to see it any more.’”

“And she never did,” Louisa remarked later.

May Alcott, in her mid-thirties a serious painter working in oils and watercolors, hankered to return to Europe. In the summer of 1876 Louisa offered to pay May’s way. Abigail encouraged her youngest daughter to go. During their goodbyes Louisa observed that May was “sober & sad, not gay as before.
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[She] Seemed to feel it might be a longer voyage than we knew. The last view I had of her was standing alone in the long blue cloak waving her hand to us, smiling with wet eyes till out of sight.” On Saturday, September 9, Bronson accompanied May to the steamer in Boston and watched from the dock as she waved a handkerchief from the deck of the Cunard ship
China
until she disappeared.
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With May abroad, Louisa’s next task was finding a home for Anna and her sons, ages fourteen and twelve. The Thoreau house became available that winter after the death of the last member of that family, Henry David’s sister Sophia. Henry David had died, in his forties, of tuberculosis, and Louisa and Anna had accompanied their father to his Concord funeral in 1862. The Thoreau house was a handsome, spacious colonial with a garden plot on Main Street, less than a mile from Orchard House. With Louisa’s financial assistance, Anna purchased it on May 28, 1877, for $4,500. “She has
her
wish, and is happy,” Louisa wrote in her journal.
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“When shall I have mine? Ought to be contented with knowing I help both sisters by my brains. But I’m selfish, and want to go away and rest in Europe. Never shall.”

Throughout the summer Louisa rarely left her mother’s side. “I could not let any one else care for the dear invalid while I could lift a hand,” she said, “for I had always been her nurse and knew her little ways.” Sometimes Abigail still felt well enough to go out for early morning carriage rides with her. Louisa would coax Rosa to a spot where she knew Marmee liked to pick flowers. She would gather bouquets for her mother, who always replied with a smile. The little trips cheered Abigail, Louisa observed: “It keeps her young, and rests her weary nerves.”

Jaunts with Marmee had a similar effect on Louisa, who thought she might finally have outlived her illness.
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Throughout June she kept house, attended to Marmee, and helped Anna to pack for the move to her new home.

In July, however, Louisa’s symptoms returned. Too tired to write or do chores, she lay in her bedroom across the hall from her mother’s, “happily at rest, wondering what was to come next.” In August she forced herself to begin another juvenile novel,
Under the Lilacs
.
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Bronson felt she was well enough to serve as “our housekeeper during the summer mostly.”
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Abigail, her heart failing, slept most of the time. She was often so weak that she had to be carried in an armchair up the stairs. “This is the beginning of my ascension,” she would say with a smile.
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Louisa, foreseeing “a busy or a sick winter,” hurried
Under the Lilacs
. It was half done by early September, when Bronson—“the Concord sage . . . [and] Gifted Sire of Louisa May Alcott, the authoress of ‘Little Women,’” who felt he had finally achieved “social standing” in “these later years”—commenced a solo conversational tour of New England.

Abigail had trouble breathing on September 7, while her husband was in Connecticut and Louisa was at her bedside. The doctor came and told Louisa that her mother’s end was near.
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After the doctor departed, Abigail reached out to Louisa. “Stay by, Louie,” she said, “and help me if I suffer too much.”
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How often Louisa had heard this . . . As a girl, when Marmee wept over having no money, Louisa determined to protect her. At ten, listening to her parents’ discussions of a separation, she cried and vowed
to stay by her mother. During her teens and twenties Louisa sewed, cleaned, taught, wrote, whatever would bring in cash. Her life and work reflected these very words: Stay by, Louie; help me if I suffer too much.

Louisa and Anna called their father home, knowing that Marmee would want him there. In her mother’s bedroom Louisa continued working on her novel. Even as she “forgot” herself to wait on Abigail, Louisa’s brain felt “very lively” and her pen “flew,” effects of stress she had seen before. “It always takes an exigency to spur me up and wring out a book,” she observed. “[I] never have time to go slowly and do my best.” She completed
Under the Lilacs
and wrote “My Girls,” an essay about independent women that paid tribute to Abigail. It describes women successfully pursuing fields that had been closed to their sex. One, a doctor, “quietly and persistently carried out the plan of her life, undaunted by prejudice, hard work, or the solitary lot she chose.”
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Another is a freed slave who teaches school. Yet another, a lawyer, “cleared the way for those who come after her, and proved that women have not only the right but the ability to sit upon the bench as well as stand at the bar of justice.” And one is a “sister of charity,” the very term that Abigail had used to describe herself.

On Abigail’s seventy-seventh birthday, a sunny October 8, her two “girls,” now forty-six and forty-four years old, built a pyramid of flowers on her bedside table. Her visitors that day included her niece Lizzie Wells and her adopted sister Louisa Greenwood Bond. Louisa read aloud a letter from May, with news that one of her paintings had been chosen for display in the Paris Salon.
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Once again she and Anna offered to send for May to come home. Abigail said no. Dr. Conrad Wesselhoeft, a homeopathic physician Louisa had consulted for years, was able to provide Abigail some “relief.”

Louisa was so exhausted—“in danger of my life for a week” that month—she feared she might not be able to keep her promise to close her mother’s eyes. She hired a nurse and forced herself to rest. By early November she was back at her mother’s bedside around the clock. Abigail gave her the leather-bound King James Bible, published in England in 1803, that had belonged to her mother. Louisa undid the clasps to find inside its cover her grandmother’s handwriting, “Dorothy May, 26th Sept. 1806,” and her mother’s “Abba May, Nov. 1825,” a few days after Dorothy’s death. Louisa added, “To LMAlcott Nov. 1877 . . . from her
dearest Mother.” Someone, either Abigail or her mother, had turned down a page in the thirtieth chapter of the Book of Isaiah that contained these comforting words: “For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem: thou shalt weep no more.
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He will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of thy cry; when he shall hear it, he will answer thee. And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers.”

On November 14, Louisa and Anna moved their dying mother to Anna’s house, where it seemed easier to care for her.
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Louisa was to install a central furnace there, too. They carried Marmee upstairs to a sunny chamber with windows looking south, full of “flowers and the old fashioned furniture she loved,” according to Louisa. Abigail said to her daughters, “The power that brought me here will take the kindest care of me wherever I may be hereafter.”
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Closing the cover of a book by Samuel Johnson, “her favorite author,” according to Louisa, Abigail added, “I shall read no more, but I thank my good father for the blessing this love of literature has been to me for 70 years.” On Saturday, November 24, when her nieces Louisa May Greele and Lizzie Wells arrived, Abigail rejoiced to see the daughters of her late sisters Louisa and Eliza.
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Louisa awoke at her mother’s bedside on Sunday morning to a cold rain. She started a fire to warm the room and glanced outside. The leaves were mostly gone, the road muddy. Anna, Lizzie Wells, and Bronson joined her. All day, according to Bronson, Abigail “lay in a semi-conscious state, whispering to herself the unspeakable raptures she enjoyed as a foretaste of the bliss she was soon to partake in its fullness.” Louisa thought Abigail seemed “very happy, thinking herself a girl again, with parents and sisters round her” at home on Federal Court, when she was the petted baby of the family. Early that evening Abigail looked up at her forty-four-year-old daughter and saw her own mother, Dorothy Sewall May, dead more than half a century. “Marmee,” she said to Louisa.

Louisa reached down, embraced Abigail, and held her until seven thirty, when she “slipped peacefully away.” As she had promised, Louisa stayed by and closed her mother’s eyes.
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“She died in the arms of the child who owed her most, who loved her best, [and] who counted as her greatest success the power of making these last years a season of happy rest to the truest & tenderest of mothers,” Louisa told a friend.
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Thirty-five years before, at age ten, she had written the poem, “TO MOTHER, I hope that soon, dear mother, you and I may be in the quiet room my fancy has so often made for thee—the pleasant, sunny chamber, the cushioned easy-chair, the book laid for your reading, the vase of flowers fair, the desk beside the window where the sun shines warm and bright: and there in peace and quiet the promised book you write; while I sit close beside you, content at last to see that you can rest, dear mother, and I can cherish thee.” Now she thought, “The dream came true, and for the last ten years of her life Marmee sat in peace, with every wish granted, even to the ‘grouping together,’ for she died in my arms.”
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In her grief Louisa composed another poem for her mother, this one
in memoriam:

TRANSFIGURATION

Mysterious death! who in a single hour

Life’s gold can so refine
,

And by thy art divine

Change mortal weakness to immortal power!

Bending beneath the weight of eighty years
,

Spent with the noble strife

Of a victorious life
,

We watched her fading heavenward, through our tears
.