Marmee & Louisa (46 page)

In the fall of 1878, not quite a year after Abigail’s death, Bronson informed Louisa that Robert Niles would publish their memoir of Abigail.
¹²⁶⁰
In November Bronson gave the manuscript to Frank Sanborn “for criticism. . . . Mr. Niles is waiting to put it to press.” Knowing that Louisa wished to travel to France as soon as possible to see May, he hoped “the Memoir will detain her with us till spring.”
¹²⁶¹
The memoir was never published, and only a partial manuscript remains.
¹²⁶²
Louisa reported in her journal that she “tried to write a memoir of Marmee, but it is too soon.”

Louisa also penned a note requesting that all of her own journals be destroyed after her death, to protect her and her family from scrutiny.
¹²⁶³
In 1882, four years later, she claimed in her journal to have “read over & destroyed Mother’s Diaries as she wished me to do. A wonderfully interesting record of her life from her delicate, cherished girlhood through her long, hard, romantic married years, old age & death. Some time I will write a story or a Memoir of it.”
¹²⁶⁴
Having relied so heavily on Abigail’s journals in her fiction, Louisa may have felt she already had. Several years later Louisa “sorted old letters & burned many.
¹²⁶⁵
Not wise to keep for curious eyes to read, & gossip-lovers to print by & by.”

In the fall of 1879 Louisa, who had hoped to be with her sister May when she gave birth, realized she was too weak to travel. “It is my luck,” she wrote, mournfully, having to “[g]ive up my hope and long-cherished plan . . . I know I shall wish I had gone.”
¹²⁶⁶
Her father set off on an unusually short western tour to his Connecticut hometown and Columbus, Ohio, that enabled him to return in time for his eightieth birthday. Louisa, who turned forty-six on the same day, came from Boston to Concord to celebrate with him, Anna, Fred, and John. They were all together when the news arrived that May, attended by “the best accoucheur in Paris,” had given birth to a healthy girl, Louisa May Nieriker, on November 8.
¹²⁶⁷
“Two years since Marmee went,” Louisa observed.
¹²⁶⁸
“How she would have enjoyed the little grand-daughter & all May’s romance.”

Not long afterward they heard that May had a serious “brain disease.”
¹²⁶⁹
After the birth she had developed a high fever and fallen into a coma-like sleep, seldom opening her eyes. “The weight on my heart is not all imagination,” Louisa said.
¹²⁷⁰
“She was too happy to have it last, & I fear the end is coming. Hope it is my nerves, but this peculiar feeling has never misled me before.” On December 31 a telegram from Paris arrived at the Emerson house in Concord.
¹²⁷¹
Emerson, infirm at seventy-six, read it,
put on his overcoat, and hastened to Orchard House, where Louisa was reading in the parlor. No one else was home. Answering his knock, she knew from his face that something terrible had happened. “My child, I
wish
I could prepare you, but alas,” Emerson said before handing her the telegram. “May is dead.”

“I am prepared,” she said, “and thank you.”

May’s death certificate cited no cause. American newspapers reported what Louisa believed and informed them—that May died of meningitis. It is more likely that May developed a generalized infection due to unsanitary conditions during childbirth, a condition called puerperal, or childbed, fever.
¹²⁷²

Early in the new year Louisa learned that May “wished me to have her baby & her pictures,” meaning her paintings.
¹²⁷³
“A very precious legacy. All she had to leave . . . I see now why I lived. To care for May’s child & not leave Annie all alone.” Like her mother six decades earlier, Louisa was expected to raise the child of her dead sister. On September 19, 1880, ten-month-old Lulu, as the Alcotts called her, finally arrived in Boston. This was another beginning for Louisa. She now had a child of flesh and blood, rather than of words. Lulu “always comes to me,” she noted, “& seems to have decided that I am really ‘Marmar.’ My heart is full of pride & joy.”

Unlike Abigail, who had cared for nieces and nephews in her twenties, Louisa was a sickly middle-aged woman. Her household consisted of two mothers, one baby, two teenage boys, an old man, and as many nurses and nannies as she and Anna desired. Each fall, Louisa and Anna closed the house in Concord and moved their dependents to Boston for the winter. Their burdens were shared. “Louisa’s health still continues very uncertain, and the care of our large family falls upon me,” Anna wrote in the spring of 1881, when they still occupied the former Thoreau house.
¹²⁷⁴
“Although we have a faithful nurse” for Lulu, “either L[ouisa] or I must be always on the watch.
¹²⁷⁵
I have a large house, endless company, a family of nine including three servants that are more care than all the rest put together. I am so busy.”

In addition to everything else, Anna and Louisa shared a love of children. Not long after Anna’s husband died, Louisa had written her a poem:

To Nan

I remember, I remember

A doll which once you had

A plaster head with numbered bumps

In long clothes sweetly clad
.

And how you loved the funny thing

And bore it in your arms
,

A tender mother even then

And proud of baby’s charms
.

Now living idols fill your heart

And be in your embrace;

Two yellow heads, bright-eyed & fair

Smile up in mother’s face. . . 
.

Three weeks after Lulu’s arrival from Europe, Bronson, hale at age eighty-one, departed again for the West. Anna described him as “perfectly well, busy & bright as a boy, enjoying a serene & beautiful old age,” looking “far more youthful than his daughters who are thirty years younger.”
¹²⁷⁶
This winter tour lasted seven months, entailed conversations in thirty towns, and earned $1,200, more than ever before, according to Odell Shepard, “now that no one needed” it.
¹²⁷⁷

In the fall of 1882, six months after the death in April of his beloved friend Emerson, Bronson had a stroke, which incapacitated him. Lulu was now almost three. Each summer Louisa took her and her nurse to a house in Nonquitt, on the southern Massachusetts coast, to enjoy the ocean. Louisa was “entirely absorbed in her baby whom she loves passionately & on whom she lavishes all the strength & affection of her generous nature,” Anna remarked.
¹²⁷⁸
“It is beautiful to see them together.”

Despite her love for her proxy child, Louisa never got over feeling that with Abigail’s passing there was no longer any reason to live. She often wished Marmee were present. “I never go by [Orchard House] without looking up at Marmee’s window where the dear face used to be,” she said.
¹²⁷⁹
As often as possible she visited her mother’s grave, where an empty bird’s nest she found one day seemed “a pretty symbol of the refuge that tender bosom always was for all feeble & sweet things.”
¹²⁸⁰
On
March 29, 1880, the first time women were ever permitted to attend the Concord town meeting, Louisa felt Abigail’s presence as she became “the first woman to register my name as a voter” in Concord.
¹²⁸¹
She and nineteen other women voted for members of the local School Committee. “Next year,” she said, hopefully, “our ranks will be fuller.”
¹²⁸²
She aimed “to stir up the women about suffrage,” but they seemed “so timid & slow.”
¹²⁸³
That fall she was “ashamed . . . that out of a hundred women who pay taxes on property in Concord, only seven have as yet registered [to vote]. . . . A very poor record for a town which ought to lead if it really possesses all the intelligence claimed for it.” Her father said he felt “much gratified in the fact that my daughters are loyal to their sex and to their sainted mother, who, had she survived, would have been the first to have taken them to the polls.”
¹²⁸⁴

Around this time Louisa wrote a recollection of the gloomy November of 1848, when she and her mother and sisters “decided to move to Boston to try our fate again.”
¹²⁸⁵
With “the intense desire of an ambitious girl to work for those she loved,” she had vowed to “do something by-and-by . . . anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die.” She added, “So the omen proved a true one, and the wheel of fortune turned slowly, till the girl of fifteen found herself a woman of fifty, with her prophetic dream beautifully realized, her duty done, her reward far greater than she deserved.” Louisa was rich and famous for sure, but happiness proved more difficult to achieve.

One of her late pleasures was mentoring admirers, mostly by mail. She encouraged one fledgling writer in a style reminiscent of her mother’s: “There is enough in the facts to make a thrilling tale told briefly & dramatically.
¹²⁸⁶
 . . . Imagine you are telling it to children & the right words will come.” To a Montana woman who wished to publish an account of Sioux Indians, Louisa wrote, “What is success given me after years of hard work if I cannot feel tenderly for others in need, & gladly help all I can. There is no more beautiful tribute to my books than the appeals that come to me from strangers who call me ‘friend.’ I wish you were nearer me. Write & tell me about the son. How old—does he like books, &c. I am 52, & an invalid but still able to do something thank God.” Sounding like Abigail, Louisa added, “Hold fast, dear woman, to your faith, else all is lost. God does not forget us, & in time we see
why
the trials come. May He bless your loving effort & let me aid in its success.”

To fans seeking tips, she quoted Michelangelo, “Genius is infinite patience.”
¹²⁸⁷
Many of her thoughts are near aphorisms, a gift her mother shared. “Everything in this busy world is so soon forgotten if let alone,” she wrote to a colleague.
¹²⁸⁸
“Never use a
long
word, when a short one will do as well,” she advised aspiring writers; “express as briefly as you can your meaning.
¹²⁸⁹
 . . . The strongest, simplest words are best.” To a curious colleague in 1887 she described her work habits: “My methods of work are very simple.
¹²⁹⁰
My head is my study. . . . Any paper, any pen, any place that is quiet suit me, & I used to write from morning till night without fatigue when ‘the steam was up.’ Now, however, I am paying the penalty of twenty years of over work, & can write but two hours a day, doing about twenty pages. . . . While the story is under way I live in it, see the people, more plainly than real ones, round me, hear them talk, & am much interested, surprised or provoked at their actions.” In her journal she was terser: “Very few stories written in Concord; no inspiration in that dull place.
¹²⁹¹
[I] go to Boston, hire a quiet room and shut myself up in it.”

She carried on her mother’s work for female suffrage. She appeared one day at the Boston office of
Woman’s Journal
with a hundred-dollar donation. “I made this before breakfast by my writing,” she told Lucy Stone, “and I know of no better place to invest it than in this cause.”
¹²⁹²
She wrote Thomas Niles, “I can remember when Anti slavery was in just the same state that Suffrage is now, and take more pride in the very small help we Alcotts could give than in all the books I ever wrote or ever shall write.”
¹²⁹³
She helped start a Temperance Society in Concord in 1882 and served as its secretary. Her letters often closed with the words, “Most heartily yours for woman suffrage and all other reforms,” “Three cheers for the girls of 1876!” or “Yours for reform of all kinds.”
¹²⁹⁴
Her uncle Sam had frequently used the valediction, “Yours for Improvement in Everything.”
¹²⁹⁵

In 1885, in response to widespread rumors that she and Julia Ward Howe had abandoned female suffrage, Louisa wrote to
Woman’s Journal
, “It is impossible for me ever to ‘go back’ on woman suffrage.”
¹²⁹⁶
It is “a great cross to me that ill health and home duties prevent my devoting heart, pen, and time to this most vital question of the age. After a fifty years’ acquaintance with the noble men and women of the anti-slavery cause, and the glorious end to their faithful work, I should be a traitor to all I most love, honor, and desire to imitate if I did not covet a place
among those who are giving their lives to the emancipation of the white slaves of America.”

Some day, she hoped, men and women could choose for themselves how to behave in public and in private. To her, women and men were fundamentally equal. She believed, with her mother and uncle, that gender is as arbitrary as race. She valued traits associated with both genders, and objected to the claim that women who support equal rights lose their femininity. “The assertion that suffragists do not care for children, and prefer notoriety to the joys of maternity is so fully contradicted by the lives of the women who are trying to make the world a safer and a better place for both sons and daughters, that no defense is needed.
¹²⁹⁷
Having spent my own life, from fifteen to fifty, loving and laboring for children, as teacher, nurse, story-teller and guardian, I know whereof I speak, and value their respect and confidence so highly that for their sakes, if for no other reason, I desire them to know that their old friend never deserts her flag.”

In her early fifties, Louisa sold her father’s beloved Orchard House and returned with her family to Beacon Hill, the neighborhood her mother loved. The hill had begun its transformation to elegance in the year of Abigail’s birth, when the real estate speculator Harrison Gray Otis began building “grand houses with beautiful gardens.” By the 1830s, when the Alcotts lived in the slums above the wharves, “more than a third of Boston’s richest families” resided on Beacon Hill.
¹²⁹⁸
In 1884 Louisa leased a brick townhouse at 31 Chestnut Street, a street she had often visited in the hard years while boarding with her cousins Thomas and Mary Sewall at No. 98.