The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (27 page)

To Louisa it sounded as if he were saying: Soon you will come to accept that your silly fancies are out of reach. Her confidence felt shaken, but as the carriage pulled away, she straightened up and gave her head a little shake. She’d had enough with the sadness and doubt. Enough with questioning her choices, with wondering what might have been—if it had been her purple hem trailing out the open door of Joseph’s carriage instead of Nora’s. Her future was in Boston. Her life was beginning.

B
oston was just as Louisa remembered it: teeming with men’s shouts and the chaos of horses in the dirt streets. And as she walked down Chauncey Place, southeast of the Common, a hearty autumn rain began to fall and turned the dust into a sudsy soup. She looked down to see the hem of her best dress soaked at least a good two inches with mud and laughed out loud at her futile efforts to arrive in the city with a shred of dignity.

She had the address of Mrs. David Reed’s boardinghouse scribbled on a paper in her pocket and, in the swampy weather, was never so glad to locate a doorway in her life. Her trunk was at the station and would be sent for once she secured her room.

Louisa knocked and a stooped woman with an out-of-date bonnet wrenched the door open just wide enough to poke her head through.

“And who might you be?”

Louisa hesitated a moment before answering what should have been a very simple question. Who
might
she be, now that she was away, on her own? She
might
be anyone. The prospect of this so seized her mind that she considered inventing a new identity, a clean slate. But there is no escaping your own skin. “Louisa May Alcott. Are you Mrs. Reed?”

The woman nodded. “Proprietress.”

“Ma’am, I am the niece of Mr. Willis.”

“Which Mr. Willis?” Mrs. Reed asked, narrowing her eyes.

“Mr.
Benjamin
Willis.”

A change came over Mrs. Reed’s face. The nose that had been upturned in distaste, giving her the appearance of a pig, relaxed and she looked human once again. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Mr. Benjamin Willis was a close friend of my late husband’s. I take in anyone he recommends.”

Louisa exhaled with relief. “Thank goodness for that!”

Inside, Mrs. Reed showed Louisa the cramped parlor full of worn furniture. The light through the large front window was good, though, and Louisa’s eye marked a chair in the corner that would be excellent for reading.

“A woman living
alone
in this big city. I shall put you in the attic—you’ll be safest there.”

“I thank you, ma’am.” From one attic to the next, Louisa thought.

“And just what is it you’re here to do, if you don’t mind my asking?” Who would ever confess that in fact they
did
mind? Louisa wondered.

“I’m here to see what I can make of myself. I’m a writer.”

“Gracious me! What a boring thing to do with your time.”

“Yes, well, I’m a boring sort of girl, I guess you could say.” Louisa grinned as she climbed the stairs behind the woman’s massive rump.

“And no husband, I presume?”

Louisa felt a tug behind her ribs. The excitement of the day had managed to drown out her other thoughts. She steeled herself, remembering that all was as it should be, and the reason she was here now, with the chance to show what she could do, was that she had refused the conventional path Joseph had wanted them to take together.

“No, ma’am. Not looking for one either.”

The old woman scoffed. “Gracious me,” she said again under her breath. Louisa reflected that perhaps she should not have mentioned her uncle’s name, in which case she would have been cast out and free to go to the next boardinghouse down the lane, where she could avoid all these questions.

The attic room was on the fourth story, cramped and stuffy. But there was a fireplace, a window that looked out on the First Church steeple, a bed and sturdy chair. Mrs. Reed told her the charge would be three dollars a week, including board and firewood. She’d have to sew an awful lot of pillowcases to make that up if she couldn’t sell her stories, but she knew it was a fair price and accepted. Mrs. Reed stood around, waiting to be asked to sit for tea by the stove, but Louisa was bold enough not to offer. She was exhausted by her travels and longed to part ways with this tiresome woman.

“Well, I’ll let you get settled in, then.”

“The man from the station should be bringing my trunk around soon.”

“I’ll send my niece Caroline up when it arrives. Supper is at five.”

And with that Mrs. Reed turned and descended the steep staircase, her fingers like talons on the handrail.

 

 

The following Wednesday
was sunny and warm, autumn’s last hurrah before the blanket of winter descended. Louisa packed two new stories in a side bag and prepared to walk to the office of the publisher J. T. Fields, who had published Mr. Hawthorne’s lurid and successful book
The Scarlet Letter
. Louisa nurtured a furtive wish to claim some literary success for her own, and Mr. Fields seemed just the sort of man to help her do it.

At the corner, Louisa stopped short to gawk in the window of Madame Garnier’s boutique. It would be months before Walpole or even Concord would adopt some of the more modern trends, and she knew they’d be adopted in a sort of amateur way, with homemade touches that diminished their effect. Here she saw a painted silk fan with inlaid mother-of-pearl on the handle, a caul for the hair accented with beaded gold thread, and kid gloves in every pastel shade—pink, blue, buttery yellow. The most fashionable women now wore slightly shorter skirts, revealing a bit of ankle, and all manner of decorative hosiery was available. Horizontal stripes in the daytime, and in the evenings, slightly scandalous lace.

Though the vanity of fashion had no place in the Alcott household, Louisa observed that these garments were works of art—the texture of fine silk and lace and brocade, the pinprick-sized stitches made by the seamstress’s deft hand. If she were to admire the blacksmith, who seemed to be Whitman’s hero, for pounding the perfect horseshoe, why could she not admire the seamstress for her creation and admire the creation itself? After all, just as the horse would carry the weight of all his labors on those shoes, so too would the woman carry on her shoulders the weight of her lesser status, the expectations of who she should be.

Musing on Whitman made her think of Joseph and she found herself wondering what he was doing at that very moment. Cutting fabric behind the counter at the shop? Brushing Romeo’s mane? Buying a pretty bonnet for the new Mrs. Singer? Louisa nearly groaned out loud at the last image.
It’s as if I’m determined to make myself miserable,
she thought.
Well, I won’t do it
.

With a deliberate shake of her head, she turned away from the shop window and carried on down the street. On School Street she finally came to the Old Corner Bookshop, above which Fields had his office.

“Good morning,” Louisa said to the shopkeeper, who was just cranking out the awning that protected books in the window from damage by the afternoon sun. “Is Mr. Fields in?”

“I can’t say as I know,” the man said. His head was covered in tight brown curls that extended in all directions. “Sometimes he comes before I get here and lets himself in. But you can come through the store and up the back steps.”

Louisa nodded and smiled, her heart too swollen in her chest with nerves for her to speak. She had written ahead to Mr. Fields to tell him she would be in the city and had some material for him.
Why should I be nervous?
she thought.
I am a published author. Of course he’s going to be interested in my stories
. She threw back her shoulders in her best idea of a businessman’s posture and, looking quite ridiculous, ascended the back staircase like Queen Elizabeth.

Indeed, Mr. Fields had arrived early. The main door to the offices was open. The desks in the main room were empty—his clerks did not arrive until the afternoon. The room led toward the front of the building, where an office was partitioned off by a green curtain. Long counters ran the length of the office, and books were stacked in piles taller than Louisa.

She approached the publisher’s office, but she did not know how to alert him she was there. How does one knock on a curtain? She cleared her throat. “Mr. Fields?”

“Who’s there?” he grunted.

“Louisa May Alcott.”

“Ah, Miss Alcott, daughter of my favorite bumbling philosopher. Please come in.”

Bumbling?
Louisa thought, unsure of whether to take offense. It was true—her father was a bumbler. And that was far from the worst thing that could be said about him. She decided to brush the comment off.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, pushing past the green curtain. “You received my letter, I hope?”

“Yes, yes,” Fields said, nodding in a way that communicated he had no idea what she was talking about.

Louisa took a deep breath. “Well, I’ve brought the story. It is based on an experience I had a couple years ago, when I went out to service for a family in Dedham. I won’t tell you their name—as you will see, their literary likeness is most unfavorable.”

Fields nodded and sat back in his chair with the manuscript she’d pressed into his hand. Louisa stood uncomfortably while he read, as there was not another chair in the small office. She glanced back out into the main room. A row of gas lamps was bracketed along the walls on either side of the space. On a table in the corner, a basket of fruit stood rotting, perhaps a gift from a would-be author, ignored, gone to waste.

She turned back to Fields. His high forehead shone with perspiration in the cramped room. The noise from the street drifted in through the open window behind his desk.

Finally, he looked up and spoke. “You have been a teacher, in the past?”

“Yes, sir, I have. And a governess. But this story concerns only my time in Dedham. There I washed clothes, cooked for the family, beat the rugs. As a servant.”

Fields pressed his full lips into a patient smile. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I would advise you, then, to stick to teaching.”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Stick to teaching. You have no talent for writing.”

Louisa stood in the heat of the room blinking a moment before his words penetrated her mind. She felt the blood rush into her cheeks and the stays of her dress tighten as she struggled to breathe. She couldn’t think of anything to say that would sound even mildly dignified. She also felt she might cry at any moment.

“Well,” she choked the barely audible word and received the manuscript he handed back to her. “Good day.” She made it halfway down the stairs to the street level before the tears began to flow.

Back out on the street the sky looked the color of dull homespun washed too many times. No one else seemed to be bothered by it, though. The streets were teeming with people rushing this way and that. Louisa tried to focus her eyes on individual faces—a mother and her two small daughters, covered from head to toe in silk bows, a bespectacled man with a doctor’s bag, a pack of ruddy-cheeked boys with suspicious grins. She felt a pang of loneliness, as if all the rest of the world were part of a complicated waltz, moving to and fro in time, and she did not know the steps.

It occurred to her that in another two days she would have to pay Mrs. Reed the three dollars she owed for the upcoming week. She had spent some of her savings to pay the fare to Boston and to buy a kettle and a ream of paper. It wouldn’t be enough merely to scrape by on her own—she needed to have something to send home to her parents.

In all her debates with herself over whether she should come to Boston to try to make her way on her own, she worried about leaving the family and feeling alone, but never once had she pondered the possibility that her stories would not sell. It seemed obvious to her that she had been put on the earth to be a writer. Nothing else held any interest for her. Teaching and housework strained her patience—they seemed the sort of occupations only a woman could do and she felt sometimes that she was very little like a woman. Sacrifice without the expectation of anything in return was the most lauded aspiration for a woman in her father’s mind, but Louisa didn’t think much of it as a goal, even if she could scarcely admit that point of view to herself. Why would God give a woman the talents and abilities mostly reserved for men if He did not want her to use them?

But in Louisa’s experience, no matter how much one wished and prayed, God was not going to come down and pay the rent. She reached into the pocket of her dress and felt around for the slip of paper Bronson had given her. She had only two dresses for daytime, and she’d switched back and forth between them since arriving, merely spot cleaning the front and hem to avoid the trouble and expense of laundry. The paper was right where she’d left it.

Louisa told herself to bear up, for it was all in the service of her writing. If she could earn enough money, she could stay in Boston. Back at Mrs. Reed’s she wrote out a message to Mrs. Clarke, offering her services as seamstress, and sent Caroline to deliver it.