Eden's Outcasts (40 page)

Meanwhile, the days dragged on. During the first winter of the war, still too pinched to refuse work, she took one last stab at teaching, this time at a kindergarten in the Warren Street Chapel in Boston. James T. Fields, publisher of
The Atlantic Monthly
, graciously lent Louisa forty dollars to outfit her classroom and convinced her to board with his family. Bronson wished her well, but he was privately skeptical. So long as she cared most about her books and studies, he did not see how she could succeed in teaching, “an art that demands the freedom of every gift for attaining its ends.”
²²
As he feared, the job proved both unpleasant and unprofitable, and Louisa was unable to pay back the cost of her board, let alone Fields's loan. To trim expenses, she tried moving back home and commuting from Concord. However, the daily round trip of forty miles quickly wore on her, and she was grateful when May agreed to fill in for the last month of the school term. Abba complained that the venture had been a swindle of Louisa's time and money, and Louisa dubbed it a “wasted winter.”
²³

Despite this failure, and despite the fact that he had published “Love and Self-Love,” Mr. Fields affronted Louisa's pride with a statement she never forgot. “Stick to your teaching,” he bluntly advised her. “You can't write.” He could hardly have hit on a surer way to stoke her determination. She replied hotly, “I won't teach, I can write, and I'll prove it.”
²⁴
She also quietly resolved to pay back his loan one day, if she had to sell her hair to do it. The one bright spot in the winter of 1861–62 was the circle of acquaintances Louisa made while residing with the Fields family. As a literary salon, James Fields's home rivaled the parlors of Concord, and his guests during Louisa's tenancy included Longfellow, Fanny Kemble, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These were not threadbare, self-denying intellectuals like her father or Thoreau, but popular writers of high quality who had found ways to spin their art into gold. If Fields's suggestion that she stick to teaching had not confirmed her will to succeed as a writer, the experience of “living in style in a very smart house with very clever people” would probably have served the same end.
²⁵

Bronson found little to do to support the war effort directly. Although he never questioned the need for military force, violence was too foreign to his nature for him to find a place in explosive events of the moment. He found himself an aging pacifist whose theories of life suddenly seemed irrelevant. One morning, he overheard some neighborhood boys marching down Lexington Road like soldiers and declaring that they wished they had a chance to shoot the enemy. He asked them to wait a few minutes and returned with an armload of pumpkins. He invited the boys to gratify their warlike zeal by attacking the pumpkins. When they had worn themselves out with this play, he lectured them on the wickedness of their blood-thirsty passions.
²⁶
When a neighborhood woman stitched together an American flag spangled not with stars but with hearts, Alcott assisted at its raising, delivering a little speech on the occasion.
²⁷
Having no part to play in the hostilities, Bronson turned to the place where he continued to exert complete control: his garden. During the first winter of the war, he wrote voluminously in his journal on the subject of apple trees and, citing Confucius, argued that one who diligently sows the ground wins more merit than by reciting a thousand prayers.
²⁸
It was the work of a man eager to consider himself useful.

Bronson closely followed the reports of battles, perusing the newspapers “with an avidity unknown before.”
²⁹
He agonized with each Union defeat and rejoiced with the victories that, at first, seemed all too few. Through the winter of 1861–62, he was a frequent visitor to Thoreau's house. Thoreau had gotten over his initial indifference to the war, and the two friends fulminated at what Thoreau called “the temporizing policy of our rulers.” Frustrated by the failure to win a quick victory, Thoreau blamed the people “for their indifference to the true issues of national honor and justice.”
³⁰
After these discussions, however, Bronson's most deeply felt concern was not for the fate of the country but for the health of his comrade. Thoreau was dying.

His health troubles had begun in December 1860, when he contracted a bad cold that he may well have caught from Bronson. The cold had led to bronchitis. During the first half of 1861, in an attempt to regain his health, he had traveled west to Minnesota but had returned with symptoms of tuberculosis and an acceptance of the likelihood that he would die young. In recent months, the pace of the disease had quickened. Thoreau had last been able to visit Walden Pond in September. He had stopped writing in his journal in November. Now, in the new year, hope had faded entirely. Bronson spent the evening of New Year's Day 1862 with Thoreau and was “sad to find him failing and feeble.”
³¹
Through the rest of the winter and into the spring, Bronson reported his friend's condition in his journal. The news was never good. On May 4, Alcott and the poet Ellery Channing, who had traveled with Thoreau on his excursions to Cape Cod and the Maine woods, paid one last visit to the bed from which their friend could no longer stir. Two afternoons later, Channing came to Orchard House with the word that the struggle was over. Soon after, Emerson also came to the Alcott home to commiserate. Bronson went as soon as he could to see Thoreau's mother, who told him about her son's last moments. Thoreau's sister Sophia then took Alcott to his friend's chamber, where they gazed on the face of the dead man. But for its pallor, the face still looked alive.
³²

Emerson scandalized the portion of the town that regarded Henry as an infidel by arranging a church funeral for him. Thoreau had never been a churchgoer, and he himself would very likely have disapproved of Emerson's decision. Nevertheless, Emerson said his sorrow was so great that he wanted all the world to mourn with him. The day of the ceremony, May 9, was calm and clear, and as the mourners entered the churchyard, they were welcomed by the songs of birds and the sight of early violets blooming in the grass. Bronson, Louisa, and Anna all attended, and Bronson read aloud from Thoreau's works. Louisa was proud that her father was chosen to give the readings, and she found the church farewell fitting. She told her longtime friend Sophia Foord, “If ever a man was a real Christian it was Henry, & I think his own wise & pious thoughts read by one who loved him & whose own life was a beautiful example of religious faith, convinced many.”
³³

Neither Bronson nor Louisa found it comfortable or proper to express their loss with extravagant displays. Although his journal mentions Channing's sadness, Bronson did not record his own reaction to Thoreau's death. After the funeral, Louisa kept busy with her stories—a handy reason, perhaps, for avoiding conversation. She asserted that she could never mourn for men like Thoreau “because they never seem lost to me but nearer & dearer for the solemn change.”
³⁴
She predicted that his life would blossom and bear fruit long after it was gone. Nevertheless, the void that Thoreau left behind was palpable, and it gave Louisa one less reason for remaining in Concord. Through the summer months, she turned out more of her vivid dramatic tales, which she considered silly but which found an eager reception from magazines like
The Monitor
and
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
. For the latter, she submitted a tale called “Pauline's Passion and Punishment” in hopes of winning a one-hundred-dollar prize.

As the war entered its second summer, whatever anguish Bronson initially felt about its violence was giving way to his irresistible need to idealize. It was a tendency that people who had seen the war firsthand were likely to find absurd. Fresh from her brilliant literary debut,
Life in the Iron-Mills
, Rebecca Harding Davis came to Concord to meet Hawthorne. At the Wayside she attended a dinner party with Alcott and Emerson that dimmed her view of transcendentalism in general and Alcott in particular. Before dinner, Alcott stood in front of the fireplace in Hawthorne's small parlor, proclaiming the war “an armed angel…awakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.” Waving his hands like the conductor of a one-man orchestra, he chanted his praise of the rifle and the sword, raised in a righteous cause. Davis, who came from Wheeling, Virginia, and was no great enemy of slavery, quietly took offense at Alcott's words and their “strained, high note of exaltation.” She later wrote:

During the Civil War, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was the Alcotts' remote and skittish next-door neighbor. Bronson found “something of strangeness even in his cherished intimacies.”

(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

Hawthorne, according to Davis, wore a look of mockery as he sat backward astride a chair, listening to Alcott's monologue. At last, he said gravely, “We cannot see this thing at so long a range,” and he quietly conducted the party into the dining room.

Earlier in the day, Hawthorne had warned Davis about Alcott's obsession with vegetarianism. “You may begin at Plato or the day's news,” Hawthorne told his guest, “and he will come around to pears. He is now convinced…that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit.” By the end of the meal, Alcott did indeed announce the spiritual influence of pears, and Hawthorne laughed aloud to see his prediction come true.”
³⁵
Yet although Davis thought him ridiculous, Alcott remained more sensitive to the sufferings of war than she knew. When he read the accounts of Antietam in September, the old feelings of helplessness and pity came back. He wrote, “What can one do but read the news and weep at our victories even?”
³⁶

For Louisa, a supreme test of confidence was drawing near. It was hastened, perhaps, by the news that Anna and John were expecting their first child, another sign that time was passing. “At twenty-five,” Louisa would later write in
Little Women
, “girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will; at thirty, they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact.”
³⁷
Louisa was to turn thirty on November 29, 1862. She had no interest in quietly accepting the fact. The notation in her journal for that month, “Thirty years old. Decide to go to Washington as a nurse if I could find a place,” illustrates that the birthday and her redoubled desire to break out of old patterns were no coincidence. Uninterested in enlisting dewy-eyed young women heeding the call of romance instead of duty, Dorothea Dix, the head of the Union's nursing corps, had publicly announced that she would consider no applicants under thirty. Louisa had heard good reports of the facilities at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington. She hoped to rely on Hannah Stevenson, who had found Louisa a job in the aftermath of the latter's brush with suicide and who wielded some influence with the necessary authorities. Louisa sent in her name and, as she awaited a reply, made ready for a great change.

Louisa received her orders on the morning of December 11. She had not been assigned to the Armory Square but to a less desirable institution in Georgetown known as the Union Hotel Hospital, a place Louisa learned to refer to in jest as “The Hurly-Burly House.” Louisa was to report for duty as soon as possible, and the rest of that Thursday was spent in a whirl of activity. Abba, Anna, and May, back from Syracuse, all helped to stuff Louisa's traveling bag with all there was of home that such a bag could carry. Sophia Hawthorne looked in to see whether she could help. There were too many hands for the necessary tasks. Someone remembered to make tea but, in the confusion, put in salt instead of sugar.
³⁸
Bronson was away that day making school visits; for all the documents show, he and Louisa may not even have had a chance to say good-bye. Proud as he was of his daughter's decision, he also knew that she was going to a dangerous post; he told someone that he was sending his only son to war.
³⁹
Louisa was equally aware that she might never see the family again. She maintained a brave face until the very last, but when it was time to go, she began to cry. Everyone broke down. Already knowing the answer, she asked her mother as she held her close, “Shall I stay?” “No, go! and the Lord be with you,” was the reply.
⁴⁰
As Louisa turned to catch a last glimpse of Orchard House, she saw her mother waving a handkerchief. May, along with Julian Hawthorne, escorted Louisa to the Concord train station.
⁴¹
Louisa rode to Boston, where she spent one last civilian night with her cousin Lizzie Wells.