The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (28 page)

By the next evening the Clarkes had sent a bundle over. The next few days she sat in her garret surrounded by fabric, her thumb full of pinpricks. Daylight found her asleep at her desk, her cheek pressed against the page where she’d managed to record five or six meager sentences. The sewing was piled on a table by the door: one dozen pillowcases, one dozen sheets, six cambric neckties, and two dozen handkerchiefs.

A
ll along as Louisa struggled to earn her room and board and stay awake long enough at the end of the day to continue writing, Joseph wound between and through and around her thoughts like a long green snake. Yet there was nothing to be done about him. Life was moving on and she approached each day the way she would cope with a rotting front tooth and no dentist nearby. One learned to smile with her lips closed.

The weather turned colder as if to impress upon her that time was indeed passing, but she did her best to ignore it. The stories piled up, along with the rejections, and she sewed more pillowcases and men’s shirts than she ever had in her life. She revised
Christmas Elves
. May came to Boston for the day with a friend from school to deliver the finished drawings that would accompany the text. Louisa was surprised by how delighted she was to see her sister, to hear the news of home. She was careful, though, to cut May off as she began prattling about what was going on in Walpole. Louisa was full of curiosity about Joseph and Nora’s wedding—when it would happen, whether it had already taken place—but she was afraid of what knowing would do to her.

She tied up the manuscript and took it to Mr. Briggs, who had published
Flower Fables
the year before. He was happy to see that she continued to work but informed her that it was too late in the year for a book about the holidays because it couldn’t possibly be out in time. Her father had been right after all, much as it pained her to admit it. Mr. Briggs said she could bring the manuscript back in the spring and he would see if he had the space for it then.

Though it nettled her pride after the encounter with Mr. Fields, she began to look for teaching opportunities. She knew she had to stay busy, for if she stopped to think about how differently things were working out than she had hoped, she feared she might collapse.

One Saturday morning while the rain fell in sheets out on the street, Louisa sat in the parlor of the rooming house reading
The Old Curiosity Shop
. It was a rare moment of leisure but also a practical matter: the main fireplace provided much more warmth than the tiny stove in Louisa’s room, and she had spent the morning chilled to the bone. Just as she was losing herself in the image of Nell staring out at the windows of all the other houses on the lane, wondering whether those houses felt as lonely as the one she shared with her grandfather, the front door swung open with a gust, and a tall man wearing a somewhat crushed and weathered hat stepped into the entryway. Mrs. Reed’s niece Caroline stood clutching the door against the wind.

“Telegram for Miss L. M. Alcott,” he called to Mrs. Reed, who stood fumbling with a tea set in the dining room, preparing for the midday meal. Louisa’s chest tightened. Good news usually did not arrive by telegram. She closed her eyes in prayer a moment before she spoke.

“I am Miss Alcott,” Louisa said. The messenger turned to her, the shoulders of his overcoat glistening with rain.

“Yes, miss. Please sign here.”

Her hand trembled as she wrote. He handed her the slender message and she thought about how a simple piece of paper could change a person’s life. She ripped the message out of its envelope. It was from Joseph:
My father dead at six this morning.

The following week
Louisa sat finishing her noon meal at the long knobby table in what Mrs. Reed called the dining room. The space was scarcely more than a hallway, however, and as she ate she was forced to scrape her chair in close to the table to let people pass. Louisa tried to eat quickly. She’d had a story simmering since the early morning, and her mind felt cluttered with potions, swords, lopsided hats, old violins without any strings, as if it were some kind of gypsy cart. When she was working most feverishly, she could go for days without eating. But then she would collapse and not be able to start again until a week had gone by. She had promised her mother she would take care of herself and so she forced herself to sit and eat when she’d rather be scribbling away in the attic.

Another reason to bolt the food as quickly as possible was the lurking Mrs. Reed. She liked to find Louisa alone and pummel her with excruciating stories of fellow boarders’ foibles and the trials she endured as “proprietress.” Just as Louisa was chewing the last unpalatable potato, the lady entered the room with a stack of clean plates for the hutch in the corner and commenced to chat.

“Well, Louisa, there’s nothing dainty about you, is there?” Mrs. Reed pointed at Louisa’s empty plate and asked in what was, as far as Louisa could tell, an attempt at some kind of humor.

“The dainty ones look pretty in a sitting room, ma’am, but when a woman is making her way in the world on her own, she must resolve to take fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.”

Mrs. Reed gaped at her, scandalized. “And where did you learn to talk this way? What a violent mind you have, child.”

“It has always been so. My three sisters have pure hearts and gentle spirits, but all the boiling blood went into me, I’m afraid. I write it into my characters to keep it at bay.”

“And your father—Mr. Alcott? He must not approve of this life you have chosen. Doesn’t he wish you would marry?”

Louisa thought the question over for a moment and realized she didn’t know the answer. Bronson was an unconventional man in many respects, and she knew she would be underestimating him if she categorized his disapproval as something so run-of-the-mill. Over the years, through his many parlor conversations with his friends—Mr. Emerson, Mr. Thoreau, Mr. Channing, Margaret Fuller, and others—he had developed a complex philosophy about human nature Louisa had never been able to untangle. But part of it held that a man must both marvel at the power of
and
learn to control the wildness within him. The wildness itself was not sinful—it connected man to the earth, gave him spirit and the ability to endure. But its presence was a test of his diligence. In Bronson’s eyes, Louisa had never buckled a saddle on that wild mare rearing within her. Worse, she seemed almost proud of this fact and channeled the passion into writing tales of sensational drama rather than study her German, contemplate the mysteries of the divine, or somehow put her gifts to use for the greater good. In short, he thought her unashamedly feral. Whether marriage would remedy that fact was beside the point.

“Mrs. Reed, I think my father is happy to have the meager earnings my stories can bring. It is a difficult time for our family, and we all must work toward the cause of bread and decent bonnets.”

She shot Louisa a skeptical look and closed the door on the hutch. “Nonsense. Every father wants his daughter to marry. When he comes to visit I will have a chat with him. From time to time, eligible bachelors come to stay at this house. I could arrange an introduction.”

Louisa smiled sweetly, but inside she boiled. Was it too much to ask to simply be left alone? It seemed her very existence as a single woman invited speculation and offers of help, as if it were simply impossible that she truly might not
want
to be married.

And yet she felt a wave of doubt when she thought about the price of this freedom. The death of Joseph’s father seemed to reveal the fissures in her resolve to separate herself from him. She thought of him often, felt weighed down by the grief he was suffering. It was so difficult to force herself not to love him. Joseph was
good
; he wanted to do right by his sister and Nora, didn’t shy away from wrestling with the question of the proper course when what was righteous went against what was true. And there was nothing she could do to help him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Reed, but it is of no use. Even if my father was desperate for me to marry, and I don’t believe he is, he couldn’t get me into marriage with a shoehorn. It goes against my nature.”

Mrs. Reed stared at the girl and shook her head. “This is a most unnatural way to live.”

Louisa shrugged, pushing her chair back from the table one last time. “And now I’m off to write some unnatural tales. Good afternoon.”

 

 

Another week of writing stories
she feared no one would ever read came and died away, and Saturday morning arrived. Louisa fastened the buttons on the better of her two dresses and brushed the tangles out of her thick mane of hair. She parted it down the middle and wound the side sections into thick twists stretching from her temples to the nape of her neck. There she coiled the rest of the hair into a heavy chignon and fastened it in place with the mother-of-pearl comb Anna had sent from Syracuse as an early birthday present. The gift was just in time—Louisa never had been able to find the comb with the steel flowers that she had lost sometime over the summer.

Louisa wasn’t the sort of girl to stand before the mirror contemplating her appearance, but this morning she hesitated a moment. She wished the glass could reflect more than just her deep-set eyes and round unremarkable chin and show her some clue of what was in her heart. How long should she wait to see whether anyone would show interest in her work? Perhaps it was time to consider the possibility that she might only be a writer for herself and her family. There were worse fates. She was fortunate in so many ways. She felt healthy and strong, she could work and take care of her family. And she could still write, for leisure, when she had the time. The only difference would be that she would do something else to make money. Governess, teacher. It was silly and selfish to ignore the truth.

She went out at half past eleven to deliver a stack of towels she’d finished the night before to Mrs. Clarke. Walking always had a calming influence on her. The metronomic swing of her legs cleared her mind and forced her to breathe, coaxing her courage out of its hiding place. The sun hung directly above the city. November’s chill weakened its heat, but the glare was an assault on eyes accustomed to the soft light of the reading lamp. She made her way north across the Common to Chestnut Street. Soon she was rapping the iron knocker of the Clarkes’ stately home, built about fifty years before by the Boston architect Charles Bulfinch. It sat among some of Boston’s finest homes.