The Other Alcott

by Elise Hooper

  A team pulling an omnibus headed toward them, and May inhaled sharply. He gave a sharp tug on the reins to steer the sleigh into a clear straightaway.

  She tried to relax as the sleigh careened along the snow. “I can barely wait for my art classes to begin. Alice has been so helpful, giving me all of the information about supplies. What a lovely woman.”

  Joshua frowned and pulled his wool cap down lower on his forehead. “Well, don’t get me wrong, I’ve known Alice for years, but she has some . . . well, Alice is a bit different.”

  May pictured the small, pretty woman at the party. “How is she different?”

  But Joshua kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “And anyway, why tie yourself down to all of those classes? You don’t want to illustrate another one of your sister’s books, do you? The first one brought you so much heartache. I’d hate to see you go through that again. Why keep punishing yourself? Artists appear to be a miserable lot, and that’s not you.”

  Her right mittened hand clenched the rim of the sleigh. Who was he to tell her how she should feel about art? She opened her mouth to speak but realized the storefronts on Boylston were blurring past them. We’re going too fast for a busy area, she thought.

  They veered onto Tremont Street, and an icy patch glistened ahead in the snowy sludge. Before May could say anything, they were fishtailing along the ice on the road. Their horse staggered, its rear legs sliding out from underneath it. Everything held suspended for a moment before a shriek of splintering wood snapped through the air with a sickening crack. The sleigh whipped sideways while remaining upright. May pitched to the right, jammed between the rim of the sleigh and Joshua’s weight. Her mouth, open with a silent scream, clamped shut with a bone-tingling click of tooth upon tooth from the impact of their sudden stop. But there was no time to assess injuries.

  “Get out, get out!” Joshua shouted. She needed no urging and fought the drag of her skirts to scramble over the high back of the sleigh. Without thinking, she circled forward to grasp the horse’s harness. The poor beast had regained its footing and stood enveloped in wreaths of vapor from its heavy breathing, kicking its hind legs in agitation. A broken wooden shaft hung awkwardly off the sleigh. The creature’s hooves continued to drill into it, sending splinters flying through the air like shrapnel to litter the snow behind them.

  “He’s free—move him away, move him!” Joshua yelled from somewhere beyond May’s vision.

  Without taking her eyes off the horse, she backed away from the sleigh, bringing the animal with her. The whites of the creature’s eyes settled, its big brown eyes rested on her. May let out a shuddering exhalation.

  Joshua came around the animal, bent over and checked its legs before rising to look at her with a sheepish and shaken look on his face. A thin, red scrape blazed across his cheek. “Are you hurt?”

  Was she? No, she felt alive. More alive than she had in ages. The cold air tingled against her face, and the brightness of the day left her blinking furiously. She shook her head. “Are you?”

  “No, but I was sure I was going to end up like a pincushion with all of those shards stuck in me while I unharnessed him.” Joshua gestured at the sleigh; its ruined shaft bristled with splinters.

  She nodded, trying to sort out what had happened just as a horse-drawn cart stopped next to them. Voices called out offers for help. Wide-eyed faces orbited, curious for a glimpse of excitement. Shaking, she crossed her arms over her chest and backpedaled out of the circle of onlookers.

  “Let me arrange a ride home for you,” Joshua said, following her attempt at escape.

  “No, I’m fine, but I need to stay on my feet.” She mustered a confident smile. “The walk home will settle me.”

  Already a swarm of men had descended upon Joshua, and he nodded back at her distractedly. She turned, pulling her wool cloak around her, and set off into a packed-down path of snow to cross the Common. About three-quarters of the way across, she began to regret walking. Within her wet leather boots, her feet stiffened into frozen blocks. Her neck ached, and she suspected a spot upon her right hip was ripening into a juicy bruise. She arrived back at the Bellevue to find their rooms dark and cavernous. With icy, numb fingers, she wriggled out of layers of clothes and collapsed into bed.

  Shivering under the quilts, she thought back to the sleigh ride, before the crash. What had they been discussing? Joshua had discouraged her from a friendship with Alice and pursuing her art. He didn’t appear to take May’s aspirations seriously at all. Did he think her art would disappear as her affections for him grew? Art was no passing fancy; it was no phase to be outgrown like wearing plaits and pinafores. She burrowed deeper down in the sheets and fell into a restless sleep.

  “WELL, YOU LEFT the sitting room in quite a state last night. I spent ages sorting through your soggy clothes and hanging everything up to dry,” Louisa grumbled from her desk the next morning when May limped out of the bedroom, but her eyes widened as she looked her sister up and down. “Good Lord, what happened?”

  May dropped onto the chintz love seat next to the fireplace and relayed an account of the unfortunate sleigh ride while Louisa tucked a blanket around her. May brushed some loose papers on the seat out of her way, but stopped to study one.

  “Who’s A. M. Barnard?”

  Louisa mumbled something unintelligible as she wrapped a shawl around May’s shoulders.

  “What?”

  “I’m A. M. Barnard.”

  “You are?”

  “Mr. Niles told me I can’t write any more of my blood and thunder stories as Louisa May Alcott,” she said. “People expect wholesome fare from me now. A. M. Barnard is my pen name for when I want to write more salacious stories.”

  May stared at her sister as she let this sink in. “So, you’re finished with the second novel?”

  “Yes. I finally sent in the galley proofs for part two of Little Women yesterday. Mr. Niles confessed they want to entitle it Good Wives. I told him that was the most feebleminded title I ever heard and threatened to not pen another word for him ever again. They should just call it Little Women Part Two. Eventually they can just print both of them as one book. Ugh, Good Wives. What malarkey.”

  “So, what becomes of Amy March? What should I expect from my fictional counterpart in this one?”

  Louisa sat in a chair and gave her sister a smug smile. “Well, I know you felt I did you a great disservice with young Amy March, but I think you’ll be quite pleased with how she grows up. Aunt March sends Amy to Europe to study art. Back at home, Laurie professes his love to Jo, but she rejects him, so he travels to France where he and Amy fall in love and marry. So, Amy March ends up being wealthy and able to pursue her art.”

  Disappointment deadened May’s limbs. She certainly didn’t want a cast-off suitor from her older sister.

  Louisa gave a triumphant smile. “I knew you’d like it. You get to be an artist.”

  May’s breath stopped somewhere deep inside. All these years, her family had humored her artistic aspirations: Father built her a tiny art studio off his office; Marmee let her draw on the walls of her bedroom; Louisa permitted her to illustrate Little Women. But May always suspected, deep down, they didn’t believe she was an artist, not in the same way that Louisa had always been considered one. Was it because Louisa suffered for her writing? Must one suffer for art? May certainly hoped not. Creating beauty through art made her happy. And being happy seemed to be her natural state, a state Louisa seemed to view with suspicion. And now it seemed Joshua also equated art with misery. She massaged her sternum and found her voice.

  “Why do you write? To make money?”

  Louisa looked surprised. “I suppose I write because stories and characters rattle around my head day and night.”

  “But did you start to feel like a real writer once you began to make money from it?”

  “No, I always believed I was meant to be a writer, but after years of eking out a slight existence, it feels awfully satisfying to ma
ke some coin from all of this, even if I’m not writing exactly what I want. This juvenile fare bores me to tears sometimes. But I’ll get to write more of what I want. Someday.” Louisa poured a cup of tea from the pot on her writing desk and stirred at it with a silver spoon. Both sisters watched the gleam of the metal flash in the low lighting of the room.

  “Are you ever lonely?”

  “How could I be when I’ve got you around?” Louisa stood and walked to the window and pointed to the street below. “We’ve never been up so high up before. I love this view.”

  May rose and joined her. Seven stories down, people the size of thimbles went about their business, bustling from storefront to storefront, loading in and out of carriages. It was another world up here. The State House rose in the distance with the empty space of the Common farther away to the left, paths scarring its snowy expanse. Her eyes left the drab blocks of brick buildings, traveling along the cirrus clouds feathering the vast cerulean blue sky extending out in front of them. “It’s a far cry from our attic window back in Concord, that’s for sure.”

  Louisa turned away with a fit of coughing and circled back to her seat. “I simply can’t imagine a life that didn’t include writing. Caring for a husband and a flock of babies just never interested me.” She gave her sister a level look before tilting her head from side to side to stretch the cords of her neck.

  May stayed at the window, studying the frozen landscape below. She remembered a time, years ago, when she was playing in the barn with her sisters. A well-placed barb had provoked Louisa into pulling one of May’s golden braids and hissing, “See how you’re the only fair-haired member of this family? See? It’s because you are not one of us. As a little mite, you were abandoned on our doorstep one morning, and Marmee took you in. Now we’re stuck with you.” Louisa had leaned back from her tirade with a look of vengeful delight, expecting to see her younger sister crumble into a teary puddle, but May felt only a sense of freeing clarity. So that’s why she was so markedly different from everyone else in the household, why she didn’t accept hardship as readily as the rest of them.

  During the previous winter, Marmee and Lizzie had dragged five-year-old May to a decrepit tenement in the city’s West End. She remembered her eyes watering at the rank smell of onions in the dark press of the room and the chilling, listless stare of the baby whose twig arms dangled from the grasp of its mother. The woman’s surrendered expression had been that of a dingy, moth-eaten flag lying on the floor, and May had counted to three hundred to steady her quaking legs, while willing Marmee and Lizzie to speed up their patient conversation with the woman. May had kept counting and tried to keep from looking at the nearby table covered in dead flies dotting unidentifiable stains. When she had tried to sleep that night, it wasn’t the image of the neglected woman and her baby keeping her awake, it was the fear that the Alcotts often seemed close to finding themselves in a similar predicament. She swore to never visit the poor with Marmee again. Father’s philosophies set them apart from everyone, and while her sisters and Marmee supported his radical views, and even added some of their own, May did not subscribe to any of them so readily, and it often felt as though her family believed her desires for comfort, happiness, and stability to be shortcomings, moral failures, signs of selfishness.

  For months after Louisa’s sly story, she had imagined her other family out there—her real family—living in a lovely home, somewhere far from the privations of the Alcotts’ quirkiness. It all made sense. Of course, this all made no sense, but her overeager imagination seized on the idea and sugar-spun it into a fantasy far from the realities of her day-to-day toil. The dream lost some of its clarity in the years that followed, but it morphed into something more toxic: a belief she was an outlier within her own family.

  May sighed. Snippets of Joshua’s dismissal of her artistic ambitions in the sleigh came back to her. Well, she could do better than what everyone else imagined. Much better. Soon no one would question her artistic aspirations. And she’d do it sensibly without sinking into vortexes and making herself miserable. Somehow she would become an artist in her own right. Though it went against every instinct, May leaned in closer to the window and peered out. Dizziness struck her, but she rested her forehead against the cool glass and continued to study the city below, ignoring the vertigo rising inside.

  Chapter 6

  Dr. Rimmer, please allow me to present Miss Alcott.”

  The trim man with dark hair pomaded with architectural precision paused and gave a curt nod. “May I check to see you have the correct supplies?” May fumbled for her shawl strap and pulled out the paper, drawing pencils, and charcoal he specified in his letter. Dr. Rimmer ticked off the items she brought against a list he produced from his breast pocket. “Excellent, welcome.” He hurried to resume his spot at a long table in front of the room. With easels lined up in perfect lines and whitewashed walls, bare except for the occasional anatomical study of the human body, the space looked less like an artist’s studio and more like a surgical theater.

  Without lingering on a long introduction to the day’s subject—the study of hands—Dr. Rimmer lectured about the relevant bones and musculature while the women followed along taking notes. Aside from his voice, only the scratching of pencils on paper could be heard. May smiled as she looked at all of the women around her, solemnly bent over their work. This was no class for debutantes looking to fritter the day away by painting and gossiping with friends. Now, this was a real art class!

  While May worked, she became conscious of her own hands. Chapped, despite her constant attempts to keep them smooth with cold cream, they knew their way around a laundry scrubbing board. Marmee, Louisa, Anna, and May all shared the same weathered hands, whereas Father’s were graceful with tapered, long fingers. Sometimes a dark crescent of soil ran along the top of his fingernails from his work in the garden, but May often eyed the contrast of Father’s enviably unmarred hands to her own with dismay. His attempts at writing essays about his beliefs fell short, and to complicate things further, he didn’t believe in being paid for his labor, yet he seemed not to notice that the women in his family held no such compunction and accepted employment as nurses, cleaners, and teachers to bring in much-needed income to the family coffers. The impracticality of his ideas aggravated her to no end.

  May couldn’t help dwelling on Lizzie as she worked the contouring of a thumb joint. She had inherited Father’s graceful hands. It was hard to believe thirteen years had passed since her death. Marmee had been caring for a destitute family crammed into a squalid room perched over a pig shed and unwittingly brought scarlet fever home with her. Both Lizzie and May had fallen ill. Guilt always nagged at May over the fact that she recovered quickly, while her sister never recuperated. Lizzie had spent two years languishing in poor health before dying a few months short of her twenty-third birthday. The memory made May drop her charcoal into the rim at the bottom of the easel and exhale loudly.

  Dr. Rimmer appeared at her side. “Miss Alcott, may I recommend using a more circular technique for rendering a smoother gradation of value?” He held out his hand for her pencil and demonstrated using tiny meticulous circles to build shadows, before handing the pencil back. His nails were clipped short, his hands unmarred. May tried to imitate his method, banishing all thoughts of Lizzie from her mind.

  “Better.” He nodded. “When in doubt, think back to the basic shapes to guide your work—triangles, circles, rectangles—there’s a system.” She looked down at her drawing, and her eyes caught a flash of gleaming black leather boots on the floor beside her. She suspected Dr. Rimmer polished them himself, for he seemed like the type of man who didn’t trust others to get things just right.

  “Yes, a system,” she echoed.

  Dr. Rimmer continued down the row, inspecting the other easels, making corrections and adjustments to the work of his students. May’s hands were smudged, and she was sure charcoal streaked her cheeks and forehead. Unused to sitting for so long, her back fel
t stiff and her eyes burned. Dr. Rimmer’s white shirt still looked crisp and unblemished, and he held the posture of a military general, even late in the day.

  He resumed command in front of the room and held a plaster sculpture of a hand. Pointing to the three phalanges comprising each finger, he lectured the women on the importance of shadowing these contours correctly. May could not remember a time she worked for so many hours in a row. Next to her jumble of lines, Alice’s sketches of hands looked convincing. As the outside light faded, Dr. Rimmer noted the time and announced the end of class.

  SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, May and Alice ambled along the brick sidewalks of Hamilton Place, eager to stretch their limbs after a long day in class with Dr. Rimmer. They dodged piles of filthy snow, remnants of the long winter that seemed to be nearing its end. In all their time together, May had been studying her friend closely, looking for a sign, a hint of why Joshua had described Alice as different, but she remained confounded.

  Alice grabbed May’s arm and pointed at a feathered bonnet visible in the window of a milliner’s tiny shop. “What a confection! I must have that for spring,” she said, tugging May into the store.

  The milliner moved a pincushion aside on the counter to showcase the hat for Alice. “Colored feathers are all the thing for next season. They’ve arrived straight from Paris, miss.”

  “This is divine.” Alice held the pearl-gray satin bonnet up and ran a finger along one of the emerald-colored feathers sprouting from a cluster of lilies of the valley.

  May nodded, unable to assemble enthusiasm for the extravagant purchase. She squinted into a far corner of the milliner’s shop—in the low light, the silhouette of a dress form reduced itself to basic shapes. Dr. Rimmer’s words about bodies being composed of a system of lines and angles crystallized in her mind as she studied the beautiful simplicity of the triangle of the shoulders down to the torso and the same shape mirrored downward from the waist to the hips. It was easy to get distracted by the details of musculature and facial features, but finally, she could see the body in its most elemental form. Dr. Rimmer was right. She laughed out loud at the simplicity of her newfound sight.