Louisa’s playful but piercing raillery notwithstanding, Bronson’s reputation was beginning to revive. While in New York, he had the honor of being elected as a vice president of a women’s rights convention, and the doors of illustrious men and women were open to him. Thoreau, visiting New York, joined with Alcott to seek out Horace Greeley and ride with the latter to his farm. The poet Alice Cary was also present for this visit, but Alcott was more interested in telling Thoreau about another poet he had met a month earlier: Walt Whitman.
Whitman had received Bronson while reclining on a couch, pillowing his head on a bended arm. He immediately impressed Alcott as an extraordinary person. No sooner had Alcott told his journal that Whitman was not easily described, than he launched into a vivid description: Whitman was “broad-shouldered, rouge-fleshed, Bacchus-browed, bearded like a satyr.” Bronson marveled at the poet’s brute power, genius, and audacity and noted Whitman’s calico jacket, coarse overalls, and cowhide boots with an admiration approaching envy. Whitman’s voice, too, was enchanting—deep, sharp, sometimes tender, and almost melting in its intonation. He was, Bronson thought, an Adamic figure, claiming never to have sinned and “quite innocent of repentance and man’s fall.”86 Alcott could not wait for Thoreau to meet this singular man.
On November 9, the two Concordians heard Henry Ward Beecher preach at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Church. Alcott was entirely taken with Beecher’s keen intelligence, broad humor, and lively human sympathies. Thoreau was less impressed, finding Beecher’s performance “pagan.”87 They disagreed again the next day when Alcott introduced Thoreau to Whitman. The poet and the naturalist eyed each other, Alcott noted, “like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run; and it came to no more than cold compliments between them.”88 Whitman was surprised at Thoreau’s indifference to current political events. Thoreau was taken aback by the sensuality of Whitman’s conversation; he felt as if he were interviewing an animal.89 Alcott reached the conclusion that both his friends were “hard to tame.” He remained on excellent terms with both of them.
In February, on a return trip to New York, Bronson attended a production of Euripides’ Medea, which affected him profoundly. The play tells of how Jason, the husband of Medea and the father of her children, forsakes her in order to marry a Corinthian princess. Jason deceives himself into believing that his new match will benefit all concerned; it will give his children a royal name, win a place in the palace for Medea, and in time, garner a crown for Jason himself. He persuades himself that his adulterous marriage is an act of duty. Jason ignores the chorus, who warn that he is betraying his wife, and he blames his domestic discord on the feminine—and therefore flawed—thinking of Medea. He declares, “The human race should produce children from some other source and a female sex should not exist. Then mankind would be free from every evil.”90 Medea responds in jealous fury. She not only poisons the princess and her father, but murders Jason’s children with her own hands. In the final scene, Medea departs in a chariot pulled by dragons, carrying the children’s corpses with her.
The play, “with all its appalling accompanyments [sic],” struck personally at Bronson’s guilty memories, suggesting “events too vividly, perhaps, of home experiences, and the Courage of Principle.” Euripides had taken Bronson back thirteen years, to a time when he, like Jason, had confused his selfish pursuits with altruism and when, along with Charles Lane, he had dreamed of building a little world made solely of men. Medea’s chariot seemed to him like the ox-drawn sled moving slowly away from the ruin of his fond Utopia. He wrote to Abba, “I had ‘Fruitlands’ before me, and Ideas there celebrated and played oft to the applauding snows—the tragedy of ox-team and drifting Family wailing their woes to the wintry winds.” Alluding to the period of madness that had followed, he added, “You shall imagine the Sequel, and the rest.”91 Alcott’s personal farce had been replayed for him as Grand Guignol.
Coming home from New York, he stopped in New Haven to give a series of six conversations at Yale. He was pleased to find there a number of “bright boys…professing an unexpected interest.”92 One of these was William Torrey Harris, a Connecticut-born graduate of Andover who was so eager to make Alcott’s acquaintance that he met him at the New Haven train station. Like Frank Sanborn, Harris almost instantaneously became Alcott’s devotee. Later that year, Harris left the college without a degree, accepting a teaching position in St. Louis, where he dedicated himself to the study of Hegel and other German philosophers. In future years, when Alcott traveled west to St. Louis, he did so at Harris’s standing invitation.
In the summer of 1857, the Alcotts reassembled in Walpole. Louisa and Anna had fine times together, and Lizzie, who had never fully regained her strength following the previous summer’s fever, was cheered by all the activity and seemed to rally for a while. However, the long, cold winter had taken a toll, and her lingering frailty was now a cause of continual worry. To Louisa, it seemed that Lizzie’s emotional attachment to the world was diffident and weak. “She never seemed to care for this world beyond home,” Louisa wrote.93 She was starting to wonder whether home was a sufficient reason for Lizzie to live.
That summer, Louisa came to understand and appreciate her father more than she had previously done. The change in her attitude was precipitated by the arrival of a welcome visitor. Bronson’s mother, still hardy and sharp-minded at the age of eighty-four, made the journey to Walpole from her home in Oriskany Falls, New York, to spend time with her eldest son. She did not leave until November. For Louisa, who had spent little time with her grandmother, the visit was a minor revelation. It was not merely that she found the elder Mrs. Alcott “a sweet old lady…very smart, industrious and wise.”94 More importantly, both in her character and in the stories she told of the past, she helped Louisa to understand her father in the context of his youth.
Louisa had come to regard her father as a somewhat pitiable figure, a man who, though admirable for his ideals, was a hapless, fumbling personage, unable to boast of any concrete achievements. The presence of Bronson’s mother changed all that. At last, Louisa could “see where Father got his nature.”95 She had observed her father through mature eyes only after his youthful enthusiasm had been spent and his most precious visions had been crushed by circumstance. She had, of course, not seen him as a bright and energetic youth, eager to recast the world in the contours of his dreams. But now her grandmother brought forth her recollections of the young Bronson, and Louisa was astonished to learn what an active and self-reliant person her father had formerly been. To her surprise, she learned that her father, like Louisa herself, had been formed by adversity, ambition, hard work, and struggle. She conceived the idea for a novel to be based on Bronson’s life, with chapters based on his experiences on Spindle Hill, at the Temple School, Fruitlands, Concord, and Boston. She only hoped that she would live to write this great memoir of “the trials and triumphs of the Pathetic Family.”96
In the fall of 1857, Abba took Lizzie to the seashore at Swampscott, hoping that a change of air and the influence of “the salutary Sea,” as Bronson put it, might restore her health. Meanwhile, Bronson considered the possibility of moving back to Concord.97 He decided to spend some time in the old town in September, exploring available properties and consulting with Emerson about the feasibility of his return. On the way there, he stopped at the seaside resort where Abba and Lizzie were staying. Although he generally thought Lizzie none the worse, she was slightly thinner and her features paler and more elongated than when he had last seen her three weeks earlier. The salt air had performed no miracle. The doctor whom the Alcotts had at last chosen to consult was hopeful, and Abba shared his view. However, Bronson thought the case “a critical one” and fretted that Lizzie had “neither flesh nor strength to spare, and the Eye falling upon her wasted form scarcely dares to hope for her continuance long.” As always, however, Alcott tried to discern the soul as well as the body. Lizzie remained gentle, confiding, and pleasant, and her f
ace seemed so full of hope that Bronson wondered why he should venture to fear or doubt.98 And yet his doubts persisted.
On September 7, Bronson left Abba and Lizzie in Boston and traveled to Concord, where he began looking at the available real estate. He quickly fastened his attention on a house belonging to a John Moore, adjacent to the Alcotts’ former home at Hillside. Shaded by elms and butternut trees, it was the first that one passed when walking westward from Hillside toward town. The property included an orchard of at least forty apple trees, ten acres of woodland, and an excellent well for drinking water. In an enthusiastic letter he sent to Anna, Louisa, and May, Bronson acknowledged that the house was old, but he added that nothing like it could be found near the center of town for a comparable price. He promised that as the family weighed the decision to buy the house, he would not press his position. However, his heart was obviously set on the property; he declared, “’Tis the home for me.” Like a child promising to be good in exchange for some much-desired treat, Bronson averred that he was “minded to take the reins a little more firmly in hand, and think you may rely on me for supports of labour and money in the years to come,” adding that he could “do more for you, and for myself, from the Concord position, than any known to me.”99 In the face of such eagerness, it would have been difficult to raise objections. On September 22, Bronson purchased Moore’s estate, as surveyed by Henry David Thoreau, for $945.
Since the time of Louisa’s birth, the Alcott family had changed residence on an average of more than once every two years. Bronson’s two great yearnings, one for firmness of place and the other for ceaseless discovery, always contended inside him. In the late 1850s, the need for place at last prevailed. The Moore house on Lexington Road was to be his home for almost twenty years. Because of the apple trees on the property, he christened his newly acquired home “Orchard House.” Taking an inspiration from Hawthorne, he sometimes referred to it as “the House of Seven Gables.” Louisa, always ready to puncture a romantic soap bubble, called it “Apple Slump.”
CHAPTER TEN
ORCHARD HOUSE
“My associations with the place are of the happiest and holiest kind”
—A. BRONSON ALCOTT,
Journals, April 28, 1880
BRONSON FELT HE HAD A STROKE OF GREAT FORTUNE IN acquiring Orchard House, and he was flattered when friends told him it was one of the best-placed and most picturesque houses in Concord. The location was indeed opportune. From the front door, an easy stroll up the Lexington Road brought the traveler to Concord’s handsome town square. The house was even a bit closer to Emerson’s than Hillside had been.
In England, Hawthorne received word that the Alcotts were moving into Orchard House. Surprised that Bronson had been able to afford such a purchase, he reacted to the news with pleasure, though not for the kindly reasons one might suspect. Hawthorne knew how prone Alcott was to overextend himself, and he saw nothing wrong with being in a position to reap the advantages in case the philosopher stumbled once again. With cool opportunism, he wrote to his friend Howard Ticknor, “I understand that Mr. Alcott…has bought a piece of land adjacent to mine, and two old houses on it…. If he should swamp himself by his expenditures on this place, I should be very glad to take it off his hands…. You would oblige me by having an eye to this.”1
In early October 1857, while Orchard House underwent extensive repairs, the Alcotts settled into a temporary home on Bedford Street in Concord. Believing that Lizzie’s condition had stabilized, Bronson departed on November 11 for a tour of the West. He stopped for more than a week in Buffalo, where a friend of Emerson’s introduced him to former president Fillmore. The president and the philosopher spoke for two hours, trading opinions on slavery and the recent violence in Kansas. Alcott found Fillmore “candid, conservative, and fearful of consequences.” In a letter to Abba, he paid Fillmore a left-handed compliment, pronouncing him “sincere in his timidities.”2
In Bronson’s absence Anna, Louisa, and Abby May amused themselves by acting in plays with young men from the town and the boys from Frank Sanborn’s school. Anna soon attracted the attentions of a witty twenty-four-year-old named John Pratt, while Louisa took an interest in a blond, round-cheeked, motherless boy, Alf Whitman. No relation to the poet, Whitman boarded with the Pratts and often turned up alongside John when he came to visit Anna. Although the friendship of John and Anna soon blossomed into romance, there was no such possibility for Louisa and Alf. Alf, at fifteen, was ten years Louisa’s junior. The attraction, though platonic, was nevertheless strong. They went to skating parties together, rowed on the Concord River, and acted opposite each other in a dramatization of Dickens’s The Haunted Man. For years afterward they exchanged letters signed with their character names “Dolphus” and “Sophy.” Alf thought of the Alcotts’ home as an enchanted palace.3 Louisa called Alf “my boy,” and she thought that, if she were a goddess, he would be the kind of boy she would create.4 It was not the only time when Louisa sought the close companionship of a much younger male. Always believing that she should have been born a boy, she loved to participate vicariously in the adventures and discoveries of boyhood. She also relished the role of surrogate mother or big sister. For the role of lover, however, she possessed neither map nor compass. Though Alf remained in Concord for less than a year, Louisa remembered him distinctly. When she wrote Little Women, Alf was one of the two models for the character of Laurie. But not everything was pleasant that winter. Along with the good times at the Alcott house, Alf remembered how Louisa would often excuse herself to climb the stairs and check on Lizzie.5
Although he had wanted to travel as far as St. Louis, Bronson had only reached Cincinnati when a letter from Concord alarmed him too greatly to continue his tour. Hastening home, he found Lizzie “wasted to the mere shadow of what she was.”6 Her spirits had dwindled too, and she spoke of how enticing she found the shades of Sleepy Hollow, a recently consecrated cemetery that lay a short distance from Bedford Street. As her thoughts fixated on death, she commented strangely, “It will be something new in our family, and I can best be spared of the four.”7 Early in February, she began to refuse her medicines. It seemed to Bronson that she had made her choice.
Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, the Alcotts’ “dear child of grace.” When she died, Louisa and her mother both thought they saw her spirit leave her body. This is the only likeness of her known to exist.
(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
Around March 10, Lizzie put aside her sewing needle, saying that it was too heavy for her.8 A painless serenity attends the last days of Beth March in Little Women. Lizzie was not so fortunate. On Friday the twelfth, in severe pain, she asked to lie in her father’s arms and called the rest of the family to her side. Holding their hands and smiling, she seemed to Louisa and the others to be saying farewell. All the next day, the struggle continued. Lizzie begged for relief and stretched out her thin hands for the ether that had lost its power to soothe her. At midnight, a resolution finally came. With the family assembled around her bed, she said distinctly “Now I’m comfortable and so happy” and drifted into unconsciousness. Some time later, she opened her eyes with a look that struck Louisa with its beauty.9
At three o’clock Sunday morning, on the cloudless night of March 14, it was over. A few moments later, Louisa saw a shadow fall across the face of her sister. Then, to her quiet astonishment, she watched as a light mist rose from the body, floated upward, and vanished into the air. As she visually followed the course of this phenomenon, Louisa noticed that her mother’s eyes were moving in the same direction. “What did you see?” Louisa asked. Abba described the same mist. The attending physician, incredibly named Dr. Christian Geist, confirmed what they had witnessed. It was, he said, the life departing visibly.10 When she died, Lizzie looked to Louisa like a woman of forty, her small frame worn down by the wasting illness and all of her fine hair gone.11
Wishing to be alone, the Alcotts sent no word to their friends and re
latives in Boston until after the funeral. His daughter’s passing moved Bronson to write with the lyric grace that too often evaded him: “This morning is clear and calm, and so our Elizabeth ascends with transfigured features to the heavenly airs she had sought so long.”12 Abba took Lizzie’s passing hardest. For days after her daughter’s passing, she sat in the empty chamber, not yet believing that she would never again hear her daughter’s voice or see her face gazing up from the now-vacant pillow. Remembering all that Lizzie had endured for two years, Louisa told herself and others that Lizzie was “well at last,” that she had found a place where rest, not suffering, made up the essential core of being.13 To Louisa, death seemed beautiful, a liberator for Lizzie and a teacher for those left behind.
The weather was beautiful on the fifteenth, and as Louisa wrote, “everything was simple and quiet as she would have liked it.”14 Three of Bronson’s friends—Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson’s young disciple Sanborn—carried Lizzie’s coffin out of the house on Bedford Street and, later, to a receiving tomb, where her body lay until her parents could purchase a plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. While noting that none of the three men had come to visit since the Alcotts had returned to Concord, Louisa was nonetheless grateful for the sympathy and respect they showed Bronson and Lizzie that day.15 Emerson told the officiating minister, who did not know the family well, that Lizzie was a good, unselfish, patient child, who made friends even in death. Everyone seemed to forget that they were not burying a child but a woman of twenty-two. “So,” Louisa wrote in her journal, “the first break comes.”16
Eden's Outcasts Page 29
