Marmee & Louisa (32 page)

To the men in the family, including Bronson, Lucretia was a perfect hostess. Bronson reveled in her hospitality after his brother-in-law had gone to the spa. He occupied one of her many guest rooms and the minister’s “warm, comfortable, tidy study” mostly “by myself, as Scholars love to do: Mrs.
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May and Charlotte keeping the house” and supplying him—as they did all male relatives—with “warm water for bathing and shaving,” abundant bread, butter, and apples, “and as much leisure as you choose.” The Mays’ youngest son, “Bonnie” George, visited the spa and reported that Joseph had recovered and their father appeared “quite gay.
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Why, you would never think he was a minister.”

Meanwhile, in the Alcotts’ rented house in Concord, Elizabeth continued to fail. Each week she was paler and weaker. At twenty-two, she looked like an old woman to Louisa. Abigail and Louisa shared the task of watching her, leaving the housekeeping to Anna, who also spent time at the Pratt farm, north of the Concord River beside Punkatasset Hill.
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Early in 1858 Abigail spoke privately with the doctor, Christian Geist, who said he could no longer give her “much hope.”
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A few days later Louisa noted, “Lizzie much worse. Dr. G. says there is no hope.”
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So Abigail summoned Bronson home from Cincinnati. He arrived in late January. Throughout February, Abigail made sure that Lizzie was never left alone. From time to time the family gathered around her bed, as Abigail’s family had done when she was small. Abigail was now Marmee, like her mother before her, and it was her daughter who was dying.

Lizzie felt ready to die; she told her mother, “I can best be spared of the four.”
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Like every Alcott daughter, she was a day worker in the business of maintaining the family. She continued to do needlework until early March, when even her needle became “too heavy.”
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Abigail and Bronson were sitting beside Lizzie on the evening of Friday, March 12, when Lizzie “reached her arms out of bed to her Father and said take me father into your lap,” Abigail reported. “He did so, bracing himself in the large chair. I took her feet in my lap,” and Louisa, Anna, and Abby May, “seeing something unusually serene about us, closed in the group.” Lizzie smiled contentedly at them all and said, “
All
of us here!” Her next words were, “Air, air,” and when the window was opened, “heavenly air. I go! I go! Lay me down gently.”

It seemed “she bid us good-by then,” Louisa felt, “as she held our hands and kissed us tenderly.”
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Around midnight Lizzie said, “Now I’m
comfortable & so happy,” and soon she was unconscious. The next day, according to Abigail, who provided her “ether and wine,” Lizzie suffered “occasional paroxysms [of] physical distress.” Early Sunday morning, while the rest of the family slept, Abigail called Anna, Louisa, and Abby May to Lizzie’s bedside. “We sat beside her,” Louisa said, “while she quietly breathed her life away,” until at three o’clock, “with one last look of her beautiful eyes, she was gone.”

Abigail and Louisa dressed Lizzie’s body and lay her “on the couch, a form chiseled in Bone, held by a mere integument of skin, no flesh perceptible,” Abigail noted. “Her father came” and said, “My child, how beautiful,” the three “girls went to bed, and Mr. A[lcott] and myself sat down to try to bring home the lesson . . . that we are wiser for her life, holier for her death.” March 14 had dawned “clear and calm,” Bronson noted in his journal, and “our daughter Elizabeth ascends with transfigured features to the heavenly airs she had sought so long.”
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That morning Thoreau and the Emersons called at the house. Near Lizzie’s body Louisa found a large, pale green moth with “soft brown spots” and hooked wings “fluttering at the closed window. I let the little emblem of the freed soul fly away from its cell, as she had done from her prison of pain.”
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Elizabeth Sewall Alcott’s last rites were held the following afternoon at home. Abigail asked Emerson, now in his fifties, Thoreau, not yet forty, and two younger men, John Pratt and the schoolteacher Frank Sanborn, to bear Elizabeth’s coffin from the house to Sleepy Hollow, a new cemetery that the Alcott girls had known as a picnic place.
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“We longed for dear Uncle Sam” to preside at the funeral, Louisa told a cousin, “but [Samuel Joseph] was too far away,” traveling in Italy, so the Rev. Dr. Huntington of Boston, for whom Abigail had worked, said the service. At her “urgent request” the minister read the simple King’s Chapel burial service that had been said for her three sisters, her brother Edward, her mother and father, and her grandparents. She expected it would be said for her, too. It includes portions of the Gospel of John, the 39th and 90th Psalms, and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Louisa, Anna, and Abby May cast handfuls of earth on Lizzie’s coffin as the minister intoned, “FORASMUCH as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto himself the soul of our deceased sister, we therefore commit
her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; looking for the general resurrection in the last day. . . .”

Four days after Elizabeth’s burial Abigail sat down to write to her brother, who was in Rome. “In the anguish of a bereaved heart we are apt to cry out for help.
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The body sickens and the soul saddens. We seek sympathy and receive demonstrations that our friends are with us in our trouble.” Like Louisa, she blamed herself for Elizabeth’s doom. “I dare not dwell on the fever which I conveyed to my home which devoured the freshness of her life, and left her wrecked humanity on the shore of Time for a brief space. I dare not dwell on the helplessness of science which in the person of four ‘skillful Drs’ I summoned to her aid. The fact is before me: she has faded like a shadow through the valley of death into life and light.”

Louisa’s first thought after the death of her sister was to visit her cousin Charlotte, the “sister-in-love” whose comfort she needed. But Anna resisted Louisa’s plan, saying she couldn’t manage without Louisa, and Marmee needed their help. “Louisa is going to stay longer” in Concord, Charlotte’s brother John Edward reported in early April, because “Cousin Annie could not let them all go at once.”
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Louisa “will be along in a week or two.”

Anna had another reason to ask Louisa to delay her trip. She had happy news that she had likely concealed during Elizabeth’s final weeks of life. Anna and John Pratt were engaged to marry, they revealed on April 7. Abigail, delighted, wrapped her eldest daughter and her prospective son-in-law in her arms. Her own troubled marriage—the hard early years, struggles and separations, and a continuing lack of intimacy—had not lessened her faith in the institution of marriage or the importance of family. Indeed, Abigail’s unconventional desire that her girls find their way to do good in the world without concern for society’s expectations gave them unusual freedom in choosing how to live. Abigail not only supported Anna’s conventional choice to marry but also approved of Louisa and May’s decisions to stay single while preparing for professional careers. Abigail identified with her daughters, recalled her own difficulties determining how to lead her life, and encouraged them to find the path that suited them. Anna was doing exactly that.

To Louisa, though, Anna’s engagement felt like an act of abandonment. Ever since Louisa was ten years old, lying in bed beside Anna as their father and mother loudly discussed a separation, Louisa had aimed to keep her family whole. She anticipated the natural dissolution of the family with a gloom like that experienced by Abigail as she faced the prospect of marriage to a man she did not love and all her sisters died, one by one. An engagement was nearly as awful to Louisa as a death. “So another sister is gone,” Louisa mourned in her journal. The problem was not John, “a true man, full of fine possibilities . . . a model son and brother.” The problem was that she wanted Anna to stay by Marmee and keep the family intact, as Louisa was doing. It is not clear if Louisa admitted to herself that a sister’s departure increased the burden for the care of their parents on the remaining sisters. The greatest burden, of course, would fall to a spinster daughter. “I moaned in private over my great loss, and said I’d never forgive J[ohn] for taking Anna from me. . . .”

But Louisa’s generosity won out. “I shall [forgive John] if he makes her happy, and turn to little May for my comfort.”
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Like Abigail in her twenties, Louisa depended on at least one close female companion. “Little May” was now eighteen, taller, fairer, and more coquettish than her sisters, with a desire to paint and travel the world.
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That summer the Alcotts moved into Orchard House. In nearly forty years of marriage, Bronson and Abigail had moved more than thirty times.
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The renovations to the new house were not completed, a process that would take years.
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Bronson’s first step was, with Thoreau’s assistance, to line the hill behind the house with logs and roll an existing two-story tenant house over the logs fifty feet forward to meet the rear of the original two-over-two farmhouse. This doubled the size of the dwelling, providing a third bedroom for the family and three rooms for paying boarders. Behind and to the right of the house he planted a garden that would expand to include rows of beets, spinach, carrots, turnips, parsnips, radishes, lettuce, onions, leeks, and fennel; mints; patches of three kinds of squash, sweet corn, cucumbers, beans, and cabbages; and small patches of caraway, dill, thyme, and sage. He planted ferns, lilies of the valley, and crocuses, and Concord grapevines beneath the dining room window. “This loved spot, so largely now of my own creation,” he said later, was “where I have had . . . the most profitable and agreeable occupation since our married life opened. . . .
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My wife and Louisa are less
attached” to it, he knew, but “Anna and [Abby] May partake of my love of it, and cannot think of leaving it.”

That fall, hoping to spend the winter writing and painting in the city, Louisa and her younger sister May, who had recently dropped “Abby” from her name, prepared to move to rented rooms in Boston. Before they left, Abigail gave May her deceased sister’s miniature 1834 edition of
Diamond’s New Testament
“with Notes Explanatory and Practical,” which she inscribed, “to Abby [May] from Lizzy’s Library, July 1858.”
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At Christmas, while Bronson was on a lengthy trip to and from Chicago, Louisa and May gathered with their mother, Anna, and John at Orchard House.

Late that week Samuel Joseph, whom Abigail had not seen for nearly a year, paid them a visit. He had recently returned from a tour of Europe with his son Joseph. Soon after Lizzie’s death, which occurred during his stay in Rome, he had received a letter from Lucretia asking, “Have you written poor aunt Abba? Her heart is full & she feels I doubt not in her desolation as if ‘no sorrow was like to her sorrow.’ We are all apt to. But time the great assuager reads us other lessons & she & we all can say ‘It is well with our children.’ ‘For He giveth his beloved rest,’ & we should not dare to disturb this rest or call them back if we could. They are safe, we know they are safe.”

It must have been a relief for Abigail to sit and talk with the only man who sympathized with her so well. As sister and brother reviewed the past year, she called Elizabeth’s death “the inexplicable trial of my life.” It was, she felt, “an eventful year to us all, but not without its lessons or tests of our faith. When with my sick dying daughter I turned my back forever on [New Hampshire and] its beautiful hills, I felt that although the pastures were green and the hills were covered with the flocks and herds of rich men, I had no bread or honey. For my daughters, I was left to dig or die.

“Since then I have made little or no effort to earn.” Alone, without home or income, “I took faithful care of my darling Lizzie till she [was] released from her sufferings by the great Physician of all our woes.
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 . . . I said I had done what I could.” Quoting the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Exodus, she added, “Lord, help thou mine unbelief. Save me and mine or Slay us forthwith. We still [have] time to help God before we die.”

Louisa, too, took stock at the close of the momentous year of Lizzie’s death and Anna’s engagement. “Now that death and love have taken two of us away,” she wrote in her journal, “I can, I hope, soon manage to care for the remaining four.
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 . . . I can see that these [two] experiences have taken a deep hold, and changed or developed me. Lizzie helps me spiritually, and a little success makes me more self-reliant. . . . No more sewing or going to service for a living, thank the Lord!” Writing, Louisa had realized, “is my salvation when disappointment or weariness burden and darken my soul. . . . I feel as if I could write better now. . . . I hope I shall yet do my great book, for that seems to be my work, and I am growing up to it.”

Chapter Twelve