The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (24 page)

“Oh, Louisa, you know that is not true.”

“Do I? It seems to me he can only sit with my sister in the dead of night, when no one else is around. Perhaps he is ashamed to associate with our family. We
are
but poor daughters of a philosopher who struts about town in tatters. When it comes to marriage, you are sorely naïve if you think money does not matter. It may be the only thing that really does.”

Anna brushed aside a tear with her fingertips. She clamped her hands on the small of her back and squared her shoulders as she gazed down the path that led away from the house toward town, and beyond that Boston, New York. She knew there were thousands of other places, but she didn’t need to see them for herself to know they were there. “All my life,” she began, her voice low but strong, “I have tried to be good. That probably sounds silly to you, but it’s true. I have. I’ve tried to be a good daughter to my parents, tried to keep our family together—and it hasn’t always been easy. I never have asked for anything for myself, have barely hoped even in silence for the things other people take for granted. But this, the love of this man, a home of our own, my own daughters, sons, if God decides to provide them—I cannot hold my tongue and let the chance of having those things pass me by. I
will
become Mrs. Nicholas Sutton. I’m determined.”

Somewhere beneath her resentment, Louisa wanted to reassure her sister that if anyone deserved the happiness of marriage and family life, it was Anna. But though it was petty and small of her, she could not do it—something she would soon regret for a long time. It wasn’t jealousy Louisa felt. That very evening, though it seemed like an age ago, she’d made up her mind that marriage was not her own path, and nothing in her wanted to go back on that now, despite everything she shared with Joseph. If she was jealous of anything, it was Anna’s ability to be satisfied with convention. She wasn’t a prisoner of the restlessness Louisa felt, the endless questioning her mind pursued. Anna had a more typical worry: If she loved him, would he love her back? Would they be together as they hoped?

“I suppose I can hardly blame you for wanting to escape this poverty. There’s certainly no end in sight.”

No purer heart had contemplated the meaning of the role of wife than Anna. The suggestion that she was clinging to Nicholas for his money cut her to the quick. “How can you say such a thing to me?” Anna cried, tears slick on her cheeks. “I
love
him.”

“Well, we can love people for all sort of reasons.”

“I won’t hear this—I won’t.” Anna shook her head, her voice growing frantic. “It is only that you are envious, because your own affair cannot end happily.”

“What do you know about the way that I feel? I don’t envy you—I pity you. I am going to make something of my life. I am going to sell my stories and see the world. And you want to waste your life cooking and cleaning and chasing babies around the yard because a man made you his wife. Why would I be envious of that?”

Anna looked Louisa straight in the eye. “Because you can’t have it.”

The sisters stood still and close. Louisa turned away first, storming into the house. Anna followed silently behind. The last thing they needed now was to wake their parents.

But Abba was already awake. Or had never gone to sleep. They could hear her talking softly to Lizzie, the sound of a rag being wrung into a bowl. She was nursing her patient and took no notice of her older daughters’ late arrival.

 

 

 

W
ednesday was reserved for baking, and as usual Anna and Louisa rose early to help their mother. May lingered in her room to “finish her mending”—and doze in the sunny window seat. In the bed beside her, Lizzie slept late, her fever in retreat after a restless night.

Baking was a hot, arduous task and it took most of the day to make the bread and pies that would get them through the week, including Sunday dinner. The kitchen was unusually silent. While they waited for the brick oven to heat, Louisa, who was best at forceful kneading, stood at the worktable. She ground the heels of her hands into the warm dough, her arms locked in the repetitive movements. Her muscles ached with exhaustion.

Anna had scarcely said good morning to her. Louisa knew she had said some hurtful things in the night, but despite the light of day she didn’t exactly regret them. Her anger had been tamped down but still burned as an ember, keeping her moving. If it was jealousy that made her hate her sister at this moment, then so be it. There was no question that Anna deserved happiness, but didn’t Louisa deserve it too? Didn’t everyone deserve a chance to be happy?

When the last loaf was cooling, mother and daughters sat at the oak table for a moment of rest. Louisa reflected that all three of them could benefit from a long afternoon nap. Anna’s face was drawn and pale and her shoulders sagged. Louisa stifled a yawn. Abba looked the worst off, sadness burning in her dark eyes.

She clasped her daughters’ hands. “My girls,” she whispered. “I fear for Elizabeth. She is so frail. It seems every fever or cough she contracts is worse than the last.” She stifled a sob. “I don’t know how much more her body can take.”

The sisters comforted their mother and ushered her into the parlor to the comfort of the horsehair sofa. They never knew how much stock to put in Abba’s dire predictions. To her, Lizzie was always frail, always on the verge of leaving this world for good, though the facts didn’t bear that out. Louisa had to admit, though, that Lizzie seemed more like an invalid than ever as the summer waned. Since her adventure in Bellows Falls, she had spent most of her days in bed. No matter whether their mother was overreacting, Abba needed rest. Anna and Louisa promised to finish up the work in the kitchen.

A little later, as Abba’s eyes fluttered on the verge of sleep, the sisters heard a sharp knock at the front door. Abba bolted up and swung the heavy door open. Samuel Parker stepped inside, the brilliant morning sun behind him throwing his face into shadow.

“Is Mr. Alcott in, ma’am?” Samuel’s shirt collar hung open. A semicircle of sweat soaked his undershirt.

Abba’s knuckles whitened on the doorknob. “Good morning, Samuel. Is everything all right?”

Louisa and Anna looked into the parlor, their aprons still fastened at their backs.

“Hello, Samuel,” Anna called. An oblong smudge of flour marred her left cheek. “Would you like some brown bread? It’s almost cool.”

He glanced in her direction, then looked back at Abba. “
Please
—Mr. Alcott. Is he home, ma’am?”

“Well, yes.” Abba, flustered, fussed with folds of her skirt. “He’s in his study.”

Without a word Samuel pushed past her and flew down the hall to the closed door. He bolted in and slammed it behind him. The two male voices ejected a few quick, indiscernible sentences, and the door flew open again. Samuel clomped noisily down the hallway in his work boots. Bronson followed at his heels, his shirt fluttering like a sail behind him.

“What the deuce is the matter with you two?” Louisa shouted, her forehead glistening in the heat of the kitchen.

Bronson turned back to Abba as Samuel sprinted down the front path and south toward the center of town. “Stay here.” He clamped his hand on her upper arm, almost violently. “All of you. I mean it. I will be back as soon as I can.”

He hurried awkwardly down the path after Sam.

“Wait, my husband, wait! What is the matter? Please—tell us!” Abba yelled.

But Bronson didn’t turn back.

 

 

He didn’t return,
in fact, until the late afternoon. Abba and her daughters obeyed his command—they did not leave the house, not even to cast the dishwater into the weeds. The women were uncharacteristically silent as they worked about the house, grateful to have something to keep their hands busy. Never had the floor been quite so clean; never had the kitchen been so well scrubbed and aired.

Each held in her mind her own private speculation of what sort of disaster had befallen the town, and they prayed vague and desperate prayers against the unknown. Louisa felt an overpowering dread. Something in Bronson’s demeanor betrayed his concern for his daughters in particular, and Louisa doubted the emergency involved an elderly uncle or friend of her father’s. Death called on the old and sick like a guest with an appointment, but when it came for the young it barged through the door and took everyone by surprise. A frothing anxiety burned in Louisa’s chest. Something had happened to Joseph. She felt she knew it for certain, could sense that he was in pain—or worse.

Oh, why hadn’t she gone away with him when she had the chance? The world seemed full of poison, fear, and harm, and she began her grieving.

The clock on the mantel ticked past three when Bronson appeared in the doorway, cloaked by the shadow of the whole house now that the sun had made its way to the other side of the sky. He held his hat in his hands and stepped over the threshold with a deep sigh. He pointed toward the horsehair sofa. Louisa sat between her mother and sister, taking their hands and steeling herself for the blow to come. Bronson knelt down before them. Louisa closed her eyes and began to pray, so she did not see him take Anna’s hands in his.

“My child, forgive me for what I have to tell you. Nicholas Sutton is dead.”

 

 

Later they would hear the story.
Halfway down the south panel of the roof, his back turned toward the breathtaking view of the Connecticut River and the verdant hills of Vermont the third-story dormer would provide, Nicholas Sutton lost his footing and felt the slate slide beneath the soles of his boots. He reached out desperately to take hold of an ill-placed shingle protruding from the pattern, an exposed beam, but there were none. The young men had crafted a smooth, even design, and there were no imperfections he could exploit. In one horrific moment his friends watched as he disappeared over the cornice, his face twisted in terror.

Samuel and Joseph clambered down the ladder as quickly as they could, throwing their own safety into jeopardy, and scrambled around to the back of the house. Joseph felt his knees buckle when he saw the contorted shape Nicholas made in the grass. His hips were squared toward the sky, his knees pointing up, but his upper body faced down into the grass. His right cheek was visible, and part of his right eye. The socket was full of blood. Samuel and Joseph sank down beside him and Nicholas emitted a small moan.

Samuel and Joseph locked eyes—they couldn’t believe he was still breathing. Samuel leapt to his feet and took off running full speed toward his father’s house—the first place he could think to go. Soon he would remember that his parents had gone to the next town over for a luncheon, and he would turn toward the Alcotts, two doors down, where he felt sure Mr. Alcott would be in his study. Though it was rumored he had sent his own daughters out to work rather than take on work he felt was beneath his intellectual abilities, Walpoleans also knew well the story of Bronson’s effort to free the jailed runaway slave the previous summer, where his bravery and quick thinking amid the pistol shots astonished the mob. Mr. Alcott would know what to do.

Meanwhile, Joseph knelt in the blinding morning sun on the dry, caked ground, talking softly to Nicholas. “Samuel has gone to get help, Nick. Hold steady, man. Everything will be all right.”

The last part was a lie, he knew. As he said it his oldest friend, who, like an older brother, had taught Joseph how to dig the thimble-sized frogs out of the muddy stream bed behind his house when they were boys, shuddered out his last breath.

 

 

 

T
he house was unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon. Typically, Bronson entertained a few of his intellectual sparring partners from Concord or Boston while Anna, Louisa, and Lizzie looked on, sometimes chiming in, but mostly keeping to their sewing, or in Louisa’s case, escaping to the bedroom to work on a story. May would tear through the house just on the way to or just returned from some gathering with the friends she seemed to collect like charms on a bracelet. And Abba, when they could convince her to let the kitchen and the wash and the garden be, would hover a moment in her rocking chair, her chapped and aching hands resting in her lap like two old potatoes.

But on that morning the people of the town of Walpole had laid Nicholas Sutton to rest in the cemetery behind the Unitarian Church. After the service, the Sutton family received mourners at their home. Bronson had insisted they all attend and he received little resistance. Anna entered the Suttons’ parlor looking especially pale in her black dress, her hair knotted in a severe bun at the back of her head. She stood tall and did not cry, but her eyes were empty and Louisa could see she had retracted somewhere deep within herself. The neighbors greeted one another, many stopping to clutch Anna’s hand a moment longer than the others’, acknowledging what she alone had lost. Around midday they returned to Yellow Wood and scattered to separate corners of the house, either to contemplate the shock of the tragedy alone or to simply try to forget.

Louisa stood in the kitchen preparing a simple supper of baked apples, spider corncake steamed in molasses, and succotash. The others insisted they had no appetite, especially Anna, who ended nearly two days of silence to say so. But Louisa knew that as the nervous tension of the day subsided, they would discover they were ravenous. She reflected as she tested a half-cooked butter bean between her teeth that the grief and uncertainties that plagued the human mind drove people back into their bodies almost as a kind of refuge. Noticing the coarseness of wool against the skin, hot sun on the back of the neck, the delicious stretch of the muscle in the arch of the foot—these palpable sensations had distinct beginnings and endings, unlike the swirling chaos of the troubled mind. Louisa knew a full belly would bring unexpected comfort.