Eden's Outcasts (43 page)

Any disagreements about whether Louisa should be promptly taken home were settled in tragic fashion on January 20, when the matron, Mrs. Ropes, died. The doctors consented at once to Louisa's departure, but heavy rains prevented any movement until the following day. Dorothea Dix herself appeared at the train station to see Louisa off and present her with gifts. Bronson, who had more pressing matters on his mind, vaguely described them as “good things for Louisa's comfort.”
⁸⁰

They traveled all day and through the night. On the evening of January 22 they arrived in Boston too late to catch the train for Concord. They spent the night with relatives of Abba. By the time they reached Orchard House the next day, Louisa was not in her right mind. She had the impression that the house had lost its roof and that no one there wanted to see her. The exhaustion and illness of the previous six weeks had changed her so profoundly that Sophia Hawthorne said she would not have recognized her. For his part, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher that the fever looked very threatening and that he feared she would not pull through. Lying in her great mahogany sleigh bed, barely conscious of the anxious stir around her, Louisa spent the next two days adrift between sleep and delirium.

In a journal entry describing her journey to Georgetown, Louisa had called the moment “a solemn time, but I'm glad to live in it; and am sure it will do me good whether I come out alive or dead.”
⁸¹
She very nearly had come out dead, but she also had lived more intensely and with more visible purpose than she ever had before. But as Dr. Bartlett made his daily visits and her family hoped for the best, it was not clear that she would live to turn her experiences and her purpose to account.

T
HREE WEEKS PASSED BEFORE LOUISA CAME FULLY OUT OF
her delirium. Well into February she struggled through “the crisis of typhoid,” as Abba described it to her brother Samuel. She added, “Poor Louy…left us a brave handsome woman…and is returned to us almost a wreck of body and mind.”
¹
Abba also shared her worst fears with Sophia Hawthorne. Sophia wrote that, during those anxious weeks, her only activity was finding ways to help Louisa and the other Alcotts through the ordeal.
²
Emerson, as always, lent support, this time by placing in Abba's kitchen “a nice strong woman” to do the housework. However, Abba wrote, “While I am able to move I will not have a nurse. It would not relieve my anxiety, and might hinder my own action.”
³
As Abba observed, Louisa's condition demanded great care and judgment. Whatever aid the neighbors might give, there was much that the family dared not entrust to outsiders.

Bronson, Abba, and May looked after Louisa in shifts around the clock, trying to soothe her distracted mind and searching her discolored face for any promising change. Only Anna, living some twenty miles away in Chelsea and now in the advanced stages of her pregnancy, did not take part in looking after Louisa. From a distance, however, Anna, too, followed the patient's progress; during the first week of Louisa's convalescence, Bronson sent Anna continual updates on Louisa's condition. His letters relayed the facts in a direct manner, but they also emphasized the optimistic reports of the doctors and the hope of a speedy recovery. It is reasonable to suppose that he wished to avoid disturbing his pregnant daughter's tranquility by painting too grim a picture. Even so, Bronson admitted that the trip home had been almost all Louisa could withstand. She had, he told Anna, “required all her strength and courage to come through.” She would still need all her patience to recover from her illness and fatigue.
⁴
Bronson's journal entries, so frequently full of metaphysical musings, were now terse and factual: “Wait on L.” “Watch and wait on our patient” “Sit with Louisa into the night, reading from Gospels and Herder.” A week went by before he mentioned getting any rest.
⁵

The vigil was exhausting and occasionally terrifying. Abba told Samuel, “Her mind wanders and she lies whole hours muttering incoherent things, then going off into long slumbers, or [arising] in a panic of terror, flying off the bed in terrible confusion.”
⁶
When Louisa tossed about on her bed, Abba would try to calm her by saying, “Lie still, my dear.” On hearing this, however, Louisa would look at her with frightened, unrecognizing eyes. Once, Louisa rose from her bed and made an impassioned speech that sounded strangely like Latin. Only later was she able to explain that, in her delusional state, she had decided that her mother was “a stout, handsome Spaniard, dressed in black velvet with very soft hands,” whom Louisa believed she had married. From the lips of this dreaded spouse, the gentle command to lie still was far from comforting. He seemed always to be coming at her through windows and out of closets. When she had made her pseudo-Latin plea, she thought she was making an appeal before the Pope.
⁷

Louisa's other fever dreams were no less vivid. She imagined she was in Baltimore and a mob was breaking down a door to get her. In other fancies she was “being hung for a witch, burned, stoned, and otherwise maltreated.” Two of the nurses and a doctor from the Union Hotel Hospital tempted her to join them in worshipping the Devil. One night, hearing a crash coming from Louisa's room, May rushed in to find her sister on the floor. Louisa sharply upbraided May, asking her how she could have left her alone with so many men. Louisa thought she was still at the hospital, surrounded by wounded soldiers who refused either to die or get better.
⁸
It is something of a relief to realize that Louisa herself did not regard her visions seriously and recorded them only because she found them entertaining. Having never been gravely ill before, she found the experience “all new & very interesting.”
⁹
Although Bronson wrote that Louisa dreaded the return of the fever fits that came upon her “twice in the twenty four hours,” she herself wrote later that she had enjoyed her fever “very much, at least the crazy part.”
¹⁰
Undoubtedly she was the only one who found her hallucinations amusing.

Abba, all but exhausted from watching and worrying, could not contain her rage in response to the misfortunes that continued to beset her family. Their sufferings, it seemed to her, defied any earthly understanding of proportion or justice. Although Dr. Bartlett assured her that the signs were favorable, Abba no longer had any faith in medicine, and she seemed about to lose a profounder faith as well. Haunted by her experience with Lizzie, she confessed, “I hate Drs. and all their nonsense.” However, she added, “the efficacy of good nursing I do know and appreciate and believe if she is to be saved from violent death or the stern ravages of chronic ailments, it will be by faithful vigilant care.” This, Abba vowed, her beloved Louisa would have “if all the rest of the world goes to the dogs.” Indeed, she had had enough of the world and the way it had repaid her efforts, as well as those of her husband and children, to be charitable, generous, and kind. On the subject of the thankless earth, she wrote:

But the sacrifice of Louisa was not demanded. The changes were imperceptible at first, but gradually, as Julian Hawthorne put it, Louisa was climbing painfully out of the grave toward life.
¹²
On February 2, Anna's father-in-law came to take Bronson's place by the sickbed so that the latter could give a series of conversations in Boston. Two days later, Bronson returned to discover that the fever had finally broken. Louisa was now sleeping more soundly and, when awake, impatiently asked for food. Two weeks after Louisa's return, the worst was apparently over. As snow fell on Concord, Bronson sat with her parts of the night, reading and conversing. By the middle of the month, Louisa was holding up her end of these conversations. She remembered very little of her ordeal. The face she saw in the mirror was so large-eyed and emaciated that she did not recognize herself. Her first attempts at walking brought only frustration; she cried because her legs “wouldn't go.”
¹³
Though she was improving, the nights seemed horribly long, and the days were idle and fretful. For such a naturally active woman, the waiting for strength to return was almost intolerable.

She felt a great indignity, too, on discovering that her doctors had shaved her head. She lamented the loss of her fine hair, a yard and a half in length and, in her view, her “one beauty.” Five years later, in
Little Women
, Louisa was to use another illness during wartime as the reason for a similar sacrifice. As Mr. March lies dangerously ill in a Washington hospital, Jo raises twenty-five dollars to contribute toward his comfort and safe return by selling her hair. Echoing Louisa's journal, Jo's sacrificed hair is mourned as her only beautifying feature. Nevertheless, as Louisa conceded in her journal, “a wig outside is better than a loss of wits inside.”
¹⁴

With Louisa on the mend, Bronson was able to resume his conversations with a clear conscience. His first efforts were unsteady, owing to his lingering exhaustion from his long vigils at his daughter's bedside. Louisa observed, “He was tired out with taking care of me, poor old gentleman, & typhus was not inspiring.”
¹⁵
However, his conversational tactic of linking general concepts and qualities to individuals was starting to work well. His talks on Hawthorne the Novelist, Thoreau the Naturalist, and Emerson the Rhapsodist received favorable notices in the papers. One observer wrote, “Mr. Alcott is one of a class of thinkers who have done more for our literature and politics and religion than any that America has yet seen.”
¹⁶
Although listeners sometimes complained that his characterizations lacked sufficient variety and that some shades of personality completely escaped him, they were still intrigued by his personal reminiscences, which were genially related and never marred by “the sting of gossip.”
¹⁷
Bronson himself had concluded that a signal failing of the transcendentalist movement had been its insistence on cosmic universality and its refusal to take adequate account of the person. In a conversation he gave in Boston on March 23, he reflected, “Impersonality—Law, Right, Justice, Truth—these were the central ideas; but where the Power was in which they inhered, how they were related to one another, what was to give them vitality—these questions were quite neglected, and left out of sight.”
¹⁸
Bronson quietly resolved never again to ignore the individual. Although his prose would never lose its tendency to stray into the ether, his new appreciation of the personal signaled a welcome change in his writing habits.

Louisa's recovery and the critical success of her father's conversations were only the first of the great joys that came to Orchard House that season. On March 28, only six days after Louisa was well enough to leave her room for the first time, she joined her mother and May in looking out on a snow-covered landscape, waiting for Bronson to bring some eagerly anticipated news. Late that night, Bronson, “all wet and white” from the storm, burst through the front door. Waving his bag aloft, he cried out his great tidings: Anna had given birth to a healthy boy. In unison, the three women opened their mouths and, by Louisa's account, screamed for about two minutes. Then Abba began to cry, Louisa to laugh, and May to pepper her father with questions about the baby's weight, length, and coloring that he, in his own distracted excitement, could not answer. Red-faced and damp, Bronson could do little more than smile and repeat in a besotted voice, “Anna's boy, yes, yes, Anna's boy.”
¹⁹

Two days later, Bronson was still in ecstasies when he wrote to congratulate his firstborn daughter. His letter contained a hint of condolence; Anna had been convinced that she was carrying a girl, whom she had decided to name Louisa Catherine. She had given no thought at all to boys' names, and some days passed before her son acquired the name of Frederick Alcott Pratt. Bronson reassured Anna, saying, “Boys are blessings too.” The rest of his condolences, however, were less congenially phrased. He confessed that he had wished for a boy years ago, when Anna herself was born. Moreover, he added, he would have found it “a hard joke” if someone had told him that no boys were to join the family until thirty-three years after his “first disappointment.”
²⁰
Well intentioned as Bronson's remarks undoubtedly were, one can only sympathize with Anna. Bringing forth her first child only to be called a “disappointment” by the man whose approval she most coveted, she may well have thought that the harder joke was on her.

March ended with both Anna and baby in fine condition and Louisa evidently on the road to health. Unfortunately, Louisa's convalescence was not all that it appeared. During her recovery, Louisa complained to Bronson of a perpetually sore throat. She also found herself “longing to eat, [but with] no mouth to do it with, mine being so sore and full of all manner of queer sensations it was nothing but a plague.”
²¹
Abba had also noted to her brother Samuel, “Her throat and teeth and tongue are in the most tender and sensitive state.”
²²
Louisa's sore throat and strange oral sensations were the results not of her disease but of the treatment she had received from the Union Hotel Hospital physicians. Her doctors, following what they considered sound practice in cases of typhoid, had given Louisa heavy, repeated doses of mercurous chloride, a compound more commonly known as calomel. In so doing, they had permanently poisoned her.

For the next seven years, Louisa had no idea what was wrong with her. Unaware of the toxins that had lodged permanently in her system, she had no accurate explanation for her searing headaches, her chronic weariness, and the intermittent pain in her legs. She had no good name for the condition that had stolen her youthful vigor and was later to disable her for months at a time. She attributed her symptoms to neuralgia or—not implausibly in view of her writing habits—to overwork. It was not until 1870 that, while traveling through France, she happened on an English physician who finally explained that she was suffering the effects of her erstwhile “cure.” Louisa was, in effect, a lingering casualty of the Civil War, and the last twenty-five years of her life were the history of a glacially slow mortal illness.
²³
Except for the fledgling drafts of
Moods
, all of the work for which she is now remembered was written after the causes of her death had been set in motion.

Until the spring of 1863, Louisa had never had a reason to doubt her physical strength. As a tomboy, she had run and played tirelessly. As a robust young woman, she had always relied on her seemingly inexhaustible stamina. While she had lain in the throes of fever and mercury poisoning, that stamina had saved her life. However, the struggle had weakened her permanently. Julian Hawthorne was aghast at the change. He could barely reconcile the “hollow-eyed, almost fleshless wreck [with] the Louisa we had known and loved.”
²⁴
It seemed that the alteration had gone far beyond the merely physical. Emotionally, it was as if a veil now separated her from the world. Occasionally, it would slip aside, and “a flash of humor or a shaft of wit would come out of the shadow.”
²⁵
At other times, however, it seemed that her illness and the haunting memories of the hospital had marked her with an indelible air of gravity and melancholy. Louisa's six-week errand of mercy had exacted a staggering cost.