Eden's Outcasts (35 page)

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.”

B
RONSON 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.”
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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.”
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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 relatives 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

Both she and her father wrote poems to help them come to terms with the loss. Louisa wrote hers some days before Lizzie's death, and Bronson wrote his shortly after the end. He copied both of their lyrics into his journal. A decade later, Louisa rewrote her poem, with some revisions, into the text of
Little Women
. When she did so, however, she omitted the second stanza:

In this verse, Lizzie becomes what she never was in life: the leader of the family, the one who bravely goes ahead of the rest to prepare a place for all. Christ's promise that the last shall be first lies just beneath the surface of these words. As Louisa reflected on Lizzie's superior fitness to become an angel, she reflected as well on her own weaker qualifications. Thus, in the poem, Lizzie becomes not only a leader but a teacher, one whose remembered example will instill her older sister with the patience and courage that Louisa felt she so desperately lacked.

Bronson's poem was less sentimental and a good deal more frightening. Instead of focusing on the virtues of his lost daughter, he reflected guiltily on his inability, even in her last moments, to supply his child's most urgent needs:

Lizzie's dying plea to have her pain extinguished, as well as her final turning away from him, haunted Bronson. He was not merely the cloud-borne, insouciant dreamer that his detractors said he was, and all his philosophical detachment could not insulate him from this loss.

The day after the funeral was Anna's twenty-seventh birthday, a welcome reminder that life would go on. In the morning, the family shared a somber breakfast, and that evening they exchanged “pleasing memories of the dear one.”
¹⁹
Anna was given Lizzie's desk as a present, a gesture that emphasized continuity instead of disjunction. The next day, a workman named McKee and his crew arrived to begin the renovation of Orchard House. At the beginning of April, in order to better supervise the construction, the family took up temporary residence next door in a wing of Hillside, which the Hawthornes, still in England, graciously provided for them.

With the passing of Lizzie, who had taken comfort during her last days in gathering the family around her and murmuring, “All here,” a source of emotional cohesion was lost.
²⁰
Whereas Lizzie's illness had brought the family closer together, her death temporarily had the opposite effect. May departed for Boston, and Anna went to stay with her friends the Pratts. Instinctively, they were seeking distance. Although Louisa averred that she did not miss Lizzie as much as she had expected, it was hard to deal with so many departures at once. Even her mother and father, though physically present, seemed distant, immersed as they were in other concerns—Abba in her memories and Bronson in the renovation. Whatever the many discomforts Louisa had known, loneliness had seldom been one of them. Now, it bore down on her with oppressive force.

During these months at Hillside, Bronson sometimes strayed into the upstairs study that had once been his, where he experienced deep feelings of nostalgia. He took down some books from Hawthorne's shelves and, to his surprise, discovered that their tastes barely overlapped. Everything in the room seemed both familiar and strange. Here, he had conversed with Fuller, Thoreau, and Emerson. Here, too, he had held sessions of discussion and discovery with his own children, in the only school the world could not deny him. The room also reminded him of Lizzie. “Then my dear departed child was here,” he lamented, “around whom so much of my home delights are gathered.”
²¹
If the renovations of Orchard House had not kept him so busy, Bronson's broodings about the past might have overwhelmed him. Already, he loved the house. “Standing quietly apart from the roadside,” leaving space “for the overshadowing elms to lend their dignity and beauty to the scene,” Orchard House delighted Bronson with its porches, gables, and chimney tops. It was more, he thought, than he deserved or would have dared to wish for.
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