Eden's Outcasts (65 page)

That same morning, Louisa wrote a brief note to Anna. She complained of a dull pain and the sensation of a weight of iron pressing down on her head. As she wrote these two letters, Louisa began to feel feverish. She sent for Dr. Green, who expressed concern but offered no specific diagnosis. It occurred to her that some rest might do her good. She settled into her bed and closed her eyes. She opened them once more, just long enough to recognize the worried faces of Dr. Lawrence and her nephew John. Before news of Bronson's death could reach her, Louisa's sleep had deepened into a coma. Anna joined the bedside vigil, but there was nothing to do but wait. Before sunrise on March 6, barely forty hours after Bronson's death, Louisa, too, was dead. When the story of their last conversation circulated and people became aware of Bronson's request that his daughter might come up with him, it was hard not to entertain the macabre idea that Louisa had accepted her father's invitation.

Among her papers, Louisa had left an unpublished poem, simply titled “Free.” Written with the suspicion that her death was not far off, it may have given some comfort to those who found it, reassuring them that Louisa had greeted death as a blessed liberation. It reads in part:

Bronson was buried on the morning of Louisa's death. The cemetery where he is interred, Sleepy Hollow, was itself an offspring of transcendental thinking. A reaction against the somber aesthetics of the barren churchyard, it was intended as a place that would enfold the dead and the bereaved in the redemptive beauty of nature. At Sleepy Hollow's dedication in 1855, Emerson had told those gathered, “The being that can share a thought and a feeling so sublime as confidence in truth is no mushroom. Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.”
⁷¹
No one had believed more confidently in truth than Bronson Alcott. In what he deemed to be its earnest service, he had endured ridicule and poverty. With the innocent faith of a child, he had placed all his trust in a voice that had always summoned him upward. On a cheerless March day, the earth of Sleepy Hollow received his body. He had always been certain that a finer part of him would be welcomed elsewhere.

The mound above Bronson's coffin was still fresh when, on March 8, his daughter joined him. The funeral was held in the family's home at 10 Louisburg Square in Boston, the same place where Bronson's had been conducted two days before. The same mourners were there, and the same minister, Cyrus Bartol, delivered Louisa's eulogy. Then it was time for Louisa's remains to follow those of Bronson to Sleepy Hollow. It is impossible to know the thoughts of Anna, the oldest and now the last of the little women, as she stood on this hill whose soil contained not only so much of the literary life of America, but of her own life as well.

Lulu Nieriker, now eight, had lost a second mother. Her father came to visit her after Louisa's death and, the following year, sent a relative to bring the girl back to Europe. Anna went with them to assure herself of the fitness of her niece's new home. She left Lulu there, satisfied that Ernest Nieriker was “a good man,” whom she respected “more and more every day.” Before her death, Louisa had legally adopted Anna's younger son John, a stratagem that enabled him to inherit her copyrights. These he held as a trustee, dividing the income with Lulu, his brother Fred, and his mother. Anna Alcott Pratt outlived her father and sister by only five years. Her two sons remained in Concord. Fred Pratt died in 1910. John passed away in 1923. Raised in Zurich, Louisa May Nieriker married an Austrian, Emil Rasim. Sheltered by Switzerland's neutrality from the ravages of two world wars, she raised a daughter of her own, was widowed early, and lived to the age of ninety-six.
⁷²

On Spindle Hill, near a sloping crossroads where the traffic goes too fast, a heavy stone marker indicates the spot near which Bronson Alcott was born. It is easy to drive by without seeing it, and not everyone who lives in the neighborhood knows it is there. In Concord, tourists now come to snap pictures and lay flowers in a corner of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery known as Author's Ridge. Apart from Westminster Abbey and Père Lachaise, one doubts that there are many places on earth richer in literary remains. Barely a dozen paces separate Bronson's grave from Henry Thoreau's, and Hawthorne's is nearer still. Emerson lies a short distance away. His monument, a large, white, rough-hewn monolith, is the only one on Author's Ridge that is in any sense imposing. Although more ornate markers were later erected to commemorate both the Thoreau and Alcott families, the original headstones are startling in their simplicity. Thoreau's bears the name “Henry,” and nothing more. The grave of Hawthorne carries only the last name, and there is nothing but the small floral tributes of admirers to distinguish his place from those of various other members of the family. The Alcotts lie in an orderly row along an asphalt-covered path beneath sheltering oaks and pines. The stones are engraved only with dates and initials. “A.B.A.,” the good but enigmatic patriarch, is on the far right. Next to him is “A.M.A.,” the sometimes angry but always loyal wife and mother. Then come three daughters, in the order in which they left the world, “E.S.A.,” “M.A.N.,” and lastly “L.M.A.” Anna, buried as a Pratt, not an Alcott, is a few strides back from the path, alongside her beloved John. The earth beneath one of the stones contains nothing; although Louisa had hoped to one day bring May's remains back to Concord, she never succeeded. Bronson's and Abba's youngest girl, perhaps the boldest adventurer of all, never came home. With this exception, the family is still close together. Of the five who are represented in this neat little row, only Louisa has any additional personal memorial: a narrow marble rectangle that says “Louisa M. Alcott” and a bronze-colored medallion identifying her as a veteran of the United States Army. No reference is made to any other accomplishment of this astonishing family.

To know what this family did accomplish, one must descend the hill and walk along Lexington Road to Orchard House. The Hillside Chapel, home of the Concord School of Philosophy, still stands on the property, and each summer it still welcomes scholars who gather to discuss the Alcott legacy. But something deeper can be learned from looking at the children who never stop coming to Bronson's and Louisa's house. They are eager, hushed, and wide-eyed. They come to see something they cannot describe but most certainly feel, something that comes neither precisely from the Marches nor the Alcotts, but is perhaps an idea of how life and families ought to be. Louisa once wrote to an admirer, “To all of us comes[a] desire for something to hold by, look up to, and believe in.”
⁷³
In the eyes of the children who come to Orchard House, it is possible to see not only this desire, but also its partial satisfaction. Louisa May Alcott, who poured her life's experience into works of fiction, never wrote the great book for adults of which she thought she was capable. Her youngest sister left a number of attractive canvases and some whimsical drawings on her bedroom wall. Few people know the other two sisters as anything more than characters in a book. Bronson Alcott spent his life chasing a nameless, evanescent ideal and filling up massive journals that only scholars care to read. Were it not for the pen of her gifted daughter, Abba Alcott, though better known than most of the nineteenth-century women who toiled ceaselessly for their families, would have left a principally invisible legacy. However, through some strange spiritual alchemy, the novelist, her sisters, and the parents who raised them created something extraordinary. Louisa May Nieriker summarized it best in an interview she gave in the last year of her life. She said, “The Alcotts were
large
.”
⁷⁴
The largeness endures. Bronson Alcott expected the world to be miraculous. Talk with anyone who has read and loved
Little Women
, and you may conclude that he was right after all.

To the extent that a written page permits knowledge of a different time and departed souls, this book has tried to reveal them. However, as Bronson Alcott learned to his bemusement, the life written is never the same as the life lived. Journals and letters tell much. Biographers can sift the sands as they think wisest. But the bonds that two persons share consist also of encouraging words, a reassuring hand on a tired shoulder, fleeting smiles, and soon-forgotten quarrels. These contacts, so indispensable to existence, leave no durable trace. As writers, as reformers, and as inspirations, Bronson and Louisa still exist for us. Yet this existence, on whatever terms we may experience it, is no more than a shadow when measured against the way they existed for each other.