Eden's Outcasts (64 page)

Jo's Boys
is noteworthy, however, for its elaboration of Louisa's ideas on women's rights, and the book serves to correct the reversals of feminine ambition that Roberts Brothers and her conservative readership had initially argued her into adding at the close of
Little Women.
In
Jo's Boys
, despite the mutterings of some prematurely crusty young alumni, Plumfield has become fully coeducational. It has also added a college, committed to the right of all sexes, colors, creeds, and classes to the best possible education. Most significantly, Nan, a girl who boldly breaches the gender barrier at Plumfield and who acts as Jo's spiritual successor in
Little Men
and
Jo's Boys
, deftly fends off the inept romantic advances of Tommy Bangs and remains happily unmarried. Having escaped the snares of matrimony, she is able to preserve her independence and achieve her dream of becoming a doctor. Jo's earlier concessions to the social status quo eventually result in happier, more enlightened lives for all, both female and male.

Although Meg's daughter Josie anticipates Billie Jean King by matching the boys stroke for stroke on the tennis court, the juxtaposing of young male and female scholars is in no other instance competitive. Alcott's educational ideal does not focus on the winning of personal honor. Rather, it calls for each person, male and female, to cultivate his or her talents without regard to sex, so that each may optimally serve the community. At Plumfield, stigma attaches neither to the young woman who studies ancient Greek nor to the one who is happiest in the college's sewing circle. To be useful is to be blessed; all other considerations are beside the point. In her holding that all honest, useful work is equally valid, Louisa remained true to the ideals of her mentor Emerson, who, as William James observed, believed that “no position is insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine.”
⁵⁶
Louisa was hostile to any limitation on women's opportunities. Nevertheless, she would have been mystified by any feminist credo that implicitly valued traditionally masculine pursuits above the conventionally feminine. In her view, it was idiotic to force a born physician to stay home and bake pies, yet it was equally foolish to disparage the person who loved to bake pies, and baked them well. Louisa does not hesitate to enlist the opinion of Bronson's alter ego in support of her egalitarian views. Mr. March rejects the idea that women must always submit to men as “the old-fashioned belief.” While admitting that changing old attitudes can take time, Mr. March states his own impression that “the woman's hour has struck; and…the boys must do their best, for the girls are abreast now, and may reach the goal first.”
⁵⁷

The changes are manifest in Jo herself, who has not only been a successful mother to her own children and countless others, but has also won accolades as an author. Like
Little Women
, Jo's breakthrough opus is a hastily scribbled family story, written with no great hope of success. To Jo's astonishment, the book “sailed with a fair wind…straight into public favor, and came home heavily laden with an unexpected cargo of gold and glory.”
⁵⁸
Jo's triumphs in both domestic and professional life appear to repudiate the apparent message of
Little Women
that one must choose among one's satisfactions. In her last appearance, Jo March, who had once bravely martyred herself for the greater good, is resurrected as a woman who has been able to have it all.

While writing
Jo's Boys
, Louisa had worried that her young audience, after fifteen years, might have outgrown its interest in the March family. To the contrary, she discovered that her first generation of readers was now raising children of its own, equally ready to be captivated. Louisa, however, had had her fill of the March family and their protégés. As the manuscript approached completion, she sounded faintly murderous when she wrote to tell Thomas Niles of her desire to “finish off these dreadful boys.” She closed the same letter saying “Sha'n't we be glad when it is done?”
⁵⁹

To vent her frustration, Louisa used odd moments in
Jo's Boys
to take satirical vengeance on her admiring audience. In “Jo's Last Scrape,” a chapter that is both the comic highlight of the book and the author's earnest plea for privacy, entire boarding schools descend on Jo's home in search of mementos. A literary charlatan asks her to affix her name to his manuscript, and another eccentric acolyte demands both a pair of Jo's stockings to weave into a rug and the opportunity to catch a grasshopper in the author's garden. When a critic suggested that the chapter was too personal and should have been omitted, Louisa replied that there was no other way in which the rising generation of autograph fiends could be reached so well and pleasantly. With “a little good-natured ridicule,” she hoped to teach them “not to harass the authors whom they hold in thier [
sic
] regard.”
⁶⁰
Despite the lighthearted tone of “Jo's Last Scrape,” Louisa was only partly able to conceal the annoyance she felt toward the army of juvenile readers who have reduced Mrs. Bhaer, as they had reduced Louisa herself, to “only a literary nurse maid who provides moral pap for the young.” The phrase sounds more like W. C. Fields than Louisa May Alcott. It is a bitter self-description.

When she reached the last page of
Jo's Boys
, Louisa confessed her strong temptation to polish her manuscript off “with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.”
⁶¹
She dated her preface to the book July 4, 1886, declaring once and for all her independence from the March family and the task of writing juvenile novels. Orders for
Jo's Boys
were immediately brisk, and Roberts Brothers printed thirty thousand copies in the first two months of its publication. Louisa could count on the lordly sum of twenty thousand dollars in publishing income for the year. Having sent Lulu with Anna to the seaside for the summer, Louisa had plenty of quiet now. Despite medical warnings that the effort of finishing
Jo's Boys
might dangerously tax her strength, she found herself surprisingly invigorated. She hoped that, at last, she would be free to write serious books for mature readers.

Her hopes proved premature. The ideas, it seems, crowded in too fast to be sorted out, and even with Lulu absent, the demands of keeping the house in order kept her too busy. Most disappointingly, however, the improvements in Louisa's health and emotional outlook proved transitory. By mid-September, all her apparent gains in strength and enthusiasm had evaporated, brought to a sudden end by a round of headaches and dizzy spells. She was “much discouraged,” she wrote, and life again seemed “a burden with constant pain & weariness.”
⁶²
Her journal entries, ever more fragmentary, noted some days of comfort but told more often of coughs, a pounding head, and a rebellious stomach. The doctors firmly advised against another full-length book, and Louisa could choose only to submit.

Her steadfast hope now came from God, as she explained in a letter she wrote that autumn to Florence Phillips, a young woman whom she had met on one of her excursions to Nonquitt. Some, Louisa acknowledged, might know God through an epiphany of joy, but the God who mattered to her now had been revealed to her through poverty and pain. The last veil that had separated her from divine love had been pushed aside by sorrow, when her mother had died. When she cried for Abba, she knew that God was very near. Of her firm faith, she wrote, “It needs no logic, no preaching to make me
sure
of it. The instinct is there & following it as fast as one can brings the fact home at last in a way that cannot be doubted.”
⁶³
Her God was very much like the characters who had played the part of ministering angels in her novels: quietly present, sharing burdens, not banishing pain but making it sweeter and easier to withstand. If not restoring health, He at least might provide patience and peace.

There was, however, a kind of repose that the Lord could not provide and that Louisa needed to seek for herself. It was time for her to give up caring for Bronson and Lulu. Dr. Rhoda Lawrence, who had used Louisa's money eleven years earlier to found a nursing home in Roxbury and who now came to give her benefactor therapeutic massages, invited Louisa to sample the fruits of her own charity. Louisa May Alcott, now fifty-four, began the year 1887 as a patient in Dr. Lawrence's convalescent home on Dunreath Place, Roxbury.

Bronson remained with Anna at 10 Louisburg Square, a very fashionable address in Boston. He was comfortable and alert but still incapable of meaningful work. He had clear memories of all his old friends, and he took pleasure in being paid social visits and being in the company of his family. However, his right side had never regained normal function. Just how much progress he made in learning how to write with his left hand is unclear, but the issue was rendered moot by his mental state. Although he could carry on simple conversations, he was unable to express complex ideas. Once a week, attendants carried him to a waiting carriage for a drive around town. His greatest joy remained his books, including, Louisa noted, the ones that he had written himself. He kept these near him constantly and loved to boast that he had written four of them after the age of seventy.
⁶⁴
The greatest comforts of all, however, may have been the books that only Bronson himself could fully appreciate: the sixty-odd volumes of journals that, but for the tomes from the early forties lost in Albany, gave such a complete record of an eventful and contemplative life. Indeed, Bronson had more than his journals to remind him of old times. He also had kept a collection of books that he called his “autobiographical collections.” These were scrapbooks of memorabilia collected over the course of decades: newspaper clippings, advertisements for his conversations, almost every scrap of paper imaginable pertaining to himself and his family. Although his waking hours were bright with memories, Bronson slept much of the day now. One day, he looked up from a newspaper and remarked, “Beecher has gone now; all go but me.” He was now one of the last living representatives of a generation that had given a new conscience to America. Once Louisa took up residence in Dr. Lawrence's rest home, she seldom saw her father. During 1887, under doctor's orders mandating complete rest, Louisa spent weeks at a time without leaving the home, relying on the ever-faithful Anna for news of the outside world. When she did go to visit her father, it was with the constant awareness that
this
might be the last meeting before he slipped away.

As to Louisa's own prognosis, the doctors were more optimistic, though one may reasonably question the absoluteness of their candor. One of the many physicians who took his turn at trying to cure her was Dr. Milbrey Green, who based his therapy on plant remedies. Louisa was as much attracted to his common sense and positive attitude as to these botanical concoctions. In a letter to Anna, she transcribed the following conversation with Green:

Louisa both hoped and did not hope. Like her father after his stroke, she was bent on recovery. She was willing to try any regimen of baths, exotic herbs, or rest cure that might give her the years of health that the doctors promised her. Dr. Green had said that one or two years of patient conformity with his instructions would bring twenty years of productive life. The plain appearance of things, however, contradicted the bold predictions. In September 1887, she noted her weight as 136 pounds, already low for a woman of her large frame. By February 27, 1888, the figure was down to 113. She jauntily observed, “Now we will see how much I gain in the next 6 [months],” but it was getting harder to deny what was happening to her.
⁶⁶
Her life had become a ceaseless round of reporting symptoms, absorbing medications, and experiencing pain.

On March 1, Louisa went to visit Bronson and Anna at Louisburg Square. She brought flowers, and her father smelled them gratefully. Smiling up from his pillow, Bronson looked sweet and feeble. As Louisa knelt at his bedside, the dying philosopher made an eerie request. Noticing his benign countenance, Louisa said, “Father, here is your Louy. What are you thinking of as you lie here so happily?” He took her hand in his and, with a gesture toward the ceiling, replied, “I am going
up. Come with me
.” Instead of being aghast at the suggestion, Louisa replied gently, “I wish I could.”
⁶⁷
Her father kissed her. “Come soon,” he said. When they parted company, Louisa had much to occupy her mind—enough, apparently, to make her forget to put on her wrap as she stepped out into the late winter air.

Three days later, around eleven in the morning, Amos Bronson Alcott died. As he slipped away, Louisa was across town at her nursing home on Dunreath Place, unaware that her father's end had come. She wrote a letter to her friend Maria Porter, who had sent her a photograph of May. Knowing that Bronson was near death, Mrs. Porter had expressed her hope that Louisa would find the same strength to bear her father's passing that had been hers when Abba had died. Louisa replied that sorrow had no place in such circumstances and that death was never terrible when it came, “as now, in the likeness of a friend.” She would be glad, she said, “when the dear old man falls asleep after this long & innocent life.”
⁶⁸
Over long decades, the father and daughter had judged each other often, and not always in the most lenient terms. However, the last adjective Louisa ever wrote with reference to her father was “innocent.” If ever he had wronged her, those wrongs were now forgotten. In a postscript to Mrs. Porter, Louisa wrote that she expected to spend another year at “Saint's Rest,” the name she had given to Dr. Lawrence's house. Thereafter, she added, “I am promised twenty years of health. I don't want so many, & have no idea I shall see them. But as I don't live for myself I hold on for others, and shall find time to die some day, I hope.”
⁶⁹