Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Laddie’s willingness to share a keyboard with a Russian at first surprised Louisa and eventually won her admiration. Laddie had spoken to her not only of his own mistreatment during the rebellion, but also of how tsarist troops had massacred a crowd numbering in the hundreds for singing the Polish national hymn. Touched by the story, Louisa asked him to play the song at the piano. Laddie demurred; he did not wish to offend the Russian guests at the pension, especially the irritable baron. “Then play it,” she urged him. “He dare not forbid it here, and I should rather enjoy that little insult to your bitter enemy.” Laddie, however, was good-natured but firm as he gave Louisa a lesson in manners: “Ah, Mademoiselle, it is true we are enemies, but we are also gentlemen.”30

  Laddie shared confidences with Louisa and slipped little notes under her door, which he referred to as chapters in the great history that they would write together. Their dictionaries and grammar books became serviceable go-betweens, supplying a prim and respectable reason for meeting but easy enough to cast aside when the mood called for games and dancing instead of conjugations. As she and Laddie wandered the shore of the lake, they made splendid plans for the future. It is hard to imagine, though, what plans they could realistically have entertained. For the fiery American woman, well into her thirties and her fortunes still unmade, any candid look into the future must have included much hard work with uncertain prospects of reward. For the gentle, infirm Pole, the word “future” could never have been spoken without a hint of hollowness. It was the present that these two must look to. There would not always be time, but there was time now for walks in the chateau garden, for taking a sailboat out onto the lake, and for wondering why time must always go on.

  November 29, Louisa’s birthday, was wild and windswept, “very like me,” she observed, “in its fitful changes of sunshine and shade.”31 Thousands of miles away, her father was turning sixty-six, precisely twice her own age. She thought of him and felt a trifle empty at having to miss the modest ceremony that they always had on that day. Anna Weld brightened the day by giving her a painting of the nearby castle of Chillon. Laddie, with nothing tangible to give, played her a concert and wished her “All good and happiness on earth and a high place in heaven.” Louisa admitted to herself that, despite the pleasant times with her father, she usually felt sad on her birthday. Today, however, was an exception; she was happy and hopeful and enjoyed everything with unusual relish. It was true that she felt rather old for thirty-three, but as she gratefully acknowledged, there was much in her life to keep her young.32

  The romance lasted into December. Louisa and Miss Weld had intended to move on to Nice earlier, but an outbreak of cholera in that city had combined with their current sense of comfort to dampen their enthusiasm for the trip. When they at last decided to press on, the farewell festival that the pension organized in their honor was not sufficient to dispel the melancholy. Laddie traveled with them as far as Lausanne and then, kissing their hands, he bade them a disconsolate farewell. For Louisa and Miss Weld, the journey to the Mediterranean was a sullen passage, its discomforts perhaps sharpened by the fact, now apparent, that Miss Weld, too, had been attracted to Laddie and considered him her particular favorite. At some point, Louisa went back to the page of her journal in which she had initially commented on her “little romance” with Laddie and scratched out what she had written with such vigor that she destroyed the paper. It is the only place in her surviving journals where she canceled an entry with such violence. Next to the remaining portion of the entry, she wrote, “Couldn’t be.”33 However, it was easier to efface Laddie from her journal than from her memory. She wrote about him in The Independent and years later in a story titled “My Boys” in a collection of sketches she called Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag. In these factual reminiscences of him, Louisa noticeably avoided the word “love.” Yet there is no better word for what she felt.

  Throughout most of her stay in Nice, which lasted until May 1866, Louisa’s state of mind was at a pronounced variance with the splendor of her surroundings. Having come this far, Miss Weld no longer desired to travel, and her time with Laddie had taught her little about bearing illness with good grace. Louisa could not fail to appreciate the beauty of the promenade that curved gently along the bay and played host each day to an array of handsome carriages and fashionable people. However, the well-stocked shops, the picturesque buildings, and the profusion of roses, orange trees, and palms failed to lift her spirits. She was homesick, and even if the days brought perfect weather, they brought no activity that Louisa found either pleasant or interesting. Making matters worse, Laddie sent them letters that expressed a despairing state of mind, and his laments struck Miss Weld as deeply unsettling. Louisa wrote in her journal, somewhat enigmatically, “I could not advise them to be happy as they desired, so everything went wrong & both worried.”34 Although Louisa was occasionally able to escape for a walk among the vineyards and olive trees, the overall situation was oppressive and untenable. Recollecting her Christmas in Nice, she later wrote, “With friends, health, & a little money, how jolly one might be in this perpetual summer.”35 But these three ingredients were wanting. By February, she could no longer bear the prospect of catering indefinitely to Miss Weld’s whims and frailties. She gave notice that she would quit her post as the latter’s companion at the beginning of May. Leaving Anna in the care of a maid and a substitute companion, Louisa climbed aboard the Paris-bound train on May 1 feeling she had performed an act of self-emancipation, long overdue. For the rest of her life, she never again accepted nonliterary employment.

  When she disembarked in Paris, she was not prepared for the surprise that greeted her. There, in the crowd, waving his familiar blue-and-white cap, was Laddie. He had come to Paris to reunite with some of his old student compatriots and to teach music until conditions were ripe for a return to Poland. By some stratagem, he had found out the names of the people with whom Louisa was going to stay in Paris and had learned from them the details of her itinerary. The sight of Laddie was thoroughly agreeable to her; it was evident to her now that his romantic gestures meant nothing more to him than a jolly amusement, fun and flattering perhaps, but in no sense serious. His amorous triflings were a sign of immaturity, but this very immaturity had been largely responsible for her feelings toward him from the start. In at least one measure of adulthood, however, he may have been her superior. He, perhaps more than she, had always grasped the impossibility of their situation and had been the first to realize that, where a deeper attachment was out of the question, flirtation and frivolity might be pleasing ends in themselves. Louisa had only sixteen days to spend in Paris before pushing on to London. The time was long enough, though, for her to say later, “We had a happy life together.”36 Their days were filled with sightseeing, long walks in the Bois de Boulogne, and listening to afternoon music in the Tuileries Gardens. One form of enjoyment was shunned, however. Laddie was unable to go to evening dances or concert halls, for fear that the close and stuffy atmosphere would harm his lungs.

  To Louisa’s thinking, the difference in their ages allayed improper suspicions rather than inciting them. She told readers of her Scrap-Bag, “My twelve years’ seniority made our adventures quite proper.”37 While admitting that Wisniewski was “captivating and romantic,” she emphasized the respectable distance between them by classifying him as a “boy.”38 The nickname she gave him, “Laddie,” also underscored his boyishness. A second nickname was Ladislas’s own suggestion. Back home, his mother had tenderly called him “Varjo.” He asked that Louisa use this name too. During their time in Paris, he grew more playfully daring, encouraging her to call him not only Varjo but “ma drogha,” which, he explained without a hint of mischief, meant “my friend” in Polish. Louisa innocently consented. Only after the phrase excited chuckles and knowing glances from Laddie’s Polish friends did he reveal that she had been calling him “my darling” in the most tender fashion. Evidently, Louisa’s “boy” took great amusement from the ambiguities of their
connection.

  The significant emotional attractions in Louisa’s life had always in them some spirit of charity, which both enabled her to justify her passion and to maintain a protective sense of hierarchy in the relationship. Alf Whitman had lost his mother. The soldiers at the Union Hotel Hospital were wounded and dependent. Laddie was an expatriate freedom fighter who appeared to be mortally ill. To describe all of them, Louisa resorted to the phrase “my boys.” In her journal, she called her time with Laddie “a little romance.”39 Yet it was also clear that she could not allow her feelings toward him to be merely pleasurable or self-indulgent. Laddie’s brave sacrifice of his health and his subsequent need for help and care gave Louisa an opportunity to sympathize and to give, and this fact mattered to her every bit as much as his physical beauty and well-mannered charm. These sympathies were genuine, but they were also a way to keep the little romance little.

  Carolyn Heilbrun rightly warns that to read Louisa May Alcott with a consciousness of Freud is to enter at once into problematic territory.40 Sentiments like those Alcott expresses regarding Laddie come to us as from an Eden of the psyche; they are messages that we, with our own cultural understandings of human urges and emotions, are both too clever and too clumsy to reliably decode. In being attracted to a young man with an evidently fatal disease and who undeniably reminded her of her wounded Civil War soldiers, was Louisa unconsciously eroticizing death? What motivated her to infuse her feelings of romance with such maternal overtones? A twenty-first-century reader feels remiss in leaving such questions unasked. However, one who respects the guileless wish of a kind woman to give solace to the dying and a mother’s protection to a charming but luckless youth feels like a scoundrel in asking them. One conclusion, however, seems inescapable. When Louisa experienced feelings of tender attachment, she had an almost reflexive wish to raise that attachment to a level of sanctity. All her life, she had been taught that love should be pure and disinterested, and her model for such affections had always been the family. Hardly surprising, then, that the greatest gift she thought she could give Laddie was to receive him as a figurative son.

  On May 17 they saw each other for the last time. At the train station, as she held the bottle of cologne he had given her as a remembrance, Louisa must have felt that the only sin at such a moment was dishonesty. The twelve years that divided them vanished. The silly conceit that he was merely her boy fell away. Years later, the young readers of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag read about a moment a bit beyond their comprehension: “I drew down his tall head and kissed him tenderly, feeling that in this world there were no more meetings for us. Then I ran away and buried myself in an empty railway carriage, hugging the little cologne bottle he had given me.” She still kept with her a dried December rose from Vevey, a rose that preserved for her the memory of Laddie, “the last and dearest of [her] boys.”

  Louisa’s description of her parting from Laddie as a self-interment and her choice of a faded rose as the emblem of their relationship speak poignantly of her sense of loss and lament. In one sense, the descriptions were apt: Laddie was her last significant romance, perhaps the only real one. However, that loss was not quite so permanent as she feared. To her grateful surprise, Laddie did not die soon after their parting. Indeed, he lived to return to Poland, maintained a correspondence with Louisa for several years, and before finally disappearing from the surviving documents, was able to tell Louisa of having married and become the father of two daughters. His life in fiction proved even longer. As Louisa freely admitted, Laddie, along with her old Concord friend Alf Whitman, jointly supplied the inspiration for Laurie, the effervescent boy next door in Little Women.41

  Louisa spent seven weeks in London, taking in all that the city had to offer. She was perhaps most grateful for the chance to indulge her ongoing fascination with Dickens. She spent a day eagerly crisscrossing the city in search of real-life locations that had surfaced in the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield. She even managed to secure admission to a reading by the author himself and doubtlessly looked forward to the event with expectations that could only be disappointed. And disappointed they were, from the very moment that the great man appeared on stage, bedecked with gaudy rings and sporting foppish curls. Repelled by the sight of his false teeth and the sound of his voice, which was that of “a worn-out actor,” Louisa now had a clear image of the kind of literary celebrity she did not want to become.42

  As Louisa explored an old world to the east, Bronson embarked on another excursion to the Midwest. Since the death of Lincoln, Bronson had begun to reconsider his ideas of inherent eastern superiority, as well as his sense of what qualities were most authentically American. From the banks of the Mississippi, he wrote to Abba that he had not found anywhere “a more profound treatment in the true American spirit, than these men exhibit.” In St. Louis, he observed, philosophers like William Harris were “powers and influences.” The educated men he found here, he thought, had a unique practicality. Their thought was quick and forceful, and they looked at life through a perspective of clear logic to which Bronson was unaccustomed. He proclaimed that the waters of the Mississippi bathed the shore of a “New New England,” and he felt that eastern men, so slow to believe in things that originated elsewhere, might benefit from performing the same pilgrimage that he had made. Euphorically, he averred that the possibilities of the wondrous West were infinite.43

  Certainly Bronson’s personal prospects in this rising city were encouraging. On February 26, he wrote to Abba that he had had an engagement every evening.44 His conversations were winning favor, and the attendance was strong both in numbers and in quality of participation. He was glad to report that he and his audiences had been working smoothly together, and his friends were encouraging him to prepare a new lecture on New England from the standpoint of its relations to the West.

  Despite his optimistic letters home, however, he was impressing people more as a personality than as a thinker. When, at Harris’s invitation, he addressed the St. Louis Philosophical Society, his audience grew restive. Alcott had chosen to set forth his theory of genesis, which held that human beings were originally bodiless souls, engendered by a force of “pure being.” The material world had come to exist because these souls had sinned and, in their falling away from perfection, had created a descending series of natural kingdoms.45 The theory made great sense to Alcott but not to the Philosophical Society. Schooled in Hegelian dialectic, they expected reason, not divination. Harris’s respected associate Henry Brockmeyer, who later dubbed Alcott’s speculations on the birth of the cosmos a collection of “infantile asininities,” openly heckled the speaker. Under pressure to articulate his ideas as a logically derived system, Alcott could only bluster. Another audience member provoked a laugh by suggesting that only an Alcott could rightly interpret an Alcott. Visibly upset by the lack of courtesy, Bronson meekly bore the jibes and submitted to “the gantlet of their fierce logic” as best he could. Though unimpressed by his lack of rigor, the society members could at least recognize a good sport. They rewarded Alcott’s perseverance by electing him an auxiliary member.46

  Alcott’s social encounters more than made up for his awkward moments at the podium. While in St. Louis, he took tea with General John Pope, who had led the Union army at Second Manassas. Passing homeward through Cincinnati, he stayed at the home of Judge Alphonso Taft. Alcott had previously passed within the orbit of three presidents. In addition to discussing abolition with Fillmore and observing Lincoln in the Senate chamber, he had likely been introduced to Franklin Pierce by their mutual friend Hawthorne. Now he came unknowingly into the presence of a fourth, when he was introduced to the judge’s eight-year-old son, William Howard.

  On March 17, Bronson was back home. Comfortably reinstated at Orchard House, he thought of Louisa, still overseas. He waited only a day after his return to send her a letter. Though he was anxious to see her again, he also advised her to “get all you can before setting your face homewards.
” Calling her his “noble daughter,” he suggested that she might come with him on some future western tour. He closed with an exhortation and a statement of deepest pride: “The doors are opened wide for the freest exercise of your good Gifts, fame, if you must have it, and a world wide influence. Permit me to claim you in my name, and for your sex and country.”47

  Louisa came home on July 20 to a joyful reception. Bronson met her at the station. At the rustic gate of Orchard House, Louisa first caught sight of Anna and the boys. May was the least able to contain her excitement; Louisa described her as “flying wildly around the lawn.”48 But perhaps the most wonderful sight was Abba standing at the front door, her face wet with tears. Louisa fell into her mother’s arms and, at that moment, knew that she was truly home. A stream of friends came by to wish her well and to see how her travels had affected her. They all agreed that she was changed for the better, a judgment Louisa was happy to accept, for as she said, she would always have room for improvement.

  As for the family, some had fared better than others in her absence. Her father and May, she felt, were essentially unchanged. Anna’s boys were sturdy and affectionate, though chasing them around seemed to have worn their mother down somewhat. However, Louisa was concerned about her mother, who looked old, sick, and tired. Abba had always boasted about the invincibility of the May constitution. Indeed, between the two of them, it is hard to say whether it was Mr. or Mrs. Alcott who presumed more heavily on a sense of genetic invincibility. Now, however, it seemed that Abba had drawn a bit too hard on her reserves. As it happened, she still had more than a decade of life ahead of her, but Louisa could no longer trick herself into believing that her beloved mother would live forever. “I never expect to see the strong, energetic ‘Marmee’ of old times,” Louisa wrote a few months later, “but, thank the Lord, she is still here.”49 Abba had lived a hard life, bravely expending herself for all who asked. Now, Louisa believed, it was time for others to live for her.