Girlhood in Boston

A ten-minute walk can cover the distance from Boston's North End to the Parker House at the corner of Tremont and School. Though the route lies slightly uphill, though the traffic around Haymarket Square can cause delay, the course is short, the impediments insignificant. Charlotte Cushman took nearly sixty years to span that distance, but she filled her trip with detours and voyages and ascents that made her journey notable.

Her story begins with the country. Her blood came west on the Mayflower in the veins of Mary Allerton, whose marriage to Thomas Cushman took place in the new colony, Plymouth Plantation, in the year 1635. The Cushman-Allerton roots sprang from the bedrock of religious nonconformity in England. As agent for the Pilgrims, Thomas' father, Robert, had petitioned the Virginia Company for permission to settle on its territory in North America. He had petitioned King James I to give the settlers "liberty of conscience." Though James denied Cushman's request, he did allow the Pilgrims "so long as they remained faithful subjects to his Majesty" to be tolerated in their form of worship. Thus encouraged, Robert Cushman arranged the purchase of two ships, the Speedwell, a vessel of sixty tons, and the Mayflower, somewhat larger.

The vessels took to the wind off Southhampton on August 5, 1620. A compound of troubles forced the ships back to port, but on September 6, one hundred and two Pilgrims set sail once more on the Mayflower. Among them rode the Isaac Allerton family, including daughter Mary. Early the next summer Robert Cushman and his son Thomas sailed west on a ship called the Fortune. Men who looked after "great riches, ease, pleasures, dainties, and jollity in the World," Robert had written in a pamphlet detailing the facts of American settlement, "I would not advise them to come there." But any man willing to spend his labors for the good of those who should come after, any man desiring to further the gospel among the poor heathens, contenting himself with such hardships as by God's providence should come upon him, "such men I would advise and encourage to go, for their ends cannot fail them."¹

Once arrived in Plymouth, Robert Cushman left young Thomas in the custody of Governor Bradford and returned on business to London; he died in England in 1626.

The "grave, sober, holy, and temperate" Thomas Cushman served as ruling elder of the church at Plymouth for forty-three years; Mary Allerton Cushman lived until age ninety, the last of the Mayflower "Adventurers." Passing years saw the circle of their descendants widen, Pilgrim roots become Puritan towns, Puritan towns become outposts of British commerce, British allegiance alter into American nationality and self-interest--until, in 1769, in the sixth generation from Thomas and Mary, Elkanah Cushman was born in Plymouth.

Elkanah's parents were people of humble means. When they died, Elkanah, who was thirteen, made the long walk up to Boston to seek his fortune. There he met Mary Eliza Babbit, whose line went back to Ireland. Her father, Erasmus Babbit, Jr., born in Sturbridge and graduated from Harvard, practiced law in various towns. Fond of music, blessed with an exceptional memory, he could "play upon the violin and sing 'from sunrise to sunset,'" with the inevitable result that his clients were few, his fees small. His marriage to Mary Saunders of Gloucester, whose family had blood ties with the Sargents, Winthrops, and Saltonstalls, had produced two sons, Winthrop and Augustus, and a daughter, Mary Eliza. Though Mary Saunders Babbit herself had a ready wit and abounding good spirits--and a talent for mimicry--she possessed an endless ambition, a drive that eventually made her despair of Erasmus' frivolities and small fees. In 1810 she moved with her children to Boston. Her daughter Mary Eliza was seventeen, a spirited girl with a broad square face, a fine singing voice, and notable skill as a reader.

To help meet expenses, Mary Eliza maintained a school until she married Elkanah Cushman in 1815; Elkanah was forty-six, a widower with a son and a daughter; Mary Eliza was twenty-two. On July 23, 1816, Elkanah and Mary Eliza Cushman became the parents of Charlotte.

By then, Elkanah had become an established Boston merchant and shipper. At one time he may have worked as a hairdresser, but his partnership in Topliff and Cushman brought his major income during Charlotte's early years. The firm manufactured ship-bread, which it transported and sold over a wide coastal area, at times as far south as the West Indies. Its warehouses occupied space on Long Wharf, the pier which jutted from the bottom of State Street nearly two thousand feet into Boston Harbor.

Charlotte's own roots were planted firmly on Richmond Street, later renamed Parmenter Street. The birth house, Number 110, was a typical Boston middle-class home of the period. White steps led up from the cobblestoned street to the door recessed in an arch. The three-story building topped out in a sizable attic, an ideal play place for children in winter. Wide-shuttered windows pierced its timbered front; its ends were dark stone.

Over the housetops behind, the spire of Second Church punctuated the sky from its corner on Hanover Street. Here, with the help of the ministers Henry Ware and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Eliza firmly grounded her children in Unitarianism. The Cushman house was easily accessible to Long Wharf, a short walk downhill for Elkanah, a long circuitous expedition through exotic byways and secret paths for Charlotte.

An easy jaunt north led her to Old North Church; a half mile south and west past Mill Pond, which later became Haymarket Square, brought her to Boston Common, pasture for the community's cows, playground and battleground for its children.

Inside the Cushman house, the common or family room to the left balanced the dining room to the right, with the larder and kitchen behind. Seated on a low stool in that kitchen, Charlotte listened entranced to her Grandmother Babbit mimic a whole menagerie of animals. The sleeping rooms upstairs were sparsely furnished: plain sturdy chairs, a highboy, a bed or beds spread with thick feather covers, a sea chest or two for storage. The steeply roofed attic above the bedrooms extended to the four lines of the house. Its center was tall enough for a man to stand, for a tall girl perched on a chair to sing for the assembled neighbors.

During Charlotte's childhood when she and her family lived in the house on Richmond Street, and later at a succession of other addresses in the area, Boston emerged from its colonial status as an English-oriented seaport to an American blend of seafaring investment and industry. Charlotte grew up with the town, a place which foreign visitors for years would find reminiscent of London, with its brick and timbered houses, its Adams spires, long cobbled streets, irregular plan, its bustling waterfront, its street cries, and the sturdy English values of its people.

Whether Calvinistic in religion or frankly materialistic in business, Boston mingled its English past with its American present. It had not yet become a town noted for its art or intellect. If Washington Allston could sell a painting in Philadelphia for $3,500 in 1816, he could hardly reap a fraction of that figure in Boston.² One irate Bostonian complained that Boston was consuming its wealth "in the profusion of the table, and other luxuries equally indicating a gross and depraved taste." In 1817 there were not over sixty thousand books in the entire city.³ When Gilbert Stuart died in 1828, he was buried in an unmarked grave on Boston Common.

In the years immediately following 1816 Boston perched solidly above its harbor, differing little from the town it had been in April 1775, when it saw the Somerset, British man-of-war, foretelling the end of English control. From the sea it rose a mass of stolid brick and granite, thrusting up from the center an irregular skyline of red towers and white spires, black chimneys and gabled roofs huddled around Charles Bulfinch's domed State House. Its rocky land connected with its back country by a narrow strip called "The Neck," which easterly gales and high tides flooded at times, leaving Boston at sea.

Hardly more than a country town in size, Boston was human-oriented--with scope for the energies of its adults, with elbow room for the frolics of its children. Its homes were largely the functional style of its Puritan past; bright gardens sparked its slate gray streets in summer. Firelight from its hearths, torchlight from its street flares, cut the winter dark. The town crier shouted the news along its narrow streets. From her infancy, Charlotte knew his jangling bell, his ringing report of some current event, whether an auction down on Long Wharf, the berthing of an overdue vessel, or an eminent death. The favorite of all North End children, the crier in June broadcast the word that the grass on Boston Common had just been cut, that the children must "Come and roll! Come and roll!" down the newly mowed slopes.

In that pasture, where Emerson as a boy tended the family cow, Charlotte and her brother tended their own cow ten years later. She came to know well the route between Richmond Street and the Common as day after day she goaded the plodding animal over the stones, up the gentle sweep of Beacon Hill, through the gates onto the Common's green acres. The Common was fenced; the grass was usually lush. If the task required anything more than an occasional glance at the animal, it seldom interrupted the clamor and noise of play. The trees and stony outcroppings invited young imaginations to riot. The girls demanded the shade to play house in; the boys claimed the branches to swing on, the rocky points to hide behind as forts. For Charlotte, the greater fun lay with the boys. She neatly described her childhood pace on Boston Common: "I was born a tomboy."⁴

The Common in winter offered its frozen pond for skating, its broad white slopes to the blades of a hundred sleds. Snowballs arc'd overhead. When trouble developed, Charlotte fired back snowball for snowball or hid in one of the icy forts, just as in summer she shinnied to the top of the tallest tree.

Born in 1818, her brother, Charles Augustus, was Charlotte's earliest friend. Together they explored the byways of Boston, raced breathless and laughing up Copp's Hill for the view through the ancient gravestones, squashed bare feet in the muddy shore of the Charles, bashed the skulls of Charlotte's dolls "to see what they were thinking about."

Charlotte burned with curiosity to see how things worked, to know how they were put together. The square-jawed girl with dark hair falling loose to her shoulders had no faculty for making dolls' clothes, but their furniture she could make skillfully. "I could do anything with tools,"⁵ if not with a needle.

Out of sight of their mother, Charlotte and Charlie searched out the smells and noisy excitements along Boston's wharves. By the time she was six, often along with John Gibbs Gilbert, who had been born in the house next door, she knew the fun of clambering among the crates waiting for shipment, the rich smelling coils of oily rope, the bales of teas and spices. One of her favorite games was leaping, joyous and terrified, out over the chasm of water that lay between the wharf and the deck of some swaying vessel.

One morning she misjudged the distance. Screaming, she fell head first into the icy water. Panic-stricken, the boys stood helpless, watching the terrible thrashing, then the grayish bubbles that marked the place where Charlotte had disappeared.

Before Charlie could run for his father, an older boy suddenly came running, stripping off shirt and shoes, and dived in. In a few moments, he reappeared with Charlotte, gasping and choking, under one arm. He hauled his dripping burden onto the dock. Crying, she could not speak; her teeth chattered. When he saw she was not hurt, he went his way, leaving a pair of dockhands to carry her to her father.⁶

Elkanah reprimanded her, then wrapped her in a large jacket and sent her home. Opening the door to the sneezing girl and her wide-eyed brother, Mary Eliza would have meted out heavier punishment if Charlotte had not immediately developed a heavy cold. But the girl needed no firmer rebuke. She would always remember that terrifying incident.

On March 17, 1822, a second daughter was born to Elkanah and Mary Eliza. Susan would grow up the "pretty" sister, the dainty one of the two. Before Susan, Charlotte had only barely suspected the value of personal beauty, but she soon learned that her little blue-eyed sister could set off gales of compliments with the merest tilt of her delicate chin, the slightest cut of her eyes. Charlotte herself had never garnered any such praise. If the fact dismayed her at first, it soon translated into the broader swagger she injected into her games.

Playing with Charlie and the boys, Charlotte wasted no thought on her looks--or on the quiet little Susan content at home with her dolls. Whether playing bandits among the rocks and trees or skating on Frog Pond, she led the group. To invent a plan was to put it into action; to imagine a game was to play it--with Charlotte appointing the captains and laying out all the boundaries.

She had a passion to imitate everything--the gibberish she heard from a swarthy sailor on Long Wharf, the dour Bostonian riding by stiff and officious in his black coach. Around the fire on winter evenings, she could match Grandmother Babbit in mimicking voices and gestures and faces, especially when Charlie or Susan cried out, "Now be a pig, Charlotte! Now be a lobster! Now be old Miss Gaines!"

As time passed, the family came more and more to relish the quick laughter she could set off with the subtlest change in her voice, her royal air in sweeping the crumbs from under the table or grandly poking the fire. For upstairs, to their helpless grief and distress, Grandmother Babbit now lay dying of cancer.⁷

The circle at Mary Eliza's knee was complete by 1825, when another son, Augustus Babbit, was born. Just as Grandmother Babbit had once amused Charlotte with songs and imitations, Charlotte now delighted this tiny brother with her own oinks and whinnies and squeals. As he grew out of infancy, little Augustus' high spirits delighted his elder sister. Though nine years divided them, Charlotte felt a special bond with this brother. She saw in Augustus a mind and fertile imagination like no one else's in the family. She knew from the start that this "was by far the cleverest of my mother's children."⁸

Charlotte's mimicry did not always find such a happy audience as Augustus. When the Reverend Mr. Henry Ware, minister of Second Church, came to call, she watched him, his chin in his hands, resting his elbows on the table. Over the teacups, his easy talk with Mary Eliza proceeded pleasantly until Charlotte began mouthing his words. When Mary Eliza saw her, she reprimanded her sharply: "Take your elbows off the table and your chin out of your hands; it is not a pretty position for a young lady!"⁹ If Ware recognized the parody, he gave no sign, though he could hardly have missed it.

The reprimand did nothing to spoil Charlotte's interest in Henry Ware. She early formed a deep attachment for the minister and for the venerable hall where he preached. No longer fashionable or wealthy, Boston's Second Church had an age of history behind it; from its curved mahogany pulpit Increase and Cotton Mather had thundered their Puritan warnings. Its rectangular tower had rung out the knells and tolls and joyous peels of a whole community's biography. By Charlotte's time, the church had become solidly Unitarian. The good Mr. Ware preached the liberal view of a reenvisioned Christianity, challenging his hearers to see proof of God's love in the unity pervading God's creation, the harmony open to the simplest understanding. At his death, Charlotte wrote a monody expressing her grief.¹⁰

Though Henry Ware's sermons were filled with sunshine, the workaday mood of Boston was otherwise. The dour negations of the earliest Puritans still shadowed the daily life of the town. Sundays were serious, a matter of blue-law control. In many families there was no Sunday cooking, no pleasure reading, no play. Sundays were for church attendance, for Bible study and prayer. In spite of their growing worldly interests, many Boston hearts still pondered the age-old Calvinist question: "Am I doomed to burn forever in Hell?" still firmly certain that God tolerated mankind's whims only at His pleasure.

The Boston of Charlotte's early youth had only one theatre. Built at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Federal Street in 1794, when the town finally lifted its official opposition to drama, the Federal Street Theatre stood a monument to the community's slowly altering values. An elegant structure with a projecting arcade wide enough to shelter arriving carriages, it had spacious saloons and Corinthian columns throughout its interior.¹¹ Though some years would pass before Charlotte attended her first performance, she early sensed the excitement that surrounded the pros and cons of theatre. If "entertainment" stood at the heart of Boston's dilemma, its theatre sometimes raised additional questions.

Like other American cities of the period, Boston sensed in the English stars who appeared on its stage the snobbery of Mother England toward the new country struggling to break its European strings. "English managers, English actors, and English plays . . . must be allowed to die away among us, as usurpers of our stage," Whitman would later write in his Brooklyn Eagle.¹² Native theatres could lead the fight against despotism, could scorn all bigotry, all affectations, avarice and "unmanly follies."

With just such follies, Edmund Kean had enraged Boston in 1821 by his refusal to play to a small house, though that house demanded a show, not its money. Four years later, when the arrogant Englishman dared to appear in Boston again, the crowd exploded into an angry mob. Shouting and hooting, it broke windows and doors and pelted Kean on stage.¹³ For all its pious doubts about "entertainment," a city's image had been insulted, a nation's stature had been scorned.

Charlotte may have witnessed the riot. At all events, theatre was news in her formative years, whether as an arena for international rivalries or as a bright façade on Federal Street where glamour sold for the price of a ticket, where the charm of costume and disguise and the stories spelled out by the fabled men and women occupying its boards came home to Charlotte on the lips of her young Uncle Augustus Babbit, who attended it regularly.

For Charlotte, Babbit's accounts became the material for playlets of her own. The front steps at 110 Richmond Street were her stage during the middle years of her childhood. She was a schoolgirl now; by now she was feeding a bottomless appetite for words, pantomime, and stories fleshed out and dressed in the skirts and shawls from her mother's storage chests. With Uncle Augustus encouraging her, she needed only the tall front steps or the attic at the top of the stairs. The parts she played and the gestures and costumes appropriate to them were as delicious now as her earlier forays over the hills.

The holidays of her youth fed her hunger for drama and display. The Fourth of July was a frenzied medley of bells and echoing cannons from Beacon Hill, ringing orations and flags, military parades with fifes and drums along one side of the Common, games and footraces whirling the dust, and great showers of fireworks streaking the night sky. For days afterward, Charlotte and her friends would still be translating the day's sparkle and tempest into mimes and speeches.

Charlotte may have started school as early as four. At the time, Boston sent its young to public schools taught by middle-aged "dames"--who might or might not be suitably skilled. Charlotte's childhood neighbor, Mary A. Livermore, who became the most popular female lecturer of her day, recalled the dreary school which Charlotte probably attended. It was "kept" by Ma'am Adams, a shrewish tyrant who dozed in her chair, took snuff, drank tea--or nipped Santa Cruz rum from a bottle stowed in a cupboard. The room was furnished with hard benches, so high that the feet of the children dangled in midair. If a bench tipped over, as it often did, the class set up a savage howl for sheer joy at the noise. If the dame dropped off to sleep, the room broke into pandemonium; the children darted about the room, throwing their spelling cards out the window, sometimes even dashing into the street. When Ma'am Adams awoke, she tore through the room brandishing a switch, raining its stinging blows on bad and good alike.¹⁴

From such a primary school, Charlotte moved on to grammar school, probably the Hancock on Hanover Street. Here boys and girls were taught separately, never playing together during recess, never using the same stairs or doors. They sat stiffly on long benches before tall desks; no child was permitted to slump against the desk behind. The schoolroom windows flooded light directly in the children's eyes. A blazing fireplace at each end attempted to warm the room. Despite the discomforts, good teaching occurred in such hostile surroundings, and Charlotte developed an early skill as a reader.

For Charlotte, these childhood years held a sort of primal joy in being alive. Recognizing the high-spirited child she was, her mother held her in check with a loose rein; Mary Eliza's own penchant for song and laughter understood the penchant for joy in the child. If there was a watchword for Charlotte's early childhood, the word was "laughter."

The sound of that laughter became precious in the Cushman household in 1825, the year of Augustus' birth, the year the family's income began suffering serious decline. Though the times favored success in merchandizing and shipping, Elkanah's business methods exposed him to difficulties he could not wholly control. On the long voyages to the West Indies, Topliff and Cushman's sales agents could make the difference between the firm's realizing high profits and total loss: once out of Boston harbor these supercargoes controlled all financial arrangements. On their own, they decided profit margins and terms of sales. Conducting its business by such means, the company suffered almost inevitable mismanagement and fraud from its supercargoes. Topliff and Cushman was too small a firm to weather for long a string of such losses.

The impact of the business decline came home to Charlotte when her parents faced the fact that straitening family circumstances required a move to humbler quarters. Reluctantly, they left 110 Richmond Street in 1825. It was the first of a series of uprootings that would take the family over the next ten years to Centre Street during 1825 and 1826, to Spring Street in West Boston during 1827, to 161 Court Street during 1828¹⁵, and to other places--most of them still adjacent to Second Church and Long Wharf--one even across the river in Charlestown.

Sadly regretting the moves, Mary Eliza became in the process the pivotal point for her family. However deeply her face might reflect her troubles, the children found their security in her. As the mother took on more and more responsibility, the father figured less and less in the family's routine. Charlotte's masculine contacts during this period were her brothers and her Uncle Augustus, seldom her father, whose age and fiscal worries by now prevented his being the strong responsible head he might have been. Elkanah drifted as the family moved. As his children grew, his business dwindled. With a wife so much his junior, with a family of children at least twenty years younger than the son and daughter of his first marriage, he found the rhythm and pattern of their lives more and more difficult.

It was young Uncle Augustus Babbit, only thirteen years older than she, who first took Charlotte to the theatre. What her father lacked in spark and interest, this uncle possessed abundantly. Handsome, careful of his dress, Augustus usually sported a tall, white wing collar and neckcloth when he was not garbed for his trade, the sea. He encouraged Charlotte with prizes for her studies, especially music and penmanship. Like his parents and his sister, Mary Eliza, he delighted in music and singing; he had a special interest in theatre. When the Tremont Theatre was built in 1827 to compete with the venerable house on Federal Street, Augustus Babbit underwrote part of its cost.

In the theatre season of 1826-27 the great English tragedian, William Macready, made his first American tour. A top star at London's two legitimate theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, Macready played a resoundingly successful engagement at the Park Theatre in New York and moved from there for a brief run as Coriolanus at the Boston Theatre, beginning on October 30.¹⁶

The experience was totally new, totally arresting for Charlotte. The actor she saw was not handsome; his features were far from distinguished--but he outweighed the limitations of his face with the intellectual power of his acting, the flash of his incomparable blue eyes.

At his debut the year of Charlotte's birth, Macready had transported London with his "paroxysms of passion," the wild transitions of his eyes.¹⁷ Gradually his experiences in Covent Garden and Drury Lane had developed in Macready his own "school" of acting, an attempt at naturalness that substituted sheer violence for the classical posturing of an earlier day. He had retained the broad gestures of Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble, but he had tempered them with more natural speech. By 1826, Macready's "style" placed him among the greatest of English actors. Walt Whitman's later description of Macready's magnetism on stage detailed the effect Charlotte witnessed as a child. Merely walking down the stage, Macready was a king, not solely because he wore a crown and a scarlet robe; his total envelopment in the role "dilated his heart with the attributes of majesty"; royal authority flashed from his eyes.¹⁸ He walked with a slight roll, each shoulder thrusting forward alternately; he spoke with a particular catch of his breath at moments of greatest intensity. The sound might degenerate to an almost cough-like rasp, but Macready could suggest with it the highest reaches of passion.¹⁹ His electrifying pauses at such moments were the secret of all his skill, the essence of his power.

At her first exposure to such artistry, Charlotte drank in the wonder, the force of language she now heard for the first time. She went home from Macready's kingly performance alive to new ideas for games. Her attic could become the Boston Theatre; a chair or two could suggest the stage. With her friends from school rounding out the cast, she herself could play Macready. In the attic plays she began devising, she almost always reserved a masculine part for herself. The stuff in her that relished climbing trees on Boston Common, leaping from Long Wharf to the deck of some anchored vessel, was translating itself into the characters she enjoyed playing at home. She soon discovered that Macready's reading skill at the Theatre could challenge her at school.

In reading class, it came her turn to read a speech from John Howard Payne's Brutus. Before, she had been shy and bashful about reading aloud, afraid of her own voice. But as she now worked haltingly through the passage, her tongue suddenly loosened. She finished the lines, reading with such force that the teacher promptly sent her to the head of the class. It was a moment of artistic birth, too slight to be recognized at the time, but in the thrill that surged through her, she sensed a new capacity within herself. Years later Charlotte looked back at the child marching proudly and a little uncertainly to the front of the room and knew that at that moment the faculty had been born that became her ruling passion.²⁰

Until then her only strength at school had been arithmetic. She had a small medal to prove it, a prize her teacher had given her one day for especially good work with the figures on her slate. Charlotte had packed the medal away, against the day when Uncle Augustus would sail again into port. Now, as she moved up in the class, she heard a boy grumble, in puritanical envy: "No wonder she can read. She goes to the theatre."²¹

It was true. Augustus Babbit was seeing to that. As a stockholder, Babbit not only held an interest in the theatre's profits; to lighten his sister's trouble, he took Mary Eliza to the theatre whenever his ship was in port. She came to know William Pelby, the theatre manager, and the bewigged and painted people backstage, and Charlotte often accompanied her. Through Uncle Augustus, Charlotte had open entrée to all the plays.

It was on such an occasion that Charlotte first heard the operetta Bluebeard. Now in her early teens, she organized a group of girls to produce a version of it in her attic. With neighborhood children and their mothers for audience, Charlotte sang and played the swashbuckling role of the lover Selim, garbed in what passed for white Turkish trousers, a tight-fitting jacket, a red sash at her waist and a straight red feather stuck in her hair. A wooden sword slapped at her side. Charlotte's dash and command in the role overshadowed the girls who played Fatima, Irene, and Abomelique, especially at the moments when she leaped to a chair and sang out, with wide Macready gestures, "Fatima, Fatima, Selim's here!" in a voice that was already attracting attention.²²

Singing had long been a natural part of her games, of her simple household chores. She could shout as loudly as her brother Charles; she could out-sing all the children she knew. Now her voice was maturing into a rich contralto. By late 1828, the Cushman finances had sunk so low that Mary Eliza, with some of her own mother's spirit, concluded that she herself would have to shoulder the major load. But taking this stand was not easy; opportunities for women to work outside the home were strictly limited. She thought of teaching a school, but Elkanah's elder daughter, Isabella, had already left to manage a home of her own, and Mary Eliza's own children were too small to fend for themselves. Nor could she work in a shop. If she considered sewing flannel shirts at home on consignment from some "slop-shop" in Ann Street, the six cents per shirt she could earn discouraged her. She determined at last to move the family to a bigger house, one as ample as possible for their needs, but one especially suitable for boarders. The house she finally chose stood at 327 Main Street in Charlestown.

The family move came just in time. Working agreements between Elkanah and his partner had always rested on the shakiest unwritten foundations, but in the midst of all their growing troubles, relations between them now took a calamitous turn. Feelings became so bitter that Topliff grabbed all the firm's remaining assets and forced Elkanah into bankruptcy. Creditors took over all his property, even the family furniture.

If Charlotte resolved to seek revenge the dismal day she saw the household goods passing piece by piece out of the house--and Mary Eliza's paying guests along with them--her angry grief matched that of her sister and brothers huddled in the skirts of their weeping mother. With this failure, Elkanah Cushman's moral fiber left him; from then on, he hovered vaguely in the background of his family; he became a shadowy figure removed, in Charlotte's thinking, to the sidelines of life.

But the loss worked differently on Charlotte and her mother. By some means, they rallied their spirits; Mary Eliza recovered her paying guests. She could not guarantee ease and comfort for her children. The most she could attempt in the sudden maturity facing them was to instill in them some sense of their own resources.

Pondering the family's difficulties, Charlotte considered her own position. Her voice might indeed have some promise. Boston's church choirs were always looking for soloists. And though the work seldom paid directly, it brought trained singers into contact with people able and willing to pay for vocal instruction. Decent opportunities otherwise were slim. Of one thing she was thoroughly certain: a lifetime of boardinghouse keeping was unthinkable. For Charlotte, it was an early end to childhood, but perhaps she could sing her way.