For the Good of the Family

Charlotte found it easy enough to dream of a life built on song, but singing her way out of drudgery, singing the family into new ease and comfort, was hardly a Cinderella affair. To begin with, she must develop whatever talent a teacher might find in her. And locating such a teacher, with the meager fees her mother could pay, only complicated the dream.

Mary Eliza decided to ask a family friend, a retired sea captain named John Mackey, a straight question: Could a young lady's trained voice bring her a living? Captain Mackey and Jonas Chickering had recently founded a piano factory in Boston, and Mackey was in a position to know. His reply was positive. Even in a town where openings for women, especially in the arts, were severely limited, Charlotte ought to be able to make her way in some church connection. She could use a piano in his warehouse for practicing, and his young protégé, George O. Farmer, could pass on to her the rudiments of singing he was learning from John Paddon, the best voice teacher in town.

Charlotte began her informal lessons with Farmer in 1829, just as her formal schooling was ending. At thirteen she had mastered the practical skills--reading, writing, and arithmetic--that Boston expected its girls to know. Though "slower" females might remain in class until sixteen, the Boston School Committee made no provision beyond the basic subjects; public school could offer them nothing more. For Charlotte, age thirteen was a turning point. She might proceed to a denominational academy or a private school that taught the elegant manners of polite society, but Mary Eliza's practical values, even given the means, hardly imagined such hopes for Charlotte. Charlotte's further education--whether practical, philosophical, or moral--would have to come from the world of experience beyond the schoolroom walls. Better to look to her work with George Farmer as a step toward a solid trade than waste any dreams on elegance.

Under Farmer's elementary lead, her progress soon brought her a choir position at Second Church, where the pulpit was undergoing a change. To succeed Henry Ware, the long-beloved pillar on Hanover Street, the congregation had called young Ralph Waldo Emerson to be junior pastor. Emerson's narrow shoulders, large feet and hands, and eagle-like features soon became a familiar sight to the new girl in his choir. Every Sunday for three years she followed his highly untheological sermons, his slow evolution from liberal Unitarianism into the Transcendental speculation that eventually took him out of the ministry in 1832. In his ordination sermon on March 11, 1829, Emerson confessed his own humility: "I come to you in weakness, and not in strength. In a short life, I have yet had abundant experience of the uncertainty of human hopes."¹

Disavowing any role as an "ecclesiastical policeman," Emerson made his point through quiet illustrations: religion was nothing limited or partial; it had universal application; its interests were all mankind's. Charlotte heard him develop his idea of compensation, the perpetual balance of opposites, sweet and sour, young and old, "the wings of Time are black and white, Pied with morning and with night. Mountain tall and ocean deep Trembling balance duly keep."² She heard the earliest stages of his doctrine of self-reliance: "the good man reveres himself, reveres his conscience, and would rather suffer any calamity than lower himself in his own esteem."³ One sermon interested her particularly: "A trust in yourself is the height not of pride but of piety, an unwillingness to learn of any but God himself." The self was to be trusted, for in God "the self must be perceived." What moral or intellectual excellence man ever gets out of this little plot of ground "you call yourself, by the sweat of your brow--is your portion."

However long such germinal ideas might take to sprout, they were not lost on the attentive girl in Emerson's choir. By the sweat of her brow, Charlotte's portion seemed increasingly to lie in music, and Emerson soon noticed the "plump, round, rosy"⁴ girl behind his pulpit singing out the joyous words of a song like Wesley's "New Year's Hymn." Unmusical himself, Emerson took a special delight in the force and authority that radiated through Charlotte's voice as it ranged upward now from a full contralto.

That voice was one of Emerson's few joys between 1829 and 1832 while he struggled to shepherd his flock on Hanover Street. From the sidelines, Henry Ware offered him little help, for the turns Emerson's ideas were taking raised serious doubts about his real interest in a formal ministry. "How little love," Emerson's journal noted in October 1831, "is at the bottom of these great religious shows; congregationalism and temples and sermons,--how much sham!" If his people ever faced the truth about Unitarianism, they would discover that its strength was largely negative. The objections it raised against proud, ignorant Calvinism were about all the strength it had. The creed at Second Church was "cold and cheerless" until controversy warmed it with "fire got from below."⁵ Not more than ten people, Emerson was certain, ever truly came to hear the sermon. "The singing, or a new pelisse, or Cousin William, or the Sunday School" were the "beadles that brought and the bolt that hold" the silent faces in church each Sunday.⁶

If the singing was an attraction, Charlotte could claim part of the credit. And for payment she gained more than fresh ideas in Emerson's choir. Her experience paid off in a heightened skill and poise, and it carried over into a new role she assumed at home.

Late in the day or between chores, she would take her stand on the front steps where neighborhood children had gathered to hear her sing. At fourteen, Charlotte discovered before this realest kind of audience a hint of a latent ability. She first tasted on her mother's steps the delight that could come from swaying a crowd's emotions. Like Whitman, noting the lonely cry of the bird, "the solitary guest from Alabama," Charlotte's own sense of her personal destiny may have awaked from that early hour, "now in a moment I know what I am for."

And stranger things were happening all around. Her childhood neighbor and playmate, John Gibbs Gilbert, had already made a theatrical debut; the tall young man was already becoming one of the country's favorite comedians.

But except for her songs and her secret wishes, life at present was grim enough. Boardinghouse keeping was no easy role, even with Charlie old enough now to share the continual chores. At eight Susan was a pretty child, too small to help with the burdens. At five Augustus delighted them all with his sunny smile, but he could do nothing more practical.

The constant worry on Mary Eliza's brow darkened the household. The sound of her sobbing upstairs, pacing and pacing her worries, troubled Charlotte's sleep. That worried pacing in the room over the kitchen begot the urge in Charlotte, at fourteen, to save the family. Now physically mature, she was five feet six, tall for the day. Her face was plain. Her chin projected; her jaws were square like her mother's and Grandmother Babbit's. Her wide mouth turned down. Her nose was too blunt to offer any lift to her heavy expression. When she saw her face in the same glass with Susan's, she grimaced. Her one source of pride was her long dark hair, which she brushed morning and night to maintain its sheen. True, her blue eyes radiated sober intelligence, but whatever beauty sparked her face now was the rare smile that broke the mask when she looked at Augustus.

For two years Charlotte's closest friend outside the family had been young Charles E. Wiggin, son of a former employee at Topliff and Cushman. At fifteen, Charley had come back to Boston and taken a room at Mary Eliza's. Charlotte's struggles to beat her difficulties were deeply admired by Charley Wiggin. If the two saw some things differently--Charley's Baptist training only slowly let him relax and enjoy the theatre⁷--he could celebrate and encourage whenever good fortune came Charlotte's way.

Such a stroke was Charlotte's "concert debut" on March 25, 1830, in a recital arranged by George Farmer and the new manager of "The Hall" on Franklin Avenue, Algernon S. Chase. After a guitar solo, a flute duet, and a trio singing "Sweet Home," an anonymous "young lady," said the program, would sing "Take This Rose," "Oh, Merry Row the Bonny Bark," and "Farewell, My Love."⁸ The newspapers ignored the recital, but for Charlotte the night was a milestone. Facing her family and a goodly crowd of her neighbors, she made it plain that her weary routine as a scullery maid had no connection at all with her ambitions.

Emerson's sermons surely suggested that any pattern could be broken if necessary, even crushing frustrations like a family's poverty. To be sure, her voice needed more training, but it already covered the darker contralto tones nicely, and at times it opened out into the brighter range of a full soprano. Her songs during the public recital gave Mary Eliza renewed hope that Charlotte could eventually lighten the troubles of them all. Charley Wiggin was there to applaud and approve.

Back in Emerson's choir loft, Charlotte attracted the interest of another friend of her father, Robert D. Shepherd. The power of her voice and her sincerity struck Shepherd so deeply that he offered himself as her patron: the girl deserved better instruction. George Farmer's own teacher, John Paddon, might be persuaded to accept her as a pupil. After deliberating with Mary Eliza, Paddon formally "articled" Charlotte for a period of three years. Under the contract she would serve an indentured apprenticeship; her work in Paddon's home would pay for her lessons. Though she could no longer help with the labors at home, her efforts with Paddon clearly promised more practical ends.

Something in the hard work Paddon demanded struck a favorable note in the eager daughter of English Puritans. Under her humorless new teacher, Charlotte drove herself hard. The regimen Paddon demanded quickly revealed the promise in the voice, the character in the singer. Singing the difficult Italian and English music he set before her, she soon surprised even him.⁹ For nine months she followed his exacting routine, and her progress might have continued indefinitely if another turn had not come in her life.

Early in 1833 an invitation arrived from relatives in New York. Could Charlotte come for a two-week visit? The Samuel Judds could give her a well-deserved break in all her labors, and she could return home newly refreshed for more. Paddon and Shepherd readily approved her making the journey, and Mary Eliza saw no reason to stand in her way.

Safely arrived in New York, Charlotte noticed immediately the city's quicker pace, an obvious difference from Boston's sedate routine. As the English Mrs. Trollope saw it, New York rose from the sea like Venice "in the days of her glory."¹⁰ With a population of 250,000, the metropolis of the New World stretched four miles north from the tip of Manhattan. In its Battery it boasted one of the world's most beautiful promenades; Broadway ran its full length between public buildings and sprawling hotels bordered by trees and grass and shops, their interiors lighted at night with gas. If another newcomer, Fanny Kemble, correctly observed an unkempt air about the place--the grass in City Hall Park that looked a bit shaggy around the white picket fence enclosing the park, the broken brick sidewalks, and the many pigs rooting free in its gutters--New York still sported a remarkable air. Men stepped aside to let a lady pass. Dress styles among the rich were entirely French; coiffures were elaborately frizzed in the French manner. On the sidewalks fruit markets displayed their wares in bright-colored mounds. Swags of dress goods draped the fronts of the shops.

Visitors like Mrs. Trollope and Fanny Kemble might note a strongly anti-British feeling among the brisk New Yorkers, but to Charlotte the city's main concern centered on its own material progress. Its newer dwellings used a warm brown stone from New Jersey, decorated with bright green window blinds. Inside, the furnishings were equally rich; the silk upholsteries and marble tables, the porcelains and mirrors were surely as fine as London's. Omnibuses with names like Lady Washington, Lady Clinton, Lady Van Rensselaer rolled through the streets. Private carriages behind spotless teams were handsomer than anything Boston could offer. Hackney coaches plied the major thoroughfares for twenty-five cents per mile.

At the Judds' urging, Charlotte's two weeks stretched into three months. Near the end of her sojourn, they broached a disturbing idea. In view of her happiness in their household and their easier life, in view of her complete captivation of them, would Charlotte consider their legally adopting her? Looked at practically, the notion had much in its favor, but the matter created in the seventeen-year-old girl a troubling dilemma.¹¹ There was no doubt about the greater ease and comfort, and there was little doubt about the advantage to Mary Eliza with one less mouth to feed, one less child to worry over. And there was another advantage.

If she really expected her voice to prove her salvation, New York could offer attractions that Boston could not possibly match. Its developing taste for opera was one case in point. And its warmhearted support of the drama was another. Though the Judds were firmly opposed to the theatre themselves, Charlotte discovered early the great excitement that centered in New York's Park Theatre, where visiting stars like Charles and Fanny Kemble regularly played. Charlotte may even have seen the elegant Fanny, "better than merely beautifully," in her round of popular roles; years later she recalled her "young hero worship" of the new star.

Only lately, New York had created a special reason for Charlotte's wishing to stay. A fully fledged opera theatre had just opened its doors at the corner of Leonard and Church Streets. The Italian Opera House foretold a long step ahead in the cultivated life of New York. Boys at its entrance met arriving carriages with the cry, "Buy a book of the opera! English and Italian!" White-vested ushers moved quickly among its aisles and the velvet chairs in its boxes. The audiences sparkled in full dress and jewelry. When the conductor tapped his baton, forty men took up their instruments, the curtain rose grandly, and the performance, Rossini's "La Gazza Ladra" perhaps, began.¹²

With professional opera now playing to full houses in New York, the musical tone of the city seemed sure to rise steadily. Choir singers and voice teachers could see a bright day ahead with the Opera House magnifying the whole community's feel for music. Compared to New York, what could Boston now offer? Charlotte dreamed no dreams of herself on an opera stage, but if her voice held any promise at all, could she afford to go home? Yet, down deep in her heart, could her homesickness be ignored?

The question focused her uncertainty. After her three-months' absence, did she still have a place with Paddon? An articled agreement was not lightly ignored. And did she still want it, with the rather uncertain future it offered? In her dismay, she could not answer the question alone. Mary Eliza would have to decide.

The months that led to the turmoil in Charlotte had brought her mother similar concern. In the end, Mary Eliza's sense of family dictated her stand. Formal adoption into the Judd family was out of the question. Later, Charlotte would be old enough and free to decide for herself the best route toward the life she finally wanted. But for now Charlotte must come home to the family and meet with them all whatever fortune offered. When the word came, Charlotte felt no grave disappointment.

Back in Boston, she found her old singing teacher furious. His eyes sparking fire, Paddon demanded to know how so careless a pupil could dare expect further interest from him. He cancelled the articled agreement. Miss Cushman's foolish memories of New York, he said curtly, could compensate for the loss.

The problem now was to form a new plan, and in forming it Charlotte established a basic pattern for her life. Facing a problem meant defining the result she wanted, then building a strategy. The pattern whispered a certain Emersonian optimism, the echo of pulpit ideas at Second Church. Where others called defeat inevitable, Charlotte would face defeat and call it momentary delay.

At home, the floors still had to be swept, the beds aired and shaken, but there was no greater reason now for Charlotte to accept a lifetime of mopping and scrubbing than there had been at the start of her lessons with Paddon. On that, she and her mother agreed. The girl must find a new teacher.

Leaving Manhattan, Charlotte had not guessed that New York's new zest for opera might excite the country at large. But the names of Joseph and Mary Ann Wood entered her life in Boston just after the celebrated English singers had made triumphant debuts at New York's Park Theatre. When the Woods followed their widening fame north to Boston, Mary Ann needed for her two concerts a finer piano than the battered piece backstage. To find one, she and Joseph went to Captain Mackey's warehouse where Charlotte still practiced. To Mackey, Mary Ann mentioned another problem: could he suggest a local contralto who could sing a couple of duets with her?

Next afternoon, Charlotte made her way nervously to the Woods' suite at the Tremont House. Climbing the stairs, she felt suddenly foolish. How could she dare sing for the best English singers, so the papers said, ever heard in the United States? But during her audition, she relaxed a little. They were not formidable people. At the piano their coach, James G. Maeder, let her set her own pace. From her chair by the window, Mrs. Wood smiled encouragement. When she finished singing, the Woods and Maeder all cried their praise. Pressing her hand, Mrs. Wood insisted she must train her voice for opera. A gift like hers must not be wasted; such talent demanded training--and the most serious respect. Leaving the hotel, Charlotte could still hear Maeder's thundering assurance: "such a voice properly cultivated" could lead her to "any height of fortune I coveted."¹³

Rushing home with the news, visualizing the future, Charlotte was suddenly happier than she had been since her earliest childhood. Throughout the Woods' stay in Boston, she met them almost daily for similar talks. She became Mary Ann's constant companion on strolls down the bustling sidewalks of Tremont Street, along the shady paths of the Common, with Mary Ann emphasizing again and again her certainty that Charlotte must set her sights toward a career higher than choir work or coaching. She must groom her voice for the stage.

The concerts with Mary Ann Wood only strengthened a resolve now growing inside her. About Mary Ann herself, Boston waxed ecstatic. "If that woman will sing a dirge over my grave," cried the Transcript, "I will cheerfully die tomorrow."¹⁴ And Boston did not miss the compliment Mary Ann paid to one of its local daughters; the light from the English star brightened the name of the girl who shared it.

Boston's praise for Mary Ann Wood was a slowly evolving sign that new days were at hand for Cotton Mather's old city. In 1834 Boston stood at the threshold of a forty-year period when it would become America's literary "Parnassus." In that "brief but golden day" it would call itself the hub of America's intellectual universe.¹⁵ The wealth its ships brought home, the profits its industries reaped became the gold to support a Brahmin class; the money that spilled over fed a broad middle core, still loyal to its godly doctrine of hard work, but able now to afford with the fruit of its labors the finer pleasures. With a population of sixty thousand, Boston ranked in size just under New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The Boston and Worcester Railroad, which extended only as far as Newton in 1834, would push to Lowell, Worcester, and Providence the following year. In residential areas that now extended eastward toward Pearl Street and Fort Hill and westward along Franklin and Tremont Streets, Boston's new middle class housed itself behind Georgian and Grecian façades, turning its back on the somber timber and stone, the negations of its Puritan past. The new Brahmins themselves moved more and more onto Beacon Hill and Beacon Street facing the Common. With Harvard to lead Boston's intellectual advance, its Unitarian ministers to preach the virtue of the enlightened mind, "improvement," particularly "self-improvement," became a Boston watchword.

At long last, "improvement" could mean artistic refinement. And a local bookseller like James T. Fields could build a successful career publishing poetry and fiction that an earlier Boston would have tossed aside as wicked impracticality. By the time of Charlotte's meeting with Mary Ann Wood, Boston's enlightened citizenry could dare to encourage a local hopeful to train her voice for a larger place than a bench in a choir.

Opportunity for Charlotte knocked in another form as well. At the end of the Woods' engagement, the "remarkably fine" gift James Maeder saw in Charlotte and the wide opportunity he saw for himself in a city only beginning to sense its musical possibilities prompted his decision to remain in Boston. A man of great charm, lavish with his means when he recognized talent,¹⁶ Maeder would take Charlotte as an articled pupil.

If the term had sour overtones, the system still offered advantages. Now Charlotte could aspire to real prominence on a concert or opera stage. Now the family could hope for an end to their money troubles. There was one factor, however, that Charlotte had not counted on.

More accurately, it was a succession of factors. For all the pleasure and release Mary Eliza had found at the Tremont Theatre with Augustus Babbit, for all the delight she took in good theatre, she was at heart devoutly Puritan. She could enjoy theatre at a safe distance, but she could not live with it. Applauding skilled players on a stage might be one thing, but seeing one's own daughter planning a lifetime career among them was quite something else. Singing on stage, a painted face among the painted players, was hardly the life she had pictured for Charlotte when it first occurred to her that the girl's voice might be the family's redemption. Surely her daughter could see the chasm that lay between family need, its reputation, and the theatre as the core of her life.¹⁷

For no matter how surely Boston itself was changing, the town still had its doubts about theatre. Weren't all stage people unthinkably scarlet? Wasn't every actor's path mired with threat and temptation? In this risky business, could Charlotte possibly stay clean, living forever on the wave of a crowd's adoration?

Charlotte respected the argument; she knew her town well, but her mother's warnings were premature. The Woods had only suggested the stage; her voice still had to be trained. The day it might bring her fortune lay far, far ahead.

In all the clamor, a quieter voice now demanded a hearing. Here in her late teens, Charlotte confronted her personal affections. In the five years and more that Charley Wiggin had boarded at her table, he had become a valued friend and confidante. And dining across from her, Charley knew the family hopes that centered in this eldest daughter. Only now did he confess his own hopes. Strolling out on Long Wharf one late afternoon, Charley begged her to forget all about an opera career and marry him.

Charlotte let her gaze drift out over Boston Harbor; then she shook her head slowly. She was not ready for marriage. She was not sure she would ever be. Besides, she told Charley, nobody could tell about a career until he had tried it. Watching the light die in his eyes, she reassured him. She needed more time. Like her mother's, Charley's fears were premature.

Charley Wiggin did not struggle for Charlotte's favor alone. A quick introduction at church perhaps had led young Charles Spalding to come to the boardinghouse almost daily, and by late summer, 1833, he was writing his cousin about Charlotte. She was not like most girls, he wrote, people who could seem brilliant only under the best of circumstances. Her natural zest was her charm. "She does not follow where others lead the way. She is the pioneer who opens the pathway." She never deceived. "Gay, volatile, and even reckless," she had a gift for discerning character. "I wish with all my heart that wealth and honor and high society might be bestow'd by me, to make her happy."¹⁸

If this friendship led to a formal engagement, as one report claims, Charlotte's "charming" impulsiveness dismayed the boy's family. When she took a stagecoach out to meet them, she arrived seated on top between two young men. The mother of her fiancé greeted her warmly, commenting on her good luck in finding acquaintances on the same coach. "Acquaintances?" Charlotte laughed. "I never saw them before, but I am going to ride with one of them tomorrow."

When the new friend galloped up next morning leading a horse for Charlotte, she tucked up her skirts, leaped into the saddle, and raced off after him. An hour later she was back, with the friend lost a mile behind in her dust. Pondering this forward, headstrong, young person, Spalding's mother was too astonished to comment.¹⁹

In time the friendship cooled, though in May 1835, when Spalding died after days of violent headaches, his father wrote Mary Eliza that his son had often alluded to Charlotte in his more lucid moments. When Charlotte sent him the miniature Charles had given her, the father wrote gratefully and enclosed a lock of the boy's hair.

Whatever grief Charlotte felt at losing a friend, at eighteen her notions about herself and her purpose were too unformed to make her mourn the loss of a lover. She might find her personal mission later. Her responsibility to the family might include marriage; eventually she might place marriage at the logical center of her life, but during her training with James Maeder she could make no permanent promises. If Charley Wiggin or anyone else came to seem right later, later there would be time. If the alternative happened, so be it. Time itself would tell.

When the Woods returned to New York, Mary Ann maintained a steady interest in Charlotte's progress. "I am sure, my dear Charlotte, that I need not tell you how I miss you," she wrote on January 23, 1835, "and how happy I shall be to see you again, and trust you will follow my advice by practicing steadily . . . as I am most anxious for your success." In the margin Charlotte penciled, "The happiest day of my life [was] while reading this letter."²⁰

If Charlotte blossomed under Maeder's instruction, her contact with the man himself was no less happy. Where John Paddon had been a sober taskmaster, Maeder had a temperament like her Grandmother Babbit's, a genial wit and a sunny outlook that became even more delightful after his marriage to the young English singer, Clara Fisher, in December 1834. Clara's had been a celebrated name on the English stage ever since her debut in 1817, at age six, in Drury Lane's "Lilliputian" production of Richard III. Acting and singing in America had brought her additional fame, particularly in juvenile roles; her singing of "Home Sweet Home" often moved her audiences to tears.²¹ By the time she met Charlotte, she had formed a theory of acting that could apply to singing as well: never attempt to act until you can read well enough to convey the meaning of the words without moving the hands.²² The skills and insight Charlotte learned from both the Maeders served her well the night in April 1835 when she took her first determined step toward an operatic career.

In the time that led to that evening, Charlotte held firm to her vision. Real as her mother's objections were, they could not dash her hopes that talent and hard work--and a strong sense of moral uprightness--could make their way in the musical theatre. Certainly, she could see no moral lack in the Maeders or the Woods. Was there reason to conclude, from an assumption based on little evidence, that the stage inevitably corrupted? To oppose the assumption took courage in Boston, but in doing it, Charlotte remembered again the heady ideas she had learned at Emerson's pulpit.

Whatever thoughts Emerson might have expressed about a life in opera, he had admonished Boston to rethink a whole spectrum of subjects. Consistency to the old Puritan hobgoblins was a foolish consistency indeed; the sun shone brightly today, lighting all regions of the human intellect and sensibility. Boston must reexamine its morals. To Charlotte, bred a Unitarian and challenged in her most formative years by the young minister at Second Church to think her own thoughts, the force of his reasoning was clear. She must seek her own harmonious place in God's perfect scheme. If God created voices and the hearts to make them sing, he had blessed the arts and the stages that afforded them expression.

Within a year Emerson would publish his Transcendental manifesto, his conviction that never in history were the skies brighter than now; his Nature would fling the challenge to all conservatives. Sustained by such logic, Charlotte found in Maeder's connection with the Tremont Theatre and his personal interest in her talents a clear enough reason to see herself on the musical stage.

So ran the drift of her thoughts and her debates with Mary Eliza the spring of 1835. In Mackey's echoing warehouse and in her sessions with Maeder she groomed herself for various singing roles, particularly the part of Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro. Mozart's difficult opera had been known in New York since 1824.²³ It had been performed in Boston, and to choose it now for a debut involved an almost impossible risk. To go well, it required a perfect ensemble; every voice needed to be a superior instrument. But in spite of its problems, Maeder was convinced that Charlotte was ready for it on April 8.

She herself was less certain. The dream of using her voice in some form of stage art appealed now more strongly than ever before, but the desire was nothing if the gift it required was lacking. Mary Eliza held her peace. Her objections stood firm, and as surely as Charlotte dreamed of a sparkling future on stage, her mother prayed that the debut would somehow redirect her daughter toward more proper ends. Temporary failure in public now would be a small price to pay for missing a lifetime of grief later.

The night before her debut, dread and misgiving troubled her sleep. Details of the ordeal ahead raced through her mind. Was her voice ready? Was Maeder correct that she could handle a soprano role, even though Almaviva's top notes were considerably higher than her natural range? And since this was opera, not a recital, would her acting be good enough? Here in the dark the debut ahead seemed like nothing but pitfalls.

At dawn, she threw off the covers and dashed into her clothes. She tapped on Charley Wiggin's door. Would he go for a walk with her? She had to do something to steady her nerves. The walk through the dim streets calmed her a little. By night, after a day packed full with a last-minute costuming and a rehearsal, she felt better, though still so tense that she begged Charley to walk with her again, this time across the river and up the hill to the Tremont Theatre.²⁴

Moving up Tremont Street past the burying ground and King's Chapel, past School Street to the theatre's Grecian façade, Charlotte completed a circle she had begun eight years before, an excited little girl with her Uncle Augustus. The night they had seen William Macready in Coriolanus neither she nor Augustus could have imagined the step the nervous young woman was now taking.

Lanterns swung in the wide arches over the theatre entrance. The tall columns extended upward into an ornate triangle that disappeared in the darkness above. Crowds would soon be massed at the doors, eager to hear Clara Fisher sing Susanna. And even if Charlotte's own friends and family filled only a row or so, the Advertiser and Patriot had spread a hopeful word that eased some of her fears: "She is said by the best musical judges to possess an extraordinary voice of great compass, rich, flexible, and sweet."²⁵

At the door she thanked Charley and told him good-bye. He wished her a wistful "good luck," knowing that any success she achieved tonight might spoil his own hopes. Then she moved through the shadows backstage to the dressing room and began struggling into the heavy costume. Clara Fisher and the others in the cast wished her well. And then she stood ready in the wings, counting the minutes of the long first act, feeling a tightness in her throat before she could make her first entrance at the beginning of Act II.

The nearly twelve hundred faces that watched Charlotte's entrance saw an eighteen-year-old girl struggling to hide her timidity and fear. As Almaviva she had a difficult task: she not only must sing well but must try somehow to ease herself so fully into the character that the audience would forget the singer. Hopefully, while she was singing, she would forget about herself.

She did not wholly succeed. In "Porgi amor," when Almaviva laments that the Count no longer loves her, her notes were so quiet that the back corners of the hall could not hear. And she had trouble remembering her proper position in the scenes. Maeder and Thomas Barry, the theatre manager, had showered her with so many details that at times she felt on the verge of panic. But encouraging smiles from Clara Fisher helped settle her fears; scene followed scene more easily once she realized that the eyes of the audience were not always riveted on her, ready to note her slightest error. But her costume gave her real trouble, and nobody else could help. The whirlpool of heavy drapery around her feet threatened to trip her each time she tried to move, to act as well as sing the Countess' tearful emotions.

In spite of her fears, the long performance was interrupted again and again with cheers. Though they were mainly for Clara, Charlotte tasted the sweet delight of knowing that some were also for her. When her voice rang out in the happy ensemble at the end of Act IV, her fears and doubts had disappeared in a bounding inner gladness that, while she might not have wholly succeeded, she had not wholly failed. The applause at the final curtain sounded sweeter than any music she had heard.

She left the stage elated. The stormy applause had not been simply polite. It was more than a friendly gesture toward a local girl who promised to make good. When Mary Eliza and Susan and Charlie pushed into her dressing room, their faces reflected her own joy that she had safely leaped her first hurdle. Mary Eliza said nothing to spoil the victory, though on Charley's face Charlotte caught the shadow of a warm friend's happiness mixed with a lover's dismay.

In the days that followed, the papers loudly echoed Charlotte's own joy. One critic complained that she put less energy into her part than "it would bear," but Charlotte blamed that on her heavy costume. "There is but one opinion expressed in and out of the house," cried the Atlas, "Miss Cushman's success was brilliant."²⁶ Her voice, in spite of her youth, was superior to that of any other American heard thus far in Boston. "She does honor to her teacher, Mr. Maeder." In spite of obvious nervousness, her acting had a "very respectable character." With her "good person," she held the stage with a proper grace and dignity. If Boston had enough musical taste to appreciate a really fine singer, the young lady would become "deservedly a great favorite." To the Pearl and Literary Gazette, the much she still had to learn was splendidly matched by the great knowledge she already had. As an actress she showed much promise.²⁷ And a newspaper notice from faraway New York opened her eyes a little wider to her possible future. "A Miss Cushman is doing wonders at the Tremont, in opera," reported the Spirit Of The Times. "If she should succeed at the Park, Mr. Manager Barry will make his fortune--perhaps."²⁸ New York, it seemed, was far from a closed issue.

In the height of her new celebrity, John Paddon took an ad in the Transcript to say that while he was happy in Miss Cushman's success, that while he had joined her other friends at the Tremont to cheer her efforts, he must state for the record that he had already given her much instruction "before any such name as Maeder was heard of in this city." No one could possibly think that a voice could be brought to stage quality in a few short months. Miss Cushman had studied only briefly with Maeder, and it was easy to see how little credit he could claim. Paddon considered himself "the substantial cause"²⁹ of Miss Cushman's success.

Paddon might better have swallowed his injured pride. Charlotte herself stilled the mild tempest that broke out in the Boston press. Maeder, she stated, deserved full credit. Paddon himself had said that when she broke her articled agreement he saw no promise in her. Paddon finished the paper byplay with another paid note in the Atlas: "I only feel for Miss Cushman a very sincere, and indeed anxious desire for her success."³⁰

The debut on April 8 led to another appearance in the same role on the thirteenth, again to high acclaim, "less embarrassed" than on the first occasion.³¹ On the twenty-first and twenty-second, before she felt fully ready, Maeder presented her in an opera version of Cinderella, but here her efforts failed. The Pearl found her music "imperfect"; she needed more study before she could hope to compete with "stars"; as an actress she needed "grace." On the fourth of June, after more hard work and redoubled efforts, she sang Julia Mannering in an opera version of Scott's Guy Mannering: Or The Gypsy's Prophecy.

Throughout the summer, her spirits stayed high, if somewhat less than joyous after her drubbing as Cinderella. She had found the profession in which she wanted to work. And the labor it demanded was still worth the cost. She filled her days vocalizing with Maeder, learning new roles, anticipating the day when the Woods would return for a fall engagement in Boston. Her gratitude toward the Woods was boundless. On October 6, Charlotte was the Countess Almaviva to Mary Ann's Susanna. Neither the Advocate nor the Atlas fully applauded her performance; the Atlas could see "but little improvement in her singing and none in her acting," though it was "no faint praise to say that she appears well even beside Mrs. Wood."³²

By late fall Maeder knew that in Charlotte he had a promising find, a singer of professional caliber. Why not take her with Clara and him to fill a singing engagement in New Orleans? Charlotte had already anticipated his question. Life on an opera stage was clearly a matter of constant travel. One willingly accepted the vagabond life it required.

But Maeder's question was difficult. Her mother would have strong opinions, though she would have to admit now that Charlotte's voice had promise, that it was indeed a practical instrument that might bring financial rewards for them all. And just as truly, in her singing she had something valid to offer. Heads could shake and objections could thunder, but she would proceed with her plans. If it gave any comfort to Mary Eliza, she would prove once and for all that working on the stage she could still stand firmly on the side of morality.³³ Her mother must throttle her fears.

And for the last time a problem centered in Charley Wiggin. Years later a New York paper failed to name the young man, but if the story was true, Charlotte broke once and for all Charley's hopes that she would give up this "unwomanly proceeding" and marry him.³⁴ The only clear road she saw for herself--and for the good of the family--was the long road south to New Orleans and the public stage. Charley would watch her movements from a distance, he would marry a local girl and succeed in other ways, but he would never become fully reconciled to the loss he suffered when the opera stage outbid him for Charlotte's affection.

Whatever pain her decision cost her, marriage to Charley Wiggin bad no place in Charlotte's dreams by late fall, 1835. When James and Clara Maeder persuaded her to cast her lot with theirs, she set her sights on the warm southern clime of New Orleans where new adventure and the truest test of her self-reliance waited.