The Heart's Conviction and Early Retirement

"Genius!" cried the Picayune. "Extraordinary vocal power!" cried the Bee, recanting its old sting about Charlotte's voice. Reading the words to Sallie, Charlotte found a happy reminder of the favor these New Orleans people had done her so many years before. Their goodwill now was a heartening send-off for the run she was beginning.

Throughout the run, whether she played the tattered gypsy, the spirited Rosalind, or Lady Macbeth, Charlotte set off frenzied applause. Even in The Stranger, a play which the Picayune man dismissed as "sickly" and sentimental, she seemed able to do no wrong. Her sufferings as Mrs. Haller were stunningly real. Rarely had an actress played in New Orleans who could manage her voice so superbly, said the Picayune. "Rich and melodious by nature," its inflections enabled her to utter every variation of feeling, "so that each pulsation, every throb of the heart, is reflected." It was her "sobs and sighs, and groans, rather than the text of the play-wright, which elicited the applause of the audience by touching their sympathies."¹

Backstage, affairs were no less happy. Charlotte's early ties with Macready might have handicapped her with Ludlow and Smith, who still bore scars from his blasts against them in 1844 for ignoring the business outlined in his promptbooks. To Macready's shouts of "Stupid!" Ludlow had stomped off to his office: Mr. Macready could say anything else "in writing!"² But Charlotte was too much a professional to explode in a fury when the St. Charles people needed coaching. Like Macready, she had sent her acting copies ahead with her instructions penciled in carefully, but she knew the value of tact when rough spots still showed up in rehearsals. The St. Charles people were craftsmen, unlike the sorry lot at the Walnut.

Charlotte's tact and hard work paid off. Her twenty-seven nights in New Orleans were the longest run ever known in the city; she had played to greater receipts³ than even Macready. Couldock himself had pleased New Orleans: As the Stranger he had performed "remarkably well."⁴ Writing Henry Chorley the news, Charlotte figured she ought soon to be able to return to England at least thirty thousand pounds richer, ready to live the best life her brilliant American success could afford. Already she yearned for the elegance of Mayfair, the conversation, poise, and grace of her Portnam Square rooms.⁵

Playing Mobile and Savannah, the rawness and laziness she saw everywhere in the South irked her. She and Matilda tried vainly to find any bookshop that carried Longfellow, when in every village in England they could have bought him easily.⁶ Jogging along the roads through the plantations, she tried not to see the slave gangs. At distances, half-hidden in the clumps of great oaks that framed them, she glimpsed the white-columned, baronial homes of the planters, proud riders in white panamas and black string ties she passed on the roads. The ragged small towns passed in a blur of pigs running loose, of unpainted wooden houses and sagging fences, of Negro children swarming about their mothers in red bandannas. When April found her in Charleston, the town's "flattest month of the year," she gritted her teeth, then refused to play to half-empty houses for a "not over-courteous"⁷ manager and determined to push on north.

By the time she had weathered the bouncing stagecoaches and stuffy trains to Washington, she was thoroughly homesick for England and happy to find proof again that some parts of the country, at least, were civilized. Driving along Washington's muddy, catalpa-lined streets, she could imagine the city that might one day enhance the banks of the Potomac. Already a square stub of marble promised the day when a soaring white shaft would honor the nation's first president. Already the gaunt iron ribs of a dome were rising over Capitol Hill. But as yet Washington's 50,000 people had only sketched the broad outlines of a city.

At the Adelphi Theatre, on May 1, she set off the usual cheers as Meg Merrilies. Next night, gripping her daggers, her Lady Macbeth electrified the audience; her tone, the expression of her face, her manner were "peculiarly fine."⁸

But for the money, Philadelphia interested her more, a fact made plain in the card the manager of the Arch Street Theatre published a day or so before she arrived. "The enormous expense attending Miss Cushman's engagement" required him, said E. S. Connor, to ask a favor: would his box holders please use their own boxes and not fill up the front seats which he could otherwise sell? To avoid raising prices, even though he had hired "first-rate, celebrated auxiliaries" for Miss Cushman's run, he must suspend his "free list" entirely.⁹

However much she cost Connor, "satisfactory" was Charlotte's own word for the flood of dollars she pocketed in Philadelphia. Now she could face her month at the Astor Place Opera House in New York more calmly, if not fully sure she was wise to appear with an English actor where blood had flowed in protest over English talents "dominating" the American stage.

Standing tense in the wings at the Astor Place the night of May 13, Charlotte dreaded the reception she and Couldock might soon meet. Remembering the furious cries and hisses that had boiled up here last May when Macready came on stage was all too fearfully easy. Tonight, who could predict what trouble might be brewing? Sallie had taken a peek through the curtains and come back smiling: There were no angry banners in sight, no ominous bundles that might spell rotten eggs and vegetables. Still, no one could know anything until the curtains parted and she and Couldock appeared.

The ordeal was over in a few minutes. When Charlotte bounded on stage, the applause was courteous enough; the crowd sat hushed and enthralled while her Romeo poured out his rising passion. If Couldock's Mercutio offended anyone's flaming patriotism, apparently Charlotte's triumph in London, her victory over the English on their own ground, was enough to allay the fires. A year had been long enough for tempers to cool. On June 1 the Prompter labeled the whole engagement "brilliant." To Charlotte's old standby, the Spirit of the Times, her Rosalind was "swashing," "martial," the best Rosalind one could imagine. "We are delighted to have our countrywoman acknowledged as the best actress in her line in the land."¹⁰

From the Astor Place she moved on to Niblo's Garden, expecting to act the remainder of June, but when frantic word came from Susan, she canceled her contract and took the first ship to Liverpool. Susan's baby daughter, Ida, was on the point of death from some unexplained illness. She stayed three weeks with Susan and Sheridan, offering what comfort she could. When the baby began to recover, she took full advantage of the time to become reacquainted with young Ned, now twelve and strangely unhappy and sullen in Sheridan Muspratt's house. Charlotte tried to plumb the cause of Ned's trouble, but nothing came clear.

She acted two nights in Liverpool, then sailed for home. The September night she arrived back in New York she acted again at Niblo's, a fact which proved to one paper that the Atlantic was, after all, becoming little more than a bridge. To welcome her back, a sellout crowd jammed the Garden, "compelling the curious to perch on chairtops for a view of the stage."¹¹

In September, she moved on to Boston to fill a round at the Howard Athenaeum and relax between times at the new Tremont House, with its lavish decor, its baths, and its unique indoor water closets. Amid comforts like none she had enjoyed since England, Charlotte welcomed a new round of visits from the bright lights of Boston. When Longfellow called and found her away at rehearsal, he stayed on to chat with Matilda about her George Sand translations. "You ought to go to England," Matilda told him. "You are much more known and honored there than in this country."¹² As a proof, Matilda cited their vain search for any of his books in a Southern store.

On a day free of rehearsals, Charlotte and Matilda accepted Emerson's summons to Concord to meet John Greenleaf Whittier--to bemoan together the evils of slavery, to reminisce with Emerson over their distant days at Second Church, to recall their bright friends, the Carlyles.¹³ Another day they called on Longfellow at Craigie House. A "very agreeable" visit¹⁴ it was, the poet told his journal. She happily arranged theatre tickets for Mrs. Horace Mann, Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister-in-law. She could only get places rather high up, but since it was a matinee, "there will be only nice people all over the house," she wrote Mary, "so you will not be incommoded in that respect."¹⁵

Between all the socializing and work, Charlotte filled her time with business, detailed letters about the terms under which she would act, conferences with E. A. Marshall, who wanted to book her for New York and Philadelphia. But Marshall's proposal to share the profits with her after box office takes of $200 in New York and $100 in Philadelphia was "out of the question."

"You shall either give me half after $100 or a clear half of five nights and I will act for nothing on the sixth, or you shall give me $250 per night, and this is the best I can possibly do!"

Marshall's reply was clear. "I don't think I can afford it, but I will think of it. I had rather give a certainty, but it is too much."

She could take her time with Marshall. "You can think of it and let me know this week. It is immaterial to me whether I act in NY or not this fall."¹⁶

With or without Marshall, she could avoid returning to New York just now. P. T. Barnum's protégée, Jenny Lind, had arrived from Sweden on September 7 and had touched off a popular storm. Seated behind Barnum in an open carriage, nearly smothered in flowers, the fabulous, golden-haired Jenny had moved grandly up Canal Street. Near-riots had broken out at the box office the day her tickets were placed on sale; for her first American concert, Castle Garden packed in over 6,000 people at $5 per head.¹⁷

Looking beyond New York, Charlotte wondered how Jenny Lind's national tour might affect her own drawing power--how much appetite America still had for a native daughter's acting when it could feed on Jenny's glorious, bird-like singing. It might help to arm herself with another novelty. What about playing Romeo one night and switching the next to Juliet? If Fanny Kemble was not too old and fat to do Juliet, "I am sure I am not," she wrote William Fredericks. "I think a good deal of interest and curiosity might be excited."¹⁸

She mentioned the idea to a crowd of friends in her rooms, among them Hawthorne, Charles Sumner, and Longfellow's brother-in-law, Tom Appleton, but when nobody took her seriously, she let the matter drop. The talk turned instead to Appleton's witty comments on the Brownings and to Hawthorne's new book, The Scarlet Letter, and the wide sale it was enjoying. The talk turned too to the delights Bostonians were finding in winter treks to warm, sunny Rome. More and more sober consciences were persuading themselves that one ought, if one could, to get away from the useless pains of blizzards and snow.

Busy again in Philadelphia, Charlotte soon wished she had pushed through her plan to play Juliet. The night of November 8 saw a performance at the Walnut, cried one paper, that Philadelphia would long remember with "shame and disgust."¹⁹ Why Marshall let the play go on, why she herself did not ring down the curtain, Charlotte could not later imagine, for by the end of the first act it was clear to players and audience alike that Fanny Wallack (Lester Wallack's aunt), the night's delicate Juliet, was gloriously drunk. By the end of act three, Fanny's hiccuping and giggling had made the play a shambles. A minute or so before the curtain, she stopped still, made one great sweep of her outstretched arms, then fell flat on her face, tangled and kicking in her draperies. The crowd burst into yells and laughter, and stagehands carried her off, her swollen red face shrieking. Watching it all, Charlotte stood dumb and helpless. Her own Juliet might have been a little unfeminine, but it could hardly have been so tasteless.

Surely, nothing worse could befall the tour she now began with a run in Pittsburgh and a river circuit through Cincinnati and Louisville to New Orleans. Despite Fanny Wallack, her crowded houses in Philadelphia had averaged $500 per night. Yet her disgust at Fanny brought home the fact, all too clearly, that there was no real guarantee against such things in the profession she had chosen. She wrote W. S. Fredericks, her friend from her days as manager at the Walnut, that she was thinking of quitting the stage for good. What advice could he give her about making a formal farewell some months hence?²⁰

On this new sally into the hinterland she would miss having Couldock's support. By now, the actor had achieved a certain fame, and he frankly confessed that he no longer wished to play second fiddle. Charlotte was not wholly sorry. Playing opposite Couldock of late, she had thoroughly tired of his temper. On stage he still served her well, but backstage and during rehearsals, his explosions shot off more and more fire. In Philadelphia she knew she no longer wished to tour with an actor who could fly into rages at another's simple mistakes. When a Salanio in The Merchant of Venice muffed some lines, Couldock ordered him to his dressing room.

"You played Salanio last night?"

"Yes, sir."

"And your name is er . . . ?"

"Ogden, sir," the actor replied, nervously.

"Ah, yes, Ogden. Well, how long have you been at it, Ogden?"

"About three years," he answered, feeling easier.

"Three years, huh! Well, will you let me give you a bit of advice, Ogden." Suddenly, Couldock's voice rose to a fury. "You take some money . . . and you go to a hardware store. And you buy a good sharp hatchet and then I want you to take it home and chop your damn fool head off!"²¹

With that, Couldock made a furious leap at the actor and fell to clouting him over the head. The scene was worthy of an Edwin Forrest.

Thinking about Couldock took Charlotte back to her timorous first days in England and the progress the years had brought. She could rate her professional life "satisfactory." She had learned to value herself with managers; her skill in the game was making her comfortably rich. Yet, one phase of her life was far from easy. In many ways, Matilda was a disappointment. Her "nerves" often made her difficult; she often complained that nobody understood her. About that Charlotte could be sympathetic. She could imagine how burdensome life must be to a person whose hunger for fame had simply outrun her talents. She didn't know what could or should be done about Matilda, but her quiet vexation with her perhaps explained the grief Charlotte encountered in Cincinnati. Rehearsing long hours with shoddy acting companies, she had long ago learned to clench her teeth and suffer in silence, but nothing had prepared her for Conrad Clarke, a young stock actor at the National, who soon impressed her as the "cleverest young man I have seen."²² Clarke's Orlando packed a fire and a steely grace that astonished her.

Before long, her astonishment turned to something deeper. Playing opposite Clarke, bandying Shakespeare's tender words with this red-lipped young man, Charlotte sensed in herself a growing uneasiness. Were her sleeplessness and her boredom with Matilda signs that deep inside her a woman's heart lay sleeping, in unguessed readiness for some vibrant man's animal charm? In spite of all she had told herself about any actress' need to keep her heart free, had the time come to abandon that lonely conviction?

Talking earnestly backstage with Clarke, letting him escort her back to her hotel, Charlotte felt herself succumb more and more to his charm. He had grown up a Quaker, he told her, the proper son of Philadelphians who had opposed with pleas and head shakings his wish to become an actor, but the fire inside him had made him do what he must. To all this Charlotte nodded her understanding. Day after day, when Clarke knocked on her door, she sent Sallie away on some idle errand, then sat curled and quiet on her sofa while Clarke told her his dreams and plans. The talks became the highpoint of her day. Looking forward to them, she could imagine the time when, to this beautiful young man sprawled in his chair, his boots propped on her footstool, she might bare more of her heart than she had to any other man.

To Sallie and Matilda she said nothing. And they said nothing to her. If the company noticed the softening in Charlotte's manner, they gave no sign. Yet a stock actress guessed her feelings one night in the wings when, talking to Charlotte, she suddenly asked, "What of all things in this world, Miss Cushman, would you rather be?"

A few steps off, Clarke stood bantering the pretty actress whom the company all called "the poodle dog" for the way she wore her hair. Glancing at Clarke, Charlotte sighed: "I would rather be a pretty woman than anything else in this wide, wide world." Then hearing her cue, she rushed on stage to shriek and moan as the ragged Meg Merrilies.

A night or so before the Cincinnati engagement ended, Charlotte decided she might have been hasty in planning a complete retirement. Once back in England, she might go on acting at times--but only as the spirit moved her. To have a dependable talent opposite her, she might take along Conrad Clarke. He already knew how much she admired his talent, how deep her interest in him extended. When she ventured the matter to Clarke, his "Yes!" made her almost foolishly happy. Any plan so obviously good for her career could hardly be bad for her heart.

Through intuition and the evidence she had seen on stage of Clarke's acting ability, Charlotte knew all she wanted to know about him; nobody had told her anything. Yet she learned the rest soon enough. Between scenes one night, she was just entering her dressing room, when she heard a woman's voice say quietly, "You are Charlotte Cushman, the great actress?"

When Charlotte turned, she found a strange huddled figure holding a child in her arms. The woman looked at her, then tearfully poured out a torrent of words: "Haven't you got enough men to admire you without coming between husband and wife? And robbing me of my husband?" Charlotte looked her full in the face. "Who is your husband?" "Conrad Clarke, the father of this child," she answered.

Charlotte stared at her, unbelieving. There was no reply she could give the woman. She grasped the doorjamb. Fame had opened broader ranges of joy and richer rewards than she had ever envisioned, but suddenly, it tasted hateful and sour. She asked the woman to wait until she could finish the play.

At its curtain, she sent Sallie to bring Clarke to her. When he knocked, she opened the door. She said nothing to him, but--battling the tears that stood ready to flow--she swept a hand toward the woman and child. The shock, then the anger that flashed in Clarke's face told her all she needed. When he began angrily berating the woman for coming, when he turned to Charlotte, stuttering in his rage, she faced him, seeing him now caught in his trick. He had, of course, made her no commitments; there had been no real avowals of anything. Yet the hours he had spent with her, laying open his dreams, had seemed so much more than an actor's ambition, so truly a proof of regard that tears seemed the only possible comment. But she held her pose. As coldly as if she were waving Cardinal Wolsey aside, she dismissed the wretched Clarke and his family. Only after she heard the door close did she let herself slump in her chair, turn to her glass to face the bleak crumpled reflection.²³

As quickly as possible, Charlotte turned her back on Cincinnati, richer by $5,000 for her eighteen nights' work--and wiser. Writing Fred from Louisville, her tone told more than her words. "My labours are much more fatiguing than they were last year, for I have to teach every new Macbeth, and Wolsey, etc. etc., and I go into the theatre at 10 o'clock, remaining until 3, teaching people how to act, and at night they are just as bad as though I had not taught them." The routine allowed her no time for rest: "I am almost worn out with it."²⁴ She blamed Clarke for nothing.

Humiliated, angry only at her stupidity, she recalled words she had not said to herself since Rosalie's death, words about actors throttling their personal feelings to have energy left for their roles. She could muster no interest beyond the definite farewell she determined anew to make soon, to put an end once and for all to the tricks and pretenses that acting made her prey to. An announced formal farewell could do her pocket no harm--and more importantly, it could free her forever from all further risks to her heart.

To add to her pain, she knew by the time she left Cincinnati that her booking agent, Corbyn, had given her wrong travel schedules and bungled acting dates farther down river--all because, she concluded, she had paid him beforehand. The fact merely confirmed what she had long suspected. No man could really be trusted. Of all the men she had ever known, which one had ever had brains--or feelings?²⁵

Reports from Philadelphia brought her a vengeful joy. Edwin Forrest's sins were finding him out at last. His wife, Catherine, was spreading the ugly story that after the Astor Place Riot, Forrest had actually sent money to Boston to foment further trouble for Macready. Hearing other terrible facts his wife was divulging about him daily, Charlotte felt only more certain than ever that marriage could never make sense for a player. She told herself that marriage to Conrad Clarke--even if he had been the man she had thought he was--would have proved a disaster.

Acting Mrs. Haller one night farther down river, she knew again how desperately she wanted to quit acting. The blundering manager, unable to find two white children to appear in the play's last scene, and without telling her anything, met the emergency by sending on two little Negroes. She almost dropped her lines when she saw them, but since the audience seemed willing to accept the matter, she played on. But at the moment when the children were led up to the elaborate cage-like arbor--there to wait out of sight until the meeting between Mrs. Haller and the Stranger--first one terrified child, then the other, cried, "Me won't be put in de calaboose! Me won't be put in de calaboose!"

When nothing could stop their cries and yells and the audience broke up laughing, the green curtain had to come down prematurely and the play hobbled along without them. Charlotte determined then that any time she ever played Mrs. Haller again her contract would specify white children, or else.²⁶

When a painful hoarseness waylaid her in Louisville, she suffered again all the pangs that knowing Clarke had brought her. Days later, miserable with a bilious colic, she faced again the big question. With a purse full of money, what madness could prompt her to keep on acting? Why shouldn't she take her fame and comfortable gains and retire--with the easy conscience that her hard work had long since justified?

"I wish I could get a few bottles of Mrs. Haydon's gin," she wrote Fred. Perhaps he could forward a case to New Orleans by one of the California steamers. Her aching throat was a real problem now; the gin might help her relax.

Thoughout her run in New Orleans late in January 1851, her throat continued to trouble her. At times, her voice left her completely. Until just before curtain time, she could only speak in whispers; some nights the curtain was rising before she could talk at all. With this added worry, surely it was pointless to keep on. Besides, she knew the full truth now about acting, the tricks and shams, the dingy paraphernalia that made up what the public called "theatrical splendour." Much as she had once objected, Macready and Fanny Kemble were right; sooner or later, any sane person must doubt the "properness" of theatre. Contemplating the clean, dispassionate life she meant to live in London, she could feel no sense of mission, no pride in being a working woman. Whatever ambition had fired her once had gone out.

The crowds she drew in New Orleans brought her no lift. Though she was the "great card of the season," only fair houses turned out to see her. Her fear of Jenny Lind's following her west had proved right. Too many people were saving their money until Jenny could arrive in town, almost on her heels. The press' reaction to her own work, its lack of sympathy and complete unconcern for her troublesome throat, only deepened her gloom. One paper scoffed at her "violence, her startling attitudes and grimaces, her screaming tones." It would have only troubled her more to know that one woman, Charlotte's last night, had to be carried out and put to bed, Meg Merrilies had worked so hard on her nerves.²⁷

Yet gloomy or not, Charlotte would not let herself be mistreated. When P. T. Barnum wrote ahead to St. Louis, wanting to book a hall for a Jenny Lind concert--the hall that was already booked for Charlotte--she made her stand crystal clear. "I shall not object to giving up the nights required by Mr. Barnum . . . upon consideration of being paid two hundred and fifty dollars ($250) per night for so doing, which is the positive worth of those nights to me."²⁸

Reading a London paper, Charlotte found that a famous farewell to the stage had just taken place, at the very time her own thoughts about retiring stood uppermost. For all the irritations he had caused her, she read with envy the news that Macready had at last relinquished his crown. On February 26, 1851, he had played his last Macbeth, happy at fifty-eight to be free of all the vexations that acting had brought him. Macready had stayed in character to the last. Making his final exit from the Drury Lane stage, he had admonished his servant to hold the curtain close about him, lest he be annoyed by the good-byes of "those actors."²⁹

When Charlotte read some weeks later a note of her current high status in England, she felt sure her own proper time had arrived. "In kindling and uniting the heart of a whole audience--in transmitting a stream of fire through a thousand brains at once, till they vibrate to her own, Miss Cushman has no superior," said Tallis's Dramatic magazine. The American actress outdistanced all English rivalry and "challenged even Rachel."³⁰ If such was her reputation, what better time could she find to retire--once she had given proper notice? She would begin now to let the impression circulate that any who wished to see the great Charlotte Cushman on stage should not let the opportunity pass.

She kept that thought fresh throughout the season of 1851 and into the next, though she refused to let her plan work any effect on the quality she presented on stage. In Nashville, she might have let herself fluff through an accident. Instead, something of the old fire in her capitalized on it. Reading Macbeth's letter, she had only spoken the words, "Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be What thou art promised," when she tangled a heel in her train and fell, sprawling. In fearful silence, the audience watched her cover the fall, not quite sure it had been an accident. She raised herself slowly, set one hand firmly on the boards, and gazed at the letter in her other hand. Then slowly she rose to a kneeling position and continued speaking. At her words, "Hie thee hither," she leaped to her feet, fully in character, to finish the speech with all the force it required. The crowd burst into cheers.³¹

Covering the fall had felt good. Momentarily, an old excitement flowed through her, the art required in playing a part without losing herself in it. Falling, she had sensed immediately that Lady Macbeth would have been far more interested in the letter's dread words than in any foolish loss of balance. As Lady Macbeth, she had merely continued building the role.

Later, playing Meg, she could laugh when her terrible force left the actor playing Dirk Hatterick overpowered and dumb. "Well, sir, go on with the dialogue," she said finally to rouse him. When the actor apologized after the curtain--"The wonderful power of your acting completely upset me. I was no longer Dirk Hatterick, but a powerless thrall in your possession"--she accepted the compliment. "But please don't let me make you forget your business."³²

Nor did she suggest in New York in June the thoughts that now occupied her. At Castle Garden, she took the rehearsal for Guy Mannering into her own hands when the conductor failed to maintain the timing. After asking him twice to stop playing his violin and beat out the time with his stick, she at last walked down to the footlights, reached over and took the offending instrument, then marched up and down, calling the tempo and beating the time with her heels.³³

On July 30 in Chicago her Mrs. Haller left the Journal convinced that something much deeper than pretense had figured in Charlotte's acting. Her Meg overwhelmed the paper's young critic. What he had meant to analyze, he found himself responding to emotionally, his mission forgotten in "the wild and loving, the imperious and reed-like Meg Merrilies."³⁴ The actress had attained the heights of art by concealing her art completely.

After another brief run in New York at John Brougham's Lyceum Theatre, playing La Tisbe in Smith's Actress of Padua, Charlotte directed her tired steps back to Boston. Planning her Boston appearances, she meant no arrogance when she wrote J. B. Wright, the National Theatre manager: "I really have not the courage to act with novices."³⁵ Nor did she overlook in this Boston run another chance to make money. She hoped Wright would approve her opening as Bianca in Fazio. "I can do more for you and myself, with it than anything else, provided it is announced as the character of which I made my first great success in London, and now acted for the first time in Boston since my return from Europe."³⁶

Heading for Boston, she stopped long enough in Albany to confront an old grief. In the years since Augustus' death, she and Mary Eliza had never decided about a final burial place for the body; the casket had remained in careful storage. She determined now to send it to Boston for burial beside Elkanah. That done, she faced another family problem. Ever since her quick trip to Liverpool, she had felt a growing sympathy for Susan's boy Ned. Whether Sheridan was too strict a disciplinarian, whether the stepfather resented the boy, hostility smoldered between them. Reading Susan's worried letters, she had hit on a plan. Carefully, tactfully, she broached it: Would Susan let her adopt Ned?

In retirement, she could give the boy a solid homelife. With all her new money, she could buy him whatever he needed. With all her free time, she could lavish on him every attention. She could free him, once and for all, from whatever feelings he had about not being wanted. When Susan wrote her consent, Charlotte joyously took the bold step. Under the laws of New York, his birthplace, Ned became Edwin Charles Cushman, her legally adopted son.³⁷ As soon as she returned to England, Ned could join her and, under her lead, grow up--if her plans worked out--along the lines his nature and her good sense and experience dictated. Signing the papers, she felt in her heart a new joy; she saw her future take on a new brightness. Until now she had not dared confess to herself or anyone else the emptiness in her life that this child of her own could fill.

Arriving in Boston, she took Longfellow the Spanish moss she had brought him from Louisiana, then rushed off to rehearsals. She missed his return call, but the poet stayed on for a talk with Matilda, noting the sadness he saw now in Matilda's face, "some bitterness, as of disappointment,"³⁸ he guessed. Another day she missed Julia Ward Howe, but business and her plans for Ned and England were far more interesting than mere social rounds.

In her rare leisure, Charlotte fell to planning the kind of retirement she wanted. She would take her lead from old Samuel Rogers and fill her house with the wittiest people, the best talk and books and art she could afford. On acting days, she still gave her best to the play, though as Romeo one afternoon, she almost had to give more. With Sarah Anderton as Juliet, she had just finished one of her tenderest speeches when somebody's crude sneeze, clearly a catcall, broke the mood. Immediately, Charlotte stopped the scene, glared out into the dark hall toward a flurry of smothered laughter, then laid a protective arm about Juliet's shoulders and led the lady to safety. Then, still in character, she returned to face the offender across the footlights. Facing the crowd, Charlotte peered again toward the sneezer. Then she commanded, "Some man must put that person out, or I shall be obliged to do it myself!"³⁹ Immediately the crowd rose, cheering, while men lifted the struggling culprit over their heads and carried him out of the hall. When the uproar subsided, Romeo shepherded Juliet back onto the stage and continued the play.

Partly to enliven these later days before she retired forever, Charlotte took on another new role. If she felt comfortable as Romeo, why not try Hamlet? First in Boston, then on November 24 in New York, she came on stage to brood through the long hours Hamlet needed to make up his mind. The public gave mixed reactions. Some said, "bizarre," a "mongrel performance." Others accepted the illusion readily enough, though the real good that came from the effort was the fact that it helped speed up her time.

In Boston, no one had watched her with more excitement than a twenty-year-old girl who came in each afternoon from Watertown. Harriet Hosmer left the theatre ecstatic. "You have no idea how splendid Hamlet was. I used to think Lady Macbeth the finest thing that could be done, but Queen Katharine shook my foundations and Hamlet overturned it! It was grand."⁴⁰

When a friend brought the girl backstage, Charlotte set her down for a talk. Something about Harriet was immediately captivating: her laugh, her quick humor, the spirited way she tossed her head and combed back her short, brown curls with her fingers, as boys did, the way she sketched in the air something she was trying to say. When Harriet declared she meant to become a sculptor, Charlotte listened earnestly. After the visit, the girl wrote a friend in St. Louis: "Isn't it strange how we meet people in this world and become attached to them in so short a time?"⁴¹

Before long Charlotte knew Harriet's full story: her mother, two brothers, and a sister had died of tuberculosis. Her father, hoping to toughen her, had taught her to ride and swim and ice-skate as well as a boy. Attending school in Lenox she had become a favorite of the town's famous resident, Fanny Kemble. A schoolmate from St. Louis, the daughter of Wayman Crow, had helped her gain admission to the St. Louis Medical School to study human anatomy--in hopes that she might one day carve figures in marble. Back home in Watertown, Harriet had busied herself ever since, modeling small figures in clay, dreaming of the day when wider doors might open.⁴²

Looking at Harriet's clay squirrels and birds and cherubs, sensing that this was no ordinary talent, Charlotte determined to help the spirited girl. In the chance, she saw a beautiful recompense for the early favors she herself had received. Perhaps when she came back to Boston, she told Harriet, she could suggest a plan. Bidding Charlotte good-bye, Harriet felt "as if I had lost my best friend."⁴³

The interest Charlotte took in Harriet helped her through a rough time with Ned. Once his adoption was final, she wrote the boy that she would help him obtain whatever education he wanted. She had hoped he would choose some school in London near her, but the boy told her his heart was set on the United States Navy. Would Auntie help him get an appointment to the Naval Academy? After an engagement in Philadelphia, disappointed but reconciled to the fact that this adopted son had no real intention of ever living with her, she moved on to Washington to see New York Senator William H. Seward, who might help her swing Ned's appointment.

By the time she left Washington the middle of January 1852, she had the matter secure, and in Senator Seward she had found a new friend. Something in her had immediately sensed a kindred spirit in this witty, garrulous man with the long beaked nose and side whiskers. If she returned to Washington in the spring, she assured him she would gladly accept Mrs. Seward's invitation to visit them at their house on Lafayette Square, near the White House.⁴⁴

With Ned's affairs settled, Charlotte could bring her days in America to a close. She had come home to reap as much money as possible, and by mid-spring she was almost content. She had put some of her earnings in Philadelphia real estate; she had arranged with New York investors about putting more of her money to work. After farewells in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia she could return to England, confident that she had made her time in the States pay.

When she mentioned a New York farewell in March to John Brougham, he objected to her high terms. Edwin Forrest and his wife had been fighting each other for months in a highly publicized divorce trial. At its end Forrest stood a proved adulterer. Catherine, the injured victim, quickly returned to the stage to capitalize on the ugly publicity. Sympathetic crowds packed her theatre, and Brougham doubted just now how much any other actress could draw. In reply, Charlotte curtly refused either to lower her terms or to work with anyone who dared suggest that alongside Catherine Sinclair "any after affair would fall far short." None too heartily, Charlotte hoped that Brougham might "secure a more attractive feature than you seem to consider, yours very truly, Charlotte Cushman."⁴⁵

The urge to cut herself free of all such tasteless connections merely spurred her determination to get on with her plan. In Boston the first week in March she took sweet satisfaction in reading the playbills the National Theatre had plastered about: "Farewell engagement of Miss Charlotte Cushman! The highly gifted American artiste . . . being positively her farewell engagement in Boston prior to her final retirement from the Stage."⁴⁶

So it was official. Urgent regrets on every hand might attempt to dissuade her, but her mind was made up. The pattern her life would follow and the places she would live it were now nobody's business but hers. She had not dismissed Boston's drawing room talks about the endless delights of sunny Rome. When a Boston doctor assured her that her chronic hoarseness would improve only if she sought a milder climate, she saw her way open. She would return to London--free forever from the blistering heat that every household in America seemed to worship--renew her English friendships, then in the late fall wend her way south to Italy.

Looking ahead toward Rome, she answered a recent letter from Mazzini, the Italian patriot she had met at Jane Carlyle's. Mazzini had heard of her plan to come to Rome. Would Miss Cushman kindly contribute some money, however little, to further his campaign for Italian unification? She sent him the money, then drove out to Watertown. Would the good Dr. Hosmer let Harriet go with her to Rome to study with some famous sculptor? Surrounded by Rome's treasure of marbles and classic ruins, inspired by the city's "artistic air," who could guess what success Harriet might achieve? When the Wayman Crows in St. Louis pledged their financial help to Harriet, Charlotte's plans were complete. She and Matilda, with Harriet in tow, would make their first big venture into the life of the idle rich.

In Washington to visit the Sewards, she mentioned her plans to the popular journalist Sara Jane Clarke, who wrote under the pseudonym "Grace Greenwood," and soon she had added the red-haired Grace to the party of "jolly female bachelors" she would lead on Rome. Another idea struck her: decorating her London walls with portraits, she ought to feature the Americans who best accounted for the heights American culture was reaching. When Grace wrote Hawthorne about it, he sent a graceful reply: "I wish my reputation, such as it is, had come earlier, so that my face might have been in request while it had the grace of youth. . . . However, after the impression of her own face, which Miss Cushman has indelibly stamped on my remembrance, she has a right to do just what she pleases with mine. I am gratified that she wishes it."⁴⁷ When Longfellow also agreed to sit for a portrait, Charlotte wrote him gratefully. Should he ever visit England again, he would find himself proudly displayed "among my Penates."⁴⁸

She told Philadelphia a brief good-bye in early May to a flood of bouquets, despite some objections that as Lady Macbeth she had painted "the thoughts and words too closely," pulled too explicitly at her breasts when speaking the line, "I have given suck, and know How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me."⁴⁹

Her farewell to New York must serve as her national good-bye. For the last time in America, she would play her round of characters, pack up her promptbooks and costumes, and make her exit. Partly to round out these fruitful two years at home, she persuaded Couldock to leave his tour long enough to support her. Before she left for the theatre the night of May 15, 1852, she penned her feelings: "Tonight is my last of labours. I am more glad, heartily glad, than I can tell you, for I am weary beyond description."⁵⁰

New York could remember her as Meg Merrilies. The press next day echoed the applause. "Her dying scene, can we ever forget that?"⁵¹ For a moment, the Spirit of the Times could doubt the meaning of her good-bye, "which, it is said, is the last she will play in this city prior to her return to England, in which country she will take her farewell of the stage and retire forever from the profession."⁵² Reading the doubt, Charlotte savored again the rich taste of the word. Parting was such sweet sorrow.

With Ned safely arrived from England, tall now and fine-featured like his mother, Charlotte took him to Annapolis, proud that he wanted her to help him enroll, sad next day that the proud young man in his new midshipman's cap and stiff collar could dismiss her with such a brisk, manly good-bye. To cover the hurt, she turned her thoughts toward people who needed her help. Before she sailed from New York on July 16, 1852, she finished her plans for Harriet Hosmer. Hattie and her father would join her in Paris in the fall; then with Matilda and Grace Greenwood they would make their way toward the mecca of all serious artists, Rome.

Now, aboard the steamship Asia, Charlotte waved her last to the crowd on the dock. In her pocket she carried ample dollars for the years stretching ahead. Stowed below were her new portraits of Charles Sumner, Longfellow, and Hawthorne, and the large present of books Hawthorne had sent down from Boston. Only when a sudden blast from the whistle rang up the plank did another emotion flow through her. She confessed it to no one, not even Sallie, but was her "farewell" sounding a note too final? A week short of thirty-six, could she be sure she would never regret this "irrevocable" good-bye?