At Home in Rome

At forty-two, Charlotte felt she had chiseled her celebrated name and her characters deep enough on the public platform. She pictured herself now on an easier private stage, her homes in England and Rome, where she could slip into whatever role whim and affection dictated. With Emma Stebbins happily content at her side, there could be no doubt, surely, that she could find in Rome outlets enough for her energies.

Ten days later, at tea in Susan's leafy garden, Charlotte heard all the news about Ned, that he had left the American Navy to join the East India Merchant Marine, that during a recent cruise to Calcutta he had fallen prey to cholera but miraculously was mending. Ned's pictures showed a beautiful young man with piercing eyes, fluted nostrils and sensitive chin, a black mustache and side whiskers. Charlotte had her own opinion about the foolish life Ned had chosen when he could so easily join her in Rome and move among cultivated people, where she could open for him such interesting doors--and, incidentally, where she could help mold his character.

Regretting that she could do so little about this willful adopted son, she moved on to Malvern, to spend six easy weeks while the baths, the strolls, and the long letters she wrote Emma Crow relaxed her from her labors. In London, she stopped long enough to check with Wilmot at 1 Bolton Row, store her costumes safely away, pay a few courtesy calls, accept a few invitations, and forward a string of good pearls to Mary Devlin in St. Louis. Then she booked tickets for Rome.

Out at her mother's small house in Brixton, she sensed a hostility in Mary Eliza, if not in Charlie. Patiently, she explained again the routine she would follow in Rome, and just how Emma Stebbins figured in it. Yet in Mary Eliza's pursed mouth, she read nothing but disapproval. There seemed no way to make her mother understand the depth of the bond that constituted her life with Emma or the pleasure she found with her other "aristocratic friends," as Charlie called them. She reminded herself at last that she was beholden to nobody, Mary Eliza's old ways and old creeds notwithstanding.

After Paris and Strasbourg, she and Emma took a rumbling diligence for the hairpin ride over Mont Cenis, with its flowered meadows and waterfalls, then down into Italy around Lake Como for the train to Florence, where she found Isa Blagden and Elizabeth Barrett Browning still wildly excited over spirit writing. But Charlotte was more interested in her talks with James Jackson Jarves about the antiques he could help her acquire for her Rome apartment. Soon, she pushed on south through Tuscany until one late afternoon, from a pine-tufted outlook, she sighted again the purple hills, the silver river, and the gold and umber cluster of Rome.

When her carriage rolled up the Via Gregoriana and stopped at Number 38, Charlotte was home. Her bronze doorway stood recessed under a beveled arch; overhead jutted four tiers of balconies. To her right up the short street, she saw the salmon towers of the Trinita dei Monti church that fronted the Spanish Steps. Farther on opened the wide promenade of the Pincian Hill with its scarlet gardens, its flocks of rooks, and its dark jagged pines.

Inside, she and Emma Stebbins rejoiced again at their luck. The marble rooms would make a comfortable home, yet they were adequate too for the Saturday evenings Charlotte planned. Her back windows opened out over multicolored houses and churches, the winding Tiber, and farther on the Pantheon, Hadrian's Tomb, and St. Peter's--and beyond it all, the plains and rolling green hills of the Campagna. In her back garden she found acanthus, tumbling geraniums, and orange trees, and fragments of Roman sculpture embedded in the walls; in a far corner, a vertical shaft of a well opened, far below, into a cavern where serving women from the neighborhood came to fill their buckets.

In the busy days that followed, making the rounds of the antique shops and studios, gathering statuary, more paintings, and rare Italian cabinets and carved chairs, Charlotte rejoiced again in the wealth that work had brought her. Here in Rome, she could afford a life that would have cost her double the price at home. Under one roof, there was ample space here for Hattie Hosmer--who had already accepted Charlotte's invitation and moved in--for Emma Stebbins, and for herself in the second-floor suite with its sunny front windows and an alcove for her writing desk. Below, Sallie had her own quarters.

During Charlotte's absence, Hattie had set for herself a schedule that would have toppled a lesser vigor. After nightly parties, she joined a table of bearded sculptors in the smoky Caffe Greco to talk shop and hotly defend the merits of women as artists; then about one o'clock she bounded home unescorted for a few quick hours of sleep. At seven she leaped out of bed, tore off to work amid her clay figures, her great marble blocks, and charcoal sketches until late afternoon, when she galloped off for a pounding ride on the Campagna. By night, Hattie was ready for more parties. When the Hawthornes came down from Liverpool, overjoyed to be free at last of the Consulate and the Mersey's glowering skies, they found her perched atop a scaffold, her black velvet cap and short skirt matching perfectly her puckish greeting, the rapid strokes of her hands shaping the clay. Her obvious delight in her work captivated all the family, though Hawthorne hoped privately that this good Watertown girl would someday adopt a more sober style.

Charlotte fully agreed with Hawthorne. Having the girl here in the apartment, she had thought she might quell Hattie's energies a little, bring her to form, as it were, yet there seemed little she could do with Hattie, except shake her head and recall the days when she herself, in boots and cravat, had dismayed a proper England. Hattie led her own life and welcomed advice from no one. At a late dinner party one evening, when a monocled Englishman offered to escort her home, Hattie convulsed the table: "No gentleman goes home with me at night in Rome."¹

For Charlotte, Emma Stebbins was more to her style. When Emma took a studio nearby in the Via Sistina, Charlotte joined her for a lunch of cheese, prosciutto, and fruit each day at one; then while Emma finished off her work for the day, Charlotte sat in the cool window and wrote long, endearing letters to Emma Crow, describing her lazy routine: "I have lived a life of labour, and now that I have achieved a position and a fortune to support it I feel that I am only right to enjoy what is thrown in my way."²

After lunch they returned to the apartment to change into black skirts and hats for an afternoon ride. On days when they planned to take the high jumps on the Campagna, Charlotte rode her Italian horse, Othello, who seemed to understand on instinct the sudden precipices that made a Campagna ride so exhilarating. "Unsurpassed days," Emma called them, "days of glory and beauty." Home for an early dinner, they were ready for guests by eight, or after an evening alone--teaching Bushie, the new Scotch terrier, to "play the piano" or "sing"--they were in bed by eleven.

Sallie and her Italian maids had the apartment ready for Charlotte's first big party in January 1859. Moving gaily among the palms and flowers, the cages of twittering birds, her guests saw the antique cabinets Jarves had sent down from Florence, their handles like battered shields, the gilded monogram locks on their doors. Women who wandered into Charlotte's bedroom saw the portrait of Jane Carlyle on her wall. Downstairs hung her paintings by William Page, her Sully portrait, and, in her bookcases, her autographed copy of The Scarlet Letter.

Ensuing months saw her Saturday evenings become social events for Rome's forestieri, occasions for welcoming newcomers from London or Boston or New York, where sculptors like Randolph Rogers, Story, Gibson, Paul Akers, and Louise Lander, painters like Page, poets like the Brownings, novelists like Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Trollopes, and musicians like Adelaide Sartoris matched wits with cardinals and Vatican people, with Dickie Milnes--now Lord Houghton--and American tycoons like William B. Ogden and Emma Stebbins' rich brother, Henry. Writers argued ideas they would later expand in print. If Dickie was right that conversation is the "happy counterplay of witty minds," politics and science and business vied with art and high humor around Charlotte's candlelit table.

Here, Page defended his "rediscovery" of Titian's pigmentation and fumed that the Paris Exhibition had just rejected his "Venus Rising from the Sea"--"a wonder of light and colour and space and breathable air,"³ Mrs. Browning called it--on grounds of its nudity.

With Hattie cheering him on, Gibson argued that modern sculptors in their pursuit of "the ideal" should follow the Greeks in painting in eye color and in staining their marble pale gold--perhaps with tobacco juice--to bring out its warmth. To which Hawthorne muttered from his corner, "Were he to send a Cupid to America, he need not trouble himself to stain it beforehand."⁴

The small, wiry Story doubted that honest sculptors ever turned their clay models over to stonecutters. Mallet and chisel were a sculptor's own proper tools: "If I want a line different--a blow, and there it is."⁵ To this, Hattie quickly rejoined. Story himself had said more than once that Michelangelo had wasted precious hours roughing off chips when his genius might better have turned to new visions. Her studio workmen saved her days, dutifully copying leaves, turning drapery folds, while she worked up new ideas in clay. Randolph Rogers agreed with Hattie. At the moment, there were seven Nydias in his studio, each in some state of completion by a cutter armed with caliper and chisels.

Hawthorne developed ideas about a sculptor's responsibility, which he soon broadcast in The Marble Faun. Since marble did not decay, since it ensured immortality to whatever was carved in it, the worthy sculptor had an almost religious obligation to commit no idea to it "save such as may repay the marble for its faithful care."⁶ Slumped on a sofa, puffing his black cigar, Hawthorne pondered American women like Louise Lander and Hattie, young women thousands of miles from home, going fearlessly about, pursuing their own artistic fulfillment.

White-haired Frances Trollope, down from her villa in Florence, set off gales of laughter with her jabs about how the "nudo" in antique sculpture so scandalized visiting Americans. It reminded her of her visit, thirty years back, to the sculpture gallery in the Pennsylvania Academy, where a female attendant had whispered, "Now, ma'am, now: this is the time for you--nobody can see you--make haste." When Fanny stared at her surprised, the woman explained: "The ladies like to go into that room by themselves, when there be no gentlemen watching them."⁷

Morality aside, Hawthorne wondered if all nudity in art was justified. Man was no longer a naked animal. "His clothes are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him."⁸ Yet he readily confessed that the romantic sense of eternity in Rome played tricks with one's wish to be literal. In America, struggle as one might, it was difficult to write a romance "where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity"⁹ in broad daylight--which was just the reason, was it not, why they had all come to Rome?

Hiram Powers regaled them further with his stories about the average American's disbelief that good art should cost money. "Two thousand dollars! My stars!" he quoted one of them. "Why I bought one t'other day for two hundred dollars, and it ain't plaster neither, for I drew my jack-knife right across her nose, and it never made a scratch."¹⁰

Hopping about, Browning injected a special excitement into the talk, but he so rarely pursued one topic for long that following his ideas was often maddening. Why did he so seldom, Charlotte wondered, center his thoughts on spiritual matters? There was something truly objectionable about a poetic sensibility that focused so short. "He says some splendid things," she later wrote Emma Crow, "but most of his finest is spoiled by materialism--or rather man-ism."¹¹

Secure in the fame that Uncle Tom's Cabin had brought her, Harriet Stowe put up her feet on Charlotte's fender. In that position, she could "talk till all is blue,"¹² she cried gaily. When the question of women's rights came up, Harriet poured out a sermon as fiery as any her brother Henry Ward had ever preached in Brooklyn: "Did anybody ever think that Mrs. Siddons and Mrs. Kemble and Ristori had better have applied themselves sedulously to keeping house, because they were women?"¹³ To that, Hattie cried amen. A woman's talents were not hers for nothing. Every woman had the god-given duty to educate herself for any profession that interested her and to practice it for her own good. She should be free to set her own course, work toward her own goals. Most women, of course, would always choose a partner to fight their battles for them, but the gifted few would always prefer to make their own way in the world. "What fun it would be to come back to this earth after . . . a hundred years or so and see what has been going on in flesh while we have been going on in spirit."¹⁴

Clapping her hands in agreement, Charlotte bade them recall something Lydia Maria Child had said years ago. Someday, men and women would think of themselves as equal members in a domestic team, would perceive that "there is no separation or discord in their mutual duties." They would be one: "the treble and bass of the same harmonious tune."¹⁵

In the spring, when a starry-eyed Kate Field arrived from Boston with her aunt, Charlotte welcomed them the evening her guests were Levasseur from the Palais Royal Theatre in Paris and former President Pierce--who was "very polite" but not a man "of much fun."¹⁶ Yet since talk in Charlotte's salon was free to take any turn, darker notes inevitably crept in. Living in Rome was not wholly bliss. Rome's legal system was maddening. At carnival, young Julian Hawthorne stood amazed that the crowd took no notice when a woman, disliking a young man's flirting remarks, whipped out a dagger and ripped him open. And for reasons no American could comprehend, when trouble broke out among these passionate screaming Romans, the first to complain in court was automatically declared innocent. In this Papal country, no Protestant church existed--though it was hoped that sometime in the future permission might be obtained for worship somewhere outside the walls.

Furthermore, no one went safely abroad at night--Hattie's loud cries to the contrary--unless he went armed and carried his own wax tapers. Servants were always a problem. Charlotte's cook, Augusto, was a chef par excellence, yet she had had him little more than a month before she realized that he carried on a constant graft in the kitchen, extracting his own percent of supplies. All over Rome, petty thievery flourished. If one let himself notice, the streets were appallingly dirty--"malarious and fleay," Hattie cried gaily--and its people were wholly immodest and as uninhibited as children. Shaking their heads, Charlotte and her guests agreed that life here was interesting. They had not come to Rome to change it.

Real unpleasantness was rare the winter of 1859. Yet into the sweetness and light that enlivened Charlotte's gatherings a grievous fear intervened. With her guests, Charlotte felt a growing concern for the big American question of slavery that the papers from New York and London daily featured. Kate Field had heard it voiced strongly in Florence.

"Last Monday slavery was attacked," said Kate, "and I, an American, in the mingling of Italian, French, and English" had to protect her country. "Foreigners cannot understand the 'peculiar institution,' and that it is no child's play to free 4,000,000 blacks. The English, the very creatures who forced it upon us, are most bitter against us."¹⁷

American papers never let their readers forget that states' rights and union and Negro slavery were questions that would not wait unanswered forever. Uncle Tom's Cabin and John Brown's recent wild scheme at Harper's Ferry foretold tragedy. In the dread thought, Charlotte recalled the worry she had seen in Seward's eyes whenever such questions arose, the human misery chained below decks as she sailed the Mississippi. War must not come; elections next year would provide the answer.

A closer war troubled her now. Already, gunfire could be heard almost within range of Rome. Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia, had lately agreed to destroy Italy's insufferable inconvenience as a divided nation. When battles at Magenta and Solferino destroyed Austria's hold on north Italy, Napoleon turned his attention to the Rhine, leaving Victor Emmanuel free to encourage insurrections in Sicily that could eventually unify all of Italy. When Garibaldi's efforts in Sicily and Naples succeeded, only Rome itself--still loyal to Pius IX--remained independent. Now, with the Pope's hold on Rome gradually weakening, who could predict what changes an altered Vatican status might bring the forestieri?

At ease among her treasures, Charlotte found the question almost rhetorical. Had they not all seen old Pio Nono make his usual appearances in St. Peter's? Had they not seen the tears of the faithful thousands massed in Piazza San Pietro to see the beloved old Pope appear on his balcony to smile and raise his arms in blessing? The end of the church's political hold on Rome seemed too far away to be real.

Charlotte tried not to waste her thoughts on worry. At her table, when the question arose about which was the greater art--poetry or fiction? painting or sculpture? she laid down her fork and delivered the conviction her life had taught her: "When God conceived the world, that was poetry. When he formed it, that was sculpture. He colored it and that was painting. Then, as his crowning work, he peopled it with living beings, and that was grand, divine, eternal drama."¹⁸

Not so, cried Adelaide Sartoris. Music was still supreme. Later in the evening, when Adelaide told them that Fanny Kemble had recently made a brilliant success in New York reading The Tempest, the report proved, said Charlotte, just how right she had been about acting. Yet, if the group wanted proof that music was worthy enough, Charlotte would gladly oblige by singing. Enjoying her joke, she took her seat at the piano and sang one of her comic ballads--"Father Molloy."

Writing Elizabeth Peabody later, Charlotte was grateful that Boston propriety had found in her art a proper Godliness. "No one knows better than myself, after all my association with artists of sculpture or painting, how truly my art comprehends all the others and surpasses them." Such was a "truth more or less powerful as one is more or less truly gifted by the good God."¹⁹

Sparring ideas with her guests, Charlotte wondered how Susan could bear gloomy Liverpool. Or for that matter, how anyone could live in America without the vigorous wit that swirled so delightfully here. If America had no monuments, no art traditions, the least she could do in Rome was offer a stage where the drama of art could be played, where even women could argue their deepest convictions--and American and English money could meet artists who needed customers.

Since American tourists seemed to believe that a Roman picture or statue was better than one created anywhere else, she gladly fostered the notion by arranging visits where sales could be made. Whether thinking about Page or Emma or Hattie, or American financiers like William B. Ogden--whose railroads were pushing westward toward California--she made the system profitable for both sides.

"Dear Mr. Story," she wrote, "Will you come quite socially to take a cup of tea with us on Saturday evening?" to meet a few Americans, "strangers to you, but worth cultivating (?) in the studio way."²⁰

Already she knew that without her for a salesman, Emma Stebbins would be lost. Emma had force as an artist, but her shyness had become a private joke between them. To Emma, every path was crowded with lions, and she wasted much time thinking how to avoid them. But with Charlotte nearby, arguing that most lions were imaginary, Emma agreed that she might be right--for any one particular lion.²¹ Together, they happily composed a team--if not quite the treble and bass of the harmony Lydia Child described.

For herself, Charlotte could socialize or not as she pleased. Out on the Campagna she galloped through meadows and past ruins that challenged her to clamber through them. When she rode to the hounds with Hattie, she sometimes came in the winner, then sank into a camp chair under a striped marquee for a picnic of ham and hard rolls. On days when she lacked "spirit" for the Campagna, she summoned Penini Browning, who kept his pony in her stable, to ride with her in woods closer home. At nine, Pen was still so pretty in his curls and velvet that she wished, with Hawthorne, that his father might somehow make him more robust and earthly, give him "a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in."²²

When Ned wrote from England that he had come back, fully recovered from cholera, she flooded him with letters to join her. Surely, the sea life had little to match the place she could offer him here. When Ned arrived, Charlotte knew at once that, at twenty-one, he lacked nothing as far as looks were concerned. It remained to be seen if he had the intellect to profit from all the advantages. On a picnic at Hadrian's Villa, with Emma and Hattie and Kate Field, she assured Ned that Rome was where be ought to be. But Ned, it developed, had merely come down to Rome to see Auntie--and to say he really preferred, just now, a life at sea.

Ned was packing to ship for Australia and Charlotte was down with a fever when a telegram brought word that Susan was ill, that Charlotte and Ned must come. Ned rushed north immediately, and Charlotte followed as soon as she could raise her head. On the twenty-fourth of April she took the new train to the coast, made connections for Marseilles, and arrived at Susan's bedside five days later.

Struggling for breath, Susan hung during the next three weeks between coma, sudden chills, and hysterical laughter. On the ninth of May, Charlotte asked the doctor when he expected a change. His reply dismayed the family: "She is going very fast." In dumb surprise, Charlotte could only cry out in anguish. "You don't mean to say she is dying?"²³

She recoiled in shock at the answer. Since Susan's marriage, Charlotte's far-flung career and travels had diverted her thoughts away from the domestic routine that had more and more occupied Susan. But now, at Susan's death, she plunged into bitter sorrow. Writing Emma Crow, she could not describe her sadness, except to say that only Sheridan's and Mary Eliza's surpassed it, she supposed. Heartbroken, Ned and the two small sisters, Rosalie and Mabel, cried piteously when she tried to read them a Liverpool paper's words about the good the Cushmans had brought the city. "When the gifted lady who bears that name took first rank in the first class of her profession, her sister, Miss Susan Cushman, shone like a vision on the same boards with her." To the public's regret, Susan had left the stage, but "the high qualities which fascinated the audience blessed a happy home." Death had laid its hands on a lady outstandingly "dignified" and "accomplished."²⁴

Charlotte bought a special carriage for herself and Mary Eliza and Ned to ride in the black procession that wound its way to the Liverpool Necropolis the afternoon of May 13--then sent it to London, a symbol like the blood stained jacket, for safe-keeping. To ease Ned out of his grief, Charlotte arranged a job for him on a Liverpool vessel supplying coal to the French Mediterranean Fleet. He could spend his liberties with her in Rome. She remained with Sheridan's grieving family until late in August, hoping that he would let her take the motherless girls to rear. But the man and his haughty mother stood firmly opposed and became hostile when she insisted.

Back in Rome, Charlotte struggled to find an interest to fill the gap Susan's death had created. Hattie's antics amused her: fox-hunting, Hattie had fallen at least thirty times, not for bad riding but for daring. Emma's growing excitement with her own work was pleasant to see: making the portrait bust for Shepherd was her big fascination at the moment. And Charlotte was left to fill her time pleasantly, with daily rides or talks with the Brownings at their apartment in the Via del Tritone. But down deep, her zest had vanished. "I feel myself more indifferent to life, and death has less terror for me than it ever had before,"²⁵ she wrote Emma Crow in October. Couldn't Emma persuade her father to let her come to Rome for the winter? Charlotte rejoiced when Wayman Crow consented. The girl would arrive around Christmas.

By the time Ned's job expired, he had made a big decision. If Auntie still wanted him, he would live in Rome. Overjoyed at his words, Charlotte was happier than she had ever been since her London victory in 1845. Now, she could help Ned forget the years when as a troubled boy he shuttled between his grandmother in Brixton, his mother in Liverpool, and boarding school in Yorkshire--feeling unwanted and having no sense of permanence. Wherever Auntie was was home. The back bedroom upstairs would be his. In the stable, he must take his pick of the horses. Would he like to take dancing and fencing lessons? Together, they must see to his clothes.

Theodore Parker's coming to Rome for his health gave Charlotte another interest. Racked with tuberculosis, worn from his long career as a champion of Negroes, Parker sat huddled and weak in his rooms, convinced that Civil War must soon ravage America. Almost daily, Charlotte helped the feeble old man downstairs to drive in the sun with her. "Many thanks for all your favors," Parker wrote in his quavering hand, "the drive the other day, the old-fashioned chicken pie this day." The great loaf of Indian corn bread she had brought was "like a song of Zion sung in a strange land among the willows. It carries me back to dear old Boston once more."²⁶

Sallie set the work routine in the household, but lacking Italian neither she nor Charlotte herself could do more than throw up their hands when shrieks and skirmishes broke out in the kitchen. "Running a household of hens," Charlotte wrote Kate Field, who had gone on to Florence, "is difficult and requires molto pazienza which, alas, I have not, by birth or education."²⁷ Down in the stable, she never knew what new disorder she might find. And Ned was, strangely, no help; he had taken her at her word, it seemed, and spent most of his days away on some horseback escapade. "My spirit has fainted as often as fifty times a day, and a revolver the only thing to be desired, for my servants first, and then myself."

In late afternoons, whenever she stood with Ned at the back windows watching the sun disappear behind St. Peter's, Charlotte pondered again the political stresses rumbling inside its halls--and the future for them all, here. "Italy for the Italians is the word and will be the deed," she wrote Kate. It would not surprise her to hear that the Pope had called in his bishops and set off a revolution all over Europe. But be that as it may, "We shall again see Rome the Capital of Italy."²⁸ The French troops camped in the Borghese Gardens would sooner or later see to that.

Life took a new turn in December with the arrival of Emma Crow. Ned was no poet, no scholar, but he needed no special gifts to sense the romantic charm that Rome offered the young. Inviting Emma Crow to Rome with Ned in the house, Charlotte got more than she bargained for. However simple her motives--about Ned and about bringing Emma to visit--two problems quickly became clear. For all her convictions about the goodness of work, she could hardly argue that Ned must labor, when money so obviously was not the question. In her house, where Ned's every wish was met by an adoring aunt or a servant, only folly would have tried to persuade a young blade that he must shoulder his load, especially when Auntie had already made her big dreams for him so clear. With her means, she wanted Ned's soul to grow. "He need never become like the crude, sweating 'western men I have known.'"²⁹

Though maternal love planted the sentiment, it could not harvest ambition and character. In her own youth, Charlotte had plotted her course out of deep need and pursued it. But Ned's problem was not so simple. Along with his sea bag of souvenirs, Ned had brought to her house all the charm and vague skills of a ne'er-do-well. If Auntie wanted his soul to grow, he was willing. At the time, Charlotte did not notice that he said nothing at all about being grateful.

The other problem centered in Emma Crow. Much as Charlotte adored Ned, and much as her heart turned over each time she met Emma's happy eyes, it was not her purpose, certainly, to play Cupid between them. Loving them both, she wanted the love of both fully returned, undivided. She had not imagined that Emma and Ned might fall for each other. A gnawing doubt disturbed her: was Emma's marriage to Ned what she wanted? Could she honestly recommend this harum-scarum young man as a husband? She was hardly mother enough, she supposed, to resent a little whatever girl caught Ned's fancy, yet what was Emma Crow to her that the thought so troubled her sleep? When she sensed the icy hostility that flashed at times between Emma Stebbins and Emma Crow, she only despaired more. The visit that had seemed so inspired ended early in February with Emma Crow's waving a tearful good-bye, mainly to Ned--and Charlotte's staring hurt and uncertain at the disappearing train.

Charlotte broached her worries to James and Annie Fields when they arrived from Boston for Carnival, 1860. The eminent American publisher and his young wife ought to have a comforting thought or so for a troubled old maid--and mother. The Fieldses did not fully guess her concern--why worry about a healthy young man's falling in love?--but their coming did bring diversion. Driving them up and around the Pincian for the sunset, to Pamfili Doria to gather anemones, welcoming them for late breakfasts at 38 Via Gregoriana, Charlotte made the most of their visit. "A most clear hearted, clear headed woman," Annie said about Charlotte in her diary, in vast imperception of her friend's real condition just now.

Meeting Ned, watching Charlotte blindly spoil him, Annie Fields could not miss the resemblance between this prince living in Charlotte's house and the golden boy she met at the Brownings. When Pen complained one morning that riding every day in the Pincian bored him, Annie suggested he ride somewhere else. "Oh, no!" Pen shook his head. "My pony and I have to go there. We are one of the sights of Rome, you know!"³⁰ What could Miss Cushman expect of the decorative youth she was training to be just like him?

Leaving for England, the Fieldses made a suggestion meant to help Charlotte find a solution to her problem. Could an actress of her vast talents ever be happy offstage? In her diary on March 1, Annie wrote, "We have persuaded her I think, to go to California to play a short 3 months or so and take the money which is waiting her there."³¹ The middle of March when Ned stood at Charlotte's side to welcome the Brownings to dinner ("a feast of reason and a flow of soul and champagne," she wrote Emma Crow), when he escorted her and Emma Stebbins to Harriet Stowe's gala party, Charlotte's thoughts were really turning on the Fieldses' suggestion.

She took her time deciding. By late spring, she had made up her mind about nothing. Rolling along in her carriage on the Pincian one afternoon, she spied a familiar figure in lavender silk. She swept down out of her carriage and rushed across the Promenade, hands thrust out, pouring out a volley of words, to greet Adelaide Ristori. When the great Italian recognized her, she dropped her lace parasol and ran forward, exclaiming, "Brava! Brava!"³²

Charlotte still had only a few Italian expressions, but in their broken talk, understanding neither her own wild phrases nor Adelaide's ecstatic replies, Charlotte recognized deep in herself a heavy chagrin. Ristori had never made any foolish decision to retire. Seated beside Adelaide on the marble bench, seeing the vital brilliance in her magnificent eyes, Charlotte read a point for herself clearly.

Days later, when a surprising note arrived from Fanny Kemble, who had come to visit the Sartorises, Charlotte doubled her efforts toward making some decision. Fanny, it seemed, was ready at last to forgive the friendly interest that once had looked like meddling; she recalled now that packed among her stage effects in Lenox, she had a very elegant crown: "You must permit me to send it to you," said Fanny's note, "as some small return for those far more beautiful things [Charlotte's flowers] with which in the early days of my acquaintance with you you adorned my room." In the meantime, could she send her a few ornaments, "a small token of my former obligations to you?"³³

So, Fanny was friendly again. If Charlotte's genial reply took Fanny "back to the old old days when you . . . compassionately tried to smooth away some of my thorns," Charlotte felt again, writing it, the old urge to ride out and conquer that had long ago galvanized her ambitions.

A letter from Mary Devlin wanting advice only whetted her craving for action. Edwin Booth and a Boston lawyer were both begging her to marry them. What should she do? Charlotte had not met Booth, but knowing actors and the perils involved in marriage to them and knowing the erratic strain in Booth's family, she recommended the lawyer.³⁴

Nearly two years ago, gathering up her farewell flowers, Charlotte had not imagined that sweet idleness might again sour. But now, when Hattie left suddenly for Watertown at news that her father was dying, Charlotte broached a bold plan to Emma and Ned. Now that Emma had had her year's work and had finished the bust for Shepherd, now that her bronze "Angel of the Waters" was ready for Central Park and her beautiful "Lotus-Eaters" was finished, couldn't they all go back to America, where Charlotte could take up again her own work? When Ned suddenly took an interest, and Emma tipped her head slowly and smiled, Charlotte blessed the bond her four years with Emma had welded.

To Ned's letter to Emma Crow, she scrawled a postscript that more than displayed her feelings. If Ned was restless and miserable "unless he is writing to you and good for nothing to himself or anybody else," Charlotte could not "bear a letter to go off to you without one word from me, for I know how disappointed I should be if a letter arrived without some word from you." So, although Ned had probably told everything already, "I must send you one line to tell you that you live fondly in my thoughts' deepest places, that I long for you, want you, as perhaps you do me, that no human being exercises so peculiar a power as you do over me and that I am not whole without you! Does that make you happy, darling?"³⁵