A Hunger for Home

Coming through London in December, 1863 Charlotte found furious letters from Hattie. The London Art Journal was daring to charge that her colossal Zenobia, which she had just sold for $4,000, was actually by one of her workmen. To satisfy Hattie, Charlotte stopped long enough to start legal proceedings against the paper. At Brixton, she found Mary Eliza sadly declined. Her face had lost its color; her eyes could do little more now than stare piteously when she was not sleeping. For days, Charlotte fretted about her duty. At last, seeing no change in her mother, knowing no way to predict what might happen, she moved on south, fearing that at every stop a wire might recall her to the bedside.

Arriving in Rome, she tried to imagine the import of her final talks with Seward. The Secretary had promised nothing, hut he saw no reason why Ned might not qualify one day for the Consulate. Toward that end, Charlotte set to work redecorating the fourth floor apartment and the rooms that Hattie had suddenly vacated, without a word of thanks for the five years' free shelter, to move to her own new flat in the Palazzo Barberini.

Hattie's move was hardly surprising. About that, Charlotte had her own opinions, a feeling Browning voiced perfectly sometime later. "Hatty is just old Hatty--less interesting, as is the way with all such pretty things after a time: the 'not-niceness' of her conduct is the old story."¹ Yet much as she resented Hattie's ingratitude, it was good to know that the London Art Journal had retracted its charge. The Athenaeum had even printed a letter from Story: the celebrated Zenobia was truly "the product of Miss Hosmer's own mind and her own hands."² Without Hattie, Charlotte now hoped more strongly than ever that the young Cushmans might one day join her.

"A whole week has passed, and again I am at my writing-table," she wrote Emma Crow in January 1864, "talking by 'word of pen' to my darlings over the sea. . . . How are they? What are they doing, thinking, feeling? Do they love me best in the world? Do they want me as I want them?" She could answer for one, and they for two, "and so all is well; and my conclusion is that we are very happy people, and having only one large cause for disquiet, namely, separation."³

One cold afternoon she ordered her coachman, Giuseppi, to drive her and Emma Crow's sister and brother-in-law up around the Pincio. When one of the horses began dancing a bit, Giuseppi struck him with a whip, the horse kicked and Giuseppi struck him again so hard the frightened gray team tore off up the Pincio. Rounding a corner, the barouche side-swiped a carriage, then crashed into a tree. Charlotte and her guests picked themselves up, unhurt but frightened speechless.⁴

But most days passed uneventfully. With Emma at work on further commissions, Charlotte filled her time reading--"On Sunday I did not go to church, but stayed at home to read the three cantos of Longfellow's 'Dante' in the January number of the 'Atlantic.' How beautiful they are!"⁵--or writing letters of pithy advice to the young Cushmans: "Show me a man's intimates, and I will tell you what that man is. . . . I bless my mother for one element in my nature, or rather my grandmother, ambition. I cannot endure the society of people who are beneath me in character or ability. I hate to have satellites of an inferior calibre."⁶

Between times, she flooded the mails with letters about her investments, particularly stock she had bought in Ogden's new Chicago and Northwestern railroad. Nights she filled as she pleased with the usual round of parties.

Without really meaning to, Charlotte continued to leave the impression with the male sculptors in Rome that she meant to wreck them. Privately, she called them "chiselers,"⁷ but when Story accused her of saying his statues were really the work of his cutters, she stood firm. "I have said no such thing! I know that all sculptors require assistances from even human tools; all sculptors, I believe, have them, and if I say this of you, I say it of all!"⁸

But Story would not be mollified. "Miss Cushman is mouthing it as usual," he wrote Charles Eliot Norton, "and has her little satellites revolving around her."⁹ About that, Charlotte confessed how she really felt to Kate Field. Story was an "independent humbug who took other people's ideas for himself."¹⁰

Writing Fanny Seward, Charlotte found plenty to praise in other men. "Have you seen Whittier? . . . He is a true soul, with a pure poet's heart."¹¹ She was equally sure of Tennyson. "Last night I was reading for some young friends from England the 'Guinevere' Idyll of Tennyson and the 'Lady of Shalott'; and every time I read him I am more and more impressed with the beauty of his rhythm. . . . 'The Lady of Shalott,' read in a measure slowly, is like a gently flowing river, 'as it goes down to Camelot.'"¹²

In June 1864, Charlotte felt grimmer realities intervening, especially when Rome began seething in its normal summer heat. A new onslaught of rash spread over her hands, and her doctors insisted again that only waters at a spa like Harrogate, England, could cure it. Mary Eliza was still failing, and Emma Crow was pregnant again, after three miscarriages. Fearing a fourth, Charlotte prevailed upon Ned to let Emma come over for the final months so the baby could be born in the cool of an English summer, where Auntie could smooth away the details.

With her mother and Emma Crow and Emma Stebbins, Charlotte lazed away July and August on Harrogate's high tableland. Then, as time neared for Emma Crow's baby, she took a house near Manchester "until the event be over."

Once tiny Wayman Crow Cushman had been safely launched in the world, and mother and child had returned to America, Charlotte filled her letters with advice about rearing him. "A mother who devotes herself to her child, in watching its culture and keeping it from baleful influences, is educating and cultivating herself at the same time. No artist's work is so high, so noble, so grand, so enduring, so important for all time, as the making of character in a child. . . . No statue, no painting, no acting can reach it."¹³ About the baby's character, "we shall see if we cannot make a clever man of him, and then it will not matter much who was his aunt."

On March 4, 1865, Charlotte wrote home from Rome her satisfaction in the day's events in Washington. How grand Abraham Lincoln must feel that "by the sheer force of honesty, integrity, and patience," he had overcome faction to such an extent that he was today, "by the convictions of the whole people," placed again in the Presidential chair. Upon his shoulders rested the hopes of republican institutions for all future time. "God help him to keep true and faithful!"¹⁴

The seeds she had nurtured carefully with Seward bore fruit in February 1865, when the State Department announced that, with Stillman's resignation, Edwin Charles Cushman had been appointed U.S. Consul in Rome. Now, with the apartment ready for Ned and Emma and baby Wayman, "Big Mama" as she now signed her joyous letters to them--could throw open her doors and welcome her family home. Yet when they arrived in April, Charlotte felt a sudden misgiving. Did Ned really have the character and judgment necessary for the job? She would not let him, of course, make serious mistakes. And when she saw Emma Crow and the baby, "the very loveliest child, white and pink, with the largest loveliest blue eyes you ever saw," she believed that Ned had cause enough to make good. To make him feel properly responsible, she suggested that he pay a token rent for his quarters.

With the sudden new rhythm of life that entered her marble apartment, with the flurry of maids who rushed upstairs whenever the baby whimpered, Charlotte could not imagine greater happiness. Yet even more was in store for her when, on April 11, news flashed down the telegraph wires from London that Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox. "Today my pride, my faith, my love of country is blessed and satisfied!" America had achieved new glory. "My heart swells and my eyes brim over as I think today of her might, her majesty . . . her inability to recognize bondage."¹⁵

Four and a half years ago she had caught Seward's conviction that no matter how high the cost, the Union must be maintained and slavery abolished. Today, she could rejoice with the crowd of other Americans who massed in front of the Consulate at 28 Piazza di Spagna and then swooped up the Spanish Steps to 38 Via Gregoriana, singing and rejoicing. America was at last "one sole, undivided--not common, but uncommon--country, great, glorious, free."¹⁶

And then almost immediately came the sad word that Seward had been severely injured in a carriage accident on April 5, his jaw broken on both sides. And finally, most heartrending of all, came the news that no American in Rome--or anywhere else--could believe. "Assassination is not an American practice or habit," Seward had written early in the war. But an event at Ford's Theatre the night of April 14, 1865, proved that it would never again be considered impossible.

Writing Emma Crow, who was in London, Charlotte could not believe the fearful news that reached Rome on April 27. "It is too theatrical a thing to be done by an American." The thought of what America had lost "makes my heart ache with terror for the results . . . I am unable to do anything else but sit and clasp my hands in dread and fear."¹⁷ When later reports named Lincoln's assassin, she believed it easily: John Wilkes Booth, "the madman . . . the perfectly reckless daredevil." How appalling for Edwin Booth and his family. "Poor little Mary! She has escaped much torture and suffering." Poor little Edwina, this dreadful crime would "attach itself to her and all the family forever and forever!" And poor Edwin himself. "I cannot see how he can ever hold up his head again, or present himself to a public."¹⁸

Coupled with that horror came the almost overpowering news that Seward, helpless in his bed, had been murderously attacked at nearly the same moment by one of Booth's conspirators. Lewis Payne had appeared at his door and identified himself as a messenger from the doctor. When Frederick Seward reached for the package, Payne insisted he must give Seward the medicine himself. When Frederick refused to let him enter the bedroom, Payne struck him with the muzzle of his heavy pistol, leaving him bleeding and unconscious, then rushed upon the Secretary with a knife and slashed his face. Seward's male nurse repulsed him then or he would have cut Seward's throat. Screaming in the corner, Anna and Fanny saw it all.¹⁹

"All the Americans here meet, look at each other, and burst into tears," Charlotte wrote Fanny. "Your father's life is prayed for as never man's was before." If he was able to hear it, would Fanny try to convey to him "through your loving words what I would say but cannot."²⁰

By August, Charlotte tried to look at the nation's tragedy in some sort of historical frame. "At last then--having great national crimes to register--we have a history!" she wrote Kate Field. "At last, we are of the 'Great Peoples.' Strange that it must be ever so. The baptism of blood for each great truth to have a name!"²¹ But the nation had survived; a new President, for all his hot temper and sympathy for the South, had taken hold. Seward had left his bed in May--his head covered with a close-fitting cap, his jaws still fastened with wire--and taken up his duties alongside Andrew Johnson, though his own life continued to center in grief. Unable to bear up any longer under the horrors recent months had brought, his wife died suddenly in June; after that, Fanny fell into serious decline.

In Rome, a happier note was the report that Emma's toga-clad bronze of Horace Mann had arrived in Boston and would be unveiled on July 4, a companion piece to a bronze Daniel Webster. Emma debated about going home for the ceremony, but with the statue out of her hands, she felt "like a soft-shelled crab--at the mercy of everything." She decided to stay safe in Rome, where the only imperfect note was Ned's family's apparent unwillingness to understand Miss Stebbins' place in Auntie's life. But about that, Charlotte wasted little concern now. Emma Stebbins was as "true, noble, self-sacrificing"²² as ever--and much in need of moral support when the verdicts came back from Boston. The Transcript and the Advertizer both found Emma's Horace Mann a "mass of bad drapery," and William Story's wife called it "the very worst thing I ever saw."²³

With "this old man of the sea" off Emma's shoulders, Charlotte was determined now to see that Emma got every penny due her for it. The friend of her heart deserved it; a woman had been deprived of her rights. In England for another cool summer, she found her mother seriously fallen off; Mary Eliza was now a querulous, fault-finding old woman complaining at every discomfort and blaming all her troubles on Charlotte's "unconcern." Charlotte tried to read the complaints as senility's innocent mutterings; she admonished herself not to fret about matters she could not change. Instead, she threw herself anew into correspondence with Seward.

The sight of Seward's handwriting, however shaky and almost painfully difficult to read, brought her a cheer she had not felt in months. To most of his friends, Seward must write through an amanuensis now, but Charlotte, he declared, was of "different metal." "How much I do miss your good bright thinking," he wrote in September. "How many high questions of state and delicate questions of manners I have to treat of every day in which I could interest you and profit by your experience and sagacity." Her "faithful and affectionate friend" ended his letter with a pregnant question: "When may we expect you home to stay?"²⁴

At the time, Charlotte managed no ready answer. Of her forty-nine years, she had lived more than fourteen abroad. Yet hearing the word "home" filled her now with yearning. The hunger made no real sense, she told herself; her heart really centered in the lives that circulated around hers in Italy and England. But in the days stretching ahead she could not discount a growing urge to return to her roots. Had the war and assassination and Seward's brush with death brought her close, in a new way, to a sense of her own mortality?

Charlotte was too good a Victorian to miss her time's concern for "death's dark angel." When life was action, she could push the dark thoughts to the back of her mind, but heading for England, she had found a new heaviness stealing into her letters, a subtle awareness that she herself was merely one of God's billion creatures who knows that he has passed his crest and entered a downhill road. She might have persuaded Emma Stebbins to push on with her through Liverpool and to the first ship to New York, if doing so would not have forced her to try to explain more than she herself understood.