Vague Foreboding

Charlotte never put stock in hunches. She had listened while Isa and Elizabeth Browning talked spiritualism, but she had kept herself uninvolved with realms outside of the practical. In letters to American friends she could follow one paragraph about her religious "uneasiness" with "Let me know something of Delaware and Hudson and Penn Coal Company property. . . . If anything very capitally good comes in your way as an investment, think of this 'old maid' over the water and put in for her as well as yourself." But her low spirits the fall of 1865 foretold matters more sober.

When Charlotte came through Florence in late October, Isa found her looking older and thinner. "I do not think she is happy,"¹ Isa wrote Kate Field. Nor by January 1866 had she shaken off her deep discouragement: "I feel suddenly and unnaturally old. . . . I am a broken winded hunter and have no longer any spring in me."²

Much as she had once thought that Ned's family would add blissful joy to her life, she found now--through no real fault of theirs--that her beautiful rooms were merely another source of depression. "At home every evening; if anybody strolls in we are glad to see them, give them a cup of tea, and then stupidly talk about--anything--nothing--until 10 o'clock when we all prepare for bed, in fact the contrast between this house this year and last year could not be believed in, unless seen."³

Charlotte's vague sadness became sudden shock when news about Jane Carlyle reached her from London in April 1866. Jane had gone riding in a brougham in Kensington Gardens with her dog on her lap. Near Victoria Gate, she had stopped to let the dog out for a run alongside, but a brougham coming from the opposite direction knocked him over. Frantically, Jane leaped out, but finding that only a paw had been bruised, she picked up the dog, resumed her seat in the brougham, and signaled her coachman to drive on. After a circuit or two of the Park, the coachman asked if the dog was all right. When Jane gave no reply, he stopped and asked a passing lady to look in upon Mrs. Carlyle. The woman saw Jane slumped back in her cushions, her hands limp in her lap. When she failed to answer the woman, the coachman jumped down from his box, threw open the door, and found Mrs. Carlyle dead.

And then, within a few weeks, Charlie wired from London that Mary Eliza had taken a bad turn and that Charlotte must come immediately. Troop movements in Italy had commandeered every conveyance north, and Charlotte could leave Rome only after frustrating delays. In Paris, she received the death message. She only reached Liverpool in time to follow her mother's casket to the grave beside Susan's.

Moving Mary Eliza's furniture from Brixton to 1 Bolton Row, Charlotte grieved that she had known her mother so little in the years that had followed her swift rise to eminence. Suddenly, she was overcome with remorse and a deep sense of loss; however little her family appreciated her, she was losing them, one by one. When Charlie confessed his own sense of emptiness and lack of purpose now that his mother no longer required him in England, Charlotte pushed aside her grief and began writing letters to various men in America. Could William Ogden find Charlie a place in his company that required "patient and methodical attention more than intense genius?" Could Seward give him some routine job in the State Department? "He will not let me support him and be idle, which I would gladly have him be," but the loss "I have lately met with in my poor dear mother makes me so anxious about other members of my family that I am willing to risk the chance of a refusal from you rather than not ask for that which might keep one of them longer with me."⁴

In London, she had no heart now for social routine. Writing Fanny in July, Charlotte reported that she had perhaps insulted Mrs. Charles Francis Adams, wife of the Ambassador, only one of the many people "to whom I have been unable to perform my social duties."⁵

A nagging discomfort she had suffered for months added to her depression. In August, doctors in London finally convinced her she needed an operation, simple but painful, and "not a thing to be talked of in a public way."⁶ Recuperating from it, she was cheered to find in Fanny's letters word that Seward was puttering again among his flowers and birds. "I think one thing that keeps his heart younger than many a boy's," wrote Fanny, "is his ardent and appreciative love of all that is beautiful in nature."⁷ And Frederick's wounds were also slowly mending.

In late summer, Charlotte begged Fanny to come to Rome next winter and idle her days however she wished, since she herself would be bound in mourning. But a grief-stricken letter from Seward in late November brought word that Fanny had died in October, and Charlotte held back her tears to write her old friend. "What terrible sacrifices have you, my good, noble, and soul-tried friend, been called upon to lay on the altar of your country."⁸ She regretted now more than ever that she had not gotten to America the past summer. "It would have been a great joy to me then and a great consolation to me now! . . . Ah, my friend. Truly, 'God's ways are not as our ways.'"

With Emma back from a trip to New York and Ned and his family returned from Boston, Charlotte threw herself into the whirl that had once made life in Rome exciting, but now, even with Julia Ward Howe in town, she mustered little elation beyond furthering Emma Stebbins' career. "Don't forget Miss Stebbins's 'Bacchus' or 'Italian Autumn,'" she wrote a recent American visitor. "I would like you so much to have it that if price is an object, I think she would be willing to take 400 scudi for it . . . I am sure you will find satisfaction in having something from Miss Stebbins."⁹

When the half-Negro, half-Chippewa girl, Edmonia Lewis, arrived from Boston, Charlotte took her up as a personal project. At twenty-two, Edmonia had already impressed Longfellow and William Lloyd Garrison with her determination to become a sculptress, and Charlotte lost no time in bringing attention to this "poor little soul, who has more than anybody else to fight."¹⁰ The first statue she completed in Rome indicated fully the line her work would follow.

An ideal figure of Hagar illustrated, said Edmonia, her strong sympathy "for all women who have struggled and suffered."¹¹ Her "Hiawatha's Wooing" impressed Charlotte so deeply that she and a group of other Americans bought it and presented it to the Boston YMCA, as proof that "a race which hitherto in every age and country has been looked upon with disfavor" was capable "of producing work worthy of the admiration of cultivated people."¹²

In hopes that high wit and music might restore her spirits, Charlotte reestablished her evenings at 38 Via Gregoriana, often welcoming 175 people. She turned her thoughts to another project, one that bad interested her ever since she read Annie's ode at the dedication of the new organ in Boston. A Danish sculptor in Rome, Wilhelm Mathieu, needed encouragement, and she commissioned him to make casts of his heroic busts of Palestrina, Mozart, and Beethoven for the Music Hall as her gift to the city of Boston. She took new interest in the family when Emma Crow gave birth on June 2, 1867, to another son, especially when Ned gave him two names dear to her heart. The boy would be Allerton Seward, with the Secretary of State readily agreeing to be the baby's godfather. "Find a good Christian of any church to be my proxy."¹³ Charlotte happily nicknamed him Nino.

To escape Rome's summer heat, Charlotte and Emma settled in Bude, a village in Cornwall, which reminded her of Newport. They sat for hours among the rocks and watched the waves come dashing and booming up against them "in a wilderness of milky foam, which beats again and again on the rocks until it is caught by the wind and blown about in flakes like sea-birds."¹⁴ After Sallie had brought down their lunch, she and Emma settled their heads upon a convenient rock and read or dozed in the sun, fully content until the spirit moved them "to clamber about and explore."

But the holiday was only preparation for the kind of foolishness Charlotte had long feared in Ned. Back in Rome in late October, she faced the fact again that having Ned with her the past two years had done little to reassure her about his judgment. As Consul, Ned was mostly his own boss and from that stemmed his freedom to make mistakes. He was familiar with American law forbidding citizens from participating in foreign wars; more than once he had refused to sanction offers from young American Catholics eager to fight for the Pope. Yet Ned's own love of adventure, plus perhaps some taste for drama he had inherited, outweighed his diplomatic detachment. Only days before Charlotte returned from England, with Garibaldi's forces standing within four miles of Rome, Ned had decided to move out--as an observer--with a column of Papal troops. He marched with them four days, even joining in one skirmish and suffering a slight wound.

When the report got back to Rome, indignation rode high against this American's personal involvement. Richard Rothwell, an English artist, fired off a furious letter to Seward, charging that Cushman had done service "in mortal conflict against the Italians whose inability of soul has aroused them to seek a Nationality," that he had returned to Rome boasting of the wound he had received, which "unfortunately," said Rothwell, "was not 'wide as a church door' but enough to mark his infamy and cast a stigma on the proud republic of America."¹⁵

Seward wrote Ned immediately, requesting a full explanation. Ned denied the charges brought by "an old man of eccentric habit and very little reputation as an artist"; he did assert that with the commanding general's permission he had accompanied a column as a spectator, in order to obtain reliable information for Washington, and that during a skirmish the officer he stood beside had fallen injured and he had picked up a gun and fired in self-defense. Later, wounded slightly himself, he had gone to a hospital but had used his time there to help tend the wounded of both sides.

Seward's reply was firm. "No interest of the United States could be served by such a proceeding;"¹⁶ no reasonable motive could be assigned for it, except interest or, more, curiosity--neither of which was consistent with consular character. The reprimand from Seward, however much it embarrassed Charlotte and tended to cool Ned's ardor for action was far from enough to satisfy the Italian patriot Mazzini. "My American friends and I want him dismissed."¹⁷ But when Ned denied again that he had been guilty of any improper act, Seward accepted the explanation.

Improper or not, the matter was "Ned's folly" as far as Charlotte was concerned, and she made herself clear on that point to Seward. His "last dispatch to my nephew," more like a father's letter "than his folly or overzeal merited," had had its effect. "I do not think you will he troubled on his account again, in such a way! I was in England--or it would not have happened at all. It grieved me much more than I can tell you, but when I learned of it, it was too late to do other than make the best of it, but it has been a lesson well learned."¹⁸

Yet for all Ned's escapades, for all her yearnings sometimes for the old days when she had only herself and Sallie and a hotel room to worry about, Charlotte found Ned's children a steady delight. "Wayman is strong but delicate looking, as fair as any girl and too pretty for a boy. Allerton is a remarkable child in his way with a wonderful intelligence for seven months."¹⁹ Her pain about Ned eased a little when Algernon Swinburne thought well enough of Ned's explanation to Seward to send her the manuscript of a poem. Swinburne's "A Watch in the Night" was "splendid," she wrote Jamie Fields.

Elizabeth Peabody's coming to Rome in February 1868 sustained Charlotte through the long moments of depression she managed to hide. She kept the talk moving so swiftly, and on such a high plane, that Elizabeth confessed later that amid all the glories Rome offered, her talks with Charlotte Cushman had helped her arrive at new "mental maturity." The evenings Charlotte arranged in compliment to Elizabeth--on one occasion she read "The Halt Before Rome" to Lord Houghton (Dickie Milnes), and Bayard Taylor--seemed to Elizabeth like "golden hours" bursting with Charlotte's "grandly moral, delightfully human nature."²⁰ In the group, a new face counted himself a "Cushmanite." Dr. James Simpson from Edinburgh noted the determined effort Charlotte made to fill her rooms with gaiety.

If someone had made Charlotte confess it, a suspicion lurked in the back of her mind that something was dreadfully wrong. In late May, when Oliver Wendell Holmes sent her the manuscript of his poem "H.W.L.," paying tribute to Longfellow, when the Boston Transcript printed a biographical sketch of her, Charlotte saw in these reminders of her position at home cause to wonder if a return to America might help shake off her gloom. She could tell her friends it was a business trip; she could admit to herself that it was a chance for another comforting talk with Seward. By June 21, she and Emma were at sea, enjoying random talks with old Commodore Vanderbilt, who prevailed upon her, once they had landed in New York, to let him show her around his Staten Island estate.

Too tired to think about acting, she had packed no costumes. Nor would she go in for public readings. Of late, Charles Dickens had all but preempted that stellar position in America. Last December, Dickens had created near-frenzy. By 8 A.M. the day of his Boston debut the ticket office queue had stretched nearly half a mile, and his farewell in New York in April had left a sweet taste in all America's mouth. Time had wrought happy changes, Dickens confessed, in the nation he had once so completely reviled. Leaving it, he could report changes moral and physical; changes in the amount of land subdued and cultivated; in the rise of vast new cities; in older cities grown almost beyond recognition; changes in "the graces and amenities of life." Nor, said Dickens, was he "so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me."²¹

Not even Fanny Kemble could compare with Dickens on the platform, Annie Fields told her diary after Fanny's Boston reading in January--though Annie was prejudiced, perhaps, in Dickens' favor after the splendid dinners she and Jamie had enjoyed with him in Boston. Writing Annie, Charlotte made herself clear about public readings. "I hate to read except to six people, and I won't read to a public if I can possibly help it."²² She had not come home to work.

In Washington, Charlotte found Seward waiting for her at the station, looking better than he had for years. At dinner and later in conversation, she was cheered to find that after his terrible sufferings, he had regained his old clarity and humor. Next day, Seward refused to suffer the heat in town; with Frederick and his wife they picnicked on Cabin John Creek, comfortable enough under the trees in spite of the 102° temperature. Another day Seward took her across to the White House, where she was "very agreeably disappointed" to find President Johnson better in every way than reports she had heard about him, not at all the bumpkin or the malicious fool his enemies considered him. He had a sort of pathos in his voice and manner. "Perhaps it is only to ladies he is so, though even men have remarked it."²³

In August, Charlotte accepted another invitation from Seward, this time to his home in Auburn. She arrived in the midst of an immense reception he was giving for a delegation from China and the "strong-minded women," Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In October, she made a trip to St. Louis to see the Crows and discuss the trusteeship she wanted arranged for her estate, in case she should die before Ned learned responsibility enough to handle it.

Back in New York, she pondered a thought that had occurred during her last talk with Seward. Her old friend would not stay active in politics forever. When he retired--or a new administration replaced him--Ned's job in Rome would be reassigned. Writing Emma Crow, she knew that the young Cushmans must make their own decisions, that they would probably settle somewhere in America, but "Oh dear, I cannot think of it without feeling sick at the bare idea. How shall I ever manage to live without my children and their children? I want all the comforts I can have and what comfort can I have away from them?"²⁴

In any event, she was sure now they would never make a home in London, and that relieved her of keeping 1 Bolton Row any longer. If they chose New York, they would find it the place to make money, though there was nowhere "on this side of the Atlantic to spend it." Still, where one lived while he made it "does not much matter; besides you can have very good society, if you please, in New York and that not among fast people either."

In Boston for the grand opening of the new Selwyn Theatre, Charlotte found herself as much the center of attention as the actors on stage. In the private box the managers had provided, she sat silently appalled at the acting--"Oh, my child. . . . Every human being on his own hook, no whole, no harmony"²⁵--but the house itself was splendid, the dresses beautiful. The droves of people who came up to speak to her found her "young and handsome"--words she knew were not true, but it was "pleasant to find people thinking much of you and caring." John Gilbert, looking "splendidly," brought up his new wife, Sarah.

She and Emma rounded out their visit with two weeks at Addison Childs' home in Swampscott and another quick trip down to Newport to reaffirm the charm she always found there. "Newport is to me the most charming climate on our side of the water, the sea fogs soften the skin, take out all the wrinkles and let you grow. . . . When I come home to live, as I hope to do one of these days, I shall hope to have my home in Newport."²⁶

In New York just before sailing, she called on Collis P. Huntington, one of the country's new railroad tycoons, to discuss a long-range plan for investing in one of the new lines projecting toward San Francisco. Then, on board the Scotia, she counted the days until she could rejoin the children, hopefully in time for Emma Crow's next baby.

The new Cushman who arrived in late November, scarcely more than a few days after Charlotte returned to 38 Via Gregoriana, was another boy, Edwin Charles--whom she and the maids promptly nicknamed Carlino. With little Wayman and Nino, Charlotte revived a custom from her own childhood, when each night at bedtime she sent them into gales of laughter with the barnyard noises she remembered hearing at Grandmother Babbit's knee. Only now she made the boys believe the sounds came from somewhere else in the room. She sat smiling and silent when they suddenly turned back to look at her, then wheeled again to look for the pigs and dogs and ducks hiding somewhere, surely, under the tables and chairs.²⁷

At Hattie's dinner for Longfellow and George W. Childs, owner of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Charlotte confronted again an old question. "Miss Cushman," asked Childs, "why don't you return to America" to resume an active career? Thousands of Americans were of theatre age who had never seen her. Charlotte's reply was studied. "Why, Mr. Childs, I really can't live there as I am now living. I am able to keep my horse and carriage and I have a very charming home." With Italian prices so much in her favor, how could she afford such luxury in America? Childs was unconvinced. "I think you make a mistake by not coming."²⁸

Over tea with Longfellow in January 1869, Charlotte pondered the question--while the poet sought her advice. Did Miss Cushman find in his New England Tragedies any possible value for the stage? Answering him candidly, she felt her old hunger for action rekindle, yet what reason could ever make her leave the family behind? Or take Emma Stebbins away from her studio? If a return to work meant London, she might once have suggested that Rosalie and Mabel needed their Auntie handy, but with a new wife, Sheridan Muspratt valued her interest in Susan's daughters even less than before. Once, she might have said that her mother needed her closer to Brixton, if three years ago she had not buried that reason alongside Susan in Liverpool. One sudden event, however, turned in her favor in April 1869, when a letter from Seward brought word that he had resigned as Secretary of State, content that he had fulfilled his duty to the country, that the constitution was safe and union assured. After that, Ned and Emma Crow would soon be leaving.

Dressing the morning of May 9, Charlotte's vague fears and doubts became icy terror when she discovered a small lump in her left breast. Horrified, she rushed to her mirror. She raised her arm vigorously up and down over her head. There was no pain, no other visible sign of trouble. Yet a lump was there, unmistakably. Suddenly cold and trembling, she fell into a chair--while terrible memories of Grandmother Babbit's death from cancer flooded over her.

For days, she tried to hide her panic. But she could not hide her long face and silence, her sleepless nights and quick tears. When she could no longer fend off Emma's repeated questions, she knew she must tell the truth. Was this the sign she had been expecting; was now the time to pull up her stakes and go home?

Uncertain, she fled to her doctors. They advised a trip to Krankenheil in Bavaria--the waters might help. Instead, she and Emma went to Paris to seek more definite opinion. The Paris doctors ordered a quiet summer at Malvern with fresh air and exercise and careful diet; she must "amuse herself, and forget her trouble if possible."²⁹ Whatever the malady, it was too incipient to diagnose. Writing Elizabeth Peabody from Malvern, Charlotte confessed that no worry had ever clutched her like this. She would see a London doctor in three weeks: "My heart sinks within me--with dread and fear."³⁰

London confirmed the worst. Sir James Paget, surgeon-extraordinary to Queen Victoria, told her there was no cure except "cutting it out," and the sooner the better. Not satisfied, Charlotte consulted another doctor, who gave her a lotion to try for six weeks: the symptoms should be more definite by then. "I have been keeping the breast covered with a compress of lead water ever since," she wrote Elizabeth Peabody. The lump, instead of decreasing, was "very much larger than it was when I first discovered it."³¹ "I am so homesick this summer for my own beloved land," she wrote Jamie Fields. Would next summer be "half so sweet and lovely?"³²

If there was any virtue in trouble, it lay in the deepening devotion Charlotte saw daily in Emma's eyes, the fear and suffering that Emma's face reflected. With Emma here and Ned leaving Rome in the fall, Charlotte was certain that she must--at least until she knew her own future--leave Italy. She would rent out the apartment; the place was too expensive to lock up. Now, biding her time while the lotion proved fruitless, fearing the word that must come with a return to London, she tried to rivet her mind to happier matters. "If I get over this fear which haunts me, perhaps when I come home, I will work a little," she wrote Miss Peabody.

She wrote long letters to Algernon Chase in Baltimore, full of questions about a new dye for cloth. Did it look like a bright investment? Once back in America, Ned would need some business to curb his "frivolity."

When Isa Blagden learned of her trouble, she wrote tender advice from Florence. "What you want is not external torture but internal replenishment of blood." Proper diet was the thing: "port wine, milk, glycerine taken internally, raw eggs, succulent meat, and the sedative of a kiss"³³ every time Charlotte needed encouragement. To prove her affection, Isa hoped Charlotte had seen her article in All The Year Round last fall. Adelaide Ristori was a good wife and mother, but, Isa had written, "Charlotte Cushman is especially the friend of women, the one woman whose hand has always been held out to support the feebler, poorer ones of her own sex."

In London, Charlotte faced again the dread fact with Paget. Edinburgh was the place for the operation; the surgeon, Sir James Simpson, whom she had entertained in Rome. In an operating theatre, Simpson was performing wonders with a new anesthetic. The Queen herself had sung the praises of "blessed chloroform" ever since Simpson had used it on her in childbirth.

Bidding Emma Crow and the children good-bye in Malvern, Charlotte bit her lips to stave off crying. If they needed money, they must draw on her London account. Sallie and Emma would write them daily; their remaining in Malvern was better for all, since nobody knew how long she must wait in Edinburgh for the operation. Beyond that, no matter how hard she looked, time was clouded.