The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O'Connor McNees Read Free Book Online Page A

Unitarian church, the pale pink and yellow panes glinting in the morning sun, he had suddenly grown shy. Margaret tried to put him at ease by suggesting whom he might invite and how they might send around the invitations. Samuel seemed only too happy to oblige her wishes. She had told Anna that though he wouldn’t admit it, welcoming the Alcott sisters was for him the perfect pretense for a gathering he could be sure Margaret would attend.
    She had then further divulged that at a party the previous fall, after Samuel drank three glasses of champagne punch, he’d told Margaret, haltingly, that her blond curls reminded him of corn silk at a husking bee. Or, rather, that corn silk reminded him of Margaret’s curls, since he had touched the slick fibers many times but could only dream of touching her hair. Anna had giggled and rolled her eyes, but Margaret nearly went into a swoon as she relived the encounter. Louisa just shook her head, amazed at the nonsense to which young women her age seemed devoted.
    Once the tent was fixed securely between the trees, Samuel and Nicholas waved the girls over. Inside, the swimmers could change from their Saturday clothes into proper swimming attire, which for the boys meant wool tunics with short sleeves and wool breeches that stopped below the knee, and for the girls a heavy flannel dress with pantalettes beneath, swimming boots, and a cap for their hair. All the girls but Louisa emerged from the tent one by one, shapeless, bobbing along like bald old men toward the water.
    Louisa peeked out of the tent to see the group gathered on the water’s edge, splashing in the warm current and pointing out a red deer that eyed them from the opposite bank. She crept out and folded her dress into a neat square, then rested it atop her boots, which she placed in the modest line the other girls’ boots formed. Their laces were cinched into bows, as if leaving them untied signified less than total commitment to matters of propriety. She’d been unsure just what to do about her feet. She had only one pair of boots, and it had taken her all morning to help Anna fashion something she could wear in the water, a pair of slippers their father had abandoned, which the girls cut down with a kitchen knife and sewed into rough shape, the laces jutting in irregular zigzag down the front. Anna had refused to go to the party at all until Louisa convinced her that no one would be looking at her feet.
    Since their conversation on the bench at the edge of town, Anna had grown demure, reticent. She was thinking now about impressions, taking note of the names of important families in town, particularly the ones with sons. Louisa had no choice but to leave her own feet bare. She didn’t care at all whether the others thought the Alcotts were poor—they probably knew it anyway, since why else would they drag themselves to Walpole for the summer, unless it was to live as another family’s charge? But Louisa knew it mattered to Anna.
    Better to be called brazen than destitute, she thought, forsaking her bathing cap. She pulled the long steel comb out of her coiled hair, shaking the dark waves free until they hung to her waist, skimming the gray flannel belt of the swimming costume Margaret had lent her. At times like these, Louisa felt quite proud of her ability to rise above the frivolous material trappings of feminine existence. She did not have dresses with lace bodices or bonnets decorated with velvet ribbon; she did not own jewels or cashmere shawls. It simply was not possible in their current circumstances to attire all four girls as well as most young women would have liked. But Louisa knew she had something far more luxurious within reach: a thick stack of paper and ink in the well. In the quiet of the evening she could hold the blotched sheets in her hands and marvel that she had once again captured and set down in words the thoughts and images that careened through her mind. There was something deliciously