chapter fifteen Villa Cushman
In Winslow Homer’s etching The Bathe at Newport, the water rises to eye level. The bathers soak up to their necks in the calm water. A man with brilliantined hair and a handlebar mustache splashes a woman in an elegant bathing costume floating on her back. Bodies seem to connect underwater. It’s a somewhat cartoonish depiction of the Newport bathing glitterati, but it captured the decadence and sensuality of the seaside paradise, which with Saratoga in Upstate New York was one of America’s first two resort towns, entirely devoted to pleasure and leisure.
A few hours up the coast from New York City, Newport offered quiet, natural beauty, and the healing sea air. Some, like Washington Irving, found it “too gay and fashionable” with its dance halls and expensive restaurants and flocks of summer beachgoers, but Charlotte agreed with Henry James, whose favorite thing to do in Newport was “Nursing a nostalgia on the sun-warmed rocks.”
The Bathe at Newport by Winslow Homer
The “Villa Cushman” was completed in 1872 and Charlotte and Emma immediately moved in full-time. It was expansive and expensive, with a large, wraparound porch from which Charlotte had a view of “my sea and my sunsets.” Windows on three levels faced the water, and there were enough bedrooms to host the whole Cushman family when they came for the summer. The children were Charlotte’s greatest joy. They were “very well & happy,” and when they came to visit they brought her “little offerings” until their small, magical gifts and flowers “surrounded me on every side.”
But when the high season ended and the children left, Charlotte’s depression returned. To remedy the situation, Emma Stebbins’s sister, Mrs. Garland, moved in with them temporarily. Charlotte found her a “timid, shy, proud person” with “a sweet poetic mind” and liked her very much. Charlotte also wrote to several friends, including the novelist Helen Hunt, inviting them to come stay in the house. Also born and bred in Massachusetts, Hunt was an activist who wrote frequently about the treatment of Native Americans in the United States. She was also an advocate of other writers, corresponding frequently with Emily Dickinson and encouraging her to publish her poems: “It is cruel and wrong to your ‘day & generation,’ ” Helen would write to Emily in 1884, “that you will not give them light.” Charlotte encouraged Helen to keep writing, even after her latest collection of poetry was panned by the critics. “I don’t believe any of our American men know how to criticize your poems,” Charlotte wrote, “because they are so full of feeling.”
Charlotte hoped to recreate at the Villa Cushman what she’d had in Rome: a gathering of writers, artists, and family, knit together under one roof and watched over by her and Emma Stebbins. But the relationship had never recovered from Charlotte’s continuing passion for Emma Crow Cushman. When Helen Hunt called Emma Stebbins Charlotte’s wife, Charlotte corrected her. “You are wrong dear in your term ‘wife Emma,’ ” she confided, explaining that she and Stebbins had not been more than friends since the arrival of Emma Crow Cushman, “the gentlemanly little person of whom we have spoken.”
Still, Charlotte was happier in Newport than she had been in many years, until one day when she woke feeling chilled, then had attacks of fever. With despair she felt again a hard mass growing in her breast and knew she would likely need another operation. Sickness made the demands of daily life seem suffocating, the “immediate present seized, held, grabbed, clutched, clawed, demanded, asked, begged, entreated & coaxed” her until she no longer felt “mistress of my soul.” She felt she was wasting the little time she had left, and that her intellect was declining without use. “Can’t even hold my pen straight enough to spell correctly & a disordered stomach & weak driveling ideas!”
Rest seemed to have helped for a time, but it was no complete cure. The only thing Charlotte felt she could do was to go back to work. Though she was too weak to stand for an entire performance, she could still give an excellent dramatic reading, leaning on a podium or sitting in a chair. Even after all this time, she had not lost her talent for oration and capturing an audience’s imagination. Her magnificently harrowed voice made a garden appear where only the bare ground of the stage once stood. “I won’t give up reading, Ever, while life lasts!” she swore, though she often had to perform with a doctor waiting in the wings.
Audiences rewarded her return to the stage with excitement and passion. Many of the older patrons remembered Charlotte from their youth, and connected her career with some of the most memorable and happy times of their lives. Everything now was divided into before and after the war, and Charlotte reminded them of a simpler time.
“When I wish to be antediluvian,” wrote Henry James, “I live over a small incident of childhood, very young childhood.” He was referring to a cold, dark winter night when he had sat with his brother William alone at home, their heads bent over a book, a lamp held between them. Their parents were out at the theatre, watching Charlotte Cushman in Henry VIII at the Park Theatre.
