Seeing Charlotte perform was like being dipped in consciousness. It was a rite of passage.
Years later, James bought a ticket to see one of Charlotte’s staged readings. He initially thought she looked sickly. Yet even weakened by cancer, sitting alone in a chair, her magnetism reached out to him. As she read from Henry VIII, her frailty added realistic pathos to her portrayal of the weakened Queen Katharine. When he left the theatre, he was stirred. It was “one of the most ineffaceable in my tolerably rich experience of the theatre… a vivid vigil in which the poor lonely lamplight became that of the glittering stage, in which I saw wonderous figures and listened to thrilling tones, in which I knew ‘Shakespeare acted’ as I was never to know him again.”
Far from being a pale imitation of the play, Charlotte’s voice did as much to fill a theatre as a whole troupe of actors. Thomas Wentworth Higginson discovered that just by listening to Charlotte recite a poem he could “see every fibre of thatch on the roof and every bristle on the dog’s back.” The critic George T. Ferris called her a “magician,” bringing Shakespeare’s characters back to life: “She has but to wave her wand to unlock from the prison-house of Shakespeare’s pages all the immortal phantoms that brood within them,” Ferris wrote. “It is for her alone to invest them with a splendid and subtle life.” Now in her sixties, Charlotte was helpless to stop the illness that was clawing its way into her. But she could, if only for an hour, wake Shakespeare from the dead.
chapter sixteen Contrary Winds
The cold February air brought the smell of the sea beyond Long Wharf. “Twice a day,” wrote Emerson, “the flowing sea took Boston in its arms.” It was 1876 and Charlotte had returned home to Boston for medical treatment. She left the opulent downtown Parker House, where she and Emma Stebbins were staying, and walked by herself through the city where she had spent her childhood. During her walk, Charlotte caught a cold. The next day she stayed in bed, shivering and feverish. Her cold quickly turned into pneumonia, known at the time as the “captain of the men of death.” As Emma Stebbins brought her medicines and warm drinks, she could hear a storm starting up outside the window.
Blocks away, the Great Elm on Boston Common thrashed in the winds. In its trunk was a hole “big enough for a nine-year-old boy to hide in,” and despite its immensity, inside it was rotten. The Great Elm was more than two hundred years old, and the city had grown up around it. When the storm finally stopped, a crowd of people gathered in the Common, standing around the corpse of the great, fallen tree.
Ned and Emma Cushman arrived to help, and Sallie never left Charlotte’s side. For a day or so she seemed to recover, but the chills and fever came back raging the next morning with a strange trembling the doctor called “rigor.” She coughed constantly, and faded in and out of sleep and fever dreams:
She was twenty-nine, wandering among gravestones, new to London, far from her family and the girl whose ring she wore, and miserably homesick. She was composing a poem called “The Place of Graves.” The theme was mortality and the ephemerality of fame. She was on the cusp of such fame, which seemed still a “vanity” and “feverish dream.”
Then, she was a little girl on her mother’s lap.
Then, she was playing with Ned and Emma’s children, her children, and they ran and put their arms around her, kissing her on the lips. Only God knew how much she loved them.
In Charlotte’s rooms in the Parker House the doctor took Emma Stebbins to the side. He spoke gravely to her and she ran out of the room crying.
Ned brought Charlotte a glass of milk punch. It reminded Charlotte of a story she’d read by Mark Twain in the last issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
In 1875, the new Harlem line of the New York streetcar had opened, and instructions for the conductor were posted on the wall, in sight of the train riders. The words were oddly rhythmic, and Noah Brooks and Isaac Bromley, two newspapermen who were riding the Fourth Avenue line and couldn’t get the words out of their heads. They published the instructions as a poem, which then got stuck in Mark Twain’s head. He then wrote a story called “A Literary Nightmare”—to get it out:
Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
Chorus.
Punch brothers! Punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare.
If the Tribune poem tormented a few hundred readers, Twain’s story reached thousands. It told of a literary infection that torments a writer until a friend, who he infects, keeps bursting out in snatches of “Punch brothers! Punch with care!” in the middle of a funeral.
Back in Parker House, Ned helped Charlotte sit up to take the drink. “Come auntie,” he cajoled, “here’s your milk punch.” Smiling, Charlotte recited: “Punch, brothers! Punch with care!” And then she fell asleep.
On February 18, 1876, one hundred years after the birth of the United States, its greatest actress, Charlotte Cushman, died. She was fifty-nine years old.
On the day of her funeral, her body lay in state in the Parker House. Hundreds of friends, family, and theatre colleagues came to pay their
