It’s unclear who had the idea first. That day Charlotte and Charles made a new game of jumping from one of the ships to the next. Boston’s Long Wharf stretched 1,586 feet into the deep water of the Atlantic with room for nearly fifty ships to dock at one time. Could they get to the end without touching land? They walked up the gangplank to the deck of the first ship. If any of the sailors noticed, they were too busy, or knew them too well, to care. It was exhilarating at first, leaping over the canyon of dark water to land soundly on the next ship, the sharp report of their feet hitting the deck. Then Charlotte leapt but misjudged the distance and fell into the dark water of Boston Harbor.
Filthy water rushed in through her nose and into her mouth. Her heavy petticoats turned to wet rags, then to ballast, and she began to sink. I’m dying, she thought, as the waters went over her head.
Then hands plunged into the water and she felt herself being hauled up, waking out of a terrible dream. The sailors dried her as best they could and gave her a spare pair of overalls and a jacket to wear instead of her wet clothes. They led her back to her father’s office still shaken, wearing a sailor’s rough trousers: a tall, raw-boned girl new-baptized as a man.
Soon after Charlotte’s near-death experience, her father disappeared, leaving the family with no visible means of support. Charlotte later called it the “first disaster” of her life. It felt like drowning.
Debt collectors descended on the Cushmans like ants at a picnic. Mary Eliza moved them from one boardinghouse to another, but it was no use. On the day the debt collectors finally caught up with them, Charlotte and Mary Eliza watched the men carry the past away on their backs, hunched over with the weight of family heirlooms.
Mary Eliza finally settled them at 41 Brattle Street, where with few other options for bringing in her own income, she used the little money she had left to open a boardinghouse. At thirteen, Charlotte dropped out of school to work for her mother full-time. (Charles and Susan were too young to help and Augustus was still a toddler.) Mary Eliza could have sent her children to relatives—well-meaning friends in New York even offered to adopt Charlotte—but she refused to break up her family.
Their new neighborhood was a mix of high and low classes. It was a short walk to the genteel meadow of Boston Common and also around the corner from the Tremont Theatre and the actors, politicians, wealthy men, and prostitutes who frequented it. The actors would become Charlotte’s mother’s best clients.The Cushmans had gone from being the pedigreed family of a prosperous merchant to genteel poverty. It pained Charlotte to see her brother Augustus growing up without the ease and luxury she’d taken for granted as a little girl. She worked every day for her mother, but although the boarders helped feed and clothe them, Charlotte was determined to lift her family back out of poverty, somehow.
It was no easy task. Window-shopping in the boutiques around Long Wharf and Boston Common, one saw very few women working. The shop clerks, the carriage drivers, the lamplighters, street sweepers, and newspaper sellers were men. Sometimes Charlotte might see lady’s maids in sere cotton dresses like her own, appearing briefly in the doorway of some stately home to dump out their masters’ chamber pots, or occasionally through the back curtain of a haberdashery, a woman surrounded by heaps of fabric, bent double as she made tiny stitches along a man’s pant cuff. Education made little difference; even women who had finished high school had no universities that would admit them. Charlotte lived in a half world, denied even the physical freedom of riding out on her horse alone. She could have looked for a wealthy husband, but was scornful of women who believed marriage would bring them independence; it was, she would later write, a form of sexual slavery. She wanted more than that.
Charlotte’s work was grueling. She emptied chamber pots and stripped beds, washed endless piles of linens, their sodden coils heavy as a body. She dusted the dressers and lamps and tables with a goose wing. Several times a day she filled the ash bucket and dumped hot ash down the toilet to muffle the smell. If the weather was nice, she opened the windows and lifted the sash to bring sweet air in and let the bad air out. Every few months, they washed down the bedposts with lye to kill the lice. But it was here the first glimmer of an idea came to her. Her eyes burning from lye as she scrubbed the kitchen floor or with her hands plunged into a basin of soapy dishwater, she listened to the actors and actresses. They might complain about late payments, drunken costars, costumes rubbed raw, and nervous exhaustion from train travel, but they also recited lines from great poets and playwrights, told good jokes, read widely, traveled constantly, and told stories about stars who were invited to dine with royalty and made great fortunes.
The next time Uncle Augustus came to visit them in Boston, Charlotte pleaded with him to take her to a play at the Tremont Theatre. She knew she was her uncle’s favorite and that he felt sorry for her. Though Augustus and Mary Eliza’s family may have once had money, there was none left to help Charlotte or her siblings. Augustus had always believed in Charlotte’s intellect, and now here she was changing guests’ stained sheets instead of coming home breathless and excited after school. When the newspapers announced that the famous British actor William Charles Macready
