Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral - David Dobbs (2005)

Part I

Chapter 7. Selection

Anna Russell Agassiz, Alexander’s wife and the sister of the wife of his best fiend

ALEXANDER AGASSIZ was not one to dally daily with philosophy. If he dealt with the epistemological issues raised by Darwin’s species view in Revision of the Echini, it was only so he could form a good working response to it. Most zoologists and naturalists, particularly taxonomists, ultimately reacted the same way. Rather than being frozen by abstract questions of species essence, they recognized they just needed a consistent functional definition of what species were.

Having tackled Darwinism’s practical implications, Alex forged ahead, dissecting, classifying, analyzing, and writing. Revision of the Echini was a huge job that taxed his energies and intellect. Yet the three or four years during which he concentrated on the book were the happiest of his life, partly because he finally had the time and independence simply to work. Touring Europe had reinvigorated his health and scientific enthusiasm, and when he returned he found the museum running so smoothly that he had only to serve as advisor rather than day-to-day manager. The Calumet mine was also “in apple pie order and running as smooth as clockwork.”

His only negative distraction was Louis’s health. Louis had suffered a small stroke in 1869 before Alex left for Europe, and his strength was returning only gradually. By the time Alex was back, his father was coming to the museum each day for just an hour or two, after which he would go home to rest, sometimes getting more work done there. He was hardly the “steam engine” Alex and Theo had so often marveled at. This worried Alex. But Louis’s reduced energy actually proved a bit of a blessing, for a less vigorous Louis made less trouble. He seemed to concentrate more on his main work, that of teaching and his latest investigations, and less on battling Darwin or launching projects that Theo and Alex would have to quell. He was less riotous.

The home Alex and Anna rented, Charles Eliot Norton’s mansion known as Shady Hill, was spacious and comfortable, and the growing income from Calumet relieved them of financial worry and (courtesy of hired help) not a few chores. They were free to work and enjoy their children (now out of diapers and the most labor-intensive years) and friends. Summers they spent on the shore, renting a different house each year. Alex, who loved horses, taught the boys to ride during these summers, fitting it in amid more field and book work on Echini. The young family spent much of their time with Theo and Mimi. The two couples understood each other thoroughly. The brothers-in-law were almost as close as the sisters, for they had known each other now half their lives. The bonds between the families were further strengthened by the nearness in age of George to Cora, Mimi and Theo’s daughter, a much-adored child in whom Theo took immense pleasure.

After a life marked by unexpected setbacks and turmoil, Alex felt a happiness so blooming that he hesitated to trust it. He particularly feared that illness would again strike his family. It was a reasonable fear in that pre-antibiotic time. In the twenty-four years since Alex had moved to the United States, epidemics of cholera, yellow fever, and flu had killed many thousands, and the previous eight years alone had brought lethal outbreaks of typhus, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, and yellow fever. His father’s ailments were never far from his mind, and at some level his mother’s last illness doubtless stayed near too. Occasionally came close reminders. Early in 1873, while Theo, Mimi, and Cora were traveling in Europe, Mimi, who eleven years before had become dangerously weak after bearing Cora in Florence, fell seriously ill there again, probably with the flu that was then killing many on both sides of the Atlantic. During the lags in transatlantic correspondence, Alex and Anna often feared the worst. When in March they heard that Mimi had pulled clear, Alex felt the relief of someone who had dodged a scripted fate. “Every thing seems so prosperous,” he wrote Theo in expressing his great relief, “that I feel as if some of us would have to pay a heavy penalty … for all our happiness.”

When the penalty came, it struck hard. In July Theo and Mimi were still abroad when Cora took sick. She likely contracted the flu strain that had threatened her mother. Cora, however, did not pull free. After an illness of two weeks, she died at The Hague.

It took the Lymans two months to bring their daughter’s body back to Cambridge for burial. Theo, always emotive, was still devastated when they arrived. For weeks he wept at any reminder of his daughter’s absence. He had frequently recorded in his diaries and letters acutely observed descriptions of Cora learning and playing and growing-her hopscotch games with new Italian neighbors, comic language miscues with French playmates, her proud mastery of the first German songs she memorized and translated. (Theo recorded in his diary the entire songs, in both languages.) Now, actively prod ding his remembrances to keep Cora present, he filled his diary with hearten expressions of grief. As the months passed, he lamented time’s erosion of the pain that was all he had left of his daughter:

The outlines of the painful images are growing less sharp; a sort of perspective begins to invest what once was present… The vivid grief is followed by a state which well may be called “for loran.” To grieve is to live, to be forlorn is a negative existence. “Think of what you have left”-that is the old saying. I indeed have much left-but is life so sweet that we should seek to hold to it when one half is lost? I don’t see much chance of dying- my health was never better-and I have no wish to die so long as I can help Mimi.

Theo, who had escaped the Civil War with body and spirit intact, barely survived his daughter’s death, and it’s clear he barely cared to.

Alex and George, Cora’s lifelong playmate, carried Cora’s bier to the grave. In the months following, Alex watched in pain as his best friend, long a bright light in his as in many lives, suffered precisely the erasure of happiness Alex had feared. The penalty had been levied.

It soon struck much closer. Some ten weeks after Alex helped Theo and Mimi bury Cora, Louis fell ill. Louis had often been sickly over the previous five years, but he had felt better for months now and had been particularly vigorous since summer, when an innovative natural history course he gave to several dozen public school teachers had provided the thrill, seemingly lost to days past, of sparking inspiration in new followers. He had returned to Cambridge that fall of 1873 full of plans, igniting many burners at once. He even wrote a new rejoinder to Darwin for the Atlantic Monthly. He seemed almost back to his old steam-engine self.

Alex and Anna saw all this from close range, for in November, having vacated Shady Hill for the returning Charles Eliot Norton, they had moved back into the Quincy Street house for what was to be a short stay while they looked for another place of their own. On December 5, Alex, Anna, and the boys helped Louis celebrate Liz Cary’s birthday with a party that included Alex’s sisters, Pauline and Ida, and their husbands, Quincy Shaw and Henry Higginson, as well as several of the Cary family. Spirits flowed and ran high, and Louis even indulged in a forbidden cigar. The following morning, however, Louis complained of feeling “strangely sleepy” soon after getting to the museum, and he returned home and went to bed. When Cary could not rouse him that afternoon, she summoned Alex from the museum. Though Louis would regain consciousness a few times, he could neither rise nor speak. He had suffered a massive stroke. Alex, Liz, and Anna took turns tending him, keeping an increasingly tense and hopeless vigil.

He died after eight days, on Sunday, December 14,1873. Though Louis Agassiz had lost his intellectual following, he still held a large place in many hearts; the outpouring was extraordinary. Countless elegies and front-page headlines mourned his passing; the Boston papers the next day were rimmed in black. The funeral, held four days later, drew an overflow crowd, as all of Boston and Cambridge seemed to come out. In the foremost rows near Alex, Ida, and Pauline sat not only Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard, but Henry Wilson, the vice president of the United States.

Missing from the funeral, however, was Anna Russell Agassiz. On the last night of Louis’s life, exhausted from tending him, she had taken a bad cold. It had not relented and in fact had grown much worse, with an intense headache and a fever setting in on Monday. Alex, worried almost sick himself, had hardly left the house but to tend to his father’s funeral business and then go to the funeral itself Rushing home from the interment, he found Anna sicker than ever.

By this point he feared she had contracted typhoid fever, the latest outbreak of which was killing many. But a doctor’s exam the next day found a different or possibly an additional culprit: Pneumonia had filled her left lung. This was Thursday. For three days, in a struggle that must have seemed nightmarishly familiar to Alex from his mother’s Freiburg denouement, Anna lay with laboured, rattling breath. Her coughs threw blood. On Sunday the rattle spread to the right lung. A second doctor was summoned, and after conferring, these two doctors, among Boston’s finest, prescribed large quantities of brandy. It was a standard contemporary cure-all. But it almost certainly weakened her, depressing her heart, lungs, and immune sys tem-everything that needed to rise to defeat the infection.

The desperately optimistic consensus the next day was that Anna was not much worse. They dared hope that the left lung might clear in time to save her life. But that evening she began to fade and by midnight she was gone. Alex watched her expire, stunned to numb ness. His father, he of the long shadow who two decades earlier had left Alex to tend his dying mother, had reached from the grave to claim also his wife.