Louisa by Louisa Thomas

and John Quincy hardly let themselves hope, not even writing to their parents about the possibility of a child. Lady Carysfort refused to let Louisa submit herself to her anxiety. Instead of letting her lie on her sofa, weak and reclining, Lady Carysfort would appear at her doorand demand that they go riding. She would send an invitation for dinner and refuse to take no for an answer. And so Louisa rode out into the bracing air, or spent evenings in “
a perfect gale
” of laughter while sitting next to some “German lump of obesity,” or listening to the king of England’s son play the piano while a Frenchwoman sang “God Save the King.”
    In mid-April, Louisa entered her confinement. The king, she later said, ordered the street outside the Adamses’ apartment blocked, so that the clatter of traffic would not disturb her. On April 12, she went into labor. The pain was intense, the German male midwife drunk, and Louisa’s left leg temporarily crippled. But a son was born, breathing. They named him George Washington Adams.
    A high fever gripped Louisa after the delivery. Puerperal fevers were common; doctors, drunk or sober, were not always in the habit of washing their hands. John Quincy was anguished and scared. When he wrote to tell his mother about the birth of her grandson, he added that he was waiting a few days to tell Catherine Johnson: he was afraid to write immediately, since he might have to follow the good news with a letter saying that her daughter was dead. But his responsibilities to his country remained foremost in his mind. Two weeks after the child was born, John Quincy received his recall to the United States, and he wanted to leave without delay. One of John Adams’s last acts as president had been to summon his son home. On the day John Quincy received his recall, Louisa, who had been slowly improving in health, was “continually seized” with “sudden faintings.” John Quincy despairingly wrote in his diary that she was “immovable,” unable even to shift from one side of her bed to the other. She lay there for weeks, her baby suckling one breast while a borrowed infant nursed the other, since Dr. Brown feared that excess milk would spread her fever to her brain.
    But she could not convalesce forever—however much some part of her, consciously or not, might have wanted to remain right where she was. John Quincy prepared to leave Berlin at the earliest possiblechance. There was not even time to wait for the child to be vaccinated by traditional methods; a faster, experimental one was done instead. By the time Louisa managed to limp across the room with assistance, arrangements had been made to sail to the United States. She still could not climb the stairs. On June 17, she was lifted into a carriage, and she, John Quincy, their son, and their two servants, Whitcomb and Epps, left Berlin. Saying goodbye, she cried “bitter tears.”
    The son she held in her arms was her solace. What she thought of his name is unknown. Perhaps it was a chance to prove her American patriotism. Perhaps she was just glad that the name was not an Adams name, that it was not John. (Presumably, the disgraced Joshua was not an option.) Perhaps she didn’t care. What mattered was the existence of the child in her arms. It was her triumph, the redemption of what she saw as her failures so far. “I was a
Mother
,” she wrote.
    They went first to Hamburg, where, on July 8, they boarded a ship. It was called the
America.
Its deck was as close to America as Louisa had everbeen.

PART THREE
MY HEAD
and
MY HEART
Washington and Massachusetts ,
1801–1809

4
    I N THE SUMMER OF 1805, Louisa and the boys came to Quincy with her sister Eliza, moving into the small saltbox cottage where John Quincy had been born near Penn’s Hill, two miles away from the elder Adamses’ mansion. Washington may have seemed remote from cosmopolitan life, but