Louisa by Louisa Thomas Page B

particularly delicate and my spirits worse,” she would remember. Yet she was able to write to Abigail, “I have enjoyed almost perfect happiness.”
    The following summer , 1806, he left her in Washington, pregnant. His departure left her bereft. “The loss of Mr. Adams’s society is to me irreparable,” she wrote to Abigail. “I already look forward to his return with the most anxious impatience.” John Quincy had been in the habit of measuring the temperature each morning; in his absence, she rose at sunrise to do it. In his letters to her, he was intimate. She was “dearest Louisa”; she was sent kisses “
de l’amour.
” She was sweetly teased. “George appears to have lost none of his sensibility, but has a placidness and ease of temper, which must have come to him I think from some of his
remote
ancestors,” John Quincy quipped after he was reunited with his sons. “He resembles you more than formerly. Not however so much as John, who seems a little miniature of yourself.”
    â€œI can believe that George grows like me but Johns round face and deep dimples must I think be infinitely more like his father,” Louisa responded, “who has ever been celebrated for this to
me
fascinating beauty.”
    Their separation was the more difficult because of the complications from pregnancy. She was confined to her room in the suffocating heat, suffering from abscesses in the throat and ears, her legs badly swollen. She could hardly stand. Even so, when she learned that her sister Harriet’s son was dying, she made the hot mile-long walk to her sister’s house. That night, with the temperature at 100 degrees, she went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn child.
    The tragedy, for a while , seemed to make them realize their closeness. When John Quincy heard the news from her, he staggered. “Her letter affected me deeply in its tenderness, its resignation, and its fortitude,” he wrote in his diary. In his room, by himself, he “yielded to the weakness, which I had so long struggled to conceal and restrain,” and he cried. For his part, his response was balm to her. “My heart swelled with gratitude and love,” she wrote to him, “and I almost ceased to think the strike so bitter which proved to me how dear I am to your heart.”
    It was never that simple, though. They loved at a distance; proximity was harder. So was the long separation from her children. She was furious when she learned that John Quincy had taken a room for himself in Cambridge instead of spending time with the boys. By the time she reached Massachusetts in August 1806, she had not seen them for nine months. When Louisa arrived in Quincy, her children “recieved me as a stranger,” and little John cried that he wanted to return to his grandmother. John Quincy was almost as fractious. The solicitude and tenderness he’d shown toward his wife in her absence evaporated. Louisa was overwhelmed; the little saltbox cottage was as crowded as ever. When they tried to have company at the house, Louisa burned her cakes and greeted guests with soot on her face. John Quincy retreated into his irritation. “This is no longer the studious life of the two former months,” he wrote in his diary soon after Louisa arrived. “I have wasted the past week, and fear I shall waste the next. Nothing can be more fatal to study than petty avocations continually recurring.”
    The following winter , 1806–7, she stayed in Boston with the children in a boardinghouse on the outskirts of the city, a lodging so grim that even Abigail thought it “cold and bleak.” Louisa would remember John Quincy’s decision with bitterness. “Everything as usual was fixed without a word of consultation with the family,” she later wrote. The pattern in which she was excluded from major decisions about her children’s life and in fact her