Reluctant Genius by Charlotte Gray

Author:Charlotte Gray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2014-02-07T14:00:45.664000+00:00

Mabel and Alec with their daughters Elsie (left) and Daisy in 1885.

The most difficult blow for Mabel came on November 17, 1883. She was seven months pregnant, her two little girls both had bad colds, and Alec had disappeared to a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Hartford, Connecticut. She began to feel ill, but the doctor reassured her it was just a cold and told her to stay out of drafts. In the middle of the night, a painful cramp awoke and her, and she realized with horror that she had begun contractions. With only Sister and a neighbor in attendance, she gave birth prematurely to another boy. “Poor little one,” she recorded sadly in her journal. “It was so pretty and struggled so hard to live, opened his eyes once or twice to the world and then passed away.”

Alec arrived home three hours later. He was saddened by the baby’s death, but he was particularly upset because he knew how much Mabel longed for a son and he did not know how to comfort her. He berated himself so vehemently for once again being away from home during such a crisis that Mabel had to dry her own tears and look after him. He would brood for years on his lost sons, his helplessness in the face of their deaths, and Mabel’s sorrow. “My true sweet wife,” he wrote in December 1885, “nothing will ever comfort me for the loss of these two babes for I feel at heart that I was the cause … when death came and robbed us of the little ones we wanted so much, you forgot your own suffering to try and comfort me.” Two years later, the sight of Mabel cradling a doll in her arms (during a sitting with a portrait painter) prompted him to write, “I love you very much my darling little wife, and wish indeed you could be blessed as you desire.”

The Bells named their second son Robert. Mabel had little chance to recover her usual stoicism in 1883 before more family tragedies struck. Her brother-in-law Maurice Grossman died the following year, aged forty-one, of a liver tumor. Within a year, in 1885, her sister Roberta, wife of Alec’s cousin Charlie Bell, died in childbirth, leaving two little girls, Helen and Gracie. Meanwhile, Sister, Maurice Grossman’s widow, was fighting a losing battle with tuberculosis, from which she had suffered for twenty years. She eventually died in 1886, leaving her parents to raise the Grossmans’ only child, a daughter nicknamed Gypsy. The Hubbard-Bell clan now appeared much more fragile than it had at the start of the decade. Reflecting on the loss of her exuberant Hungarian brother-in-law, Maurice, Mabel noted how sadness had subdued her family: “We seem such a quite ordinary family now. Alec is a man out of the ordinary certainly but he is quieter in general life. He never shocks and takes away our pride with his overflowing spirits and utter disregard of conventionalities as Maurice sometimes did.

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