Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [47]
As to leaving his children for three years, Finley reasoned that all his artistic labors aimed at having a home for them. Since his study abroad would ultimately be to their benefit he need not feel guilty: “I think no one will accuse me of neglecting them.” But he had not often visited the children during his four years in New York, either. Instead he sent them instructions indistinguishable from those his parents had sent him many years before, bartering love for obedience: “tell Susan if she loves her Papa, she will gratify him by behaving so that he shall hear good accounts of her.” The conflict between domestic life and an artistic career was of course nothing new to Finley. As a student at the Royal Academy he had painted a Judgment of Jupiter, showing a young woman in flight from her lover Apollo, god of inspiration, to her mortal husband. For himself he had long ago chosen Apollo, finding some comfort and warrant in religious scruples about the “danger of idolizing the family circle.”
Following the deaths of Lucrece and Jedediah, Finley’s children had been looked after in New Haven by Elizabeth Morse and nurse Nancy Shepherd. But Elizabeth herself had died while he was caught up in preparing the third annual N.A.D. exhibition. At first she had shown symptoms of dropsy. When he learned that her legs were swollen he sent a letter of sympathy—and news that the exhibition was thronged, “the first people in the city, ladies and gentlemen.” Two weeks later he wrote again. “I am so situated as to be unable to leave the city without great detriment to my business,” he said. “I will come, however, if, on the whole, you think it best.” Whether he then returned to New Haven is unknown, but ten days later Elizabeth was dead, at the age of sixty-two. She had been a difficult woman, a difficult mother—embittered by the loss of eight children, sharp-tongued, quick to find fault. Still, her death left him counting the toll of the last few years: “my wife, my father, my mother all in their graves.”
After Elizabeth’s death, Finley’s children were placed with various caretakers, with whom they would remain during his absence. Charles, seven and a half years old, was boarded with a clergyman near New Haven. James, two years younger, early on developed some serious illness: “I can’t but hope he will yet be a well child,” Finley said; “he seems to have an unusual share of troubles.” James was moved around, boarded awhile upstate with Richard Morse’s new bride and her aunt, then taken by Sidney Morse to Brooklyn and put in an “Infant School,” then reunited with his brother Charles at the home of the clergyman. Finley placed ten-year-old Susan with Lucrece’s sister and her husband in Concord, New Hampshire—“without expence to me,” he noted.
The couple considered adopting Susan, not out of affection for her, it seems clear, but out of respect to the memory of Lucrece. Lucrece’s sister complained to Finley that the girl had been improperly reared, too much given her own way: “when I commanded her to do any thing, she would not be very ready to mind.” She applied herself to breaking Susan’s bad habits by denying her walks or visits and sending her to a “man’s school,” in which almost all the students were boys. “If there is any thing that is painful to me,” she said, “it is to see a child, made completely wretched by selfishness and indulgence.” Susan keenly felt her separation from Finley and wrote to him imploringly from New Hampshire: “I hope you will not go to Europe my dear Father. You must come and see me.” At the bottom of the letter she added: “When this you see/Remember me.”
Finley was not deaf to such cries, nor indifferent to the uprooting of his children. But long practice in a self-pitying fatalism helped him justify his failure to relieve their situation: “my children scattered,