Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [93]
Morse had cause to brood over his children’s well-being. Eighteen-year-old Susan lived with Sidney for a while in New York, but not happily. Full of business cares, Sidney sometimes forgot to dole out the money he was obligated to provide from her grandfather’s bequest. And despite Susan’s many economies he considered her extravagant. She reported to Morse that when she asked for money to buy Christmas presents, Sidney gave her a lot of his old books to bestow, “which I did not like much, as my friends gave me such handsome presents.” Mostly Susan was unhappy over living as the ward of friends and relatives. While in New York she also stayed part of the time with a family named Peters, and when they moved was left uncertain where to go next. She ended up with an aunt in New Haven, where, she said, “I do not feel exactly at home.” Her great wish, she wrote to Morse, was that someday “my dear father will have a sufficient competency to enable us to live in a home together.”
Morse usually offered Susan little consolation. “I look to God to take care of you,” he wrote. She lacked a home, true, but he reminded her that he himself was deeply bereft: “You cannot know the depth of the wound that was inflicted when I was deprived of your dear mother, nor in how many ways that wound has been kept open.” What hope of family life he held out for her seems, at least in one letter, no more than disguised self-pity, designed not to reassure Susan but to elicit her sympathy:
Tell Uncle Sidney to … have a little snug room in the upper corner of his new building, where a bed can be placed a chair and a table, and let me have it as my own that there may be one little particular spot, which I can call home. I will there make three wooden stools, one for you, one for Charles, and one for Finley, and invite you to your Father’s house.
Morse’s repeated depiction of himself as poor and helpless obviously made Susan feel guilty. She asked him to bring back a music box she might listen to while sewing—“that is, if you can afford it.” Like the rest of her letters to him since childhood, those she sent to Paris usually ended with a plea: “How I long for your return, my dearest father!”
However insensitive to Susan, Morse was even further cut off from his sons. “I feel quite unfit to advise with regard to them,” he told Sidney. “I know neither their dispositions nor their necessities.” For a time the boys were put up in Claverack, New York, with their uncle Richard and his wife, Sarah. Charles was nearing college age. Thirteen-year-old Finley, his mind stricken, seems to have had trouble dressing himself and may have developed a violent clumsiness. Richard described him as “mild, sweet-tempered, destructive.” He believed Finley should be put out to “some kind-hearted farmer in the country, where he could amuse himself with work or play.” In his emotionally ragged state, Richard cannot have been an adequate caretaker for Morse’s sons. And his wife seems to have been no better. Winter was coming on, and the boys lacked coats and had outgrown their pantaloons. Yet she told Richard, “Don’t bother about the children. Let them remain till their father comes home, or makes provision for them.”
Sidney planned to send Charles and Finley to school in Vermont. Susan was dismayed by the idea: “Poor boys! They are truly wanderers,” she protested to Morse. “I cannot bear the thought of their going