MF
“I didn’t write back,” said Henry. “I was cross with her about not understanding. About the Wild. She was always mis-using my words and the words of others, bending them to her own meanings.”
“Something no one else has ever done.”
“Well yes, of course — I can’t think why it irked me so.”
“It’s all right, Henry.” Anne touched the lines of writing on the page delicately. “I like her hand. It’s so grand and forceful! Not the least bit lady-like, I’m afraid.”
“She was short-sighted. I think that’s why she wrote such a large hand.”
Anne held up Henry’s letter next to the one in the desk. “A letter is a very live thing, isn’t it?”
“When I went over to see Jove, the day I came home, I meant to talk to him about the desk and the letter to Mrs. Hawthorne. Somehow I thought he might like to deliver the letter and visit the Hawthornes with me.”
“I could go! I want to see the mountains —”
“But I never even told him about this letter. It was strange. I couldn’t.”
He told Anne about Emerson’s planned “Memoirs” and also about the money that had never been sent to the Ossolis.
“Were they punishing her?” Anne asked.
“I don’t think so. They wanted her to come home. We all wanted that.”
“Indeed. I’m afraid I don’t see why.” Anne was surprised to find herself taking Miss Fuller’s part. “No one wanted her to marry an Italian, so they wouldn’t want to meet him either, would they?”
“They wanted everything to be proper — up to standard. It would be best for the child,” said Henry.
“He was an Italian child, wouldn’t he be best living in Italy?”
“He was also American. All Americans are best living here.”
She rubbed the tabby’s head, those two almost-bald spots in front of her ears. A purr rumbled out, but then Anne clutched the cat so close she struggled and jumped free with a squawk.
“Can I go with you to see the Hawthornes?”
“I need to write to them first.”
Henry wrote the letter that day. It was another week before the reply arrived.
In that week, at a picnic, Anne decided which of the two farming brothers she preferred: It was Thomas, the elder. She said nothing to Mother or Sissy, but she did tell Dolly Allan.
“How do you know you like him best?”
“He is going to have the farm when his father dies, and Henry likes talking to him about threshers and rotation and all the advanced ideas for farming. He admires Henry and he is the only person I’ve ever seen Henry explain his pencil inventions to — the ground plumbago, you know, for printing. Henry says Thomas is a ‘coming man.’ He also likes my drawings.”
“I don’t suppose he’s at all handsome.”
“So he is! You know he is! And he smells wonderful.”
“Annie!”
“He does — like hay and burnt toast. And sometimes peppermint.”
Lenox, 18th August ’50.
My dear Henry,
Glad as we must always be to hear from you, this occasion tests even that felicity. Mrs. Hawthorne has been saddened by the death of “La Signora Ossoli,” as have I. We offer up our condoling to the crêpe and grosgrain of mourning in which all Concord doubtless has draped herself since the news of her daughter’s final fall.
However, that is “as far as it goes” — as the good pig farmer who lives down the road says. This Berkshire Hog will not go a-snuffling in the dirt to snout out scrips and scraps.
To put it plainly: Neither my wife nor I has any wish to receive, and most certainly will not read, the letter you describe. Do oblige me by disposing of it in the nearest stove. I can only wish you had not troubled to fish it out from the sea.
Do you think me harsh? No doubt you do not know the worst of what we know, of her irregular life, in Italy and before. In our days in Concord, she was merely a Transcendental heifer, and tho’ we were fond of her as one of our own and endured her posturings as those of a sister, the wide world showed her for what she truly was. There was a Jew in New York who made her his mistress, on good authority. As for Italy, you all may trick up as a legitimate, even aristocratic, marriage and family this disgraceful business, of a bastard child fathered on her by an Italian rowdy with a fantastic name, but I shall not join you. She would have done better to have gone over to Rome entirely and entered a nunnery. Foolish Ophelia.
Thrice in recent months I have been obliged to intercept letters from that woman to my wife. With her permission — and her tender heart made her give it at first with difficulty — I have destroyed them unread.
When next I hear from you, I hope it will be on a topic more inclined to foster our mutual friendship. By all means visit our hovel in the hills, provided you come empty-handed.
N. Hawthorne
“My goodness,” Anne said. “This is a shocking thing.” She handed the letter back to her brother. “I suppose he also means to be amusing. But I don’t understand. Surely Miss Fuller was their friend?”
“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “She was their friend, once — I thought they were all quite taken with one another. I often don’t understand these things. I thought she admired his writing, even to excess. Whatever could she have said, or done? I know that he is an anti-revolutionist, but I am surprised that he would let a difference of opinion affect an old friendship.…”
“Mother says he is actually opposed to Abolition!”
“It’s not so simple,” Henry said. “Hawthorne despises slavery, just as he despises tyranny, but he also despairs. He thinks revolutions and Abolition are doomed enterprises — get rid of one form of slavery, and another will take its place — and so he mocks us all for hoping.”
“What will you do with the letter?”
“What he says — get rid of it,” said Henry.
“But it is addressed to her, and she does not say that.”
“I suppose I could send it, and let him do what he likes —”
The Canary-bird’s cage hung in the attic’s east window. Anne poked a finger in, preened the bird’s head, and let it gnaw the finger delicately.
“What he likes may not be what she likes,” she said, “and in any case obviously he takes charge of their correspondence. I don’t think you should do anything with it now. Maybe in a few years he will soften, or she will write herself and ask for it.”
“I am uncomfortable having it around. It feels like a corpse, or like something stolen.”
“These are her Last Words.” She said it with the capitals.
“She wrote thousands and thousands of words, far too many words, one might say. I don’t want to be burdened, like a ghostly postman. Margaret’s ghost’s postman, I mean.”
“I read Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She does go on, but I thought parts of it were wonderful. ‘Let them be sea-captains, if they will!’ ”
“Do you want to be a sea-captain?” said Henry.
“Certainly not. Ow!” The bird pecked too hard, and she pulled out her finger to suck it. “I want to paint and make botanical drawings and have seven children and when I go on a sea voyage, I hope the captain will be a good strong man who will keep me safe. But I still like that she wrote it. It’s a grand dream.” She wrinkled up her brow, almost comically, and then said, “But that’s a terrible tragic irony, isn’t it, that she was ship-wrecked? And that captain was a man.”
“Women are never logical.” Henry looked at Hawthorne’s letter again, puzzling. “Perhaps she didn’t praise his stories properly, to his way of thinking? He’s thin-skinned, you know. And as he says, he may be be appalled morally by her life.”
“Maybe he was, Mr. Nathan was, a Jew — we all heard of that, but that’s not so bad. I am sure she was not his mistress. Mr. Greeley would never have asked her to write for his paper if she were actually a bad woman!”
Henry smiled at his sister. “I’ll put it away
for now. We won’t mention it to anyone. Let’s plan a walk tomorrow — I stored your trousers and hat and the rest of our gear in the shed at the old house. We can go to Fiddler’s Swamp and look for pitcher-plants.” Anne married Thomas Bratcher shortly before Christmas. Their cottage occupied the bottom-land of the Bratcher farm’s big meadow. In hopes of escaping the damp, Anne set up her easel in the attic, but soon found she had little time for painting. The decorations she painted on the walls of the sitting-room clouded over, in a greenish black mould, during that first wet spring and summer — laughing, she and her husband scrubbed the walls down with lime. She was pregnant then, and laughing suited her. She laughed and sang, and even whistled when she was alone fighting the damp, repeatedly sifting the clotted flour, airing their clothes on the fence whenever the sun came through, and firing up the stove even in the worst heat, to keep the plaster from sagging and crumbling off the walls and ceilings.
She was herself as hot as a stove, an engine of heat, and she stayed strong until her final month, as it happened a very warm September. Thomas built a low seat for her by the spring, with a canvas awning, so she could sit in its shade with her feet in the fine sand of the gently bubbling cold water. There, during her final three weeks, she repaired to weep, gently, for the sorrows of the world. Dolly Allan was dying of summer fever on the lungs and Anne was not allowed to visit the sick-bed. Henry no longer talked to her in the old way or called her Annie. He did not ask her to draw and paint his plant and insect collections, and there was no more talk of Anne making illustrations for Dr. Jaeger’s insect encyclopedia. She would never travel anywhere, not to Paris, certainly not to Tahiti. She would be lucky if her life as a farmer’s wife would permit her one trip a year to Boston. Her baby might be still-born, or blind; her husband would cease to love her; Sissy or Mother had said something unkind; a runaway slave had been seized in Boston and sent back to the Carolinas to be hanged; the red calf had sickened and died in the night.
She had two daughters in three years’ time; and then they waited, anxiously, for a son, who arrived at last, as if the wait had been designed to make his arrival the more joyous, a few years later. By then they had moved into the main house, nicely set up on the hill, with Mother Bratcher, now a widow, and a bachelor uncle. Here the walls were elegantly papered. With her children Anne painted flowers and birds and fanciful landscapes on the furniture — except for the dining-room table and chairs, which Mother Bratcher insisted be left alone. In the nursery, she painted the life-cycle of the tadpole-to-frog around one window frame; around the other, that of the Monarch butterfly, with leaves and eggs on the bottom, three of the gaudy waist-coated caterpillars climbing up the left side, their chrysalides, jade green with dots of gold, decorating the top, and the butterflies taking flight along the right.
In these years, on the rare occasions when she and Henry were alone, Anne sometimes asked about the letter in the desk. Henry answered that it was still there, that no one had come for it or asked after it.
What Henry did not tell his sister was that on one occasion curiosity had successfully tempted him to look at the pages. His excuse was that he had been ill. It had been a cold spring, hardly a leaf in bud in April, and the rain was always mixed with snow. In a very heavy sleet, Henry had gone out to work. He liked the rain, he almost even liked it leaking into his boots, when he waded through pastures that had become ponds, and he loved it pouring off the brim of his hat.
A farmer whose fields abutted Emerson’s land in Walden Woods was selling off an additional parcel to the railroad. It was foolish to attempt surveying work in the wet — the steel needles and plates corroded, the plumb lines stretched — but he did it anyway, even knowing he would have to do it again. Henry stood knee-deep in the meadows for two days and then came down with a cough. Teas and broths and bed were his punishment for more than a week, while he lay feverish and dreamy. Once he woke to find the tabby cat stretched out on her back purring beside him. She seemed not the slightest concerned about the Canary-bird, who was chirping so indignantly from her cage in the window that it sounded like yelling. Henry dragged himself over to the bird and threw a cloth over the cage, silencing her, then, faint with the effort, turned back to speak to the cat.
“Oh, Miss Kitty, I feel like the devil.”
The tabby sat up and stared at him, cocking her head slightly. The dream he had just left came rushing back to him, so overwhelmingly that he felt dizzy, laid his head down, and muttered aloud, “Margaret!”
The cat bounced off the bed and went straight to the little lap-desk, where it sat pushed against the wall at one end of the big table. With one light jump, she landed on the narrow flat part of the top and, ever so slightly, lashed her tail.
Henry saw, again, Margaret’s face — his dream of her talking, animated, at some gathering, then the water, water from the meadows, rising and rising, now a monstrous wave, over her face. He stared at the cat.
Slowly, he shuffled over to the lap-desk, weakly picked it up, and weakly shuffled it back to his bed. He re-made his nest in the quilts, this time sitting upright. He placed the desk on his knees. It smelled of salt and that medicinal tang of sea-weed.
Very gingerly, he tugged back the rickety hasp, lifted the lid, and touched the top page with his hand. Margaret was speaking to him, she wanted him to read this.
He bent over the desk, not taking the pages out, and began to read. He read the first page, then set it beside the pile. He began the second page.
A sense of cold dread filled him and recalled him to reality.
He dropped the page and shut the lid, replaced the hasp, and with more energy than before took the desk back and this time shoved it beneath the table and out of sight. Draped in his quilt, he paced the floor and said aloud, “I’m sorry, that was none of my business, I’m so sorry, please forgive me, it will never happen again.”
Reading another person’s letter. And from one woman to another. He was, as well as a sneak, a scoundrel. But Margaret would forgive him, and Mrs. Hawthorne would not know.
He never liked having the desk in his room, but felt no temptation to read the letter again. It might as well have been bound with hoops of steel, and guarded by an angel with a fiery sword. Or something like that, fiery swords rising, spinning like spokes of a wheel from the cold undertow of his dreams.
TWO
IF FOUND, THIS LETTER IS FOR SOPHIA HAWTHORNE IN CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS. M.F. OSSOLI.
On the 17th of May, 1850, hours out of Livorno, aboard the merchant ship Elizabeth bound for New York—
My dearest Sophie, as always you are to me—
How extraordinary to be on board & coming home —!
Here I must compose my thoughts. Perhaps I will not send this to you by post, perhaps one day soon I will sit beside you on a bench under a maple-tree — how I miss Concord’s maples! — & be able to sit beside you as you read & tell all that needs to be told. The pages and pages of words I have offered you & the entire public in print for four years have been true enough, certainly, & many may have felt that my partisanship in the cause of the Italian Revolution, & all revolutions of the people, was not sufficiently measured or cautious. But if they, if you, only knew to what degree I was exercising the highest degree of caution, of discretion, by not telling my private story. Yet still I hesitate. Not from shame, but from something else — a fear of offending, a fear of disturbing the peace of so dear a friend.
— To whom did Jeanne d’Arc confide, when the angels & Mary told her to strap on her armor? & Did these friends weep, or laugh? Surely they tried to prevent her … & yet my own reasons, altho’ I cannot with that Catholic girl’s pious confidence assert they come directly from God, but only more likely that they be the promptings of the Divine within — may seem equally mad, tho’ not violent in intention.
What I want to tell you, & you alone my dear, comes from a full heart & an over-full, doubt it not, brain. But I trust that it will unfold, unfold as the pages of this letter unfold,
best when you may be sitting quietly — & quite alone, my dear! — when the children have gone to bed & Nathaniel is sitting up in the parlor with his friends, the port & cigars in full fume, & you may scamper to a private attic corner to read.
You are a full-grown lady, by now; you will not scamper up those stairs but rather wend your way. I hope you did not find my earlier letters amiss; I spoke in riddles, perhaps, because I was too afraid to tell anyone the entire truth. (The Entire Truth! As if such a Universe could be told!) But it is all out now — or at least the public face of my life is unveil’d as I return home. Here I am, an old married woman, a Marchesa (such pomp as ill-becomes any democrat but my husband has held to the title for practical reasons) in the bargain, with the best child in all the world & my dear husband beside me. That I did not receive return letters from you did not surprise or worry me unduly; perhaps half of the letters sent to me never arrived because of the war — & because, it must be said, of Italian ways in general. A saying there is: Nothing is urgent in all of Italia but the priest’s brandy & the husband’s dinner.
There! I am unfair, again, in my old jesting way. The noblest of men, & women, inhabit Italy as well. As you know if you have read my dispatches. Mr Greeley assures me that indeed they were widely read & I believe that this was so. But, despite all my pleas for financial assistance from my countrymen to help the cause of the Italian people, so little was sent.
3 June, Gibraltar
Alas, the journey has not begun well. Our Captain Hasty, a kindly & confident man who had all our trust, has died of the typhus. His good wife Mrs Hasty & I nursed him as he failed — it was a swift but agonized death, & the ship’s linen in short supply — and oh! the odors of sickness, again they press on me! — Now we are quarantined at Gibraltar, barely a step away it seems from Livorno.… We must wait a few days for more supplies. We will not be able to put his body ashore as he must be buried at sea as a precaution, & this is a great source of distress to Mrs Hasty. Two sailors show signs of typhoid symptoms as well. We are attempting to exercise the same measures of washing & airing that seemed efficacious in the field hospitals in Rome. Also isolating the sick. This is a bad business & I am especially fearful for my husband, my Giovanni, about whom I have yet to tell you in detail — but he was weakened in body & mind from the days of battle — I have begged him to confine himself to the cabin. He, dear fellow, wants to help & so we have agreed he may assist in the galley, making ox-tail broth for the sick. (The cook is also stricken but only slightly.) God willing there may be no more cases.
Miss Fuller Page 6