Miss Fuller

by April Bernard

  I felt dizzy, as if the silence itself had struck me.

  Or it was as if, stepping onto the crest of the Hill, we had stepped onto a stage & that was the cue for the sound to cease. At the very moment when we both might well have died, the cease-fire was begun.

  Mazzini, who never would surrender, had surrendered. We had lost.

  Later, & again later still, I shook as with an ague with the realization that I might have orphaned our boy that night. I cannot explain it — except to say that all the boys fighting & dying were my sons & my husband was my son & then I ran out of mother-love & wanted at last to die myself.

  It was not a frame of mind likely to visit one in anything less than such circumstances. Please do not think me a coward if I say that tho’ I hope for revolutions again wherever the tyrants oppress the people, with equal force I pray I shall not myself be called to battle ever again.

  Same day, later

  Ocean again serene & I have endeavored to wash our soiled linens. (I do not believe Mr Bangs knows much about the weather or what to expect. We now fear we will not be home for a week more.)

  & Yet I must contradict myself. Tho’ I trust it will not come to war, as surely it will not, I am prepared for the battles in the newspapers, in the legislature, & on the streets, for the great cause that awaits me at home — what is also your own cause, I am sure, of Abolition. Which must & will be mine as well. (Your sister Elizabeth was one of the first I heard speak passionately & publicly on the subject — I can still remember the welcome shock of her insistence on the words “our African sisters”!) America needs to be a bright beacon of hope for all the world, undimmed by the shadow of her historical crime of slavery — together we will make it right and I am ready for that fight surely.

  All but two of the fruits are too mouldy to eat, & these, along with some maggoty rye-meal past eating even by the goat, we have tossed to the fishes.

  16 July

  Where is our promised wind? We are off the Carolinas now, not in sight of shore, but the ocean carries smells of the land — a real, green smell of trees in the wind, & vastly many more birds. Impatience is our companion. I see her as she might allegorically be represented, a woman in tattered clothes wringing her hands & with wild eyes fixing her gaze at the horizon — but hold! Impatience is none other than I myself.

  17 July, Wind

  I will be fretful & complain a little about the events of this past year. We staggered away from Rome, almost ashamed but withal grateful that by surrendering Mazzini had ensured that Roman lives would be spared by the victorious French. We had almost no money, my husband’s brother had taken over the vine-yard he had hoped would be his own & his last illusions of any inheritance dissipated into the air.

  & When we arrived in Rieti to fetch Nino he was nearly dead from starvation. The erstwhile-beloved Chiara had shown her true family colors — with a new child of her own to nurse, she had been feeding my baby on nothing but wine-soaked bread, I knew not for how long! It was the only time in my life when I have struck another person — that family hearth, so often the scene of vulgar quarrels, must have brought it out in me. I slapped Chiara’s face & to tell the truth punched her, until restrained by Giovanni & I believe I might have strangled her, so hot & complete was my rage & so intent was I on her ugly screaming throat & mouth. Her baby wailed, contributing to the scene an additional music of squalor. Fortunately the doctor — not my good Dr Carlos, who had joined a cadre of troops, but some other — arrived & managed to calm everyone with sedatives & reassurances.

  My own little goat was gone, but the now loudly repentant family gave us another nanny-goat for milking & we loaded up the cart & headed for Florence, where Madame Arconati had found us rooms & where we could settle while I finished writing my book. The journey was extraordinarily terrible except that within a day or two it was evident that Nino would thrive. How he loved the goat’s milk!

  DEAR SOPHIE, THE SHIP [BLOT] IF [BLOT] TOW [BLOT] PRAY MY NINO [BLOT] NOT FRIGHT [BLOT]. 18 JU [BLOT] LO [BLOT] M.

  THREE

  Shreds of thick tea-colored paper still stuck to the wood inside the lap-desk. Anne scraped gently at these with a fingernail, releasing an old smell of iodine and salt. She rubbed at the scratches on the steel lock and hasp she had pried off with a small file. The stack of pages she held on her lap, like a creature. Would she read them? She still could not decide. It was early on a September morning in 1882; it had been more than thirty years since Henry had first shown her this letter, when they had wondered how to deliver it to Mrs. Hawthorne. How unearthly the feeling — like the whisper of the sea in one’s ear, a sound one almost ceases to notice over time but of a sudden with meaning articulated, the sea itself trying to speak in sentences, now that she had at last seen these pages again. The longer she did not read them, the more difficult the prospect of reading them seemed.

  She needed to take a walk. She tucked the pages back into the desk, but left the lid open. Rummaging in the back hall for her boots and hat, she stepped on the collie-dog’s paw and in the agitation of his yelping stepped back abruptly and banged her head on a coat peg.

  “It’s nothing,” she answered Mattie, her servant, who had stirred and called out from her room next to the kitchen. “I’m fine — go back to sleep.” She was almost disappointed, gingerly touching her scalp, to see there was no blood.

  As she pulled on her boots, the dog whined his excitement and she remembered Miss Fuller’s words: “Complete. A complete life of its kind.”

  The meadow was heavy-soaked with dew, waiting for its final cutting of the season, and she had to drag herself through the high wet grass, tangled with vetch and bed-straw, to get to the path by the creek. The damp clung to her skirts and she wished again that she could still wear trousers as she had when she was a girl, secretly, when she went adventuring with Henry. The dog chose his stick and she threw it, again and again, into the water.

  It was in the spring of 1862, when they were learning of the terrible losses at Shiloh, that Henry died at last from consumption. For three years he had been an invalid, and in those years Sissy had scarcely left his side.

  Anne’s husband came home from the war in 1864; a month later he died of puncture wounds in his stomach that would not heal. Their son, not much more than a child at his father’s death, had taken over the work of the farm with two cousins. He went on to buy and sell land and had set himself up at last in a prosperous coal-and-kerosene business in Boston. Her daughters had married — the younger, who had long been a trial to her mother, moody and difficult, had gone west with her husband; the elder with her husband and five children still lived close by in Lexington.

  Most of the Bratcher acres had been sold off at considerable profit. A mill and gravel works was now in operation a mile down the creek, the woods had been cleared and a dozen houses clustered there, a peach orchard had been attempted and abandoned, the dairy had closed, and the richest land still was given to vegetable crops and hay but farmed by a man who was a tenant.

  When she was not making her visits to her son in Boston or her daughter in Lexington, or having them and her grandchildren to stay during the summer, Anne lived alone with a woman servant and a handy-man in the old homestead, set up on its knoll with a small barn for the horses and a fenced yard. She had never travelled far; her son had long promised her a jaunt to New York City, but when he and his family had gone there for a month last spring, there was no mention of her accompanying them. Sometimes she tried to interest her friends and children in a summer trip to Cape Cod, but nothing had come of that either and she was reluctant to go alone. She did take the train into Boston a few times a year, to look at paintings and go to lectures and concerts with friends, and she must be content with that.

  At his death Henry had left Miss Fuller’s desk along with his specimens to Anne — although their sister Sissy, fierce guardian of his papers, had not permitted her to take immediate possession. With their parents both gone, and after Sissy’s death in 1
876, Anne had quietly collected the desk and the specimens from the house-hold of furniture before the heir, a cousin of their father’s, moved in. The desk had been refitted with a new steel hasp and lock; she guessed that, at soon Sissy had understood the papers were not Henry’s own, she had locked them up and set them aside.

  In the six years since Anne had claimed the desk it had sat on the floor in a corner, under the jumble of things in her work-room. This was formerly the dining-room of the Bratcher homestead, now set up with her easel and paints along with articulated wooden hands and heads; printed model landscape figures of alps, ruined towers, windmills, church spires, ice-bergs, and the like for copying; assorted urns and plaster fruits and dried flowers for her nature-mortes. Those specimens of Henry’s that had survived the decades — a dried wasps’ nest, a hundred shells, many seed-pods, a full wood-chuck skeleton, a fox’s skull, and Indian arrow-heads, belts, and baskets — covered the shelves, side-board, and fire-place mantel throughout the room. The Canary-bird they had once rescued was stuffed and perched, along with three New England song-birds, on a piece of birch-wood in a tall glass bell jar. Sometimes she used these objects in her paintings as well, as emblems held by the subject in a portrait, or on a window-sill in the foreground that opened onto an imaginary landscape.

  She did not sell her paintings; those friends who indulged her by sitting received a painting from her as thanks, but she knew not to inquire too closely about whether or not they hung the trophy someplace more prominent than the spare bed-room or the attic. No one had ever offered to pay her for a painting. She still had problems with perspective, but now and then she pleased herself by an illusion of depth. One of her own favorites was a painting with the Canary-bird sitting on the window-sill, the window open and in the distance, an assortment of people, a picnic party laden with baskets and blankets, climbing towards the viewer from the bottom of a yellow and green meadow. Her daughter, loyally, said it reminded her of a painting by Mr. Inness.

  A curious incident in that summer of 1882 had prompted her to think of Miss Fuller again. A friend sent her a book with a note — “You knew the dramatis personae, did you not? I hope this will amuse you.” The book, newly published in London, was called Day-Dreams of the Utopists: The Transcendentalists and Their Legacy by J. M. Rushworth, described in the preface as “An American Statesman and Home-Spun Philosopher from Virginia.” Rushworth mocked Emerson as the “grand old ostrich of Concord with his head forever in the sand,” “ignorant of the plain facts of God, commerce and human nature,” a “preacher of the gospel of Himself.” Anne guessed that Mr. Emerson’s death that year had occasioned the book, or perhaps emboldened the press to publish it. The late Mr. Alcott was similarly derided; Mr. Channing, still alive, was barely cited. Though dead, Henry was spared; he was mentioned only as the “half-Red Indian, half-Stoic versifier and shadow of Emerson.” Attacks on William Garrison and Horace Mann — not Transcendentalists at all of course — suggested that the author was chiefly writing a political tract against the Yankee notions of Unitarianism, liberal education, and Abolition, though in the current climate he was not brave or fool enough to attack Abolition directly.

  It was in the chapter on Miss Fuller that Mr. Rushworth’s style of invective became most pronounced. She was described as “myopic and a hunch-back,” physically ruined by a father who had forced her to study “like a Medieval scholastick,” love-sick for Emerson and Alcott, a “self-declared Sibyl” with “strings of gullible girls and overgrown boys at her feet,” whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century was “long-discredited,” who had written “Socialistic propaganda on behalf of the Italian assassins in the pages of the Tribune.” She had disgraced her family and friends by a romance with a German Jew in New York, then by “falling into the embrace of the Papacy” in an unproved marriage with “an Italian so-called nobleman, one Ossoli,” who had “been duped into rescuing her from the scandal of her liaison with Mazzini,” and who was “most certainly not the father” of her “imbecile, and possibly mulatto, child.” Anne learned that Nathaniel Hawthorne had lampooned Miss Fuller in his novel The Blithedale Romance, published two years after her death, where she had appeared as a snake-necked sex-goddess of destruction named Zenobia. (Rushworth explained that the historic Zenobia, for whom the character was named, was a fourth-century empress in Palmyra who murdered her husband and child.) Rushworth described the Ossolis’ deaths as “tragic but mercifully swift.”

  The chapter ended with an anecdote about Miss Fuller visiting Carlyle in London in 1846. “She approached the great man with a pronouncement: ‘Mr. Carlyle, I am ready to accept the Universe.’ ‘By Gad, woman, you had better!’ he replied.”

  Wondering a little about laws of libel — could one libel the dead? — Anne of course thought of the desk and its letter. She recalled that she had learned of Mr. Hawthorne’s death several years ago, but was Mrs. Hawthorne still alive? Wouldn’t her sister Sissy have taken care of that detail, assuming she had noticed to whom the letter was addressed?

  Anne wrote to an old family friend, the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, at his Boston church. Did he know if Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was alive and where she lived? Mr. Clarke’s reply arrived: Mrs. Hawthorne had died, more than five years ago, in London. He was delighted to hear from Anne, he said; and could he be of further assistance in her inquiries? She sensed she had pricked his curiosity; but instinctively she did not wish to confide in him. Feeling brave and a little reckless, she wrote instead that she was simply widening her education, and asked if he would write her a letter of introduction so that she might use the library at Harvard.

  In September, Anne ventured into Cambridge on the train. The sound of a bell boomed the hour as she entered the Harvard Yard. Flocks of gowned young men burst from the doorways and swirled about under the trees, jostling her and then apologising with exaggerated courtesy. She threaded her way through more men up the steps to Gore Hall. At the front desk she handed over Mr. Clarke’s letter for the inspection of a gloved attendant; he rang a bell and murmured to a much less elegantly dressed fellow with a clerk’s swaddled coat-sleeves, who fetched another just like him. Flanked by these two, she was ushered past a card catalogue, where worked what looked like a dozen women in aprons, to the Reading Room. At a table in an alcove, under the amused, or simply curious, or even outraged eyes of many men, young and old, she spent the afternoon. The librarians whispered suggestions and retrieved items. Carefully she looked into books — the two volumes of the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (selections of Fuller’s writings, with essays by Emerson and others), a posthumous edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a collection of the Tribune columns from Europe. She noticed from the fly-leaves that none of these had ever been borrowed from the library by any Harvard students. She had brought a note-book and short pencil that fitted into her reticule — with these she took notes without being sure what would be helpful. She wrote down: No one reads her work. Memoirs: Ed. by Emerson, Clarke, Greeley, Channing. Henry quoted but did not contribute. Emerson quotes Carlyle as saying that MF had “a high-soaring, clear, enthusiastic soul.”

  One of the librarians brought her a sharper pencil.

  To page through the old newspapers and journals, bound in great flat green and black leather boards, like atlases, she had to stand up and lean over the table. She saw, on the front pages of the Tribune from the 1840s, that Miss Fuller’s account of the events of the Italian revolution ran down the right-hand column, and that she was often paired with another Tribune correspondent, the German writer Karl Marx, whose columns ran next to hers. Both wrote about the war: Miss Fuller from Rome, about day-to-day events; Mr. Marx from various other European capitals, where he reported on what others thought of the war and something he referred to as “the international workers’ struggle.”

  As well as contemporary reviews of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she also found some lines that mocked Miss Fuller, in a longer work in verse called “A Fable for Critics,” by Jame
s Russell Lowell. It had been published while Fuller was in Europe. In a firm set-down, Lowell said that she stole the ideas of others, that she was spiteful, and that she wrote with “an I-turn-the-crank-of-the-Universe air.” Anne tried to remember where she had seen Lowell’s name already — ah, yes, in that article by Miss Fuller called “American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future.”

  Her back ached from leaning over the table. She asked one of the librarians to find Fuller’s original article, and after some time he returned. She resumed her stance. It had been in the Tribune. Oh. Well. Miss Fuller sounded as if she had every right to her opinions. She sounded very learned, in fact. And not at all spiteful — generous, rather, and hopeful even for work she did not like. Ah — here was James Russell Lowell’s name, alongside Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s. Miss Fuller decidedly did not think that the future of a new American poetry lay in their hands; Longfellow parroted the works of others, and Lowell was, she wrote, “absolutely wanting in the true spirit and tone of poetry.”

  Anne put a little note in her book: She made everybody angry.

  Bewildered by the size of her task, she leafed through bound copies of The Dial magazine; half of its pages seemed to have been written by Miss Fuller. In her note-book, she listed some subjects: American Painters; New Poetry; Poverty; the American Indians of the North-West.

  She read accounts of the ship-wreck, several obituary notes, and the essays and reviews that accompanied the publication of the Memoirs. In Boston the writers were kind; in New York and farther afield, they were less so. She knew she was not imagining it: Here was that same feeling she had been surprised by so many years ago, when Miss Fuller had died. Everyone was — relieved. Not actually glad that she was dead, perhaps. But surely relieved, relieved of the burden of this impossible woman. Relieved that they no longer would have to read her exhortations to do good, to send money, to think more broadly, to consider the poor and the powerless, to worry over their place in history, to follow her difficult sentences, to wonder if women after all should be allowed to pester them in this way, and to do such things as Miss Fuller did and imagined.