The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  With that, he continued to lead me down the declivity of streets until we were descending onto the Common, a place familiar enough to me that I felt great comfort and relief, like one who suddenly rushes out of her cell into the full sunshine of midday, even though it was full, moonless night and we traveled briskly under nothing but stars.

  Yet I began to fear these new circumstances as my mind came back to me, and I hesitated on the verge of the Common, calling out to my new companion: “Wait! Who are you? And where are you going?”

  “Ah,” he said and laughed gently, “those most ancient of questions! Just by this elm here.” He stopped us beside the great trunk. “I am a gentleman, I assure you, who wishes to help you, as it seems you have fallen into some trick or seduction.”

  “But who are you?” I persisted, refusing to be drawn any farther into the shadows.

  He said nothing immediately, but took off his hat and shook out the long curls about his head.

  “It is my habit still as a former seaman,” he said, brushing his hair aside. “I’m not so long returned to Boston that I can crop it yet.” His gentle smile encouraged me.

  Then he unbuttoned his long, rough coat and flung it open to expose the elegant dress of a gentleman.

  “You see,” he said. “I am a gentleman. Mean you no harm. Only aid and comfort.”

  His new demeanor and appearance helped alleviate my apprehensions, but I was still confused.

  “My intention is to lead you to a place for women caught in your circumstances—to the Temporary Home for Fallen Women. I know the matron through other acquaintances. There are those among us in the city, men and women, who have rescued women like yourself.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but I am not a fallen woman,” I said. “Can you not, rather, take me quickly to Mr. George Spooner’s residence? Across the Neck.”

  “Spooner the painter?”

  “The same. I’ve worked in his studio and he would provide me adequate protection until I can make other arrangements. I would certainly not want to return to my rooms, from which I was abducted in the first place, nor would I place my brother in any danger in the middle of the night… .”

  “Word has it that Mr. Spooner has gone to Italy, I’m afraid,” he interrupted me. “But I assure you of the most complete protection in the Home. If you will but allow me, Miss… ?”

  “Mrs. Fullerton. And I repeat, I am no ‘fallen woman.’ I am rather a widow, an artist, who was taken forcibly from her rooms and imprisoned in the very neighborhood where you found me, sir. Despite my being at the bidding of another who schemed to bend me to his will and whim, I have retained, I assure you, every virtue.” I then removed my golden wig and shook in turn my natural hair about my neck and shoulders. I continued speaking as I did so. “I had begun to accompany my tormentor out under the guise of compliance merely to discover an opportunity for escape such as I found by way of your kindness. For which I most heartily thank you, sir.”

  “You are very welcome, Mrs. Fullerton. But if I may suggest a means of attaining your security and every simple need at this hour of the night, and with your benefactor Mr. Spooner abroad, I beg you follow me.”

  I hesitated, shivering.

  “How long were you held against your will?” he asked.

  “It is hard to remember precisely. Several months, I should say?”

  “Well, then, even the prospect of your rooms remaining untenanted by others is slim indeed. Allow me, as I say, to offer the best temporary resolution to your plight, Mrs. Fullerton.”

  I saw little other hope and grew colder every moment, so I allowed him to lead me away quickly through the shadows. I once again asked him who he was. He said that his name was Dana, that he was a recent graduate of Harvard who had for some time read the law and during the past year had served as an instructor in elocution at the college. This appointment he was about to resign in favor of legal practice and the completion of a book recounting his adventures as a common sailor in the California fur trade.

  I recognized his name as that of an old, honorable family, and I began to see more fully that I had precious few other possibilities before me that night. I could hardly do worse than he proposed, for a night or two while I thought out my immediate plans and made discreet inquires as to the whereabouts of Tom and Julian.

  So we scuttled across the dark Common like thieves avoiding the night watch and rattle. My freedom was to begin among those “fallen sisters” who in some fashion had released themselves from the sale of their own flesh. As we fled under the great elms I began to rejoice in my freedom, feeling suddenly like a child, my life all before me again. I was reminded of the carefree boys I had often seen in their games upon the Common in every season: playing at marbles-in-holes in the malls, or lined up in groups and tending their favorite kites hanging high in the southwest breeze over Park Street, or fishing for pout in the frog pond, or on winter days coasting on Beacon Street, the Park Street mall, and from the foot of Walnut.

  As we fled, Mr. Dana intimated that he had the acquaintance of one or two leading members of the New England Female Reform Society, which supported, financially and otherwise, the Temporary Home we now sought for my initial asylum. By the time he left me in the care of Matron, I believed that my falling in with Mr. Dana had been fortuitous indeed. As he and I parted, he promised to make every effort to find Tom and Julian and report back to me.

  In the meantime, I came under the care of Matron, a woman whose appearance—her cap and stiff gingham gown rustling like footsteps on autumn leaves, and her thick, creaky shoes—belied her kindness. She gave me many reassurances as to my safety. And I found myself among other young women who had come here for protection and aid. As she showed me to my bed, Matron handed me an issue of the Society’s journal, the Friend of Virtue. This one seemed to be the first issue, from 1838, wherein it was explained, when I read it the following morning, that the Society’s goals were, first: “to guard our daughters, sisters, and female acquaintances from the delusive arts of corrupt and unprincipled men,” and, second, “to bring back to the paths of virtue those who have been drawn aside through the wiles of the destroyer.” Licentiousness was its chief enemy.

  Later issues of the Friend came my way during my days at the Home. More and more voices were therein raised for the Rights of Women. But I was more than a little surprised by the many accounts of libertines and profligates, often masked by the firmest respectability, who preyed on their female victims. Most astonishing was the Friend’s propensity to name, at times, the prominent patron of an unfortunate, misled woman—whether he be unmasked in his very pulpit, bench, or legislative hall. And as I read and heard numerous accounts, in their own words, of how this or that woman ended in the brothel, I saw that not so much had changed under the sun since the time of Frances Hill in London. Not only intelligence offices, but stage depots, the new railroad station-houses, and ship ports were all dangerous to a confused or desperate woman, for all those are the haunts of procurers who merely have to lie in wait for their prey to pass before them, whereupon their deceptions begin.

  Friend of Virtue. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

  One article, entitled “Slavery in New England,” especially struck home to me. I discovered that my own bondage was not exceptional. Other women too had been locked away in rooms. And many had been far more directly abused, threatened, and forced than I. One woman I met during the week I remained at the Home had been tempted into a brutal trap, as the court revealed, by another woman hired by several brothel keepers to enter the very mills of Lowell in search of likely victims.

  Here I found myself among women who were not yet too degraded to spurn offers of refuge. But I knew from even my narrow experience at Mrs. Moore’s and with Mr. Dudley that there were many more who would spurn such offers, who had indeed come to view their outlaw lives and labors as preferable to the more respectable forms. And of course there were many still who had discovered all choice in the matter had outrun
them, for even appearing once on a court docket would ruin a woman’s reputation at any age.

  These stories, Matron one day assured me, are all old ones: “If now we hear the West End where you were detained called Satan’s Throne and Nigger Hill,” she said, “it was fifty years ago—and even before that—known as Mount Whoredom!”

  I NEED NOT EXPAND upon my days and weeks at the Home: it seems rather more fitting to describe how I came to leave that place of refuge and, eventually, to take up my life once again as a traveling painter.

  By week’s end, Mr. Dana kept his promise. He returned empty-handed, however. Mr. Spooner, he said, had left with his family for a sojourn in Italy. “And Mr. Julian Forrester,” he gravely announced, “it seems has accompanied the Spooners—in just what capacity, I know not.”

  “And Tom?” I asked, “my brother … Tom?”

  “Nothing.” He shook his head and frowned seriously. “He left no word with the landlord either. But as business and my schedule allow, I’ll make further inquiries. The important thing now, Mrs. Fullerton, is to find a good place well beyond Boston, beyond the reach of all those who do not have your best interests at heart.”

  “By all means, would you please continue every effort you can to find Tom! I would be most grateful.”

  He reassured me, explaining that I would soon have a visitor who might be able to suggest a hiding place in “a nascent conclave of visionaries.”

  AND SO IT HAPPENED that I met a most astonishing woman. She arrived in a tasteful, full-sleeved, long-waisted gown, lorgnette suspended from her neck, strawberry blond hair center-parted and smoothed, à la Madonna style, to either side of her fine head. She knew Mr. Dana, and he her, from Cambridgeport school days, from mutual acquaintances, and from her association with Mr. Dana’s father. (Indeed, I later discovered that she had once lived for a time in the splendid mansion Judge Dana—the grandfather—built in the last century before the Dana family’s financial reversals.) She had embarked upon a series of subscription lectures, or “Conversations,” in Boston. But unlike Mr. Dana who, although he had expressed sympathies with the oppressed and seemed to have a nose for cruelty and injustice, apparently viewed the world from a conservative cast of mind, Miss Fuller was reform-minded in nearly every way: anti-slavery, women’s rights, religious and communal experimentations.

  With a puckish smile, she offered some recollections of my Good Samaritan’s being hauled by his young ears across the schoolroom and over the benches by Masters Barret and Perkins to be beaten with their long pine ferules for various classroom delinquencies.

  “Poor little Dana!” she said, and laughed outright. “But please, Mrs. Fullerton,” she went on, “enough of our friend. Tell me rather the true history of your life and your recent … incarceration.”

  I began at the beginning, but as I spoke of the mills and of my most recent adventures, I saw that nothing seemed to ignite her outrage more than “the economic subjugation of women.” A particular vehemence she directed against those who seldom felt the lash of the law—procurers, keepers, and patrons—yet who were chiefly responsible for “the utter degradation of the indigent and ignorant.”

  “Moreover,” she explained, “men generally have been for over a century rating women for countenancing vice. But at the same time, they have carefully hid from them its nature, so that the preference often shown by women for bad men arises from a confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, acquainted with regions which women are forbidden to explore, rather than from a corrupt heart in the woman.”

  “I have had enough of adventurous vice,” I said.

  “Indeed, Mrs. Fullerton!” Despite a rather too-nasal quality of her voice, she spoke with an energy most uncommon, and once aroused you could see the flash of the warrior’s blade in her blue eyes, even though she habitually spoke much of the time with her eyelids half-closed. Yet these narrowed apertures lent greater penetration to her gaze.

  I dared not speak a related question I had often asked myself about women practitioners in any of the arts: Did their work in fact lack something? Some stimulant of adventures and wars, of rough virtues and vices, of an exposed and energetic life? If Miss Fuller might have discovered an answer, this did not seem the moment to ask her.

  “And as to marriage,” she continued, “it has been inculcated on women for centuries that men have not only stronger passions than they, but a sort that it would be shameful for them to share or even understand. So that a great part of women look upon men as a kind of wild beast, supposing ‘they are all alike,’ and assured by married women that if they but knew men by being married to them, they would not expect continence or self-government from men.”

  She stopped, smiling to see whether I followed her.

  “I wonder but that women are often ashamed of their passions, Miss Fuller,” I said, “and that accounts for some of them charging all shame to the masculine sex, and all loss of virtue.”

  She opened her eyes wide and looked at me. “Indeed! Is it not inevitable then,” she said, “that there should be so many monsters of vice? Is it not, rather, reasonable to ask whether virtue is not possible, perhaps necessary, to man as well as to woman? Cette vie n’a quelque prix que si elle sert a l’ education morale de notre coeur.” She went on for some time in that vein, recommending to me still more issues of the Friend in my leisure.

  Yet once Miss Fuller saw for herself that I had not been utterly debauched, but merely taken by force, maneuvered by cold calculation, and liberated through my own subterfuge, she seemed to take up my cause more as an equal and developed a deeper interest in my well-being. “This Dudley creature,” she said, “is but one more of those sporting men who consider women a kind of fera naturae to be hunted down like other game at his will and pleasure.”

  I came to believe that she admired my cunning resistance to my captors. Because as much as she felt pity for fallen sisters and outrage for their debauchers, she also expressed her frustration over “the too frequent readiness of far too many women to be led by strangers into lives of iniquity.” I then told her that I had come away from my captivity determined to avoid all further capitulations to the desires of men; nay, that I now wished all such further relations to cease. “It is the memory of my husband alone that glows in my heart,” I said. “All my force, all my attention, I now wish to devote toward becoming one who shall paint.”

  Once she fully comprehended the nature of my ambitions, she opened like a tulip on a morning in May.

  “The very first order of business,” Miss Fuller said near the end of our second meeting, “is to remove you from the city and provide for your security and independence. For in the absence of liberty you can neither earn your bread honestly nor continue your development as an artist.”

  What she proposed was a trial period, to begin in April or May, of six months or so living in a community just then getting underway in the rural reaches to the northwest. She had spoken to the committee of founders about me.

  “You are quite safe here, Mrs. Fullerton, of course. Yet this is but a temporary home.” Then she added with a smile: “Surely, in this rural community you would be well out of the reach of your tormentors, for as long as you wish.” I felt less certain of that than she, but I had no better plan.

  “There is no need of an Inferno,” Miss Fuller said at one point near the end of that second meeting. “It will be punishment enough for every fault if we never become creators.”

  “If we never fulfill our gifts, such as they are?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Just so, Mrs. Fullerton. Just so.”

  Portrait of Mrs. Littlefield of Salem, Massachusetts, Artist Unknown. Published courtesy of the Fruitlands Museums, Harvard, Massachusetts.

  It seemed as if Miss Fuller infected the very air of Matron’s receiving room with the malaise of freedom and self-reliance. At each of our meetings, she entreated me to be at once cautious and bold. And as she advised me in this regard, I saw before me again cert
ain of those other women I had met in my travels: Caroline Parrie, Tirzah and Harriet Fiske, Sarah Clarke, and now Miss Fuller herself. Indeed, we discovered Miss Clarke to be a mutual acquaintance, a friend of Miss Fuller’s from her own days as a pedagogue at Mr. Alcott’s Temple School. Miss Clarke was a gifted painter, whom I had the pleasure to meet through Julian, and who was the only woman privileged to study with Allston.

  All these women, I say, bending like supple reeds under the weight of Necessity, nevertheless had fashioned lives of vital interest to themselves, of, by, and for themselves, so that they might then participate in the community of others—their families, their customers, or the powerless and ignorant among us. But in every case, before she could join the community through her chosen labors, each had first to map and pursue a path to the independent, cultivated core of herself, to the inner source of ripening and furtherance, without which even economic independence were but hollow.

  NINE

  Eden in Massachusetts Et in Arcadia ego

  Miss Fuller arranged for my conveyance by wagon to the incipient “Community of Newspirit.” My driver was a silent young man named Martin who perhaps suffered from intolerable shyness. For one so long incarcerated as I had been, it was a pleasing journey: breezes and clouds playing over the May-green hills and scattered country dwellings, sun warming saddened bones, the very air of freedom filling my lungs at every breath. Only as we finally neared our destination did the winds freshen, the sky turn bleak, and the rains begin. My umbrella soon became unruly and my cloak and clothes soaked through to my skin.

  Once in the farmhouse, I dried myself off in my tiny new room and changed into fresh clothes of homespun linen that had been laid out for me. My welcoming committee had left for me a place in the kitchen close by a pungent fire of peat and maple logs in a large fireplace, while they—two men and a woman—sat at the long, plain dining table. They introduced themselves in a friendly manner, despite their tendency to avoid smiling, to speak with unnatural calmness, and to refer to one another as “Brother” and “Sister” so-and-so.