The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  Julian looked about to see the effect of his argument. Then he added, “But let us be honest on this count: Unless one has visited Italy—and this you have to see for yourself, Allegra—you cannot form any idea of the privileges and respect an artist enjoys there. Here, there is simply no point of reference, no understanding of such a thing.”

  “Wasn’t it Mrs. Trollope, George,” Mrs. Spooner asked, “who said … what was it now? … That we Americans speak only of the finish of drapery and resemblance in a portrait … never of ‘drawing’ or ‘composition’ or the like. Never of ‘inspiration.’ And that we ask ‘only how long it takes to paint a painting and then divide up the price by the number of days, as if years of invention and study go for nothing with those people!’”

  “I believe you are correct, dear. The indomitable Mrs. Trollope!” Mr. Spooner laughed. “But to take your other point, Julian, what one paints finally is a matter of temperament, as well. Cole always said he was constitutionally repelled by cities. ‘Never go to New York,’ he once told me, ‘without a presentiment of evil.’ I, on the other hand, have found myself comfortable in the wilderness, in rural society, and in the city. So I do a bit of everything, eh? But I live here, for, as Mother says,” and he too made a slight bow to his wife, “we have a living to get, after all.”

  “I wouldn’t dispute that, Father,” Gibbon said. “As to this business of necessity, I quite agree, let there be portraits galore.” He nodded to me and I nodded back. “The country is a good place to study and paint. And then the city is a good place to sell the products of a cultivated mind. Let those who would display their wealth, as offensively as they wish; let those who would devote whole lifetimes to this swelling and swaggering and strutting in the marketplace, but let them also, I say, purchase our renderings of beauty and sublimity … and even their own faces flattered out of recognition.”

  “Precisely why old Cole is too massy and umbrageous!” Julian snapped and laughed. “He is at once too besotted with his own wanderings in the wilderness and too servile from keeping a sharp eye, at the same time, ever on the marketplace.”

  Mr. Spooner, who had by now imbibed several glasses of wine, gave out a great laugh. “Julian, you too often overreach yourself for the telling phrase, but it is most amusing to listen to you, eh?” He smiled and looked at each of us. Then he laughed again. “An artist must follow his own talent and his own soul first, for if the masters teach us anything it is that art must be a thing not merely of fidelity but of the spirit. And it is the masters who offer us the corrective of timelessness, of what lasts. If we wish to avoid the mire of mannerism, narcissism, and … ephemeral fashion in the arts.”

  “To the masters, then!” Gibbon said. He stood up and raised his glass. “To the Italian masters.”

  We all stood out of our chairs and toasted.

  How much I must have lost, I thought, from having seen so few of them!

  Mr. Spooner put down his glass. As he seated himself, he began to laugh again. “As you were speaking, son, you put me in mind of something old Stuart once said, apropos of all this American face painting. Mind you, this was years ago. ‘By and by,’ he said, ‘you will not by chance kick a dog kennel, but out will start a portrait painter!’”

  Everyone laughed but Julian.

  “Shall I ever travel to Italy?” I asked musingly once the laughter abated. “For all my travels in New England, still that seems an impossible voyage. It has taken me what?—five years to make a partial circuit of the Commonwealth!”

  “I’m going to return some day, Mrs. Fullerton,” Gibbon said. “And I should be delighted for your company. But as father has suggested, now is the time for dedication and absorption, the time for me to begin garnering commissions in earnest. If we both proceed in that direction, why should we not be able to make such a voyage eventually?”

  “Thank you, Gibbon,” I said. “Let’s hope that some day… .”

  “Who knows but that we shall all return!” Julian quickly suggested. “It would make a rather pleasant entourage, as before, but with the happy addition of Allegra.”

  “But for now we all have work before us,” Mr. Spooner said. “And we must for a time devote ourselves to the work at hand in the city we have come to love. Here and now, my friends, this place and these moments are what we need to improve. I hope, Allegra, that you will find the rooms I have in mind suitable when we visit tomorrow afternoon. If not, we will soon find something more acceptable to you. Fear not. And then we shall gladly, all of us, return to our work.”

  “May the devotion of the masters inspire us,” Gibbon said, standing up and offering his glass.

  When that toast was finished, I began to explain that I had a note from Miss Fuller. “Apparently, Mr. Dana had notified her of my return to Boston, because she had once written to him of her concern over my abrupt departure from Newspirit. She wished to express her relief at my having been ‘found, yet again.’ …”

  “As we too are relieved at having the long burden of our sorrow lifted,” Gibbon interrupted, and made a gallant little bow toward me. “You understand, of course, Mrs. Fullerton, that it was only when we heard from Mr. Dana, as a result of his inquiries of us, that we knew of your being found in the first instance, even though we’d been back in America some months.”

  “To our dear friend and fellow artist,” Julian leapt up and said, “that she has found herself and been found once more. Nay—that she has survived and, by the look of her, flourished. That she may continue to paint beautifully and … be beautiful.”

  Everyone stood as he spoke and toasted me. It was a remarkable moment. Gibbon beamed upon me. Julian laughed pleasantly, even at his own stumbling. Mrs. Spooner held her glass as high as any. And my dear, formidable master looked upon me with affection.

  “Thank you all,” I continued. “Miss Fuller made mention in her note of John Neal’s lecture this week. She herself hopes to be able to attend and has offered to introduce me. I wonder if we might go as well, all together.”

  “When is it to be?” Mr. Spooner asked.

  “Thursday evening,” I said.

  “Why not, then?” he said, looking at each of us quickly. “I like Neal. Always have. He is a man—at least when he considers the arts—without any nonsense about him.”

  The entire company assented to attend. And we toasted Mr. Neal before finally leaving our jolly table.

  We all slept late, as Mr. Spooner had predicted, the following morning. When he took me around finally, I was quite satisfied with the rooms he had held for me—a kind of third-floor bachelor’s apartment with a parlor and small bedchamber, which we thenceforth called my painting garret, although I still worked a day each week in his more ample atelier. I discovered from a window of my quiet little sanctum in Roxbury that I could survey the neighboring city (which I often did as my way of keeping the Sabbath, when all commercial sounds had stilled to open the air for occasional church bells and the songs of myriad insects, who always seemed to raise a shriller hymn of joy on this day).

  But it was not long after I had settled in my rooms that such peaceful interludes were interrupted by my interviews with the authorities. Mr. Dana had prepared me to tell the truth, and I had been worrying about just how I would construct it.

  My first interview was with a man and woman in street clothes who appeared at my door, saying they were from the county prosecutor’s office. The man was rather a dour, mustachioed old figure, but as soon as they were seated, the woman, perhaps a year or two beyond my age, smiled and handed me a brief account of my abduction published in the Friend of Virtue.

  “Can you tell us please, Mrs. Fullerton, whether you find this article correct in the essentials?” she asked.

  I read it quickly. Neither my nor Dudley’s names appeared in this particular account.

  “Yes,” I said. “In the essentials. His name was Joseph Dudley, by the way.”

  “We know,” the man said. His voice was deep and quiet. “A general list o
f malefactors was published in a later issue. Mr. Dudley appeared on that list.”

  “Did I as well? As his victim, I mean?”

  “No,” the woman answered. “They are very good about that in cases not yet brought into the courts. This was, as Mr. Wellington said, a general listing of malefactors. They seldom contest such listings publicly, if they are in fact guilty. Too shameful.”

  “Thank goodness for their keeping me off any lists.”

  “Can you provide us some detail, Mrs. Fullerton,” she asked, “about this period of your abduction, for some months, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Although it seemed forever. Did not Matron tell you my story?”

  “She did,” the woman answered. “But we prefer to hear it in your own words.”

  “I see. Yes, of course.” I could not speak further.

  “Mr. Wellington can step out,” she suggested, “if you’d be more comfortable that way.”

  “No. No, that’s not it. I don’t know where to begin, that’s all. You see, other than being imprisoned and turned into an object of amusement, like a mere mouse in a cat’s cruel play, there is nothing about which I need to feel shame.”

  “Just begin with the moment of your abduction, then, if you please,” she said.

  I told them the entire story, in convincing detail I hoped, up until my escape with Mr. Dana’s help. Mr. Wellington scribbled furiously in his notebook and Miss Gretchel (for that was her name) asked questions and listened. Then they inquired about my days at Newspirit and my further associations and travels with Tom. I told them all that I have told my reader, save for Tom’s own hand in Dudley’s demise and my own pangs of vengeance. What Tom and I had agreed we should tell Mr. Dana, I then told my official interlocutors. Their reaction to Tom’s flight after Dudley was found, and then later abroad, was more measured than Mr. Dana’s, but it amounted to the same thing: an innocent man is a fool to flee. Once again, I reminded them of Tom’s credible fears and his reasoning in his innocence. I said that I had not been able to convince Tom to face all accusations directly. These statements they took in; they made no further comments or queries to suggest disbelief.

  Taking their leave, finally, they asked me to remain in the city that September while they concluded their investigations in light of my own testimony, a written version of which they promised to bring for my signature within a day or two.

  THAT THURSDAY WE ATTENDED Mr. Neal’s lecture. The others were rather disappointed in the subject of the evening, but I found his remarks entertaining. I found I was able to cast aside the darker apprehensions Mr. Wellington and Miss Gretchel had elicited. Mr. Neal eschewed the arts in favor of “true womanhood.” Perhaps this was why Miss Fuller had recommended him to me.

  After the lecture I met up with Miss Fuller. She said that she had known Mr. Neal since 1838, when he spoke to her schoolgirls in Providence.

  “As you heard this evening, Mrs. Fullerton,” she said to me, “Mr. Neal gives a truly manly view of the matter, although not the view of common men. And isn’t it pleasing to watch his countenance, whose energy is animated by genius? I always find his striking ideas and phrases an inspiration,” she added. She then told me that she was herself at work on a book about the situation of women.

  It was only later, discussing Mr. Neal’s interests in phrenology and magnetism, when I discovered from her that she had once gone so far as to let down her hair and submit her “haughty head to his sentient fingers” for a reading.

  But this evening, Mr. Neal rose to speak before a full house, and he did not fail to amuse and provoke. He began by pleasing his audience with an admirable summary of Yankee character as “remarkable for sobriety, invincible steadiness, and good faith.” He then, however, proceeded to set them down hard by warning against a “perversion of that remarkable character” into a not uncommon “Perfection of Rascality—exhibited by those among us who go about their business of worldly thrift and absolute fraud precisely as they go about their worship.”

  He then boldly connected our Yankee attributes to an insufficient moral passion to work against slavery in the South. The clarity of argument by which he immediately connected our insufficient moral passion against slavery to our failure of women in our American democracy is beyond my powers to replicate. Not that I had never heard such a connection before, as when Tom and I once attended a lecture by the Grimké sisters during their tour of Massachusetts, but it was the force of Mr. Neal’s reasoning that I found so remarkable.

  I can only relate that he thundered against the legal restraints upon women, comparing us to slaves and apprentices who, as wives, in the tradition of English common law, could not hold or dispose of their own property.

  “She is taxed, yet she is not allowed to vote? Is that not the very abuse for which our Revolution was fought?”

  He warned, however (referring to Godwin and Mill, whom he had known once among Bentham’s circle) of the long line of distinguished thought arguing that voting alone does not create change.

  “A woman in a democracy must, instead, be equal on every footing—social, educational, legal, and political,” he said, and thumped the lectern with a clenched fist. “Let us, my fellow men in the audience, consider the matter a little more closely—that is to say perchance more painfully—still: How have we attained our mastery over women? By superior virtue? By superior understanding? Do you, can you—any of you—really believe such a thing?” He laughed; he boldly looked over his audience before continuing.

  “No, sirs, it is by the original accident of superior strength alone that we have done so, and so have maintained our first advantage. Is it not an advantage unworthy of us, unworthy of true gentlemen?”

  There was a mild applause from several women in the audience, and more shifting, harrumphing, and scornful tittering from the men. But I must say that most of the women present appeared either impassive before his plea or in modest agreement with their husbands and brothers. Yet Mr. Neal, far from appearing daunted before this complacent and condescending response, bulled his way forward, as one who gains energy from battle.

  “Let me tell you in all frankness, ladies and gentlemen, that I do not believe marriage—an institution I deeply respect and in which I am a happy participant—marriage, I say, is not, however, a condition absolutely indispensable for the happiness of woman and the development of a true womanhood. But whether she choose marriage or that single blessedness we sometimes hear of, the woman in America has the protection of every right, natural and constitutional, presumed and granted to men.”

  He went on in this forceful vein to the continued discomfort and condescension of most of his audience, for nearly two hours, never referring to prepared notes. His superior address, no less than his outbursts of eloquence, fascinated me. What he was saying of justice and women, as my reader will by now understand, had been long fomenting in my own mind, not only since my acquaintance with Miss Fuller, but through the example and courage of some who once sat for me during those years of my travels.

  My interest in Mr. Neal was all the more strengthened by some of the commentary I heard in the aftermath.

  “What do you think of this Mr. Neal?” one woman asked of her companion.

  “I think him an enthusiast, but a right manly man, and thoroughly the gentleman,” he responded.

  “But I mean to ask, what do you think of his opinions?”

  “I think,” he said, “that they would take woman from her throne where she is worshipped, to place her in the furrows to be bespattered.”

  Miss Fuller and I approached Mr. Neal once the crowd had dispersed, save a few remaining auditors. One in particular, clearly a woman of imposing carriage, was saying, “Would political equality, sir, be preferable to exerting the moral influence of her sex to right her wrongs? Is it not, moreover, a declaration of a woman’s rights for her to say, ‘I am a wife and a mother! To be these is my freedom, to be other is slavery?’”

  Mr. Neal smiled benevolently upon her. “It ma
y be so for her, madam,” he returned, “but suppose she happened to be neither? According to your definition, she is then a slave. Yet we have thousands of women in this country who are neither wives nor mothers—nor ever will be—just as my twin sister is neither. Would you leave her, would you leave them all, nothing to console them? Why, indeed, if we agree that women are unlike men, can we not agree that they are not for that reason in any way inferior to them?”

  Mr. Spooner had followed us as we worked our way closer to John Neal. He knew the speaker from former associations, and once all the others had left us alone with Neal, Mr. Spooner invited him, along with Miss Fuller, to his home for refreshment.

  It was in these circumstances that I met this extraordinary man. Neal had himself, I discovered, once been an itinerant artist and schoolmaster; he seemed to know every artist of note here and in England. He was also a lawyer, a novelist, an editor and essayist, a lecturer, and a man of myriad interests. Miss Fuller whispered to me, “He is the most brilliant and original man to come out of Maine, his friend Mr. Longfellow notwithstanding.” And it became clear, the better I began to know him, that his old role as Byronesque Yankee Genius was, in part, a creature of his own manufacture, as much as it was once upheld by the public press.

  Late into the evening we all sat in Mr. Spooner’s studio, which Mr. Neal first insisted on seeing and then upon using as the site of our conversations. He once or twice referred to his old friend Miss Fuller as the “She-Gladiator” while they bantered one another. If he seemed to best her as to the merits of some artist over another, she tweaked him jauntily: “Mr. Neal does not argue quite fairly, for he uses reason while it lasts, and then helps himself out with wit, sentiment, and assertion.” When she caused us to laugh by such remarks, she would follow with something more friendly: “But his lion-heart and his sense of the ludicrous in human affairs redeem him.”

  At one point she furthered her argument for his redemption by toasting him as a man who morally and materially had helped the careers of many women, from actresses to authors, giving particular instances of his generosity regarding Ann Stephens and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. I found I liked him immediately, but I could not then have known how he would help and encourage me as well.