The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “Oh I wouldn’t want to do that just yet, my darling.”

  He kissed the top of my head and I felt his hands slide softly down my shoulders and along my arms as he breathed into my hair. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered. “More than I’ve missed any woman.”

  I heard myself murmuring, “I can’t believe that, Chas.”

  “Oh, but it’s true, very true.” His voice seemed drowsy too now. “I’ll just have to make you believe it.”

  His hands began to pass lightly over me. I felt his lips on my neck, my ears. I lay my head back on the settee, my eyes still closed. He continued to murmur softly. I might have been asleep or in a half-dream, feeling by then only his fine large hands and the light random touches of his lips.

  Then I felt him move around to the front of me, kneel down, and remove the empty cup from my hands. He gently reached beneath me, lifted me into his arms, carried me to the small bedchamber, and placed me softly on the narrow bed. I heard him open the single window over the street, and the dim street sounds rose with the warm air to wash over me. Far off, the driver of the fish cart from the city sounded his magical horn as he made his way among the streets.

  Chas sat on the bed beside me, removed my shoes and massaged my feet—while I lay there without opening my eyes or speaking, as if in a waking sleep induced by pleasure and fatigue—and then began gently to undress me.

  Soon he was caressing me with a soft relentlessness of moist lips and fingers, assuming every liberty of a husband, until I no longer wished to struggle against my desire.

  I felt him stand up and remove his own clothes while I remained in a stupor of longing; then he sat down quietly beside me. I could smell his unclothed man’s flesh now just as I heard, as if it in the distance, a humble bee stumbling in from the trellis beside the open window, flying heavily and drowsily around the room a moment, and returning to bungle and bump against the sash.

  Then as if dreaming, I seemed to watch myself reach for his hair and pull his face up to mine. In the delirious minutes that followed, the humble bee continued stumbling against the sash—a mellifluous monody that, later still, accompanied Chas’s strange sweet laughter of pleasure and happiness, and then followed us into sleep.

  THE NEXT DAY Chas called at the studio where I had promised to help Mr. Spooner varnish several paintings for exhibition. It was past the hour in the afternoon that I had agreed to meet Chas. We had planned that supper at the Oyster House which we had slept through the previous evening.

  Mrs. Spooner, a bit unsettled, looked in to announce my visitor, “a singular looking gentleman who claims to know you.” I looked at the clock, felt suddenly ashamed, thwarted, and happy at once, and asked her if she’d mind letting Mr. Sparhawk in, “an old friend and painter himself.” He wouldn’t mind, I explained, waiting while I clean up. Later, I apologized to her for having caused her, by my failure to be ready at an appointed hour, to endure this person in her home without her prior consent. It was a blunder that only a lady as generous as Mrs. Spooner would have allowed me to forget.

  I presented Chas to Mr. Spooner, but I was surprised to discover that there was some repulsion between them at this meeting. I have at times observed between other persons, or between someone and myself, a similar immediate, unspoken dislike—some incompatibility of spheres—as if two people had lost their reason and become like animals of a species meeting on a woodpath and finding one another’s scent all off. Then there seems to be nothing such souls thrown together by chance can do to overcome their instinctive repulsions. Unless both struggle mightily to deny their antipathy, there is no social emollient alone that can overmaster the unfortunate meeting. But is it not just as inexplicable when two meet and feel an innate liking for one another, as between Miss Fuller and me, or for that matter between Chas and me?

  To circumvent the awkwardness in this instance, I set my materials aside rather too quickly and hurried Chas out the door and into the gig he had hired for Boston.

  “So that’s the great Mr. Spooner?” Chas said as he drove us hurriedly down the street. “I hadn’t taken his measure, I now see, at our first encounter, brief as it was.”

  “What on earth got into you, Chas? You were very nearly rude to him.”

  “I can not suffer a fool—and a drunkard!—who would have the world believe he is above the rest of us.”

  “You don’t even know the man. He has been very helpful to me, but he always opens a bottle after a day’s work.”

  “A coxcomb!” he said and laughed.

  “You’ve misjudged him entirely.”

  “A doodle and a donkey. A puddinghead and a jack-pudding. An empty pantaloon!” He looked at me. “You’re not laughing, Allegra. Perhaps I’m wrong. But I’ll wager he’s tried to have his hand up your sweet skirts.”

  “Oh, now I see. So that’s it, my dear Chas. Don’t be a ridiculous donkey yourself, a vulgarian. My relation to him is on entirely different grounds than those you suppose.”

  “If you say so, my dear.”

  “Why are men such blockheads?”

  “Oh we can not help ourselves, when the prize over which we contend is so … delicious.” He smiled wickedly at me.

  “And when you are so full of nonsense. As you can see, he is married. And I am no one’s prize. But if you do care for me as much as you protest you do, you’ll stop this ridiculous cant and become yourself again.”

  He frowned. “Well, I admit I find it difficult to keep my senses about me where you are concerned. It was only something I thought I saw in the way he looked at you and addressed himself to you. Did you not see it yourself? I tell you, Allegra, there’s something about the man, about his assumption or assurance or … whatever toward you that I don’t care for.”

  “Put all that out of your mind, then, you misprize him. He is not ‘Your Rival.’ You and I have one another, for these few days.” He began to speak, but I reached over and placed a finger firmly against his lips. “I must say one thing more. I can not and I will not be with child. And I do not wish to marry, not any more than you do, Chas. Allow me to finish, please. We have forgotten ourselves two or three times now. It is all too easy a thing to do. But …”

  “But!” he interrupted. “But!”

  “But I never was with child during my marriage … for some reason no one can say … and I can not chance being with child now.

  And I can not trust myself over to every charlatan with a remedy, with their ‘French Discoveries,’ or their ‘Portuguese Female Pills.’ …” He said nothing now. “Which is not to say we must give up on each other.”

  He looked at me sternly, and then his face broke into a smile. “But to say we must take our pleasure otherwise, you mean.”

  “Do you not agree?”

  “If that’s what you wish, and if you mean to deny only the one thing, I have known happiness in many another.” He looked away. “You don’t take me for a man to force a woman, do you, Allegra?”

  “If I did, I would not be here with you, Chas.”

  Chas reminded me of another argument Mr. Neal had made that night after his lecture. Gibbon had asked him whether women who adopted his view do not come to despise all men as a sort of category—the Offending Sex. Merely by virtue of their being men.

  “I do not find that to be true,” Mr. Neal had said, “if the man does not deserve it, in my travels and discussions with women of free thought.” Mr. Neal nodded to Miss Fuller. “There will, of course, be confusion about the expression of feelings, of love even, of longing, of lust, so long as we live in a benighted state that promotes inequality, and therefore contentiousness in any public examination of that inequality. Confusion, I mean, as to the proper expression of love, to say nothing of overtures to intimacy, as if they were categorically expressions of subjugation or disrespect. Confusion, to put it simply, in all the relations between the sexes, intimate and otherwise. But when love is not confused with the exercise of superiority or force over another, love then has the most s
alutary effect upon us poor human creatures.”

  “Now, on our last night together,” Chas was saying, “let us take pleasure in that oyster dinner and in one another’s company.”

  “Fried oysters and champagne? Why not for once an extravagance?”

  “If you wish, then, oysters and champagne it shall be!”

  “And you don’t leave until tomorrow in the afternoon, so let’s improve the time.”

  “And put that Devil Spooner behind us, my dear. You know, let me say this, your painting is very good, from what I observed in your rooms. You’re beyond us now, well beyond all of us poor limners, who must cast about for such gross work as we can find. You needn’t defer to this man any more.”

  “Thank you, Chas,” I said. “I hope you are right about my painting. Mr. Spooner says that the true blasphemy is not to use one’s gift, whatever the world may think of you. But only we ourselves can determine what we will make of it.”

  “And you are making much of yours, my dear. Your Mr. Spooner is right on that point, I think. But if you had no gift I should be a happy man to keep you continually in pleasure … with child or without, if it comes to that.” He gave out a great laugh, and slapped the reins to hurry the horse.

  I DID NOT SEE Chas Sparhawk again until September of that year. I grew ever more immersed in work and study. I dreamed of travel, too, of seeing the Italian masters in their original state. On a return trip from Portland to Boston, Mr. Neal gave me several books and encouraged me to “drink deeply at the fountain of Italian genius,” but neither he nor Mr. Spooner nor I could determine just how my own journey was to be managed.

  They agreed that if one did not have the family means, as an Allston or a Trumbull had, then one would have to find a patron—merchants, lawyers, collectors, et cetera—for whom one would have to execute views and reproductions to order, in the manner of Morse; or, in the manner of Harding, simply earning your keep as you go. The latter they agreed might be too great a risk for a woman traveling alone. And was I not closer to the age and circumstances of a duenna than to be the object of one!

  I did not feel bold about traveling in foreign lands on my own, but I never spoke of my apprehensions; I resolved not to let such feelings stop me should some means for study abroad arise. I saved everything I could from my modest commissions and my pupils, but I soon saw what a long road to adequate funds that would be.

  My consolations, however, were substantial. Two occurrences in the course of the ensuing year I sensed even at the time would change my life irrevocably. The first I took to be ultimate proof of my master’s trust in my abilities: Mr. Spooner asked me whether I would collaborate on a landscape he had begun on our travels (which I had recommended for their magnificent vistas) to the hill country in the region of Newspirit. Imagine the elevation of my soul when he asked me to join our signatures on the finished work!

  The second occurrence I took to be equally signal: Mr. Spooner sent my completed study in self-portraiture (the very study Mr. Neal had found in the studio) to the Athenaeum, where it was exhibited for sale among the most respected painters in the city of that day. It sold to a patron who wished to be anonymous. Thereby was I finally inaugurated in 1843 as a fine artist—no longer a mere traveling face-maker nor a mere pupil, and it seemed that I had before me only the necessity of study in Europe to complete my years of apprenticeship.

  Looking back on that time, I see now that if these accomplishments were substantial, my high confidence was largely the enthusiasm of a young woman, not yet out of her twenties, whose vision of her future was still tinted by the rainbow hues of youthful promise.

  NINETEEN

  My Italian adventure

  To Spring; or, Concerning the Ancient Myths

  And are you living yet,

  O sacred Nature? May our human ears,

  So long unused, catch that maternal voice?

  The brooks were once a home for the white nymphs,

  Their shelter and their glass

  The liquid springs; and the high mountain ridges

  To secret dancing of immortal feet

  Trembled, and the deep forests (now

  The lonely haunt of winds). The shepherd boy

  Who sought at noontide the uncertain shade

  And led his thirsty lambs

  Down to the flowery river’s brink, might hear

  Sounding along those banks

  The rustic Pan’s shrill song or, struck with wonder,

  Gaze on the rippling waters, for unrevealed

  The quiver-bearing goddess

  Went down to the warm flood, to cleanse away,

  After the bloodstained hunt, immodest dust

  From her snowy flank and virgin arms… .

  And legend told you,

  Musical bird, well-versed

  In human deeds, amid leafy coverts

  Singing now Spring is born again, you mourned

  To the dark silent air,

  In stillness of the fields, your ancient wrongs,

  And all the dreadful tale of your revenge

  In that wan day when wrath and pity met.

  But we can claim no kindred

  Now with your race; nor human grief informs

  Your varied notes; darkling valley hides you,

  Free from all guilt—the less belov’d for that.

  —Giacomo Leopardi, January, 1822

  In March of 1843 the world did not end. The revival meetings in cities, the preachers haranguing thousands of townsfolk in their enormous traveling tents, the throngs closing their shops and houses (many giving away all worldly goods) and standing about in the fields wearing their muslin “ascension robes,” and the suicides and disrupted families—all came to naught.

  The thousands who had converted to the millenarian Millerite calculations for the end of the world were, however, not to be so easily discouraged. New calculations were made immediately, and embraced. The world would end, in fact, on October 20, 1844. One did not have to throw away his sign proclaiming “This shop is closed in honor of the King of kings. Get ready, friends, to crown Him Lord of All.” One only had to tuck the sign away for a year or so. The pitch and volume of this madness increased and seemed to suck away intelligence and skepticism. Soon a Millerite Tabernacle opened in Boston, the very center of American learning.

  I RECALLED EVEN Miss Fuller once saying that she would be willing to accept the millennium in order to unfetter and enlarge and exalt our minds. But I doubted her faith in such a coming, for she had little patience with dogma and zealotry of any kind, or in their missionaries. The transcendent, which she once described as “that beyond which we can conceive,” was to be manifest, if I understood her correctly, otherwise.

  “Counting Room Almanac, 1843,” from Worcester Business Directory, 1842–43. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

  I began, however, to despair of my compatriots. But I was soon to be out of all that, for just as the leaves were turning once again that year, a long-awaited opportunity arose. Mr. Spooner had received a commission from the American Academy for a series of studies in the draughtsmanship and compositional techniques of certain Italian masters, to be produced as a lavish instructional book in folio. He garnered several other handsome commissions for paintings while in Italy as well, and he, Mrs. Spooner, and Gibbon had begun to plan for their journey. I was invited to accompany them, as was Julian, but his mother’s health was failing again and he was for the moment ill-equipped to finance his own expenses abroad.

  The central question, of course, was how I should pay for my travels. Not wishing to place myself in any greater debt to the Spooners, who had been most generous toward me in every way, I tried to take the matter into my own hands. I gave up my private rooms, took on additional pupils, and completed and sold two landscapes for a good price through Mr. Spooner’s own sales agent. In short, every vital energy I now bent toward garnering funds to wing me abroad.

  I returned to Mr. Spooner’s studio and to the priva
te room I had occupied in their house upon first returning to Boston. Following much effort on their part, both Mr. Spooner and Mr. Dana helped me procure two commissions to be executed while abroad, and as my reputation had gradually grown, I found myself in some demand now among a better sort of patron. Mostly they wanted my renderings of children and women, and at a range of prices more reasonable than they could negotiate of the fashionable portraitists.

  Under these new circumstances I could of course no longer entertain Chas Sparhawk. He had been especially vehement in advising against my returning to “the unhealthy influences of that Spooner domicile.” And Chas knew of my plans to leave this life in America behind me. There was discord between us now, and that rift caused me much anguish and self-reproach. Still, I believed that there was no hope for it if I were ever to live and study in Italy.

  In spite of the frightening financial uncertainties, I believed my time had now come, if it ever were to come, and I must dare to leave my homeland.

  I had distressing incitements as well: there was to be an element of decampment in my own passage abroad. For although Mr. Dana told me in the spring that to his knowledge official pursuit of Tom in the Dudley affair had ceased, I did afterward glimpse from time to time Miss Gretchel or Mr. Wellington among the throngs of the city, and I began to suspect they were keeping watch on me, as if they hoped I would lead them to Tom, who, perhaps they believed, had not fled overseas. But of course he had, and I hoped they would tire of their secretiveness well before I sailed for Europe.

  Of my afflictions from my rift with Chas, Mr. Spooner politely suggested that Chas had somehow mesmerized me into a kind of dependency, “a strange and unseemly servility.”

  “Even were it so,” I said, “I can’t believe I’d have been wholly insensible to his machinations.”

  “I’m not talking about some display of hocus-pocus and such mountebankery as he uses to entrance the coarser crowd,” Mr. Spooner said. “His methods would have been far more subtle, and for purposes other than monetary, with you.”