15 July, Sea choppy Celesta & I have managed to air the cabin & its sorry linens. Husband & baby sick, Mrs Hasty also, but all now asleep. The sailor Tomaso has given me a small rope-bracelet with wooden beads that press against my wrist - a salt"s remedy or charm against sea-sickness that aids me immeasurably.
Mr Bangs says that a storm is behind us & will whisk us north & east & home in a matter of a day or two. I had best speed my pen as well.
My story now is in the winter of 1848a49, & into the spring, the months of the Risorgimento, the Roman Republic & then the terrible siege. Oh, to recall the thrill of those few months of Rome"s freedom - the Pope having left in November! (I liked to pretend he left because I returned, but in truth he left because he was a coward & feared a.s.sa.s.sination.) The a.s.sembly in session & daily new declarations & new laws pa.s.sed for our freedoms! Freedom of the press! 250,000 Romans casting votes in their first elections! The Inquisition declared illegal & its monstrous building shut down! Many wanted to burn it but cooler heads prevailed - as fortunately cool heads prevailed throughout that halcyon time - to propose that the building instead be made into new homes for the poor, or perhaps an asylum for orphans. Mazzini came in & out of Rome, for he was wanted in the fighting in the Piedmont & then in Naples - every time he came into the city, he paid me a visit in my new rooms on the Piazza Barbieri. He was tired but hopeful - & like my Giovanni, like all the men, seemed to have derived some super-human strength in those glory days of freedom. Daily we prayed for expected help - money or arms from England, & at the very least diplomatic recognition from everyone"s beloved America.
During these months I was able to visit Rieti for two weeks, in April. The family was quarrelsome & rude, I worried about the cold, as the cottage there had only the one fire-place in the kitchen, but Nino"s cradle was always on the hearth & all seemed well. After two weeks in my arms & bed, he cried when I left but was soon comforted again by Chiara & so the agony of leaving was chiefly mine.
As I had long predicted, the return of the conservatives in France meant that instead of offering salvation, as some had once fondly hoped, France as enemy sent ships & a full battalion to restore the Pope to "his" State - landing on the coast at the end of April & laying violent siege to Rome & its brave people for many terrible weeks. Cannons fired all day long into the city. The Princess Belogioso, with admirable efficiency, organized field hospitals. I was delegated to run the one on Tiber Island called Fate Bene Fratelli.
Early on, a boy with a wounded leg had the gangrene setting in - the one doctor for five of our hospitals was not around, who knew when he would return, not that day or the next surely - we had no surgery saw, & so I asked one of the only men who was able - his own head-wound had nearly healed - to fetch an axe, & while I & another woman held the boy"s arms he chopped off the leg just below the knee. It took three whacks, & as the boy did not swoon at once I was obliged to sit on his chest to keep him down. Then I sat by & pressed the bandage all night to make sure the bleeding stopped, until in the morning the doctor"s boy arrived with his bucket of hot tar & we were able to sear the stump. The soldier did survive - unlike so many others - & lived to hop about on a wooden peg. But tho" he called me Mama, as all the boys & even most of the older men did as well, when in distress - I felt like no Mama I had ever wished to be.
Many of the children of Rome had been sent to the countryside, but some orphans & others, less fortunate, came to the hospitals for safety & we made use of them to fetch & carry & fed them what we could. We also enlisted the prost.i.tutes, who worked n.o.bly & without rest. We tied red armbands on the women & children to mark them as helpers & to them all I was also "Mama," or the "Signora D"oro," for my hair.
Mazzini held the city for longer than anyone had thought possible. The ancient walls held, & barricades went up in the streets. French troops sometimes breached a wall, & there would be a skirmish in the Vatican gardens or at the Quirinal, but the aggressors took many losses & were always beaten back. The difficulty for us was that no one outside came to our aid, not even with food - all the Catholic world was in an uproar of indignation about the ousting of the Pope & allies we might have hoped for in England or America, even from Norway, did not see this as a fight that they would join.
It was during this time that I became convinced that the inst.i.tution of slavery in the United States had so weakened the moral fibre of my countrymen & women that they had lost the will to fight for freedom abroad - even when such freedom was in the spirit of our own articulated Const.i.tution & vision of the rights of man. & So the pernicious effects of slavery extended well beyond my own country"s borders.
& Slowly, as with any siege, those trapped within began to flag. I had moved to rooms in a quiet corner in the northeast of the city; but soon the fighting was visible from my windows there as well - I saw close up to my eyes the guns & blades & men bleeding in the streets, like some ghastly Carnevale. The noise day & night was terrible, the unholy blast of gunpowder, the sc.r.a.ping & crashing of metal & stone & I sometimes left my bed to sleep on a cot in the relative quiet of the hospital, where the groans of the wounded & dying were at least human.
In a battle in the Borghese Gardens, Giovanni was wounded in the head & lost his vision for two days. But at the end he would not leave his exposed post on the Pincio Hill, through all the cannonades of the end of June - Except to visit me on one fateful night, June the 30th. He had not slept or eaten for days. I fed him & he dozed for some few minutes. I begged him not to go back, but he said that he would & I believed as if with a premonition that he would die - I followed him against his will, I said that if he would go, so would I. I hoped to make him fear for my life & so not go - or fear for our boy should we both die - perhaps I wanted to die too, as all seemed hopeless & the sound of guns & blasts in one"s ears for days & nights, the bracing of the body for the sound in the brief silences, jarred the sense from one"s mind - If he would go, then so would I, I said, & followed him up the hill as blasts sounded close by -.
The hospital wagon had just pa.s.sed, collecting the wounded, nevertheless by habit I reached to touch each body to make sure the soldier was not still alive. There were more dead men than I had seen in one place before - perhaps 40 scattered over a quarter-acre of ground. Rubble of pavilions, benches, & old pathways, trees snapped in two or uprooted - it was like some terrible giant had grown tired of his toy-town & in a tantrum had smashed the whole world. Some bodies were so torn apart that there was no mouth or nose on which I could lay my hand to feel for breath. The air was a yellow cloud of powder-fumes.
As we drew close to my husband"s post, where a group of men sat & lay together in a heap, the noises suddenly stopped.
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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pa.s.sionately & 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 & rea.s.surances.
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 sc.r.a.ped 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 gra.s.s, 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 1876, 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; a.s.sorted 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sortment 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 G.o.d, 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 p.r.o.nounced. 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 a.s.sa.s.sins 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 n.o.bleman, 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 s.e.x-G.o.ddess of destruction named Zen.o.bia. (Rushworth explained that the historic Zen.o.bia, 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 p.r.o.nouncement: "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, a.s.suming 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 a.s.sistance in her inquiries? She sensed she had p.r.i.c.ked 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 ap.r.o.ns, 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 James 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.
She made everybody angry. Such a terrible talent.
Flanked closely by two ushers to the door, as if she were a horse that might rear in traffic, Anne stepped out into a misty evening. As she had been reading, the world had been transformed into softness and muddle, and the eye was drawn to small patches of clarity where the gas-lamps lit the paths. How could one reclaim the private person one had known, even if only a little, in the midst of the clamor and eloquence of public opinion and reminiscence? She concentrated very hard on her own few memories; she summoned up her own words. Under the lamp-light at the Yard gate, she wrote in her note-book: More alive than anyone else. And then: She frightens me.
The day following her Harvard visit Anne drove her pony-cart to the public library in Concord, to borrow The Blithedale Romance, the novel of Hawthorne"s she had learned was supposed to be about Miss Fuller. Not much of a novel reader as a rule, she struggled at first to understand what was fantasy, what was allegory - since clearly the narrator was meant to be a figure for Hawthorne himself, and Blithedale was like Brook Farm, in Roxbury, where Hawthorne had briefly joined his many friends in the early 1840s to run a communal farm on n.o.ble principles. (She remembered Henry"s muted horror at the scheme - or perhaps just at the very idea of living with that particular company - and remembered also that Miss Fuller had not joined them either, as she was too busy elsewhere.) The very disclaimer from the author at the start of the book was, Anne surmised, a kind of code: I"ll say this is not Brook Farm, that these characters are not based on figures from real life, and by my so saying you will understand the reverse. Anne could not make out who the powerful, sinister Westervelt and Hollingsworth were meant to be exactly - the Reverend George Ripley, who founded Brook Farm? Mr. E? Alcott? - but she was pretty sure that the feeble and pretty Priscilla was a sort of Sophia Peabody (loved by the narrator) and that Zen.o.bia, despite her "dark" hair, was Miss Fuller.
Named for that powerful queen of ancient history, Zen.o.bia of Palmyra, who murdered her husband and son, this Zen.o.bia of Hawthorne"s imagination was beautiful and mesmeric, rich and richly dressed, preaching a doctrine of female emanc.i.p.ation although she herself longed only for a man"s love, hiding an illicit marriage, enchanting the narrator and Priscilla and everyone around her - and then bringing destruction, mostly upon herself. She committed suicide by drowning at the end of the novel.
Anne pondered these things, and returned to her notes to write: Mr. H. wrote the novel soon after MF died; and it is filled with love and hate. He is unjust in his portrayal of her as idly rich, as she surely was not. He also believed his wife, "Priscilla," was in her power. Did he suspect Sapphic tendencies? (Good heavens.) Do novelists do this often, kill a person a second time? Would he have been happier if Miss F had committed suicide? Did he somehow imagine she had? But how can a ship-wreck be suicide? Does he suggest by giving her the name "Zen.o.bia" that she murdered her husband and son? Did he confuse her power with the power of the weather itself? The G.o.ddess of hurricanes.
In any case, thought Anne, Miss Fuller had certainly occupied Hawthorne"s imagination.
At last, not sure if she should, less sure of everything than she had been even before her researches began, the next morning, at dawn, almost as if she were ceremoniously opening a tomb of the Pharaohs, she took a file and broke open the desk lock. The interior still smelled, sharply, of the sea. She touched a b.u.t.ton, a drawing-pin, three tiny buds dried on a k.n.o.bbly stem - she recognized the plant, Amaranthus graecizans, or was it virids? - a clam sh.e.l.l no bigger than her smallest fingernail, some fine sand. She smiled and thought, Amaranthus fulleris.
As she lifted out the pile of Miss Fuller"s pages, she dislodged something: One of Henry"s small travelling notebooks had been wedged there, between the pages. The pebbly leather had been smoothed to shiny patches where her brother"s left hand had held it open as he wrote with his right. As she put her own hand where her brother"s had been a moan came from somewhere, from her own throat, as if she had just that moment lost him.
On the first page were her own joking words about the train from that hot day in 1850; then the following in Henry"s hand: 25 Jul.
a Sad bcs. not sad a Not Tragedy. Tr. large & human; this nature & not human, tho" large a Sailors liked her, praised her, loved her a Sailors shaved almost bald. A mourning ritual of the salty fraternity?
a Bolton, a sailor, has circled the world 2X. Orig. fr. Kentucky; likes Ma.r.s.eilles best bcs. cheap wine & wife there a Study rip currents and undertow. Visible sometimes even w/out gales - gales far out can cause a rip, or an undertow? Are they same?
a Current running a pale green almost white w/lavender lights, sideways, parallel to sh.o.r.e a Candle in tide, swirl"d by waves like whelk-sh.e.l.l, or barber pole a 2 b.u.t.tons fr. Ossoli"s coat, jet, real but not actual a Ellery & Arthur arrivd 26 Jul.
a Argument about the boy"s corpse: Arthur will dig up & take coffin home tho" Ellery & I see a greater poetry in leaving it here where his parents died a All frantic for book ms 28 Jul.
a Women cant have the Wild within a Found & buried in sand a woman"s arm & hand. M"s? 7 Crow Brothers: The sister"s finger bone whittled to open the door a M told me she did have Wild - so why Europe?
Old World not The Wild, The Wild is interior & wards westly. M did not have Wild.
a Sorry I never liked M.
a Crab sh.e.l.ls, bird skeletons, this stuff, not actual. Goat when alive: Actual. Smells hwvr both alive & dead. Not Real when Dead? The Wild can also contain Death The rest were his notes on weather, tides, birds, kelp, sh.e.l.ls, gra.s.ses, the formation of dunes (with tiny drawings and arrows), and a local story about a beached whale. Nothing more about Miss Fuller.
Tenderly, she placed Henry"s note-book beside the wasps" nest on the mahogany side-board where the Bratcher plate and service had once shone.
Then she sat for many minutes, with the stack of pages in her lap, still not sure whether or not to read the words of this long-dead, alarming, annoying, still-alive woman. And she went for a walk with the dog to think some more.
"Complete," she said aloud, and the dripping wet dog turned to look at her. "What is that?" He c.o.c.ked his head at the question, or more likely at the stick she raised to throw again. She threw the stick, and turned back, now in a hurry. The dog swerved from his play and followed her.
Not pausing to take off her boots and hat, she returned to her work-room. The dog, sensing her mood as one that meant he must be quiet, found his usual place on the worn Turkey carpet next to the wood-stove and put his nose upon his paws.
She pulled the stack of pages out and began to read words formed in a large, looping hand: "... How extraordinary to be on board and coming home! Here I must compose my thoughts.... 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...."
Anne read all the pages, more than forty sheets scrawled across two sides. At some point, quite unconsciously, she removed her hat and boots. She curled up in an arm-chair, the pages piled in her lap, and read that way for an hour or so; then, stiffening in that posture, returned to the chair at the table. When Mattie put her head round the door in the early afternoon she knew by the set of Anne"s back not to disturb her. Anne did not eat or drink, and she felt weak and sick when she at last stopped. It was dusk. She stretched, and still in her stocking-feet stepped out on the back doorstep with the collie-dog, just in time to see the last pink and orange smears over a black horizon-cloud in the west.
A little later, carrying a pot of tea and a plate of cold pork, pickles, and green beans, Anne returned to her work-room. She re-read the pages by lamp-light, while the expected storm crashed around the house, briefly. At last she went to bed.
Some days later, on a rainy morning in mid-October, a letter arrived from Anne"s difficult daughter in the Wyoming territories declaring that, as women there had the vote, she was campaigning for a district council seat. She added that one day, when Wyoming became a state, she hoped to be governor. Chewing over this preposterous news, Anne bound Miss Fuller"s pages up in butcher"s paper and tied them with strong twine. On the top she wrote: PRIVATE PAPERS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI.
She had heard of an organization recently founded, The New England Society for the Progress of Women. With her other daughter - the clever, handsome one - she braved the rain that afternoon, to attend a tea at the Society"s modest house in Cambridge, and while the speaker droned about conditions in the New South, she slipped into the library-office of the director. She took the bundle from her carpetbag and placed it in a low cupboard, on a shelf underneath other papers. It did not look as though these shelves were dusted often, but one never knew. Evening was coming on already, and the rain blew against the window of the office. She shivered.
As soon as next month, perhaps, the Society might move to a new building, or rearrange its offices, and the ladies would sort and pack these shelves. Someone would find the bundle and send it to a local scholar, a historian. Possibly that historian would be interested; possibly he would read it. Possibly he would give it to a woman of his acquaintance, herself educated and a believer in the rights of women, and she would know what to do with it.
Or perhaps one day the Society"s maids would be told to clear out all those old papers. One of the maids, educated even if only slightly, would notice the label and call the bundle to the attention of the house-keeper, who would authoritatively drop it in the dustbin.
Or the Society"s house would go up in flames on some cold night five years hence.
Or the shelves would never be sorted, and the Society"s building would return to private hands. It would be home to a large and boisterous family. One wintry day, the children would need extra paper for snow-flakes and paper dolls, and would cut page after page into delicate shreds.
Miss Fuller did not inhabit Anne"s night-time dreams. (Those were populated almost exclusively by members of her family and by a boy she had loved when she was fifteen, a glorious laughing boy visiting relatives in Concord, who had climbed into a pear-tree and thrown fruit at her and then pulled her under a wagon to kiss her.) But once she was fully awake, her first thought was often of that woman.
It was Anne"s morning habit to make a pot of tea and take it into her work-room. She drew the curtains back on the clear north light, tied her duster into place, and set up the paints - daubing oil into cyan blue and Indian yellow powders, shaving off curls of j.a.panese lacquer for the red tints, thinning out the white with pine spirits, to make the misty white-into-grey gruel of sea foam.
If you could have visited, you would have seen the stacks of worked and half-worked canvases, dried and set aside, and if you had leafed through them - but can one be said to leaf through those heavy things, so much heavier than leaves? - you would have seen how her theme had seized her. For again and again, as long as she was able to paint, in the years until rheumatism froze her fingers, she worked on the same image.
We are in a shallow but wild sea. The vantage point of the viewer is slightly behind and to one side of the central figure, a woman - so it is as if the viewer, standing in deeper water, is following her lead. The woman is partly bent and stepping through ocean waves; sometimes with her entire face visible, turned to us with a beckoning expression; in some versions one can make out the images of figures on the beach (that one looks like Henry in his old suit!); sometimes with the beach bare; sometimes with a bell-buoy or a life-boat visible; sometimes with the light of a sunrise rouging the tips of the waves, but always: A woman, her hair streaming in the wind and water, her red dress half torn away and soaked nearly to black, clasping a book under one bare arm and a small child in the other - a woman, thus enc.u.mbered, yet striding through the boiling waves, and making it to sh.o.r.e.
AUTHOR"S NOTE.
Though grounded in fact, this is a work of fiction. To readers interested in history I recommend Margaret Fuller"s writings and the biographies of her written by Charles Capper and by Paula Blanchard; Alexander Herzen"s memoirs; Megan Marshall"s biography of the Peabody sisters; Brenda Wineapple"s biography of Hawthorne; and the biographical and critical writings on Th.o.r.eau and Emerson by Stanley Cavell, Walter Harding, Jonathan Levin, Joel Porte, and many other scholars.
I wish to thank: Patricia Willis at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Pamela Matz at the Widener Library at Harvard University, and the librarians at the Houghton Library at Harvard, for invaluable a.s.sistance; and The Corporation of Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony, for time and peace in which to work.
Many thanks to my agent, Jin Auh, and to the wonderful Steerforth Press team of Roland Pease and Chip Fleischer.
Douglas Bauer, Christopher Benfey, Catherine Ciepiela, Annabel Davis-Goff, Richard Q. Ford, Lyndall Gordon, Elana Greenfield, Alice Mattison, Marc Robinson, Elizabeth Sacre, and Mark Wunderlich provided help of various and essential kinds, and I am profoundly grateful.
It was Joel Porte"s inspired writing and teaching that "shocked my soul awake" to the lives and work of nineteenth-century American writers when I was an undergraduate; to him I owe my longest-standing debt and offer my deepest thanks.