Margaret Fuller (59 page)

Yet Nino’s very existence raised the stakes of Margaret’s new undertaking: “For his sake indeed, I am become a miserable coward. I fear heat and cold and moschetoes. I fear terribly the voyage home, fear biting poverty.”
To William Channing she admitted, “I never think of the voyage without fearing the baby will die in it.”
Headache and what felt like a “dangerous pressure on the brain”
overcame her for more than a week, during which she felt “so sad and weary” about leaving Italy “that I seem paralyzed.”
A bleeding performed by one of Mozier’s doctors brought relief. “One would think that so much fuss could not end in nothing,” she wrote in another letter to William Channing, “so Patience Cousin and shuffle the cards, till Fate is ready to deal them out anew.”

As the spring rains let up and the skies cleared for the
Elizabeth
to sail, Margaret continued to fret about Nino, his health on the voyage, his future in America: “I hope he will retain some trace in his mind of the perpetual exhilarating picture of Italy.”
Could Margaret retain the hopeful notes she had sounded in her final
Tribune
column, written for New Year’s Day, 1850? As she had confided in William Channing, “It has long seemed that in the year 1850”—the year Margaret would turn forty—“I should stand on some important plateau in the ascent of life, should be allowed to pause for awhile, and take more clear and commanding views than ever before.” But so far she had experienced “no marked and important change.”

“Joy to those born in this day,” Margaret had written for the
Tribune.
“In America is open to them the easy chance of a noble, peaceful growth, in Europe of a combat grand in its motives, and in its extent beyond what the world ever before so much as dreamed. Joy to them; and joy to those their heralds.”
Margaret had made herself one of those heralds of a better day. Could she, leaving Italy “with most sad and unsatisfied heart”
along with so many “betrayed and exiled” comrades, rest content in the belief that “there come after them greater than themselves, who may at last string the heart of the world to full concord”?

21

“No favorable wind”

M
ARGARET HAD ONCE CONFIDED IN ANNA WARD THE STORY
of her unfortunate uncle Peter Crane, her mother’s only brother. In childhood, Peter and Peggy, as Margarett Crane had been called as a girl, were “the flower of the family, sweet-tempered, generous, gay and handsome,” both “very dear to one another and to their parents.” But as the two siblings grew older, Peter became restless, and one night he ran away from “the little farm-house home, without the consent of his parents,” knowing they would not give it, certain that “in some distant Eldorado, he could do more and be happier than in the narrow path marked out for him at home.” According to family legend, the “rashness of Peter” was offset by Peggy’s “fortunate” marriage to Timothy Fuller soon after. For as long as he lived, Timothy Fuller helped support the Crane parents, supplying “the place of the wandering son.”

What became of Peter? Although he had sent home to Peggy a sum of money “from the first fruits of his labors,” out of which she purchased her “first white gown,” Peter never prospered as he had dreamed, and he never returned home. In the end, he “could not bear to come back thus, old, sad, and poor to lift the latch again of the door from which he had stolen by night in presumptuous youth.”

Uncle Peter was not really so old when he died, barely fifty. But his was one of those “long sad tales of ineffectual lives” that, Margaret told Anna, “move me deeply.” Margaret was in her early thirties, an ambitious woman still uncertain of her capacity for achievement, when she learned the news of her uncle Peter’s lonely death and wrote out the story for Anna. Margaret had not yet published her first book, and she had been turned aside painfully, both in love and in friendship. “It
is
sad when a man lays down the burden of life frustrated in every purpose,” Margaret wrote to Anna. “Happy the prodigal son who
returns!
”

Three years later, Margaret left America as one of its most accomplished citizens, a cultural emissary to Europe. She was the author of a book on the woman question that had revived the cause and advanced it well beyond Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Woman;
she was a widely read columnist for a national newspaper with a rare commission as foreign correspondent. But Margaret, “the much that calls for more,” had still been searching. Now, after several “rich, if troubled years,”
although worried that “to go into the market, and hire myself out” would be “hard as it never was before,”
Margaret had fulfilled many of her longest-held desires. She had taken a lover who became her devoted husband; she had borne a child. Stored for travel inside her portable desk was the manuscript of a new book, her “great history” of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. Margaret, who had played the role of eldest son to her father in girlhood and to her family since Timothy’s death, whose heart was moved by Uncle Peter’s story rather than Peggy’s, could now play the prodigal who
returns.
Uncertain of her welcome in the United States, Margaret was sure of what she possessed, what she was bringing home—“my treasures, my husband and child,”
and her book, “what is most valuable to me . . . of any thing.”

Another long-ago night in Boston with Anna Ward: Sam was away, and Margaret and Anna shared a bed, “together in confiding sleep,” as they had done so often when Margaret visited Anna before her marriage to Sam. But this night, with her head on Sam’s pillow, after listening to Anna’s “graceful talk,” Margaret fell into a restless sleep and dreamed “a frightful dream of being imprisoned in a ship at sea, the waves all dashing round.” Dreaming, she suffered through “horrible suspense,” knowing the crew had orders to throw their prisoner overboard. Into the nightmare scene entered “many persons I knew,” who were “delighted to see me,” yet when Margaret begged their help, “with cold courtliness” they “glided away.” “Oh it was horrible these averted faces and well dressed figures turning from me . . . with the cold wave rushing up into which I was to be thrown.”

The seventeenth of May, the day of sailing, came
.
Margaret and Giovanni spent their last night in Florence with the Brownings, Margaret almost giddy with anticipation. During the last days of packing her nerves jangled at the thought of America, of the “sense of fresh life unknown here,” and of the “rush and bang” of Americans—more than twenty million of them now—“with their rail-roads, electric telegraphs, mass movements and ridiculous dilettant phobias.” How many would “care for the thoughts of my head or the feelings of my heart”?

Margaret brought a Bible for the Brownings’ little boy as a parting gift from Nino, inscribed “
In memory of
Angelo Eugene Ossoli.” In the Brownings’ handsomely furnished parlor, the couple joked nervously about a prophecy in the Ossoli family that the sea “would be fatal” to Giovanni, that he should “avoid traveling” by water. Then Margaret turned to Elizabeth Browning, “with that peculiar smile which lighted up her plain, thought-worn face,” the poet would recall, and told her hostess, “I accept as a good omen that our ship should be called the
ELIZABETH
.”

But despite—or because of—her fascination with the mystical and the magnetic, properties she regarded as certain to be proven empirically one day, Margaret had long ago put aside the notion of luck, whether good or ill. She preferred to practice perseverance in the face of adversity. When Timothy Fuller had announced the move from the Dana mansion in Cambridge to the farm in Groton and her brother Eugene had complained that “our family star has taken an unfavorable turn” and “we shall never be lucky any more,” Margaret had made her own peace with the family’s change of fortune. “We are never wholly sunk by storms,” she chose to believe, even if “no favorable wind ever helps our voyages.”
Better to live by the words she had copied out from the
Aeneid
as a girl and explicated in an essay for her father, the determined oarsmen’s credo: “
Possunt quia posse videntur.
”
They can conquer who believe they can.

And yet, to those who reject the notions of luck and fate, the world still insists on offering up chance, accident. As Margaret, the prodigal who would return, boarded the
Elizabeth
at Livorno with her “treasures,” having posted by separate vessel a last affectionate letter to her mother in the event she did not survive the voyage—“and I say it merely because there seems somewhat more of danger on sea than on land”—she accepted the laws of chance.
Margaret knew, as she’d once taken the trouble to calculate and record in her journal, that “more than five hundred
British vessels alone
are wrecked and sink to the bottom
annually.
”

A steady wind drove the ship westward across the Mediterranean toward Gibraltar and the broad Atlantic. Margaret’s seasickness subsided by her fortieth birthday, May 23. Little Nino, almost two years old, made friends with the crew, with the goat that provided his milk, with Captain Hasty’s young wife, Catherine, with twenty-two-year-old Celeste Paolini, a nurse Margaret had hired after all, enabling the young woman’s return to a job she’d formerly held in New York.
Horace Sumner was already a friend. All six passengers had comfortable rooms toward the stern of the ship, in a covered exterior cabin with its own parlor and exercise deck. The breeze tossed Giovanni’s dark hair, which grew long as the days passed, curling into ringlets in the salty air.

But Captain Hasty was unwell. Fever and aches turned to smallpox, and after a seven-day sail and a night at anchor off Gibraltar, he was dead. There had been no chance for a doctor’s attention. Margaret recorded the funeral at sea, when all the ships in the blue harbor raised their banners in the late-afternoon sun—“Yes! it was beautiful but how dear a price we pay for the poems of the world.”
She did her best to console Catherine Hasty. The
Elizabeth
was doused in sulfur and quarantined; no one could board or leave the ship during the required week in the harbor, spent waiting to see if anyone else on board contracted the illness.

Under the command of first mate Henry Bangs, the
Elizabeth
sailed onward, now over open ocean. Two days out, Nino, who had visited Captain Hasty in his sickroom before smallpox was confirmed, became ill, his body and face covered with pustules, his eyes swollen shut. The vaccine administered by the careless doctor in Rieti had been ineffective. Suffering high fevers, the child wandered once again “between the two worlds.” But he was stronger now than he’d been the previous summer. When Margaret and Catherine Hasty sang to him, Nino waved his puffy hands in time to the music. On the ninth day, Nino “
could see
” again. The boy’s swift recovery, the disappearance of the pockmarks from his face, brought comfort to the grieving Catherine Hasty. She had never known “two people happier or more devoted to each other & their child” than Margaret and Giovanni. Although she’d seen them quarrel once over Nino’s care, she had also watched Giovanni draw Margaret into an embrace and calm his anxious wife, telling her “I wish we could always think the same thing—& I never could differ from you, if it were not that baby’s life depends on it.”

No one else on board succumbed to the illness, and the
Elizabeth
drifted lazily westward in a midsummer stillness at midocean. Casting her thoughts ahead to arrival in the old New World, Margaret might have recalled the last summer she’d stayed in Concord, inhabiting her sister’s house all on her own, a welcome visitor to the Emersons and Hawthornes: “I feel cradled,—with me the rarest happiest of feelings,” she’d written to Cary Sturgis. “I am borne along on the stream of life.”

Neither chance nor accident, but only time, the duration of a transatlantic crossing, prevented Margaret from receiving the letter Waldo Emerson had finally posted to her in April, just before she left Florence. But this was fortunate. Margaret did not have to read the advice of yet another dear friend who’d fallen under the influence of what she’d come to think of as “the social inquisition of the U.S.”
Waldo had joined the chorus recommending that she “stay in Italy, for now.” He offered to do the work of selling Margaret’s book for her in America, as he had for Thomas Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus,
and he marshaled his eloquence to press the “advantages of your absenteeism” and a continued residence abroad: “not only as adding solidity to your testimony, but new rays of reputation & wonder to you as a star.” No letter at all would be better than reading Waldo’s oblique, subtly reproachful reference to her changed state: “but surprise is the woof you love to weave into all your web.”

Margaret could remember instead Waldo’s several letters written from London and Paris, urging her to return with him to America, expressing at last the outright affection she had longed to hear from him: “Shall we not yet—you, you, also,—as we used to talk, build up a reasonable society . . . and effectually serve one another?” She could remember that Waldo’s vision of a future life, an afterlife, had included her: “When we die, my dear friend, will they not make us up better, with some more proportion between our tendencies & our skills; that life shall not be such a sweet fever, but a sweet health, sweet and beneficent, and solid as Andes?”

Waldo’s words, if she remembered them, might have brought some comfort as the wind picked up, blowing the
Elizabeth
rapidly past Bermuda on July 14, then close to port at New York on the evening of July 18—and then as night fell, the novice Captain Bangs all unwitting, beyond. Nino and Giovanni had to be Margaret’s first thoughts when, at four in the morning on July 19, the
Elizabeth
ran aground off Fire Island, well north of their intended destination. Here, along the narrow southern rim of Long Island, there was no safe harbor, only shallow waters and treacherous shoals; no rescue party, only a lifeboat beached near a distant lighthouse and practiced scavengers on shore who would rather pillage under cover of darkness the flotsam of merchant vessels blown off course by storms and wrecked on Long Island’s sandbars than aid in the dangerous rescue of passengers.