Miss Fuller (16 page)

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 prostitutes, who worked nobly & 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 institution 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 Constitution & 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 scraping & 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 30
^th
. 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 passed, 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 circumstances. 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 passionately & 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 shore, 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 & reassurances.

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
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]
TOW
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PRAY MY NINO
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NOT FRIGHT
[
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]. 18
JU
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LO
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M
.

THREE

Shreds of thick tea-colored paper still stuck to the wood inside the lap-desk. Anne scraped 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 grass, 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 clustered 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.