Miss Fuller (18 page)

BOOK: Miss Fuller

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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
.

•
Sad bcs. not sad

•
Not Tragedy. Tr. large &
human;
this
nature
& not human, tho’ large

•
Sailors liked her, praised her,
loved
her

•
Sailors shaved almost bald. A mourning ritual of the salty fraternity?

•
Bolton, a sailor, has circled the world 2X. Orig. fr. Kentucky; likes Marseilles best bcs. cheap wine & wife there

•
Study rip currents and undertow. Visible sometimes even w/out gales — gales far out can cause a rip, or an undertow? Are they same?

•
Current running a pale green almost white w/lavender lights, sideways, parallel to shore

•
Candle in tide, swirl’d by waves like whelk-shell, or barber pole

•
2 buttons fr. Ossoli’s coat, jet, real but not
actual

•
Ellery & Arthur arrivd

26 Jul
.

•
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

•
All frantic for book ms

28 Jul
.

•
Women cant have the Wild within

•
Found & buried in sand a woman’s arm & hand. M’s? 7 Crow Brothers: The sister’s finger bone whittled to open the door

•
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

•
Sorry I never liked M

•
Crab shells, 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, shells, grasses, 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 cocked 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 Japanese 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 encumbered, yet striding through the boiling waves, and making it to shore.

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 Thoreau 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 assistance; 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
.

All errors and fancies are my own
.