Miss Fuller (8 page)

Then some shells, several of the skate’s egg-sacs he had promised — they looked like enormous black beetles with horns on both ends — and drift-wood, sea-polished stones, sea-gull feathers, and smelly pieces of kelp came out of the crate. There was still something large under the straw, which Henry now gently swept off with his hand. He pulled the large box out.

It was a lap-desk, made of pine or some other deal-wood, with blonde fruit-wood veneer badly damaged. A green square of tooled leather, held down by dimpled bronze carpet tacks, had cracked and peeled away in strips from the slant top; the bronze latch was loose because, Henry explained, a picker had pried it open with a knife. As Anne looked over his shoulder, he lifted the lid: inside was a spilt-out bottle of brownish ink and a huge stain, like dried blood, that covered the bottom of the desk box. A pen with its nib missing, the cork to the ink bottle, some blotting scraps, a button, a litter of sand and shells, and several drawing-pins rattled about. And there was a well-stained pile of manuscript pages, covered in large writing.

Carefully, she reached in and picked up the pages — the bottom sheaf stuck to the wood, and as she pulled it up, it tore slightly and left a smudged shadow of paper. It seemed that all these were pages of a letter, a private letter, addressed to “Sophie.” At the very top, in urgent block letters, was written:
IF FOUND, THIS LETTER IS FOR SOPHIA HAWTHORNE IN CONCORD MASSACHUSETTS. M.F
.
OSSOLI
. Similar printing was partly visible through the ink stain on the bottom page as well:
DEAR SOPHIE, THE SHIP
[
BLOT
]
IF
[
BLOT
]
TOW
[
BLOT
]
PRAY MY NINO
[
BLOT
]
NOT FRIGHT
[
BLOT
]. 18
JU
[
BLOT
]
LO
[
BLOT
]
M
.

“Have you read it?” she asked her brother.

“No, how can you ask? It’s for Mrs. Hawthorne.”

She placed the papers carefully back in the desk. “It says ‘Concord’ — she must not have known they moved to the Berkshire hills. Did Miss Fuller write to you, ever, from Europe?”

“Once or twice. I have the last one here — I just got it out of my piles of papers yesterday.”

It was dated June of 1849. “Rome was under siege by French troops when she wrote this,” said Henry as he handed it to her.

Dear Henry,

Horace has sent me 3 of the 5 installments in
Sartain’s
Union
Magazine
of your astonishing account of hiking the woods in the north & climbing magnificent Ktaadn. It is likely he sent me all 5, tho’ I received but 3; the mail here is frightfully uneven because of the war — or, I should say,
wars
, as they arise across the Continent. (We have hopes yet for Poland!) I hear in your voice the voice of home, the voice of the pine-trees themselves, in these sentences — they are a thrilling testament to your deepest soul, to what you call the Wild. There is an altogether different mood here, dear Henry, the chaos of hope turned to despair & betrayal. All is going very badly with the Revolution as you know if you read my dispatches. We are under daily bombardment, & the spectre of death is everywhere. But we cannot lose faith in the rising star of Liberty, calling to the Good Wildness within us all — Wild Liberty that answers from soul to soul, that will knit us into a better, voluntary society of free men & women. I hear so little news of home — Mr E has not written once since his visit last year to England, when he did not venture south to see me, after all — & I miss you all & the peace & concord of Concord. But my spirit has found its sphere of action, its call to witness. Please, please, dear Henry, write to me & give me your news. In haste, Your sincere friend,

MF

“I didn’t write back,” said Henry. “I was cross with her about not understanding. About the Wild. She was always mis-using my words and the words of others, bending them to her own meanings.”

“Something no one else has ever done.”

“Well yes, of course — I can’t think why it irked me so.”

“It’s all right, Henry.” Anne touched the lines of writing on the page delicately. “I like her hand. It’s so grand and forceful! Not the least bit lady-like, I’m afraid.”

“She was short-sighted. I think that’s why she wrote such a large hand.”

Anne held up Henry’s letter next to the one in the desk. “A letter is a very
live
thing, isn’t it?”

“When I went over to see Jove, the day I came home, I meant to talk to him about the desk and the letter to Mrs. Hawthorne. Somehow I thought he might like to deliver the letter and visit the Hawthornes with me.”

“I could go! I want to see the mountains —”

“But I never even told him about this letter. It was strange. I couldn’t.”

He told Anne about Emerson’s planned “Memoirs” and also about the money that had never been sent to the Ossolis.

“Were they punishing her?” Anne asked.

“I don’t think so. They wanted her to come home. We all wanted that.”

“Indeed. I’m afraid I don’t see why.” Anne was surprised to find herself taking Miss Fuller’s part. “No one wanted her to marry an Italian, so they wouldn’t want to meet him either, would they?”

“They wanted everything to be proper — up to standard. It would be best for the child,” said Henry.

“He was an Italian child, wouldn’t he be best living in Italy?”

“He was also American. All Americans are best living here.”

She rubbed the tabby’s head, those two almost-bald spots in front of her ears. A purr rumbled out, but then Anne clutched the cat so close she struggled and jumped free with a squawk.

“Can I go with you to see the Hawthornes?”

“I need to write to them first.”

Henry wrote the letter that day. It was another week before the reply arrived.

In that week, at a picnic, Anne decided which of the two farming brothers she preferred: It was Thomas, the elder. She said nothing to Mother or Sissy, but she did tell Dolly Allan.

“How do you know you like him best?”

“He is going to have the farm when his father dies, and Henry likes talking to him about threshers and rotation and all the advanced ideas for farming. He admires Henry and he is the
only
person I’ve ever seen Henry explain his pencil inventions to — the ground plumbago, you know, for printing. Henry says Thomas is a ‘coming man.’ He also likes my drawings.”

“I don’t suppose he’s at all handsome.”

“So he is! You know he is! And he smells wonderful.”

“Annie!”

“He does — like hay and burnt toast. And sometimes peppermint.”

Lenox, 18th August ’50.

My dear Henry,

Glad as we must always be to hear from you, this occasion tests even that felicity. Mrs. Hawthorne has been saddened by the death of “La Signora Ossoli,” as have I. We offer up our condoling to the crêpe and grosgrain of mourning in which all Concord doubtless has draped herself since the news of her daughter’s final fall.

However, that is “as far as it goes” — as the good pig farmer who lives down the road says.
This
Berkshire Hog will not go a-snuffling in the dirt to snout out scrips and scraps.

To put it plainly: Neither my wife nor I has any wish to receive, and most certainly will not read, the letter you describe. Do oblige me by disposing of it in the nearest stove. I can only wish you had not troubled to fish it out from the sea.

Do you think me harsh? No doubt you do not know the worst of what we know, of her irregular life, in Italy and before. In our days in Concord, she was merely a Transcendental heifer, and tho’ we were fond of her as one of our own and endured her posturings as those of a sister, the wide world showed her for what she truly was. There was a
Jew
in New York who made her his mistress, on good authority. As for Italy, you all may trick up as a legitimate, even aristocratic, marriage and family this disgraceful business, of a bastard child fathered on her by an Italian rowdy with a fantastic name, but I shall not join you. She would have done better to have gone over to Rome entirely and entered a nunnery. Foolish Ophelia.

Thrice in recent months I have been obliged to intercept letters from that woman to my wife. With her permission — and her tender heart made her give it at first with difficulty — I have destroyed them unread.

When next I hear from you, I hope it will be on a topic more inclined to foster our mutual friendship. By all means visit our hovel in the hills, provided you come empty-handed.

N. Hawthorne

“My goodness,” Anne said. “This is a shocking thing.” She handed the letter back to her brother. “I suppose he also means to be amusing. But I don’t understand. Surely Miss Fuller was their friend?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “She was their friend, once — I thought they were all quite taken with one another. I often don’t understand these things. I thought she admired his writing, even to excess. Whatever could she have said, or done? I know that he is an anti-revolutionist, but I am
surprised that he would let a difference of opinion affect an old friendship.…”

“Mother says he is actually opposed to Abolition!”

“It’s not so simple,” Henry said. “Hawthorne despises slavery, just as he despises tyranny, but he also despairs. He thinks revolutions and Abolition are doomed enterprises — get rid of one form of slavery, and another will take its place — and so he mocks us all for hoping.”

“What will you do with the letter?”

“What he says — get rid of it,” said Henry.

“But it is addressed to
her
, and
she
does not say that.”

“I suppose I could send it, and let him do what he likes —”

The Canary-bird’s cage hung in the attic’s east window. Anne poked a finger in, preened the bird’s head, and let it gnaw the finger delicately.

“What he likes may not be what she likes,” she said, “and in any case obviously he takes charge of their correspondence. I don’t think you should do anything with it now. Maybe in a few years he will soften, or she will write herself and ask for it.”

“I am uncomfortable having it around. It feels like a corpse, or like something stolen.”

“These are her Last Words.” She said it with the capitals.

“She wrote thousands and thousands of words, far too many words, one might say. I don’t want to be burdened, like a ghostly postman.
Margaret’s
ghost’s postman, I mean.”

“I read
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
. She does go
on, but I thought parts of it were wonderful. ‘Let them be sea-captains, if they will!’ ”

“Do you want to be a sea-captain?” said Henry.

“Certainly not. Ow!” The bird pecked too hard, and she pulled out her finger to suck it. “I want to paint and make botanical drawings and have seven children and when I go on a sea voyage, I hope the captain will be a good strong man who will keep me safe. But I still like that she wrote it. It’s a grand dream.” She wrinkled up her brow, almost comically, and then said, “But that’s a terrible tragic irony, isn’t it, that she was ship-wrecked? And
that
captain was a man.”

“Women are never logical.” Henry looked at Hawthorne’s letter again, puzzling. “Perhaps she didn’t praise his stories properly, to his way of thinking? He’s thin-skinned, you know. And as he says, he may be be appalled morally by her life.”

“Maybe he was, Mr. Nathan was, a Jew — we all heard of that, but that’s not so bad. I am sure she was not his mistress. Mr. Greeley would never have asked her to write for his paper if she were actually a bad woman!”

Henry smiled at his sister. “I’ll put it away for now. We won’t mention it to anyone. Let’s plan a walk tomorrow — I stored your trousers and hat and the rest of our gear in the shed at the old house. We can go to Fiddler’s Swamp and look for pitcher-plants.”
Anne married Thomas Bratcher shortly before Christmas. Their cottage occupied the bottom-land of the Bratcher farm’s big meadow. In hopes of escaping the damp, Anne set up her easel in the attic, but soon found she had little time for painting. The decorations she painted on the walls of the sitting-room clouded over, in a greenish black mould, during that first wet spring and summer — laughing, she and her husband scrubbed the walls down with lime. She was pregnant then, and laughing suited her. She laughed and sang, and even whistled when she was alone fighting the damp, repeatedly sifting the clotted flour, airing their clothes on the fence whenever the sun came through, and firing up the stove even in the worst heat, to keep the plaster from sagging and crumbling off the walls and ceilings.

She was herself as hot as a stove, an engine of heat, and she stayed strong until her final month, as it happened a very warm September. Thomas built a low seat for her by the spring, with a canvas awning, so she could sit in its shade with her feet in the fine sand of the gently bubbling cold water. There, during her final three weeks, she repaired to weep, gently, for the sorrows of the world. Dolly Allan was dying of summer fever on the lungs and Anne was not allowed to visit the sick-bed. Henry no longer talked to her in the old way or called her Annie. He did not ask her to draw and paint his plant and insect collections, and there was no more talk of Anne making illustrations for Dr. Jaeger’s insect encyclopedia. She would never travel
anywhere, not to Paris, certainly not to Tahiti. She would be lucky if her life as a farmer’s wife would permit her one trip a year to Boston. Her baby might be still-born, or blind; her husband would cease to love her; Sissy or Mother had said something unkind; a runaway slave had been seized in Boston and sent back to the Carolinas to be hanged; the red calf had sickened and died in the night.