The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (17 page)

“And if he does?”

“Then I'll not do it. Not now, anyway. Not so long as we are in Canterbury with you.”

She looked sternly at me. “I guess I can't stop you from asking. But don't act as if this portrait is anything exceptional, or an enthusiasm, or anything of the sort. If you arouse him on the matter, he'll turn against it!”

“Dear Sophy, I'll be most matter-of-fact.”

I said nothing more about Mrs. Philleo for some time.

But never again while we stayed in Canterbury did I pass that old schoolhouse manse without a shudder of apprehension and sorrow. Yet to me and to Tom the people of Canterbury were kind and, many of them, grateful patrons. After a painfully slow start, people eventually started to arrive from surrounding communities as well. Word of mouth passed quickly, Tom posted more handbills, and I worked in my cottage studio from six to ten hours a day.

My likenesses became commonplace enough for me to approach Timothy on the subject of Mrs. Philleo's portrait. He was, of course, hesitant at first. But I answered his queries and he seemed to believe that I had not singled Mrs. Philleo out for any provocative purpose.

“Any likeness my humble efforts might produce for family purposes,” I assured him, “shall never compete with the public portrait of such a fashionable and eminent painter as Mr. Alexander!”

Secretly, however, I believed that here was a woman whose portrait I might be able to paint so as to supersede perdurably the currently revered likeness. Not that the earlier portrait was weak or unworthy of the attention it received, having long been hailed and touted at lectures and meetings of abolitionists. I believed, rather, given the full account I now had of Prudence Crandall's disturbing history in Canterbury, that Mr. Alexander had missed something—some personal strength or force that his sitter had possessed and that I might now capture.

The true difficulty would be that Mrs. Philleo herself was not fond of any kind of public display. I therefore approached her stepson Calvin first, when he was home between voyages to the West Indies. To be brief, I suggested to him that I might do a miniature of himself for his stepmother's sake, he approved, and he soon grew comfortable in my company. I then discovered that he favored the idea of a likeness of his stepmother for family purposes, and would be happy to purchase one.

I would have been willing to undertake my study of this remarkable woman without compensation, but to avoid arousing any suspicions I charged my usual fee. Mrs. Philleo eventually sat for me twice, but between these lengthy sittings I spent much more attention on her portrait than on any likeness I had ever done to that point. In the cosy privacy of my studio in our cot, I lavished my best efforts, everything I had learned, upon that single work.

While she sat for me, I did not bring up that violent old affair in Canterbury. Still, I came to understand from our conversations something of her life, her labors and hopes, since the Philleos had been driven out of Canterbury and into the far reaches of New York—well above the canal route between Utica and Rome and into a twenty-acre farm in the settlement of Booneville, at the foot of the Adirondack mountains. As I understood her, it was during her time in Booneville that she discovered more than enough of her husband's fallibilities; nursed him through his recovery from a seizure and fall into the fireplace (a terrible accident that left his flesh tremendously inflamed, his face disfigured, his left eye useless); and nursed a beloved stepdaughter through consumptive attacks that ultimately led to her death. If Mrs. Philleo's life had been hard, she was still invincible, for she spoke of her desire to begin all over again in Illinois where family property was even then being improved by her brother Hezekiah. It was this invincibility, I say, this obdurate strength, that I hoped to capture in my portrait.

As we spoke of her efforts to rebuild her life, it became clear to me that I had happened into Canterbury and was painting her portrait in that brief interval, when she was about forty years of age, between removals to the West. This was neither the first nor last time during my peripatetic years that I was struck by something fatal in the coincidence of my own travels and the peregrinations of others, often others whom we not only met, Tom and I, but whom I painted and who had some influence on my life and work. I was not then, nor have I ever been, a deeply religious woman, but in this instance, as in several others, I could not dismiss the impression of something almost preternatural in these conjunctions, some power—deity, angel, muse?—that guided my way. Such intuitions do not bear much thinking or talking about. Every reader will have instances of her own to recall and thereby understand me.

My portrait of Mrs. Philleo catches her in a moment of full, womanly maturity. This time her dress was astonishingly simple. There were no imbecile sleeves padded out, nothing boyishly youthful about her unadorned face—as presented in Mr. Alexander's likeness of seven years ago. No, her dress was stark and black, her hair natural, uncapped, unbonneted, cut straight around, and pulled back. And I added no conventionalisms of pillar or drapery. But here, as I say, was the face of a
woman
, with its early lines of character and experience and its firm glance of indominitability and self-sufficiency. No timorous paleness and no enigma teasing about the lips this time. It was the face of a woman who had seen much trouble, who lived amidst trouble still, but who had come through it, and would come through again and again. The face of a woman I admired. I would have given anything for Mr. Spooner to tell me whether my portrait of her were true and enduring. But I had to give it over into the family, as agreed; it was not to be exhibited.

T
OM, UNFORTUNATELY
, had been growing more apprehensive with every week and month of our stay in Canterbury. We had no news of Mr. Dudley's death or of any investigation into it. I could see that Tom was restless and dared not stay in one place for too long, fearing that somehow he had been found out and a manhunt—of which he would be completely ignorant—was afoot. He kept his plans to himself, however, but it could not escape me that he was carefully saving much of his portion of our earnings.

By the fall, I believe it was in late September of 1841, Tom could no longer tolerate his ignorance of the Dudley affair, so he finally wrote a letter to Mr. Dana inquiring, merely, whether there might be even now a case against Mr. Dudley.

By the return post Mr. Dana informed him that police investigators had discovered, through information offered by Matron at the Home for Fallen Women, that one Allegra Fullerton claimed to have been abducted by Mr. Joseph Dudley for immoral purposes; indeed, in past issues of
Friend of Virtue
Dudley had been included on a list of secret libertines holding the most respectable reputations in the eyes of the world. Since that time, Mr. Dana explained, investigators had been trying quietly to gather evidence against Dudley, but the efforts had ceased upon word of his death. Further, Mr. Dana himself had little choice when asked by the authorities but to tell them of my removal to the Newspirit Community and of Tom's to the Lowell manufactories. Once our sudden disappearance had become clear to the investigators, they were, it is not too difficult to understand, most anxious for an interview.

This intelligence unsettled us deeply. And yet another factor spurred our departure. The Lord knows how such things get started, but somehow a rumor went about Canterbury that I had fled Boston to save a scandalous reputation. I knew nothing of such gossip at first and only wondered why sitters no longer approached me and others suddenly shunned me in the street. But the malicious rumor finally reached Timothy and, through Sophy, me. Sophy denied whispers on all fronts, but Tom and I knew that by leaving quietly we would save my sister and brother-in-law more embarrassment, as much as ourselves, and further Tom's wishes as well. Once again, therefore, we poised for flight and had only to decide on a safe destination.

Mr. Dana also informed Tom that he had recently been in Hartford for his marriage to Miss Sarah Watson, and that he knew of Canterbury, from travels and associations in Connecticut. Tom, therefore, began to fear that the authorities would soon be closing in.

“Why can't you, Allegra, return in relative innocence—make a clean breast of it for yourself—and approach Mr. Dana. After all, you were Dudley's victim, and my hands alone are stained with the man's blood. Why should not his horrible crime come out after all? Your treatment at his hands and your desire to help your brother and companion would be understandable—a misjudgment alone that you now see more clearly. I'll then flee on my own, and you won't even know where I've gone. You wouldn't be able to tell them anything of me. Surely your friend Mr. Dana would offer you his advice and protection once more.”

Tom, however, was at a loss to decide upon a safe destination for himself, and, moreover, I felt again the complicity of my vengeful folly in Dudley's death. So I could not agree to abandon him to such dangers as he now faced.

FOURTEEN

To Springfield and beyond
Mr. Stock tells a curious tale

T
om and I, therefore, discussed our opportunities and dangers, as they now appeared to us. I recalled to him what Mrs. Philleo, during her sittings, had said to me about her own flight from Connecticut to New York. She and her husband had chosen to leave New England itself and try their luck in the countryside, out by canal boat, to distant reaches beyond the Hudson.

Some sort of similar journey began to intrigue us now. We might make a full harvest in likenesses of the multitudes who tour the falls of Trenton and Niagara. And the landscape along the Mohawk I understood to be particularly glorious, a painter's paradise. But we knew only that we had to travel beyond Connecticut, where we were now known to be, and beyond the investigative authorities of Massachusetts.

“The railroad through to Albany is not yet opened, Allegra,” Tom reminded me. “And we are a long, costly journey from those sublimities beyond the Catskills.”

“Length of journey is the advantage of it!” I said. “And isn't the railroad to Albany due to be completed soon?”

“Can anyone say for certain? In July they bridged the Connecticut and quickly completed the line up the Westfield river. They are open, I understand, as far as Chester, and construction continues apace all along the remaining line. The rumor is that they are pushing to complete the road to Albany by year's end. But we can't count on it, and we can't stay here waiting. We may have to endure the bone-jarrings of the stage and the alarums of public houses.”

Within a week Tom grew so anxious that we decided any movement was better than staying put and exposed. So we would earn our way west even as the railroad opened before us.

That October we gathered our belongings, took leave of our generous hosts, and took the return stage for Providence. Our plan was to travel right through Boston and Worcester and alight in Springfield. There we would resume our traffic in portraits and, in fair seasons, slip away gradually westward as patrons began to thin out in the villages along the ever-lengthening rail line.

W
E WERE PLEASED
with Springfield from the first—a pretty town situated on the east bank of the grand Connecticut, with a handsome bridge spanning the more than one thousand feet across the river to West Springfield. Here were mills, tanneries, and the largest manufacturing armory in the nation, but also many elegant private residences and buildings, to say nothing of the beautiful common with its fountain at Court Square. We had long since learned to avoid public houses whenever possible because of the noise of travelers continually coming in and going out and being called for their boats or stages before daylight. So we put up at the Connecticut Hotel and the following day found suitable rooms by answering to announcements in the
Washingtonian
. But we were so cautious and inconspicuous for a week or two that business was slow in coming. More than once we were hungry, yet we had to guard against the slightest appearance of indigence and make every respectable appearance abroad. And we soon discovered that we had competitors. The most formidable was Mr. Joseph Whiting Stock—a man whose power of will and talent surmounted his chief disadvantage, viz., that he had been from age eleven paralyzed below the waist when an ox-cart, leaned against the side of a building, fell upon him.

But Mr. Stock proved congenial, and after we knew him a little he told us the story of how one of his physicians, Dr. Loring (himself a painter who had studied with Franklin White), had recommended that he take up painting and music to enliven his childhood of confinement to bed. I found his countenance pleasant, with large, mild eyes, a prominent but not disproportionate nose, and a firm jaw covered by a trim beard. His thick dark hair was parted neatly and combed to curl just below his ears. His neck and shoulders were sturdy, not frail as one might expect of a man crippled from childhood. He was a skilled and quick painter of landscapes as well as portraits. He worked on a large or medium canvas and would also make deft miniatures, which he frequently set beautifully in morocco or gold platings. He took an occasional pupil to supplement his income; Tom and I found him to be a shrewd man of business. But he was generous, as if he despised competitiveness as beneath him and trusted completely his own merit and skill.

A natural gentleman, Mr. Stock introduced us to persons of some distinction in Springfield. One evening, after his sister arrived to help him prepare for his journey, he invited Tom and me to an intimate supper in his rooms above the post office.

Mr. Stock showed himself to be a man of sentiment who enjoyed hearing and telling affecting stories garnered in his travels about New England. During the blancmange, he began a story that took us well into the evening and made Lucy, a woman of sensibility, weep.

It seems that once, in a village he did not name, a still lovely woman in her forties had heard that a painter, Mr. Stock, had taken rooms for a portrait studio at an inn on the stage line. He referred to this lady only as Mrs. L.

“When she came to me,” he told us, “she was wearing a dress of black velvet, a lace collar falling over a white embroidered chemisette. On her breast, a gold pin. Around her neck, a black mourning cord woven out of some departed's hair. And into her belt she had thrust a gold pen, as if it were a rapier. She wanted for her attributes a red book in one hand, and a Carolina Rose in the other.

“Her portrait,” I asked, “was perhaps to be the story—her pen and book, so to speak—of such dangers as she had discovered in love?”

“Something of the sort, I believe,” Mr. Stock answered. “You may judge better for yourself once you hear her story. Let me say at this point that I did not stint, therefore, in portraying, I must admit, her unnerving spirit and beauty. Her hair was as dark and full as one half her age, and it was all her own hair. Her dark eyes flashed a vigor I was unable to capture fully on my canvas. There was about her beauty, nonetheless, a strange melancholy unlike anything I have quite seen. Neither shall I ever forget her story, told to me finally during her long sitting. You see, I took the utmost care in rendering her likeness.” He paused to glance at his sister, who appeared to be in delicate health. But Lucy sat calmly, hand on her chin, looking pensively at the table top. It struck me that she had heard this tale before. Mr. Stock continued, however, as if she had not.

“I found out from the innkeeper's wife that Mrs. L. had inquired of me and had decided on the commission only after she understood that I had been crippled since childhood. Perhaps she took a certain unnecessary pity upon me, as people sometimes do, but I think rather she wanted to be sure that her portraitist would not presume to develop a romantic interest in his subject. For I can only imagine her experience to have been that men invariably developed such interest.

“The innkeeper's wife also told me that Mrs. L. had come down from the hill-farm where she at that time lived in virtual isolation with her daughters and husband. I found it all very curious, and at first she would not respond to my simple questions about her farm and children—you know, the sort of harmless badinage in which we portraitists engage our sitters. Instead, she turned the tables and asked me how I came into my profession.

“So I told her the story of my accident in youth and of how I had managed to overcome my infirmity and get about as well as any limner. After taking up drawing and painting, you see, I had been engaged to do anatomical drawings for another physician who took pity on me and invented a type of chair on wheels, with handles for steering. This device, I explained, had delivered me from my long confinement. Indeed, it did not take me long to so far improve my condition that I was able to dress myself, get into the chair without assistance, and move about the first floor of the Springfield house where I was born. With this conveyance, I assured her, I had traveled extensively from 1836. Moreover, I soon discovered that this conveyance was readily placed onto a railway carriage, thereby releasing me to work in Wilbraham, Hartford, New Haven, Boston, and New Bedford, among other towns and ports.”

It struck me as he spoke that the amount of work he accomplished in his condition was inspiring, but it was no more so than Julian's friend Fitz Lane, who himself from infancy got about only on a pair of crutches as a result, so they say, of eating an Apple-Peru plant in his father's garden. I came to attribute Mr. Stock's productivity to his keen ability to sense the first hint of dwindling patronage wherever he worked and move on, to his personal discipline, and to his sister Lucy—a mild and lovely woman who had at first accompanied him in his travels and helped in uncountable small and significant ways.

“Perhaps,” he continued, “such candor on my part helped her ultimately to speak with equal candor to me. As you well know, Mrs. Fullerton, there is no explanation or predictable pattern to the way our sitters come to tell us things they might not tell others, or the way, for that matter, some remain resolutely reticent.

“The point is that she came to trust me. I sometimes think it is my infirmity that helps people come to believe in my discretion, my powers of sympathy, or my heightened understanding, if you will. People often seem to tell me their ambitions, their joys, their troubles.” He laughed. Lucy looked up and smiled.

“Be that as it may, Mrs. L.'s story touched me deeply. She grew up a simple farm girl, not poor. Her father was a hard-working and prosperous enough man, and he insisted that all his children contribute to the prosperity of the family. One night in the village there was a dance, however, and Mrs. L., then in the bloom of maidenly beauty, attended along with many of her friends.

“Two young men, students at Harvard College, who happened to be adventuring about during their vacation, came into the village and heard about the dance, either from someone or from the sound of young people dancing and singing in the hall. They insinuated themselves into the crowd and the more forward of the two, I shall call him Mr. F., saw Mrs. L., or Miss O. at the time, and fell immediately under her charm. She agreed to dance with such a fine-looking young gentleman, and before she knew it these two, by turns, became her partners to the exclusion of others. She must have been so taken, as any girl would, by the attentions of two such bright, attractive, well-bred young fellows that she could not bring herself to shun them for the attentions of the more familiar young men.

“As fate would have it, however, the other young man, Mr. L., found himself so smitten by her that he could not leave the next day as they had planned. They stayed in the village and Mr. L. sought Miss O.'s company continually. ‘He was as straightforward as he was handsome,' she told me as she sat before my canvas. ‘I was quite flattered and excited by all the attention. In brief, he declared his love, or as he put it, his desperate love, and told me of his life and family in Boston. They were wealthy beyond anything a farm girl like me could have imagined,' she said. ‘I felt as if I were in a fairy tale. My feelings soon grew from the mere enjoyment of his flattery, to infatuation, to love on my part as well, and we determined to marry.'

“Of course,” Mr. Stock explained, “his family wanted no part of such a match, believing that their high-spirited son merely had become enchanted by his youthful enthusiasm for her inordinate beauty. But the young man left his parents in Boston, married her anyway, and then returned with her to Boston and established themselves in a beautiful home on Beacon Street with a fashionable view of the Common. As mistress of this establishment, she was provided with all the accoutrements of her new position: gowns, jewelry, works of art, everything suitable to one in her new station in life, everything to give her joy.

“Soon she had a child, a son, within their first year together, but it was not long—it must have been two or three years later—before her devoted husband took ill and died.”

I felt a harsh flash of sympathy strike my heart for another young wife who suddenly lost her beloved husband. But Mr. Stock continued without pause.

“If there was now no animosity from his friends and family, neither was there friendship nor love. Moreover, although her husband had been of old Boston family, he counted among his friends the usual assortment of parvenus and pretenders who cannot go back more than twenty-five or fifty years in their ancestry without stumbling, much to their chagrin, upon a butcher, a tailor, a blacksmith, or some other merely respectable mechanic. And of course these people, particularly, now regarded her in bleak light.

“She soon grew lonely in her big house in the city and decided it would be best for her and her son to return to the place of her birth. She put the Beacon Street house up for sale and took only a few items she could not bring herself to leave behind: a crystal chandelier and matching crystal wall sconces, several sets of china, some clothes, and a few personal items.

“From then on her life was to change in every way. She returned to the farm, but in the few years she had been away, her parents had died as well. In the absence of other living children, they had left the farm to a valued, long-time farm worker, one Mr. K., an uncouth, uneducated man, but he agreed to take them in, at least for a time. She did not wish to impose on anyone else. He was the kind of man she had known all her life before the Boston years, and he was, as she said, remarkably handsome in his coarse way. Without detail, she told me that out of her dire circumstances and her attraction to him she married Mr. K.”