The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (25 page)

He had simply handed me a copy of the previous invitation for submissions with a note scribbled in his own hand attached. “We might submit this one, once sufficiently finished, next year to the Athenaeum, don't you think?” was all it said. The invitation read:

Sarah Clarke, that acquaintance from my earliest days in Boston and a mutual friend with Miss Fuller, had been exhibiting in the Athenaeum since 1832, and I had seen her
View of Kentucky Beech Forest
there only this year. She too had encouraged me to exhibit when I had called upon her recently at her West Street studio. So my courage and ambition to produce fine work and to place it before the most discriminating audiences in competitive situations grew apace, with, above all, such moments of encouragement from Mr. Spooner.

I had only begun to portray a possible facial expression, but Mr. Neal, after ascertaining that it was a work of mine, simply said, “Ah, a young woman recalls in the privacy of her chamber those men—desirable and undesirable—who had once centered their hearts on her.”

I felt my face flush because he of course recognized it as my self-portrait, and because, though I had not intended the painting to speak of such reminiscence, it suddenly occurred to me that Mr. Neal might have somehow caught what the woman's vague expression in the mirror was beginning to betray.

Rachel Ruysch in Her Studio
, he said, referring to a Netscher print I had once seen: the woman artist blessed by trumpeting angels who wreathe her hair in laurel as she paints flowers upon a somberly undercoated canvas. He laughed. “Yes, yes, Mrs. Fullerton—and why should you not aspire to the European tradition of women artists? Katherina van Hemessen (or her master Margaretta von Eyck); Giovanna Fratellini; Onorata Rodiana, the maiden warrior-painter! …”

Even as he spoke, Mr. Neal poked and pottered about the studio and found another exercise Mr. Spooner had set for me, in this case a pencil study in form and composition. The objects in the sketch had come from one of our long walks in the surrounding country—Mr. Spooner, Gibbon, and I. Before the oaken door of an old house stood a family sleigh. Through its slats sprouted the growth of a summer's sunshine. Beyond the sleigh, an old barn, its sides stained with the dung of decades, leaned against beams placed to brace it.

“Yes,” he said. “The composition is quite refined, isn't it?” He glanced at Mr. Spooner, who smiled, and then turned the drawing about to observe it from a number of angles.

“But you see, don't you, Mrs. Fullerton, the way narrative emerges as well? It is so with everything you do?”

“Everything?” I asked, not knowing how to answer.

“Narrative,” Mr. Spooner offered, “seems to arise naturally out of her temperament.”

“I see,” he said and put the drawing down. “You know, Mrs. Fullerton, George has told me of certain episodes in your remarkable
peripeteia
. And I understand that you love the great English authors, that your mental companionship has been of a high order. Now, clearly you have a gift for narrative, as a product of your temperament, as George put it. Why not consider some day setting down a few of your adventures—whether as memoir or romance—to see what you can make of them, in all honesty, for the amusement and edification of others?”

“I'm afraid, sir, that however much I love to read when leisure arises, I'm no scribbler.” He laughed along with me. “What's more, Mr. Neal, I find that my days are quite full learning to paint and painting for my living. And why should one wish to compete in yet another field overcrowded with aspirants, mad scribblers all—these annual productions of tens of thousands of moral and religious tracts, of volumes of fiction and poetry, and most of it trash and nonsense, or written to the ten-chapter formula or some such external necessity?”

He glanced at Mr. Spooner again and smiled. “Some day, perhaps, I mean, Mrs. Fullerton. Some day when you achieve more leisure and would wish to turn it to advantage. It is the very presence of so much rubbish, as you say—and to speak nothing of the immense exhalation of periodical trash—that all the more requires a book of truth now and then. Every educated person knows that the most popular and lauded authors of one generation, but for the rarest of exceptions, are forgotten by the next, and the next, and on even unto the last. I should think it a flattering distinction to escape the admiration of the papers and periodicals. The overwhelming presence of mountebankery in American letters need not stop a woman of character and ability, Mrs. Fullerton.”

“Perhaps some day then, eh, Allegra?” Mr. Spooner said and smiled. “But for now the dear lady has her hands full. And she is learning what we all must learn: one achieves mastery not only by yielding to one's impulses but by gradually, patiently chipping away the stone wall that separates what one sees or feels from what one is capable of doing.”

“I would expect nothing less of you, George, than that you discover remarkable talents and nurture them,” Mr. Neal said, then turned again to me. “It was just a thought, to be considered in later years, Mrs. Fullerton. Allow me to send you some of my favorite American and European authors.” He chuckled and began picking through piles of studies which had collected from Mr. Spooner's pupils, passing through many, pulling out one from time to time for examination and, at intervals, commenting. All the while, Mr. Spooner sat in his favorite chair comfortably smoking a cigar, enjoying Mr. Neal's desultory commentary.

I
F I FOUND
such conversations pleasing and provoking, I nevertheless did not forget my former companion, and I was deeply troubled all these days in Boston at the prospect of never hearing from Tom again. My only consolation was a firm belief that by now he was well beyond the reach of all those who would detain him.

EIGHTEEN

Chas returns to me

A
fter Mr. Neal's visit, days went by in a rush of garnering commissions and working with Mr. Spooner. I also took in turn two pupils of my own, daughters of a merchant living in Roxbury not far from my own rooms. Mr. Stock had suggested to me that he often found the practice of taking on pupils lucrative. I had done a portrait of the merchant's wife, and she purchased the last of my garden landscapes begun at Newspirit.

I also had letters, or notes rather, from Chas Sparhawk, because as promised I sent him my new address. He arrived at my door during the third week after my return to Boston. At that very moment, about three o'clock in the afternoon on a Wednesday, I was engaged with my young pupils. So I asked Chas to dawdle on the settee with the newspapers while I finished the girls' lessons. As soon as they left, he caught me up. “I have you in my arms and my sight for two days, Allegra,” he said. “I've come all this way to be with you and you alone. Have you arranged it so, my dear?” I told him that I had kept my promise, but for one obligation briefly with Mr. Spooner the following afternoon. “All the rest is to be ours.”

“Then close your door—I've brought two bottles of the good farmer Johnston's vintage.” He drew a bottle out of the carpetbag he had carried in. “Glasses? Cups?” he said, holding the bottle high. “Anything will do.”

While he opened the bottle of very dark red wine, I went to the cupboard. I took out two cups, having no glassware as yet, and turned back to him. He had the bottle open and a wide grin on his face.

“Not settled in yet, I see,” he said. “And I'm sure you've been working hard every day. Today especially? I thought so.”

He handed me a cup half full of the wine. “Now, my dear, sit down and put your pretty feet up on that hassock there. Enjoy a draught.” I sat back and sipped the strong-tasting wine. “You should see the grog blossom on farmer Johnston's nose!” he continued. “A jolly bottleman who drinks this delicious stuff like mother's milk, and has been at it for about as long, I'd say. The old lady herself still lives with him and I suspect her for a bacchante, which is where he must have learned to imbibe.” He laughed and held out his cup toward me. “Mother's milk, you see!”

I sat with my tired legs outstretched while we drank off our first cup and he told me about his journey to find me. He soon poured a second draught for both of us and then sat down beside me and gazed into my eyes. His low voice now, the wine, my sitting after a long day dividing my time between commissions and lessons for the Misses Lewiston, contributed to my growing languor. I wanted more than anything just then to take a nap, whether in his arms or not hardly mattered. Yet I was also receptive to his presence, as if I were a gullible farm girl-turned-clairvoyant in one of his mesmerical demonstrations.

“Why don't we have supper at the Oyster House later,” he was saying. “Is that all right?”

As I closed my eyes and agreed, he put a hand gently on the back of my neck. I heard him stand up and move behind me. Then I felt both his hands lightly kneading my neck and shoulders. “Poor Allegra,” he said. “You are tired, aren't you?”

“Um,” I said. “You're putting me to sleep, Chas.”

“Oh I wouldn't want to do that just yet, my darling.”

He kissed the top of my head and I felt his hands slide softly down my shoulders and along my arms as he breathed into my hair. “I've missed you,” he whispered. “More than I've missed any woman.”

I heard myself murmuring, “I can't believe that, Chas.”

“Oh, but it's true, very true.” His voice seemed drowsy too now. “I'll just have to make you believe it.”

His hands began to pass lightly over me. I felt his lips on my neck, my ears. I lay my head back on the settee, my eyes still closed. He continued to murmur softly. I might have been asleep or in a half-dream, feeling by then only his fine large hands and the light random touches of his lips.

Then I felt him move around to the front of me, kneel down, and remove the empty cup from my hands. He gently reached beneath me, lifted me into his arms, carried me to the small bedchamber, and placed me softly on the narrow bed. I heard him open the single window over the street, and the dim street sounds rose with the warm air to wash over me. Far off, the driver of the fish cart from the city sounded his magical horn as he made his way among the streets.

Chas sat on the bed beside me, removed my shoes and massaged my feet—while I lay there without opening my eyes or speaking, as if in a waking sleep induced by pleasure and fatigue—and then began gently to undress me.

Soon he was caressing me with a soft relentlessness of moist lips and fingers, assuming every liberty of a husband, until I no longer wished to struggle against my desire.

I felt him stand up and remove his own clothes while I remained in a stupor of longing; then he sat down quietly beside me. I could smell his unclothed man's flesh now just as I heard, as if it in the distance, a humble bee stumbling in from the trellis beside the open window, flying heavily and drowsily around the room a moment, and returning to bungle and bump against the sash.

Then as if dreaming, I seemed to watch myself reach for his hair and pull his face up to mine. In the delirious minutes that followed, the humble bee continued stumbling against the sash—a mellifluous monody that, later still, accompanied Chas's strange sweet laughter of pleasure and happiness, and then followed us into sleep.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Chas called at the studio where I had promised to help Mr. Spooner varnish several paintings for exhibition. It was past the hour in the afternoon that I had agreed to meet Chas. We had planned that supper at the Oyster House which we had slept through the previous evening.

Mrs. Spooner, a bit unsettled, looked in to announce my visitor, “a singular looking gentleman who claims to know you.” I looked at the clock, felt suddenly ashamed, thwarted, and happy at once, and asked her if she'd mind letting Mr. Sparhawk in, “an old friend and painter himself.” He wouldn't mind, I explained, waiting while I clean up. Later, I apologized to her for having caused her, by my failure to be ready at an appointed hour, to endure this person in her home without her prior consent. It was a blunder that only a lady as generous as Mrs. Spooner would have allowed me to forget.

I presented Chas to Mr. Spooner, but I was surprised to discover that there was some repulsion between them at this meeting. I have at times observed between other persons, or between someone and myself, a similar immediate, unspoken dislike—some incompatibility of spheres—as if two people had lost their reason and become like animals of a species meeting on a woodpath and finding one another's scent all off. Then there seems to be nothing such souls thrown together by chance can do to overcome their instinctive repulsions. Unless both struggle mightily to deny their antipathy, there is no social emollient alone that can overmaster the unfortunate meeting. But is it not just as inexplicable when two meet and feel an innate liking for one another, as between Miss Fuller and me, or for that matter between Chas and me?

To circumvent the awkwardness in this instance, I set my materials aside rather too quickly and hurried Chas out the door and into the gig he had hired for Boston.

“So that's the great Mr. Spooner?” Chas said as he drove us hurriedly down the street. “I hadn't taken his measure, I now see, at our first encounter, brief as it was.”

“What on earth got into you, Chas? You were very nearly rude to him.”

“I can not suffer a fool—and a drunkard!—who would have the world believe he is above the rest of us.”

“You don't even know the man. He has been very helpful to me, but he always opens a bottle after a day's work.”

“A coxcomb!” he said and laughed.

“You've misjudged him entirely.”

“A doodle and a donkey. A puddinghead and a jack-pudding. An empty pantaloon!” He looked at me. “You're not laughing, Allegra. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'll wager he's tried to have his hand up your sweet skirts.”

“Oh, now I see. So that's it, my dear Chas. Don't be a ridiculous donkey yourself, a vulgarian. My relation to him is on entirely different grounds than those you suppose.”

“If you say so, my dear.”

“Why are men such blockheads?”

“Oh we can not help ourselves, when the prize over which we contend is so … delicious.” He smiled wickedly at me.

“And when you are so full of nonsense. As you can see, he is married. And I am no one's prize. But if you do care for me as much as you protest you do, you'll stop this ridiculous cant and become yourself again.”

He frowned. “Well, I admit I find it difficult to keep my senses about me where you are concerned. It was only something I thought I saw in the way he looked at you and addressed himself to you. Did you not see it yourself? I tell you, Allegra, there's something about the man, about his assumption or assurance or … whatever toward you that I don't care for.”

“Put all that out of your mind, then, you misprize him. He is not ‘Your Rival.' You and I have one another, for these few days.” He began to speak, but I reached over and placed a finger firmly against his lips. “I must say one thing more. I can not and I will not be with child. And I do not wish to marry, not any more than you do, Chas. Allow me to finish, please. We have forgotten ourselves two or three times now. It is all too easy a thing to do. But …”

“But!” he interrupted. “But!”

“But I never was with child during my marriage … for some reason no one can say … and I can not chance being with child now.

And I can not trust myself over to every charlatan with a remedy, with their ‘French Discoveries,' or their ‘Portuguese Female Pills.' …” He said nothing now. “Which is not to say we must give up on each other.”

He looked at me sternly, and then his face broke into a smile. “But to say we must take our pleasure otherwise, you mean.”

“Do you not agree?”

“If that's what you wish, and if you mean to deny only the one thing, I have known happiness in many another.” He looked away. “You don't take me for a man to force a woman, do you, Allegra?”

“If I did, I would not be here with you, Chas.”

Chas reminded me of another argument Mr. Neal had made that night after his lecture. Gibbon had asked him whether women who adopted his view do not come to despise all men as a sort of category—the Offending Sex. Merely by virtue of their being men.

“I do not find that to be true,” Mr. Neal had said, “if the man does not deserve it, in my travels and discussions with women of free thought.” Mr. Neal nodded to Miss Fuller. “There will, of course, be confusion about the expression of feelings, of love even, of longing, of lust, so long as we live in a benighted state that promotes inequality, and therefore contentiousness in any public examination of that inequality. Confusion, I mean, as to the proper expression of love, to say nothing of overtures to intimacy,
as if
they were categorically expressions of subjugation or disrespect. Confusion, to put it simply, in all the relations between the sexes, intimate and otherwise. But when love is
not
confused with the exercise of superiority or force over another, love then has the most salutary effect upon us poor human creatures.”

“Now, on our last night together,” Chas was saying, “let us take pleasure in that oyster dinner and in one another's company.”

“Fried oysters and champagne? Why not for once an extravagance?”

“If you wish, then, oysters and champagne it shall be!”

“And you don't leave until tomorrow in the afternoon, so let's improve the time.”

“And put that Devil Spooner behind us, my dear. You know, let me say this, your painting is very good, from what I observed in your rooms. You're beyond us now, well beyond all of us poor limners, who must cast about for such gross work as we can find. You needn't defer to this man any more.”

“Thank you, Chas,” I said. “I hope you are right about my painting. Mr. Spooner says that the true blasphemy is not to use one's gift, whatever the world may think of you. But only we ourselves can determine what we will make of it.”

“And you are making much of yours, my dear. Your Mr. Spooner is right on that point, I think. But if you had no gift I should be a happy man to keep you continually in pleasure … with child or without, if it comes to that.” He gave out a great laugh, and slapped the reins to hurry the horse.

I
DID NOT SEE
Chas Sparhawk again until September of that year. I grew ever more immersed in work and study. I dreamed of travel, too, of seeing the Italian masters in their original state. On a return trip from Portland to Boston, Mr. Neal gave me several books and encouraged me to “drink deeply at the fountain of Italian genius,” but neither he nor Mr. Spooner nor I could determine just how my own journey was to be managed.

They agreed that if one did not have the family means, as an Allston or a Trumbull had, then one would have to find a patron—merchants, lawyers, collectors, et cetera—for whom one would have to execute views and reproductions to order, in the manner of Morse; or, in the manner of Harding, simply earning your keep as you go. The latter they agreed might be too great a risk for a woman traveling alone. And was I not closer to the age and circumstances of a duenna than to be the object of one!

I did not feel bold about traveling in foreign lands on my own, but I never spoke of my apprehensions; I resolved not to let such feelings stop me should some means for study abroad arise. I saved everything I could from my modest commissions and my pupils, but I soon saw what a long road to adequate funds that would be.

My consolations, however, were substantial. Two occurrences in the course of the ensuing year I sensed even at the time would change my life irrevocably. The first I took to be ultimate proof of my master's trust in my abilities: Mr. Spooner asked me whether I would collaborate on a landscape he had begun on our travels (which I had recommended for their magnificent vistas) to the hill country in the region of Newspirit. Imagine the elevation of my soul when he asked me to join our signatures on the finished work!