Miss Fuller Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by April Bernard

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:

  Steerforth Press L.L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208,

  Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bernard, April.

  Miss Fuller / April Bernard. – 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58642-196-0

  1. Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850–Fiction. 2. Feminists–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.E7258M57 2012

  813′.54–dc23

  2012003390

  v3.1

  for Henry

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Author’s Note

  Other Books by This Author

  A Note About the Author

  ONE

  News of the wreck made everyone want to be up and going, doing something, talking, moving, to keep the knowledge from puddling and festering. It was a hot July, in the year 1850. Margaret Fuller, their old friend, together with her husband and young son, had been ship-wrecked and drowned, on their voyage home from Europe. No one in the Thoreau house had slept.

  “It’s Bedlam!” said Mother, as if the sight of Mr. Emerson coming up the path made it official. One went to see Mr. Emerson; he did not pay calls himself, and certainly not before breakfast. He dipped his massive head slightly as he came through the door, a Colossus visiting the Pygmies. Mother’s nose came up about even with his middle waistcoat button.

  Mr. Emerson had come to ask Henry to go from Concord to New York and then Fire Island, the site of the wreck, to claim the bodies and other remains. With luck, yet how ridiculous to speak as if luck could ever again be hoped for, Henry would find her book manuscript.

  Anne, his youngest sister, helped Henry pack his satchel. She always helped him if he let her. She tried to persuade him that as this was a delicate errand he would need her to accompany him.

  “The ocean may well have stripped her clothes,” she said.

  He said, “A dead woman is like any dead animal.”

  It had been nearly a decade earlier, when Anne was twelve years old, that she had first, as she said, “encountered” Miss Fuller. She and her oldest sister, Helen, sometimes still called one of the “girls” although she was well into her twenties, had traveled as guests of Mrs. Deaver on a special trip into Boston. Trips to Boston were the height of excitement, but Anne was always ready to go anywhere, even the next town. All other destinations were known to be inferior to Boston — including New York, Washington, and London — with the possible exception of Concord itself and the home of a distinguished relative, a judge, who lived on a promontory in Marblehead. Anne, adopted and by far the youngest in the family, looked forward to Marblehead — someday, they said, she would see it — with especial awe.

  Meanwhile, there were the reliable glories of Boston. The always fashionable Mrs. Deaver had purchased a subscription to something called “Conversations,” which title she pronounced with a self-conscious slowing and mouthing, as if the syllables were Italian: “Con-verr-sass-ee-on-es.” Mrs. Deaver had taken a European tour.

  For some time Miss Fuller had been “offering” Conversations, on topics of “general interest to ladies of culture,” usually at the Peabody home in West Street. But for this exceptional occasion, raising funds for a new progressive school, it was to be a larger gathering at the grander home of Mrs. Vaughn. There had been some confusion and embarrassment about whether or not the girls would need to purchase tickets, but Mrs. Deaver convinced their mother she was welcome to bring them along as guests. Anne was deemed just old enough to behave herself; Sissy, the middle sister, was nursing a slight cough, and had decided to stay at home. The cough may have been a convenience, as she was inclined to regard such outings as frivolous. Helen was perfectly polite but they were to know that she condescended by accepting the invitation. Their brothers John and Henry, meanwhile, had made the breakfast table raucous with predictable jokes about the dangers of the Thoreau girls “conversing.”

  “John ‘converses’ nineteen to the dozen,” said Helen crossly from her corner of the stagecoach, “and Henry in certain moods would talk over the last trumpet.”

  The railroad lines commencing to cross-hatch New England had not reached Concord quite yet in 1841. So it was the Boston stagecoach, on that day offering the unexpected luxury of no other passengers, that shielded them from the March sleet, as they were tucked up with blankets and hot bricks wrapped in burlap to warm their feet. Anne reached down to feel the heat from the bricks through her gloves.

  Mrs. Deaver inquired politely about their brothers’ school and Helen fibbed, saying that attendance was still growing, and they had great hopes for the summer term. There were no such hopes; the school was not making enough to pay and their brothers were exhausted by the work. Anne gamely seconded her sister’s remarks, as she often did, with a quiet, “Indeed.” This old-womanish habit she had picked up from one of her mother’s friends. When Anne needed to disagree, she applied equal economy of means. “Do you really think so,” without the interrogative lift, expressed a quiet nay without committing her to the labor and peril of voicing a counter-argument. Her family, who would have liked the argument much better, found this tiresome. No doubt that was the chief reason she persisted.

  Mrs. Deaver proceeded to “sell” them on their forthcoming treat.

  “The first time I went, in December, it was most elevating. The Peabody ladies have a little shop, completely refined, with hundreds of books and pamphlets. We met in the ‘book room,’ very cozy. I tried to just get the feeling of the thing, not as a participant of the Conversatione myself, just a learner, a student. Well, not knowing anything certainly did not restrain Mrs. Delapont; nor her cousin from New York. She opened all of her remarks with ‘In New York,’ so as we’d know. ‘In New York, the question of archaic architecture in private homes, especially broken columns à la grecque, is quite settled.’ In New York!”

  Helen smiled at Anne.

  “No one cared, it was entirely a different matter from what Miss Fuller was offering for our consideration, which I believe concerned the large spaces of a geometrically pleasing kind, as in the ancient Acropolis, which is built on the Golden Mean. Things in proportion, ‘the assistance they offer for thought.’ ”

  “Some people,” said Helen, “have been known to think perfectly well in meditation cells. Or prisons.”

  “Certainly, yes, but would they not have thought better and more, more widely, on the Acropolis? That’s just the sort of conversation one can run with, as it were, with Miss Fuller in the room. She’s got the force of large ideas, even if I’m not sure where the ideas lead because I don’t have the reading. Such vistas — Greek, which I believe Miss Fuller actually reads, and those heathen classical stories which are really so wise and not at all in contradiction to our own Bible if read rightly, as — allegories.”

  “Miss Fuller is, I believe, excessively educated?”

  “Dear me yes, her father trained her as if she had been a boy. It’s made her goggle-eyed and very odd, of course, but she is a female genius, certainly, though I can’t say if I know that she is a model of the New Woman, as Elizabeth Peabody claims, or something simply unique —. She speaks like a wonder, can quote anything at all.”

  “I trust that the slavery question will be addressed.”

  “Not this afternoon — more classics, I think. She does know so many languages. Greek, as I said, Latin, Italian, French, German, and I think so
meone said she was studying Hebrew, which seems peculiar.”

  “Henry says that we should all study American,” said Anne.

  Mrs. Deaver barked a laughing “Hah!”

  “Henry is our genius, especially Anne’s,” said Helen.

  “How droll,” said Mrs. Deaver. The girls should not worry about their dresses, she went on, as no one would expect them to measure up to Boston fashion. Country girls, she elaborated, might even be said to be in bad taste should they attempt to dress like city girls. She said that skirts were even wider than last winter and that the very latest thing was cuffs decorated with colored silk fancy-work sheathed in Bruges lace.

  Anne fingered her plain cuffs of dark red merino, the same fabric and color as the rest of her best coat and dress. Helen, in dark blue, moved her head in a way that could not quite be called “tossing” and looked out the window, apparently seized by a sudden interest in melting snow.

  “Surely,” she said, staring out, “we should prefer quality and enduring modest beauty of dress to fashionable fripperies.”

  As Mrs. Deaver adjusted her shoulder cape, revealing her own splendidly embroidered and lace-covered dress cuffs, she demurred, slightly: “I was not speaking of fandoodles and bric-a-brac, dear. Certainly nothing like those turban tassels on Angela Sawyer’s aunt when she visited in the fall.”

  The memory of the tassels, and the head that had so unwisely worn them, allowed them all to share in the delight of a shocked pause. Helen arranged herself and embarked on a summary of Mr. Garrison’s most recent editorial in the Liberator, which editorial both of her listeners had in point of fact already read. Although she accepted a chicken wing from the hamper, she did not pause to take a bite until they passed the Common, when she at last took account of the food she had been using as a sort of conductor’s stick.

  The Vaughn house occupied most of an entire block; Anne discarded her first impressions that it was a municipal hall or a theatre, and took in the fact that it was an actual residence. Mrs. Deaver looked suddenly, ludicrously, shy, as if the granite of her face were visibly eroding to shale and about to slide away. At least the sleet had stopped; the street and steps were dry. Helen tugged at her gloves with an air. If she could gird up, then so could Anne; she retied her bonnet, patted her coil of braids at the back, and gripped the iron railing of the front steps.

  Of the preliminaries Anne remembered little, for like an animal in peril she concentrated almost entirely on danger from the moment she stepped inside. Relieved of coat and bonnet, she shrank back, ducking her head to shield her eyes against the brilliance of the reception hall. Helen, graceful and pretty and lit up by the company, led the way as always, greeting and being introduced. Anne stayed at her sister’s side like an ape on a leash, she thought.

  Glimpsing her face in one of the large gilt-framed looking-glasses was a help. She would not, at any rate, hop or gibber. Her face, arguing with her own metaphor, was not at all simian, not like Henry’s and Sissy’s. The Thoreau chin was a family trouble, and Sissy’s was the worst of all, with that bulge as if she held a whole potato in her mouth. Henry and their father had the chin as well, but were saved by side-whiskers as effective disguise, or rather, counter-balance. Mother, Helen, and John were the handsome ones.

  Anne, whose only knowledge of her own ancestry was that she was Mother’s third cousin and had been born in Maine, was just different: tall for her age and fair, not especially pretty but clever enough. She suddenly wished she were an actual monkey, like the one a family friend had brought home from the tropics. It died of a cold after a couple of months, but Henry had taken her to visit when it was alive. The monkey’s owner had let it out of the cage, and it ran up the book-shelves and sat and chittered on the mantel-shelf over the parlor fire. With its small pink face rimmed in white fur like an Esquimau’s, round dark eyes, and shaggy grey body that looped about into a long curled tail, it was as fetching as any play-thing. It had bitten her hand hard enough to draw blood. A nasty beast, but kin.

  A monkey in Mrs. Vaughn’s bright hall could swing up on the curtains and the lamp fittings and no doubt thoroughly avoid conversation. Would a monkey chew on the furniture? That table looked like a glossy caramel cake. Like floating cake. All the furniture — in the bright hall, in the parlor, in the far dining room — seemed to be floating above the ground. It looked dangerously insubstantial; and indeed when she bumped a table it skidded a distance as she jerked back with a stifled shriek. The chairs and tables were actually fitted with gilt feet, tiny wheeled slippers, as if they were about to dash off to a ball. Someone said the furniture was French.

  More danger — in the form of strange faces that looked and then quickly looked away, or worse, looked and stared — manifested itself. And the ladies were, as Mrs. Deaver had forecast, in disconcertingly wide skirts. Upside-down flowers: Several of the younger ladies appeared to have sprouted a corolla of stiff petals opening out from a tiny calyx of waist, which petals drooped to the floor. In this inverted vision, the arms were leaves and the neck, the brief stem. Viola bostonia or perhaps Lupinus peabodacea. Curls bounced, framing each maiden forehead as so many corkscrewed roots, and the air in the rooms surrounded these delicate roots with a sort of pellucid mulch. Water flowers? Nymphaea conversationis. She decided to sketch her visions, once she was safely home with her paper and drawing pencils; she barely heard the questions posed about her family, her interest in antiquity, and the depth of Concord snows. Her drawing began to take shape in her mind — it was of lady-flowers in a glass vase and a monkey, fingering their skirts, arrayed upon a table-top that resembled a sugar-iced cake.

  Two ladies wearing spectacles were introduced, their eyes nearly invisible as the lenses flashed with reflected light. One was the elder Miss Peabody, Elizabeth, the teacher and editor, who immediately turned away to begin speaking to someone else; the other was her sister Mary. Mary told Anne that she had heard of her interest in art. When she lowered her head confidentially, her eyes were revealed, wet and golden-brown as a trout’s.

  “At present,” said Mary, “my sister Sophia — she is not here today but is home with a migraine — has been engaged to copy the Copley portrait in Mrs. Vaughn’s sitting room. If it is a success, Mrs. Vaughn will hang it in her summer house.”

  “I also have a sister Sophia — we always call her Sissy — who is also at home, with a chill. But she does not paint — and I have never taken lessons.”

  “With our two Sophias absent, we must count on Miss Fuller to make up the deficit of wisdom.”

  The Peabody sisters were jostled away before any more could be said. In later years Anne would remember Mary’s lugubrious remark as a kind of emblem of the heavy, unamused repartee known as “Boston wit.”

  Now the movement of the crowd was prodigious; perhaps the ladies as well as the chairs had little gilt wheels on their feet; certainly they moved in a gliding motion, when given ample width of floor to cross, their skirts swaying in a syncopated rhythm, a half beat behind each forward plunge, like the skirts of skaters. It was almost impossible to tell about the feet by looking; as well as fashionably wider, the Boston ladies’ skirts were also markedly longer. Helen, although like Anne limp of skirt and exposed of ankle, was charming a pair of elderly ladies she had just met — they clasped her between them as they all sashayed — by scolding them about slavery in Texas.

  A largish woman in shiny magenta silk blocked half the entrance to the large room set up for the Conversation. This must be Miss Fuller — her calyx-waist was not small, her large bust was not fully subdued by her corsets, and the sense of something barely pinned down, like a tent in a gale, was present in the bulges of her figure, the large fair hair fixed it appeared in many places but still sliding to one side, the curls jigging at her temples, and in the movement of her arms, which seemed to be gesturing in great labor against an invisible wind. Helen tugged on her sister’s hand and they made their way to a settee beside Mrs. Deaver, who had found a chair and was trying an
d only just failing to look regal.

  Tiny Mrs. Vaughn smiled as everyone sat down and then amidst approving chuckles found a footstool on which to stand. She spoke a few words of appreciation for the pleasure — or perhaps she should say, the pleasurable effort of the mind — they were about to share with Miss Fuller. Her erudition, her writing for and editing of The Dial, and the fascinating pamphlet newly published about the education of young ladies — copies are available in the reception room and of course at the Misses Peabodys’ shop, yes, those lovely blue covers, and at a nominal cost for Conversation subscribers to defray publication expenses only — were familiar to them all, she hoped. Yes, the proceeds from today’s special talk would be for Mrs. Somebody Mumble’s new school — modeled with the guidance of Mr. Horace Mann — and we are all enthusiasts for the progressive education of young women. Naturally, as this is a theme of Miss Fuller’s talks, and of her life, she has generously agreed to speak on behalf of this cause.

  (“Does she receive a fee today then?” Anne whispered. Helen almost imperceptibly shrugged.)

  Today — and the ladies were urged to take care, as tea-cups were now being passed amongst them, and yes that is Mrs. Wadsworth’s famous marmalade sponge! — they would be taking up the thread dropped with such suspense before in December: What Can the Classical Age Teach Us About Woman Today?

  Anne spilt her tea entirely out of her cup and smeared jam on her sleeve. In the midst of her shame, which mounted as Miss Fuller’s advance to the front of the room was delayed by the mopping and dabbing of several napkins, she closed her eyes and subsided into a stunned stillness. For some time she was not able to listen. Eventually the French-horn notes of Miss Fuller’s most emphasized words came through, as the mortified pulse of blood in her head beat less fiercely to the speaker’s rhythm:

  “… Not so much the Greeks as the Romans … Education … Reverence for the Female Principle, which we must not confuse with reverence for the Actual Females, the Wives and Daughters. But there were Rights of Woman as well as Man, in corners of that empire and in many other societies …”