The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (29 page)

But the following month I returned to my proper self and rushed into his workroom with the news that there had simply been some sort of mistake or irregularity. He lay down the drawings he had been completing for his book, embraced me, and danced me about in relief.

“We could not have remained apart much longer, Allegra,” he said. “This mess was destroying us. How could we continue to deny one another?”

I sat on a chair. “I haven't slept through the night for a month,” I said. “We shall have to be much more careful from now on… .”

He interrupted me, “I completely agree, my dear.”

“I don't think I could survive another month like that,” I said.

“Nor I. I assure you, darling.” He came over to me, lifted me out of the chair, and embraced me once again. And that very hour began our new explorations of pleasure, almost as if we were starting all over again.

These explorations went on satisfactorily for some time, especially while the memory of our hopeless confusion lingered. But any degree of self-restraint began to prove difficult and contentious.

One afternoon I entered his workroom while he was studying some private drawings he had done of certain Greek and Etruscan artifacts. These were mostly sculptures, but some included scenes from vases of erotic encounters and
phylakes
. And one statue in particular, carved from soft stone, I had seen before: a Greco-Roman Priapus pouring oil onto his phallus from what looked to be a clay bottle. It was this sketch-pad study—his most striking—that I drew forth out of the sheaves.

“You recall, my dear,” he said, “what I told you Greenough said of that figure?”

I looked up at him. “I believe so, George. That ‘the rivers of olive oil which have poured down from Mediterranean hills over the centuries have flowed not only onto these many peoples' gustatory palates'?”

He smiled that I should have remembered Greenough's words. “Indeed, darling! And do you recall,” he added, “that the traditional phrase of ‘using one's wife in the Italian manner' had been preceded by the old Latin phrase for ‘in the Roman manner.'”

“And no doubt ‘in the Roman' by ‘in the Greek'!” I said, and we both laughed.

It was soon afterward that we began to circumvent our contentious self-restraints, by introducing “certain Italian pleasures” into our relations. Mr. Spooner was an utterly thoughtful, tentative, and gentle guide—and cautious of every emollient. He did not insist that we become full celebrants immediately; he did not hurry us through those ageless, darker ceremonies of desire. Yet slowly now our relations grew more completely indulgent, taking on a certain indelibility or compulsion, a certain unanticipated enthrallment. We lived, as it were, in a revelatory flame of carnality, until Gibbon and Mrs. Spooner arrived in Florence the following spring.

T
HE PREVIOUS AUTUMN
, we had received a letter from them saying that they planned to travel to Italy with the spring weather. If I grew vexed about how we would regulate our lives in their presence, this letter nonetheless roused my spirits and drove me on. Gibbon explained that he had fulfilled an idea he and his father had bantered in correspondence for some time.

Having heard me speak of my Prudence Crandall Philleo, both Mr. Spooner and Gibbon had wished to see it. While in Connecticut on other business, and through the intercession of his mother with the Rev. Mr. May, Gibbon appealed to the Crandall family to be allowed to view this portrait by his friend and former pupil of his father. The long and short of it is that finally he prevailed upon the family to lend him the portrait briefly that he “might display this excellent work in an exhibition at the Athenaeum.” Bids were offered even though it was not for sale, and one exhibition review in particular swelled the reputation of my best portrait. That review Mrs. Spooner had clipped to be enclosed in Gibbon's epistle, and I quote from it in part for my reader's amusement.

“The portrait of Prudence Crandall Philleo by one Allegra Fullerton (with whose work I confess I am until now unfamiliar) arrested the attention of many a casual and seasoned observer. Was it the maturity of her subject now depicted in contrast to the more youthful, well-known image from the brush of Mr. Alexander? Was it merely the notoriety, now rather quieted, of the audacious Miss Crandall herself? Or, was it perhaps the upstart, implicit challenge to one of our acknowledged portrait masters?

“I think it is none of these. Say rather that it is each and all of these considerations, and yet something more. And this
something more
is, in my judgment, the essential factor behind the dignified stir. This portrait depicts—with delicate, laborious, and masterly technique—not some serene, prim, and pleasing woman of modest principles. No, here is a portrait of a lady who has suffered much yet retained an admirable bearing; who carries her wounds somewhat below the surface of figure and physiognomy; who has chosen a rigorous simplicity that might shame our latter-day Pythagoreans and philosophes; whose renunciations and labors ennoble her resilient spirit; and whose self-assured yet quiet venerability is unassailable before the ancient and dishonorable follies, vices, and injustices of civilization. And yet this woman in the portrait is quite human for all that.

“Mrs. Philleo's gifts are earned, we believe as we view her, by the sheer uncommon force of her scruples and her will, by her acceptance of living and toiling under the sun—nay, by her exacting labors in the sweet and terrible vineyards of our Lord's terrestrial zone. This is the portrait of a woman who has been tested by others but who has even more severely tested herself, a portrait of nobility without blind idealism, experience without easy compromise, castigation without defeat, and nobility that embraces the commonplace—or, that looks out at the world from a common face which yet must strike any sensible viewer as the most uncommon of womanly faces. With what cunning surety our Mrs. Fullerton hath wrought!

“Upon inquiry, I find that she is a student of Mr. George Spooner, which fact mayhap explains some of the qualities of execution and sensibility we find in her portrait of Mrs. Philleo. But one is never comfortable attributing all the gifts of the pupil to the disciplines of the master. For there are requirements of temperament and vision and innate powers that a master can but nurture and conduct, even as a great musical conductor directs the gifted musicians who make their gorgeous music under his profoundly cognizant eye… .”

S
UCH LAUDATORY
, fulsome response was indeed pleasing, in my impecunious condition in Florence, yet it struck me still as tempting Fate. But then I remembered Rembrandt's depiction of the criticas-donkey, and felt more humble once again. Still, the response opened my way a little farther forward, thanks once again to the Spooner family. Now, however, the guilt of my betrayals began to fester, all the more so because Gibbon assured me that he and his mother had booked passage on a ship for Leghorn by way of Gibraltar. He also reported that the portrait itself had been returned as promised to the Crandall family, and none of us a whit wealthier in coin of the realm. Still, I found that other commissions followed this “stir.” Within several months, I discovered that some Americans, finding themselves in Florence and feeling desirous of portraits, copies, or Tuscan landscapes, now came to my studio to examine my work. For at the end of his review article, the author, one Pemberton Chatsworth (with whose work I confess I am until now unfamiliar), “understood,” as he put it, “that the intrepid Mrs. Fullerton now resides among the throng of international art-colonists in Florence, Italy.” Both Mr. Spooner and Mr. Greenough recommended me to friends and other travelers at every turn among the Florentine communities of visitors and exiles.

Thus in higher expectations did I spend the balance of that year, 1844, summering in Bellosguardo, returning to the city on the plain in winter, working, working, working wherever we were, either on my commissions or studies or independent works of a higher nature.

In all my endeavors with oil and canvas, Mr. Spooner remained my guide, as on one late afternoon in December when we walked to Galileo's Tower up along the Poggie Imperiale bordered for a mile or more by fine cypresses, ever-green oaks, green banks, and hedges with roses even in that season, as if to remind the foot-traveler of summer all the winter long.

We reached the square, broken tower atop the low hill, entered a courtyard where a dog saluted us, and took our position with a northward view. I had brought with me three sketch-studies for moonlit visions of the city that Mr. Spooner had agreed to examine. But first we drank in this other vision before us of Florence, with Fiesole perhaps a dozen miles away, swimming in a blue mist that softened everything into dreamy obscurity, excepting where the declining sun shone through and blazed the landscape.

Eventually we sat on a bench, leaning against one another, and I drew out my studies. The first study was a view of moonlight along the Lung ‘Arno where the brown river took into his breast a silvery glory that he flung back in mellow glow upon the irregular housefronts.

The second Mr. Spooner recognized as a view of San Miniato we had cherished one moony night upon emerging from a café and seeing the towers and cypress groves wrapped in a luminous gray veil, as if they shone with their own light and lent a crystal depth to the atmosphere about them.

The third he also recognized from another moonlit evening in the Piazza del Granduca, where the light poured into the square from behind the old palace and sheathed Neptune's back in silver; it looked as if the colossal old god were uprearing to life again and about to stride back toward the sea. It was this third study that caught his admiration, perhaps as much for the idea of the thing as for the execution. So it was my Neptune I started on the following morning in my painting room.

Our single interruption before the arrival of Gibbon and Mrs. Spooner was the great flood of early November, not long after we had returned to the city. Mr. Greenough's studio, on the slope of the Fieosle hills, was safe. The Greenoughs being away in Austrian Silesia taking
das Wasser kur,
even unto Mrs. G.'s confinement, we and Charles Skottowe, the Irish artist, removed a number of paintings to that higher ground for safekeeping until the waters receded. There too I hid away my rather too Dionysian portrait of my mentor. Fortunately, our quarters on the third floor of our pension remained untouched. Otherwise, our lives and labors continued in uninterrupted passion and serenity we knew could not last much longer.

TWENTY-ONE

The rival

A
s soon as Mrs. Spooner and Gibbon arrived we left the city for new quarters in Bellosguardo. I don't know whether Mrs. Spooner suspected anything, but it is hard to believe that despite our displays of innocence and respectability, she did not divine something amiss. She maintained her generosity nevertheless, only increasing my secret tortures of guilt from our betrayals. I did not know just what Mr. Spooner felt, for we avoided one another's company with a scrupulousness that, looking back on it, probably called attention to itself. I began to spend time haunting the galleries alone or showing Gibbon some of my discoveries in them.

To his credit, Mr. Spooner began a loving portrait of his wife, lavishing as much attention on this portrait as ever I had seen him lavish on any other. One afternoon, early in that summer of 1845, I entered his studio expecting to find him alone at that hour, only to discover that he and his wife were in the midst of her third sitting. He was calm and cordial, as if nothing had altered between us since leaving Boston; he invited me to have a seat and enjoy some “gossip of New England.”

I saw again that she was indeed in her matronly way a rather pretty woman. His portrait was beginning to capture also, beyond her pleasant aspect, a deeper character and vivacity, which all those who knew her intimately would have recognized. This deeper character, which I believe men found appealing, arose as if out of her true nature from beneath the mild physiognomy she turned to the world.

After their conversation modulated from Boston to her cautious journey across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, I said, “You do look not only fully recovered, Mrs. Spooner, but more fit than ever.”

“The sea voyage was perfectly bearable,” she said. “And thank you, Allegra. Yes, I feel quite well now.”

“Your waiting for the mildest season was wise, then,” I suggested.

“I believed it helped me, and especially during two perfectly dull weeks spent in quarantine at Gibraltar.”

“Many come more indirectly for that very reason, I understand.”

“Perhaps so, but I was in no mood for overland journeys,” she said and smiled. “You look well yourself, Allegra. But I was just telling George—Italy has changed you in some fashion. I haven't quite made up my mind yet just how. Maybe it's something to do with all this independence and freedom to study and work here … and I'm sure the beauty as well.” She waved her arm in a wide arc to take in the countryside beyond our villa rooms.

“Allegra's work improves steadily,” Mr. Spooner said. He smiled at me, turning his face from his easel a moment. “We must go to her painting room later, my dear, so you may see for yourself.”

“I'd be delighted,” she said pleasantly. “I haven't seen enough of you lately, Allegra, and even less of your paintings, since arriving here. I hope you haven't found our arrival a distraction or … a nuisance.”

“Heavens no, Mrs. Spooner.” I laughed. “How can you say such a thing?”

“These days I see little enough of you myself, Allegra,” Mr. Spooner said. He looked at his wife. “She's become a regular anchorite in the service of her Angels of Inspiration. But seriously, Emeline, she is becoming a wonder fit for the praise she's been receiving from home.”

“I work hard, but I also take fresh air and walk and visit the galleries frequently. I'm glad Gibbon has come too, for he makes a good walking companion. Do you know the Florentines do not know quite how to take a foreign woman walking in the city on her own? They all ride in carriages themselves. And there is this one impertinent little man in particular who not only makes little noises and hisses like the others, but comes right up to you.”

“He has a mania for running after such unattended ladies,” Mr. Spooner said and laughed. “And he is violently amused if the unsuspecting damsel jumps aside at his zealous tributes to her attractions. But he is restrained somewhat by his vocabulary, which he limits to a few repetitive but flattering ejaculations.”

“‘Very good,'” I said, imitating his voice. “‘Very much pretty! I like… . You handsome!' And so on, as he dodges from side to side, just heading you, then sailing round, and cutting ridiculous capers at every turn.”

“He was so enthusiastic in his pursuit of one lady,” Mr. Spooner said, “that he pitched himself over a donkey as she turned into her own door!”

“What an infernal annoyance,” she said, smiling. “I trust we older dames are safe from his admiration, however.”

“Don't be too sure, my dear,” Mr. Spooner said. “I'm sure he'd love to count you among his harem. Give his right arm for the pleasure, no doubt.”

“He'll pop up right under your eyes like a phantom!” I said. “Count on it if you go about in the streets of the old city alone.”

“Nothing short of a thorough drubbing will ever stop the imbecile,” Mr. Spooner said. “But no need of your going about alone now, is there, Emeline.”

“Or go in a carriage,” I added. “The difference in prices between Paris and Florence enables anyone who wishes to keep a carriage in Tuscany.”

We continued exchanging stories of Florentine excesses until the day's sitting terminated.

That evening, Mr. and Mrs. Spooner came into my painting room to consider some of my productions at their leisure. They were mostly pleased, and said so. Mrs. Spooner lingered after her husband excused himself.

“Are you sure you are well?” she finally asked, turning from an oil painting.

“Yes. Quite, Mrs. Spooner. Do I appear otherwise?”

“Only in some vague way, my dear. Am I mistaken to perceive some slight dissatisfaction, or disappointment? May I be of help in any way?”

“I have perhaps been working too hard and worrying more than I should about sustaining my commissions—after these are finished. I seem to mistrust good fortune. You see, I do well enough—my debt's paid off and I'm getting by in modest circumstances now. I am, all in all, perhaps too much the worrier. Please don't trouble yourself over my nonsense. Things have in fact gone well enough in Italy. Getting my living, I mean.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” she said and smiled. “But remember; I am here if you need any assistance. George and I are here. You'll not go wanting. Think of your work and let nothing else trouble your mind. The rest will come of its natural course. And now you have Gibbon to escort you about. Young people need other young people.”

“You are right, of course.”

“Don't hesitate to ask … to ask anything of me. Don't let worries fester like old wounds.”

Her sympathy and generosity only made me feel more ashamed of my past betrayals. But what could I do? Live with them, with myself. And work. The time would come, I now saw, when I would no longer be able to remain with them. I did not know how long I could endure this necessary distance from George Spooner.

T
HEN ABOUT THAT TIME
I found myself distracted into the company of a young Englishman who flung his handsome, punctilious, and cantankerous presence into the City of Flowers at the end of May, another young man whose influence upon me I now believe to have been considerable—much as I found myself disagreeing with his sundry pronunciamentos at the time. One afternoon in a gallery of the Pitti I was rapidly sketching, on an empty stomach, certain portions of the celebrated Salvator marines when he swept by me in a conspicuous blue cravat that matched his eyes. He returned to stand and glance unobtrusively at my scratchings. He pretended to be absorbed mainly with that master's battle pieces, standing by and away from them at different angles, coming near as if to compare the marine before which I sat. He seemed to become so agitated, however, as he stepped about that I finally asked whether he were feeling quite well or whether the heat outside had brought on some illness that required the aid of others. No longer able to contain himself, he then suggested, with an audacity I soon learned to expect, that we would all do far better to study the frescoes of Angelico at St. Mark's or Santa Maria Novella.

“This, Madam,” he said, pointing with his cane to a magnificent Salvator battle piece, “is fit for nothing but a sign over a butcher's shop!”

I carefully closed my sketchbook and asked him to explain himself. He looked at me as if to study such a strange creature—this Sketching-Woman-With-Her-Own-Opinions—but his face seemed, even while he remained silent, to relent. He then explained briefly that he had just come from a morning devoted to the study of certain Fra Angelicoes, had been overwhelmed by his effort and excitement over the heavenly faces before him, and could not have “come from a more unfortunate school for Salvator,” who by the sudden comparison seemed “a mindless charlatan and ruffian.” He had trouble with his
r
's, pronouncing them, rather comically I thought, like
w
's, as in “Salvatow” or “Wuffian.”

As we explored and debated these and other opinions which he boldly delivered, he managed also to introduce himself as the author of
Modern Painters
, of which I had heard only certain vague murmurings among the cognoscenti-in-exile. This abrasive young man mentioned that he was traveling in Italy to complete his second volume, and was specifically in Florence to visit the Uffizi, Pitti, and Accademia galleries and, even better, to prosecute his studies in the chapels and cloisters of Novella, Marco, Croce, and the Carmine. Later, over tea, he also delivered himself of strong opinions regarding the Tuscan and Florentine populace, whom he portrayed as disquieted souls lost in the Purgatory of Philistia.

“Except when I am in the churches,” he said (like the very monk he at bottom no doubt was), “I don't like Florence. There is no feeling about it: the people are Leghorn bonnet makers and one feels always in a shop—too busy about nothings to admit emotion of any kind. And the countryside is covered with villas of broken English and dissipated Italians. And the city streets, without footways, are so horribly crowded one thinks of nothing but dodging carriages.”

After days spent in his studies, he often, I soon found, overstated his case to vent the exasperations of his work and to add an element of cynical humor into our conversations.

“The square is full of listless, chattering, smoking vagabonds,” he said on another occasion, “and they are forever paving, repairing, gaslighting, and drumming from morning till night, like the crass men of our century that they truly are. Have you not, Mrs. Fullerton, quite given up stopping to look about you in the very thoroughfares for all this noise, dust, tobacco smoke, and spitting?”

“No, sir,” I would reply to such like remarks. “I find that I am reminded by it all the more of home.”

“I also, and all the worse for that!” One time he claimed to have seen no pretty faces among the Florentine women, and no vestiges of the deep old faces among the men—“only these French beards and staring eyes and mouths with cigars sticking out at you.”

He appeared to delight in mild squabbles with his interlocutors over such trivial matters, and he was sure to produce a laugh or two through the wit of his headlong criticisms, but on one point I found myself rather in agreement—viz., the Florentines' tendency to undervalue and thereby at times deface the magnificence all about them. We produced a rather lengthy catalogue one evening, putting our heads together, of examples we had seen: the perpetual chipping and cleaning and adding to Giotto's campanile; the exposure of paintings to weather and workmen; the infernal retouching and “brightening” of the masters; and the priests' hanging of their candles and lamps from the old frescoes themselves, as I had seen they had nailed two big lamps right into a Masaccio.

“Even though today's Grand Duke wishes to encourage art,” he added, “he doesn't know what art is or how to encourage it. So that the monkey who touched up Buffalmacco's pictures by painting everything green begins to look like a gentleman and a scholar compared to these modern Florentines, who are surely a separate race from the old masters and the crowds of the mighty dead who people their paintings. I tell you, Mrs. Fullerton, it shakes one's English prejudices!”

Yet I confess, for all his satire and dandyism, this young Englishman began to unsettle some of my own opinions and judgments. There seemed about him as much to admire as to revile, but his discipline was his crowning attribute—
everything
in his life was subordinated to his current project. I was reminded by this attribute of Mr. Spooner, but he, on the other hand, always maintained an engaging quality of generosity about him.

A
LSO THAT SUMMER
a girl of fifteen (the daughter of a rather dissolute English baronet and his stunning wife) came among us with her otherworldly gifts. We met this young woman, Adèle, through Mrs. Powers, an honest but credulous woman, whose Thursday evenings were sometimes given to spiritualistic displays. Whether it was for some girlish quality in herself or for her highly sensitive, visionary nature, Adèle was the only young woman whom Mr. Ruskin seemed to notice. She possessed among her powers those of a medium, and her presence among gatherings of poets, artists, and aimless aristocrats became the very thing.

Thin and wan, the poor creature did appear not long for this world, yet she was in her own way pretty and exceptionally clever. Her performances on the pianoforte or in dramatic readings, simultaneously translated from Latin or Italian texts, were in as much demand as her performances at a seance. There seemed to be general agreement that her powers of manifestation eclipsed those of many others in the city at that time who claimed such gifts.

It was at one of Mrs. Powers's evenings that the Spooners and I met this young lady. I found the rappings and movements of “personages” and things about the room disturbing, but remained skeptical. Later, Mrs. Powers assured me of the authenticity of these strange doings, and said that she herself had once been molested by a spectral monk in her very drawing room. She then suggested that we take the opportunity of Adèle's visit to Florence to see whether we might get to the bottom of certain nighttime disturbances up in our old villa. We agreed to her proposal all in good fun. Mr. Spooner himself had once charged nighttime bumpings to the “vigorous dalliance of our most unrespectable house mates,” John and Louise. These friends no longer lived with us in our new villa, yet here too certain sounds emanated from the night.