The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (34 page)

It was this letter, as well, which informed me that upon close examination by American and British authorities, Tom had been released due to an insufficiency of evidence to detain or deport him. “Mr. Wentworth, I recently learned, has begun his long journey to find you in the political wilderness of fair old Italy,” he wrote.

“At least he is free,” I sighed, as I placed the letter in my lap. “And he'll soon enough discover the Spooners and learn of my departure.”

I will not take up the reader's precious time with the tedium of my months of study and work in and about Boston. I have but one more instance to report because it was for me the galvanizing, monumental incident at this point in my uneven life.

I had been living in constant fear for the Spooner family's safety. They had been traveling in Italy, and I wondered if each letter from Gibbon, with whom I maintained a correspondence, might be his last. I did not know it at the time, but the Spooners, in some final desperate moment, had climbed aboard the American merchant bark
Elizabeth
, that spring of 1850, and sailed for America with the Marchesa Margaret Fuller Ossoli, as she now was known. With the Marchesa were her husband and their child, Angelino (or Nino), now about two years old. The European revolution had settled nothing, still less in Italy, where things had taken a hopeless turn.

As the
Elizabeth
was making her way west, I did not know either of Miss Fuller's many dangerous adventures with her infant son and, somewhat later, her new husband—her flight from Rome and eventual return to Florence for refuge with the Brownings and Greenoughs, the excursions and alarums of the deteriorating military and political situation, the incidences of smallpox aboard ship. It was only after the wreck of the
Elizabeth
off Long Island that I also learned that Tom too had been on board. Because of their hurried, desperate boarding, neither the Spooners nor Tom had appeared on the ship's original manifest. But the captain's wife somehow survived the ship's grounding on one of the numerous sandbars, at 3:30
A.M.
on July 19, 1850, in waves and gales of hurricane force. It was she, apparently, who listed Tom and the Spooners as among the missing.

Devastated by the newspaper accounts of the loss at sea of the Ossolis and Spooners, Julian and I left immediately by the cars for New York. When we arrived on the beach at Fire Island late in the day of July 24, the seas were of course calm and most of the flotsam from the wreckage had been scavenged or recovered, the wreck itself still holding where she struck. There were a few survivors; little Nino's body, stripped by the waves of every shred of clothing, had washed up on shore. None of the Spooners', nor Tom's, Margaret's, or Ossoli's bodies had been recovered, however. Tom had always been a strong swimmer, but his wounded left arm having been amputated in a British prison hospital, he wouldn't have stood much chance of survival in an angry sea.

Also lost was Margaret's manuscript on the history of the Italian Revolution, which had failed thus far of finding a publisher. On the very beach from which no help had been launched to aid the shipwrecked unfortunates, Julian and I met Ellery Channing, who had come down from Massachusetts with Mr. Thoreau to search for any remains and effects of the Ossolis. Mr. Spooner had made the acquaintance of Mr. Channing on some earlier occasion, and the poor man seemed deeply disturbed by this sudden, further news of the Spooner family. He assured us that nothing but a trunk full of letters and books, a coat, and a few of the child's clothes had turned up. The body of Nino had been ceremoniously buried among the dunes by some surviving sailors, who had come to love their little shipboard playmate. And now Mr. Channing was about to ensure that the body was sent to Cambridge for proper burial, while Mr. Thoreau was en route to Patchogue to see whether he might regain any effects taken by pilferers. Mr. Channing showed us a button they had removed from a coat of Ossoli.

“It had been a terrific storm,” he told us, looking out at the quiescent sea, “by all accounts. Of course such a disaster might occur at any time. Yet we now understand a further complication or two: Captain Hasty died of confluent smallpox while anchored off Gibraltar, and the ship, after a period of quarantine, sailed to America under command of First Mate Mr. Bangs, a much less experienced seaman; moreover, the 150 tons of Carrara marble in the cargo (including, it is said, Mr. Powers' statue of John Calhoun) broke through the hold of the ship as the great waves slammed it broadside against the sandbar.” He shook his head and looked down at the sand.

I shivered, recalling Margaret telling me once that when Ossoli was a child, a fortune teller had warned him “Beware the sea!” This, so far as I knew, was the first ship he had ever set foot upon.

Finally Mr. Channing spoke again. “There are great … great losses here to be endured.”

O
NLY LATER
, from the reports of certain survivors of the wreck, including Mrs. Hasty (the captain's wife), did we begin to understand something of what Tom and the Spooners and the Ossolis suffered in their final hours aboard the disintegrating ship. Tossed out off their beds at the initial impact; the whole ship was dashed violently against the bar at the second: then darkness as the lamps had been doused by waves breaking in at the skylight and cabin doors; the dangerous, thrashing tangle of rigging and broken masts pulsing in the swells; the hysterical cries of the young nursemaid, the bawling of little Nino, the utter helplessness of the parents in the teeth of the storm; and Margaret in only her white nightgown against the soaking cold and furious wind, her hair all down and atangle; the prayers and messages to family should any of them survive; and then the final efforts to flee the breaking ship by swimming on spars: a few surviving, many sinking never to be seen alive again, and the Ossolis refusing to be separated, preferring rather to go under together if such—after all they had survived in the last two years—proved to be what Fate now required. In the last extremity, Margaret was washed overboard with her family in the great waves of the incoming tide, in but her fortieth year.

On that bright July afternoon on the strand, looking out over the bars and the sea, I asked my dear old Julian: “Why this?”

He did not answer, but turned to hold me, while we shed tears together.

Later, as we were walking away from the sea and the beach, I asked Julian another question. “How does even a single mistake made by a good and selfless man like Tom take on a nether life of its own, hounding the unfortunate wretch like that black river dog Cerberus?”

Julian did not look at me as we walked. He said only: “Wasn't it the Goddess Folly who once asked,

‘Why should I envy other gods,

When all men eagerly offer greater sacrifices to me?'”

There are moments in our lives when such thoughts plague us, just as there are moments of happiness and glory and love. But that day in July on the beach was one of the lowest moments of my life.

S
O I GRIEVED
my dear brother and companion. Then I joined many others in grieving the Spooners, and Margaret and her young family. And then sore at heart I returned to my rooms in Boston, allowing no visitors save Phebe Miles, my new pupil. I had met the Miles family again at the memorial service for Margaret. Having abandoned Newspirit in the second year, Mr. Miles had opened a school in Roxbury, where the family resided. Phebe, now a young lady of twenty, taught the ornamental arts to her father's female scholars. In the course of months my wounds began to heal, and I returned fully to my own life, as we human creatures do after great pain or loss.

I saw Chas for a time. You may well ask, reader, why I did not marry him. I now believe my mind was quite made up during that long period of our separation. Still, to own the truth, I was not always certain what was happening in my heart. I can say only that Tom's, Margaret's, and the Spooners' terrible end buried a particular emptiness and sorrow deep, very deep, in my soul.

Yet how could I have relished attaching myself to a man I would have to share with others, and I came to feel that he was perhaps sated with me in the course of two or three months anyway. And one thing more, a further consideration as well: a woman who depends upon the fine arts for her livelihood can not, in New England, afford a public scandal—something I narrowly avoided more than once in my adventures. Despite Chas's arguments, Boston then was not the place for a woman to earn her independence steeped in public censure.

So I let Chas return to his sweet, luscious little dears and continued to forge a life of my own. I became, after all, that “spinster artist” one reviewer had christened me, or that “chaste priestess of the painterly muse,” as another had phrased it in his ignorance. For such are the categories by which the world must see us—or by categories more reproachful, which certainly might have been used against me.

S
INCE THE WRECK
of the
Elizabeth
, and especially all these years later as I now spend my days writing this personal history, I think often of Tom and the Spooners and my friend Margaret Fuller Ossoli. I think particularly of her failures and successes, of the meaning of her strange life and the flowering of her truest self in dangerous times and places during her final years. Although I have always remained thankful for every encouragement and generosity from Mr. and Mrs. Spooner, as well as from Mr. Neal, from Julian, from Tom, and from Gibbon, it was Miss Fuller herself, during my last year in Italy, who became my cynosure, and she still burns brightly to light my own way, all the more so in life's darker moments. Although some have ridiculed and reviled her before and since her death as a “he-woman” and “She-Crichton,” as an “intellectual Bloomer in cerulean stockings,” or as one who “understood Socrates better than Plato did, Faust better than Goethe did, Kant better than Kant did,” she labored mightily—against enormous intolerance—to create a place for herself in the ruthless world of ideas, letters, and revolutions. By such labors she demonstrated the possibilities for those of us who have come along beside her and after her, and who have chosen to discover our own
vita nuova
despite the unwelcoming world.

Such were my thoughts one summer evening as I stood behind Phebe while she worked in oils upon a task I had set her.

“I think I'm losing the best light, Mrs. Fullerton,” she said. “Do you think we should finish up for today? The colors seem all off to me.”

“Surely, Phebe, we can not work without light,” I said. “And darkness ever comes soon enough. Let's keep on but another quarter hour. Unfortunately, we'll have no time together for the remainder of this week.”

“If you say so, Mrs. Fullerton.” She continued to apply her brush diligently to the marine.

I turned to the window and removed the half-curtain to let in more light. I thought of Margaret again. Recalling the many criticisms of others that I have mentioned reminded me, as well, of Mr. Channing's more trenchant description of Margaret, during the service in her memory.

“She was,” he had said, “our first female correspondent abroad, our first female social and literary critic of distinction, our great mother in the movement for the rights of American women, and, ultimately, one of our most brilliant voices of conscience and sanity in the long, continuing conflict over the liberation of America's slaves.

“Two years ago,” he continued, “she wrote to me that slavery was our American cancer, out of which had grown the fistula of our war with Mexico. ‘I listen to the same arguments,' she wrote, ‘against the emancipation of Italy that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland, as for the conquest of Mexico.' Her hope for a better future lay in the youth of our country and of Europe, touched by the light of high hopes, as yet not seceded, as so many of her peers, to become middle-aged indolents, voluptuaries, or, as she phrased it, ‘mere family men who think it quite life enough to win bread for half a dozen people and treat them decently.' Do you recall, my friends, her New Year's message to her country in the
Tribune
? ‘May America be worthy of the privileges she possesses, while others are lavishing their blood to win them.'

“Indeed, had her great work on the economics and politics of revolutionary Europe survived the wreck of the
Elizabeth
, does any one of us gathered here today doubt that she would be held in acclaim as a courageous visionary-without-peer? Held, further, as one who understood and clarified the great industrial and political transformations of the Old World—yet in progress—during this very
noon
of our bloodstained century?”

I turned again to look closely at Phebe's progress now, placing a hand softly on her shoulder. The light she had thrown upon her ships in Boston Harbor was striking and bold. She seemed to be capturing something of that old feeling from a moment in my own childhood, and suddenly I did not doubt that she too had once seen that flash of the Sun God's sword above lambent waters. Here was a child who, unlike little Effie, had lived into the promise of her womanhood.

“I think I must stop for today,” she said finally.

“Yes, Phebe. That's quite all right,” I said. “That is, indeed, quite well and quite beautiful for today.”

I returned to the window and looked down on the street. People were busily enjoying the end of another summer's day.

Yes, Mr. Channing, I said to myself, it was your astonishing Margaret who over the years became my dearest friend and guide. The one who said, “Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” The one who showed me that all painting, like all writing, is worthless except as the record of a life. The one who showed me, and many others, how to face the world—alone if need be. How to struggle to be, as she put it, “natural and true in one's work while living in a world out of harmony with naturalness and truth.” And how, finally, to remain constant to the true path of our singular lives.