Miss Fuller (2 page)

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 and 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 …”

Gradually Anne came to understand that no one was looking at her. It was just a cup of tea, nothing even broken, and if the stain persisted they could turn the sleeve at home. No one was looking at her.

Miss Fuller now was clearly speaking about the present day, and Anne opened her eyes to wonder how they had vaulted over the centuries so quickly. Helen beside her was at full attention — the subject was the need today, in Boston and throughout this country, to explore the full capacities of both men and women.

“You ask, But will not women cease to be womanly, if they are thrust into the spheres of learning, of philosophy, of political life? I do not urge any ‘thrusting,’ no such unnatural movement, but only what is natural, the leaning towards,
through inclinations which are as in-born in some women as they are in most men. Certainly most women must continue to be womanly, and concerned with children, with home and hearth, with all the fine things that make our lives noble and sweet — producing such matchless sponge and tea as we have drunk — and spilt — here today.…” Miss Fuller paused.

Laughter fluttered through the room. They were looking at her again. Some more moments passed; life returned.

“… For how many of us may be destined for a public stage? Not from eagerness to perform for applause, but from a sense of duty, of the rightness of a crusade? If we do not change our minds about what women may do, how can we hope to change the injustice, the poverty, and the mistreatment of fellow souls whom we see daily about us? If we cannot change our minds about what women may do, how can we, my sisters, hope to see the world change for the better and make its progress to that Finer Day we await in our hearts and minds and souls?”

A brocade drapery, of silvery blue, swagged the window recess behind Miss Fuller. It looked like a ship’s sail. Anne began counting the panes in the enormous windows.

“Surely you have yourselves known someone — an aunt, a mother, a sister, or you, your own self — who has an
inclination
towards some area of thought or action that our prejudices say cannot, or should not, be entertained? How often have I heard that a young woman should not be
taught Greek, as it will damage her brain, stunt her growth, possibly unfit her for life itself — and yet how I loved to learn Greek, and Latin, and the mathematics, and to read philosophy. And I dare say, these years later, that I am healthy enough.”

Each window was three rows high, each row of four tall panes each, with an arch at the top, of glass panels in a fan pattern. The windows looked on a desolate wintry back garden; as Anne craned her neck to watch, a white terrier with brown spots sped down a path.

“Has any young girl of your acquaintance a knack for the natural sciences? Can you imagine a day when she might study the sciences at a college, as men do? We have heard of such colleges, small ones, established in Switzerland and in France so that women may gaze through telescopes and explore the bituminous horizons of chemistry, just within these last few years. Think of Miss Herschel, England’s famed Comet Catcher! Why not here? Why should the world of science, the glorious future of our understanding, be deprived of those intellects which are suited for her study and promulgation?

“Some of you may have heard the story about my little adventure — near misadventure — at the Harvard College Library. It is a sanctum forbidden to women; and yet I knew of its heavy-laden shelves, its reference volumes, encylcopediae and records and almanacks from other centuries and other countries. As I was laboring on a translation from the
German last year, I found that I too wished to consult some of these books, and a friend offered to go to the library for me, to consult a reference work, in German, about the reign of Catherine the Great — my problem concerned military matters on the Russian steppe in the last century — but I declined his kind offer. For one thing, his knowledge of German was inferior to my own. For another, I knew myself to be embarked on a work of serious, and valuable, scholarship. I knew also that any man from anywhere in the world engaged in such work would be able to use the Harvard Library. And so —”

Miss Fuller paused for the full effect, her forehead glistening. Anne was still looking into the garden. The terrier had a grey squirrel in his mouth and was shaking it vigorously.

“Yes, I did! I walked right up the steps of the famed Gore Hall. I ignored the initial efforts to impede me, I announced to the librarians the nature of my task, and — I think they were simply too amazed to stop me — I found my books, solved my problem, and, much to the evident dismay of the door-keeper, I have been a faithful visitor to that sanctum ever since!”

She needed to wait for the exclamations, laughter, and light applause to die away.

“Yes, I did enjoy my little triumph. Yet I know it to be small indeed. For consider! Is Woman truly revered in any area of life? I do not speak of your individual domestic arrangements where I trust such ladies as yourselves are
treated with the respect, with the reverence, due to you from your admirable husbands. Mr. Harvard College himself may have the good manners briefly to forget his own benighted prejudice about women in his library — as a matter of
politeness
. But his law does not change. And in the eyes of the real Law, the laws of the town and the state and the country? We are nothing.”

The animals had disappeared into the shrubbery. If Anne closed one eye, the right-hand window was filled with the black blue-green of a fir-tree that pressed against the house. If she closed the other eye, only half the window was dark, and the rest was white with the light of the clouded sky.

“Stop squinting!” Helen hissed and pinched her, hard, on the hand. Fortunately no one noticed, as Miss Fuller was now speaking at an orator’s pitch, her dampened fair curls drooping, elongated nearly to her shoulders.

“You have less, in the eyes of the Law, than a seamstress of a hundred years ago, or Shakespeare’s Greasy Joan who ‘keel’d the pot’! A peasant woman in medieval England, married as she may well have been, owned the humble property her father left her, and owned the property she held with her husband jointly if he died. Those laws were changed in England (and its colonies) in the eighteenth century and changed again, not for the better, thirty years ago. In an effort to shore up its great estates, to keep financial and political power in the hands of its aristocracy, England
dis
-enfranchised its entire female population!
Primogeniture does not only assure the eldest son inherits; it is also another name for pushing women out of whatever public role, whatever autonomous power, they had enjoyed hitherto. In such an era as this, this nineteenth century of progress and industry and the advance of learning and science, it is a shock, a disgrace, that women virtually have been stripped of their dignity and property rights!”