Miss Fuller (4 page)

Anne climbed up, shook the reins, and set out on the return to Concord. At the haying, she would help cook and
serve dinner and carry egg-nog and vinegar-water to the thirsty men. In this weather everyone watched the sky all day, hurrying to get the hay cut and raked into windrows and pitched into the wagons before the thunder-storms came in late afternoon. She thought of the farmers and clucked the horses to a trot. She was whistling “Go tell Aunt Rhoady, the old grey goose is dead,” when again she remembered the death of Miss Fuller — Mrs. Ossoli, perhaps she must be called, or absurdly, the Marchesa. Then the feeling came again and the day that had been bright dulled. She felt the horses slow to a walk under the reins that dropped to her lap. She felt, perhaps, more frightened than sad. A wreck was not something you could avoid, unless of course you never went anywhere. There were certain place-names that crowded her mind, and picture-plates from the geography books whose every detail she had memorized: Tahiti, Bombay, Cairo, Copenhagen, Tierra del Fuego. She wanted to go everywhere, by train and sailing-ship, and see the wide world. Which, perhaps for the first time, seemed mortally dangerous.

But there was another feeling that nudged her. Not fear, not sadness, something else. Amongst them all, at the news of the wreck, there had been an unspoken shadowy
satisfaction
— she could name it now, and touch it. It was like a thick rope you could grasp in the dark. It was the feeling that this had “served her right.” Not like the other deaths in the last few years — first the horror of their brother John
seized with fever and lock-jaw; then the Emersons’ little boy taken by fever; then darling sister Helen flickering and sputtering like a candle flame for many months from consumption, and finally snuffed last year. Unimaginable griefs, each one more terrible than the last, the vanished beloved cried out for in the nights. And all had died as they had lived — blameless, blameless.

Miss Fuller, on the other hand. She was not blameless, not at all; this was a death made for wincing, not weeping. It even made you angrier about the other deaths. She had no one to blame but herself. When the toddler will not stop teasing the cat and then the cat scratches, you say to the child, “See? I told you not to, serves you right.”

“We told you,” she whispered, but then she was not sure — either that they had, actually, told her; or, indeed, that a death in a hurricane could be said to be anybody’s fault. Could it be that she, that they all, were secretly pleased Miss Fuller was dead? Sissy and Mother had been pursing their mouths in identical straight lines that might mean disapproval and maybe also the self-satisfaction that comes with disapproval. But not really
pleased
— that wasn’t possible. Miss Fuller was Mr. Emerson’s pet, and Mrs. E had petted her too, and Henry had always said he admired her. The Hawthornes and Alcotts and Peabodies were her dear friends. Mr. Greeley, the editor of the
New-York Daily Tribune
, called her a heroine. No one could be glad to see a heroine die.

And the husband, in spite of being an Italian, was a human being. As Africans were human, so certainly were Italians. She had never actually met an Italian, though she had met slaves and freedmen. How terrible — and how
provincial
, her new word of scorn — that she had need to remind herself of the humanity of an Italian. They did not know him, how could they condemn him, even if he were perhaps comical, a comical Count. Or was he a Marquis? Possibly a dancing-teacher, as one wag had suggested. And the baby, good mercy, no one could be glad for the death of a baby, even if they had said for months that it might not be — quite right. Anne was unsure if the whispers had meant the baby was sickly or possibly an idiot, or actually born outside of wedlock — before a marriage? Was there no real marriage? It was dizzying to even think of this — since the whisperers also hissed “Marchesa” and “Catholic,” and made mouths around the words “Italian marriage” as if they meant something else.

The family had refused to be impressed when Miss Fuller had left for Europe in 1846. All right that she had lived in New York and written for the reformist
Tribune
about the city slums; all right that she had traveled to the Great Lakes and deplored the mistreatment of the resettled Indians on their tawdry “reservation.” But Europe? Mother, Helen, and Sissy were very clear on this: It was not the right thing to have done, to have gone to Europe; neither becoming nor patriotic. Her newspaper columns from London, Paris,
and Rome; her interviews with Carlyle and George Sand and Mazzini the revolutionary and Mickiewicz the poet; her exhortations to aid the Italian cause and the causes of all the revolutions popping and fizzing, sometimes booming, over Europe — all went largely unread at their table, certainly unstudied. (Henry did read them, Anne knew, but he rarely spoke of them. One of the aunts had been living with them when Miss Fuller was writing from England and France, and the aunt had been an enthusiast, reading passages aloud. There was relief when she left.) Such a writer and talker should be at home, where they needed her, with the Abolitionist cause. Women’s rights, on which Miss Fuller had spoken and written so famously, were another distraction, not to be countenanced in the face of the great wrong of slavery that history had placed before the men and women of the United States. In the last weeks before her death, Helen had sat up in her bed-clothes for long enough to preach a gasping sort of sermon about it. Helen had been far angrier with the likes of Miss Fuller than with the plantation owners and their “stooges” in Congress — who, as she and Mother agreed, had not been bred to know better.

Anne had talked privately with Miss Fuller only once, and that was during one of those summers — a year or so after the Conversation Anne attended — when Miss Fuller had been living in Concord, at the Emerson home. In large groups, such as the lemonade parties Mrs. E hosted, Miss
Fuller was expansive, full of opinions, and only fell silent when Mr. E spoke. She made sheep’s eyes at Mr. E — everyone saw it, including Mrs. E, though she would never say so. Anne guessed that was one reason Mrs. E was so gracious. Helen commented on Miss Fuller’s diminished figure, and Henry reported that she was attempting a “vegetary” regimen, some combination of something called the Graham System and one pressed upon her by friends from London who followed Oriental dietary laws. Mrs. E had been making a great effort to satisfy her guest’s appetite, but everyone could see she was looking thin and wan, and Mrs. E felt blamed.

One afternoon Henry took his sister along with Miss Fuller for a river jaunt in his skiff. This time Miss Fuller seemed a school-girl gawky. When she snagged her pink sateen dress in an oarlock, Henry’s face registered for his sister’s benefit a comedy of exaggerated eye-rolling dismay unnoticed by their guest, who never stopped talking for a moment about a lecture she had attended the night before, not even when a length of sateen ripped into a kind of fringe that trailed into the water. At last catching her breath and looking about, she finally noticed the draggling finery and laughed easily, which made Anne like her after all. Then she quoted something in German and simpered and squinted, so she had liked her less. Naturally the laughing and the German, like everything else about her, were too loud for Henry.

As Henry headed down river on his own, Anne walked Miss Fuller back to the Emersons’.

“Please, do call me Margaret, as your brother does. And we have in common as well that we are both editors for Henry.”

“No, I could not say I am his editor. I am a copyist, at times. We make the joke that I am his private secretary. We are all most grateful — I’m sure Henry is — that you have taken his pieces for
The Dial
.”

“He has the soul of a poet, and I applaud his verses. But his essays, although rich and clear, are not, somehow, always
coherent
. I’ve only taken the one, you know. Sometimes his poet’s soul
wanders
.”

“Do you really think so.”

They arrived at the garden gate. Anne flinched as the woman seemed about to embrace her; they settled for shaking hands.

Now she thought of her new Canary-bird, instantly thought to name her The Marchesa, then as quickly repenting of the joke, decided to call her plain Birdy instead. She would put the cage in the shade near the fields for the day, and find a tin cup for the bird’s water. Two of the farmers, young brothers, would be scything and pitching hay today, and their sweat would plaster their shirts to the hard planes of their muscles. She tried to decide which was handsomer, Thomas or Robert. It would take further study.

The day grew lighter again. She urged the horses on, past
the tall green spears of mullein, the joe-pie weed with tight grey buds, the flutter of buttercups, campions, and hawkweed that swayed and bobbed in the ditches by the road.

When Henry arrived in New York, a newspaper at the hotel carried the latest news of the wreck of the
Elizabeth
. She had foundered on a sand bar off Fire Island in the night three days earlier, in the freakishly violent hurricane that had run up the eastern coast, then cut across Long Island and into Connecticut, where it had abruptly died out into nothing more than heavy rains.

The paper was
The New York Globe
— a rival of Greeley’s
Tribune
— and the tone of the article was dry. After reviewing the essentials — number of estimated dead in the nation (84), estimated speed of winds (more than 100 miles per hour), how many hurricanes reported on this path from previous years (3), number of merchant ships on the Atlantic estimated lost due to weather each year (27) — it focused on the continued efforts of the shipping company to recover their cargo, 150 tons of Carrera marble. She was a merchant vessel; apart from the crew and some livestock, the few passengers had included the writer Margaret Fuller, her two-year-old son, and her husband, the Italian marquis named Ossoli. All three, along with an Italian girl who was their maidservant, and two sailors, were now dead. Six
dead, seventeen survived. The child’s body had been found — he had died in the arms of a sailor only yards from the beach, and both bodies had already been buried behind the dunes. Now that the seas were calmer, rope lines and mule-teams would be engaged in the effort to drag the marble slabs to shore. The rest of the paper was filled with reports of the hurricane’s wrecking path from the Carolinas north, and of the efforts to clean the streets of Manhattan from debris. A political cartoon showed the mayor of New York City riding the hurricane like a bucking horse. “Winds from Washington are powerful strong,” he said.

In the
Tribune
, a black-bordered space offered a tribute to their dead correspondent. “Death of Margaret Fuller, the Marchesa Ossoli, the Most Famous Woman in the World,” said the head-line. The next phrase continued editor Horace Greeley’s combined instincts for drama and advertisement: “Tireless Champion of the Truth.” Henry set the papers aside with a sigh.

That night Henry slept only a little, then rose early and walked through rubbishy streets. The mess of roof slates and broken glass was being cleaned by men with shovels and brooms. At the pier he caught a ferry to Bay Shore. The next ferry to Fire Island was delayed, so an oysterman with a single-sailed dory took him across the choppy bay.

He walked across the narrow finger of Fire Island in the hot, bright, salt-stung air. Dead animals, smashed cottages and barns, and flattened trees told of improbable disaster in
the midst of rose-hips, sand, heather, thrushes. Coming up over the dunes to the ocean-side, he saw spread before him what looked like a battlefield: a tent encampment, teams of mules and drivers in the surf, the bulk of the destroyed ship so close to shore — absurd that it had sunk, that people had died, virtually on the beach! — and a line of slowly moving people stretched in either direction from the wreck as far as he could see. He realized that they were scavengers, pickers. Four days since the storm, only the dregs were left — shreds of soggy timber still peeling from the ship, bottles and ropes and bits of cloth that washed up. Important items, such as trunks and cartons and furniture, were long gone, he feared; unless perhaps the shipping company had done its own salvage work.

A short conversation with a boss at the mule-teams took away that hope. There was only one forlorn police-man guarding a sad heap of empty trunks wrested from the hands of pickers. Jumbled about were sea-weed, scraps of clothes, a couple of plates, a kettle, and a broken chair. The police-man held a brown goat on a leash of rope; the goat was browsing on the clothes.

“No one has claimed him,” he said. “Do you want him?”

Henry said no. Once untied, the goat bounded off, first in the direction of the mules and then veering off into the dunes, chased by two determined pickers.

All that day Henry wandered the beach, speaking to the pickers and the sailors to see if they knew anything about
the Ossolis’ belongings, if they had seen any papers, but with no luck. The few surviving sailors now working on the marble crew were able to tell him more of the story.