Miss Fuller (7 page)

(Was she calling Emerson vulgar?)

 … that love, a love, to woman is her whole existence; she also is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy.… I know that I, a daughter, live through the life of man; but what concerns me now is, that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.

That was the clear end, the major crashing chord, of the essay. Although Miss Fuller threw in a bad poem treacled with high sentiments to close, Anne held to the phrase
a complete life of its kind
and knew she would not forget it.

The awkward, herky-jerky force of the essay, rather like an electric eel, twisting, brilliant, sparking — that, and the heat-lightning flashing and filling the window-panes — kept her awake until the dawn.

Henry returned in a thunder-storm. A crate of specimens came off the cart with him.

As Sissy made tea in the nearly empty kitchen Anne told Henry about the Monarchs — one had already taken wing; three more were still in chrysalid state; one pouch had fallen, black and dead, to the bottom of the case. The kitchen table and nearly all the china had gone to the new house, so they
set their tea-cups, without saucers, on the broad lip of the stove. The rain stopped and the sun came through the dripping window of the kitchen. Henry excused himself to go take tea with the Emersons. Lidian, Mrs. E, had sent a note asking him to come right away.

“He has gone to his Maker,” said Anne to her sister.

“I don’t enjoy your jokes about Mr. E,” Sissy said.

“You mean God?”

“It is not amusing.”

“I will call him Jove, then, is that better?”

Henry walked the short path to the Emersons’, and at the gate Lidian saw him coming and rushed to embrace him. She was sniffing; he backed away so as not to encourage any real tears. Mr. E was in his study, but he was no longer morose. He was talking and pacing, almost preaching, to Ellery Channing, who seemed to be taking notes. “Henry! Ellery told me you had stayed to scavenge.”

“I was collecting specimens, yes.”

Henry then noticed James Freeman Clarke, standing over by the corner window, and they bowed slightly to one another. His reddish hair, backlit by the late afternoon sun, stood out in wisps from his pale head.
Clarke looks like an old man
, Henry thought. Years ago many of them had guessed he might marry Margaret; but Lidian had thought not, and she had been right.

Emerson said, “We are beginning — embarking — you know, Ellery is really the man in charge, on a book of memoirs
of Margaret, selections of her own writings accompanied by recollections of those who knew her best — myself, Ellery, Clarke, Greeley — commemorating her genius.”

He paused, then announced: “ ‘Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.’ You must contribute as well. Collecting her best words. Commemorating her genius.”

Henry took tea and sandwiches and waited for the others to leave. James inquired after Henry’s studies and said that while he was staying in town he would like to accompany him on a botanising walk or a river jaunt. Henry looked at James’s sleek brown boots and gave his usual shuffling answer about it all depending on the weather. Mr. E ate greedily and needed help to push his chair back from the table — one could not help but notice the girth he had added recently. Standing up to his nearly six full feet, however, he seemed in fine proportion.

After tea he and Henry took one of their usual paths, through the orchard and then on up the hill for a good view. Mr. E talked without ceasing about Margaret, her peculiar genius, her radical habits of mind, her place in the history of thought and action. Suddenly he sat down hard on a mossy rock, interrupting his own monologue, and softly wailed —

“Oh, have I done wrong?”

“What? Tell me.”

Mr. E did not want to go on; or he did, but he couldn’t. He pouted out his lips like a child. Henry was patient, staring out at the heavy trees that clustered along the curving
river in the distance. The crown of one of the trees was yellower than the others — a hickory?

“I — I advised — I refused. She wanted money, months ago — she begged me for a loan and I did not answer, and she wrote to Greeley for an advance from the
Tribune
, for the book on the revolution — and I was in New York with Greeley at the time. He was short of ready money in any case, and I advised him not to make the sacrifice.”

Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the
New-York Daily Tribune
, was Margaret’s employer and champion. She had written dozens and dozens of dispatches from Europe for him, all these years. He had published
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
and had promised to publish her book on the Italian revolution. Greeley and his wife and children were Margaret’s dear friends. This was incredible.

“Not to send her money he planned to pay her anyway?” Henry said.

“Not even a portion of it. I feared — we all feared — she would never come home. Such rumors we had been hearing, you know them yourself, from the Springs and that portrait painter — Ricks? Hicks? — and Hawthorne’s friend, the one who knows the Brownings.…”

“I did not believe the rumors,” said Henry stiffly. “If they did not have a marriage in a Protestant church that does not mean they were not married.”

“But marriage itself has been doubted, amongst people who knew —”

“Everyone would have doubted the marriage if it were in the Roman church as well. She explained all that, you told me yourself. They were married in late autumn of 1847, but the records were lost in the subsequent confusion of the war. These speculations are ridiculous and mean-spirited.”

“I confess I was at first shocked that she had married at all.” Two tiny green grass-hoppers leapt up from the grass and clung to Mr. E’s trouser leg. He brushed them away and continued:

“The domestic life, as wife and mother, always seemed to me something Margaret was too — noble, I think, yes, too noble for. She had too pure an intellect and character to … but the rumors —”

“We need not listen to slander,” Henry said.

“The only way to counter slander was for her and her husband and baby to come home, so we could see them all.”

Henry walked on ahead, to an old apple-tree that had just recently broken in two. The place where the break had happened was pale and mealy, and the center was hollow where the tree had been rotting from within. He plucked a green apple no bigger than a quail’s egg and polished it in his hands as Mr. E caught up.

“Are you angry, Henry?”

“Did you even think about how they would live here? On what income? Would her brothers have taken them in?”

“Or Elizabeth Peabody, or I. Our hands would have been open, once she was home. We would have found a place for
them in Concord, or with her mother. Elizabeth proposed she begin a new series of Conversations. And naturally her book on the revolution would have been published.”

“Do you know if she asked anyone else for money?” asked Henry.

“Her brothers. I think they had already sent her what they could spare. And she did ask Elizabeth, too. I told her not to send money, either. I persuaded her that Margaret must come home.”

Henry said, “You took a lot upon yourself.”

“It was for her own good! I know it was! But — I saw her brother Richard yesterday in Boston. He had only just received a letter she wrote in May, from Livorno, as they were waiting to board. A letter from the dead! Poor thing, he’s been ill enough. In the letter she wrote that they had borrowed money for food and boat fare, and that they were nearly starved.”

“No.”

“And that the only fare home they could afford was on a merchant ship. They could not even afford the packet boat, which would have been safer — so many merchant ships are lost, so dangerous with the baby — And on another boat, they would have arrived much earlier. Don’t you see? And avoided the storm!”

Mr. E groaned and rubbed his face.

If sin existed, this was a sin; but who could grant absolution? Henry only said, “You could not have known.”

On their silent walk back down the hill, Henry absent-mindedly handed the green apple to Mr. E. He as absently took a little bite, then quickly spat it out and tossed the bitter fruit into the grass.

Henry had a sudden memory of one summer, many years earlier, when Margaret had come for her usual stay at the Emersons’ home. He had been living there too, as he often did, working as a carpenter and general handy-man in the house and garden in exchange for the peace of his study-hours at a desk in the barn. He was short of money then, and the Emersons were kind to him. Margaret had joined them in July, to Henry’s mild annoyance — she took up all of Mr. E’s best conversation, and seemed as well to make Lidian nervous.

But what he now remembered was something else: her quick look of sympathy that day when Mr. E had folded some coins in a paper and shoved it at him through the breakfast cups. It was called a “loan” but was really a gift; she knew so; she also knew that Henry must have needed it, and that he hated to receive it in front of her. The next week, she had bought two poems of his for
The Dial
— poems he knew for a certainty she did not like, he could tell well enough — and paid him more than he supposed poems usually merited. He angrily questioned her “charity,” she as angrily insisted it was nothing of the kind, and if he thought it was charity, well, he could give it to a charitable cause. So he did; the ten dollars she had paid him he gave to the First Parish Church fund for the new steeple.

“Since then,” said Margaret, who liked to repeat her own jokes, “I always think of you when I hear the bell.
The Dial
paid the
toll
.”

It was a hard thing to need money, to have to ask for it. It might also be a hard thing to give it; but Mr. E and Greeley and the others had not, in this case, done that particular hard thing.

The light was low and the shadows long when they arrived at the back door of the Emersons’ house. Henry did not go inside, and he took his old friend’s hand in his.

“It
was
right that she should come home,” said Henry. “It’s contrary for any American to live in Europe. She needed to come home.” He meant those words; he was not lying. But he held some other words back.

Mr. E rubbed again at his face, making the skin ruddy and disarranging his side-whiskers, and heavily climbed the back steps. Henry found that he was not able to tell him about what he had discovered on Fire Island. Emerson was a man with money to give or not to give. He and Margaret were mice who darted for crumbs.

The family finished the move into the new house. Two horses and a sledge were hired to drag the last heavy pieces: Henry’s work-table, Mother’s stove, the storage bins, and the wardrobes. Henry was to have the attic to himself,
but neither of its doors was large enough for his enormous ancient table. He had to saw off the legs first and then, with two other men helping, he and Father carried up the top. He then installed some hardware screws in the legs, and Anne helped him twist the legs back into the augered holes he had made in the top. He fretted the entire time about the danger of the wood top splitting, as it was very old cherry — and his sister as always was patient. She swept up the shavings into her hand as he re-drilled one of the holes. He did not look up from his work when he told her he had something to show her from his trip.

The table was up, the wood had not cracked, the legs were steady. They pushed it into place under the west window. Then Henry hoisted the crate onto the table and pried off the top slats as Anne collected into a tidy pile the confetti of straw that fluttered out. She held up a piece with drooping seeds that bobbed like a feather.

“It’s called sand-oats,” said Henry. “It covers the dunes.”

First came out the present of the new box of paints, not only small blocks of water-colors, but plump packets of powder for mixing with oil as well, including a new white called “Clear White,” Indian Yellow, and Persian Green.

“Lovely! Oh, Henny!”

“You said you wanted to learn oil techniques — here’s a little book about mixing the oils and making the palette, and painting on proper canvases. I can stretch some for you on frames if you like.”