The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (31 page)

“It is becoming rather apparent that something is amiss, Allegra,” he said. “Can we not all be on more friendly terms than this?”

“You take me for a hypocrite, George?”

He looked at me, speechless.

“I'm sorry. I don't want to be unfair,” I continued. “But how can I go on as if things are as they were before? And now you pretend to barely tolerate me, for her sake.”

“I know, my dear. I know. Things are not as before. I feel shame every time I speak to her, or touch her.” His eyes pierced me. “It is not easy for me either, you know. She is the innocent party, after all, utterly innocent.”

“We acted like fools?” I said.

“No,” he said. “No. We were rather … thrown together before we had measured the dangers. The strength of our feelings. And we gave in to them.”

“There's no doubt on that score.”

“How might we not have? Can we talk sensibly?”

“The only sensible thing would be for me to leave Florence. Before I throw myself at you. Behind her back, this time.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You can not leave. And besides, where would you go? You can hardly afford passage home.”

“What do you suggest, then?” I waited. “I shall have repaid you in another month anyway, everything. With two or three more commissions.”

“You insist on being ridiculous, as if that were important.” He stepped forward and grabbed me by the shoulders. He could not speak further; we stared at one another like figures frozen in a tableau.

Finally, I pulled myself away. At the moment I truly believed he was insensible to my broken heart. I ran from the room.

That summer I tried to see more of Mrs. Spooner, but that only made things worse. Twice more Mr. Spooner and I had similar encounters. But each proved as futile and frustrating as the first. There seemed to be no possible resolution to our difficulty.

After Mr. Ruskin departed, Gibbon and I went on a week-long sketching trip among the Tuscan hills. And this removal from his parents gave me some peace in which to recover my spirits and rediscover an intensity of joy in my work.

Then in September the Greenoughs returned with their infant son. When we visited to welcome them back to Florence, Mrs. Greenough proposed that I do the child's portrait. She refused to let me do it without a fee, out of consideration, I mean, for all they had done for us since our arrival. I could not convince her that I would consider it an honor simply to paint the boy.

She was looking all the more beautiful for her delivery and water cure, so I suggested I do a mother-and-child. She would not consider that either.

“Mr. Greenough and I have thought much about it,” she said. “We wish only a first-rate portrait of the child, if possible by a woman's hand.”

So that October, once the Spooners and I had moved back down into the city, I began my commission, anxious only that I be worthy of their faith in me.

He was Henry Saltonstall Greenough, a large, beautiful baby, born amidst the rigors of the system of Hydrotherapeutics at Grafenberg, on May 11, and come down from the mountain to us in Florence with his beaming, healthy, long-absent parents. What I hoped to capture—beyond the beauty of his blue eyes, thick mane of hair, and sturdy chest and shoulders—was his boldness of spirit, a birthright, no doubt, from his parents.

No sooner had I captured this child on canvas than I returned to the Spooner suite, gripping the final sum in my remaining debt to Mr. Spooner. By the time I reached the door of his workroom, I was in tears. I do not know what I expected to do—perhaps hurl the final sum in his face? Instead, in my confusion and anger I stumbled through the doorway, quite surprising him at his sketch board, and rather fell at his feet—or at least some such image of myself lingers in my memory. Whereupon he caught me up in his arms and began pulling off my clothes. We were suddenly helpless brutes, like newly betrothed youth and maiden carrying on hazardously at the turn of their parents' back.

But once again, the following day, he was aloof whether in the presence of Mrs. Spooner or not, and I began to feel sick whenever

I thought of my true circumstances now. I saw that there was no more tenderness of love in him toward me, but that I had become now merely an object of his inflamed desire. That, a betrayer myself, I was now betrayed in turn.

B
Y LATE NOVEMBER
the rains came in earnest, and in December a letter arrived from Mr. Ruskin that changed everything for me. After a confection of pleasantries, he turned to the matter closest to my heart.

“I had an acquaintance who is adept at such things,” he wrote, “look into the matter of the scandal we spoke of that lovely evening on moonlit Fiesole. Knowing how troubled you were by my ungracious report, and wishing to make amends by following through directly upon my return to England (delayed somewhat by illness), I will therefore come to the point immediately.

“I regret to say that the young American wounded in a violent public fracas was indeed Mr. Thomas Wentworth; moreover, the woman he lived with was none other than your Miss Somerby. So you see, my dear Mrs. Fullerton, my own earliest intuitions, and later yours, once stimulated by that charming little Adèle, were more portentous than farfetched. The accident was due to an argument between Mr. Wentworth and another man over this common woman. I visited your cousin in gaol and told him about meeting you in Florence. He still suffers from his wounds; indeed, he has lost his left arm (which he had used to stave off this attacker). But he shall live. He remains incarcerated as a consideration to the Americans. One Mr. Wellington is apparently on his way from Boston—to what precise legal purpose I have not yet been able to ascertain. Your brother was able to jot a brief note in my notebook before I left him. And it seemed clear to me, even before reading this epistle as he handed it to me, that he wishes to come to you in Florence, if he can but design some means to gain his freedom. Should you wish to communicate with him, I will endeavor to place a brief note before him in turn, but the authorities are not wholly cooperative in these matters.”

He wished us well and suggested that my “rather too-Satyric-Faunus” painting, after further contemplations in his leisure, struck him as “true yet even antique in its intimations,” even though quite possibly unshowable in London, and “certainly I should think in Boston or New York.” He could not resist his old theme in closing. “It would require a Frenchman or an Italian to look upon it without blushing and to appreciate it as a deeper depiction of the human form—even if they appreciate for all the wrong reasons.”

I realized that this was conditional approval. But I respected his knowledge and perceptions, and knew only too well that his blame was much more liberally broadcast than his praise. In sum, I took heart from it.

Yet even that heartening was weighed down by the enormity of Tom's condition, and in such degrading circumstances, that I found I was again unable to concentrate on my work; I found myself wishing only for pensive solitude. Tom's note read simply:

My Dearest Sister: I am detained here until the American Consul and British authorities decide what is to be done with me. I am well enough. If I can find my freedom, I will work my way down to Florence and join you once again. Even at best, I am sure I will be a long time coming. Your loving brother and friend, Tom.

To be sure, I had no money to travel to Tom. And I was not at all sure that Mr. Wellington might not try to entangle me again.

Mrs. Spooner came to fear for my state of mind throughout those dank winter days.

“Let me help you,” she would say when I became distracted. There was, of course, nothing much she could do.

She would only murmur some consolation or another: “Remember what the Italians say. What is it again? ‘Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.' It is the shadow which falls upon all of us now and again, and we must all endure it and return to life.”

I said that I thought of going alone to Rome for solitude and contemplation, but neither she nor Mr. Spooner would hear of it. If I were determined, she said, then they would all accompany me. I therefore did not go, but remained trapped in an anguish of my own that none of them understood.

F
ORTUNATELY
, before Mr. Ruskin's letter arrived I had completed the Greenough portrait, to their satisfaction. By the following April once more they were preparing for another journey to Freiwaldu, Silesia. This spurred again my own wish to leave Florence, and I became much disquieted that spring. Part of my difficulty was my feeling of guilt about Tom. Most evenings found me asking myself whether it was his involvement with me that sent my brother's own life off its track. Had he not sealed his irrevocable course the very day he confronted my chief tormentor to avenge and protect me from further abasement?

Of course, his blind attraction to Miss Somerby complicated the downward course of his life in exile. How much blame she shared with me I did not at the time know, but I felt certain that, generally speaking, she was responsible in large measure for his misfortunes abroad.

But finally it was Tom himself who had failed to see the true state of things. Was he not another infatuated man? As hopelessly trapped in his carnal obsessions as Mr. Spooner and I had been in ours? Tom had never seen the real woman, but only what he had wanted to see. And who better than Miss Somerby knew how to stoke the fires of masculine fantasy?

I have seen other women like Sabra. Born with a sort of instinct, they seem to know precisely how to turn a head or a hand, pout a lip, strike a look in the eye or an attitude of such languorous sensuality (at the very moment when the foolish man most requires it) that he opens himself to realms of carnal bliss imagined in the most unfathomable reaches of his being. That is not to say that there are always, on the other hand, women whose very bodies have dried up like old figs from religious or other zealotries, women who so fundamentally detest masculinity in all its manifestations that they suffer a complete isolation from the men in their lives.

Yet the Miss Somerbys of the world use men exclusively for their own ends and desires. Was one a prude to admit it? Was I myself on my way to becoming one kind of woman or another? But what do women of either a sensual or a celibate character lose by their excesses? Do they not lose a truer basis for independence and development?

I have never believed that a woman has to concede to the passions of another once they rise to an insufferable pitch, or to allow herself to be dragged down in bondage into the well of some masculine mania.

“Would not a brief separation do us some good?” I asked Mr. Spooner one day when we met on the terrace by accident.

“Oh, I'll not trouble you, my dear! You may have as much freedom as you wish. Please do not make me out suddenly to be … to have become …
a burden
.”

“I do no such thing. I simply find that I need a period of solitude.”

“Then you shall have it! Our being in Rome or being in Florence will change nothing in that regard.”

“To live separately, yet together? What, in Rome? How so?”

“Allegra, please!” He held a finger to my lips. “I believe there is some fatal mistake in this other course you propose, even of a duration of months. I had meant to go to Rome, for us all to go to Rome, before long. We have spoken of it.” He stopped speaking, his eyes searching for understanding. I said nothing. There was something irrevocable about the moment that made me feel it would be useless, or worse, to be disagreeable or insist on my view of myself alone, healing in solitude. He rose and poured himself a glass of wine. He was unable to speak. And he probably thought silence the best condition for me to consider his argument. I could not quell the suspicion that he merely wished to keep me about as a mere convenience, in rare opportunities, to his desire. I began to harbor thoughts of furtive escape. I thought of Tom, of his someday perhaps being with me again. I had no idea how that might come to pass. But with a letter to Mr. Ruskin asking him to keep me informed, I had enclosed a note to Tom, with my address in Florence and Bellosguardo.

I was, however, stirred once again in the autumn by the arrival of another letter from Miss Fuller, who, as she wrote, had searched me out “through the agency of Mr. Dana.” She wished to announce her intention to travel in Europe—Britain, France, Italy—in a “journalistic capacity for Mr. Greeley, who suddenly views me as the Donna Quixote of his
Tribune
.” She and her companions, the Springs, were to leave America in August and hoped to arrive on the Italian peninsula by the following spring. She had written to several old friends abroad that she might “look forward to renewing old acquaintanceships fondly recalled,” and would also secure letters of introduction to “any number of other interesting persons with whom I would like to meet and converse.” She then congratulated me on the singular success of my
Mrs. Philleo,
which success Mr. Dana, she explained, had taken some pains to point out to her.

“I should be pleased to renew my acquaintance with Miss Fuller as well,” Mr. Spooner said after I handed him the letter to read. “We must invite her to stay with us next summer here in Bellosguardo—for a substantial visit. That would make you very happy, Allegra?”

Few things turn out as we plan them so far in advance. But as I suspected, Miss Fuller's arrival at Florence—in June of 1847 and after London, Paris, Naples, and Rome—I now count, looking back on it, as another turning point in my life.

TWENTY-THREE

Miss Fuller embraces Italy

W
e met, as it turned out, at the Greenoughs, who were among the first Miss Fuller visited in Florence.

“How delightful to see you again,” she said, rising and coming toward us as we entered the parlor where Mrs. Greenough had prepared tea. She took both my hands and her vivid, blue-gray eyes looked up happily into mine. I detected an occasional strand of gray now in her lovely honey-colored hair. She addressed Mr. and Mrs. Spooner, and Gibbon as well, and then we all seated ourselves as she continued speaking of Rome, which, it soon became clear, was to become something of a permanent home while she remained abroad. Miss Fuller explained that she had any number of acquaintances there and that she found “every minute, day and night, something to be seen or done, which we can not bear to lose. I am,” she added, “fast losing my Anglo-Saxon crust, which has built up over me during my entire life.”

Mr. Greenough agreed, but added that he found it “difficult to pursue one's work there.” Gibbon said that he had feared as much himself.

“On the Corso, where we live, the Springs and I,” she went on, “after the weather became fine, there was conversation or singing before my window all night long. I don't know whether I ever truly slept while in Rome.” She laughed. “Now in Florence, which is quieter, I feel as though I need to sleep all the time!”

She then spoke of meeting Mazzini in England and a most intriguing Italian nobleman while in Rome. The result of such meetings was that she had become the most “unashamed Republican.” She had even visited Mazzini's mother in Genoa and sent news of her to her brave son, along with two leaves of the scented verbena growing on his library windowsill. She believed completely in a coming war for liberation from Metternich's Austrians. “It is only a matter of time, and of an initial uprising somewhere, anywhere, on the part of the tyrant's subjects.”

After a lengthy discussion of European politics, during which Mr. Greenough made his own Republican sympathies known, I changed the subject by asking her if she had met thus far any other of those “interesting persons” to whom she had planned to present her letters of introduction.

She immediately began to speak with enthusiasm of meeting George Sand while in Paris.

Mrs. Powers, who was also present, said: “I hope she is not so vulgar as they make her out to be, Miss Fuller.”

“Not at all …” Mrs. Greenough began to answer, but Miss Fuller took up the challenge immediately.

“Even Madame Sand's portraits,” Miss Fuller said, “are inaccurate, her face being much finer, her eyes and forehead more beautiful, the lower portion of her face strong and perhaps masculine, but expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions … and not in the least coarse.”

She paused and glanced about. No one disagreeing with her, she went on. “I was nearly rebuffed upon presenting myself to her servant, a goddaughter. ‘Madame says she does not know you.' So I asked if she had not received my letter and immediately Madame Sand herself opened the door, our eyes met, and she said,
‘C'est vous,'
and held out her hand!”

Then Miss Fuller turned directly to Mrs. Powers. “Her beautiful, simple appearance and attitude gave her a ladylike dignity that struck a contrast to the ludicrous and vulgar caricature of George Sand.”

Mrs. Powers appeared glad to hear it.

“Yes,” Mr. Greenough spoke up, “wouldn't you say that there is a perfect
goodness
emanating from the effect of the whole?”

“Indeed, sir,” Miss Fuller went on. “Goodness. Nobleness. And power.”

He encouraged her to continue: “And she invited you in?”

“Oh yes!
Il me fait de bien de vous voir,
I said, and we went right in to her study.
‘Ah!'
she said,
‘vous m'avez ècrit une lettre charmante.'
I believe I loved her from that moment, even before we had talked much.

Mrs. Powers wondered about her reputation.

“She needs no defense,” Miss Fuller said, “but only to be understood, for she has acted bravely out of her nature. She might have loved one man, if she had found one who could interest and command her throughout her range, but there was hardly the possibility of that among her contemporaries. Thus she has naturally changed the objects of her affection, several times. There is of course something of the Bacchante in her and that love of night and storms, like followers of Cybele roaming in free raptures on the mountaintops, but she is not at all coarse, never gross. She has, I'm sure, not failed to draw some rich drops from every kind of winepress. When she has done with an intimacy, she likes to break it off suddenly, as has often happened both with men and women. And of course many calumnies laid upon her are traceable to this cause. But I heartily enjoyed so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her too, very much; I never liked a woman better. For the rest, she holds her place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems full of energy and courage in it.”

“Fidelity is never easy for persons of talent and intellect,” Mr. Spooner offered. He glanced at me.

Mrs. Greenough asked whether Miss Fuller would be passing through Bologna on her way to Milan.

“Yes, I believe I must.” Miss Fuller looked a little perplexed by the sudden shift in subject.

“Then you shall love Bologna, Miss Fuller, for there the intellect of woman is cherished. There is a monument to Matilda Tambreni, late professor of Greek. And a bust of a woman professor of anatomy in their anatomical hall. A thing unimaginable in America.”

“To say nothing of the conspicuous place they have given to their women artists,” Mr. Greenough added. “Properzia di Rossi, Elisabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana. Here too even the women have their Casino dei Nobili and are the very soul of society.”

“And let us not forget then while we are about it,” Miss Fuller said, “the painter of miniatures, Laya, mother of them all, whose fame exceeded the most renowned painters of Rome—Sopolis and Dionysius—and whose devotion caused her, as Pliny reports, ‘never to marry'!”

“Or Onorata Rodiana!” Mr. Spooner said cheerily, as if topping her still. “The ‘Warrior Maiden' who stabbed through the heart the libertine who accosted her in the very act of her painting the Marquis Fondalo's palace ceilings, and then escaped dressed as a man to a band of Condottieri.”

Hear! Hear!” said Mr. Greenough, laughing again. We all joined him.

“Well,” Mrs. Powers asked, “for that matter is it not Milan that pays tribute, in the Ambrosian Library I believe, to that female mathematician?”

Mr. Greenough confirmed this fact. Miss Fuller said that she more than ever anticipated her Italian travels.

I invited her up to Bellosguardo “only about a mile beyond the Porta Roma,” I explained. And in fact she did look in on the Spooners and me. After lunching and scrutinizing my atelier, she and I left the Spooners and returned to our terrace and a pitcher of cold lemon-water.

She said that she liked Mr. Greenough quite well, as a rare American whose sculpture was certainly satisfactory but moreover whose Republican spirit was exceptional. “There are very few others, even among these English,” she said, “who take the pains to penetrate beyond the cheats of tradesmen and the cunning of a mob corrupted by centuries of slavery, to discover and know the real mind, the vital blood of Italy. And of course they know nothing of Mazzini, let alone Alfieri or even, Lord help us, Dante.” She descanted for some minutes upon the history of Italy's fragmentation, going back hundreds of years, and the assorted despots (from Popes to Austrians to Spanish Bourbons) whose medieval powers still burdened the Italian people.

We spoke briefly about a current work of Mr. Greenough—a model for a relief of a bacchante and a young faun, the bacchante all relaxed, the faun all strain in the presence of fruitful vines. She admired the work “in its incomplete state,” but, she added, “the poor artist seems most uncertain about it, most unsatisfied with the present state of it, nothing like the sensual abandon, and the utter absence of shame, in that muscular being you have painted, Allegra. And I see why you had to keep him hidden away!”

She then brought us to a consideration of my new home, by which I mean Florence itself.

“Florence certainly is unlike Rome,” she said. “At first I could hardly bear the change; yet, for the study of the fine arts, it is still a richer place, I think, and you are quite right to have settled yourself here.”

“I have been planning to visit Rome for some time,” I explained, “but haven't gotten around to it yet. I have, of course, a world of masters here, and a number of new friends.”

“Indeed. You study; you work diligently. And where else can one see the del Sarto frescoes? But I think the time has come for you to venture forth to see Rome. Florence seems more in spirit—its provincialisms, its limits—like Boston than a great Italian city.”

“Oh, I shall. I'm awaiting a letter from a friend in England, at the moment.” I said nothing of Tom or his circumstances. “You have seen the del Sartos then? He is a wonder, isn't he.”

“Yes, but there is something about that woman he paints over and again. His wife, I believe, or so someone told me. He must have been infatuated, but in his portrayals he shows certain of her … bad qualities as well, does he not? A certain
diablerie
.”

I laughed at her characterization. “Perhaps,” I suggested, “that's why it is difficult to point to any painting of his that has either simplicity or quite that devotional feeling we discover in so many other masters. Imagine such early fame and success bringing him neither happiness nor prosperity; he was miserable and contemned instead. She caused him much anguish and impoverishment, you see; he'd married her despite the warnings of his friends concerning her infamous character. For her he forsook his aging parents, his scholars, even his patron, Francis I, from whom he embezzled, for her sake. Her avarice and infidelity became proverbial, even unto her abandoning him on his deathbed—this woman for whom he had forsaken all—and letting him die miserably, alone. He was buried hastily and without ceremony.”

She contemplated these facts quietly; then she said: “It is a sorrowful tale. But to learn by blundering is the destiny of men and women here below.” She looked up at the sky. “Preserve us all from infatuations!” she added.

“And from the infatuated!” I said, and we both laughed. I could not stop thinking of brother Tom's predicament as we spoke.

I seized the moment to confess my confusion, my passions, my shame over past relations with Mr. Spooner. It was as if I had been searching for months for some person of understanding worthy to unleash the crosscurrents of my heart.

Instinctively, she knew of what I spoke. She looked right into me before speaking.

“You have embarked, Allegra, upon your own
vita nuova
, as I have,” she said without further explanation.

I insisted by my look on something more.

“Listen, you poor woman, listen to me,” she finally offered. “To the pagans we must turn, finally, for the secret of a happy and virtuous life, as we turn fascinated before a Florentine fountain celebrating fecundity. To the Saxon, remember, the body is a convenience. To the Puritan, a curse. But to the Italian the body is a thing alive with beauty. And you, you and your master are as Italians now.”

“It is as if,” I suggested, “being here—this Tuscany—has taken strange possession of me, Margaret.”

“Perhaps, then, that's all as it's meant to be, Allegra.” But she pursued this theme no further at present, and turned rather to European politics again.

I had to confess that I had not given sufficient attention to political matters, having focused all my attention on the fine arts. But the expressions of her great heart convinced me I had been remiss in avoiding while we lived in Italy—much as I had feared purely out of my own self-interest—the coming rebellion. I could not have known then how much the fluidity of political conditions would determine the course of my own life. She explained calmly her growing sympathies for the Italian cause since meeting Mazzini and her new friend the Marchese Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.

I could not then tell whether it was the man or the cause that had so opened her passions, whether her heart or her politics spoke to me, or some rare conjoining of the two. It was clear only that her travels in Europe, and especially in Italy, had awakened her to a deeper life—a life for which she had been searching perhaps, a life that would gather meaning for the long studies and labors of all her previous years. It was here in Italy that she had recognized something, something as yet inchoate even to her powerful mind, yet something worthy of her at last. I felt a great empathy toward her; we were now like sisters in adventure. She had, I understood, embarked upon her own
vita nuova
, but a new life, I was about to discover, ample enough to contain Eros as well as Psyche.

I asked how she had met Ossoli, and she described her meeting him by chance. Yet there was no doubt, it seemed to me as she spoke, that she considered Ossoli an offering from the hand of destiny.

“I had gone with my traveling companions to St. Peter's to hear vespers,” she explained. “Holy Thursday it was. I wished to wander among the various chapels, and so arranged with my friends to meet after the services. When I finally noticed the crowd dispersing, I returned to the appointed spot to meet Mr. and Mrs. Spring, but after considerable waiting and looking about, even with the help of my glass, I came to believe they had missed or misunderstood me and had left with the crowd of worshippers. Just as I realized these circumstances, a young gentleman approached me and asked if I were seeking someone. I immediately perceived some resemblance to my brother Eugene, some essential kindness about this young man dressed in such fashionable, close-fitting jacket-and-trousers, with his flowing cravat and bamboo cane. Might he offer me any assistance? Together we continued looking for a time but soon gave up and went out into the piazza for a carriage. Yet we had delayed just too long, for there were no carriages to be had, and the gentle stranger offered to walk with me, poor and wandering
inglesa
, all the way from the Vatican to the Corso. I did not speak much Italian yet, but I am learning quickly now. Then, however, conversation was difficult, but sufficiently managed to create an interest in one another. And we have met once or twice since.”