The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  And so began my adventures as a traveling painter. It shall soon become clear to any who continue to read that this portrait of myself is no vaporish fiction out of that handkerchief school so popular in these, and in my mother’s, days. I assure you that I have no intentions of adding yet another, in Mr. Fielding’s apt words, to the “swarm of … monstrous romances with which the world abounds” and which common readers can regard “only as proceeding from a pruritus, or indeed rather from a looseness of the brain.” Nor should my reader look in these pages for popular prophetic utterances, for confections of romantic idyl, nor for trumperies of battlefield heroism. On the contrary, my story depicts people and things as I found them, as commonplace as the spittoon and cigar, as the crowd of heavy-witted men and women swarming about you in the streets.

  THREE

  First enterprises The persecution of a bearded man

  With God’s grace Tom and I found that we met with early success. After crossing the border to Massachusetts, we made our way to the village of Lakeworth where we found lodging to restore flagging bodies and spirits. Our plan was to move the next morning directly on to Fitchburg where my father’s cousin and best friend from his youth, William Bede, had a large farm. Here we might remain while we tried our luck drumming up business in the town center.

  But dear Tom was up before dawn, I later discovered, and out reconnoitering the hamlet—which consisted of more than a dozen dwellings within the village, two taverns, a tailoring shop above the general store, a printing shop, bookstore, hat and palm leaf shops, and the like. It seemed a worthy and industrious community and augured well, in Tom’s estimation, for initiating our venture.

  Even while I was sharing a pot of tea with our loquacious landlady, one Mrs. Grundage, Tom entered the kitchen grinning above a sheaf of handbills.

  “And what’s this, Tom?” I asked. Our hostess seemed rather stunned by his entry.

  “You shall see,” he said, coming over to me and laying the pile, face down, before me. He winked at Mrs. Grundage, and she began to laugh in anticipation. “I’ve not been idle!” he proclaimed, as if to accuse me, justly I may say, of having been a lie-a-bed. He then turned over the top bill.

  CORRECT LIKENESSES

  painted and prepared with elegance for purchase

  by

  Mrs. ALLEGRA FULLERTON

  and her assistant

  Mr. THOMAS WENTWORTH

  at the Lodging House of Mrs. T. W. P. Grundage

  This last line had been written in by a careful hand. After a suitable space the rest of the advertisement, in print again, continued as follows:

  Upon request, Mrs. Fullerton and Mr. Wentworth

  will wait on patrons at their respective places

  of residence.

  PRICES AS FOLLOW

  (full satisfaction or no pay)

  Side Views painted in full colors .............. $4.00

  Front Views .............. $8.00–10.00

  Miniatures on Ivory .............. $10.00–12.00

  (poplar board or canvas, prices range according to patron’s specifications)

  “It was Mrs. Grundage who suggested I add ‘full satisfaction or no pay,’” Tom said, “as the first step to gaining the confidence of possible sitters.” Mrs. Grundage beamed. “So I took the liberty, Allegra, seeing you needed your sleep.”

  But no commissions came our way, and we began to fear impoverishment before we had truly begun. It was Mrs. Grundage, again, who finally suggested a solution.

  “You have no specimens yet!” she said. “It seems you must have specimens to interest anyone. So why don’t you paint me and my little girl and the baby? For the room and board of this week, that is.”

  Gladly, I did. Rumor of the specimens got about, and in very short order we had many callers coming to see “whether a woman could paint likenesses.”

  Some of these must have approved, for thanks to Mrs. Grundage and Tom, I commissioned five oil portraits—two miniatures and three front views—in Lakeworth.

  “Nearly fifty dollars!” Tom crowed. “What might we not accomplish, my dear sister, in the municipalities of the Commonwealth!”

  “We have made a good start, Tom,” I agreed, “but as Miss Rosslinden said while sitting for me, likeness-takers seem to have been passing Lakeworth by more often than not. So the competition is likely to be greater in larger towns.”

  I thanked him again, however, for all his efforts in procuring clients and performing every drudgery attendant to my craft, all the more freeing me to process quickly each likeness and move on to the next. Broad of shoulder and crowned with a smooth mane of wavy blond hair, Tom’s kempt and handsome appearance, as much as his energy, I credited to much of our first success.

  My words to Tom, however, prophesied our experience in Fitchburg, for indeed our luck did turn. It was not only that the town center seemed to swarm with hucksters and peddlers of every stripe, including likeness-takers whose advertisements preceded ours, but that a certain meanness of spirit, which soon sent us elsewhere, seemed woven into the fabric of the place.

  Our introduction to this, for want of a better word, “malignancy” happened thusly.

  After lodging at my cousin’s farm, Tom and I set out in our wagon for the marketplace in the center of town in order to purchase gum mastic and those of my paint powders that had begun to run low in Lakeworth. Tom took along with us a dozen handbills on which he would inscribe in his fine hand the name of the first hotel, shop, or tavern that he could persuade to allow some corner for my studio. Then he would paste up our advertisements among the flapping crowd of hornswoggleries promising Extraordinary Novelties! and Unprecedented Entertainments!

  I was returning to our appointed rendezvous with the supplies I had purchased when I noticed a small crowd milling expectantly about the entrance to the main hotel. Four men holding shears, razor, shaving lather, and rope waited upon the stone steps by the door. Below these steps a butcher’s cart waited.

  Shortly, a tall, burly man with the most magnificent sandy beard I think I have ever seen, short of God’s own growth as portrayed by the masters, emerged from the hotel. He appeared to be the butcher, but before he could reach his cart or even descend the steps, these four men laid hands upon him. Instinctively I stepped aside from the gathering mob. I must have uttered a small cry of surprise, for three dishevelled children looked at me and began to laugh, crying “Oh! Oh!” as if to ridicule by imitation.

  These four men had thrown the butcher upon the stone steps, attempting to subdue him and, it was by now clear to everyone, cut off his glorious beard.

  “Shave him! Shave him!” the crowd began to jeer. There was much excitement and laughter, as if some circus menagerie were unfolding for their amusement.

  At that moment, from somewhere, Tom flew to my side and held me by one arm. We watched the battle in horror and fascination, and this was not the last time in our adventures that I was glad for Tom’s company.

  “What the devil has gotten into these people?” he whispered, pulling me to him.

  As we watched, poised for flight, the bearded man, who was a strong, muscular fellow, suddenly threw off his assailants long enough to fetch from his vest pocket a gleaming jackknife, which he began to lash about at the legs of his panting tormentors. Two of the men feeling the lick of his blade called out in odd high voices and limped quickly away. They were soon followed across the blood- and sweat-stained stone by the other two as yet untouched conspirators.

  At first sight of the knife, the ever-growing mob had begun to howl, and now two constables, encouraged by the people, proceeded to arrest the unfortunate butcher as if he were the assailant, instead of a man defending himself. Sulky, nodding with grim satisfaction at the hirsute man’s arrest, the people finally began to disperse in knots of gossip.

  Tom and I left, stopping only long enough to collect his handbills and cancel a notice he had placed in the newspaper.

  “Beards I know are out of fashion,�
� Tom said as we drove back to my cousin’s farm, “but can such violence arise from petty intolerance?”

  When we reached his farm, we told my cousin what we had seen.

  “Oh, that’s Old Jew Perry,” he said, laughing a little. “Asa Perry. Bit of an eccentric, I’m afraid.”

  “So he was attacked as a Jew?” I asked.

  “Oh no! Not as a Jew, just so-called. For the beard, you see. No, he was raised Church of England, I believe, but he’s an infamous crank hereabouts. He won’t shave the thing off no matter how many times some have requested it of him. He has his principles, you see. The more folks want it off, the less likely he is to bend to their wishes.” He laughed again, completely unsympathetic to the seriousness of the unprovoked attack.

  By way of explanation, he recounted an instance of how Mr. Perry’s sharp wit often bettered his critics. On one occasion a local minister met Perry upon the road and asked: “Perry, why don’t you shave and not go around looking like the Devil?” To which Perry replied: “Reverend Mr. Bascom, are you not mistaken in your comparison of personages? I have never seen a picture of the ruler of the sulphurous regions with much of a beard, but if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard.”

  Cousin William laughed again, and this time we joined him. But we felt troubled still, and Tom opined that persecutions of anyone adopting an appearance or viewpoint a little different from his neighbors must still flame forth in New England, as in olden times.

  “Oh, I imagine some things change little enough with time, Tom, whatever else changes,” William said in good humor. “Old Perry is hooted in the street, talked about in the grocery, and mothers frighten unruly children with threats of him. And I suppose it is all a most unworthy turn of events, considering that Perry’s father fought in the Revolution and he himself was a soldier in 1812. In fact, nobody’s more steadfast or works harder.”

  “And I’ll wager,” Tom said, “that the old crosspatch will live to see whiskers back in fashion!”

  “No doubt, Tom. But they don’t much care for his opinions either—abolition, abstemiousness. He has always refused, for example, to furnish liquor for his hired men in the hay field, and for that is reviled and ever on the search for new laborers. And, some even say, nakedness. He propounds the health of nakedness.”

  William’s words recalled to me for an instant the memory of my dear husband, lying of a warm summer’s night upon our bed—beautiful in the moonlight, tumescent, waiting for me to join him. I discovered after our marriage this willingness to be quite naked in the heat of summer after dark.

  Many times during that night, I recalled my husband, our happiness and sweet passions, but the next morning my feelings were distracted by more news of Mr. Perry. Mary, William’s wife, had heard among the gossips that Perry had been charged with unprovoked assault, refused to pay his fine as unjust, and so had been sentenced to jail for a year. How, I wondered, can courts and the public be so unenlightened even in our own time? Must we give up the cherished idea of human progress?

  FOUR

  My captivity continues

  Such memories filled my long, empty days now. I had come to realize that there was a certain routine in my captive hours: two light meals every day, a bath twice a week on the first floor, infrequent comings and goings of Mrs. Moore and her Ethiopian associate, Reggie, and hours of watching the street below from my window. There was to be sure a crushing boredom about it, yet also a constant, almost debilitating apprehension. I found my mind growing more active every day, as if to compensate for my sedentary flesh. Without paints, brushes, canvas; without reading material of any sort, however puerile or common; without even so much as a diary or scraps of paper to rig one up, I had all the more to fall back upon the resources of memory and thought.

  My retreats to this inner life were interrupted only by the routines I have described and, I soon came to see, by weekly evening visits from Joseph Dudley. Each visit seemed similar to the last, his ominous, calm, rational appeals for our intimacy and my refusals to respond so long as he kept me in subjugation. I believe it was after his third visit that I found a book lying on my bedside table upon waking the next morning. At first I felt discomfiture that someone had entered and stood by me as I slept. But taking up the book—there were no words printed upon the morocco cover or spine—I opened it to the title page and found Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

  I had longed for material of any sort to read. Over the years I had become habituated to reading, particularly in the evenings. Yet now that an entire book, indeed a sort of romance, had fallen into my hands, I saw immediately that it was of a kind to shame any woman of character. Could this be some foolish ploy of Mr. Dudley? Or some device of Mrs. Moore? I threw the thing aside after reading but a few pages into the opening chapter.

  These reminiscences were purported to be those of one Frances Hill, a young woman brought at the tender age of fifteen and against her will, at first, into the kind of voluptuous servitude one seldom bothers to contemplate as within one’s ken. According to the date of publication, the memoirs were nearly a century old, and I found in the early pages that the language had just enough of an antique ring to sound authentic.

  “Truth! Stark naked truth, is the word,” Miss Frances promises, “and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow a strip of gauze wrapper on it, but paint situations such as they actually rose to me in nature, careless of violating those laws of decency that were never made for such unreserved intimacies as ours.”

  Abjuring further preface in consideration of her reader, Miss Hill goes “souse into my personal history”: that tale of a village girl traveling to London to seek her fortune, upon the death of her parents of the smallpox, and entering that nest of corruption, folly, and hypocrisy—the brothel. Upon her arrival in the city she is betrayed by friend and stranger alike, fatally directed to an intelligence office (then as now infamous as a source of unsuspecting prey for brothel keepers and procurers), and awakened sensually through the tender ministrations of one Miss Phoebe. It was at this point in the narrative, with Frances and Phoebe flagrante delicto, that I threw the book across the room, leapt off my bed, and began to pace my tight quarters in a frightening state of agitation.

  I will not trouble to recount all the thoughts that raced through my mind during that day and the next. I will only say that gradually, as if some secret might be revealed therein, I found myself returning, in brief snatches, to the book. Although there were many passages I found offensive, I came to believe that I had nothing to lose or fear by my occasional perusals, and to be certain, I had little enough else to do.

  Perhaps it was nothing more than an overactive imagination charged by my deprivations, but I confess I found that little by little my suspicions grew that here was some species of token, if not quite an amulet, that I might do well to understand.

  One experience in particular, some weeks later, heightened my sense of a certain resemblance between my immurement and that of Miss Hill. The possible connections were not exact, but rather contributed to a vague sense of foreboding, of danger, beyond what I had previously acknowledged, to the current conditions of my life. In brief, I had been conducted to the room where I had my twice-weekly bath. While luxuriating in a tub of hot, sweetened water, I became aware of dim voices, as if in the adjoining room.

  Looking in the direction of these voices, I noticed a sort of panel in the wainscotting that seemed slightly ajar. I finished my bath quickly, dried off, stepped close to the panel, and squatted to examine it. It moved quite soundlessly as I touched it lightly. With the utmost care, I slowly slid the panel aside, to the full distance of two inches, discovering as I did so a slit in the wall of approximately one inch in width and between a quarter to half an inch in length. As I pressed my eye upon the opening, the voices I heard were given embodiment in Mrs. Moore, Reggie, a gentleman who by his voice seemed of Irish extraction, and two gaily dressed young women of perhaps eighteen and twenty.

  Only my curiosity
and fascination, and the advantage to me such an aperture implied, quelled my outrage at discovering that it opened directly onto me or whoever used the bathing tub.

  I listened intently to gather what they were saying. It seemed clear that they had no suspicion of my witnessing their remarks, for I was, I soon realized, the principal object of their collective deliberations. Having left me alone in the bath but a few minutes before, Mrs. Moore had apparently gone to her coterie with me on her mind.

  “Why should she get different treatment … from you or me or any of the rest?” said the woman in the yellow dress, the youngest of the three.

  “So long as Mr. Dudley’s paying for what he wants,” Mrs. Moore answered, “that’s what he’s goin’ ta get.”

  “I know what he wants,” the woman in purple said and laughed. “And like you say yourself, he’s not gettin’ it up there.” She jerked her chin toward the ceiling.

  “No one gettin’ nothin’ up there,” Reggie said. He shook his head. “But Mother Moore said it, girls; the gentleman is payin’.”

  “Well, when ‘es through with the cat-an’-mouse,” the Irishman said, “you tell ‘im for me, Mother, I’ll break ‘er for ‘im. Right in my lineawork.” He started to laugh but veered off into a terrible cough. Only drinking from the tumbler on the table beside his chair finally stopped the coughing.

  “Aw, Lanie, Reggie’d break her a sight better ’an you!” the yellow woman said.

  “You mean like I fixed you up, you little tart?” Reggie grinned and wiggled his forefinger to beckon her. She got up and brazenly came toward him, moving almost within range of his long arms. Then she taunted him playfully, coarsely, gathering up her flounces until he finally sprung off his chair and lunged for her. But she was much too fast for the big man.

  “Ah, cut it you two monkeys. Jesus Christalmighty!” Mrs. Moore said. “Comeon, will yas?”

  Reggie stopped chasing the girl, who roared and laughed through it all. Under Mrs. Moore’s insistence, they returned to their seats.