Yet he had raised an odd doubt in my mind. “Your Mr. Spooner,” he had once suggested, “is a worthy man and a great help to you, Mrs. Fullerton. But I think, so far as I understand them, his practice falls short of his principles. Only in America would he be considered of the first rank, I assure you. And don’t you think he rather preens too much over fame and fortune? Here, I tell you, in Florence, in Italy, are your true masters, and it is time to attend to these alone!”
Still he never tired of erecting his catalogues of degraded sensibility after his days spent in search of his own masterly visions. He was, I fear, so privileged, so finely tuned, or had so finely tuned himself, that he was unprepared to understand the terrors and degradations of life, unprepared to live as a man among them. But perhaps it was very much due, at that time, to the naïveté of youth; perhaps, as some later came to believe, he grew into a manhood more worthy of his arresting genius.
THAT EVENING AT THE Hôtel d’Italie, against which Mr. Ruskin tried to warn us for even a single night’s stay before returning to our mountain retreat, Gibbon suggested that we “make every effort to see less of this English prig.”
“Mr. Ruskin has already made it quite clear that his time is too precious for much consanguinity, hasn’t he?” I replied. “And we have our own work to do.”
“That may be. I only mean to say that a little of the man goes a very long way, Allegra. And Father, as you know, wholeheartedly agrees.” On more than one occasion, Mr. Spooner had expressed misgivings about Mr. Ruskin. As with Chas, there was again some incompatibility between their manly spheres.
“I quite agree also,” I laughed. “Mr. Ruskin may even feel the same about himself.”
“Yet you persist.”
“I do not persist. I find him informed, devoted, unusual, and therefore of interest. And one can learn something, taking the good with the bad, even from an English prig.”
“You admire his book.”
“I do, on balance, taking the good with the bad. You should read it, and judge for yourself.”
“Perhaps I shall. But not just now, thank you. We’ve had too much a whiff of him of late, and I find the atmosphere insufferable.” He looked at me as if for agreement. “Maybe in time.”
“Well, he leaves soon, and you shall have done with him.”
I had said much the same thing to Mr. Spooner, who had asked in turn whether I too would “have done with this Ruskin fellow.”
“He is a friend,” I said. “But I’ll not be seeing him after he leaves, of course.”
“You value difficult friendships?” Mr. Spooner asked.
“If the friend is worthy of the difficulties, yes.”
“And a loving friend, a not-difficult friend, you value such a one less?”
“I do not. As you well know, George.”
“Ah then, you do not find me tiresome these days?”
“Why do you ask such a thing? I find you distant; that is all.” He did not speak. “But that is understandable in these new circumstances, I should think.” He said nothing. “You feel some rivalry?” I asked, and then laughed to make light of it. “He has no fonder interest in me. Surely you can see that. The only woman who has turned his head in all Florence is the girl Adèle. But even she does not distract him, not truly.”
“You believe so? Mark my words, Allegra, there is at bottom something unsavory about this fellow, for all his ‘genius.’”
“Please, let’s talk no more about him. We’ll all see little enough of him in his final days in Florence. Have patience.”
“And you?”
“I’ll see little enough too. How can it be otherwise?”
“We’ll see,” he said.
I never saw Mr. Ruskin again that summer, but I had a note just after he left for Bologna and Parma; again he promised “to discover the truth about this fracas in the public house,” and put my mind at rest.
I was of course most uneasy, but somehow lived and worked each new day, avoiding frequent contact with Mr. and Mrs. Spooner.
One morning he appeared in my studio, however.
“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 ma
iden 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.
BY 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.
FORTUNATELY, 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 Bellosgu
ardo.
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
We 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.”
The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton Page 29
