The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  On the contrary, such pleas seemed to harden her resolve, as her articles for the Tribune made clear. “They talk of my country as the land of the future,” she wrote. “It is so, but that spirit which made it all it is of value in my eyes … is more alive here at present than in America. My country is spoiled by prosperity, stupid with lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal. In Europe, amid the teachings of adversity, a nobler spirit is struggling—a spirit which cheers and animates mine!”

  With another letter I enclosed a newspaper account describing the first meeting for women’s rights in Seneca Falls, New York, but that gambit elicited little response. She had become completely absorbed by her struggles for freedom in Italy and for her day-to-day security.

  Yet here I was, finally settled in Boston. Hearing of my return, Mr. Neal continued to support and promote my work; and he continued to send me books—and lists of books—that I should read, a practice he had begun prior to my sojourn abroad. I found myself enjoying a modest reputation, and I was engaged in new commissions from prosperous clients. By now, however, I discovered itinerant Professors of Daguerreotypy setting up their saloons and studios across the countryside or, in the cities, devoting galleries, entire emporia, to this hunger for inexpensive images. And Boston had become the very center of the Daguerreotype.

  In the Evening Transcript I had seen among the largest advertisements of these Daguerreotypists the announcement of one “Mr. Charles Sparhawk, Professor of Daguerreotypy, Portraits and Views to Order.”

  GOLD AND SILVER MEDALS FOR BEST PICTURES AND PLATES

  DAGUERREOTYPE ROOMS ARE AT 7 TREMONT ROW

  Portraits taken every day without regard to weather, with or without colors, and warranted superior to any taken in this city or elsewhere, or no charge. By the aid of new chemical agents, likenesses are portrayed in a moment, and by your wishes set in frames, cases, pins, or lockets.

  Two separate departments for photography, one of which is expressly for ladies.

  A variety of specimens may be seen at these rooms, which the ladies and gentlemen of Boston are invited to call and examine.

  So old Chas had traded his brush for a camera, as many other limners had. I paid little attention to that fact and to his presence in the city at first. But in several months’ time my curiosity got the better of me and I found myself standing outside 7 Tremont Row looking up as if expecting to espy Chas at work through his very window. Eventually, I took the next step and waited on a queue slowly growing behind me, and consisting mostly of energetic young women and girls, with a sprinkling of children with their mothers, and a couple or two.

  When my turn came, a young assistant, wearing a provocative indigo dress, opened the door and flashed me a brilliant stage smile. I walked in; Chas was turning from his apparatus to greet his next sitter.

  “Allegra!” he cried, motioning to his surprised assistant—a dark but cheery, bustling young woman with big shiny eyes—to close the door quickly.

  “Good Lord, woman,” he then said, “why didn’t you tell me you had returned … send me a note, or your card, so’s we might meet privately?” In two strides he was at my side and holding me by the arm and hand. He looked at his assistant and said, “No more today, Nan. Thank you very much. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning, then?”

  She nodded, smiled, opened the door and announced in her sweetest voice that there had been a mechanical difficulty with Mr. Sparhawk’s photographic apparatus; he would reopen at ten sharp the next morning, portraits at twenty-percent discount for the inconvenience. She closed the door, put on her cloak and hat, placed her umbrella over her arm, smiled at us pleasantly one last time, and went her way.

  “She’s perfectly trained, Chas,” I said.

  “My dear, dear Allegra!” He took me firmly by the shoulders and smiled down at me. He was wearing a dark brown coat and vest, a great golden scarf tied and pinned cravat fashion, and trousers of a brown and yellow check. His white-blond hair and beard were now quite trim, and he was as dazzlingly handsome as I had remembered him. “Come here a moment,” he said, and moved me toward a raised settee beneath a skylight and a sort of moveable sounding board. He sat me down and silently adjusted me for a portrait. Then he went to his camera and began rapid and precise operations upon that strange box made of several woods, and with a metallic, porcine lens sticking out at me. At his camera, he began to tell me of his learning the process from Mr. Plumbe himself, and assured me that making such photographic images as he did had become the sole source of his livelihood. He now spent May through October in and about Boston, traveling if business grew the slightest bit sluggish, and November through April in and about Charleston.

  “One must change with the times, Allegra,” he said. “Let me show you how simple this is. Now, hold absolutely still, my dear, until I tell you to move again.”

  “I suppose one must change with the times. There seems little demand for quickly painted likenesses these days.”

  “So it is. There now. No movement or talking just now, if you please. Ah, yes … . So it is, my dear. One changes as one must … and benefits wonderfully. I admit that I like this work, much prefer it to the other now that I’m in it up to my nose. It has simplified things, Allegra. It really has. And much more lucrative.” He busied himself about some adjustments and attentions to his new mechanism while I sat still as a stone for him.

  “Would you yourself be left behind, my dear?” he continued, laughing lightly. “No, don’t answer.” He held up his hand while his apparatus registered my image. “There,” he said. “There. All done. Your exact image … I have captured you here forever now, my darling.” He laughed. “And you will simply have to believe, this time, precisely what you see.”

  “Left behind?” I said, when he motioned me to relax. “I no longer wish to live as a limner, either. I have traveled another path, you see.”

  “Oh yes. The fine arts! But hardly a source of income, wouldn’t you say?” He began putting his equipment away carefully. “With those rare exceptions we all know of. Like your famous Mr. Spooner, for example.”

  “It’s the life I’ve chosen.”

  “Ah, of course,” he said, but he was still busy attending to his machine. “No doubt of your gift … And your … constancy, my dear.” He laughed. “No doubt at all.”

  Finally, he returned to help me off the seat. We stepped from the platform and he held me by the shoulders again, looking directly into my eyes. “And beautiful as ever, too. No: more so, more so! Italy has agreed with you. I’ll have to see some of your new work soon!”

  “I’m very busy at the moment. I just wanted to say hello. For the sake of our old times together.”

  He bent over and kissed me softly and deliciously, and without urgency. “And I couldn’t be more delighted that you have. Now, tell me, darling, truly. What would you say if I asked you to join me? Really. I mean it. I could teach you in a day to make these true images. Everyone loves them.” He returned briefly to his apparatus, withdrew a small plate upon which he worked some further chemic adjustments, returned to me with a small image of myself, looking rather pale and stiffened (rather like a corpse in a mirror, I thought), and smiled as he held the product of his wizardry before me.

  “An easy income once you are set up,” he went on, “and here I am all set, you see. At five bills a snap, we can be dancing together. Your independence would be assured. And travel, we could travel together, or you could stay here in Boston, whether I travel about or no. And of course join me in the mild sweet winters of old Charleston.”

  “Are you proposing marriage, Chas? I can’t believe it.”

  “Marriage, my dear? Well, not necessarily, you see. Is that your desire?”

  I laughed. “I only desire to continue as I am.”

  “Well, then, there you have it! You can travel
or not, as you wish. Learn the process or not. Continue to paint! Do whatever you want, entirely. Yet you should be with me and I with you. As we once were, you see. I’ll get us new rooms, and you can join me … as soon as I have them.”

  “You can’t be serious. Here in Boston?”

  “Oh, to Hell with people and their silly scandals! What should we care? I ask you. I tell you, times are changing, in every way, my dear. We can tell people whatever they want to hear. Married, not married. You decide on that—whatever’s your pleasure.”

  “My pleasure, Chas, is to remain constant to what I have done, am doing, and have set out to do.”

  “So it shall be!” He laughed. “Only we can be together too. And why not, why shouldn’t we be then?”

  “And your pretty young assistant? What did you call her?”

  “Nan,” he said and grinned broadly. “She’s a sweet, luscious, young bit of stuff. I won’t play the fool by denying that, and a great help to me. But she needn’t stay on if you don’t want her about. I can train some old crone to assist me.”

  “Chas, am I the fool? Boston, and I dare say Charleston, are full of sweet, luscious young bits of stuff. They are a penny-a-score. Look, my dear old Chas. I did not come here for a marriage proposal, nor to make any … arrangements, only to say hello and see how you were getting on. It’s nothing more than that. Not anymore. Can you believe me?”

  He smiled, reached for me, and lifted me up off the floor. Then he set me down and kissed me again. Longer this time and deeper, his hands starting to rove with a sort of tender familiarity that set me softly atingle like some silly schoolgirl. “We’ll see if you don’t change your mind,” he murmured.

  I pulled away. “Still the old Chas, just as I expected. I know you only too well! Your new clothes, your new process, all your changing with the times—well, that’s all fine enough, but underneath it’s Chas, Chas, Chas.”

  He laughed. But he left off his campaign, rather more readily than I had expected, and I was thankful for it. No doubt he believed I would in time think better of his proposals. I wouldn’t say I was not tempted. But I left him, disappointed yet in good spirits, with a promise to meet him again for a late dinner some two days hence.

  ALL THIS IS NOT TO SAY, as well, that there were not those who still had the desire and the means for oil portraits. I began to see, moreover, that sales and commissions were as likely to proceed from landscapes, seascapes, still-lifes, and narrative pieces, so that I was now more at liberty to continue developing my skill along these lines than previously. The difficulty, as always, was in striking the balance between the temptations to slide over into mercenary productions merely or to fall over the other side into that eternal limbo of impoverished, debilitated fine artists. I bent my every effort toward that balance which would sustain me both as an artist and as a woman-without-means who had to earn her own way.

  Whenever I stopped to consider my circumstances after returning to America, I understood my good fortune in being unmarried still. “My art,” Michaelangelo is reported to have answered when asked why he never married, “is my mistress and has given me trouble enough!” I truly began to understand Monsieur Nantieul. And in later years, I have kept a name above my easel as a warning: Francis Alexander—that fashionable old portrait painter who ended his productive years as a mere copyist of masterworks for British and American tourists in Florence.

  But during that first year of my return to Boston, I kept in my workroom a different token, something I had copied out from one of Mr. Ruskin’s letters to me in America. He had been writing about the necessity of sustaining proportions in my life.

  “The distinction is inevitable,” he wrote. “Is your art first with you? Then you are an artist; you may be, after you have made your money, a miser and usurer; you may be, after you have got your fame, jealous and proud, and wretched and base; but yet, as long as you won’t spoil your work, you are an artist. On the other hand, is your money first with you, and your fame first with you? Then you may be very charitable with your money, and very magnificent with your money, and very graceful in the way you wear your reputation, and very courteous to those beneath you, and very acceptable to those above you; but you are not an artist. You are a mechanic and a drudge.”

  It was this letter, as well, which informed me that upon close examination by American and British authorities, Tom had been released due to an insufficiency of evidence to detain or deport him. “Mr. Wentworth, I recently learned, has begun his long journey to find you in the political wilderness of fair old Italy,” he wrote.

  “At least he is free,” I sighed, as I placed the letter in my lap. “And he’ll soon enough discover the Spooners and learn of my departure.”

  I will not take up the reader’s precious time with the tedium of my months of study and work in and about Boston. I have but one more instance to report because it was for me the galvanizing, monumental incident at this point in my uneven life.

  I had been living in constant fear for the Spooner family’s safety. They had been traveling in Italy, and I wondered if each letter from Gibbon, with whom I maintained a correspondence, might be his last. I did not know it at the time, but the Spooners, in some final desperate moment, had climbed aboard the American merchant bark Elizabeth, that spring of 1850, and sailed for America with the Marchesa Margaret Fuller Ossoli, as she now was known. With the Marchesa were her husband and their child, Angelino (or Nino), now about two years old. The European revolution had settled nothing, still less in Italy, where things had taken a hopeless turn.

  As the Elizabeth was making her way west, I did not know either of Miss Fuller’s many dangerous adventures with her infant son and, somewhat later, her new husband—her flight from Rome and eventual return to Florence for refuge with the Brownings and Greenoughs, the excursions and alarums of the deteriorating military and political situation, the incidences of smallpox aboard ship. It was only after the wreck of the Elizabeth off Long Island that I also learned that Tom too had been on board. Because of their hurried, desperate boarding, neither the Spooners nor Tom had appeared on the ship’s original manifest. But the captain’s wife somehow survived the ship’s grounding on one of the numerous sandbars, at 3:30 A.M.on July 19, 1850, in waves and gales of hurricane force. It was she, apparently, who listed Tom and the Spooners as among the missing.

  Devastated by the newspaper accounts of the loss at sea of the Ossolis and Spooners, Julian and I left immediately by the cars for New York. When we arrived on the beach at Fire Island late in the day of July 24, the seas were of course calm and most of the flotsam from the wreckage had been scavenged or recovered, the wreck itself still holding where she struck. There were a few survivors; little Nino’s body, stripped by the waves of every shred of clothing, had washed up on shore. None of the Spooners’, nor Tom’s, Margaret’s, or Ossoli’s bodies had been recovered, however. Tom had always been a strong swimmer, but his wounded left arm having been amputated in a British prison hospital, he wouldn’t have stood much chance of survival in an angry sea.

  Also lost was Margaret’s manuscript on the history of the Italian Revolution, which had failed thus far of finding a publisher. On the very beach from which no help had been launched to aid the shipwrecked unfortunates, Julian and I met Ellery Channing, who had come down from Massachusetts with Mr. Thoreau to search for any remains and effects of the Ossolis. Mr. Spooner had made the acquaintance of Mr. Channing on some earlier occasion, and the poor man seemed deeply disturbed by this sudden, further news of the Spooner family. He assured us that nothing but a trunk full of letters and books, a coat, and a few of the child’s clothes had turned up. The body of Nino had been ceremoniously buried among the dunes by some surviving sailors, who had come to love their little shipboard playmate. And now Mr. Channing was about to ensure that the body was sent to Cambridge for proper burial, while Mr. Thoreau was en route to Patchogue to see whether he might regain any effects taken by pilferers. Mr. Channing showed us a button they
had removed from a coat of Ossoli.

  “It had been a terrific storm,” he told us, looking out at the quiescent sea, “by all accounts. Of course such a disaster might occur at any time. Yet we now understand a further complication or two: Captain Hasty died of confluent smallpox while anchored off Gibraltar, and the ship, after a period of quarantine, sailed to America under command of First Mate Mr. Bangs, a much less experienced seaman; moreover, the 150 tons of Carrara marble in the cargo (including, it is said, Mr. Powers’ statue of John Calhoun) broke through the hold of the ship as the great waves slammed it broadside against the sandbar.” He shook his head and looked down at the sand.

  I shivered, recalling Margaret telling me once that when Ossoli was a child, a fortune teller had warned him “Beware the sea!” This, so far as I knew, was the first ship he had ever set foot upon.

  Finally Mr. Channing spoke again. “There are great … great losses here to be endured.”

  ONLY LATER, from the reports of certain survivors of the wreck, including Mrs. Hasty (the captain’s wife), did we begin to understand something of what Tom and the Spooners and the Ossolis suffered in their final hours aboard the disintegrating ship. Tossed out off their beds at the initial impact; the whole ship was dashed violently against the bar at the second: then darkness as the lamps had been doused by waves breaking in at the skylight and cabin doors; the dangerous, thrashing tangle of rigging and broken masts pulsing in the swells; the hysterical cries of the young nursemaid, the bawling of little Nino, the utter helplessness of the parents in the teeth of the storm; and Margaret in only her white nightgown against the soaking cold and furious wind, her hair all down and atangle; the prayers and messages to family should any of them survive; and then the final efforts to flee the breaking ship by swimming on spars: a few surviving, many sinking never to be seen alive again, and the Ossolis refusing to be separated, preferring rather to go under together if such—after all they had survived in the last two years—proved to be what Fate now required. In the last extremity, Margaret was washed overboard with her family in the great waves of the incoming tide, in but her fortieth year.