The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton Read online

  Hardscrabble Books—Fiction of New England

  Laurie Alberts, Lost Daughters

  Laurie Alberts, The Price of Land in Shelby

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy

  Robert J. Begiebing, The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton; Or, A Memoir of Startling and Amusing Episodes from Itinerant Life

  Anne Bernays, Professor Romeo

  Chris Bohjalian, Water Witches

  Dona Brown, A Tourist’s New England: Travel Fiction, 1820–1920

  Joseph Bruchac, The Waters Between: A Novel of the Dawn Land

  Joseph A. Citro, Shadow Child

  Sean Connolly, A Great Place to Die

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher (Mark J. Madigan, ed.), Seasoned Timber

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Understood Betsy

  Joseph Freda, Suburban Guerrillas

  Castle Freeman, Jr., Judgment Hill

  Frank Gaspar, Leaving Pico

  Ernest Hebert, The Dogs of March

  Ernest Hebert, Live Free or Die

  Sarah Orne Jewett (Sarah Way Sherman, ed.), The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

  Lisa MacFarlane, ed., This World Is Not Conclusion: Faith in Nineteenth-Century New England Fiction

  Kit Reed, J. Eden

  Rowland E. Robinson (David Budbill, ed.), Danvis Tales: Selected Stories

  Roxana Robinson, Summer Light

  Rebecca Rule, The Best Revenge: Short Stories

  Theodore Weesner, Novemberfest

  W. D. Wetherell, The Wisest Man in America

  Edith Wharton (Barbara A. White, ed.), Wharton’s New England: Seven Stories and Ethan Frome

  Thomas Williams, The Hair of Harold Roux

  Also by Robert J. Begiebing

  C R I T I C I S M:

  Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer (1981)

  Toward a New Synthesis: John Fowles, John Gardner, and Norman Mailer (1989)

  The Literature of Nature: The British and American Traditions (1990) (a critical anthology with V. Owen Grumbling)

  F I C T I O N:

  The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (1991)

  The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

  Or, A Memoir of Startling and Amusing Episodes from Itinerant Life

  a novel by

  Robert J. Begiebing

  University Press of New England

  Hanover and London

  UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND publishes books under its own imprint and is the publisher for Brandeis University Press, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College Press, University of New Hampshire, Tufts University, and Wesleyan University Press.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Begiebing, Robert J., 1946–

  The adventures of Allegra Fullerton; or, A memoir of startling and amusing episodes from itinerant life: a novel/by Robert J. Begiebing.

  p. cm.—(Hardscrabble books)

  ISBN 0–87451–947–0 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–61168–374–5 (ebook)

  I. Title. II. Title: Adventures of Allegra Fullerton.

  III. Title: Memoir of startling and amusing episodes from itinerant life. IV. Series.

  PS3552.E372A65 1999

  813’.54—dc21 99–34280

  Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

  © 1999 by Robert J. Begiebing

  All rights reserved

  For my daughters,

  Brie and Kate,

  the two other painting

  women in my life.

  I recollect bestowing some vituperation on female authors lately. … Generally, they write like emasculated men, and are only to be distinguished from male authors by greater feebleness and folly; but when they throw off the restraints of decency, and come before the public stark naked, as it were—then their books are sure to possess character and value. Can you tell me anything about this “Fanny Fern”? If you meet her, I wish you would tell her how much I admire her.

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne to William Ticknor

  Writing is worthless except as the record of a life.

  —Margaret Fuller

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  1 The onset of my captivity

  2 How I became an itinerant painter

  3 First enterprises The persecution of a bearded man

  4 My captivity continues

  5 Recherché dramas

  6 Little Effie again, and women who discovered independence

  7 Boston and my associations with artists This strange captivity begins

  8 A mysterious opportunity for liberty

  9 Eden in Massachusetts Et in Arcadia ego

  10 Precious reunion

  11 Doubts and quandaries

  12 A murderous instance

  13 A Canterbury tale from our retreat to Connecticut

  14 To Springfield and beyond Mr. Stock tells a curious tale

  15 Far travels and new resolutions

  16 Temptation in the shape of a man

  17 My return

  18 Chas returns to me

  19 My italian adventure

  20 Our Pelasgian Arcady

  21 The rival

  22 Mr. Ruskin terminates his visit

  23 Miss Fuller embraces Italy

  24 My leave-taking

  25 The wreck of the Elizabeth

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the New Hampshire Council on the Arts and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund’s Fellowship for Creative and Performing Artists and Writers at the American Antiquarian Society for their financial support for research and travel. I thank the Staatliche Antikensammlugen und Glyptothek Muchen for permission to use the photo by H. Koppermann.

  My thanks also for the help and honesty of the following friends and readers: Robert Craven, Merle Drown, Bob Hoddeson, Larry Kinsman, Loftus Jestin, Moira Sieker, and Wesley McNair. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the many helpful professionals at the American Antiquarian Society—with special thanks to Georgia Barnhill, Joanne Chaison, Thomas Knoles, Caroline Sloat, and Laura Wasowicz. And Dick Pantano, Library Director at New Hampshire College, helped (auf Duetsch) with a particularly difficult permission.

  Many books, articles, periodicals, and manuscripts provided grist for my fictional mills, but no one working on the subject of itinerant painters in the early years of the Republic could avoid two books especially: Clara Sears’s ground-breaking Some American Primitives: A Study of New England Faces and Folk Portraits (1941) and Caroline Sloat’s Meet Your Neighbors: New England Portraits, Painters, & Society, 1790–1850 (1992). Both texts provided the basis for several characters and incidents along Allegra’s journey; I am deeply grateful to the work of these two authors.

  And my deepest gratitude to my wife, Linda—the first and last of my readers.

  R. J. B.

  Preface

  Allegra Fullerton, Roxbury Massachusetts.

  Dear Mrs. Fullerton.

  Thank you for the opportunity to consider the enclosed manuscript, which we received on the thirteenth, ultimo. Although your prose is laudable for its energy and honesty, we find we must decline your narrative due, chiefly, to an exceptional frankness of description and incident. A respectable publisher can not afford the virulent censure such a tale would surely call down upon his head.

  Moreover, please allow us to make so bold as to suggest that you might do well to reconsider several other matters. It is perhaps unseemly to include, or insufficiently to obscure the identity of, well-known personages, either living or not long dead. It is perhaps unfair to mislead your readers by mask
ing unconventional themes in a conventional narrative. And it invites incredulity, perhaps, to portray a narrator-heroine whose excessive independence strikes one as unnecessary.

  Please take these suggestions in the helpful spirit in which they are offered …

  Such is the significant content of a letter from the offices of Ticknor and Fields that I found neatly folded and moldering at the bottom of a box containing a handwritten manuscript. This manuscript was among a collection of art instruction books, sketch and watercolor studies, and albums of quotations from favored authors that came into our hands some years ago from the estate of a local woman. She had left the collection, you see, to our library in a small Massachusetts town and under the care of our historical society. As a recently retired scholar and long-time member of the society, I happened to be establishing an overdue inventory of our collections when the box fell, so to speak, into my own hands. The society’s understanding is that none of the material left to us from the estate is to be auctioned to private collectors. The manuscript to which the letter refers was written, I discovered, by the deceased’s great-great-great (or so) grandmother—one of those rare women who earned her livelihood as an itinerant portrait painter during the early decades of our Republic.

  Although the editorial underling who composed the rejection does not say it, my guess is that these gentlemen found especially distasteful the audacity of an author who would compose a kunstlerroman, or artist novel, with a woman at its center. One only has to recall that for over a hundred years beyond the decade of Allegra Fullerton’s narrative, many American women artists—especially if they were unmarried—were still left out of biographical dictionaries and genealogies.

  Today’s readers will find, of course, that such “frankness of description and incident” as the editors refer to would hardly shock our enlightened age. Perhaps these stuffy old fellows were not prepared even for frankness worthy of a journal intime or the ancient and honorable tradition of the picaresque. But I suppose I must concede some merit to their compunction over Mrs. Fullerton’s unconventional narrative strategy, for I too at first thought I had stumbled upon A Long Fatal Love Chase only to be ambushed by a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman!

  I should probably add one or two brief considerations more. If the novel’s heroine is not a conventional figure—the vapid angel or malign temptress—of so many early American novels of sentiment, seduction, or frontier adventure, neither is she a flawless heroine of Chimeric proportions, as if the only alternative to angel or temptress were a kind of nineteenth-century Anita Schwarzenegger (or some such meretricious phantasm more acceptable to our illuminated sensibilities today). No, here is a woman who had to rely on her own more natural wit and courage, as much as on the help of others, if she were to survive the menacing and irresponsible men and women she encountered on her journey toward self-definition.

  I can’t help believing that readers will welcome Allegra Fullerton’s unromanticized approach to her journey. They may miss some of that metallic—dare I say lifeless?—brilliancy of so many of our own contemporary authors. But Allegra’s story feels, to my mind, neither complacent in its genteel historicism nor smug in its cybernetic currency.

  Even though for her time she writes plainly, readers will no doubt find a certain formality of language and presentation not quite in tune with modern ears. But for those of us who can relax our twentieth-century prejudices and happily enter into the spirit of her tale, our reward will be an unaffected peek at nineteenth-century life, a kind of antidote to the mania for sentimental novels so common in many epochs, including our own.

  A MERE TRANSCRIBER, I understand my duty as chiefly to edit eccentricities of spelling, irregular capitalization, excessive uses of the ampersand, lack of apostrophes, as well as any overly ambitious nineteenth-century syntax that might confuse readers today. Beyond such clarifications, I place before you a printed text of Allegra Fullerton’s handwritten, intimate memoir—just as it flowed from her pen and her heart.

  ONE

  The onset of my captivity

  From the beginning, my time of bondage was like a terrible dream: filled with lurid strangers and events. Dark moments of unknowing alternated with moments of oppressive enlightenment. My heart seemed to oscillate between desire for liberty—sickening in its very intensity—and utter hopelessness.

  Of the first day in my room I remember little. I recall a dim Pandemonium of carts, carriages, and people below my window each time I awoke, only to lie in a stupor. If I arose languidly in an effort to understand my circumstances in this room somewhere in the city, fatigue soon drove me back to bed. Beside my bed was a simple night table on which sat two well-trimmed sperm candles. Plush, red brocaded curtains on the single window hung to a carpet patterned in unicorns and other mythical creatures.

  It must have been near dusk when I awoke once more to the presence of others in the room. But I lay in my lethargy and feigned sleep.

  “The doc give her another dose after she came,” I heard a woman’s voice say softly.

  “The old sot must have kill’t her nearly,” a man’s deep voice said.

  The voices began to whisper at the far end of the room, but with the clamor on the street and the difficulty I had concentrating on the words, I couldn’t comprehend them. I began to understand, however, that I had been in some way besotted, which accounted for my lassitude and nausea.

  I heard a tray slide off the table and the door close quietly. I slept again, waking briefly two or three times in the night, and finally, near daybreak, I began to feel some of my vital energy returning. After a patch of sky near the top of my window had turned blue, I finally arose and began to examine the room closely. I found a washbowl full of cool water on a dressing table and washed myself as well as I could. The room was close, but the window was sealed shut in some way. Still, I heard from the street below the same hubbub I had heard in wakeful intervals the day before. As I looked down upon the street I began to feel dizzy again, so I sat on the bed a while, facing the locked door.

  Eventually, a key turned and the door to my room opened slowly. I looked up to see the head of a woman, her hair covered with a colorful nightcap, peering in at me. Her face was for the moment inscrutable, neither frowning nor smiling, encouraging nor discouraging. She entered the room with a tray of food and set the tray beside me on the bed. As she did so, I noticed that her face was well powdered and that she wore an unfamiliar scent, at once exotic and sweet. Her bright, loosely fastened dressing gown, worn décolleté fashion, revealed an ample bosom, as powdered as her face—a woman of thirty-five years or more.

  Before speaking a word, she pointed to the tray of food and allowed a quick little smile and a nod of her head, whereupon her face immediately resumed its expression of impassivity.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “And why have you brought me here against my will?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough, my dear,” she answered. “For now, see to yourself. You must eat, rest well, and bathe later. And those clothes! Have you seen yourself?” She glanced toward the large mirror attached to the dressing table. “You’ll soon have clothing suitable to …” She paused and looked around the room. “To your position here.”

  “But why am I here?” My raised voice seemed to give her a start.

  Her eyes narrowed a bit. “You’ll see soon enough,” she repeated. “No more questions till you take care of yourself.”

  The door opened again and a large, rough-looking Negro man entered. In one hand he carried a fresh chamber pot; over his other arm he had draped what appeared to be several nightgowns and a dressing gown not unlike the one my mysterious interlocutor was wearing. He said nothing, never even stole a glance at me.

  “Put those things on the chair, Reggie,” the woman said. When he had done so, she thanked him. Still speechless, he then stooped over and reached under my bed, slid out the chamber pot, and carried it out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  “I must ha
ve some fresh air,” I said. “This room is oppressive.”

  She looked at me in silence, then said matter-of-factly: “None of these things we discuss till you eat, bathe, and change. Come now.” She indicated the tray of food again and stood there waiting. By then I was hungry, and I saw that I had no choice but to comply with her wishes.

  As I began to eat, she explained that once I finished I was to go under her supervision three flights down to the washroom on the first floor. After my bath, she continued, I was to prepare myself for an interview with a certain gentleman that evening. She refused to answer any further questions, averring once again that all such conversation was to cease until I had done everything I was told.

  After I ate, she led me downstairs and into the washroom, remaining there with me until I finished and dressed in one of the dressing gowns the Negro had brought in for me. I had found it most difficult to bathe under her appraising eyes. But somehow I completed my task and soon found myself back in my room. Or cell rather.

  I stood for a time at the window looking down upon the busy, unfamiliar street—a place of heterogeneous shops and boarding-houses. Below, the comings and goings of an odd assortment of people flowed continually. Sailors and shop clerks strode cheek by jowl; substantial men of trade rubbed elbows with hawkers and ballad singers; black men and women thronged among white, some exchanging greetings, others entering or exiting various shops or taverns together. As one door down the street swung open, I dimly heard a burst of wild fiddle music, as if from a dance hall. Two young men somewhat above the middle station of life, their linen suits rumpled and vests undone, lurched out of a rumhole into broad daylight and, leaning on one another, endeavored to regain their bearings before setting off down the declining street. They nearly fell over a handbarrow from which a man and woman sold their wares. Following these two men was a most perfidious looking fellow whose swarthy laborer’s clothes were disheveled, even unto the tattered cap askant on his greasy head.