Miss Fuller

Miss Fuller Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Miss Fuller Read Online Free PDF
Author: April Bernard
Tags: General Fiction
Copenhagen, Tierra del Fuego. She wanted to go everywhere, by train and sailing-ship, and see the wide world. Which, perhaps for the first time, seemed mortally dangerous.
    But there was another feeling that nudged her. Not fear, not sadness, something else. Amongst them all, at the news of the wreck, there had been an unspoken shadowy satisfaction — she could name it now, and touch it. It was like a thick rope you could grasp in the dark. It was the feeling that this had “served her right.” Not like the other deaths in the last few years — first the horror of their brother Johnseized with fever and lock-jaw; then the Emersons’ little boy taken by fever; then darling sister Helen flickering and sputtering like a candle flame for many months from consumption, and finally snuffed last year. Unimaginable griefs, each one more terrible than the last, the vanished beloved cried out for in the nights. And all had died as they had lived — blameless, blameless.
    Miss Fuller, on the other hand. She was not blameless, not at all; this was a death made for wincing, not weeping. It even made you angrier about the other deaths. She had no one to blame but herself. When the toddler will not stop teasing the cat and then the cat scratches, you say to the child, “See? I told you not to, serves you right.”
    “We told you,” she whispered, but then she was not sure — either that they had, actually, told her; or, indeed, that a death in a hurricane could be said to be anybody’s fault. Could it be that she, that they all, were secretly pleased Miss Fuller was dead? Sissy and Mother had been pursing their mouths in identical straight lines that might mean disapproval and maybe also the self-satisfaction that comes with disapproval. But not really pleased — that wasn’t possible. Miss Fuller was Mr. Emerson’s pet, and Mrs. E had petted her too, and Henry had always said he admired her. The Hawthornes and Alcotts and Peabodies were her dear friends. Mr. Greeley, the editor of the New-York Daily Tribune , called her a heroine. No one could be glad to see a heroine die.
    And the husband, in spite of being an Italian, was a human being. As Africans were human, so certainly were Italians. She had never actually met an Italian, though she had met slaves and freedmen. How terrible — and how provincial , her new word of scorn — that she had need to remind herself of the humanity of an Italian. They did not know him, how could they condemn him, even if he were perhaps comical, a comical Count. Or was he a Marquis? Possibly a dancing-teacher, as one wag had suggested. And the baby, good mercy, no one could be glad for the death of a baby, even if they had said for months that it might not be — quite right. Anne was unsure if the whispers had meant the baby was sickly or possibly an idiot, or actually born outside of wedlock — before a marriage? Was there no real marriage? It was dizzying to even think of this — since the whisperers also hissed “Marchesa” and “Catholic,” and made mouths around the words “Italian marriage” as if they meant something else.
    The family had refused to be impressed when Miss Fuller had left for Europe in 1846. All right that she had lived in New York and written for the reformist Tribune about the city slums; all right that she had traveled to the Great Lakes and deplored the mistreatment of the resettled Indians on their tawdry “reservation.” But Europe? Mother, Helen, and Sissy were very clear on this: It was not the right thing to have done, to have gone to Europe; neither becoming nor patriotic. Her newspaper columns from London, Paris,and Rome; her interviews with Carlyle and George Sand and Mazzini the revolutionary and Mickiewicz the poet; her exhortations to aid the Italian cause and the causes of all the revolutions popping and fizzing, sometimes booming, over Europe — all went largely unread at their table, certainly unstudied. (Henry did read them, Anne knew, but he
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