Finding Margaret Fuller, page 3
I fall silent, my heart pounding against my chest, and I wonder if Mr. Emerson can hear its thrashing in the quiet of the room. A log pops in the hearth, sending up a small spray of ash. Eventually, my host breaks the silence. “Please, Miss Fuller, when you meet my Lidian, would you be so kind as to refrain from telling her that I am her captor?” He says it with a rueful smile, and I can see, with relief, that I have not offended him. In fact, he seems to accept my sentiments, even if he may not entirely agree.
“I don’t see you being the sort of man who would treat his wife as such, Mr. Emerson.”
“That is high praise, coming from you.”
“Shall I meet her now?” I ask, glancing toward the closed study door. What must she be thinking? Surely she heard me enter the home. How long ago was that?
Mr. Emerson taps the arms of his chair. “Mrs. Emerson is abed. She’ll ring when she is ready to receive visitors. In the meantime, would you like me to show you where you’ll be staying for the week?”
“That would be nice, thank you,” I answer, and we rise to leave the study. Out in the foyer, I am expecting Mr. Emerson to lead me up the stairs, nearer to his wife’s bedroom, perhaps. Instead, to my surprise, my host walks me across the front hall and right to the door closest to his study. “After you,” he says, stepping aside. I enter an elegantly furnished room, with a large bed carved of black walnut and covered in a cream-colored bedspread. A row of windows offers a lovely view over his well-kept gardens and stately old chestnut trees. A bedside table stands furnished with a washbowl and pitcher of green and white porcelain, and the desk is equipped with a full inkstand and fresh paper.
“I know you will wish to write while you are here,” he says. “I promise to keep you swimming in ink.”
I nod appreciatively. The best part of the room, I decide, is the plush wingback armchair tucked between two of the windows, covered in red upholstery that matches the red rug on the wooden floor. It’ll be perfectly situated to catch the sunlight from the morning until the evening, and I imagine it will suit quite well for both reading and writing.
“Firewood will be brought in each morning. In addition to our woman in the kitchen, Nancy, we also have a handyman, Henry David. He has a room upstairs. He’s a writer, too. You’ll meet him. Brilliant man, that Thoreau, and quite capable around the house. So we trade room and board for his help at Bush. He’ll keep you supplied. We call this the Red Room. Will it be all right?”
I’ve never had a room this comfortable before, nor even a room entirely to myself. “It’s lovely,” I answer. “Thank you.”
“Good, good.” Emerson slips his hands into his trouser pockets. “Well, then, shall I leave you to freshen up?”
I nod, happy to settle in and unpack before Mrs. Emerson invites me to visit with her. But before he leaves me, Mr. Emerson pauses, hovering at the threshold of my bedchamber. “Miss Fuller?”
I turn toward him. “Yes?”
“I was planning to take a walk. I like to do so every afternoon before supper. You’ll find that Concord has that effect on you—in the summer, the day can’t help but draw you out of doors. Of course, the same can be said in the spring, and in the autumn, and in the winter. Would you…care to join me?”
I shift on my feet, looking to my bag, then back to my host. “As long as Mrs. Emerson will not need me?”
“As long as Mrs. Emerson does not need you, of course,” he quickly agrees.
“Then, yes. I would very much like that. It would be nice to stretch my legs after the journey.”
“Wonderful. Shall we meet out front in half an hour?”
“That would be lovely, Mr. Emerson.”
He turns to go, then pauses one more time in the doorway, looking toward me. I am not expecting what comes next, when he asks: “Would you do me the great honor of calling me Waldo?”
I stare at him, taken aback. He goes on, “It’s what my friends call me, you see. And I’d very much like to name as a friend ‘the Most Well-Read Person in America.’ ”
Chapter Two
I emerge to meet Mr. Emerson—no, Waldo—at our appointed time, but he’s not alone. Standing beside him on the broad front lawn is a wild-looking man whose dark curls wind like an unkempt wreath around his unshaven face. In appearance, he’s the opposite of Waldo in nearly every way; Waldo is tall and tidy, well-groomed in a crisp three-piece suit, while this other man does not appear as if he would ever consider owning a comb or a cravat. He is short, with light, bright eyes that give him the fiery look of some sort of prophet, or perhaps some feral Pan who has just walked up, barefooted, from out of the wild wood. He leans on a dirty shovel.
Waldo, perhaps noting my bemused look, gestures to the barefooted man beside him. “Ah, Margaret, here you are. Please meet my good friend and even better handyman, Henry David, or Mr. Thoreau if you prefer formality, though Thoreau certainly does not.”
“Thoreau will do just fine,” the man says, extending a dirt-caked hand for a shake.
“Hello, I’m Margaret. Nice to meet you.”
Thoreau’s grip is strong, the top of his hand covered in a thicket of hair, and I decide that indeed he must be part faun. “And you, Margaret,” he answers. Thoreau is only a bit taller than me, but sturdily built, his face and arms golden from the sun.
“Thoreau here helps Mrs. Emerson with the household chores, and he gives my fruit trees and vegetable beds their best chance.” Waldo gestures across the yard, where a lively array of trees stand in full leaf, many of their limbs heavy with ripening fruit—apples, pears, even an arbor covered in clusters of grapes. Toward a large barn tucked back from the road there are vegetable beds scored in tidy rows of dark soil. “He was just giving me an update on my tomatoes. Ready to pick any day.”
“Then I’ve come at just the right moment,” I say, looking from Waldo to Thoreau.
“Of course you have.” Waldo smiles, then turns to his handyman. “And we were just planning to take a walk to the river. Margaret has promised us a week of her time, so I thought I’d show her around our little village.”
Thoreau leans on his shovel, nodding. “Delightful day for the river.” He sees us off with a wave and turns back toward the vegetables.
Waldo and I make our way up the front walk, a path lined in smooth marble stepping stones, and through the front gate. We turn out onto the Cambridge Turnpike, the very same road by which I arrived on the stagecoach, only now we head in the opposite direction of Cambridge, merging onto the Lexington Road. “Just a mile this way to the river,” Waldo says, pointing ahead. We fall in step, side by side, as the Concord countryside unfurls before us.
We pass brick and wooden farmhouses as we go, none so grand or stately as Bush, but all of them tucked back amid lush and verdant gardens. Some of the homes are surrounded by orchard trees pearled with fruit, others with pastures growing thick and green ahead of the haying season. Picturesque stone walls delineate the thriving, fertile farmlands, and cows and horses that appear content and well-fed graze in the gentle afternoon sunshine.
Carriages and carts roll past at regular intervals, and Waldo nods politely as he walks beside me. “I find an evening walk helps my appetite at supper. And I thought that perhaps you might be willing to…well, that is…I would very much like to thank you.”
“For?” I ask, glancing sideways at him.
“For earlier…” Waldo takes my arm to navigate past a young lad wrangling a boisterous dog, tugging on the tether to keep him out of the dirt road. “For how much you shared with me.”
I nod. The truth is that I found it a relief to open up as I had. To speak so candidly with another person. To share about Father and Mother, and my childhood, and books. To have someone ask me questions and then earnestly listen to the responses. With Waldo I get the sense that he does not want me to bridle myself, to hide the intensity of my thoughts or the depth of my feelings. And that makes him a first. “Mr. Emerson…er, Waldo. I am happy to be a friend to you.”
He looks at me for a long moment, eventually offering the flicker of a smile, and then he says: “I live quite alone, you see.”
Surely my expression shows my confusion.
“Oh, not alone in the house,” he adds. “Lidian is there. And Thoreau. But, rather…in the solitude of my mind…and my books.” He glances at me, his brow knitting in a thoughtful look. “Does that sound terribly strange?”
I shake my head. “Not strange at all.” I know precisely what he means.
The buildings are closer together now, and the traffic grows thicker. We pass the massive white structure of the old Unitarian church, its white belfry soaring higher than any other structure on the horizon. After that I see a rusty red-brown building with a lively din seeping out of its opened windows and a sign overhead identifying it as Wright’s Tavern. A massive old oak grows just before the town green, and Waldo explains that it was under this tree that the first English settlers declared their intention to found the village of Concord, two hundred years earlier.
“And there is J. W. Walcott’s,” he says, pointing toward a tidy façade across the busy square. “Dry goods,” he adds, “sugar, flour, tea. And over there is our bank, and that’s a boardinghouse, managed by Thoreau’s aunts, in fact. There’s the apothecary. But let’s continue past all this, for I am interested in showing you a quieter place.”
We navigate the horse and foot traffic of the village center and its crowded commons. It strikes me that even though this is the busy and bustling heart of the town, it is nothing compared to the clogged streets of Cambridge or Boston. From the snippets of passing conversation that I do make out, it seems as though people out here walk slower, with more time to stop and chat, to banter about prices or weather or the woes of their fruit trees.
Waldo occasionally nods or touches the brim of his hat. He greets the people passing by or looking out from a storefront, but we carry on with our own private exchange, easily bandying all manner of topics back and forth. Uncomfortable silence is not a problem we encounter; Waldo seems to wish to play Socrates for me. And I don’t mind, not at all.
In fact, I thrill at the chance to go deeply into conversation with him. “What do you fear, Margaret?” he asks me as the foot traffic thins and we walk up a gentle incline, striding away from the crowded center of the village. It’s quieter now.
I barely have to think about his question, but quickly answer: “Stagnation.”
“Then it’s no wonder you have disavowed marriage,” he quips.
I grin, throwing him a sideways glance. “Mr. Emerson!”
He shrugs. “I jest. My Queen Lidian is a saint. But it’s just…oh, marriage is a confounding institution—I’ll grant you that much.”
I look out over the meadows that now surround us, gentle green dotted with the occasional burst of color—purples and golds and rusted yellows. I breathe in the sweet tang of the thick summer grass, then I let out a long exhale and say: “For me, marriage just always seemed an unnatural state of being.”
“And why do you say ‘unnatural’?” he asks.
“Of course I have no experience in the matter…”
“I desire to hear your thoughts, nevertheless. You have experience being a member of humanity.”
“Well, then…love is a bonding of the souls,” I muse aloud. “But marriage as a legal institution is a bonding of the physical bodies. Once one’s soul no longer feels itself bound to the other, why, then, doesn’t marriage become a sort of entrapment of the body and the being? For that reason I chose the word unnatural.”
Waldo pulls his eyes from mine and looks straight ahead, out over a world that is green and golden and fertile. He does not answer my question, but instead says only: “Miss Margaret Fuller, who shall never wed.”
“I won’t say never.”
“I asked you what you fear. I expected you might say spiders, perhaps. Or maybe wolves in these woods. And you tell me instead: stagnation. And then proceed to offer me the most thoughtful argument against marriage that I’ve ever heard.”
“Fine, then,” I say, laughing to myself. “You want something less philosophical and more material? Then I will give you my modified answer: water.”
“Water?”
“Yes, I fear water.”
“You do realize that I’m walking you toward the water? You could have told me you’d rather not—”
“No, not a river. That’s all fine.” I wave my hands. “I mean the sea.”
“Why do you fear the sea? Can’t you swim?”
“I can. But when I was a girl I had the most vivid nightmares.”
“And what happened in these nightmares?” Waldo asks.
I fold my arms together before me, my gaze fixed straight ahead. “I dreamed I was surrounded in a great flood…” I say, my voice hard, entirely at odds with the gentle warmth of the countryside all around us. “I could not swim my way out.”
Waldo exhales a whistle of breath. “I can see why that would give you a lasting fear.”
I turn toward Waldo now, meeting his gaze as I add: “I believe it was Father’s doing.”
I see that this catches him by surprise. “Why is that?”
“How he worked my little mind. I never could find my ease in the evenings. I’d be so overwrought, and I could never sleep. And then, when I did sleep, I’d wake with the most chilling nightmares.”
Waldo’s face creases. “My poor Margaret.” He leans toward me and puts his hand on mine. I look down, realizing, for the first time, that I’m not wearing gloves. I feel a jolt at his warm touch—it’s immediate, and it causes me to step back slightly.
He notices, and quickly removes his hand from mine. The trembling cord between us snaps. And then he looks away and raises his hand, his tone bright as he gestures in front of us. “But speaking of water, we’ve arrived at the Concord River. I hope it does not strike you as dreadful.”
I had not even noticed that we had approached the river, so intent was I on our conversation. I come back to the present moment and stare out over the pastoral scene of greens and blues—there is nothing frightening at all in the placid beauty that unfurls before us. The Concord River flows wide and lazy between its banks, two shores bathed in the golden light of the late-afternoon sun and fluffed with wild cabbage and thick ferns. Just before us a stand of paper-white river birches rise up from out of the water. More wildflowers color the scene in patches of purple, white, scarlet, and yellow.
I gaze in silent appreciation before saying: “It’s quite different from the Charles River I’m used to.”
“Yes,” Waldo agrees, running his fingers down the curled, peeling bark of the nearest river birch. We fall into step beside each other, ambling slowly along the grassy bank of the river. “Did you walk along the Charles often?” Waldo asks.
“Any chance I could get,” I reply.
“It’s a fair bit busier than our stretch of the Concord,” Waldo says.
“Busier, and noisier. And then, of course, there were the Harvard fellows hollering as they would row their boats along the river.”
Overhead a chickadee studies us from a branch of a silver maple, warbling out a warning to its friends. We both pause and watch the bird for a moment, and then Waldo says: “You do know that I am a Harvard man.”
I recommence my walking. “Yes, I know.” Does he hear the bitterness in my voice? I manage a milder tone as I venture: “The great Harvard University. To men it’s a temple of learning. Nothing forbidding about its stones, bricks, and books. To me, it was only ever a fortress, one which I would never be permitted to breach.”
Waldo absorbs this, looking out on the blue-green river in thoughtful silence. I go on: “I told you how my parents fetched me from Miss Prescott’s Seminary and brought me home at fourteen.”
“Yes,” he answers.
“Well.” I lean down, pick up a small rock, and send it with a plunk into the river. I watch the growing rings that its weight pushes outward. “After that, I would walk down to the Common and try to speak with the Harvard boys.”
“What about?”
“Anything. Whatever they were willing to speak about with me,” I answer with a shrug. “Rousseau, Dante, Cervantes.”
“I’m sure you bested each one of them in turn.”
My eyes slide toward Waldo’s, and I hear Mother’s admonishing in my head; I hope I’m not being too brazen. “Until my parents forbade me from going. Mother was afraid that word would get out that the Fuller girl was debating Harvard boys in public. They knew it would ruin whatever slim chances I might have had in…well, at getting a beau. Anytime after that, whenever I had the excuse to walk past those red-brick buildings…I remember just standing outside that library, yearning to go in. Wondering what I might find, if only I could be permitted to enter.”
We’ve stopped walking. I lean down and pick a nearby wildflower, a pale pink profusion of petals bursting out of a cheerful yellow center. Waldo leans down and picks another just like it. “Swamp rose,” he says. “Far too modest a name, I’ve always thought, for such a thing of beauty.” I gaze at the small blush-colored petals appreciatively. And then Waldo does something I had not been expecting: he leans forward and tucks his prize into my dark hair. I stare up at him, unmoving, our eyes meeting as he settles the flower into place behind my ear. His fingertips just barely graze the skin of my cheek as he withdraws his hand, and I smell the fragrant summertime perfume, a sweetness that makes me slightly dizzy. I blink once, and then again.
