One Glorious Ambition Read online

  Marianna chattered like a squirrel about her day. “And the horse came right over to me. It chose me, Mummy.”

  “No. I’m sure it was a nice”—Grace took a deep breath—“surprise for her.” Marianna sat beside her mother as she lay on the daybed. The child adjusted the quilt across her mother’s legs. The girl curled up beside her, laid her head on her mother’s chest, her small hand patting her in comfort. “I’m glad you had a nice time.”

  “I told her, Mummy.”

  “Told her what?”

  “I told her you were dying.”

  “Hush,” Dorothea said. She swallowed.

  Grace pushed herself up on the daybed, moving Marianna. “All our days are numbered, you know. I’m having a good day today. So it’ll be awhile.”

  “I know my numbers, Mummy.” She began counting.

  Her mother patted her shoulder. “Show Miss Dix your latest drawing.”

  The girl slipped off the daybed. She stopped to hug Dorothea, the blend of horse and child scents causing an ache in Dorothea’s heart. Marianna scampered off.

  “I was just preparing her.” Grace coughed, holding a handkerchief she pulled from her sleeve over her mouth.

  Was that blood? Dorothea’s heart pounded, and the words came out before she could stop them. “Why don’t you … let me adopt Marianna. While you’re still … with us. It would reassure her that if something were to happen to you, she would have a place to be, a home to go to.” There. She’d said it out loud, the desire of her heart.

  Grace wouldn’t look at her. “I have relatives.”

  “Oh, I’m certain. But your relatives likely have other children to care for, and it might strain them. I have my work, my royalties to support us, and she would be with family, and I’d have a fam—”

  “I understand that you only wish to help, Miss Dix. But—”

  “Please. Dorothea.” She reached for Grace’s hand. “She could remain with you of course until you … well … but there would be certainty then. For you both.” And for me.

  “Be grateful I share her.” She pulled her hands from beneath Dorothea’s.

  Marianna halted in the doorway, confusion on her face as she looked from her mother to Dorothea.

  “Now, I think it’s time for you to go,” Grace said. “And best if you don’t return.”

  She couldn’t argue in front of the child so Dorothea left, her heart eclipsed. How had she failed at being generous, doing what she thought was right? Trying to fix things. So much for an uneventful day.

  Twelve

  Except in Fond Review

  The Heaths were not in church that December morning. Dorothea had prepared her presents and brought them with her so she could join them later for hot cider and crumpets. Anne had sent the invitation. Dorothea packed small sachets for Caroline, Elizabeth, Susan, and pleasant Mary and a fruitcake begun in early November with fine rum for the elder Heaths, along with a packet of tobacco. Charles had told her of one of the shops where she could get the plant imported from the southern states. Her brother had come to Orange Court for the holidays, and she had reveled in his maturity. He was a nice young man. For Anne, she had purchased a second porcelain of an English lady to match one she had given her for her September birthday.

  A chill in the sanctuary soon eased with the arrival of cloaked communicants with smiles to match the Advent season. The clunk of boots on boards, purses hitting the backs of pews, as women moved to leave the outside seat for fathers and husbands, were comforting sounds. Dorothea placed the basket at her feet, unsettled since she sat in the Heath pew alone. Maybe too much snow kept them? She looked around, nodded greetings. She hoped nothing had happened.

  Reverend Channing’s words inspired, helped her focus on the Christ child and the gift of grace God gave through such a vulnerable baby. Her thoughts turned to Grace and Marianna. She had sent notes but had heard nothing since the October day when she and Marianna had gone riding.

  The Heaths never arrived. Should she still keep their invitation? What was socially acceptable? After the services she chatted with a young pastor whom Anne had pushed Dorothea toward. She had met him at a party with Ralph Waldo Emerson during the summer, and Anne had later commented on what a fine catch he would be. Dorothea found him bright and interesting, full of ideas, though none seemed to encourage the role of women as teachers, nor girls as students.

  “I wonder where the Heaths are this fine morning,” she asked Mr. Gannet.

  “Oh.” His eyes grew immediately soft. He picked up Dorothea’s gloved hand. “There’s been a death.”

  “At the Heaths?” He nodded. Her throat constricted. “Not Anne!”

  “No.” He looked down. “Mary. The youngest. A sudden illness and she is gone. Barely twenty.” He lifted his head, sounded stalwart. “They think cholera. The family grieves, of course.”

  “Oh, yes. Oh.”

  She needed to be with them, to comfort them in their suffering. She was family. They were family. She raced down the stone steps, hailed a cab, and gave the address. How awful for them. Mary—gone. But why hadn’t they sent word to her? Why hadn’t she been told?

  At Brookline, she climbed the steps to the Heath estate. Black mourning bunting already draped the massive door.

  “The Heaths are taking no callers today due to the death of Miss Mary,” the maid intoned.

  “But they’ll want to see me.”

  “Oh, Miss Dix, only family is being permitted in.”

  “Could you, that is, might you ask Anne, Miss Anne, advise her that her friend Thea is here to comfort her?”

  The maid hesitated, then invited Dorothea in, asking her to wait in the foyer as she closed the door against the cold. In a moment, Anne came down the steps, her eyes red, her long face puffed.

  “Anne, Anne, I am so sorry.” Dorothea dropped the basket, opened her arms to encompass her friend. “I would have come earlier, but I didn’t know.”

  Anne allowed Dorothea to hold her for a moment, then pushed away, her handkerchief pressed against a new rash of tears.

  “She’s gone,” Anne said. “Mary’s gone. I can’t … Thea. I … We …” She sobbed, then turned and ran back up the stairs.

  Dorothea stared after her friend’s back. Why did she not invite her to join the family in their grief? Didn’t she belong here to help relieve their suffering? The maid came from a side room, opened the door. A blast of cold air hit Dorothea. The maid motioned her out. “I … the funeral?”

  The maid shook her head, handed her the basket of gifts. Dorothea would have to ask Reverend Channing about arrangements. Maybe Anne would write to let her know. Yes. Anne would write.

  Dorothea attended the funeral, though she was ushered to a guest pew and not to the family pew where she had so often sat with the Heaths. Relatives from out of town, cousins, aunts, uncles, all filled the space; the women’s black bonnets and dresses unbroken by white lace. Psalm 27 rang in her ears, the fourteenth verse granting the words that stayed with her: “Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.”

  Wait. The family grieved. They would invite her back.

  Afterward, Anne, Caroline, and Elizabeth received people. Though lost in an unraveling of bonds, Dorothea joined the line like dozens of other mourners to pay their respects. “May I help you?” Dorothea asked. “Please. I can stop by later—”

  “We’ll be at the cemetery and then with family at the house. I’ll write,” Anne said. “I … I am too grieved to speak.” Anne took the hand of the next mourner, pushing Dorothea along.

  Still reeling from confusion and grief, Dorothea attended the graveside service. The headstones of Boston’s finest marched like gray soldiers. Nothing protected mourners from the stirred ashes left from the heavy fires set to melt the frozen ground so the diggers could do their work. December was a bleak time to die. Even the ground resisted the transition from this life to the next.

  It was Dorothea’s firs
t funeral, and at the sight of her friend, she moved into the family circle, moved beside Anne and leaned on her, sobbing her sorrow. Anne startled, pulled away, Dorothea’s arms dangled at her side.

  A divinity student approached and pulled Dorothea away from the distraught Anne.

  Dorothea said, perhaps too loudly she thought later, “I need to be with their family, to help them! They suffer so!”

  He held her back and she watched the Heath family close in on itself, arms around each other, circled in their loss, gaining sustenance from each other—their backs to Dorothea. Elizabeth Heath cast a glance at her, turned away. They acted like she was a scavenger rooting through private things in which she had no part.

  The family did not open their doors during the Christmas season, nor through Epiphany. Dorothea looked for them each Sunday, still sitting in the Heath pew although she had paid the fees for her own and for Charles and Joseph if they chose to attend. Days passed like snails. Even her students did not distract. She wrote too many letters to Anne that went unanswered. Lent arrived. Surely on Easter the Heaths would attend to celebrate new life.

  But they did not.

  Wait.

  Then, after weeks of longing, Dorothea received a short note from Anne. She pressed the letter to her heart before opening. Wait. Yes, the psalm had told her to wait. She opened it. No mention of the silence or absence but an expression of still profound sorrow. Dorothea paced the room. She must relieve her friend’s torment. She wrote back, reminding Anne of what joys still awaited her with her other sisters and with her friends. She implored her to think of others. At the end of the letter, she asked her to think of her. “Mary’s death, your mother’s deep grieving, your own sorrow all tug at my own loneliness as I am kept from you.” Couldn’t Anne see that she still had sisters, still had loving parents? Dorothea was an iceberg alone in a cold, cold sea.

  Two days later Dorothea grabbed at Anne’s return letter, then sat and frowned. It was a short note, saying their wounds were deep and Dorothea needed to understand that she needed time to grieve with her family. “I am not family,” Dorothea said out loud, the slice of the realization like cold snow on her face. But she couldn’t give in, she couldn’t.

  “I am alone,” Dorothea wrote. “You are all I have.” Charles and Joseph had Madam Dix. Marianna had her mother. Dorothea had no one. “Don’t take that from me. The living have their claims. Common charity would not allow you to forsake me.”

  Anne’s notes became fewer, the salutation now to Miss Dix, not Thea. Dorothea knew she erred, was causing rather than diminishing the suffering of another. But like the apostle Paul, she was doing what she didn’t want to do and what she wanted to do escaped her.

  “We’ve decided to suspend Bertha from your school. She’s doing well with her needlework and lettering, and with the spring snows, it’s just difficult getting her here.”

  “I understand.” This was the fourth parent who had told her this in the past month. The carriage house school had already closed with winter’s onset. Even before that, a few of the carriage house students told her they were needed at home, so they wouldn’t be attending for a while.

  Her assistants at the Orange Court school didn’t make eye contact with her, and one even suggested she needed more rest. Rest? When would she do that? She still had the monitorial position, but even there she found less enthusiasm for teaching than she had ever known. If this was her purpose, God’s calling for her life, then why were her students leaving her like icicles melting in spring from the eaves?

  Dorothea’s chest felt thick as snow. She reread Thomas Gray’s words, seeking solace. “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard” she’d read many times. One stanza stood out.

  Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,

  Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,

  Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

  Mary Heath forever lay in that narrow cell. Dorothea felt as though she lived beneath a moldering heap. The poem went on, line after line, and she wept with each stanza that crystallized loss as though it were a shard slicing her soul. She reread the line about the deceased: “He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend.”

  That’s all she had ever hoped for: a friend, a sister. Her own family. She wrote to her aunt Sarah but shared nothing of her struggle. Her cousin Mary’s life was filled with children now, leaving little time to correspond. Despite all her wishes to do otherwise, she had pushed her closest family away. First Marianna. Now Anne. Was she never to find friendship until heaven?

  Malaise settled over her. Students at the monitorial school became indistinct. The boarders irritated her with their talk of worldly things. She spent more time in her room, working on her stories, writing in her diary. She rarely read to her grandmother now. Charles and Joseph were thin threads in the fabric of her life. An orphan. That’s what she was and would always be.

  Anne’s invitation to her for a weekend at Brookline speared her day with joy like a firecracker exploding high in an evening sky. Dorothea prayed that she would find a way not to push, not to jump ahead of where her friend might be. She prayed she could keep the pain of her own wounds to herself, not add to the misery of her friend. Let compassion, not self-service, be my gift.

  She fluttered in preparation, changing collars, ironing a day cap, wearing a small straw hat instead. She brought with her the Christmas items she had never been able to present. She set the basket on the marble-top table in the parlor, but Anne did not approach it, nor did she offer up any gift she might have made for Dorothea, a gift that Mary’s death had interrupted, a gift to tell Dorothea she still had a place in Anne’s heart. Dorothea asked after the health of Anne’s parents.

  “They’re doing as well as can be expected when one outlives a child,” Anne said.

  “And you, my friend? Do you find respite in the Scriptures? In the promise of spring?”

  Anne nodded, her eyes pooling before she turned away. “To have all my sisters live to adulthood and then this.”

  “Too much sadness.” Dorothea was about to add something when the maid interrupted and said the other guests had arrived. She was just one of the guests? Yes, as the afternoon progressed, she might have been a swan on a lake, floating indistinct from many others. She hovered at the edges; remained after the others left. She read to Anne while she knitted. Then the two reversed roles, but the old closeness had disappeared, a wedge of sorrow in its place.

  As the fire waned, Anne looked at the clock in its gold frame. “I tire,” she said.

  “Of course. It’s been a long day. Thank you for including me.” She started to say how much she missed her, how grateful she was to be invited back, and ask could she come next week. But she stopped herself. A prayer answered. She gathered her things, pulled on her cloak.

  “Farewell, Dorothea.” Not Thea now. Anne did not add, “Come back soon.”

  Dorothea longed for the shade of Gray’s yew tree, but what she took with her instead was the image of the moldering heap.

  They still corresponded. Dorothea kept her letters light, but Anne’s responses—when she replied—were full of petty criticisms. Dorothea’s use of poor-grade pencils rather than ink. She chastised Dorothea for changing a few words in the hymns she compiled. She suggested her children’s stories lacked luster. “Children need adventure in a story, not just moral tomes.”

  Anne addressed her letters, not to Thea, but to Miss Dix. When the Heaths returned to the church on Federal Street, there were new guests, the Peabody sisters, sitting in the pews with them. Dorothea had heard of them, bright and wealthy and part of the circle containing the Emersons and Thoreaus.

  Dorothea slipped into her own pew, well behind the Heaths’. She could barely sing the words to the hymns, her throat so closed with tears.

  In June, at the event celebrating the final days of the Marquis de Lafayette’s American tour, Dorothea joined the f
ete, this one more open to the public. She did not need the Heaths’ invitation. She hoped she and Anne might share a fond memory of the earlier event. But Anne and her sisters stood with the Peabody sisters arm in arm this time. Elizabeth Peabody, in her exuberance, jumped into Lafayette’s carriage when the door opened and kissed his hand, much to everyone’s delight. Anne laughed. Dorothea was a moon eclipsed.

  Dorothea’s cough returned. She sent a note to Anne in poetic form, thinking it might well be her last.

  And mark how much one little year can do

  How much of Friendship that seemed made to last,

  Unwearied love, affection firm and true,

  Are now beheld no more except in fond review.

  It wasn’t Thomas Gray, but she hoped it would tell her friend how much she meant to her.

  Anne did not reply.

  With the warmth of summer, Dorothea closed her school, as she often did, looking forward to reading and perhaps even writing again; healing the wounds of a friendship lost. But her grandmother deemed to fill Dorothea’s social void and her malaise by sending her off to her pastor uncle Thaddeus Harris in Worcester. There he and his wife were to bring potential suitors into Dorothea’s world. Her grandmother still worried over Dorothea’s single state, at twenty-three, and while she resisted, she allowed herself to be persuaded. Perhaps it would take her mind from the dissonance with the Heaths and from her own uncertainty now of what her purpose was meant to be in life.

  But she became ill at the Harris household. Its quiet, sparse, Puritan focus suited her need for rest, and she believed her uncle relieved not to have to find her potential suitors. She recovered from the cough and weakness as soon as she returned to Orange Court, ready, she hoped, to start anew with her school and her life. Her three-month sentence, as she thought of it, completed. She vowed to focus more attention on Charles and Joseph and her grandmother, blood being the best bond for enduring relationships. Once again, she erred in her understanding.