One Glorious Ambition Page 11

  “Charles has gone to sea? You let him do that? What about Harvard?”

  “He showed little flair for academics,” her grandmamma said. “Joseph is much better with mathematics. Aren’t you, dear?”

  Joseph nodded. He’d been in the Latin school for the past year, and Dorothea had seen even less of him than she had seen of Charles. Charles had left without her being able to tell him good-bye.

  “I will attempt a soiree on your behalf,” her grandmother told her, “since you slept away your time at the Harris household.”

  “I was ill.”

  Her grandmother harrumphed. “Joseph, too, could enjoy meeting eligible young women. Do not sabotage these events, Dorothea.”

  “I do as you ask.”

  “You do as you please.”

  They were in Dorothea’s room after a dinner with invited guests, and she had begun pulling her chestnut hair from the braided loops as she sat before her mirror. Her grandmother stood behind her, cane in hand. “You chase them away, Dorothea.”

  “I do not chase men away.” She sighed. “They depart from me. I will not be false nor pretend to be something I’m not.”

  “You could learn to love. I did with your grandfather.” Dorothea looked at her grandmother in the mirror. Gray hair curved out from her black cap. She supposed it was a kindness that her grandmother planned the dinner. She wanted her grandchildren to be secure. She started to thank her, but Madam Dix interrupted.

  “You are a disappointment, Dorothea.”

  Her face burned. “And I shall always be for you. I cannot apologize for being who I am.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  Dorothea sneezed at the powder puff she enclosed in the glass case. “I should rid you of such worries,” Dorothea said. The older woman shook her head in lament.

  God willing, she would do just that.

  Within the week, she had closed her school and packed her trunk. At the porch she took a deep breath, and said good-bye to her grandmother. The old woman’s face was as still as a statue in the garden. “I can make it on my own, Grandmamma.” She reached to pat the woman’s wrinkled hands, the skin as thin as vellum.

  “I suspect you’ll be back and have to be nursed to health.” The woman removed her fingers from Dorothea’s touch, fluffed at her day cap. “You’ll wish you had listened to your old grandmother and accepted the offer of a young man I might find for you. It will be harder as you grow older, you know, all alone.”

  “I’ll prove to you that I am the strong Dix you always wanted, capable on my own. You can stop worrying over my future. Look after Joseph’s.”

  Dorothea shook Joseph’s hand then. “Be good to her.”

  “As I always am,” he said. “You might take note as to how it’s done.”

  Dorothea realized the only beating heart she would miss was Benji’s and maybe the cook’s. And as the carriage rolled down the drive past the elms and rosebushes, she gained hope, like the first day she had ridden Mercy outside the corral: anything could happen on a new trail through the woods—even something good.

  Thirteen

  On Her Own

  Dorothea’s move to Madam Canda’s boardinghouse on Chestnut Street told Boston society that this Dix was on her own. She had a small income from book royalties, and she renewed her position in the monitorial school. She was optimistic if not refreshed. She knew there were risks in keeping a delicate balance between being an acceptable society woman focused on her family and raising children, serving the needy and ill, and becoming too worldly, a woman going beyond her benevolent role, the only role acceptable for a single woman in New England. She had to be careful or she would come under attack from gossipers. She knew several women authors who wrote under men’s names to avoid public scandal. She’d kept her name on her subsequent books, took pride in seeing it there, remembering Anne’s encouragement.

  She still believed her route to achieving her lifelong purpose was to be a moral teacher who prepared young women to teach others. Yet, if that was her purpose, why had she lost students? Why was she supervising students who taught needlework rather than science or math or poetry?

  When invited along with another female author and fellow boarder to edit a new children’s magazine, Dorothea seriously considered the offer. Perhaps writing, not teaching, was to be her ambition. But she developed a cold that fall as she deliberated, then declined the suggestion, claiming fragile health and a focus on her students.

  Reverend Channing from the Federal Street Church invited her to lead a Sunday school class. While she felt flattered with the great man’s attention, she declined. “I have my students and my compromised health. Besides, I am in need of spiritual development myself.”

  “I didn’t realize you weren’t well again.” At least he didn’t chastise her for not attending church. She couldn’t go where Anne would be sitting each Sunday with the Peabody sisters and hadn’t found another pastor to stir her soul. “You must take care, Dorothea. The Lord has need of your talents.”

  If that were true, why couldn’t she find a satisfying path?

  He began to check on her weekly, a kindness a father might convey, asking after her health, expressing concern that she not isolate herself from the larger world of service. After a few weeks of his gentle persuasion, she did agree to teach a Sunday school class for young women at the monitorial school, thinking that would best combine both worlds.

  “Excellent,” Channing told her. He clapped his hands as he looked up at her. “He is so short; we are so tall.” Anne and she had spoken of Channing that way when they first met. “Come to my classes on Friday evening, where other teachers discuss problems, theological and discipline. It’s a small group. You would fit in well.”

  “I resist being out in the Boston cold in the winter evenings.”

  He had frowned but kept the invitation open.

  If she were honest, she would have admitted that she worried about embarrassing herself by gushing over Channing in a small group. She had to bend nearly a foot to listen to his quiet words, and his five-foot stature made her conscious of her height. His words moved her in ways only Scripture and Gray’s poems had before. She had constantly wiped her eyes during his sermons. Even telling him how much his words comforted and informed made her fight back tears. If she lost control in one of his classes, she would disappear like a rock dropped in a murky pond.

  Another book was published, a novel of a fictional family that read the Bible together. She wrote to Grace Cutter and asked if she might bring a copy by and visit with Marianna and her. Grace replied that she was too ill now to see anyone, but she thanked Dorothea for thinking of them and asked her to send the book. Dorothea signed it to Marianna.

  She heard nothing back.

  Within a week of sending the book off, Dorothea’s throat hurt. She had a fever. The boardinghouse mistress called a doctor, although Dorothea protested. He told her she needed rest. Much rest. She sent word to Channing that she could no longer teach the class. She told George Emerson she must take a leave from the monitorial school. She had no care to eat. Her heart raced, then settled like a small child running, then resting for a time. She could barely lift her pen, and eating strained what energy she assumed from her rest. Her jaw ached. She coughed until her insides threatened to leave her body. A fever developed. She perspired. She thought she might die.

  She wondered that she should leave this earth now, when God had not yet set upon her heart that specific cause that should be her one glorious ambition. Had she impeded God’s way, blown out the candle meant to guide her path? Perhaps she had met whatever purpose there had been, and at the ripe old age of twenty-four, she would depart this world.

  Her fever deepened.

  Then Anne came.

  “Only the pastors are allowed.” Dorothea’s face felt hot, and she knew her arms looked like chicken bones extended from her nightdress sleeves. The room smelled of antiseptic, vinegar, and the unemptied chamber pot beneath
her bed. Dorothea scratched at the linen aimlessly until she heard the sound and stopped.

  “I came when I heard. You must get better. No more writing, Miss D—”

  “Please.” She coughed and reached for a sip of water. “Dorothea, at least.”

  “Dorothea.” Anne pulled a chair closer to the bed and helped her with the glass. “We all wish you a full recovery.”

  “I covet your prayers.”

  “And you shall have them.” She started to pat Dorothea’s hand but stopped herself. “The doctors …”

  Dorothea coughed, then pulled the handkerchief from her face. She checked. No blood. “Yes, they think it might be tubercular. I would not want you ill.”

  She wanted to pour out her anguish, the great emptiness at not having seen Anne for so long, to ask again what had happened to their friendship, to whisper what was life about. But she had no strength. It was enough that Anne came to see her before she died. She would accept that perhaps she had accomplished what she had been sent to this earth to do: to teach, to write a bit, to pray for others, to wait.

  “I will pray you get better, Dorothea.”

  Anne’s scent lingered long after she left Dorothea. Friendships brought such joy and yet fractured easily. She had assumed too much; given too much. Expected too much from a single human being. Her strength must not come from the love of others but from God. But she knew little of that love, she decided. Perhaps she knew nothing of any kind of love at all. She cried into her pillow; but for Anne’s visit and promised prayers, she would have prayed to die.

  Then, without knowing why or how, in the following weeks, instead of succumbing to the end, Dorothea began to feel stronger. Perhaps it was spring and the presence of lilacs that graced the bedside table. Perhaps it was having Anne visit, though she had come only that once. Maybe prayers were answered, because she had not died. There must be more for her to do. She began to sit up on her own. She wrote letters describing her improved health to her grandmamma and aunts and Grace Cutter. Marianna sent her a picture of a horse with a small child on its back.

  Then new respite arrived, as welcome as spring water. “Since you have no teaching position, I invite you to join my family as a tutor for Mary and Willy while we summer at Rhode Island at my sister-in-law’s Oakland estate.” Reverend Channing spoke the words in a formal way as Dorothea received the small man in the dining room of the boardinghouse. She was able to be up now for an hour or so at a time.

  “Quite a lovely setting, on the sea. Lovely old rambling house. Miss Gibbs, my wife’s sister, is a natural healer of invalid young women, and you will find the scenery and ocean shores invigorating. You will be a member of our family.”

  “I would be … honored.”

  “Good then. I’ll alert my wife and her sister that you’ll be joining us. We leave in June.”

  Her work was more as governess than tutor, as the Channings had hired a local woman to teach languages and literature. Rather than feel slighted, Dorothea was grateful. She could walk and talk with the children, using the sea and the shore as her books. She could be a family friend, disciplining as needed but only to keep Willy and Mary safe. She loved the smell of the sea. Tiny birds quick-hopped their way as though chasing tides. The sun’s warmth on her face awakened her like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle after a long sleep.

  The squeals of the Channings’ two children got her up and dressed, ready for the day’s adventures. Channing led morning services, then disappeared into his library. Since she did not need to teach, she could engage the children in picking up shells or racing with kites along the wet sand. The light here was different than over the wharfs in Boston, which was as close to the ocean as she had been. She thought of painting the seascape, though she had never tried such a thing. Instead, she sat on the dunes and wrote while the children were with their tutor. Then she waved to them, just two years apart in age, as they scrambled over the dunes to join her.

  Willy reminded her of Charles at that age, full of curiosity and a love for the sea. Mary was a red-cheeked child of wonder.

  In the evenings, after their readings, Dorothea took the smooth wooden darner from her bag and mended socks pleasantly, listening more than talking. Pleasing Reverend Channing mattered much like pleasing her father and her grandmamma with a difference: she had hope Channing might actually express appreciation for her work, whereas she knew she would never hear praise from Madam Dix.

  “Come with me to Philadelphia this winter,” Sarah Gibbs said. “It’s not as cold as Boston. You can stay with a pastor friend.”

  Sarah wore a white shawl, her signature, as she reigned over her Oakland estate. She and her sister, Channing’s wife, were best friends, and Dorothea was honored to be included in this little cluster of family. The summer waning, new plans needed to be made. Dorothea was now one of those single women that others had to find a place for since she had no home of her own.

  “I’ll have a letter of introduction sent. I’m sure you can remain with them through the winter, and the two of us can visit back and forth.”

  “I’ve never been out of New England.”

  “Then it’s time.”

  Dorothea wrote two books while in Philadelphia. She visited a new school for the deaf but avoided the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of Their Reason. She wasn’t sure why.

  A compilation of poems and descriptions of flowers and plants she called The Garland of Flora was published by a new publisher. It was out for two months when she read the first reviews. They were not kind.

  “I shall not attempt another book that might inflict such disgust upon the literary scene,” she told her publisher when she returned to Boston.

  “Ignore the critics. The books are selling,” he told her.

  “There is too much of me in those works. I ought only to write things on behalf of others. A proper woman does not put herself into the fray, no matter how popular the cause.” Could she be anonymous again? “I don’t want to be unknown. But to be known sets me apart in ways unacceptable to a proper woman’s place.”

  Her publisher reminded her that her royalties helped support her until such time as she would marry. “Write until that time.”

  She bristled. “There is something more I am to do in my life,” she told him. “I have yet to have it revealed to me. Until I do, no more books will be forthcoming.” She wished Anne were again her close friend, who could help her through this time of negative reviews and uncertain purpose. Sarah Gibbs told her to ignore the reviewers. “Most are jealous they haven’t written a book themselves.” Dorothea wasn’t so sure. Their words had the tinge of truth, that her words lacked passion.

  Dorothea returned to Boston and took the bold move of renting a house on her own. If she was not to write, then she must go back to being a teacher. She hired a cook and a laundress. She wrote to Charles, telling him he had a place to return to when he came home from sea, and she invited Joseph to consider the house his home as well.

  Fourteen-year-old Joseph responded that he might come to her house if he could find employment in that area of the city. “I seek a business career,” he told her. Which is what Joseph then did, securing a post that would take him to Asia. He came once for dinner at Dorothea’s home, nodding as he surveyed her parlor, saying she had “furnished it well.”

  She opened yet another school, taking only girls this time and naming it The Hope. She charged eighty dollars for a twelve-week course, a fee much higher than the ladies’ academy and four times the charge of the Female Monitorial School. Higher fees were necessary, she decided, because the students would lodge at the house, have their laundry done, have clothing mended, have church seats and transportation costs to and from the school covered. She poured herself into this singular business allowing the school to consume her. Teaching must be her ambition, she decided. She nursed ill students to health, took them with her to her pew, and was humbled when parents told her their daughters had learned of Christ through her, for whic
h they were grateful. This must be how she was to spend her life.

  Yet one winter, Dorothea accepted with gratitude for the interruption an invitation to again travel with the Channings, this time to the sultry island of St. Croix. While poverty surrounded them like the silent slaves that waited on them at the large estate where they stayed, it was the ravishing of the land that Dorothea wrote about to Sarah Gibbs, who had stayed behind.

  She complained of the cane plantation’s devastation to what must have been a jewel on the crown of creation. But of the condition of the slaves she said little, only commenting that the “workers were well cared for” and she saw no need to speak of radical legislation that would doom the economy of such islands or the South. Even Channing thought the abolitionists overstated their case, after being in St. Croix.

  Back in Boston, Dorothea’s days and nights were filled with activity: serving, preparing lessons, writing letters, sewing her clothes, mending her students’. She helped a new friend, Mrs. Torrey, the wife of a wealthy industrialist, channel money into a new infant school for children eighteen months to six years old and found the experience gratifying. She was in service. She fell exhausted into bed every night, waking tired but more certain she was following her destined path.

  She still thought about Marianna, now sixteen. She had not heard of her mother’s passing. Perhaps she had recovered. She would not ask.

  Then, just when she thought she was in a rhythm she could sustain, she fell ill again. The fever was high, her chest as tight as a too-small corset. Five years had passed since her recovery in Rhode Island, walking the sand dunes and listening to the rhythm of the sea. Healthy for five years. Then this. If teaching were her glorious ambition, why did her weak and unpredictable body fail her? A racking cough proved her only answer.