One Glorious Ambition Read online

  “He’s so short,” Anne said.

  “Or we’re quite tall.” They both laughed as they made their way to the back of the lecture hall and onto the street. They were of the same height, and Reverend Channing was barely five feet tall. Once outside, the smell of horse droppings overpowered any jasmine scent from the plants in the large pots beside the doors. A long line of carriages awaited the lecture’s guests.

  “My carriage is at the front,” Anne said. “Would you care to come for tea? We can deliver you to Orange Court later if you’d like?”

  “I’d be honored.”

  “We have quite the gatherings after church on Sundays. Just chatting and playing games. Sometimes we take boats out on the lake. A few scholars. My lovely younger sisters. Perhaps you’ll join us?”

  “I … yes. Perhaps in the future.” Dorothea did not want to get caught up in the suitor circle again. Still, she enjoyed the company of this woman. Maybe there were other young people she could spend time with without the weight of marriage on their minds. “My school takes up much of my time.”

  “Even teachers need recess.” Anne Heath put her arm through Dorothea’s as they walked toward the waiting carriage.

  Dorothea felt the warmth of another person’s touch and the possibility of a friendship. She did not shrink away.

  Nine

  Friends Sublime

  Anne Heath had four younger sisters, a gregarious mother, a humorous father, and a home that others flocked to on Sunday afternoons like fox squirrels to bird feeders. Dorothea enjoyed the quiet tea with Anne, then found herself the next weekend with the Heath clan, as Mrs. Heath called her brood. The sweet aroma of kindness floated over the household, and Dorothea allowed herself to be wrapped within it.

  Both Elizabeth and Mary, the youngest of the five Heath daughters, had leather-colored hair and blue eyes and were the instigators of the games they introduced before Dorothea had time to memorize the names of the other guests. They laughed over family stories. They primped each other’s clothing, commented on their hairpieces and the stitching capabilities of each.

  Seventeen-year-old Mary giggled easily as her sisters fluffed her curls. She was the only one to have natural waves in her hair. They exchanged stories of beaus, although Anne had none. Their parents expressed compliments both at the ideas articulated by their daughters and at their actions in caring for others. They sewed clothes for the poor and collected alms for those imprisoned. Like Dorothea, Anne deplored the practice of local jails charging for people to come and “view the imbeciles” often housed in debtors’ jails.

  “I don’t think it at all Christian for people to gawk at others who are impaired through no means of their own,” Dorothea said, thinking of her mother.

  “But some are there because of their foolish choices,” Anne said. “Consider the rum business and the sugar imports and what excesses do to families whose husbands grow crazy for drink.”

  “But those with epilepsy, flight of mind, mongoloid features; these are not there for reason of rum.” Dorothea felt her skin prickle. She had not disagreed with Anne before.

  “We need protection from them,” Susan Heath ventured.

  “Do we? I’m not so sure they do not need protection from us who are supposed to be more civilized. We charge coins to view them? Hardly civilized.”

  “No reason to argue, girls,” Mr. Heath interrupted.

  Silence filled the room before Mary told a story of losing her hat on the lake and the rush of boys who splashed into the water to be the first to retrieve it. Dorothea’s heart steadied. Why was she so defensive of criticism for those relieved of their reason?

  Meals with the Heaths were happy times with chatter and laughter. In each encounter with this family, Dorothea was brought inside, felt the warmth of the hearth fire not only on her skin but in her heart. She accepted compliments about the way she expressed an idea or how much Anne enjoyed reading the letters Dorothea had begun sending each week just to share the vagaries of her teaching days. Dorothea heard herself making observations that she saw pleased the Heath family, and she reveled in their pleasure. Here was a safe place where suffering did not intrude. She waded into the water of trusting a relationship.

  “You’re visiting with the Heaths I hear.” Dorothea’s grandmother spoke into the silence of a meal in the cottage house, where Dorothea occasionally ate with her family. Usually the quiet was broken only by the scrape of spoon against the soup bowl. Dorothea often stayed afterward to read to her grandmother, whose eyes appeared to fail her.

  “Yes. They’re a fine family.” She buttered one of Cookie’s pan breads, handing it to her grandmother and asking Charles to pass the peas.

  “You should keep their acquaintance. They will be able to bring you into Boston society. It won’t hurt them to have a beautiful, articulate young Dix to add to their parties either.”

  A compliment from Grandmamma?

  “I have been invited to a cotillion. Several legislators and artists and others will attend.”

  “Tell me the guest list, and I’ll advise you who to ask to be seated beside.”

  “Grandmother, if I go, it will be to spend time with Anne and her sisters. They’re much more interesting than the legislators. I converse with them at Mrs. Hudson’s table, and I don’t always find the conversation stimulating.”

  “You might if you knew of their ledger sheets.”

  “You might,” Dorothea said. “It’s of no interest to me.”

  Her brothers exchanged glances and poked at the salt pork slices.

  “It must be!” Her grandmother nearly shouted each word. The spaniel Benji perked his ears at the thundered words, then cowered under the table. The two boys also jerked in their seats. “You are too much focused on the present without care for your future.” The older woman’s face held the expression that she had just stepped where the chickens pecked.

  “I have the school,” Dorothea said. “I can teach for a lifetime.”

  “Not all we do now will last.”

  “Then I’ll trust that God has plans for me and will tend them better than I can … or even better than you can, Grandmamma.”

  “Don’t be rude.” She frumped her napkin beside her plate. “You won’t teach your entire life. It’s too much, and it will never prove to support you and your brothers. You need a husband, Dorothea. That is that!”

  Dinners with the Heath family were so much more pleasant than those at the cottage. Dorothea listened to the fast-moving conversations around the dining room table and occasionally offered an opinion. The college students might be somber and professorial at times, but they always listened politely and did not seem to dismiss what she said simply because she was a female. The young men also nodded wisely to the offerings of the Heath girls, and their attention to Mrs. Heath’s point of view seemed more than mere politeness. This, Dorothea imagined, was how men and women ought to be together, speaking frankly and with respect. She vowed to model this with her students so they would see what respect of others looked like.

  One afternoon at the Heaths’, plum pudding was being served in the garden overlooking the lake. The aroma made Dorothea salivate.

  “We owe our fellow citizens ample opportunity to improve their lives,” one student said. “It is our Christian duty. Duty to our fellow man, service that grows out of the journey of purpose. We must all find our purpose.”

  “I do believe Miss Dix has done so,” Anne interjected. “Though I am still searching. Her school is quite successful. She’s an observant and dedicated instructor.”

  “Ah, but what of others, students who cannot afford to attend her fine establishment?” This came from the Reverend William Ellery Channing, who with his wife and sister-in-law had joined the Heath group on this day. Dorothea still reeled from the power of the man’s sermons and his persuasive voice. Hadn’t he been a classmate of her father’s at Harvard before her father dropped out? She’d have to ask her grandmother.

  “At the la
st judgment,” he concluded, “I believe Christ will say ‘as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ What have you done?”

  “Thea?” Anne asked. “Do you care to reply?”

  “He’s quite right. Those who cannot afford my school do deserve an education. But I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “I have begun a ministry, Miss Dix, whereby I visit the homes of the poor and destitute, the suffering. I find it untrue that most are people who deserve their fate or are people who have failed to lift themselves into proper society. They are instead mostly virtuous men and women who stepped out as best they could to rise above crushing poverty and found the path strewn with boulders too heavy for them to move alone. It is our duty to assist them, our Christian duty to respond regardless of the circumstances.”

  “Reverend Channing has taken it upon himself to raise funds to provide food, clothing, coal, whatever is needed for such people,” Mary Heath noted.

  The group had gathered under the gazebo in the Heaths’ backyard, and the ice in the tea glasses clinked against the sides. From her tongue, Dorothea removed a tiny piece of sawdust left behind from the icehouse.

  Mary’s eyes glistened with admiration. “He is more than a sermonizer. He is a doer.”

  “As are you, Miss Mary,” the cleric added. Polite applause followed as the pastor bowed enough to acknowledge their support.

  When he raised his eyes, he held Dorothea’s for a moment. She wanted to take action. Whether to achieve a small measure of his acclaim or to be able to respond to Christ’s call, she was not yet certain.

  Dorothea remained thoughtful as the carriage ride back to Orange Court took her past the ice warehouses and cotton stores, past the buildings she knew were full of pineapples from the Sandwich Islands and blue porcelain imported from Britain. She had ridden the route a hundred times, but this time she noticed the children. Small, dirty, barely covered with threadbare clothing, they scrounged the wharves for droppings of food or bits of cotton baling they might stuff inside their clothes for warmth. Stray cats roamed the same wharves, and many looked healthier than the skinny children who ran among them.

  She asked the driver to stop. “Please wait here.”

  Dusk hovered at the edges of the warehouses. The smell of the sea wafted to her, though not enough to cover the stench of the small child who stood before her, her hand out.

  “Are you well, miss?” She thought the child before her was a girl.

  “Aye. Just hungry. Do you have a coin for me?”

  “I do.” She removed the coin from her reticule. She hesitated. Perhaps the child would see she had more and reach for it, grab what she could. But the child accepted it and said, “This’ll buy a soup bone for me mother. She’s not well.”

  “And your father?”

  “Mum says he ain’t coming back. She works the mills to feed us.”

  “Your mother works when she’s not ill?”

  “She does, ma’am. Wants us to go to school, she says. Me brother and me, but we can’t.” The girl bit the coin.

  “Yes, schooling is good.”

  “But not for now. She’s sick, and me and my brother, we collect for her.”

  Dorothea gave the child another coin. “May your mother soon be well.”

  “I would like to use the barn,” Dorothea told Madam Dix the next day. They sat in the kitchen of the cottage. Cookie served mashed yams with butter as the evening meal, but she had cleared the dishes and shooed Charles and Joseph out, leaving Dorothea and her grandmamma alone. Benji the spaniel lay at the old woman’s feet.

  “The barn? Whatever for?”

  “To make it a school for children who cannot afford to pay.”

  “Wasteful of your time.” She tugged at the strings of her black cap.

  “I have nothing but time, Grandmamma. And I believe this is what God has called me to do: to teach. Did our Lord not say words that meant that as we do for the least of these we do for Him? I do this class for Him, for those He spent His time with, the sinners and tax collectors.” Dorothea warmed to her subject and her reasoning. Even she could hear the increased confidence in her voice.

  Madam Dix grunted, and the dog perked up his head. “However will you engage them? They’re hungry and won’t be able to think. Worse, they’ll scamper around the estate doing who knows what. I do not think this a worthy cause.”

  “But you will not forbid me?”

  “And if I do, would you defy me?”

  “I will remind you that you have leased the ‘estate’ except for the cottage to the Hudsons, and if Mrs. Hudson agrees to let me use the barn, I will proceed.” She swallowed. “It is a courtesy that I ask you before speaking to Mrs. Hudson.” The woman squinted at Dorothea, who now heard her voice quiver. “The barn is not being used now, and the children might even be able to improve its value as they help prepare it for their own school.”

  Madam Dix sat silently for a moment and then said, “Use the carriage house at least. I don’t want them jabbering that Orange Court offered nothing but a barn. And while we are on the subject of schooling, I may as well tell you that I have enrolled Charles in the Boston Latin School. It’s time he had proper instruction.”

  The sudden jolt to Dorothea’s stomach felt like a mule kick. “He won’t be in my classes?”

  “He can visit you when he comes home on weekends.”

  “And Joseph?”

  “He’ll continue with my teaching.”

  “Was Charles not progressing as you’d hoped?”

  “It’s better he has a male instructor. It will prepare him for Harvard. Living with other boys will be good for him too.” She added, “I think I’ll forgo your readings this evening, Dorothea,” and hobbled out of the room.

  Benji started after the woman, then returned, lifting his paws onto Dorothea’s lap. She looked into his watery eyes and scratched his chin. He panted happily in response. “At least you offer a little comfort to me,” she said.

  “Benji! Come!” the old woman called, and the dog scooted away.

  Dorothea dove into the new school project, pressing against the tightness in her chest when she thought of Charles’s being gone and Joseph as distant as if he were too. Charles was ready for the Latin school, but she missed him and his sea stories. The latter made her nervous as she imagined him on a ship during a raging Atlantic storm. Still, she knew that her influence over him waned and would more so now.

  Dorothea wrote daily to Anne, telling her of her project and her visits to the wharves and the business sections of the city. Wherever she encountered a small girl, she handed her a coin and asked if she might like to come to school so that one day she could earn more coins to support herself and her family. She never found the child she had spoken with on her first visit, but a dozen others were there to take her place.

  “The school will only be in the late afternoons and early evenings,” she assured the parents when prospective students took her to their homes.

  “Why would you do this?”

  Because it is my duty. “I have the ability and the gift given me to teach, and it is my desire to share that gift. It is your duty to receive it.”

  “Ain’t had many gifts given me, so don’t have much practice in recepting them,” one father said. He pressed his hand on his daughter’s head. Were those lice moving through her hair?

  She would have to bathe them all. Dorothea cleared her throat. It would be something to manage in the charity school, head lice and even ticks perhaps.

  “Give me to know that but one human being has been made better by my precepts, more virtuous by my example, and I shall possess a treasure that the world can never take from me,” she wrote to Anne after the first week of her carriage house class.

  Anne replied, “You are doing the Lord’s work with these children. They will remember not only their education but the woman who made it possible, a woman who could have spent her evenings bowling on the lawn or reading
the Sunday Scholar’s Magazine instead of your charity. I am so proud of you, my sister. So very proud. Reverend Channing will be too.”

  Anne’s words filled Dorothea, made her realize how important friendships were and how much she had missed having someone she could share her deepest thoughts with but who also showed her how to encourage others.

  “I have a request,” Dorothea told Anne one Saturday. They had come to the stables where the Heaths kept several riding horses. They had left the clan at home and now rode side by side, sunlight flickering through the trees. “Don’t save my letters.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “What if someone saw how deeply I express my emotions. My worries over Charles, my struggle with purpose, my wish that I had a child of my own. I’ve even shared with you Madam Dix’s interruption in my guidance of my brothers, how deeply she hurt me. Those ought not to be read by others.”

  “I’ve written personal thoughts to you. Do you destroy my letters?” Anne asked.

  “I do. But only after I’ve read them a dozen times.”

  Anne grinned. “When I broke the porcelain you gave me, I thought I had chipped a part of my heart away. I’m sure I wrote that.”

  “You did. And I treasure the words but keep them in here.” She patted her chest.

  “I do not have your fabulous memory,” Anne said. “I think you remember everything you read, word for word.”

  “Nearly.”

  “I wrap your letters in packets tied with ribbon and keep them in a wooden box in the attic trunk. No one will see them.” Anne resettled her riding crop.

  “Do you?”

  “You’re like one of my sisters. Letters are a part of who you are. It would be like ripping away a portion of my skin, my bones, to toss them away.”

  Dorothea leaned across her horse and reached for the bridle of Anne’s horse to stop them both. She pecked her friend on the cheek and felt her face grow hot. “Thank you for that. You are my only … friend.”

  Anne touched her cheek. “Only because you do not share yourself with others as you do with me. My sisters adore you. Mary especially.”