Melusine

Jessica Lipnack

Perhaps (excerpt from The Persuasion)

“Stay here.” He circled a soft handcuff around my wrist with his finger and thumb, tightening it as I threw back the covers. “Just a few more minutes. Here.” Tonin tapped the mattress, pulled the quilt around my waist, drew me toward him. He was half-sitting up, reading The Globe, pillows against the headboard. “You’ll like this. Richardson’s going after Nixon.”

“Good. You read about the Republicans.” I tossed The Times onto his lap, withdrawing early from the morning ritual: while I stayed in bed to write before the dreams wore off, he made the coffee and carried it back with the papers on Babi’s silver tray. We sipped and read and “practiced our a.m. activities” (Tonin’s term). Not today. He grumbled while I pulled on my jeans, laced up my boots. “Gotta run, Tonie. Pencils. I need pencils.”

“Wallet, MJ. I need my wallet.” He grabbed it from the bureau, took out a ten, then a twenty, rolled across the bed, and tucked the small fortune for those days in my pocket. “Get a nice leather notebook too.” He pinched my tush and when I turned back to face him, he drew his eyebrows tight, puckered a lip, I did the same, and we kissed. “M et T on dit au revoir,” he said.

I said I’d see him by five and jumped into Fire Engine #23, headed for Cambridge.

Parking in The Square was no problem back then. I pulled onto the curb in the alley by The Coop. The black paint of the ten-foot peace symbol, an aging merit badge from The Sixties, was separating from the brick. A skinny girl on the curb, fifteen at most—hair matted, a hole in her sneaker, and, despite the Spring warmth, wearing three jackets—held up a paper cup. I pulled Tonin’s ten out of my pocket and pressed it into her hand.

The pencils weren’t where they’d been the last time we’d been there. Half the stationery department now housed calculators, which had pushed aside the adding machines. I knew Tonin wanted a calculator and thought I should take a look, but then I remembered why I was there.

“Rohrer #2s,” I said to the clerk. I’d been using them exclusively since we’d moved to Boston. He handed me a box of pencils, already sharpened. “And that red notebook, the one with the gold edged pages.” I pointed to one in the case.

Five minutes and $20 of Tonin’s money lighter, I was back in the Fire Engine, taking a left on Church, a right on Brattle.

Crimson azalea, white lilac, and pink bleeding hearts stood centurion along the cobblestone walk. I assembled the sentence as I parked on Garden Street. Centurion or should it be sentry? Messenger bag over my shoulder, I dropped three hours’ worth of dimes in the meter, and walked through the Radcliffe gates.

Maybe guard? Two singulars and a plural? I followed the signs to the library. Maybe not stood. No verb. I don’t need a verb. Or maybe, oh, there’s the library ... at which point ankle twisted, knee buckled, palm scraped, ouch, elbow banged, woman down.

I was startled when a person I hadn’t noticed before slipped her hand under my arm. “A fine studio for the soul sculptor, this Schlesinger Library for the History of Women.” She looped the messenger bag back on my shoulder and hiked me up. “You’ll find the librarian to be of inestimable assistance and particular skill.” Was this how women spoke at Radcliffe? Soul sculptor? I noticed her silk jacket and long dress, deep red with iridescent crimson threads, wondered if she were going to the opera that night, and if so why was she here? I must have had a puzzled look because she tilted her head to the side as if considering how to respond. But I hadn’t said anything so I quickly thanked her, smiled, and rushed inside.

“There’s far too little in our textbooks about the role women played in the American Revolution.” The woman at the Reference Desk was reading Liberating Women’s History, which she put aside when I approached to explain my project. “Begin with the Encyclopedia of American Women, over there.” She pointed to a thick volume on a mahogany stand of its own. “You can take it to your desk.” She printed three names in the ornate style of my boarding school friends. “But first. Deborah Samson.” She snapped a stiff right hand to her eyebrow. “The brave soldier who fought the British in 1778. As a man.” We both smiled the way women do when they’re proud of their own. “Start with her.”

I lugged the encyclopedia, all one thousand four hundred and sixty-two pages of it, to a desk, took a sharp pencil from the box, opened the journal, and wrote the date inside the front cover. I grabbed the encyclopedia at its belly and flipped to the left, toward the Ss. But the pages fanned out of my hand and it opened to the Fs. I tried again, with fewer pages in my hand. Fs again. I grabbed with both hands but the pages slipped from my grasp until the book lay flat near the end of the Fs.

There, on the left page, was the drawing of a woman. Dark hair parted in the middle, some up and knotted in the back, some hanging in curls below her shoulders, fingers of both hands barely touching, a book in her lap. Her dress was a rich satin, V-neck collar trimmed in lace, a bow at the bodice, fitted, and with a lush full skirt. The sleeves were long and loose, cuffed in fluffy organza. Large sad round eyes, something, something almost familiar but not quite ... and I had work to do.

I put my hand beside the thick ply of pages flopped over to the right. I had to read up on the brave soldier, I had to make a timeline of Soldier Samson’s life, and, as I was thinking these very rational things, I noticed my hand scrawling mad notes in my new red notebook:

Sarah Margaret Fuller—1810-50: Critic, j’list, soc refrmr, b. 05/23/1810, Cmbrdgp’t, Mass, rig-ously educ’d by fathr, Timothy, US cong’man “2 blve that womn = of mn;” frnds w/lit, art, & pol ldrs, US & Eur; edtr, princ wrtr, The Dial (“Trans’dntal M’ment”); auth, Summer on the Lakes, Convos w/Goethe, Gunderode, Papers on Lit & Art, and Wom in the Ninet’th Cent; col’mnst, NY Dly Trib; 1st Amer wom frgn corresp; eyewit to Rom Revol, 1848; d. 07/19/1850, w/husb, Ct Giovanni Ossoli, & son, Angelo Eugene, return’g to Amer; ship broke up, storm, 150’ off Fire Isle.

I wrote Sarah Margaret Fuller again, underlined her last name twice, turned the journal to a clean page, put both hands on the edge of the encyclopedia, and easily opened it to Soldier Samson’s entry. Yes. The woman I was researching for my essay, the woman who broke ranks with her gender to defend her country. D-e-b-o-r—I’d gotten that far in writing her name when I heard something. Pssst. Pssst. Where was it coming from? Pssst. Psssssst. I traced my eyes around the room. Down the long wall of floor-to-ceiling books, along the open shelves of periodicals in the back, along the opposite bank of study carrels, and … there it was. She was. At the glass door. By the library garden. Waving. Sort of smiling. Shooing me toward her. The woman near the end of the Fs. Pssst.

I blinked. I shut my eyes and opened them. I did this faster. And slower. I inhaled. I exhaled. I coughed. I swallowed. I choked a little. I made more involuntary noises. I watched the hair on my arm rise—and I became very cold.

The woman, the Sarah Margaret Fuller whose life I’d just taken notes on, stood not five feet away, motioning to follow her. But just as I had not deliberately turned to the page where I’d read about her, I did not voluntarily rise from the chair and follow her into the garden.

She stood beside a granite bench and smoothed her hand along the back of her skirt so as not to muss it, sitting. Here. She patted the bench.

Mariana, we have met before. May I call your attention to as recently as yesterday, for instance, at the café when a woman of your generation made a penetrating, might I say, illuminating, comment about the condition of man? Her voice was strained and starchy, the phony English accent old American actors used to sound sophisticated.

I did remember that person in the café whom she mentioned—and then I couldn’t recall her at all. Every word was audible but I didn’t think she was actually making any sound. I could see what she was saying in my head, as if she were writing on the walls of my mind in flourescent ink or in the crevices of my brain or right onto my eyeballs … I wasn’t even certain where.

Eerie as this sounds, I wasn’t frightened. It was all transpiring too quickly, just beyond the click of real time, faster than I could stand apart and observe. Funny, then, that I can remember the conversation, if you can call it that, verbatim.

Mariana, there is much that I must impart to you but let us start at the destination. As you just read in that pitiful summary of my biography, pitiful, I perished tragically, with my husband and our little son, my only child, which they failed to note, off the coast of Fire Island.

I’d noticed the reference to Fire Island, where Tonin’s parents had their summer house.

Henry came to find my body at the Lighthouse but it never washed ashore. I died too young.

“Who’s Henry?” Until that moment I had said nothing but, even as I write this years later, I have no idea whether I said these words, whether I thought them, or whether I was hallucinating the whole thing.

Henry Thaw’-row. She punched her voice into the first syllable then, poof, she sizzled, making the sound of the radio dial twirled just beyond the station’s band. Then began her long fade, as she grew ever less visible, until there was nothing next to me but air and all I could hear was the librarian’s voice from way inside the building. “There’s far too little emphasis in our textbooks on...”

I didn’t move. I remember wondering if I should stand but couldn’t. And I remember recounting in precise detail what had just happened, numbering each piece, the non-compliant encyclopedia, the Pssst, the bench, the conversation with the spirit, a kind of reasonable, if insistent, one. That I liked her, liked her feist, her sheer pluck at showing up more than a century after she’d died. And then I remember another sizzle, a filmy light, a sketchy outline filling in like a photo bathing in developer, a garnet dress (I wanted one like it), high black-laced boots (desirable, too) coming into view beneath her skirt, a knot of curls taking on the color of sienna, and there she was, full, beside me again, bow at the bodice, hands clasped over the book in her lap just like the drawing, except this time with a sprig of dark-cherry heliotrope behind her right ear.

Of all that I will say, there is one fundamental reality whose truth drives our connection. My work was taken from me before it had been seen to completion. I know, I know. She waved her hand as if to prevent my stating the obvious. People say, at least many have said, that Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the most influential treatise on Woman of all time. Untrue, Mariana. They never understood it. That hastily written diatribe was but the introduction to the world I saw coming and it was hardly just about Woman. I never had the opportunity to complete my thinking. I died just at the start of the Industrial Revolution and humanity has transformed through many eras since-Man and Woman.

I don’t know exactly what she said next nor can I recall getting up, leaving the garden, or sitting down again at the desk but I do remember grabbing the pencil and watching it vibrate over the notebook. Next another sizzle, the light brightening, and watching my hand, as if it were not attached to me, lightspeeding across the page, scrawling unsteady letters and squiggly underlines:

Woman in the 21st Century

Jessica Lipnack has written many non-fiction books, many articles (New York Times to Industry Standard), short stories (Mothering to Global City Review), and essays (most recently, Ars Medica). She keeps Endless Knots, an active blog, where she writes about Margaret Fuller and her family frequently enough that they merit their own category. This story is from the novel, The Persuasion, about the return of Margaret Fuller.