One Glorious Ambition (16 page)

“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.

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 fete, 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.

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.

“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.