The House of Hawthorne (11 page)

D
r. Fiske has gone and I am in a state like that induced by morphine, but my own bodily energies have supplied it.

Dr. Fiske is an associate of Father’s, and a pioneer in the field of animal magnetism, a therapy that cures one of all sorts of nervous ills. We sit—knee-to-knee—and he rubs his hands down my arms and shoulders. Once my spheres are quieted, he places his hands on my abdomen and maintains periods of silence followed by direction to my body to suppress the headaches. I must keep our sessions from the public knowledge, because the therapy is quite new and sometimes involves a crisis of body, a most elaborate pulsing and pounding of organs that leaves one in a state of extreme rest. The good doctor says this natural mechanism is much preferable to prescriptives, and I can see how he is correct.

At any rate, this hypnosis, as it is also known, has cured me of
morphine and has left me stronger today than I have been in weeks. It is a good thing, because I am to depart for a late-summer vacation at Marblehead with Mary, to stay with our friends the Hoopers. Ellen Hooper is a poet and her husband, Robert, is a physician, and they are known for their reading parties and pleasant dinners. It will be good for Mary and me to reconnect our sisterly bonds away from home, without the misery of slavery to shadow our stay, and where I may return to my notebooks for painting inspiration.

I have been instructed by Dr. Fiske to take much outdoor exercise, and by Elizabeth’s friend Mr. Ralph Emerson to appreciate my unity with the landscape so I may create original art. That the great transcendentalist has condescended to answer the humble letters of Elizabeth’s invalid sister astounds me. He is generous to speak to me in his missives as an equal, and I will heed his advice as best I might. I have allowed myself too much rest in Salem. I find it easy to retreat to my bedroom, nurturing thoughts of Nathaniel, whose absence now plagues me like my headaches.

We arrive at the Hooper home on the coast, and are shown to the most royal rooms we have ever beheld. Mary and I squeal with delight at the lavender Turkish carpets, the pale purple-papered walls, the creamy ivory moldings and drapery, and two beds dressed in identical puffy quilts, like amethyst clouds too heavy to float.

Ellen is delighted to have our company, and we chatter like a nest of finches. She tells us that she is overseeing the table settings and menu for tonight’s dinner, and insists that we spend the
afternoon at the seaside so we are fresh and ready for the party. She procures blue serge bathing dresses and matching bonnets for us, and sends us on our way.

Mary and I walk arm in arm on the crude path through the trees, feeling the fingers of the shrubs grasping our skirts and pantaloons. I take in breaths of the salty zephyrs that have found us here, imagining the wind purifying my lungs and head, and drawing my ailments out on the tide. On the final climb to the beach, I feel my legs coming back to life, my arms pumping, my heart beating with vitality, and all at once the vista opens and the great ocean is before us.

“Oh, Mary! How I wish George were with us! He could find his healing here; I am sure of it. Maybe I will hold my breath until we return and blow some of this tonic at him.”

Mary squeezes me closer to her side.

“You are good to care for George as you do,” she says. “I am proud to see you ministering to others, and I know you bring our brother great comfort.”

“It is he who brings me comfort. There is nothing like the friendship of a man to force me outside of myself and make me see things in new ways.”

She glances at me from the corner of her eye, and when I meet her gaze, she grins.

“Just look at the darling families,” I say. “And the soaring seagulls, and the dear sailboats bobbing on the rippling waters under the soft topaz sky!”

“Careful, or you will strain yourself, Sophichen. I will be forced to write to Mother.”

I pinch her side and turn back to the scene before me. There is a great sloping path leading down to a beach, and I cannot contain my joy; I must run down it. I unthread my arm from Mary’s and pull off my slippers before hurling myself toward the water with arms open to the wind. I hear Mary’s laugh behind me, and see the ocean’s sublimity before me, and when I reach the surf, I splash in up to my knees. Within moments, Mary has caught up with me, breathing hard from her run. I catch the eye of two young men smoking under an umbrella, and the fairer of the two nods at me and smiles. Mary grabs my arm, and we follow the tide line into the craggy boulders on a hunt for sea creatures.

The day moves with alarming quickness, and I feel a slight burn on my nose where my bonnet has not protected me, but I do not care. I call it my sun kiss, and even invite more of his blessing when I lie in the sand, face to heaven, exhaling in time with the waves. Most of the families and seagoers have left, and it is as if Mary and I are alone at the edge of the world.

“Breathe with me, Mary.”

She stretches out next to me, and we must look like two great starfish washed up on the shore.

“I must write to Emerson of this,” I say. “Have you ever felt such commingling with nature? Can you not feel the presence of the sublime oversoul? I cannot tell where I end and anything around me begins.”

“That is poetry,” says Mary. “You must paint this.”

I feel a sudden separation from Mary when she says these words. I do not want commissions now; I only want to
be
, to
exist in this manifestation of my
innere
. Mercifully, she does not speak again, and I am returned to the removed state I crave.

At the Hoopers’ table I am reminded of the dreamy Cuban evenings of La Recompensa. A pleasant lethargy, not unlike a morphine trance, hovers at my temples all night, and the conversations pass over me like sea breezes. I must appear to be quite stupid, but I do not care.

Mary and I wear the new cotton dresses Mother helped us sew. Mary chose a pink floral and I found a fern-and-leaf pattern. Our lilac aprons and bonnets complement our dresses beautifully, and the off-the-shoulder leg-o’-mutton sleeves allow for coolness in spite of the summer heat.

Steaming gravies pass under my nose; delicately fried vegetables and succulent fruits melt on my tongue. Flaky pastries and sweets send the saliva rushing to my mouth, and goblets of wine are filled and refilled. I do not feel guilty about partaking when the service is done by pale hands, paid for their labors, and I grow stuffed from the fare.

It is time for the reading, and I choose a chair in a dark corner, next to Mary, while Ellen stands before us and tells us that she will read a piece perfect for ladies and gentlemen who have spent time at the shore, a charming vignette by a mysterious young writer who nearly got himself killed in a duel over an unworthy woman.

“A Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

I jerk to attention in my chair and grab Mary’s arm. Her gaze meets mine, mimicking the way I have made large saucers of my eyes. I draw my hand back, and squeeze my fists on my skirts.

Ellen does not elaborate on the firework she has thrown, so this duel must be common knowledge, but what woman could it reference? Not me, of course, surely not Elizabeth. Is there another woman who has been competing for his affections? Could she be why he has so suddenly and sullenly departed human company? I have a small comfort that it is my words he wanted to accompany him on his travels, but it is a very small comfort indeed.

I attempt to pay attention to his essay, “Footprints on the Sea-Shore.” What I do hear of his musings on the temporary nature of what we leave behind, the pleasure to be known retreating from civilization, the wisdom of nature, and the ultimate joy on reuniting with society charms me. I will have to read the essay again, alone in my room, but for now I am beside myself with curiosity. I must learn about this duel.

Once the reading is over and the men have retired to the veranda to smoke, Ellen and her friends are surprised to see me, the quietly nesting dinner dove, now animated and involved in all of their conversations. I attempt to steer the discussion back to Hawthorne without appearing too eager—or even desperate—to hear more.

“An enchanting walk to take with Hawthorne through his story,” I say. “So well animated, Ellen. You have always infused your poetic tendencies into the very work you read.”

“Thank you,” she says. “I am delighted you enjoyed hearing
it. I will have actual poetry to read tomorrow, and we will have more guests.”

“How wonderful,” I reply.

A young woman places her hand on Ellen’s arm to ask her a question, but I cannot bear to lose her attention.

“It is interesting so docile a writer might have been a part of such violence,” I say.

Ellen and her guest stare at me for a confused moment until Ellen understands my reference.

“Yes, yes, thank goodness Hawthorne did not have to face his friend. It could have ended so badly.”

“But the story you hold would have been worth something if it had,” says the woman, whom I now wish to strike with the fan she has been waving all night.

“My apologies,” I say. “Please fill me in. We are so sheltered in Salem, the news of this averted duel has not fully reached us.”

The guest has apparently tired of me, thank heavens, and as she walks away, I draw Ellen into my grasp so she may not leave until the story is finished.

“Have you not heard of Hawthorne’s romance with society girl Mary Silsbee?” asks Ellen.

My sister Mary has joined us at the mention of Silsbee, and leans in to get a better listen. Mary once told me that Silsbee is the flightiest flit that ever existed in New England. Her father is vastly wealthy, and she was engaged to a gentleman for some time, but he broke it off. To think that a man with the intellectual depth and material poverty of Nathaniel Hawthorne would
be of any interest to Silsbee, or she to him, is both perplexing and troubling.

“It has been all the talk this season,” says Ellen, who must begin to realize that poor Salem girls are not frequent dinner guests, and are not privy to society gossip. She has the decency to look ashamed at her assumption. “At any rate, it is said that Silsbee made advances on Hawthorne’s friend John O’Sullivan, and when O’Sullivan rejected her, she told Nathaniel that his friend had attempted an impropriety. Hawthorne thought it his duty to defend her honor, and challenged O’Sullivan to a duel. Mercifully, O’Sullivan, being a good friend, counseled the duped writer that he had been tricked by the wily female. Hawthorne was humiliated, and it is rumored that Silsbee has gone back with her fiancé.”

I have so many thoughts about this that I do not know how to begin to decipher them. I am unable to speak, so Mary saves me by turning the conversation back to tomorrow’s promised poetry reading, and I am able to drift away from the women.

Dominating my emotions is a strange thrill. I did not know Hawthorne had such courage. It takes a man of great character and bravery to go against his docile nature for the protection of others, and I am certain that such violence is against Hawthorne’s nature.

While I do feel a hint of jealousy about this Silsbee, I somehow think that Nathaniel must have done such a deed out of duty, rather than love, and that he must have learned many great lessons from the experience. This must be why he wanted to make a journey alone. I am elated that while he escapes the
gossip, while he attempts to get to know himself again without outside influence, it is my journal he carries in his beautiful hands, and my words he reads before he closes his eyes at night. I am certain it is my phrases whispering in his ears, and my ideals permeating his dreams.

I have never been surer of anything in my life.

I
stand at the window, watching down the street with eager eyes for Nathaniel. I will know as soon as we meet if my conviction that I am his heart’s occupation is correct.

It is October, and will be the first time we lay eyes on each other in nearly three months, since his mysterious travels north. He sent a letter that he would return the
Cuba Journal
to me, and I replied eagerly, inviting him to come today. Mother moves between hanging laundry and caring for George and Father, who has now taken ill, and Mary is visiting Elizabeth in Boston, so Nathaniel and I will have privacy.

It is a fine autumn day, and I will suggest a walk outdoors. Since my return from the seaside, I have resolved to spend more hours at exercise than at rest, more time in the moving air of nature than in the still breath of illness and lethargy in this house. I have even maintained my refusal of morphine.
Mesmerism has helped my head, and I am nearly as strong as I was in my Cuba days.

I return my attention to Elizabeth’s letter, and feel strangely stirred by her latest recommendation that I complete an illustration for Nathaniel’s story “The Gentle Boy,” to be issued as a small book, financed by Miss Susan Burley, one of Salem’s most prominent arts patrons. I will need to draw swiftly, since a publication date has been agreed upon, and the engraver must have sufficient time to work. Elizabeth has enclosed the text for my perusal. I am lost in the reading of this simple yet sad tale, and just as it concludes, I am startled to hear Nathaniel’s voice behind me.

“Have you heard of the daguerreotype, Miss Peabody?”

I drop my papers, and in moments he is at my feet collecting them. He turns his face up to me, the autumn sunshine bathing his tanned, glowing skin. The impulse that passes between us is so strong that he closes his eyes. Yes! He has felt it. He kneels with one fist on the floor as if to gain his bearings and says, “It is an invention that presses your likeness into silver, by some magic. How I wish I had a daguerreotype of you standing in the light, my reading angel.”

He has called me his angel!

He pushes off the floor and stands to his full height, so I must look up at him. His gaze returns to the papers, where Elizabeth’s letter is now on top of the pile.

“I can see by the handwriting that this letter is from your eldest sister,” he says. “I know she must have asked you to illustrate my story for me, because it is I who suggested it to her.”

I flinch that he has seen her first, and the man not only sees my face, but answers my jealous thought as if I uttered it aloud.

“Elizabeth and I have only written to each other, dove. You are the first Peabody sister I have beheld since my travels.”

Dove.
I am assuaged.

“How did you get into my house without my admitting you?” I say, a cheeky lift in my voice.

“Your dear mother was in the backyard hanging sheets, and saw me coming. I took a new way to your house, hoping to surprise you. She was going to escort me to you, but your father called through the open window to her, and she left me to find you on my own.”

“And is it not heaven to stand here together in the light shafts without anyone between us to divert our attention?” I say.

I am aware that Elizabeth is still between us in the letter, and I pull the papers from his hands and drop them on the table. He swallows like one deprived of water for a long time.

“Come, Nathaniel. I want to walk out of doors with you and hear about your adventures.”

It is the first of many walks we take that fall. The first of many excursions in each other’s company to artistic salons. The first of many visits in which the shy writer becomes a fixture in our parlor. Sisters, brothers, parents, and friends flit in and out of our company, like birds dipping for drinks in a cool pond, but we exist more and more in a private oasis. I complete my illustration for his story, and he makes his first public recognition of our mutual affection in his eloquent dedication of the book to me.
Painters, patrons, and Nathaniel himself praise my illumination of his words through my art, and it seems to me the very symbol of what I prophesied years ago in my poem.

My unknown is now known.

On a December night, he sits in my parlor at the fireside, Christmas cranberries strung on the tree, flickering candles warming every corner of my home, ribbons and wreaths hung in abundance by the dear hands of students and neighborhood children. Nathaniel has presented me with a flower I gave him months ago, pressed into a brooch of crystal for me to wear over my heart. I gave him a volume of Wordsworth’s poetry. But my sweet, poor love has never had a piece of art from anyone, and it is all he longs for. Tonight I will draw him and put every drop of my feeling for him in it. I will give it to him as a taste of myself, which I also wish to give to him in body and soul.

“Do sit still,” I tease. “You attempt to distract me with your foxy glances and your fidgeting, but I will not be waylaid.”

“Did I ever tell you of the fox I met in the mountains of New Hampshire, on my solitary travels?” he says.

“No, and now is not the time. Whenever you speak of your wilderness adventure, you are overtaken by a need to pace, and I want you motionless.”

“Then I shall sleep like Van Winkle, and when you finish, you will not recognize me. I will be ancient and white haired, and a mere shadow of the strapping man I now am.”

My charcoal sculpts and shades the smoothness of his lower lip, and I am able to complete this drawing in a single sitting. I can see Nathaniel clearly with my artist’s eye, and I have no
reservation about giving this extension of myself to him, because I know that I have found the one who is meant for me. I use my finger to soften the shading on his lips and around his eyes, and pass the paper to him. He puts his hand over his heart.

“Your fingers flatter me. I know I am not this beautiful, but only become so in your gaze.”

“You are wrong. I see you as you are. And I will know your face at every coming age, and it will be familiar and welcome to me always.”

He turns at the seriousness in my voice, and stares into my eyes. Clear as if he has spoken aloud, I hear in my mind the words,
I love you, Sophia. Do you love me?

Yes!
I think.
I am yours.

And then the smile begins, the angelic transformation that lifts his entire face from his forehead to his full, soft lips, basking me in its glory.

January 1839

We are engaged. Secretly.

Once the kisses begin, we are intoxicated with each other. Separation is sweet frustration because it allows us the poetry of love letters and the joy of reunions, but the absences feel like small eternities. How I long to proclaim our love to the world, but Nathaniel is terrified that doing so will hurt Elizabeth, and shock his mother and sisters.

When Nathaniel’s father died, Nathaniel became the man in
the house at a young age. Provided for by uncles of varying sternness and indifference, Nathaniel enjoyed a unique closeness with the women of his family, though it was assumed rather than expressed. Ebe has an almost unnatural devotion to Nathaniel, and if he tells her he plans to marry and leave them forever, he is afraid of the great pain that will meet them all. In a way, he thinks it will be like his father leaving and dying all over again.

Then there is Nathaniel’s wish to earn a steady living to support me, and this has led to his acceptance of a job—with the assistance of my Elizabeth, who knows everyone—as Boston’s customs inspector. The salary is fifteen hundred dollars a year, so he will make no fortune, but he may count on the political appointment while the Democrats remain in power, and he will make a name and reputation for himself.

I scheme to get to Boston, where my two sisters and my love now reside, and it is not long before I am studying with the sculptor Shobal Clevenger. Though I will be under his tutelage for only a short time, every minute I am not sitting with the master, I will be with my other master, my love, my
husband
, for this is how we now refer to each other—husband and wife—though there has most certainly not been any communion of body to make it so. No, it is our complete mingling of spirit that has married us, with maybe just a bit of kissing and touching to quiet the fires.

Mother must sense my combustibility, because she cautions me by mail as much as she did while I resided in Cuba about how often I see Nathaniel, and how I must restrain my ebullience of feeling. She does not know that her request makes as much sense as asking the falls at Niagara to cease their gushing.