The House of Hawthorne (24 page)

“I have received a letter from Mr. Emerson with the most shocking news,” she says.

“What is it?” I ask, surprised that Elizabeth was able to hold back her gossip for an entire meal. Nathaniel continues to read his book. He knows Elizabeth always thinks her news is shocking, but rarely does it measure up to such a description.

“It is about Miss Fuller.”

That has Nathaniel’s attention. He closes his volume of Shakespeare and sits forward in his chair.

“Old Queen Margaret,” he says. “What muck has she got into now?”

“A scandal,” says Elizabeth. “She is living with a man in Italy, to whom she may or may not be married
. And they have a child
.”

I cover my mouth and Nathaniel draws in his breath.

“No,” I say.

“Yes.”

“But when? How?”

“I know nothing but what I have told you, but you may count on my trying to find out much more.”

We are all so agitated that for the rest of the evening, we are able to chatter about nothing else. We invite Louisa and Ebe into the parlor and share the gossip, which I fear will shock Louisa’s delicate self to fainting, but she is able to control herself.

“Imagine,” says Louisa. “The woman who so criticized you when you were expecting, having her own child. I wonder if she still attends to her art.”

I laugh at Louisa’s impertinence, and almost immediately feel guilty for talking about Margaret in such a fashion. For her to have conceived a child with a man, she must surely be in love, and love is what has always been sorely lacking in her life. While Ebe and Elizabeth discuss the probability of Margaret’s marrying this man, I turn my gaze on Nathaniel. He stares out the window, wearing a look of distaste, though I do not know whether that is because he is scandalized, or is as unsettled as I am about the whole business. In a moment, he turns and gives me a tight smile, but I cannot read his thoughts.

We are not able to speak of Margaret in the coming days as Elizabeth packs to leave us. The house is full of constant bustle, with friends visiting to pay their respects and offer comfort in our mourning, and Nathaniel retiring early and sleeping like the dead in his rehabilitation. On the day of Elizabeth’s departure, I give her my warmest embrace, and cannot help my tears.

“We would all have perished without you,” I say.

“How ridiculous,” she says. “You would have brought them through it, Sophy.”

“She would have, but we are grateful.” Nathaniel steps from the front door and reaches for her hand to kiss it. She glows from his attention, and leans in to give him a hug. I cannot help but smile to see the two of them together. Elizabeth has grown
portly, and her hair has turned almost completely gray. Nathaniel, however, looks unchanged from the days when we courted, aside from the lines that have settled around his eyes. It is amusing to imagine that if the two of them had joined, what a strange, mismatched pair they would now make.

The children tumble out of the house and give Aunt Lizzie kisses and waves as she climbs into the stagecoach bound for Boston. Nathaniel wraps his arm around my waist and we watch her until the carriage is out of sight.

Nathaniel has healed in body, but a persistent gloom surrounds him. He is frantic at the ledgers, trying to find ways to support his sisters and his own family, so that after weeks of watching him agonize I must break the promise I made to myself and confess my secret.

Since Nathaniel received his first pay from the custom house, I have been in charge of our finances, and unbeknownst to him, I have set aside a large sum of his every payment as savings in case of disaster. Now that his mother has gone and left his sisters in our charge, and her meager assets barely covered her funeral, I must tell my love that all will be well.

The night is gentle—the first we have had in many weeks that bears the suggestion of the autumn to come. Nathaniel writes of his mother’s death to friends near and far, and the light of the moon and the candle on his desk give him a celestial bearing. Even though the stoop in his shoulders reveals his burdens, he is ready with a smile when he sees me in the doorway.

“It is late,” I say. “Come lie in my arms.”

He rubs his eyes and runs his hands through his hair, making it wild. “As soon as this letter is concluded. I promise.”

I walk over to his desk. I have brushed my hair and plaited it for bed, and have already changed into my nightclothes and washed my face and neck with cool water. I place my hands on his shoulders and begin to knead away the tension that sets him like a Roman statue. He allows his head to fall back and sighs with pleasure as my hands creep down his back and around the front of his chest.

“I have something to tell you,” I whisper in his ear from behind him before giving his perfect lobe a nibble.

“If you tell me you are with child again, you might become a widow, for my heart cannot take it.”

I give him a pinch on his sides, and he flinches.

“No, not yet,” I say. “I hope you do not think me cruel for what I am about to reveal, but I promised myself I would not share it with you until we were desperate.”

“I can certainly attest to our desperation, but I fear what you might say.”

“There is nothing to fear,” I say. I slip the key from the ribbon on my wrist and lean down over him to open the door at the bottom of the desk. With a flourish, I slide it open and say, “Your treasure, my lord.”

The candlelight glints off the surfaces of the stacks of coins, and in seconds I am in his arms being swung around in a circle.

“Sophy! Did you pillage a ship of pirates at the dock?”

“Yes!”

“Stop teasing,” he says, placing me on the ground. “How did you come by this? Are you the girl from Una’s storybook who spins straw into gold?”

“It is but a portion of your earnings, saved each payday from the custom house. We have lived like misers, and this is the result.”

He makes an O with his mouth and walks over to the drawer.

“But how can that be? I barely made enough to keep us fed.”

“You barely made enough to keep us fed with the amount of income I allotted our household. This is our savings, and a little from my painted lamp shades.”

The man bursts into tears before me, and comes forward, pressing his lips to mine with the same urgency as when we courted. I respond eagerly, tugging at his shirt and feeling his body come alive in ways we have not experienced for months. I worry that his sisters will hear us, so I pull back and motion my head toward the stairs.

“Sophia, what would I do if you ever . . . How did I live before you?”

“God is with us,” I say. “And now you may do as you have always wanted, without the shackles of government employment or the directives of other men. You are free to write your novel.”

Spring 1850
Massachusetts

J
ust two weeks after its first printing of twenty-five hundred copies,
The Scarlet Letter
sells out, and soon becomes an international success.

Earning the praise of his contemporaries brings about a deep and quiet satisfaction to Nathaniel. Finally he can hold up his head in the company of men of worldly success and position—men like our brother-in-law, Horace Mann; Ralph Emerson; and Henry Longfellow. Though not rich, we can pay off our debts and assist Nathaniel’s sisters. Above all, Nathaniel is most grateful to have succeeded in scouring the tarnish from the surname his ancestors stained.

But his termination from the custom house and subsequent unemployment, his mother’s death, and our illnesses have all taken a toll. Nathaniel’s boyish cheekiness evaporates. His playful mischief is difficult to resurrect. His shoulders have lost their
angles and begin to stoop. The spell of enchantment that has so long preserved his youth now seems to evaporate.

I too feel like a wilting flower. Childbearing has spread and softened my body, and gray streaks begin to dull my auburn hair. I long to paint again, but between Nathaniel and the children, I am so blessedly, constantly
needed
that time itself slips through my fingers like water.

Shortly after Nathaniel’s mother’s death, Salem suffocates us. The memory of our last walk with Madame and the room of her death haunt us so that we cannot wake from the nightmare. While Louisa is a pleasure, Ebe’s darkness seems to encourage Nathaniel’s, and I want him away from her. We decide to go inland toward the mountains to rent a little house in Lenox, where Una and Julian may romp unhindered in grassy fields. Now that Nathaniel is well-known, he cannot walk down the streets of Salem without being forced to endure multiple conversations, and the post has begun to deliver the oddest and most unsettling confessions of all manner of adulterer and criminal. It seems that readers make assumptions about the authors of books full of strange secrets and confessions.

In the Berkshires we will drink of the fresh mountain air to purify our bodies of illness and our minds of fatigue. Nathaniel will not have to restrict his walks to the dead of night, because we will be more isolated, and here, undisturbed, he may begin his next novel.

Undisturbed.

It is a word worth pondering, for the very wish for it, the
definite utterance of it, leads to its elusiveness. It is a state we pursue in our daily lives—in our hourly lives with young children—lamenting that we cannot achieve it, but it is in these small lamentations that true blessing exists, for it means there are no great tragedies prowling at our doors and hearths.

I ponder this while attempting to unpack and organize our possessions in this little red house Nathaniel calls our Scarlet Letter, fend off Julian, who is hungry every moment of the day, and entertain Una, who is a monster when she cannot play out of doors. The rain has arrived in a great drenching deluge, and I hustle the children inside and help them change their soaked clothing, all the while watching out the back windows for my husband, who left on a solitary walk to Monument Mountain an hour ago. I peer over the luscious green grass, but the precipitation prevents me from seeing all the way to the lake and mountains, and I am startled when Nathaniel enters the house from the front walk instead of where I anticipated he would emerge in the back. He is as soaked as a river plant, and his hat wilts over his slick hair, which is plastered against his neck and face. His gaze is on the floor and he removes his hat with care and runs his hand through his hair, shaking off the water before looking up to meet my eyes. I see an unspeakable darkness that I know cannot come from the weather, and I am frightened.

“What is it, Nathaniel?”

His mouth opens to form a word, but he cannot find a way to start speaking. After a moment, he reaches inside his jacket to his breast pocket to extract a letter, and hands it to me before walking to the window and leaning on the sill with his back to
me. When I see Elizabeth’s script, my hands begin to tremble. I remove the paper and let the envelope drop to the floor. A newspaper clipping falls out, and Una snatches it up and walks toward the hallway to try to read what it says.

“Una, bring that back to me,” I say, scanning Elizabeth’s familiar handwriting.

A great loss . . . a terrible tragedy . . . who could have predicted or wished such an awful end to her . . . the poor child . . . may God have mercy on all their souls
.

Una lifts the paper to me and I see a headline that does not make immediate sense.

SHIPWRECK AT FIRE ISLAND, NEW YORK

I take the paper from her hands and scan the article, my eyes shifting from top to bottom in search of my connection to the wreckage, but I see nothing. Relieved that it is no one in my family, I start at the top of the paper again, and read with interest about the ship
Elizabeth
returning from Europe,
which ran aground in a terrible storm just before reaching the mainland. As the boat disintegrated, its passengers jumped overboard, and most of them perished, including those on the list of names printed below. The names mean nothing to me until I reach one.

MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI

I suck in my breath and stagger to the nearest chair. Julian and Una look up at me with wide eyes, and I attempt to control
my emotions, but I cannot help the tears that start as I reread Elizabeth’s letter.

Emerson had learned of the wreck and dispatched Henry and Ellery to join in the search and look for Margaret’s body, but they had no success. From the survivors, they learned that Margaret’s husband drowned and her son had gone overboard, so she refused to leave the ship even though certain death awaited her on its splintering planks. A sailor had attempted to save the boy, but both of them washed ashore with no life left in them. Margaret’s body had not been found.

It is too much to bear. I squeeze my fists to my eyes and take deep, labored breaths. I do not know how to reconcile my bitterness and anger for Margaret these years with my deep sadness at losing a woman whom both of us once loved. To think of watching her husband and child die, and choosing to die herself!

Nathaniel’s head is down and pressed to the window. His shoulders rise and fall. Julian has stuck his thumb in his mouth, but Una comes to me and places her hand on my arm.

“Do not cry, Mama,” she says. “Whoever has died has gone to God.”