The House of Hawthorne (8 page)

Autumn 1837
Salem, Massachusetts

A
s night falls, I am just about to close a volume of Keats’s “Endymion,” a noble and evocative poem of a moon goddess in love with a mortal man who journeys through worlds and underworlds in search of love, only to end up back with her. I am hoping the lovers will step from the pages of the book and into my dreams, when I feel Elizabeth’s heavy step as she lumbers up the stairs. She thrusts my door open and lets it hit the wall. I flinch and grasp my head.

“Must you make so much noise?” I groan from the hammock I have had Father suspend from the ceiling. As silly as the contraption looks in our Salem home, I could not sleep any other way after Cuba. My head pains continue to plague me, and since my youngest brother, Wellington, has died of yellow fever, I find it hard to go through the motions of living, and spend many hours in this hammock.

“Hush, hush,” she says, breathless with excitement, her face glowing like a happy specter from the candle she carries. “You must come downstairs.”

“Why?”

“Because a man who makes Lord Byron look plain as paste sits in our parlor, flanked by his two dour sisters.”

Elizabeth has a tendency to exaggerate when her intellect is aroused. I am doubtful.

“It is the reclusive writer,” she continues. “The mysterious one who penned those intensely fascinating
Twice-Told Tales
. You know, the book he was kind enough to inscribe to me after I wrote a letter to him praising his fresh talent?”

My memory is stirred, but my attention is not engaged. If I were to meet every man of learning Elizabeth wrote to in praise and invited to our parlor, I would never cease climbing up and down the stairs. Wordsworth, Emerson, Channing, Alcott—Elizabeth’s adoration of these men borders on idolatry, though when she finds out they are just men, she is always disappointed. I suppose she needs a replacement for Alcott, now that they have had a falling-out.

“He would be very intrigued by you, Sophy,” she continues. “He would see you as a kindred soul, an artist of high sensitivity who must withdraw from society.”

Elizabeth’s flattery piques my interest, but for practical reasons I cannot meet this so-called “kindred soul,” for I am already in my sleeping gown, and my hair is unpinned. I am stabbed with a sudden remembrance of Don Fernando outside my
doorway at La Recompensa before our morning ride, and I fall back in my hammock and insist that Elizabeth leave me in peace.

“Give him my apologies and promises of a future liaison,” I say, “but I am not fit for visitors tonight.”

Elizabeth stares at me for a moment before nodding in agreement, and taking care to close the door before returning to Lord Byron’s handsomer peer.

I blow out my candle and attempt to sleep, but there is no ignoring the low timbre of the man’s voice just below me, climbing the staircase and reaching around the door into my room. When sleep finally finds me, his voice is my escort in my dreams, and I think it is the very voice of Endymion himself. It is as if not five minutes passes when I awaken, and feel a longing to meet this writer. I alight from my hammock so swiftly I see stars, and hurry to the top of the stairs, where I listen for his voice. All that meets me is the silence of a slumbering house.

Since returning from Cuba two years ago, I have the disembodied sensation of having left my soul in a foreign land, and I fear she will never again find me.

I lift my pencils and brushes a dozen times a day, but I am soon trembling so that I cannot make a straight line, let alone an original piece inspired by a place I am trying to forget. I have cried many tears over Don Fernando and the wretched state of the slaves in Cuba, and as much as I try to outrun my memories, my letters—bound and published by Elizabeth as the
Cuba Journal
—
have been read so widely that I must recount the scenes over and over again. I attempt to steer the conversation to the foliage, the mountains, the magical aroma of the blooms, and the moonlit horseback rides, but people want to hear of only two topics: slavery and romance.

In addition to that frustration, Wellington’s loss to our family, particularly to Mother, has darkened our spirits. My youngest brother was my little pet. It is true that he struggled to find discipline, but just as he discovered his calling—working like Father in medicine—his life was stolen from him. The yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans needed physicians, and Wellington felt called to study there and minister to patients. My brother George had visited him, and wrote that Welly worked tirelessly with the sick, thinking he was somehow immune because of his certainty that he had realized his vocation, and the many patients he had seen back to health. George wrote that it appeared an autopsy Welly had performed led to his infection. Four days after he stuck his gloveless hands in an infected corpse, Wellington was dead.

George—my fellow invalid—calls to me from across the hall, as I am about to make a rare descent to sit at the breakfast table. I am feeling well this morning, even after such a poor sleep, and want to give Mother the comfort of the company of her healthy, living children. Before I join her downstairs, I stop at George’s room and lean in the doorway. I force a smile, but it is difficult to look at my ailing brother. George is just twenty-four and the most promising of my three younger brothers, but fate has played a cruel joke on him by inflicting him with tuberculosis of the spine.
This once strapping lad is now pale and gaunt, and is recently confined to his bed because his legs no longer support him. He bears his pain like a saint, and almost never complains. I could learn a lesson or two from him.

“Have you increased your morphine, my dear?” I ask as he winces from a cough, and attempts to adjust his large frame in the small waterbed my father had made to prevent sores.

I cross the room and sit on the chair next to him, sliding my arms under his back and helping him shift onto his side. He tries to turn his head away when he coughs, but he is too weak, and I am hit with the wind of his wet, rancid breath. I draw back, and he apologizes as soon as the coughing ceases.

“Do not worry,” I say, pushing his thick, dark hair off his clammy forehead. “At least the air came from your upper region instead of your lower.”

He starts to laugh at my vulgarity, and begins another fit. This time I am able to reach under him and fluff his pillow so he is more elevated, which seems to bring him some ease.

The morphine drops lie on his bedside table. I know he is trying to make Father’s prescriptions for him last, but he is rationing too meagerly and not getting the full relief that is at his fingertips. I lift the bottle and shiver at my wish to ingest it, but I have had my daily dose, and force myself to pour his. I assist George in drinking from a spoon until it is empty, and the effect comes quickly. I feel my own shoulders relax as I witness his visible relief.

“Thank you, Sophy,” he whispers, and closes his eyes. He is soon breathing deeply and regularly, but I am unable to tear myself away.

Another brother will soon be gone. I will have no fellow invalid with whom to yell jokes back and forth across the hallway, no one sicker than me, no man in my life to tease and converse with me. My sisters are so concerned with shaping and educating me that our relationship is often tedious. My other brother, Nat, is preoccupied with his new wife and young babe, as he should be, and has little to do with me. Father cares for me in his strange, quiet way when he is home, but must work as much as possible. George is my small island of love. I do not want to start mourning him before he is gone, but I cannot help it.

I stare at him a moment longer before I am impelled to step into my room for my sketch pad. I wipe my tears with the back of my arm, and once again sit in the chair next to George. Without a thought or prayer, I begin to move my pencil across the paper, and soon, for the first time in months, I have completed a portrait. I look from it to him and know I will use this to create a model—a bas-relief—of my brother that we may have to look on even after he has left us.

Here is a man who is truly ill—a young man who will predecease his parents and siblings. While he lies dying of tuberculosis, I recline in my hammock, acting as if I will die from aches in the head. My shame burns until I can no longer bear to reflect upon it, and I leave George’s bedside.

F
ather and I sit next to each other at the table in my room, our heads bathed in candlelight, bent over my illustrations of Cuban flora. He thinks I should try my hand at medical illustration, but the mere thought of such technical work and constant deadlines makes my head ache. I push my knuckles into my temples, and he looks at me with a frown.

“Have you had your doses today?” he asks.

I am confident he has not inventoried his morphine supply, and I wish to lie so I may get more. Father may be intelligent enough to be a doctor, but his incompetence with numbers is the cause of our poverty. I cannot hate him for it, though. He allows his wife and daughters freedoms of education and employment other men would not tolerate, either because he supports it or is too tired to argue it, and he is ever at work, attempting to seek a cure for my condition. My thoughts linger in the fantasy of a
morphine haze, but I banish them. If I consume more, George will have less.

I nod my head to indicate that my allowance has been met, and the candle nearest the book blows out from my sigh.

“Curculios,” I say, relighting it and turning pages until I find my beetle sketch. “Cuban fireflies. They light up the night as strong as any candle, and are kept in little carved gourds. Enchanting, really.”

“Such an exotic garden of strangeness,” he says. “Were the beetles poisonous? Any of the flowers? Was there anything that could have been used to help in your cure if the doctor had not been so consumed by his own ailments of body and situation?”

Before I can reply, Elizabeth enters the room.

“Pardon my interruption,” she says, “but I wish you both would come into the parlor. Mother is looking after George, and Mary is at a dinner, and I need assistance.”

“Why?” says Father. He has a low tolerance for being directed by my sister.

Elizabeth steps forward and closes the door until it is almost shut. “Because Mr. Hawthorne and his sisters are downstairs, and drawing conversation from them is like dropping a bucket in a well of unfathomable depths, and only getting little splashes of water.”

“I do not believe you have ever been at a loss for words,” I say.

My father exhales a small laugh.

Elizabeth narrows her eyes. “No need for cheekiness, Sophy. I really do need your help. The sisters are as bad as, if not worse than, the awkward brother between them. They clutch his arms for dear life, as if they fear they will drown without hanging on. I can see him physically working up the courage to utter his
thoughts, but I do not think he has the capacity for small talk. All I have been able to extract thus far is a short speech about how hard it is to really peer beneath the veil of the soul of one’s acquaintances to understand their true motives.”

What a thing to say. I wonder if he has read Shelley, who also reflects on the veil of the soul. For a moment, I consider going down with Elizabeth.

“I thought he might be questioning my motives in inviting him,” she continues, “but when I began to stammer about how I admire his work, and that I only ask him over to further understand his process, he became very red in the face and worried that he had insulted me. I assured him he did not, but it would be nice to have another soul to assist me in conversation.”

I feel for Elizabeth, but not enough to disturb myself. The invisible vise that plagues my brain is beginning to tighten.

“Why do you continue to invite him?” says Father.

“Because I admire him.”

“She loves him,” I say.

“Enough impertinence,” says Elizabeth. “I do not love him—though he is a fascinating man.”

“And by fascinating you mean handsomer than Byron,” I say. “Good looks make up for many deficits.”

“His looks have no bearing on the potential I see in him as a writer, and how I might further his career and reputation through publication and review.”

“Your motives sound very pure,” says Father, standing and giving me a pat on the hand. “I will assist you only until I feel uncomfortable, which will no doubt be very soon, and then you
must alone deal with the consequences of continuously inviting a man to our parlor who is so ill at ease in his own comely skin.”

“Thank you,” says Elizabeth, hurrying him out of the room without giving me a backward glance.

I stand and creep to the doorway, where I hear Father say, “Here is the writer of whom my daughter speaks so highly,” followed by an incoherent mumbling that must emanate from the writer himself. My curiosity is piqued, but not enough to lure me downstairs. Perhaps I will venture into the parlor on Mr. Hawthorne’s next visit, which will no doubt occur very soon.

Elizabeth can scarcely go two sentences without mentioning Hawthorne’s latest story, the review she printed for him, the way she will help him publish future works. She is forever putting his writings in my hands, and I can see why. Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales
has an appeal that I have not found in the work of his contemporaries. He is able to capture some sacred truth about solitude and how it corrupts, though it is inescapable and even desirable. His musings on generational sin are also intriguing, and his strength lies in his pathos.

As an influential and respected publisher and academic, Elizabeth has many friends in many circles, and when she believes in a person, she will elevate him to the highest earthly stature. Her loyalty is admirable, and in this case warranted, though I fear for her disappointment. Mary has told me that Hawthorne has not yet gotten over his former love, a society girl and senator’s daughter named Mary Silsbee.

Throughout the winter, I continue to work on the bas-relief of George that he claims is far too handsome to represent him, and which brings much delight to my family, but I still have the feeling of being spiritless. Elizabeth has negotiated the sale of a copy I made of Allston’s painting of
Jessica and Lorenzo
for a sum of one hundred twenty-five dollars, which releases me of all guilt for not teaching in my family’s schools to earn my keep, but which burdens me with a certain level of recognition among Salem’s cognoscenti, who press me to create more. My artistic soul feels that burden acutely, and recoils.

The calendar arrival of spring has not yet displaced winter, and as I sit at my window watching the stubborn piles of snow melt in the first pulse of vernal light, and the cardinals leaping through bare branches, I pray that I may awaken with the season of renewal. How I long to feel the rapture again. How I ache to feel the euphoria from nature permeate my soul. Will I ever again emerge from this wasteland?

My musings are interrupted when I behold a dark figure against the white. He is tall, and his top hat makes him seem more so. He walks with a strange, hesitant gait, almost as if he must coerce his feet to do his bidding. An impressive black cloak moves around him, and he looks like he would be more at home in the night than in the brightness of day. When he draws near the house, he pauses and looks up at my window, the light illuminating his pale face and chestnut hair that is long on his collar.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

His eyes meet mine and hold my gaze for what must be only seconds, but when I draw back from the window and note the
heat on my brow, it is as if I have been sitting at a fireside for many hours. I drop onto my sewing chair and glance around the room, my little sanctuary. My paints rest gaily on the easel; my artwork leans against walls and furniture; my books lie atop one another on desktops and bureaus. My eyes find a paper sticking out from the volume of Shelley I had been reading, and I reach for it. I know this paper—it is my poem “To the Unknown Yet Known.” A voice in my head tells me that my soul knew something that I did not when I wrote of my love, a man of letters I conjured, the shadowy figure of an artist, the only man who would do for a fellow creative like me.

I hear the front door open downstairs, and Elizabeth’s enthusiastic greeting of Hawthorne, and in spite of the dread I feel about leaving my room, in spite of what I suspect of my sister’s feelings for the writer, I cannot dress quickly enough.

I wait on the staircase for many minutes, listening for his deep voice, his bashful laugh. I clutch the banister and talk myself into and out of entering the parlor a half dozen times. My white dress looked so bright and pleasant in my room, but now it seems too plain. Since leaving Cuba, my brown hair has lost some of its auburn tint. It is more becoming worn down, where one may still see hints of the redness, but it would not be proper to appear in such relaxed arrangement, so I have pinned it up and away from my face. But is my skin too sallow after a long winter spent indoors? I pinch my cheeks and bite my lips, willing color into my face, when I hear him speak.

“Oh, no, I have burned it all.”

Elizabeth gasps.

“Truly,” he continues. “I cannot bear anyone to read my past work. I have even tried to find and destroy as many copies as I can of my first novel,
Fanshawe
. It embarrasses me.”

“Shame on you,” says Elizabeth. “When future scholars want to see the progression of your style, they will have no juvenilia to aid their understanding. The maturation of the artist as writer is its own story. Would you deprive posterity?”

Again I hear his low laugh. He is modest—a rare trait in a man of letters.

“You flatter me, Miss Peabody. I am quite sure no future scholar will ever seek me. If she did, all she would find is a cheerless room atop my mother’s house, where I sat at a stiff desk burning my inadequate word creations.”

I can bear it no longer, and force one foot at a time down the staircase and into the room.

He sits on the sofa while Elizabeth stands at the fireplace. When I enter, Hawthorne’s eyes meet mine, and he rises. By the holy angels, I feel my soul at once aflame and reaching through my breast toward him. I falter, and he is at my arm, leading me to the sofa. I try to ignore the heat—the fire of our first joining—and lean back once I am seated. I tear my eyes from his to look at Elizabeth, and I see a pain in her face that makes me wish I had stayed in my room. She has no color, and her brow is furrowed. For once it would seem that she is at a loss for words. Hawthorne, however, is animated.

“You must be Sophia,” he says.

I gaze at Elizabeth a moment longer, and then turn back to him.

It is hard to find my breath. He stares so intensely from his dark hazel eyes under his dark brow, beneath his dark brown hair. Everything about him is dark, but not dismally so—deeply so, like the most priceless gem. I slide away from him a bit and I am happy to hear my own voice reply in the affirmative.

“Elizabeth has told me so much about you—your art. Your visceral response to creation. Your need for solitude.”

“I do need it,” I say. “Solitude.”

Oh, how stupid I sound!

He does not appear to have noticed.

“Do you find that even when you are in the company of others,” he says, “even in crowded rooms, you exist separately? And no matter how you try to join in, you are aware that you never will belong?”

“I am sure Sophia does not feel such a way,” says Elizabeth. “She is quite gay in company, but wears herself out with her extreme sociability.”