The House of Hawthorne (13 page)

It is then that I recall the portrait of Mary Magdalene in Cuba, her face conveying a heartfelt prayer. That is how Margaret appears.

T
he air has changed in Salem. I sense it the moment I enter the house.

No one greets me when I arrive. I set down my travel bags, remove my gloves and bonnet, and unfasten and hang my cloak. When I call out, there is no reply, and my solitary voice scatters. I glance out the windows to my left and see the cemetery, where a rectangle of soil announces a newly covered grave. I rub the chill on my arms and note that there are no fires burning in the grates, no pupils or visitors, and there cannot have been for some time, based on the accumulation of dust and dirty bowls and cups that litter the rooms.

I am struck with a horrible thought that George has died and word did not reach me, and I run in a sudden burst up the staircase, trying to keep my breath. As I turn the corner into my brother’s room, I startle Mother, who cries out, but George does
not stir. My George is not dead but he is barely alive. His face is gray and shiny with perspiration, his body is a mere skeleton draped in wasted skin, and he gasps with a wet, ragged sound as he tries to breathe. Mother rushes to embrace me, and I stare over her shoulder at George. His eyes flicker open and catch mine. They are hard and glassy, but burn with intensity. He lifts his hand and motions at Mother and out the door, and then closes his eyes.

“I am here, Mother,” I say. “You must rest. Let me sit with George.”

“No, no, I cannot leave little you to this task.”

I stand straight and look into her eyes, which are nearly level with mine. “I have never been stronger. Please allow yourself a break.”

Mother pulls away and looks back at George. “I suppose I should sleep so I can sit with him this night.”

“I shall sit with him. You must rest.”

Mother nods her weary head. She goes to George and kisses his forehead, and then leaves the room.

George opens his eyes, and I join him at the bedside in a cushioned chair draped in a sheet, where Mother must have been sleeping these past nights.

“Thank you,” he wheezes. “She is so good, but so . . . suffocating. As you well know.”

He attempts a smile, but commences with a terrible coughing fit that leaves his lips blue. He is a drowning man. I cannot hold back my tears; nor does he.

“Not long now,” he says.

I mark the time that evening by the changing shadows on the wall. Father comes in to administer morphine but does not leave any with me. Mother visits before an early bedtime. Mary is home, and takes a shift while I eat a little bread and butter and prepare for bed, and when I return in my white nightgown, we compose a letter beseeching Elizabeth to join us in our vigil.

I am careful when I climb into bed with George. I do not want him to be afraid or alone for one moment while he waits for that dark angel to escort him to eternity. While George sleeps, I am aware of a shadow lurking, but I do not fear it, and I understand that it is Nathaniel I sense like some sort of hovering ghost.

Moonlight has turned my brother’s flesh to stone, and I think of the sculpture I will complete of George that will not be half as beautiful as he is, but which will remind us of him when he no longer breathes the air that we do.

Sleep is beginning to press into me when George’s small voice reaches in and pulls me back into consciousness.

“Sophy.”

“Yes.”

“I am afraid to die.” He almost chokes on the words.

I rise on my arm and stroke his hair. “You have nothing to fear. You have a noble soul, and you will be welcome in heaven.”

“But have I done enough?”

“You have not been given the blessing of an abundance of years, but you spent them well. You are good and kind, and those who know you, love you.”

“Is that enough? I look at you, overflowing with love, revealing the beauty in the world through your art, ministering to
others in spite of your own infirmities—that is a life well lived. What have I really done?”

“You have traveled the world.”

“For my health,” he says. “And great good that has done.”

“You have held a good job in a Boston firm.”

“As a clerk. I could not feed anyone on that salary.”

“We exist in difficult economic times,” I say. “You have housed our Mary.”

“I needed her teaching wages to make rent.”

“My dear brother, I will have far more air than you this night and will answer all of your lamentations with effusions, so you had best save your breath. I adore you and I know with every impulse in my soul that God will bring you, His beloved son, home to rest in a heavenly kingdom, without pain or cares or woes. And when I join you in the final crossing, you will tell me how right I was.”

He smiles a bit, and seems more settled, though my words are braver than I feel. “Distract me,” he says, after another coughing fit.

I am so tired, I cannot understand how he continues to speak after such a dose of morphine, but I wonder if he is experiencing a last surge of energy before he dies.

“What subjects would you like spoken of?” I say.

“Love. Tell me more of this Hawthorne. When will you marry him?”

I wait a long moment before responding. If Mother hears this, it will add to her burdens. When I am convinced the house slumbers around us, I indulge George.

“He wants to make sure he can support me first before we establish our house.”

“A good thing,” says George.

“I do not know,” I say. “He is an artist, a writer. I do not know if he will ever achieve the affluence he desires to keep me, but when I try to assure him I am used to poverty and that God will provide, perhaps even through my art, he will not hear it. He wants his dove, as he calls me, to live in perfect rest for my health, and perfect ease to paint whenever my soul wishes, never out of necessity.”

“An unusual man,” says George. “You are lucky.”

“I know it. I feel that we were created for each other.”

“Then you were.”

“We met a man at a salon the other night—Mr. George Ripley. He spoke of forming a utopian agricultural society, a perfect community. Nathaniel is interested in taking part, and inviting me to join him as his wife once the village is thriving.”

“How charming.”

“I know. And we will live nestled in the hills of Massachusetts in perfect marital bliss.”

The fit of coughing that follows scares the conversation from the room, and shortly afterward, my brother has exhausted himself enough to sleep. Now I lie wide-awake, and it is again as if Nathaniel is with me, his voice calling to me on the wind. How I long for the first night when we might share a nuptial bed, in the embrace of Utopia, at the beginning of our artist’s partnership. But I recall George Ripley’s mention that Margaret Fuller might join his community. In the dark of night, I meet this remembrance with dread. Nathaniel became uncharacteristically open during Margaret’s talk. There is something about her that
engages his intelligence, and he seemed to connect to her in a way I thought he could only with me.

While the world sleeps, these thoughts distort my calm, and I spend the rest of the small hours of morning in nightmarish realms, haunted by my fear of Margaret’s influence on Nathaniel, and by the gasps of my dying brother.

George’s is a hard death.

In the ensuing days, Mother is so pained over his suffering that she cannot be with him. Mercifully, Elizabeth comes and gives the rest of us the steadiness and strength to keep vigil. I find a strange energy overtake me in his final hours—one that allows me to ignore sleep and hunger, and attend to the failing man before me.

On November 13, 1839, as the autumn wind pulls the last brown leaf from the tree outside George’s window, death takes George as well. It is the only moment of peace in his final days of suffering. A shaft of light pours forth from between the clouds and illuminates his face, drawing his eyes open for the last time. His countenance, which was so sunken and wasted and gray, suddenly seems to have a small life left in it, and his coughing ceases. I watch him breathe his last breaths, smaller and smaller, until his soul leaves his body. His eyes remain open, and a peaceful look settles over him. This is what we are able to show our mother.

Nathaniel writes sweetly to me, consoling words that are second-best to his embrace, which I long for as never before. I feel a renewed urgency to join him in matrimony.

After George’s funeral, I sit at my window, and feel that our lives on this earth are but a blink in God’s eye. God gave Nathaniel to me, and me to him, and we cannot waste another moment separated from each other.

I will return to Boston. I will tell Nathaniel that, no matter what, we must tell our families of our engagement, marry, and begin our lives together. I know he will be of a similar mind.

“D
ove, I know you long to speed time—I do too—but we must not act in haste. There are practical matters that one so celestial as you need not concern herself with, but that must be the business of one as earthly as I. Please do not fret, my darling. We will tell my mother and sisters soon, and the day will come for our marriage, and this entire prolonged courtship will become the smallest trial faced before a lifetime of companionship. . . .”

I crumple the letter and throw it across the room. He moves like one stuck in tar pits and I long to drag him out by the collar. I am nearly thirty years old! He is thirty-five! At this age, most women have died from having their fourth child, and most men are widowers, and yet we are virgins!

I direct my frustration into my art and create like one possessed. If I could sustain this energy, I might even be able to support us. I have suggested as much, but Nathaniel knows how
the process of creation often leaves me ill, and he does not want to rely upon my talents or to tax me in any way. I cannot argue with him, because I do not trust my head to cooperate, which vexes me nearly as much as his reticence.

The bas-relief of George is complete, and I send two paintings as gifts to Nathaniel. I wish I could deliver them to his apartment myself, but with their bulky frames, I could not carry one, let alone two. When the paintings arrive, Nathaniel writes of how I have captured the very essence and moment of our souls’ joining, and of his wish that no one but him ever look on them because of their intimacy. He has hung black curtains to protect them from the city’s soot and visitors’ eyes, but draws back the curtains to behold them each morning and night. He beseeches me to mingle in his dreams so I may be with him while he sleeps.

How I long to make this vision a reality!

The months pass with shocking swiftness, and I am increasingly agitated that Nathaniel seems content to correspond with me and dip into our home for short visits, only to leave me again and again.

“Why can you not visit with me as often as you do your mother and sisters?” I say.

“I do not visit them more, Sophia, but I must see them. I am so divided.”

“Then marry me now so we can be together most, and you can go to them when you must, and there will be no more division of spirit.”

“I cannot even bear to hold your letters in my filthy hands after working all day at the custom house,” says Nathaniel. “I
scrub them clean before handling the paper your pure fingers have touched. I cannot imagine coming home to you so sooty.”

“Do not be ridiculous. I would take you any way I could have you. If we were told that we could no longer bathe in the water of Massachusetts, I would have you dirty and stinking, and would be happy to do so.”

“What a horrid image.”

I groan and begin to argue again when he lays his fingers over my lips. I move his hand aside to speak, and he stops the words by placing his mouth on mine, and delivering the most luscious, distracting kiss. When he pulls away, he is serious and his voice is quiet.

“I implore you not to say things that bring darkness between us.”

“It is difficult for one like me, so open in my thoughts and words, to suppress anything, especially as it relates to you.”

“I do not wish to stifle you,” he says. “I only ask that you try to understand me more thoroughly before arguing. There are things I know I must do, without always comprehending why—unspoken impulses that must be obeyed. When you ask me why I must visit here or there, or why my face is shadowed, it taxes me, because there is much about my own nature that I dare not probe.”

“I never wish to upset you,” I say. “I know that you hold yourself back from embracing life’s gifts, and to your detriment. How often do you say I interpret the world for you? I know that our marriage will make you happier and more satisfied. That is why I urge so much.”

“I know, my dove.”

He kisses me again and leaves, and we make no forward progress.

By the summer, I am frantic. I pace about the parlor with another letter from Nathaniel praising my celestial nature and how my love makes him more worthy of life than he ever could be alone, while all I want to do is strike him with an open palm. Perhaps that would make him awaken from his dreamy musings and see that his angel is a woman of flesh and blood who would like nothing more than to commingle with her utmost passion.

“You wear out the floorboards,” says Mary, not looking up from her scribblings.

“I find his complacence baffling. When he is with me, he speaks of his heartiest wish for our marriage. By letter he invokes it. He frets over our separations and how intolerable the gray days are without his dearest dove by his side, and yet he does nothing to hasten the union.”

“You know how he wishes for financial security. You cannot rush that.”

“What is security? There is no such thing. The only certainly is death and its swift and frequent appearance in our lives. Why not make as much heaven on earth together as we can?”

I am aware that I am speaking to a woman who has waited almost a decade for her love—a man with far more financial stability than mine—and would wait until the end of time. I will find no sympathy from Mary.

I attempt to distract myself in other ways, and find the most heavenly respite in a stay with the Emersons in Concord. Being in the company of Waldo and Lidian, who are so like me in our
love of nature, is a joy. I spend hours walking the banks of Walden Pond, visiting friends, wading through the benevolent meadows, and hiking the hills of Sleepy Hollow. When my wanderings take me to the banks of the Concord River, I am entranced by its deep stillness. It is as if nature is trying to reassure me. I reflect on the perfection of its seasons, and remind myself to have hope that time will unite Nathaniel and me at the correct moment.

On the hill behind me is a charming dwelling. I believe it belongs to Emerson’s relation, and I think how lucky its inhabitant is to live here by the river, surrounded by fields and orchards, and such a short walk from the village, and the Emersons, and Walden Pond. I would like to live in a house like it with Nathaniel someday.

A movement on the hill draws my attention. At first, I think the young woman I see is an apparition, and then I fear she is the beggar girl, until I realize it is only a farm woman. I watch her walk with her head bent, her severe hair pulled into what must be a painful bun at the nape of her neck, her gown so thin, worn, and stretched it must have belonged to ten larger people than she before coming to hang on her gaunt frame. In spite of the verdant summer surroundings, she is a portent of winter and darkness, and I feel a longing to make her lift her eyes to the beauty of the earth. But I am mute. I fear I would frighten her if I disturbed her deep thought, and before long she is gone from my view, leaving only a chilly wind in her wake.