The House of Hawthorne (37 page)

“I know,” I say.

I do know. I know that Lidian will mourn Henry at least as hard as she would if her own husband were under this mound of
earth. She loved Henry, and he loved her, and Henry’s friendship with Emerson suffered these past years because of it, and because Emerson became so much a man of the world while Henry burrowed deeper into its soil.

“I was the reason he left Walden Pond,” says Lidian. “I needed him while Waldo toured with his lectures. Henry was my dearest companion.”

I lift my handkerchief to her eyes and dab the left and the right.

“Everything he did was an offering. Everything a gift,” she says. “If he planted a row of beans in your yard, it was to feed you, and so you did not have to soil your hands. If he filled your lamp with oil, he did it so it would be full in case you wanted to read all the night through without stopping. If he embraced you, he held on longer than anyone else, so a full communion of soul and warmth could encircle the two of you, and you would remember exactly why you embraced in the first place.”

How tragic that Lidian must confess these whispers in a mourner’s ear instead of proclaiming them at a podium. I again gaze upon my husband before raising my eyes in gratitude to the heavens. How cold and empty my life would have been without my companion.

“For a man so at home with nature and so often separate from mortals,” I say, “your friendship with Henry was the greatest gift of his short life. Love is what allows the giver to make a treasure of every small offering.”

I wrap my arms around Lidian and allow her to cry. Emerson notices us, but looks away, as if he cannot bear to see his wife’s grief over his friend.

That night I help Nathaniel into his sleeping gown. His stomach hurts him so that it is difficult to stretch his arms up high, but I do not mind caring for him so closely. He is ashamed at his lack of strength, and apologizes as I tuck the covers up under his chin.

“I wish the ground had accepted me today, instead of Henry,” he says.

“Oh, please do not speak such things aloud.”

“But I do. Life is more hard than easy, and I am tiring. I envy Henry, now embarking upon the good sailing, as he said.”

“Are you trying to break my heart,” I say, “or do you feel this with such conviction that you cannot help but utter it aloud?”

“The latter,” he says. “But I will stop if it distresses you.”

I blow out the lantern and crawl into bed with him, scooting closer as he tucks his old legs and body behind my own.

“I cannot mourn a man like Henry too greatly,” I say. “I feel that one so in tune with nature’s spirit will slip easily into Elysium. But I will grieve for Lidian. I think Henry might have occupied as much a space in her heart as her husband.”

“Perhaps more,” says Nathaniel.

I pull his arm tighter around my body, and have trouble sleeping that night, knowing how cold Lidian must be in her bed.

Spring 1864
Massachusetts

I
am seized with panic as our carriage enters Boston and turns down Charles Street, where Franklin Pierce comes into view.

Nathaniel and I have not said enough. I do not know what secret he holds. He promised we will be together when he dies!

“My love,” I say, clutching the lapels of his jacket.

The words back up in my throat and choke me. There is so much to say and no time left to say it.

“Sophy.”

Now he cries, and I know this will be our final parting.

No, no!

“Please,” is all I can utter, and I know from a lifetime of his insistence on silence, of his hatred of words and their inadequacy, that he will not have any parting comfort for me.

There is nowhere Nathaniel Hawthorne should die except wrapped in my arms. I say this to him with my mind, and I know
he receives my thoughts, because he shakes his head and looks down at his lap.

He must look at me. We cannot waste one minute!

Franklin is at the side of the carriage opening the door, and I grab it from his hands and pull it shut. He is shocked and I do not care.

I push my face into Nathaniel’s breast and sob.

Oh, God, do not let this be the last time I hold him. Please.

He trembles and cries with me, and holds me in his feeble arms. His white hair tickles my face, and I inhale his sweet, clean scent laced with traces of an old cigar and the breath of the pine trees at the Wayside. I try to content myself with his embrace and accept all of the love he has for me, which has been so abundant, so perfect, even—as I have told him—when it was not perfect.

Our love is a work of art. It is the great masterpiece of my life because it has been rendered over decades. It has been made of blood and tears and love and laughter and despair, and a million tiny moments that in isolation seemed small, but as part of this vast canvas convey a depth of feeling as has never been seen before and might never be seen again.

I feel his words before I hear them, and I am so startled he speaks aloud that I pull away to see that I am not deceived.

“I have been seeking myself and my place in distant lands for so many years,” he says, “when all I had to do was look at the horizon of your mouth, your eyes. I am home and I have always been since I have had you.”

The words are cool water on my heated skin—an anointing. Worth waiting a lifetime to hear.

“Then come back with me,” I say. “Do not leave.”

“I must go. I feel . . . called.”

“Then promise me you will come to me when this journey is over, and never again leave.”

He looks out the window. Franklin has turned away with his hands behind his back. I feel affection for him for doing so, though I am jealous that he will escort my husband on this trip.

“Do you not know that I am always with you,” says Nathaniel. “Even when my body is not. Our spheres are always in communion with each other, and will be until the last sunset.”

I do know this. I will remind myself every day.

“Do you remember the first time we met?” he says. “When you came into the room in your white clothes, descended from your invalid artist’s loft? You joined me, a mortal, from your heavenly spire. Do you know that was not the first time I saw you? The first time, you sat in a window holding a sketch pad. The window framed you like a picture, and I thought how like a work of art you were, and how I would never have something so perfect.”

He touches my gray, coarse hair and runs his hand down my plump, lined cheek, wiping my tears with the backs of his fingers.

“You are still a work of art, my dove.”

I take his face in my hands and kiss him, relishing the tickle of his mustache and the softness of his lips. We embrace again, our perfect love sitting like a warm weight between our hearts.

After a few moments, Franklin has turned back and sees us pull apart. He opens the door to help us out and says some kind words to me, but I only nod my head. I cannot speak. They start
away, but Nathaniel turns back to me, weeping, and with considerable effort he kneels before me.

“If you ever want me, go to the pine path,” he says. “I will roam there always.”

I lay my hands on either side of his head in blessing, the way I have done with the children. After a few moments, Franklin helps him stand. I do not watch Nathaniel as he hobbles away on the arm of his old friend. Instead I return to the carriage and stretch out on the seat, where the scent of pine lingers, and I inhale it in deep breaths until I am home in Concord.

When I arrive at the Wayside, I note the dark tower my husband has left. I cannot greet the children yet, so I creep to Nathaniel’s path. The walk is still and windless, and feels empty without my husband’s form filling it. I pace the path for hours as the sky burns a pink-and-orange sunset. I wait and watch, but there is nothing of Nathaniel here but the footsteps he has left behind on the ground.

I step in them with my small worn slippers, stained from the dust of London and Lisbon and Rome, and countless other cities, one at a time.

Not two weeks have passed since Nathaniel’s leaving, and I am unable to settle.

I have replaced him on the path, walking back and forth at all hours of the day and evening, waiting for a sign of him. The pines are still and the air is clear. It is as if the world holds its breath.

Una is home with me, and has been a remarkable comfort. She senses my need for calm, and has not had a fit in some time. At night we read together and sketch with Rose, and Una has seen to arranging our meals with the cook, and our invitations to friends’ houses. I am grateful for her assistance and distraction, because I am numb and unable to concentrate on anything. Also, I have experienced a sudden weakness and unsteadiness of frame. I feel as if I am pulling a heavy load behind me like a plow horse, and I have to frequently sit down until I regain my strength.

On the day my love had planned to arrive in New Hampshire, I am frantic for a word from him. Franklin has been in contact through short missives, but it is not enough. I cannot bear this. I wring my trembling hands and search out my eldest daughter until I find her in the sky parlor.

“Una, write to Julian in Cambridge. Tell him to meet your father and bring him home.”

“Father would not wish it,” she says.

She leans on the windowsill with her back to me, where Nathaniel usually stands sentry. I can see the outline of her bones through her thin, worn dress, and note the slight hunch of her shoulders. I cannot reconcile this muted person with the young child of such vitality and passion who inspired the impish character Pearl. In spite of Una’s physical deterioration, her travels and trials have given her a deeper wisdom and a gravity that I welcome, now that Nathaniel is not here. But with a grown daughter, every exchange is heavy with things unsaid and the unspoken assertion of her will against mine—the burden of her judgment.

“He always wishes to see Julian,” I say. “He will allow Julian to persuade him to come back to Concord.”

Una turns to look at me with her dark eyes, and hesitates a moment before speaking.

“Perhaps he does not wish to come back to Concord. It is so small and closed.”

I start to protest, but I hear someone calling from downstairs. Dinner is ready.

She walks past me without looking at me, and descends to the dining room. I follow her, a little angry and confused about her meaning. With Una, one never knows whether she speaks of present matters or some larger issue, and I am in no mood for such discourse. I hold my tongue, though. The threat of her tantrums keeps me silent.

I fear that we are a family of half conversations. Nathaniel’s silence, Una’s elusiveness, Julian’s absence, Rose’s quiet. Sometimes it seems I am the only one who makes any noise, and it is exhausting to exist in such a way. I feel a powerlessness like when Nathaniel left before our courtship, and did not return for months. I knew he carried my
Cuba Journal
, but our separation was not on my terms and did not end with the expediency I would have wished. He found some great meaning for himself that he was happy to communicate on his return, but I was left having to catch up from my nesting branch. I resented it then, and I resent it now, and I do not know how much longer I can endure it without a flare of temper.

I stab my chicken and try to control the rising heat in my body. My hands tremble so that I have to hit the plate several times
before sinking my fork into the meat. Una now sits with her posture erect, and takes slow, deliberate bites. Rose looks from Una to me with large eyes. None of us speaks, and just when the silence becomes unbearable, there is a noise on the piazza.

Una rises as if she cannot flee quickly enough, and I hear her open the front door. I stop stabbing and turn my head to listen, and there is suddenly a commotion and a cry. Rose reaches for my hand, and in a moment my bitterness evaporates. We stand at the same moment to see what has happened, but before we can leave the room, my sisters are there, darkening the doorway.

It is from Una’s lips that I hear the words from the other room.

“He has died!”

For a terrible moment I am filled with hatred for my sisters. Elizabeth has always been jealous of our love. They both judge us for our silence on the war, and our strange house, and my being absent for our parents’ deaths, and Una’s madness. Was it not Elizabeth who once told me that Emerson thought Nathaniel and Bronson Alcott together might make a whole man?

“No! Do not say such a lie!” I say. “He is coming home. . . .”

But before the sentence is complete, I am broken.

I release Rose’s hand and crumple to the floor, where there is a flurry of hands and hushed voices, soothing, petting, embracing, leading me to the couch in the parlor, wiping my tears with their handkerchiefs. Elizabeth kneels beside me, a considerable effort for one her age, and her face is all kindness and love. I am ashamed of my impulse to anger, but I still cannot comprehend
this news. I shake my head, and feel tears seep into my ears and down my neck. Oh, if I could drown myself in these tears!

“Sophy, you poor girl,” Elizabeth says. “How we suffer to bring you this tragedy. Cry it away. Cry it all away.”

Mary kneels beside her and takes my hand. “There never was one so loved as Nathaniel by so devoted a wife. You gave him a little bit of heaven on earth, and now that he is there, he will wait for you and bless you more than he ever could here.”

Her words ignite more sobs. I am unworthy of such kindness from them.

I force myself to sit up and call my daughters to my sides, tucking their bodies into mine. They both cry on my breast, and I think what a sad tableau we make—a room of women in grief. But soon, among the shadows of our mourning, I am aware of a warmth that comes from the light of our spheres. We are joined in our pain and love, and in our wishes to assuage one another. If we were a painting, we would have light in our centers, though shadows surrounded us.

Nathaniel was that light to me, and I to him. That is the sweetness that lives in this pain.

When I am calmer, I finally understand why Nathaniel left—it was to spare me the grief of seeing his body without a soul. Now I will forever remember him as he was when he was alive. He will exist to me as the young man I sketched by the fire in my parents’ house, whom I watched chop wood at the manse, who allowed his children to cover him with grass, and who stood on ships’ decks, as natural at sea as the father he lost to it all those years ago. He will be the rower in the
Pond Lily
, the writer at the
desk, and the dark form pacing on the pine path, more at ease with the trees than with men and women.

“He has spared me the image of his death,” I say. “He has spared all of us so he may forever live in our memories. That is how much he loved us.”

Elizabeth buries her face in her hand while she cries.

I pull her and Mary to stand with me and the girls. As we embrace, the light coming in the window from the fading day rests on the canvas of
Isola San Giovanni
that I painted. Our small figures against the vast landscape are joined and young, and are facing the future. I can hardly wait until our figures are together again on the fields of Elysium for eternity.