The House of Hawthorne (38 page)

I never set eyes on my love again.

Franklin arranges for Nathaniel’s body to be held and delivered to the church on the day of his funeral. Una and Rose help me arrange my hat and veil on the morning of the service. Franklin and Julian hold my arms on either side, escorting me. The reverend Clarke who married us all those years ago, and who was in awe of my husband then, is in awe of him now. The Church of the First Parish is filled with the great people of our time: my sisters, the Alcotts, Ellery Channing, Ralph Emerson. Franklin sits with our family, and sixteen men bear Nathaniel’s casket out of the church and to the carriage, which takes him through town one last time to Sleepy Hollow. We lay him to rest on a gentle hill, under a canopy of leaves.

At the reception after the service, I try to smile at the
well-wishers and take in their kind words about my husband’s genius, what his work means to them, and the little ways they interacted with the elusive author. But the longer the day wears on, the more I feel how much Nathaniel would have been frustrated by near strangers trying to claim a piece of him. Aside from Franklin and a very select few, Nathaniel could not bear entering into acquaintance with many, for he could not simply talk of the weather or village gossip. To befriend Nathaniel was to encounter a celestial individual, and he allowed only people of deep thought and genuine humility to enter into his sphere. I believe there were depths to him that even I could not access, so to hear these small stories of seeing him at the bakery or glimpsing him at Walden Pond tires me the way it would have tired Nathaniel.

After two hours I can take no more, and slip through the crowds to sneak outside. As I step out on the piazza, I am surprised to see Elizabeth and Franklin with their heads bent together in private conversation. They do not see me, and I do not want to be seen. I turn to find another way outside, but Elizabeth’s words stop me.

“He told me he never wanted to live to see sixty years of age.”

Franklin nods as if he has heard these words before, but I have not. I slip into the shadows to hear what she could mean.

“Do you think he hastened it?” she asks.

Franklin clears his throat. “I will not say. There is evidence, but it is no matter. My friend would have died that night anyway.”

I feel as if I cannot breathe. A fist has closed around my throat, and I press my chest, taking great gasping gulps. A horrible memory rises—that of my weary husband insisting we turn
back to the Wayside so he can get something that he put in his coat. I shake the thought away. He would not have!

“I stayed with him until he fell into a fitful sleep,” continues Franklin, “and left the door between our rooms open, in case he cried out. But it was not he who cried when he passed. There was a strange screeching, like a dog but higher and throatier—maybe a fox. It awakened me, and left me so unsettled that I got up to check Nathaniel. When I found him, he was utterly still and peaceful.”

Franklin’s voice breaks, and Elizabeth reaches up to pat his back.

I step forward, and when they see me, their faces go pale. I open my mouth to speak, but there are no words, so I step off the piazza and rush to the pine path. They do not try to follow me, and for that I am grateful.

From where I walk, I see the mourners leave over the next hour, and I stay there until the evening light changes, finally sitting on the bench where Nathaniel and I used to view the sunset.

Nature enfolds me in my grief. She settles my heart and allows me to push the words I overheard away from me. They do not matter now. They are separate from my part of Nathaniel’s death. Now I must welcome his spirit wholly into mine, so we are never again separated.

I hear it before I feel it—a sudden rushing like a wave, or the sound of the rainfall on the mountains of Cuba. I turn my head to the sky and see the pines begin to rock above me, and all at once I am engulfed in a warm, sweet wind that lifts my hair and
fills my lungs. I take deep breaths and suddenly feel Nathaniel. He is there. Dark and quiet, calming and radiating love. He is everywhere around me. I cannot contain my tears, and I stand to walk in the wind, to inhale every morsel of this gift.

The light has gone on in the tower of the Wayside. I see Una there, looking out toward where I stand. I know she cannot see me, but she knows I am there, the way that I know Nathaniel is here, though I cannot behold him. It is time for me to return to my children and offer them support in their grief. I must let Elizabeth know with my embrace that all is well between us, and I will endure this hardship.

When I return, everyone has gone and left our little broken Hawthorne bush alone. Once the children retire, I creep to the room where our letters and journals still lie beneath the floorboards.

I pry up the wood and remove each item, caressing every artifact before laying it on the table. I kiss the paintbrushes and pressed flowers; I embrace the journals my husband touched; I inhale the love letters he wrote to me during our long courtship. I will immerse myself in his words so I may relive our lives, and rekindle mine as it was before I entered into communion with him. It will be enough now that Nathaniel has finally found his true home.

After all this time, I now know that some people are not for the world. They are messengers, passing through avenues and city streets, on mountain paths, over verdant fields, and in quaint
villages; holders of secret, universal truths, and bearers of the knowledge that the rest of us need to progress: in song, on canvas, in pulpit, and on the page. The tragedy is that many of them do not understand that they are bearers of truth, and in their sacred nature are forever isolated from those of us at home on the earth.

Nathaniel called me his angel because he dealt in the celestial, but I could not be a bearer. I have often felt at peace in the world, and happy to observe and experience the beauty around me. I look with fondness at distant horizons, but until now, I have not been in a hurry to reach them.

Nathaniel was wrong about the limitations of words. In that most holy book, it says, “
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God
,
and the Word was God
.” Words are the bridge to the Eternal. They hold the power in the cosmos to conjure, transport, condemn, unite, destroy. If Nathaniel had understood that the words were arrows in his bag instead of barriers, perhaps then he would have found his peace.

The candlelight shines on the artifacts from our lives on the table before me. I imagine the stories trembling for my attention and longing for me to piece them together so they make sense, so they spell the true romance of the years we spent together.

I recall the words Ada scribbled at the séance from my mother.

“Write it. Lift the veil.”

I know the power of words and the way they reach off the page to the reader, dissolving all borders of time and space. I understand how words expand the minds digesting them, allowing those who sit in quiet rooms to embark upon grand
adventures with people they could never meet within the circumference of their own lives. For those who do not fear the vocation, it is our charge to put down the words, one after another. To make a case. To make a story.

It is clear what I must do. I must use words in ways that, despite his greater gifts, Nathaniel would not, because he feared that he would expose too much of himself. I must share his life, because the world needs his story, my story.

And in our story, the romance of the Hawthornes, I will have the final
word.

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne did write after her husband’s death, or rather, she copied their letters and journals in order to keep her husband’s legacy alive, support her family financially, and remain in spiritual communion with Nathaniel. She worked closely with his publisher, James T. Fields, to release their common and travel journals, but she was full of doubts from start to finish; she worried that Nathaniel would not have been pleased with her for publishing their personal writings, and was disappointed with the cool reception the works met. Those who thought they would finally be able to peel back Nathaniel’s veil remained unsatisfied. Sophia’s omission of what would have revealed intimate details of both their elations and trials, particularly her own contributions to the journals, resulted in documents that were too reserved to satisfy public curiosity.

Sophia traveled with her children overseas to Germany to see
to Julian’s education with more economy, and eventually moved to England, where she became ill with a form of pneumonia. Una kept vigil at her mother’s bedside the way Sophia had with her all those years ago. In February of 1871, Sophia died with Una and Rose at her side, and was buried at Kensal Green in London. Una died in 1877, in England at the age of thirty-three. In 2006 she was reinterred with Sophia in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Sophia now spends her eternal rest with her husband, Nathaniel; her daughter Una; her sister Elizabeth; and their friends the Emersons, the Alcotts, Ellery Channing, and Henry Thoreau, on a gentle hill under a canopy of leaves.

My fascination with the lives of writers from the past continues, and I am thankful to God and to many people for their support, encouragement, and inspiration.

To my publishing team, Ellen Edwards, Kara Welsh, Craig Burke, Courtney Landi, Kevan Lyon, and Lisa Bankoff: I am so grateful for your guidance and partnership on this novel.

To those who supported and kindled my research: Janet Somerville, for gorgeous photos of Florence; Lucia O. Ditch, for patient assistance with Spanish language translations; the Department of Special Collections at the Stanford University Library; and to the staff of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

To my family and friends, particularly my three sons, Robert and Charlene Shephard, Richard and Patricia Robuck, Kristina McMorris, and Kelly McMullen: Your loving support means more than you can know.

And last, to my husband, Scott Robuck: I could not have understood my characters or their particular kind of love without you. You are a gift to me, and in the more than twenty years we have spent together rests an eternity of blessings. I am so pleased that your story intersects with and completes mine.

From Concord to Boston to Salem, walking in the steps of my characters provided the first and greatest inspiration for the novel, which was deepened by the writings of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. Their journals, letters, poetry, art, and fiction provided the fabric upon which this narrative is based, as did the writings of Sophia’s children; her sisters Elizabeth and Mary; and their friends the Alcotts, Ellery Channing, the Emersons, Margaret Fuller, and Henry Thoreau. The scholarly work available on the Hawthornes is equally fascinating for those who wish to know more about these captivating people and their contemporaries.

Here is a short selection for further reading:

Hawthorne, Julian.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife
. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1885.

Herbert, T. Walter.
Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of
the Middle-Class Family
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne.
Memories of Hawthorne
. New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1897.

Mann, Mary Tyler Peabody.
Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago
. Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1887.

Marshall, Megan.
The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005.

Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy.
Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1, 1809–1847
. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Wineapple, Brenda.
Hawthorne: A Life.
New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003.

Wright, John Hardy.
Hawthorne’s Haunts in New England
. Charleston: The History Press, 2008.

Erika Robuck
is a contributor to the fiction blog Writer Unboxed, and she maintains her own blog, Muse. She is a member of the Hawthorne Society, the Hemingway Society, the Historical Novel Society, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society. She lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband and three
sons.