Hawthorne Page 2

  Or said he had. Nothing happened. Public opinion was against Julian. Parole was denied. Not until the following fall, on October 15, 1913, was Julian Hawthorne released from prison. Again, he wore the scarlet tie.

  Rose Hawthorne was born when her father was forty-seven. “She is to be the daughter of my age,” he remarked, “—the comfort (at least so it is to be hoped) of my declining years.” Hawthorne died, however, just before his sixtieth birthday and the day before her thirteenth.

  He had called her Pessima. She was mercurial, fastidious, self-critical, and impatient. Explained Sophia in the double-edged terms she perfected, “I think you inherited from Papa this immitigable demand for beauty and order and right, & though, in the course of your development, it has made you sometimes pettish and unreasonable, I always was glad you had it.”

  Rose wanted to write, but her father’s interdiction against the literary life put an end to that. In fact, both parents were wildly ambivalent about the practice of literature, declining to teach their children to read until they reached the ripe age of seven. Sophia was adamant about this. “I have not the smallest ambition about early learning in my children,” she declared. And though her two sisters were educators of note and her brother-in-law, Horace Mann, once the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Sophia refused to hand her children over to schoolmistresses of dubious intent. Hawthorne deferred to her. “The men of our family are compliant husbands,” his own sister later scoffed.

  Encouraged to paint by her artistic mother, Rose dutifully studied art until Sophia’s death in 1871, and then she cut loose, sort of. Barely twenty, she quickly married George Parsons Lathrop, a twenty-year-old aspiring writer. But if Rose believed she was replacing her parents by replicating their wonderful marriage—artist to writer—she was utterly mistaken. “Love is different from what I supposed and I don’t like it,” admits a character in one of her short stories. She did write after all.

  George Lathrop got a job as assistant editor at the Atlantic Monthly, the showcase for much of his father-in-law’s work, and when he lost the post he and Rose drifted to New York, where they nibbled at the edge of the literary set. Often dressed in yellow, her favorite color, Rose was soon known as a passable if gloomy poet and indifferent author of short stories, her best production fittingly called “Prisoners.” George, a conventional and reasonably prolific writer, was known as a drunk.

  The Lathrops converted to Catholicism, but religion didn’t help their failing marriage, and after much soul-searching, Rose separated from her husband in 1895. Una suspected abuse. Then, in a volte-face that Julian found “abrupt and strange,” Rose chose to rededicate her life to “usefulness.” To Rose, however, it was her father’s fine-grained appreciation of suffering that motivated her. “He was as earnest as a priest,” she said, “for he cared that the world was full of sorrow & sin.” Certainly Hawthorne’s last illness had cast a pall over his youngest child; and in 1887 she was devastated yet again by the premature death of poet Emma Lazarus, a cherished friend.

  This stiffened her purpose once and for all. On May 19, 1898, the thirty-fifth anniversary of her father’s death, she clipped her auburn hair and stowed the leftover tufts under a linen cap. Henceforth she dressed in an austere monkish gown. “I gave up the world,” she said, “as if I were dead.” She swore off men and earthly things, and for the rest of her life lived productively in a community of faithful women. “From close observation I have learned something about the true courage of women,” she had written years earlier.

  Her choice reflecting a condition of her parents’ lives—intimate friendships with members of the same sex—Rose started one of the first hospices in America in a tenement house on Scammel Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she nursed the dying poor. Proceeds from a memoir of her father, published in 1897, supported her in this, and with Alice Huber, a “life-helper” (her word), she opened Sister Rose’s Free Home in a three-story red brick building at 426 Cherry Street. Unlike her siblings, Rose managed to remake Nathaniel Hawthorne’s legacy into something of her own. “The ice in the blood which he feared,” observed Flannery O’Connor, “and which this very fear preserved him from, was turned by her into a warmth which initiated action. If he observed, fearfully but truthfully; if he acted, reluctantly but firmly, she charged ahead, secure in the path his truthfulness had outlined for her.”

  In 1926, just three months after receiving the Gold Medal of the New York Rotary Club, Mother Mary Alphonsa Lathrop, the former Rose Hawthorne, died. It was her parents’ wedding anniversary.

  Una Hawthorne installed her father’s walnut writing table in her bedroom, and after her mother’s death slipped Sophia’s wedding ring onto her finger. “I do indeed love them better than myself,” she said of her parents. They were her compass and her doom.

  Of the three children, Una was said to be most like her father. She thought so herself. “Sometimes I wish there had never been anything done or written in the world!” she once exclaimed. “My father and I seem to feel in this way more than the rest.” A perfectionist, she battered herself with her own yardstick. And she seemed inspired not by realities but by fiction—again, like her father.

  As a child, she’d been rambunctious, moody, and smart. “Her natural bent is towards the passionate and tragic,” wrote Hawthorne. He watched Una with absorption and loved her deeply, though with characteristic ambivalence about her strength, willfulness, pride, and intellect—qualities he both admired and censured in his stunning female characters. “If there were not so many strong objections,” he confided to his journal, “it would be an excellent thing to send her to school; we should see no more of this premature ennui—her mind would be filled … and—what I greatly desire—she would have a much happier childhood.”

  She was educated in desultory fashion but her brain matured too rapidly anyway, warned one physician, who prescribed vegetables. A few years later, another doctor suggested she terminate all instruction, including her dancing lessons. She protested, though not for long. To vanquish the vanquishers, she participated in her own imprisonment, smothering emotion with self-sacrifice and self-reprisal. Then, as if to crown her achievement, Una contracted malaria during the winter of 1858, when the Hawthornes lived in Rome. She lay in bed, face to the wall.

  The brush with mortality provided an explanation for Una’s increasingly drab temperament. But occasionally she chucked her good-girl manners and kicked and screamed until her terrified parents rigged her up to a galvanic battery and jolted her with electricity. Calm again when an aunt visited in the fall of 1861, Una rowed her and her father to the middle of Walden Pond and blithely announced it was a most dangerous place.

  Engaged to be married shortly after her father’s death, Una abruptly severed relations with her fiancé when he disappointed her in some unforgivable way. Besides, her parents’ sublime marriage couldn’t be reproduced in this vulgar world by mere men and women. So she stayed near her mother in London and participated in the new family enterprise, the publication of all of Hawthorne’s journals and unfinished tales. When Sophia died, she simmered in misery, a strange light in her eye.

  Six months later, at Rose’s marriage, the lid flew completely off. Una alleged that Lathrop had jilted her for Rose. There was no truth to the charge, except of course the truth of Una’s feelings. Descending into a pit of “insanity,” Una spent great sums of money, and an uncle reported that she “nearly took the lives of three persons”—evidently her own, her sister’s, and Lathrop’s—while she denounced Rose for having betrayed her. Placed in restraints, she was hauled off to an anonymous asylum, where she was confined until Rose and George Lathrop could escape to America without her.

  The sisters reconciled but crossed swords again when Lathrop, using family documents in Rose’s possession, dared to write a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Allies since childhood, Una and Julian closed ranks, and Julian took the battle public, writing scurrilous pieces in newspapers—much to
the public’s chagrin, for Hawthorne was a national monument which it hated to see debased by anything as crude as family squabbling. Canonization had already begun.

  The family injunction notwithstanding, all three Hawthorne children had wanted to be writers. Only Julian succeeded, after his fashion, though it wasn’t until the death of both parents that he pursued the literary career they had inveighed against.

  When Una declared she would compose romances, her mother ignored her. “She will fulfil her destiny doubtless,” she’d said, “but I do not intend it shall be hastened one hour.” As an adult, Una tried her hand at a novel, and she wrote at least one poem, ominously entitled “Dead Sunshine.” Mostly, however, she involved herself in charity work, donating her time and small income to the Industrial Orphanage Home and School in London. When the effort grew too exhausting, she took refuge in Julian’s home nearby and on occasion among the nearby Anglican Sisters of Clewer, where many women of her kind—“invalid ladies in reduced circumstances,” as they were known—sought rest and moral refreshment.

  She’d become engaged again, this time to a tubercular writer, Albert Webster. It was a ridiculous match, damned from the start. Webster immediately sailed to Hawaii, as far away from Una as he could. Meantime, at Julian’s, Una sewed her wedding dress without, one suspects, much hope. On February 3, 1877, while Una was out, Julian noticed on the front table a white envelope postmarked Honolulu. It was addressed to Una, but the handwriting wasn’t Webster’s. Una returned at teatime, opened the letter, and slowly read the contents aloud, word by scalding word. Webster had died before his ship reached Hawaii. She lowered her head and sobbed.

  Julian clenched his teeth. “Has Una had so happy and self-indulgent a life as to need this desolating blow at last?” he cried. For five months she corresponded with Webster’s sister and in August envisioned a heavenly reunion between her and her sickly sweetheart. “The idea that you suggest that he wants me even where he is, never occurred to me. Oh I wonder if he does!”

  A little more than a month later, on September 10, the unhappy Una died in her retreat at Clewer. Julian and his family were vacationing in Hastings in a house loaned by a fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and though they’d urged Una to come with them, she’d gone to Clewer instead. But something was terribly wrong. She seemed ill. She wrote Rose, who received the letter “almost at the time—if not the hour—of her death, and was appalled at the agitation that beset me as I read it.” Frantic, the Clewer Sisters contacted Julian, who told them if there was no improvement in Una’s condition, they should telegraph him right away. Una seemed better. Then she fainted. She couldn’t see. Another telegram brought Julian to Clewer too late.

  From afar, Rose learned that the doctor diagnosed exhaustion and pyrosis, a stomach inflammation she blamed for her father’s death. More romantic, Julian decided his sister had died of a broken heart.

  No one contradicted him. Whatever records may have existed can no longer be found.

  The Hawthorne children idealized their father, although, as Julian’s career attests, their relation to him was neither uncomplicated nor untroubled. How not? In his own lifetime—and under his own roof—he was venerated as a model father, husband, and genius. Partly as a consequence, he was a man deeply isolated, unable to forget himself, and his children were unable to forget him.

  With an insight so fine it bordered on the voluptuous, he crafted a style of exquisite ambiguity, of uncompromising passion and stubborn skepticism. Yet his characters are often curiously static, poised between self-knowledge and indifference and, like Hawthorne himself, confounded by what and who they are. For Hawthorne was a man of dignity, of mordant wit, of malicious anger; a man of depression and control; a forthright and candid man aching to confess but too proud, too obstinate, too ashamed to do so; a man of disclosure and disguise, both at once, keen, cynical, intelligent, who digs into his imagination to write of American men and women: isolated in their communities, burdened by their history, riven by their sense of crime and their perpetual, befuddled innocence; people ambitious and vain and displaced and willing, or perhaps forced, to live a double life, a secret life, an exemplary life, haunted and imprisoned, even as his children were—or, in Hawthorne’s terms, as are we all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Home

  This long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom-House”

  SALEM IS A TOWN obsessed with itself.

  The time is 1804; the place, a New England port city. Bright-colored sails snap and rustle in the wind. A scent of nutmeg, clove, and ginger fills the air—that and the acrid fragrance of red wine spilled from Spanish casks. Blowsy men in gold earrings lean on huge kegs of molasses, indifferent to the friendly pastor, the Reverend Dr. Bentley, who saunters beyond the docks to watch for returning vessels. Head bent, the Reverend Bentley wears his broad-brimmed hat, he usually does, and raises his skirts as if to dodge temptation, passing whorehouses and warehouses hunkered near the water’s edge. He nods at the grizzled ship’s captain, official papers stuffed in his seaman’s tin box, and at the wizened merchant who, with pencil in his Yankee hand, is tallying barrels of sugar, fifty thousand pounds from the schooner Speed. Church bells clang. Horses tied to the drays flick their tails, and the wheeling gulls scream with irreverent glee.

  Salem: pompous, pious, exotic, and rich.

  Called Naumkeag by the local Pawtucket Indians who fished there, Salem—salaam: peace—is a gateway to America, with fifty-four ships, eighteen barks, seventy-two brigs, and eighty-six schooners to its far-flung name. Its seal bears a palm tree, a Parsee, a ship, and the Latin motto Divitis Indiae usque ad ultimum sinum: To the endmost port of the East sail the tall ships. Bandanna handkerchiefs, Sumatran pepper, tea, china, silk, nuts, raisins, figs, olive oil, Indian cotton, and Arabian coffee enter America through Salem, which stocks an international market with tables, saddlery, chaises, and dried codfish, to say nothing of the oak planks, shoes, pickled bacon—and, from the South, tobacco and rice—lugged there for transport on an outbound ship.

  Cod-merchant as Midas, a Salem trader tacks a carved gilt fish on every step of the staircase in his mansion.

  But the city boasts more than cargo and piles of money, for the salty smell of conscience helps preserve such busy commerce. Generals, jurists, senators, and a secretary of state hail from mighty Salem, their families residing slightly to the north of the waterfront though never far from the creaking windlass. Naturally, the town’s latter-day Puritans disdain outward display. Gilded cod notwithstanding, they live in the well-proportioned houses designed by Samuel McIntire, graceful structures supported by simple pilasters. Their daughters marry well; their sons go to Harvard.

  One Salem daughter said no one new ever came there, for Salem had no need of outsiders. Slightly xenophobic, its citizens subsist on one another and their relations, now and in foregoing generations. Pedigree counts as much as money, frequently more; history furnishes a hierarchy of descent not to be gainsaid: who had come to America when and, of course, with whom, which mattered almost as much as what these ancestors did and whose interests—besides the Almighty’s—they served.

  Nathaniel Hathorne, as the name was then spelled, belonged to one of Salem’s first families, which meant he was a sixth-generation Hathorne who prayed for redemption at the Congregationalist First Church, where his Puritan great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, had occupied the first pew. This was important. Said the Reverend Dr. Bentley, Salem’s connoisseur of kinship, “No family had more pride of descent” than the Hathornes. Accordingly, they claimed to bear the coat of arms described in the story “The White Old Maid”: “Azure, a lion’s head erased, between three flower de luces.”

  William Hathorne was a man of persecution although—
perhaps because—he himself had fled it, Sidney’s Arcadia tucked under his arm, sailing from England to America, some say on the Arbella, with fifty servants in tow. Or so his descendants heard. Hathorne settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and arrived in Salem in 1636, induced to relocate in part by the promise of a 200-acre land grant provided he quit the church of Dorchester. He did. A man of sundry and stubborn talents, Selectman Hathorne was a prize. He voted to banish the individualist Reverend Roger Williams from the colony, and soon became Massachusetts Bay delegate to the New England Confederation of colonies, captain in the militia, then major, surveyor, magistrate, and garrulous contributor to the General Court—the very first Speaker in the House of Representatives, said Nathaniel.

  The adjudication of crime, particularly illegal fornication, was Hathorne’s forte; heresy, his genius. He pursued Quakers with the inventive zeal of the true paranoid, hunting them “like a blood-hound,” or so it was alleged. He ordered Ann Coleman dragged half naked through town while being lashed with a whip of knotted cords, and under his watch, another poor blasphemer was flogged until his back turned to jelly. For his own pains, William Hathorne received several more grants of land, 240 acres in 1648, 400 in 1654, 640 in 1675. “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors,” his descendant Nathaniel wryly observed, “and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.”

  William Hathorne earned the approval of his heirs when he defied Charles II’s edict to return to England for a royal reprimand. He’d dressed down the king’s commissioners, insulting the monarch by implication and fomenting a little insurrection to boot. The king took notice and recalled him. A thoroughgoing Massachusetts man though no democrat, Hathorne would not bow and scrape before a temporal sovereign, even one who might revoke the colony’s charter. “I cannot remember the time when I had not heard that the King sent for our forefather … to come to England, and that he refused to go,” said Nathaniel’s sister Elizabeth. An evasive letter was dispatched to the king, who was occupied with other business by the time it arrived, and forever after Hathorne’s heirs invested the Major with a “dim and dusky grandeur,” Nathaniel would write, “… present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember.”