7

Autumn 1837
Salem, Massachusetts

As 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.