41

Summer 1860
Concord, Massachusetts

How small the Wayside looks on our return from the world.

We step out of the railway wagon and are greeted by our friends Ralph and Lidian Emerson, Ellery Channing, Henry Thoreau, my sisters Elizabeth and Mary, now a widow, and Mary’s three children. I can see in their faces how shocked they are at our altered appearances.

I descend first, plump, gray, weak from the relapse in my lungs I experienced in England after we left Rome. I have lived through hell and come home to my small though dearly beloved Concord. I settle on its branch, content to never again leave. Nathaniel descends after me—wearing his new mustache, and topped with entirely white hair. His stomach has never been the same since his illnesses abroad, and he walks somewhat hunched. The only thing unchanged about him is his eyes.

The children follow us: Rose, nine years old, stepping carefully out, slight and darkened from her fair babyhood. She resembles me most, I think, though she is not prone to raptures as her mother is. Then Julian jumps from the carriage, fourteen years old, strapping and handsome. He is as tall as his father is stooped, and sometimes when I glimpse Julian from afar or pass him in the house, I see Nathaniel as a young man—bursting with vitality and cheekiness. Julian possesses a confidence Nathaniel never had; there is no diffidence about my boy. He is of this world and will do well in it. Finally, Nathaniel waits for his sixteen-year-old Una, and holds out his weak arm for her weaker one. I do not imagine the intake of breath from our loved ones as she steps out. She is gaunt and her hair, which was long and tumbling when we left Concord years ago, has not yet grown out to reach her shoulders; it is an auburn as faded as dust. Roman fever is a creeping and savage illness that often returns with fevers and terror. I know it will plague her for the rest of her life. The dark circles under her eyes mirror her father’s, and seeing the two standing together here, so changed and wrung-out, breaks my heart.

But we have made it home safely, and for that I am grateful. I close my eyes and turn my face to the sun, allowing my thanks to pulse out from me to God for letting me keep my family with me on earth, no matter what their state. Now that we are home, on our native soil, I will tend to our Hawthorne bush until it blooms again. I will tend to us all and restore the health of mind, body, and soul for which we are starved.

The carpenter’s banging makes Una shriek and moan. We have begun renovations on our little farmhouse to make it more like our beloved Villa Montauto. We are adding wings and piazzas, but most special will be the tower, like that in Florence. It will become Nathaniel’s study and his retreat from the world, where he may write in solitude amid his family.

Una’s fits of temper since her illness grow more frightening, and I am no longer strong enough to subdue her physically. She acts like a two-year-old again, but now she is bigger and stronger than me, so when she starts to yell and cry and throw things, I am helpless to stop her. When she was small, I could carry her to a chair and hold her close until she calmed. Now I can only drag her to her room and lock her in—a most drastic and upsetting measure for us all.

The fits come without warning. One moment Una sits in the grass reading a book or sketching with the Alcott girls; the next she screams from the pain in her head and spirit like the madwoman in Mr. Rochester’s attic, and her father must suffer the embarrassment of dragging her indoors so the neighbors do not get more fodder for their gossip against us.

Though we have been welcomed cordially, there is tension between us and our neighbors. Nathaniel refuses to side with the North or South as the country marches to war, and my sisters overwhelm our post with antislavery missives and essays and chastisements like blasting cannons. They reprimand us for not taking a stand in writing and professing our views in public, and I scold them by return mail until I promise not to communicate with them if they do not cease fire!

The children have gone to bed after a particularly awful day of Una’s fits and carpenter problems. The workers are nearly finished, but Nathaniel has noted—and I agree—that the changes that were supposed to make our home look like an Italian villa have made it look like the queerest old haunted house on the block. The tower does not loom impressively—it juts up like a strange afterthought. There is no symmetry or timelessness to the dwelling now; it is an awkward jumbling of mismatched architectural features.

Nathaniel sits in a chair by the fireplace, frowning over another of Mary’s letters of condemnation.

“How can she think that God would want man to take up arms against man for any cause?” he grumbles.

“I do not know,” I say.

“I would think that losing her beloved husband would make her inclined to seek to save others from a similar pain, especially from one delivered by a musket ball!”

“One would think.”

“Thank God I am too old and Julian is too young to fight, should it come to that.”

“Thank God indeed.”

He stops his rant to look at me, and when he sees how I rub my head, his face softens.

“Dove, I am sorry. You toil and work so hard, and when you sit down to rest at night, I have nothing to give you but my tempers and frustrations.”

“I am strong enough to bear it,” I say. “The burdens are heavy with or without your acknowledging them, and truthfully, I would rather have your words than your silence.”

“No,” he says. “Saying them aloud only cuts us deeper.”

“I cannot agree. Speaking them releases the inward pressure and helps us to endure, because we know that we are not alone.”

He smiles. “We have been having this debate since you were the artist invalid of Salem, and I was the stormy, obscure writer.”

“And now my daughter is the invalid, and I am no artist, and you are famous, though you would rather not be.”

“Sophia,” he says. “How unlike you to be so dark. Has it finally happened? Have I stained you with my blackness? My soul should be damned for it.”

“Do not say such things. In all the world, you are my consolation and my companion. There is no moment I have shared with you that I would undo.”

I see his eyes glisten in the candlelight, and he smiles at me with such tenderness that the day’s cares become only a faint memory.

“You have always been beyond what I deserve,” he says, looking down at his lap.

“I feel the same about you. It must be our shared adoration of each other that has made our love so perfect all of these years. Even when it was not.”

We let this sit between us, and after a short time settle together on the settee and stare at the picture of Isola San Giovanni over the mantel. My eyes move down to the hearth, and my thoughts drift to the image of a young girl and a slave man.

“Louisa Alcott sat here with me for tea last week,” I say, “and told me the most interesting story.”

“About what?”

“They harbored a fugitive slave here when she was just fourteen. The man remained for a week, on his way from a brutal farm in Maryland to freedom in Canada. She taught him letters with charcoal on this very hearth. She said that she did not understand the true meaning of hope and courage until she met him, and that though he is long gone and she does not know what became of him, she feels a sensation in her soul that he is well.”

Nathaniel is silent.

“Do you think we leave an essence behind us?” I continue. “Even when we are alive? Do you feel the man here? I think I do sometimes.”

“The walls must hold on to something of us when we go. But maybe I do not really believe that, and that is why I help you etch windows, and write in journals, and disrupt our family to add onto this queer old house. Is it a kind of quiet desperation to be remembered, even when I do not wish to be thought much of now?”

Our hearth fire pops, startling me.

“I had a dream about the slave woman Josepha, who had to leave her son in Cuba,” I say. “She did not speak, but I felt her blaming me for not intervening. Do you think it is true? If we do not take a side, are we as guilty as the slavers?”

Nathaniel sighs. “Dove, how can we be on the side of war, no matter what the circumstances? How can we support a cause that obliterates moments like this—moments that husbands and wives and children share at their firesides? If there is no time to sit together in such places, there can be no hope for the future.”

I have never felt so confused in my life, and I simply cannot face this issue anymore. Not right now, while my Una is so broken. I have to start with healing in my home before I can consider further regions. It is as if Nathaniel reads my mind, because when he speaks, it is of our daughter.

“What are we to do with Una?” he says. “She cannot be around this noise and renovation any longer. Do you think your sister Elizabeth would have her? She is so fond of Una, and could see to her education, since we cannot afford a school.”

“Only if we sign on the line with the Yankees in blood.”

“How about Mary?”

“She feels the same way Elizabeth does.”

“But she is nearby and her love for us is greater than her frustration. Can you call on her tomorrow? Tell her what you have told me about the slaves, fugitives and dreams. Show her that we turn the matter over in our hearts, even if we cannot make a decision on it.”

“Yes, I will do so. It is time anyway. Our letters have become so cold. If we sit in each other’s company, we will never express the recriminations we do on paper. We will reach an understanding, and maybe she will help us with Una.”

And help us she does.

Mary has always been the best Peabody sister. Her compassion outweighs her judgment, and she can always be counted upon for her intercession, not unlike the savior’s mother, with whom she shares a name.

Una has been permanently damaged, but by allowing her changes of place between our home, Mary’s, and even Ebe’s, who has favored Una since the days we lived together in Salem, the years pass for us in a kind of manageable existence.

Rose takes lessons with her cousins and the Alcotts, and has an inclination toward writing stories until her father sees her doing so, and erupts in a temper that shocks us all. She has not picked up the pen for fiction since then. Julian is accepted at Harvard College, far enough away for him to achieve some independence, but close enough so that he may visit whenever he chooses.

Nathaniel works on his manuscripts in his sky parlor, sketching what he hopes will be his best work, spawned from a lifetime of travels and experiences. But after we hear of the first shots of the war being fired at Fort Sumter in ’sixty-one, and then learn that Louisa Alcott is called to join the nursing units at the Washington hospitals, and then suffer the death of our friend Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel lays down his pen.

It is May of 1862, and I stand with Lidian Emerson at Henry Thoreau’s graveside in Sleepy Hollow, more than a year after the war began. Emerson listens to Ellery, who gestures large and cries openly over the loss of his friend. I cannot help but think he disturbs the forest air, which must wish to be still with the passing of one of its sons. Nathaniel stands alone at the crest of a hill with his back to the mourners. That is the way Henry would have wanted us to behave at his funeral—in quiet, solitary reflection under the dome of the sky and the canopy of leaves. A sob escapes Lidian’s mouth, and I draw her to me.

“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.