Page 21 of The Invisible Hour

The lilacs had begun to bloom and there was a scrim of hazy purple all through the neighboring backyards and gardens. The hedge beside the back door was wreathed with flowers in shades of dark and light violet. The peepers were going mad, and, because it was dusk, clouds of mosquitoes and mayflies arose, birds swooped over the river, the verdant field beyond the far bank turned from green to an inky black.

Sarah was watching the bluebirds soar across the field, their last flight before night fell. The stars were already beginning to prick through the darkening sky. Soon the owls would hoot in the tree-tops.

“I always think of Constance standing at the door, waiting for us to arrive,” Mia said. “She had the guest room ready for me, and she never questioned me the way someone else might have. She just took me in.” Mia laughed then, remembering how fierce Constance had been when Joel Davis had shown up at the library, and they both recalled how brave she was, even though she was tiny, not more than five two. “I think she would have hit him with a book if she had to,” Mia said. “And it was a paperback.”

“I heard that he’s having trouble with the government. I didn’t know whether or not I should tell you.”

Mia glanced at Sarah. “I should know.”

“They’re finally investigating him,” Sarah told her. “It took them long enough.”

“Good.” Mia felt a burning in her chest. “I hope they put him in jail, where he belongs.”

“He claimed the Community was a religion, and never paid a cent in taxes, and now the town council has asked him to prove that the land is really his, and he seems to have a problem doing that. His people are losing faith, and so many have left, especially the younger ones.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Mia said. “I hope they all leave.”

“There are a few holdovers, farming and tending the orchards, but I’ve heard that the buildings have all been neglected. People say the Community won’t be there much longer.”

Mia wondered what would happen to the cemetery if the Community land was taken over by the town. She thought of Ivy there, resting among the ferns. Mia could feel her heart opening and she thought of all the nights she had spent here listening to the river, and all the love Sarah and Constance had given her when they certainly didn’t have to. She wished somehow Ivy could have known she had wound up in a family after all.

“I owe you and Constance everything,” Mia said. “What would I have ever done without you?”

“My dear girl, I thought you understood,” Sarah responded. “You rescued yourself.”

CONSTANCE’S FUNERAL WAS HELD on an unusually warm day in May when the sky was cobalt blue. It was well attended, with guests that included colleagues from the library, neighbors and shopkeepers, children from the story time hours. Sarah and Constance also had a loyal circle of friends in Boston and Cambridge, many of them Wellesley alumnae, and they all were there as well. In the chapel of the big white church, Mia sat in the second row, behind Sarah, who was between Constance’s two sisters, both of whom wept for all the years they’d lost when they weren’t close.

It was a perfect day as they walked to the cemetery, following the hearse. There weren’t many spaces left in the wooded section of Sleepy Hollow, and Miss Allen had been lucky to purchase a plot in a shady glen, where the crowd now gathered in a quiet and respectful manner, although Sarah could be heard weeping and Constance’s sisters cried as well. People whispered that Constance had changed countless lives, as librarians often did, and it was true there were several people who had come to pay their respects that she likely would not have recognized, grown men and women who had found help and consolation in the library when they were small. I have just the right book for you, Miss Allen would always say, and she always did.

All around the grave were the flowers sent by those who were in attendance and those who were too far away to be in Concord. There was a wreath of white roses from a cousin, and a large display of lilacs from some of Constance’s and Sarah’s friends at Simmons. In the rear, behind all of the other bouquets, there was a glass jar of leaves. Mia felt something cold inside her chest, and she asked the funeral director’s assistant if he might take that offering away.

“I don’t care what you do with it,” Mia said. She hadn’t looked closely at the leaves, but she knew who’d delivered them. “Just get rid of it.”

At the end of the service, Mia remained at the edge of the assembled mourners who circled Sarah to offer condolences. There was to be a gathering at the inn, with martinis served along with pimento and grilled cheese canapes on crustless white bread and dishes of macaroni and cheese. As Sarah guided Constance’s sisters toward the inn, Mia remained beside the last of the rhododendron, still in bloom, with their huge purple flowers and dark, leathery leaves. She couldn’t yet bring herself to have polite conversation with people she barely knew. She was cast back to the day of her mother’s funeral, when Joel wore a black suit in the sudden stifling heat and Mia refused to leave the burying ground.

The day was growing even hotter, and Mia was wearing her long black dress and Ivy’s boots. It occurred to her that she would never have had this second life if she hadn’t run away from the Community, if Sarah hadn’t given her the key to the library and Constance hadn’t opened her heart to her, and she would be damned if she brought her bad fortune to them in the form of Joel Davis. She shivered to think that if she hadn’t found The Scarlet Letter, none of the rest of her life would have happened.

Mia opted to walk on, to find some solitude and shade, passing Cat’s Pond, simply and artfully designed by Thoreau, where the calm surface was filled with water lilies. Thoreau had written about the garden cemetery, In the midst of death we are in life. She came upon the surprisingly grand grave of Emerson, a huge boulder up on the hill, but she went on, past Thoreau’s modest grave, engraved with a simple Henry, walking until she reached Hawthorne’s headstone. She sank down in the grass and listened to the birds in the trees. She had brought her copy of The Scarlet Letter with her, to remind herself that life was still worth living, even on this dark day. She placed the book on Hawthorne’s grave. All that she was and ever would be was because of him. Without him she would not exist. She would be nothing at all, another drowned girl in a river where all the stones were black.

All around the cemetery paths there were wild plants, woodbine, raspberry, goldenrod, moss. Mia made a wish that she could go to the author who had saved her and know him, as she knew his book. Then she felt foolish, and much too grown-up for such nonsense, a woman sitting in a cemetery who still believed there might be magic in this world. She held the book to her chest. She could almost feel the words inside, as if each page had a beating heart. If it was a dream it was ours alone.

She could feel something go through her, as if there was lightning in the air, as if dreams could happen in the waking world. She curled up and gazed at the sky, and it changed from blue to starry black, as a sweep of crows went by. It seemed the world spun faster than it ever had before. All at once the birds were singing in the hedges, and morning was rising, and everything Mia had ever wanted had finally come to be.

PART TWO 1837

CHAPTER FOUR THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED

He was the man who people thought had everything, and yet, he’d always been convinced he had nothing at all. He was prone to black moods, even though he was doted upon by his mother and two sisters, and was highly intelligent, as well as so extremely handsome that when he walked through the town of Salem women grew faint. It was said that Lord Byron had the same effect on women, but Byron was most assuredly aware of his good looks and Nathaniel Hawthorne never looked in a mirror. He had no vanity and feared that all he would see in a mirror was the family guilt he carried, the poisonous remnants of all the dread and horror his ancestors had been responsible for, a burden that rested squarely on his shoulders. The dark history of his family led him to write about sin and redemption and do his best to make amends for crimes he didn’t commit. He would change his name as soon as he was able, adding the w to distinguish himself from his predecessors, for his background was an embarrassment he wished to keep secret. His great-great-grandfather had been the cruelest judge at the witchcraft trials in 1692 and the only one to never repent; he and all his children had been cursed by the women of Salem, and now Nathaniel felt he was the one who must atone for the family’s sins.

He’d begun to feel different from other people when he was a boy of nine, after injuring his leg. Such small occurrences could change a life and leave a person with a completely different fate, a path they would never have imagined they might take. One moment he was a part of the pulse of the world, and the next he could only watch, looking past the shady elm trees, prevented from joining in by a pane of glass, divided from all others. The cause of his injury had been a game of bat and ball, and the result of that game was that he needed to use crutches and was housebound for close to two years. Nathaniel had spent nearly all that time reading, and sometimes he felt as if each book was a raft and he was out at sea, as his father the sea captain had been before his early death when Nathaniel was only four.

His childhood affliction caused him to be moody, with a dark cast to his thoughts, but he had also become a keen observer during his recovery, able to see what others might not. His observations of cruelty went beyond those of most boys his age, whether it be a butterfly caught in a spider’s web, or a homeless man on the street, or a stray dog set to howling. He began to invent stories then, written down in milk, what he called invisible ink, for he was interested in the telling and imagining, not in sharing the tales he concocted. No matter what anyone said, no matter what they believed, he was convinced that there was magic in the world.

Perhaps his fortune was set in place when he was born on July 4, an auspicious day. His mother, Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, known as Betsy to her neighbors, and Eta to her children, told her brothers that her boy would be exceptional, independent, and unique, and would grow to be a man like no other. She was soon enough a recluse, living in the grief of her widowhood, so enamored of books she taught her children to read nearly at the same time they learned to walk. The family had very little money following Nathaniel’s father’s death at sea after he had contracted yellow fever in the Dutch Suriname in 1808. They depended upon the kindness of two generous uncles who treated Nathaniel like a son, taking on all the family’s financial burdens. Betsy and the children lived with the uncles in Salem, then, when it was deemed that Maine would be a more healthful place for all, they boarded on a farm until the uncles built them their own house. Nathaniel set to work creating a newspaper of his writings called The Spectator, distributed to relations and friends. It was then that Nathaniel truly began to appreciate the years he had spent alone in his room, the distance from other people that had given him the ability to observe and to feel what another might had also made him a writer.

While other boys had been skating and playing ball, Nathaniel had been considering the state of humankind. He came from people who tended to be gloomy, and his mother often was not to be found, having taken to her bed, avoiding the world in a way Nathaniel understood, for Betsy had never quite recovered after losing her husband. He felt for those who ached from loss. When a couple in Maine froze to death while they were in search of each other during a storm, and his uncle Richard had adopted one of their orphans, Nathaniel wrote an ode to the couple’s love and faithfulness. He didn’t sleep all night as he worked, and both his sisters knew then and there that, whether it was fortunate or not, Nathaniel’s future was clear. Their brother would be a writer.

AT BOWDOIN COLLEGE, NATHANIEL had close friends, men who were fated to become famous and rich. Longfellow, who entered school at fifteen, a few years behind Nathaniel, was not known to go out to taverns and enjoy himself, but there were many others who were more than willing to savor their time at Bowdoin. They included Horatio Bridge, who Nathaniel joined for fishing and swimming in the ice-cold lakes and ponds, and Franklin Pierce, to whom Nathaniel was perhaps closest, and who would later become president. Still, Nathaniel wasn’t swayed by his friends’ craving for power and influence, even though he was the one who had endless potential, which included a brilliant mind and those good looks he always tried to deny. No matter what they said, he wanted nothing more than to be a writer. It had been his dream since he’d begun to read, and it was all he wanted even though his friends told him he didn’t use his abilities to their full extent. Did he wish to waste his gifts on a life spent alone with paper and pen, locked away from all others?