Page 22 of The Invisible Hour

Do you not see how you affect women? You could have them all if you so wanted. You could possess a future that would cause us all to suffer from jealousy. You are unique, and we all know it. One of a kind. Our dear friend who doesn’t see himself as he truly is.

Nathaniel laughed at such nonsense, and he never told his friends about the curious things that happened to him, for it appeared that he was fated to have an appointment with the forces of magic. Twice he had seen ghosts, a matter he kept to himself. The first time was at the Athenaeum in Salem, where he’d spied an old man sitting in one of the library’s armchairs who suddenly vanished into thin air. Nathaniel soon discovered that one of the library’s wealthy patrons had, indeed, passed on in that chair, a spirit who was said to refuse to leave the place he had loved so well.

Another time, when he was about to go fishing, a woman in a blue dress stood in the grass soaking wet, as if she’d been swimming, but as he watched the blue of her dress became the open air and she disappeared bit by bit, watching him all the while. Later his uncle informed him there had been a drowning, a woman in a blue dress, a spirit called the Mermaid by locals. Nathaniel wrote a poem in her honor and continued to dream of women who were water nymphs, mythological creatures with lilies braided through their hair; he often awoke from these dreams aroused and in great physical need. Once, while walking through the remote woods in Maine, he had come upon a fortune-teller gathering sticks for a fire outside her wagon. He thought it best to avoid her, but the woman fell to her knees when she saw him, then lifted her eyes, staring as if bewitched. Are you a man or an angel? she had asked him, and he’d replied, Only a man. And one who is often lost, he thought. One who couldn’t seem to find his way in the world.

NATHANIEL OFTEN FELT LIKE a man talking to himself in a dark place. He was a loner, and he walked the streets at night, in the grips of what he called his cursed solitude. He locked himself away for days on end and accepted that this darkness of spirit was a family trait. His younger sister, Louisa, was also reclusive, known for her kind heart and her willingness to help her family, but he was closest to his older sister, Elizabeth, called Ebe, a pet name given to her by Nathaniel when he was too young to properly pronounce her given name. Elizabeth, too, had been a brilliant child, said to walk and talk at the age of nine months. She had a fine mind of her own, reading Shakespeare at twelve, and was well known to detest work of any kind that didn’t have to do with writing and reading, though she had little choice, for someone had to see to the chores. Nathaniel, on the other hand, was the son, and he had a calling, and that saved him; he was a reader turned into a writer, as was often the case when people fell in love with stories and found themselves rescued by the pages of novels.

Nathaniel wrote a novel called Fanshawe, begun in fits and starts while he was at Bowdoin, and although it was true no one would publish it, he published the book himself for a hundred dollars when he was twenty-four. He was not surprised when very few people other than family and friends read this first attempt, one he was regretting as soon as it was set in type, seeing nothing but his mistakes when he glanced over the pages. He hoped that it would disappear from memory despite a few fine reviews trickling in from critics. He half believed that the writers who’d favorably reviewed his book were drunk or suffering from spells of guilt for the many wretched reviews they’d given to other writers.

The feeling that he was a failure settled upon him in his murky room, which he often didn’t leave for days or weeks at a time, and then only to visit the Salem Athenaeum, the library where he read over a thousand books in twelve years, still writing as much as he could, endless pieces about literature and history, leaving Salem for the summers to travel with his uncles to the Saco River and the White Mountains and to Martha’s Vineyard, for the heat made it impossible for him to write, and in truth, once begun, the writing seemed to possess him, as if it was real life, and the life he led at home was the dream.

Hawthorne seemed a different person in the summer months. It was in the forests where he found his inspiration, and his true appreciation of solitude grew stronger. I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, he later remembered, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. He didn’t write in the summer, and he slipped off the skin of the boy at the window to become a man, with a man’s desires. The shyness that usually plagued him evaporated during the summertime, and those who met him then saw an entirely different man than the haunted fellow in Salem. He was good at sports, an expert fisherman, and maintained long-term friendships that often led to rowdy nights at local taverns around Sebago Lake in Maine.

He grew more handsome each year, with his thick black hair and intense gray eyes, which could appear to be purple or blue depending on the light, and his striking features, the large, generous mouth that curled up when he was amused, his high cheekbones. He liked to talk, and he liked women, who were drawn to him as if he were an elixir for their souls, and because of this charm he didn’t know he possessed, he nearly found himself engaged several times. He might have found himself unhappily wed if one of his uncles, Robert Manning, who was a surrogate father and had no family of his own, hadn’t taken him aside and said, “Think before you act, boy, or you’ll find yourself married to a stranger. Do you wish to wake beside this woman every morning of your life?”

Nathaniel resided in two worlds, the world of his writing and the world of his busy household, which he referred to as the owl’s nest. His uncle Robert was a pomologist, a fruit expert known for the thousand varieties of pear trees he grew in his orchards. Robert was at work on his famed Book of Fruits, and he insisted that a writer could also have a life beyond books. Robert had big plans for his nephew, and worried that Nathaniel was ensconced in the world that existed inside his mind. One minute he would be present, deep in conversation, and the next he was behind glass, as he had been as a boy, even when there was nothing separating him from the rest of the world. He quarreled with his uncle about his future, insisting that no man could be both a bookkeeper and a poet, and that he intended to be the latter.

Robert wanted Nathaniel to wake from his dreams and fantasies so that he might walk into the dull, tired world of figures and numbers and people who had no patience for stories. No one noticed that Elizabeth was becoming more despondent by the day due to the restrictions that she faced as a young woman. She could not go to college, or even work as a librarian, or find love if she was not chosen, or make her own decisions about her fate. She wondered what it would be like to lie with a complete stranger in a rented room and not once worry what the consequences would be, whether an unwanted child or a ruined reputation or a life cast out from family and society.

I have dreams as well, she’d told her brother. And they might as well be dust.

Nathaniel was more fortunate than she, for he was allowed an education and a career, and it annoyed Elizabeth when he couldn’t find any happiness. He’d sold a few hundred copies of his book before the publisher had ceased to be, but that was not enough to support his family, and his uncle sat him down and told him it was time for him to put away his dreams. On this the Manning brothers agreed; practicality was everything, and the cause for their wealth. When Richard had passed on, leaving nine children behind, Robert continued to act as Nathaniel’s father and more, as a trusted friend Nathaniel often turned to.

“There comes a time to give up dreams,” Robert had said. “I work because I must. We walk on earth, however we might stumble.”

Elizabeth was Nathaniel’s perfect audience, admiring her brother’s work, yet unafraid to question it with her astute editorial opinions. She was his most severe critic and his biggest champion. Nathaniel had once declared The only thing I fear is the ridicule of Elizabeth. When he began a magazine, Elizabeth contributed, but the articles were published under his name, as such ventures were not thought to be proper for a woman. In his opinion, his sister was far more clever than he, which made him even more hopeless. “I can never find quite the right word,” Nathaniel complained to her. One of his problems was that he was too quick to undo what he had written, finding the pages lacking in imagination. Elizabeth told him that judgment had ruined their family in the past, and he must not judge himself so harshly.

“It’s not the words alone that will make your work great, it’s your empathy,” Elizabeth told him. “You feel what others do and see what others might. You are your characters, and they are you, whether they be men or women, young or old. This is more than a talent—it’s a gift.”

As he wrote feverishly, Nathaniel became the characters he imagined and was transformed into these imaginary persons entirely; it was as if their souls had slipped into his own. When he put down his pen, he felt hollow for several hours, brooding and at odds, until the person that he was came back to him, returning as if he himself was a spirit caught in the ether, a man who might disappear if he wasn’t careful.

When Nathaniel’s friend Franklin Pierce came to visit, they went to the harbor, a rough area where shiploads of tea and silk arrived from China and sailors drank Jamaican rum. The two young men drank as well, but Nathaniel always stopped them from doing anything completely foolhardy. No leaping off the pier into the stone-cold harbor. No smoking opium in back rooms. Women were often the ones to try to seduce him, even those who wanted to be paid offered him their favors. Nathaniel didn’t know how other men behaved, but he couldn’t deny himself every pleasure of the flesh, and often women begged for more. He was an angel and a devil both, one told him, exactly what a woman wanted most of all.

He and Franklin frequently went into the woods, where women of a certain character danced in very little clothing for a price, and men sat drinking until they found themselves either in the arms of one of these women or passed out cold. Pierce was nicknamed Handsome Frank, but he looked average when compared to Nathaniel. Franklin was a politician, and so he saw nothing unusual in the fact that most men were two-faced. There were nearly always women involved on their nights out, but mostly Nathaniel listened to their heartbreaking stories, the children they had been forced to give away, the parents who had nothing to do with their wayward daughters. It was nearly morning when they returned from such outings, and Nathaniel often would sleep in the yard so his sisters and mother didn’t hear him come into the house and question him. He let Franklin sleep in the garden shed while he curled up beside the budding roses, strange blooms that were white at first, and then suddenly red.

Franklin had been elected to the New Hampshire legislature when he was twenty-four, was soon its speaker of the house, and was already planning a run for the U.S. Senate. He wanted to bring his friend along, and continued to suggest politics, but Nathaniel laughed. He was far too reserved and gloomy.

“Speak to crowds? I don’t think so. It’s best for me to stay in a single room.”

“You don’t see yourself,” Franklin said. “It’s quite the opposite. People are drawn to you. Men as well as women.”

“The women don’t know me. It’s a momentary passion,” Nathaniel said as they sprawled in the grass, hidden by the dark morning shadows, knowing the most sleep they’d get would be an hour or two.

“Nothing wrong with that, but no, it’s more.” Pierce considered his bighearted friend, who was naïve when it came to the shadier aspects of life. “You could be a fine politician if you’d give up your stories.”

Nathaniel’s uncle Robert had recently married, late in life, and Nathaniel had missed the wedding. He sent his regrets, not bold enough to mention that he was simply too busy writing to attend. There was no way for him to explain that a person didn’t chose being a writer, writing chose you. Already, tonight’s adventure was becoming a story in his mind of a young man’s journey in the woods and the loss of his innocence. He began writing that night, not on paper but in his mind, and when at last he sat at his desk with pen in hand, the tale poured out of him, set in the Salem of his ancestors, for their cursed lives were behind many of his stories, and when he was called down to supper and Elizabeth asked why his shoes were so muddy and why there were brambles in his hair and why on earth Franklin Pierce, soon to be a senator, had spent the entire day sleeping in the garden shed amid the bean seedlings and the burlap bags of loam, Nathaniel was not being dishonest when he said he really and truly did not know.

HIS STORIES AND ESSAYS appeared in one magazine after another, and in the early spring of 1837, at the age of thirty-two, Nathaniel’s second book, a collection of stories he called Twice-Told Tales was published to some very positive reviews, including one from his old schoolmate Longfellow, now quite famous himself, who called it a work of genius. Live ever, sweet, sweet book. There were those who called the book remarkable and tagged Hawthorne as an American genius. Even Edgar Allan Poe, who rarely praised anyone other than himself, wrote Mr Hawthorne is an original at all points. This was when Nathaniel had added a w to the family name Hathorne for publication, hoping to distance himself from his family history and any possible effects of the curse that had been set on them during the witchcraft trials; yet the book had sold little more than six hundred copies and the publisher had gone out of business with few having read the book. It seemed another failure to Hawthorne’s eyes. He was tormented by his writing now and sometimes imagined becoming a fisherman at Sebago Lake, for when he was a child, disappearing into the woods there was a pure pleasure.

The winter before his book of stories was published had been especially dark, with Nathaniel rarely leaving his room, writing as if the very act could erase the failures of his past. A deep gloom had set upon him so that he could barely see the light of day. Now at last, there had been a surge of spring and his tangled solitary time was over, but not in the way he had expected. In the month of May, when the lilacs in the garden bloomed in dark violet masses, Nathaniel’s life changed, as it had on that day when he was nine and his future was dismantled. Only now he had come to believe that his life was on the other side of the glass, it was right there waiting for him and all he had to do was walk out the door.

It occurred after a night when Nathaniel dreamed he had died and was taken to his grave in a black carriage pulled by a single black horse. The dream was so real that he’d felt as if his heart had stopped beating. He had been in a coffin, surrounded by the dark, and though he had no voice, he’d done his best to cry out. When he woke suddenly, he could not hold back his yowls into the emptiness. He was breathing hard, and he was suddenly overcome with the conviction that he had best begin to live, and that time on earth was terribly limited; it passed in the blink of an eye. He had not lived his life, he merely existed.

Nathaniel’s sisters had been awoken by his shouts and pounded on his door, worried that he’d become ill. It was early morning, not yet five and starless. Nathaniel was meant to go fishing with his uncle, they’d be after trout up in New Hampshire, but he could not imagine such worldly pursuits now. On this murky morning he felt too strongly as though he were a fish himself, caught in the net of some strange imaginings. He struggled to throw off his dream and managed at last to get out of bed, finding that he had fallen asleep while dressed.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled. “Leave me be.”

Nathaniel stumbled downstairs and reached for his black coat, then left the house, stepping into the dark morning, as he often did. There were hedges of lilacs in every garden he passed, and all of Salem seemed in bloom. When the city fell away, he began to trek into the forest, and soon he found himself in a woodland thick with unfolding ferns. Nathaniel felt intensely alive, his pulse was pounding in his head. He wrote about mysteries, wherein miraculous things could happen, whether redemption or damnation, and now he felt as if he had wandered into a tale from his own book.