He’s taller and handsomer than I remember, with sandy brown hair and piercing blue eyes. There’s something equine about the way he tosses his head and shifts his feet. A pulsating thrum.
In the Shell Room he runs his hand along the mantelpiece, brushing off the dust. Picks up Mother’s cracked white teapot and turns it around. Cups my grandmother’s chambered nautilus in his hand and leafs through the filmy pages of her old black bible. No one has opened my poor drowned uncle Alvaro’s sea chest in decades; it screeches when he lifts the lid. Andy picks up a shell-framed portrait of Abraham Lincoln, looks at it closely, sets it down. “You can feel the past in this house,” he says. “The layers of generations. It reminds me of The House of the Seven Gables. ‘So much of mankind’s varied experience had passed there that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart.’”
The lines are familiar. I remember reading that novel in school, a long time ago. “We’re actually related to Nathaniel Hawthorne,” I tell him.
“Interesting. Ah yes—Hathorn.” Going to the window, he gestures toward the field. “I saw the tombstones in the graveyard down there. Hawthorne lived in Maine for a while, I believe?”
“I don’t know about that,” I admit. “Our ancestors came from Massachusetts. Nearly two hundred years ago. Three men, in the middle of winter.”
“Where in Massachusetts?”
“Salem.”
“Why’d they come up?”
“My grandmother said they were trying to escape the taint of association with their relative John Hathorne. He was chief justice of the witch trials. When they got to Maine they dropped the ‘e’ at the end of the name.”
“To obscure the connection?”
I shrug. “Presumably.”
“I’m remembering this now,” he says. “Nathaniel Hawthorne left Salem too, and also changed the spelling of the name. But a lot of his stories are reworkings of his own family history. Your family history, I suppose. Moral allegories about people determined to root out wickedness in others while denying it in themselves.”
“Actually,” I tell him, “there’s a legend that as one of the condemned witches stood at the scaffold, waiting for the noose, she uttered a curse: ‘May God take revenge on the family of John Hathorne.’”
“So your family is cursed!” he says with delight.
“Maybe. Who knows? My grandmother used to say that those Hathorn men brought the witches with them from Salem. She kept the door open between the kitchen and the shed for the witches to come and go.”
Looking around the Shell Room, he says, “What do you think? Is it true?”
“I’ve never seen any,” I tell him. “But I keep the door open too.”
OVER THE YEARS, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible.
Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.
1896–1900
My mother drapes a wrung-out cloth across my forehead. Cold water trickles down my temple onto the pillow, and I turn my head to smear it off. I gaze up into her gray eyes, narrowed in concern, a vertical line between them. Small lines around her puckered lips. I look over at my brother Alvaro standing beside her, two years old, eyes wide and solemn.
She pours water from a white teapot into a glass. “Drink, Christina.”
“Smile at her, Katie,” my grandmother Tryphena tells her. “Fear is a contagion.” She leads Alvaro out of the room, and my mother reaches for my hand, smiling with only her mouth.
I am three years old.
My bones ache. When I close my eyes, I feel like I’m falling. It’s not an altogether unpleasant sensation, like sinking into water. Colors behind my eyelids, purple and rust. My face so hot that my mother’s hand on my cheek feels icy. I take a deep breath, inhaling the smells of wood smoke and baking bread, and I drift. The house creaks and shifts. Snoring in another room. The ache in my bones drives me back to the surface. When I open my eyes, I can’t see anything, but I can tell my mother is gone. I’m so cold it feels like I’ve never been warm, my teeth chattering loudly in the quiet. I hear myself whimpering, and it’s as if the sound is coming from someone else. I don’t know how long I’ve been making this noise, but it soothes me, a distraction from the pain.
The covers lift. My grandmother says, “There, Christina, hush. I’m here.” She slides into bed beside me in her thick flannel nightgown and pulls me toward her. I settle into the curve of her legs, her bosom pillowy behind my head, her soft fleshy arm under my neck. She rubs my cold arms, and I fall asleep in a warm cocoon smelling of talcum powder and linseed oil and baking soda.
SINCE I CAN remember I’ve called my grandmother Mamey. It’s the name of a tree that grows in the West Indies, where she went with my grandfather, Captain Sam Hathorn, on one of their many excursions. The mamey tree has a short, thick trunk and only a few large limbs and pointy green leaves, with white flowers at the ends of the branches, like hands. It blooms all year long, and its fruit ripens at different times. When my grandparents spent several months on the island of St. Lucia, my grandmother made jam out of the fruit, which tastes like an overripe raspberry. “The riper it gets, the sweeter it gets. Like me,” she said. “Don’t call me Granny. Mamey suits me just fine.”
Sometimes I find her sitting alone, gazing out the window in the Shell Room, our front parlor, where we display the treasures that six generations of sailors brought home in sea chests from their voyages around the world. I know she’s pining for my grandfather, who died in this house a year before I was born. “It is a terrible thing to find the love of your life, Christina,” she says. “You know too well what you’re missing when it’s gone.”
“You have us,” I say.
“I loved your grandfather more than all the shells in the Shell Room,” she says. “More than all the blades of grass in the field.”