With Mother in and out of bed and Papa increasingly infirm, the duties of the household fall even more heavily on my brothers and me. We have no choice, or the whole farm will slide into entropy—animals unfed, the cows needing milking, tasks doubled for the next day. To get it all done I have to dim my brain, turn it down by notches like the flat-turn knob on a gas lantern, leaving only a nub of flame.
AS SUMMER TURNS to fall, envelopes with two-cent stamps postmarked Boston begin to arrive for me at the post office again. Ramona’s “small family wedding,” she reports, has grown, predictably, into a more lavish affair. Her dress will be modern, despite her mother’s objections—a white satin V-neck with a skirt just below the knee, a wide satin belt, and a bridal cap veil (not, God forbid, her grandmother’s, with its crumbling yellowed lace). “If suffragettes can picket the White House, I can express my emancipation from long skirts and old veils,” Ramona declares. She will carry a bouquet of irises like the bride on the cover of Hearst’s magazine.
The invitation—on thick cream card stock, hand-painted with pastel flowers—arrives in an oversized cream envelope. I stand in the road and read the words etched in florid black script:
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Carle
Respectfully request the honor of your presence
At the marriage ceremony of their daughter
Ramona Jane
And Harland Woodbury . . .
Equally respectfully, on notebook paper, I decline to attend. My brothers are busy with the harvest and I must prepare for the holidays, but we all send our best wishes to the happy couple. (And later a silverplate tea service marked down on sale at a home goods shop in Thomaston.)
After the wedding, held in early November, I receive a honeymoon postcard postmarked Newport—“Such magnificent houses! All the ladies here wear furs”—and, a few weeks later, a note describing the sunny apartment in a new brick building that the newlyweds are renting in Boston. “You must come and visit in early spring. I know Al will be busy with the planting, so bring dear Sam,” Ramona writes. “He needs an adventure, and so do you. It’s neither haying nor holiday season, so no excuses. A few weeks only! Nothing will be disrupted.”
The idea of traveling to Boston under such vastly different circumstances than the one I envisioned sends me to bed with a headache for the afternoon.
“YOU KNOW WE can’t possibly go,” I tell Sam when he confronts me with the letter, which I foolishly left open on the dining room table.
“Why not?”
“The distance . . . my infirmity—”
“Nonsense,” Sam says. “I’ve never been anywhere. Nor have you. We’re going.”
Looking at tall, handsome Sam, with his strong jaw and aquiline nose and piercing gray eyes, I think of all those seafaring Samuels he was named after, setting off to explore the world. Sam is twenty years old. Ramona is right—he needs an adventure. “You go,” I urge him.
“Not without you.”
“But—Al can’t manage the farm on his own.”
“He’s not on his own. Fred is here. And Papa will help.”
I give him a skeptical look. Papa hasn’t been much help for a while now.
“Al will be fine. I’m not taking no for an answer.”
So it is that early on a March morning in 1918, despite my trepidation, Al drives us through the fog to Thomaston, where Sam and I will catch a train bound for North Union Station in Boston. The staircases and ticket lines, narrow hallways and train platforms are a bewildering obstacle course for both of us, made even more difficult by my tight new shoes. Sam carries both suitcases and an overcoat and still manages to keep a firm arm under mine, steadying me as we slowly make our way toward the gate. When we finally get to our railway car, we collapse onto the red leather seats.
A few minutes after we’ve left the station, Sam asks, “Got anything to eat?”
I had packed a few dry biscuits in my bag, but when I pull them out, they crumble in my hand. Just as I’m thinking we might have to wait until Boston, the conductor, a red-faced man with a bristly mustache, happens along to collect our tickets. Sam fumbles through his jacket for them. “Let me guess,” the conductor says. “First time on a train?”
I nod.
“Thought so.” He leans over the seat. “Lavatories are in the next car . . .” He points a meaty finger toward the right. “And the dining room is four cars down. You can get a hot meal or a cup of tea. Or whiskey, if you prefer,” he says, chuckling. His breath is briny, like lobster.
“Thank you,” I say. But after he moves along, I tell Sam, “I don’t think we should. We need to budget.” We’ve brought $80 for the entire visit; the round-trip fare has already eaten up $5.58 each. But I’m also reluctant to make a spectacle of myself, jerking back and forth.
“What we need to do is eat,” Sam says.
“You go and bring me something small.”
Sam knows what I’m thinking. Four long cars. He stands with a flourish and holds out his arm. I take a deep breath and rise to my feet. But now there’s another question: Do we take our things with us so they won’t be stolen, or do we leave them here? An elderly woman with a face like a cellar apple leans forward in her seat across the aisle. “Don’t worry, dears, I’ll watch your bags.”
The swaying of the train actually disguises my infirmity. Accustomed to having to work to keep my balance, I adjust to it more quickly than Sam, who weaves from side to side like a drunkard. In the dining car, we eat ham sandwiches and drink tea with milk and sugar, gazing out at the rushing dark. For years I’ve dreamed of this moment—or rather, a moment like this. How different it is from my imaginings! My ankles are cold, my feet pinched in these new shoes, the air sour with tobacco smoke and body odor, the bread stale, the tea weak and bitter.
And yet—here I am, going somewhere new. How shockingly easy it was to pick up and go, to buy a ticket and board a train and head off into the unknown.
Portland, Portsmouth, Newburyport. We slow into stations one after another that never have meant more to me than words on a map. When we arrive in Salem, I think about our ancestor who lived here. I imagine Bridget Bishop standing on the scaffold, trying desperately to use the sentence against her to her own advantage. If you truly believe I’m a witch, she must have thought, then you must also believe I have the power to harm you. I’ve always assumed that John Hathorne trumped up those charges against rebels and misfits as a way of enforcing social codes. But now I wonder: What if he really did believe those women were capable of ensnaring his soul?
When we pull into South Station, it’s dark and cold and we must take three different trains to get to the Carles’—one of them elevated, which requires dragging our bags up and down stairs. With Sam’s arm under mine I concentrate on my steps, one foot up, the next one down. When I dreamed of a life with Walton, I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to navigate city living. Everything comes back to this body, this faulty carapace. How I wish I could crack it open and leave it behind.