Hester(104)

“It’s just like the letter in the book.” Margaret’s pale skin, her dark hair, her eyes the same pale green-gold as his. “It’s more than strange, Mama—not only the scarlet A, the way it is hidden, but the girl in the book is named Pearl just as Uncle Darling has always called me his Pearl of the Sea. Why, Mama? What is there that I do not know?”

I wanted to tell her there are many things in this world a child must not ask. But I remembered how I’d hungered to know everything about my own mother’s past so that I could understand who I was and what I should do with my colors and my fears. And I thought about my mother, who’d meant to keep me safe but instead had died before I could understand how I should live.

I’d spent half my life waiting for my time, straddling the world between the living and the dead, between God and the faerie world, between the past and the future. I did not want that for my daughter.



* * *



THAT NIGHT I got on my knees, dragged the tapestry from beneath my bed, and carried it to Margaret’s cottage where I spread it before her. My needle and thread told every secret I could not speak: Isobel Gowdie, the crossing on the New Harmony, the cottage at the edge of Salem, Mercy’s yard full of chickens, the devil in the forest, oceans of blue hope and darkness, the patterns and stitches I’d made and taught myself—a long hedgerow of pink and white hawthorn flowers, Zeke’s blue cart, the tiger gloves, the purple and yellow irises my mother sketched a lifetime ago. There were the seals that came to me in the cove, the lantern sign, the cemetery where Nat kicked the tombstone, the maple trees beside the sugar house, and all of the whaling ships, the circle of friends in Halifax, the shop with my sign above the door: Lighthouse Dress Shop and Sundries.

In the center of the piece was the bold red A, half as tall as a man, as bright as when the letter first declared itself to me.

Margaret studied the banner in silence for a long time. Finally she went to her shelf and found the book with a scarlet letter ablaze on its cover.

“Is this about you?” she asked.

I remembered everything from the moment I saw him on the dock to the moment when he pulled back my hair and raised up a pained longing that no one had ever unleashed. I gave myself to him, and if I told it to my daughter then she would know my secrets. And if I told it truthfully, she would know my pain. And if I told it right, she would learn everything that I know about love and desire and the colors, about this world and the hidden world, about the man with the red-and-gold voice who was almost the ruin of me.

And she would know how I survived.





NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





I was in ninth grade when I first read The Scarlet Letter. I don’t remember how I felt about the love story, but I do remember how I felt about luminous young Pearl. Hester was a mother, Dimmesdale was a minister, but Pearl was a wild child and I saw myself in her.

Much like Hawthorne, I was a desultory student and a voracious reader, preoccupied with family matters and the question of how I might fit into the world. Pearl was unpredictable; her fate hung in question until she sailed across the ocean and later came into great wealth. For my school research paper, I focused on Pearl’s symbols—Pearl in the moonlight, Pearl in the forest, Pearl asking Dimmesdale if he will stand beside her and Hester on the scaffold.

Years later, when my own children were reading The Scarlet Letter, I recognized Hester Prynne’s seminal importance as a heroic woman who defies powerful men and vengeful villagers by wearing the symbol of her shame like a badge of courage. I understood that while Hester could not escape her past or her fate, she could harness her power by summoning the strength of her creative fortitude.

I gave that creative fortitude to my character Isobel Gamble.



* * *



Hester began with the question: What if Hester Prynne told her own story? I traced America’s historical fiction back to the beginning—to The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850—and rediscovered Hester as our first historical feminist hero and our original badass single mother; a woman Hawthorne created to both challenge and substantiate the notion of female weakness.

Hawthorne was a secretive man who burned many of his letters, papers, and journals. He published only five novels in his lifetime; all but The Scarlet Letter spring from a known inspiration—Fanshawe is based on his college experiences, The Blithedale Romance on his time at the experimental utopian Brook Farm, The House of Seven Gables on his family’s role in the Salem witch trials, and The Marble Faun on his years in Italy.

We can only speculate upon Hester’s true origins, as there’s no source evidenced in the author’s life or writing, no original manuscript or notes to study. Many scholars remark on a guilt and shame that Hawthorne carried all his life. Writing in the New Criterion in 1985, the literary scholar James Tuttleton says, “[S]ince The Scarlet Letter deals with adultery, could it be that Hawthorne committed adultery and expiated it through the act of writing the novel? Is he a closet Arthur Dimmesdale or a Parson Hooper mystifying his audience in the act of performing an obscure penance? Some critics and biographers have thought so.…”

Writing Hester was a delicious journey through the possibility and plausibility of this very idea.



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Every novel has many threads woven together to form a whole—many seeds are needed to plant a rainbow—and this one is no exception. I read countless books and articles about Hawthorne, most notably Brenda Wineapple’s biography Hawthorne: A Life (2003), my dearly missed friend Louise DeSalvo’s Nathaniel Hawthorne (1987), Nina Baym’s seminal The Scarlet Letter: A Reading (1986), and Henry James’s Hawthorne (1879).