Yes, Hawthorne was one of my favorite writers, and
The Scarlet Letter
was one of the great American classics, and I had written so many notes in the margins of every page, had highlighted half the words written in the novel with asterisks alongside them. But the fact that Ethan had given me the copy was the saddest part of this incomprehensible loss. Oddly, I began to dream about the book. I dreamed it would be on my desk under a single sheet of paper, and once I dreamed it was in the refrigerator leaning against a half gallon of milk, the spine as red as strawberries.
My classes began in less than three weeks and so finally, reluctantly, I bought a copy in the small bookstore in Persia. I wasn’t surprised I had to order it. A single copy of
The House of Seven Gables
was the only Hawthorne book in the shop. The lady behind the counter, someone I’d seen on occasion at church and in the small shops in the square, assured me she would have it for me in two days. I weighed my options and placed the order. I really had no other choice. I had to read the novel and take notes before the semester began.
It was the morning two days later and I was sitting at the counter in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading some recent criticism on Hawthorne—the critic compared him to Richard Ford and the elevation of the human heart through self-flagellation—when I heard Truman enter the room. I didn’t look up but saw peripherally that he was wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers with his heel outside the shoe, a habit he’d instituted a year before. It drove Ethan crazy, as the sneakers Truman demanded were expensive and wearing down the heel was a waste of good money. I just shrugged it off as teenage-hood. He disappeared behind the refrigerator door he’d opened and I lost concentration.
We all have our pet peeves and mine is the inordinate amount of time both my husband and son spend staring into the confines of a cold pantry the size of a generous broom-closet. I waited. I could see his hand on the handle, his fingers tapping to a rhythm he either heard on his iPod or in his lovely brain. In the time he stood there I could’ve completed two more paragraphs of what was turning out to be a rather interesting parallel of thought between Hawthorne and Ford—I had begun to wonder where Melville would fit into all this.
“Nothing has changed from last night, Tru,” I finally said.
His body remained hidden, but his face appeared out from the door. He smiled. “How do you know Dad didn’t raid the hell out of it?”
“Don’t say hell. You’re only thirteen.”
He stared at me for a moment in amusement.
“I wonder where I picked up the habit, Amy?”
He’d begun to call me Amy since I’d insisted he read Salinger’s
Franny and Zoey
. I wanted him to know it wasn’t abnormal to be precocious. Lately I’d been wondering if it had been such a good idea.
“And don’t call me Amy. Mom to you, thank you.”
He closed the door and stood looking at some of what was magnetized on the door. Then he reached behind his back and pulled out a book, came over to his end of the counter and slid it toward me. It was my copy of
The Scarlet Letter.
Before I could say anything, he said, “The book’s about love. It’s as simple as that.”
“What the hell, Truman Engroff! I’ve been looking all over for this book. Where did you find it?”
I picked it up and fanned through the pages.
“I Googled some of what has been said about the book and most of it is bullshit…I mean what people say about it.”
“Where did you find this book, Truman?”
He shrugged his shoulders and leaned his elbows on the counter. “I found it in your bookshelf in your office. I liked the title.”
“I’ve been looking everywhere for this book. You can’t just do that without saying something to me. You can’t imagine…”
“I saw what Dad wrote in the front. I can’t see Dad sitting in your classroom without interrupting every two seconds.”
“I’m so angry with you and so relieved.”
“I mean, I was thinking,” he went on, ignoring my obvious irritation, “that what really matters in the story is not what happened when Hester and Pearl came out of the prison, but what happened before that. A minister and this beautiful woman, both Puritans, getting it on, and her already married to this really perverse dude, Chillingsworth. There’s only one thing that could’ve made them do something like that and it wasn’t being horny.”
The expression “swelling with pride” once again became a reality for me. Ethan and I often shook our heads over our son’s intelligence. I looked at his face, at those dark brown eyes that always seemed to be hiding something. It was in his eyes that you could see his intellect. In the same way a pianist’s hands showed dexterity or an athlete’s carriage showed agility, Truman’s eyes were the calling card of a vibrant mind.
For the moment I forgot about his carelessness with the book—he must’ve known from his father’s inscription and all the writing inside that it was important beyond being a book.
“So what is it then, if not passion?”
“I mean it’s that too, but it can’t only be that. Dimmesdale is jeopardizing everything, for instance. He’ll be cast out from the colony if they don’t just flat-out hang his ass. I mean, he must be a minister for a reason…he doesn’t seem like a jokey guy.”
I was squirming with delight. I’d taught the novel to college freshmen for the past ten years and most of them couldn’t realize this important point.
“No, he’s not a jokey guy, Tru. None of those people in that place and in that time were jokey. Anything but.”
“Right,” he said. “And that proves my point. But I have one question.”
I couldn’t help marvel at this boy of mine. My amazement with what went on inside his head never stopped. I couldn’t wait for Ethan to come home so I could tell him. Our love made him just as Dimmesdale and Hester’s love had made Pearl, that’s what I wanted to tell him.
“Shoot,” I said.
“How did Hester end up with Chillingsworth? I mean he’s this really old guy and not very attractive, and so…what’s that word you always accuse Dad of being? Intractable. I mean, he’s frustrating to read about because he should know there’s no reason for him to be with Hester.”
“The marriage was probably arranged. Her father was friends with Chillingsworth and so he gave her to him. But the more important part, Tru, is that they come from the old, established conventional England and they’ve come to the New World to start over.”
Truman brightened. “And the irony is that they are even more set in their ways here…intractable here.”
“Yes, Tru! That’s a major point Hawthorne is attempting to make.”
Truman laughed. “Nothing’s changed. It’s like living here in Persia with these people, right?”
I nodded my head. “Yes, to some degree. But remember, we live here, and so do the Rodenbaughs.”
Truman shrugged and pushed himself up to his full height with his elbows. He looked at me intently for a moment, and before I could speak about taking the book he said, “I wouldn’t mind sitting in on one of your classes, Amy. I have a feeling you know what you’re talking about.”
Before I could even shout my reproach he’d turned and left the kitchen, and then I heard the sound of him bounding up the stairs. I looked at the cover of the book with Hester looking seductive and innocent at the same time and I thought that’s what our Truman was: seductive and innocent all at one time.
No wonder Carly Rodenbaugh loves him so much,
I thought.
Carly
Five years before Truman’s death
I went to Cape Cod with the Engroffs in 2005. They have a house in Sandwich, or between Sandwich and Barnstable, and I begged my parents to let me go with them over spring vacation. It was early that year—end of March—and bone-chilling cold, as my dad would say.
Truman, of course, had friends there because the Engroffs have owned the house for three generations, and, of course, Truman was aloof with them. He was always like that, except with me. The two of us went into Sandwich on bikes, and my hands were so cold by the time we got there I felt like crying, but I didn’t because of the other five kids we met up with.
They seemed strange to me. They had odd accents and were in a constant
ready
mode. I told Truman later that I felt that if I’d said, “Let’s knock off the local Quick Check!” they’d’ve done it. Truman laughed but that was as far as he went with his assessment of my assessment.
We met in the middle of Sandwich, which could’ve been in the middle of Montana—where my grandparents have a ranch—for how dead it was in the middle of March.
Oh, oh, sorry Truman, the end of March. Fucking excuse me.
Half the stores were closed, but what really got me was that none of the five local kids seemed to mind the wind coming off the ocean—which was less than a mile away—and neither did Truman. My hands were raw, that’s how cold the wind was.
Two girls were there and they were nice to me, but I had a feeling it was only because I was with Truman. I saw them looking at him, but I saw all girls looking at him at that time of our life and I didn’t like it. Not one fucking bit.
We were next to the Daniel Webster and we were all going back and forth in place with our bikes and talking.
One of the kids said, “Let’s go down to the pier.”
The way he said it, it sounded like “pee-yah.”
I didn’t want to because of my hands and I knew it would get even colder near the ocean, but Truman was all for it.
“Cool,” he said.
When did Truman ever say “cool?” Ever?
We took our bikes out of town and across 6A, which was completely fucking deserted except for one pickup truck with lobster traps in the back parked at a liquor store, and followed a road that got sandier as the wind blew harder. I couldn’t cry though, because the other girls weren’t. I just wanted to get back to the Engroffs’ house where they had a beautiful fireplace in their library and where I was going to put my hands until they tingled with heat.
The tide was up.
“Way up,” a kid named Mark said as we took our bikes along the boardwalk, which had people’s names written either on the walkway or on the railing that lead to the ocean. Locals must’ve paid the town to have their names etched in the railing.
The place was so beautiful, so different from the Jersey Shore where my family and I often went. We got off our bikes and looked down at the water. The dune grass was submerged, the water inky black. All four boys peered over, including Truman, as if he was truly one of those locals with the strange accents, and they began to talk about how cold the water was.
“Must be fuckin’ cold in there,” the boy named Lennie said.
Mark laughed. “You wouldn’t have the balls to go in.”
“Neither would you, pussy,” Lennie said.
They looked down some more and a kid named Troy said, “No one has the balls to jump in there. No one.”
It was so cold and now the two girls whose names I forget were beginning to complain.
“Let’s go, Mark. It’s fuckin’ cold!” the one girl said.
“Yeah,” the other girl said, “It’s fuckin’ cold.”
I wanted to chime in, but I didn’t.
And then—as if we were all in church, a whole congregation of churchgoers praying, it was so quiet suddenly—Truman said, “I’ll go in.”
“Fuck you, mainlander,” Lennie said. “You ain’t got the balls to do that.”
Truman looked at him with his Truman eyes. I knew right then and there that he was going to do it.
“There’s no way,” Mark said nervously. “You’d have to be fuckin’ crazy.”
“Fuck him,” Troy said, “He ain’t doin’ shit.”
“Don’t, Truman,” I said. He looked at me. “Please, Tru.”
“He ain’t. Don’t worry,” Mark said.
Truman bent down and unlaced his sneakers, slipped them off, toe to toe. He had on no socks, as usual, and was using my shoulder to keep his balance. He was wearing a hoodie (Columbia University) and took that off. He had a T-shirt underneath and I could already see the goose bumps on his arms. He removed the shirt.
“Stop fuckin’ around,” Mark said. “That fuckin’ water’s cold.”
Truman looked at him and smiled. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans and pulled them off. He was down to his boxers.
“Don’t, Tru. Please.”
Truman looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. Everyone was silent. Not a word, only the wind roaring in my ears like the sound of the ocean a hundred yards away. Truman climbed the two rungs of the wooden guardrail, stood on the top, looked back at us and plunged in feet first. All of us ran to the rail and looked over at the dark, almost inky black water. And then Truman emerged. He shook the water out of his hair, swam to the walkway, hoisted himself up and climbed over the wooden rail. By then I had his clothes and I handed them to him one at a time as he put them back on. He was shivering so badly he had to sit to get his shoes on and laced. Finally he stood.
“Fuckin’ nuts!” Troy said, laughing, and then we all began to laugh. We laughed hysterically. Maybe it was out of relief and maybe it was because it was so crazy. Whatever it was, we couldn’t stop laughing. And then a funny thing happened. Mark went over to Truman and hugged him. He held him for a minute and then he released him.