The Holder of the World (24 page)

Salem children were warned about the small house jammed with brass and copper items, called by many the House of Enchantment, meaning the place of ultimate debauchery. They were warned of ingesting the attitudes of such a house, along with the strong food and drink, where all the inhabitants, particularly the younger generation, carried the double taint of voluptuaries’ blood, where seditious sentiments were openly aired. “We are Americans to freedom born!” White Pearl and Black Pearl were heard to mutter, the latter even in school.

Respectable people expressing such attitudes would have gone immediately to jail. But the women had for so long indulged a liberty of eccentric dissent that their certification of certain extreme positions was considered advantageous to the maintenance of social order.

White Pearl eked out a living as a nurse, veterinarian, even, on rare occasion, doctor. Responsible citizens avoided her services, but she did enjoy a clientele of divers men and women who came from curiosity and stayed for the wealth of her storytelling, the pungency of her opinions. A more refined age in a more sophisticated city might have called it a salon.

JOSEPH HATHORNE
, a boy of ten, “My doleful young Joseph,” White Pearl called him in her letters, son of the witchcraft judge, John Hathorne, was only nine years old when Pearl returned with her baby and her mother, and he seemed to have found in her company, doing odd jobs, running errands, a corrective to the orthodoxy of his household. He even went to sea, driven from the taint of Salem, drawn by the stories of the China and India trade that White Pearl related as she sewed. His great-grandson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, was born in Salem in 1804.

And so all of this had happened a century before the writer’s birth, a century and a half before he wrote his morbid introspection into guilt and repression that many call our greatest work. Preach! Write! Act! He wrote against the fading of the light, the dying of the old program, the distant memory of a shameful, heroic time. Time, O Time! Time to tincture the lurid colors, time for the local understudies to learn their foreign lines, time only to touch and briefly bring alive the first letter of an alphabet of hope and of horror stretching out, and back to the uttermost shores.

About the Author

BHARATI MUKHERJEE was born in Calcutta. She attended the universities of Calcutta and Baroda, where she received a master’s degree in English and Ancient Indian Culture. She came to America in 1961 to attend the Writer’s Workshop and received a master of fine arts and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She became an American citizen in 1988. She is a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and is married to the writer Clark Blaise.

Mukherjee is the author of eight books of fiction—
Desirable Daughters, The Tiger’s Daughter, Wife, Darkness, The Middleman and Other Stories
(which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989),
Jasmine, Leave It to Me
, and
The Holder of the World
—and two books of nonfiction, written with her husband,
Days and Nights in Calcutta
and
The Sorrow and Terror
.