The Holder of the World (5 page)

8

OF THE
next eight years in the Fitch household, only one record exists. No, I take that back; an asset hunter knows not to be arrogant, to keep pushing. You never know what might be out there. From those eight years, I have found one relevant exchange of letters. These are letters written not by her nor to her, but about her.

The first is dated June 15, 1686. It is addressed to Robert Fitch by William Pynchon, an innkeeper in Springfield, asking on behalf of his son, Solomon, and in the formulaic phrases of his time, leave for Solomon to court Hannah. His public house, William regrets, has an uncertain immediate future. But he promises to make over to Solomon five hundred pounds by that September, and one thousand more the following spring.

Solomon Pynchon must have carried that letter with him to the Fitch house, for Robert Fitch’s reply is dated June 16, 1686. I do not know when Solomon spied Hannah and thought it worth his while to have his father negotiate for her hand. He may have been living in Salem; he or his father may even have had a cassock or buffcoat for a puff-sleeved linen shirt sewn by her. Or he may have been passing through, scouting a city and a profession, and found himself on an alert afternoon stopping in on the aging-father and crippled-son cabinetmakers. Hannah was fifteen, and by most accounts, pert and presentable, with the level gaze and open face of a country-raised child, despite the cramped and septic streets of Salem that had been her only society. The letter has survived in Pynchon family memorabilia, for the Pynchons are one of New England’s upstanding families. I take no particular pride in having discovered it; it is reprinted in several anthologies. This modernized example comes from
Puritans Come A-Courting: Romantic Love in an Age of Severity
(University Presses of New England, 1972):

My dear Fitch:

My son, Solomon Pynchon of this city, having attained the Age of three and twenty and completed the Apprenticeship suitable to his Calling and Competence in the Candling and Provisioning of Ships begs Leave to ask the Hand in Marriage of your fair Daughter, the esteemed Hannah Easton, beneficiary of your Christian Intervention at the Time of her ultimate Distress and Orphaning. The highest Praise of her sober craftsmanship and Diligence and Virtue have reached Our Ears, bespoken by those Patrons who wear and display with Pride its Evidence
.

I am not a Wealthy man but as a publican my Prospects rise with that of my City. The steady Progress of these past Years give no Evidence of soon abating. I am therefore Pledged to make over to my Son the Sum of Five Hundred (500) Pounds Upon Successful Completion of Marriage Agreements and binding over of Legal Documents, and a further one Thousand (1,000) to follow upon exchange of Marriage Vows. Such amount shall permit the Establishment in Boston of Solomon Pynchon Ships Candlers & Provisioners, which, through careful Nurturing and the Beneficent Protection of
the One True and Almighty God, shall provide Comfort and Security for the families and issue of this noble Union
.

That particular letter is well known and frequently annotated for the evidence of close attention paid to finances and practicalities, and for the awkward display of passion in a Puritan context. The evidence of a dialogue, a response, however, has never been presented. For three hundred years the painfully earnest marriage proposal of the well-off Solomon Pynchon to the anonymous seamstress of humble origins, Hannah Easton, has gone unanswered and unacted upon. (Hannah apparently was known both by her birth name of Easton and that of her adoptive parents, but scholars had never put the two identities together.) For three hundred years, young Solomon has twisted in agony, a symbol of impotence and futility. (See
Neyther Myles Standish nor Solomon Pynchon Bee: Marriage Negotiation in Two New England Societies
, by my old Yale professor Asa Brownledge.) Scholars have cited the letter as evidence of social mobility in Puritan New England; feminists have seized upon its implied sexism. No one, however, identified Hannah Easton as Hannah Fitch aka Precious-as-Pearl and the Salem Bibi. If Solomon Pynchon’s marital overture had been accepted, the history of the United States would have been profoundly altered.

But there was a response.

“My dear Pynchon,” writes Robert Fitch, revealing a tone that seems slightly warmer, or at least indicative of earlier contact,

the Child to whom you refer and wish to welcome to your Family if by her leave she be so willing, is not my rightful Daughter, as might be ascertain’d at a glance, but is our
Daughter none the less. Her father, an educated gentleman late of England, Cultivator and town Clerk, perish’d fifteen years ago most suddenly, still in the prime of his manhood, leaving the young wife and infant daughter without physical or pecuniary Protection in that most perilous and misbegotten of Townships, the Village of Brookfield. God’s bountiful Mercy spared the Father and Husband the sight of slaughter and Abduction that Haunt the few Survivors even unto this Day
.

The Child came into our family on the night of her mother’s Abduction, and never in the intervening years has Word been rec’d of her Christian burial. The sauvages treat the body of their fallen with no more Courtesy than the carcass of a skinn’d bear, preferring their Dogs supp upon the remnants than they Bee commended to the Throne of God. I Believe the Ghost of the Girl’s Mother still Dwells in the Heart and treads the Breast of our Daughter. She can never truly permit herself to Be Our Daughter
.

It is the Ghost’s teaching and there is nothing She has learned from my Goodwife or the Salem Congregation that causes her Fingers to be so infected, that so pollutes her Eye with infamous design, to make of the plain and simple Necessities that might cover the shame of Nakedness in Man and Woman a Proud and Unseemly Decorativeness, as Unneeded as Paints and feathers on a sauvage
.

Allow me, my dear Pynchon, to spare your Son the Agonie we have known, and such can never be known by Those who have but Commercial Intercourse with Her; if the Angel of Death marks His Brides not with the Pain of physical Suffering, but is made known through Disruption of the Humours, Infections of the Very Soul, then we have been
Warned of His evil Intent to claim Her as His Bride, and we shall Warn others in our Turn
.

It is not from Scorn, but by Respect that we must now Act and humbly decline the further Approach of your most esteemed Son. Our Daughter rests comfortably as she is able with us and we Guard her remaining Days. We do not seek to more deeply Arouse yr. Son’s Resolve through our contrary Position, as is the Case with so many young Men these last Days, but only to Spare him the Confusions and the Sadness that caring for nervous Invalids must surely Impose
.

We trust this Ardour shall pass in one so young and Strong as your Son, and we have not intimated his Feelings to our Daughter, lest it Disrupt her Balance further
.

I want to think of Robert Fitch as a man ahead of his time, or at the very least, a decent embodiment of the tolerant forces in his age. He had suffered, yet survived; his type has endured and is alive today, living by values they trust, disturbed and finally confused by events larger than any system they can put them into.

He could not understand Hannah. What she had witnessed, what she suppressed. It is just that Hannah is a person undreamed of in Puritan society. Of course she must suffer “spells” and be judged an invalid. Outside agencies—the devil, the forest, the Indians—must be blamed. She is from a different time, the first person, let alone the first woman, to have had these thoughts, and this experience, to have been formed in this particular crucible. Either she will take society with her to a new level, or she will perish in the attempt. Either people will follow, or they will kill her.

Looking at Hannah through the lens of history (I try to tell Venn, who understands these things, who supports me as best he’s able, who sees that the quest I’m on through history is also a kind of love song to him, his “inputting” and virtual reality, his own uncommunicable Indian childhood, the parts of him that I can’t reach and the parts of me he’s afraid to ask about) is like watching the birth of a nebula through the Hubble Space Telescope—a chance encounter that ties up a thousand loose ends, that confirms theories, upsets others.

Her life is at the crossroads of many worlds. If Thomas Pynchon, perhaps one of the descendants of her failed suitor, had not already written V., I would call her a V., a woman who was everywhere, the encoder of a secret history.

But no wedding came of the epistolary negotiation. If Hannah Easton or Hannah Fitch broke Solomon’s heart, he did indeed get over it. Records show he fathered fifteen children by three wives, but that his Candlers & Provisioners burned down in 1703 and he never rebuilt or restored his fortune. He died a debtor and an alcoholic in 1713. And if Hannah ever learned of Solomon’s interest, approved or despaired of Robert Fitch’s extraordinary intervention, no record of her feelings exists.

“Incestuous, obviously,” my cynical self, my well-trained feminist half, reading these notes, has told me. “The stepfather and stepbrother wanted her to themselves. They needed the money she brought in. She was an old maid of twenty, and we know she was a damned handsome woman. There must have been men beating down the door, and the old coot must have spread the rumors of her madness from Marblehead to Barnstable.”

I am aware of multiple contingencies. It is the universe we inhabit. She might have been a prisoner; they might have been her tender guardians. The fact is, she stayed in Salem with the Fitches through the famous witch trials, in which she played a small role as counselor of women who fled marriages and husbands they no longer understood. Some of her customers who had patronized her with colored silks suddenly came to her on the street begging shelter. We know the Fitches feared their stepdaughter would be next, that she would personally intervene in some witch’s trial, offering testimony that could only implicate her or her family, and that she could not depend upon her childhood woes as a reliable indulgence before a judge like John Hathorne or, worse, confess to having unnatural thoughts, impure impulses herself. They hid her wild embroidery; they barred entreaties; they monitored every visitor. Only the oldest friends, the Mannings, were allowed access.

Through the terrible winter of 1691, Hannah remained indoors, fed the news by her chair-bound brother, sung to and prayed over by her uncomprehending mother and father.

9

IN
1692 Hannah was twenty-one, still a maiden, and with slim expectations of being married—as we have seen. The barrenness of her future had to do with genealogy and poverty, and the hints of noncompliance, of contrary independence that her character had begun to reveal.

In the evenings she embroidered landscapes—frost stiffening blades of grass, pumpkins glowing like setting suns, butterflies dusting colors off their pastel wings against cassocks of black silk and breeches of black velvet. In fact, there was a wildness about Hannah. People sensed it. When she raced down Herbert Street, bolts of silk clutched against the dark wool of her bodice, they found themselves adding on her head an imaginary tiara of tightly furled red roses.

Hester Manning still had not married, which is not to say there had not been opportunities, entreaties and even the hint of a misalliance. Young men were now barred from the male camaraderie around the smithy’s anvil. The raw communion of souls, the opportunity to view men, stand near them, even talk with them on the basis of some familiarity and power—she was, after all, daughter of the forge, occasional squeezer of the bellows, stoker of coal, forager among the clinkers with the long tongs—had been taken from her all because of the sudden appearance of Gabriel Legge.

He claimed to be the son of the owner of the
Swallow
, three hundred and twenty tons. He had come from London, but hailed from Ireland, to scout the colonies for investment, for new forms of imports and exports to the New World to mark its growing stature, its great wealth and taste for finer things. But the old Friends of the Forge, meeting now at a public house rather than the blacksmith’s, guessed the scouting trip was for a wife, that his time limit was the three weeks it would take to load the
Swallow
with its cargo of hides and timber, and that his eyes had fallen on everyone’s darling, Hester Manning.

Or rather, his eye had fallen. Gabriel Legge, though tall and dashing, had an eye patch. In a wild colony of scalped heads, missing limbs, branded miscreants, maimed and diseased survivors of fires and massacres, a one-eyed man—especially if the patch be black or red or green, sometimes silk, sometimes velvet and even at times encrusted with fine gemstones—is prince. And the stories he told! He made the loss of an eye a stylish statement, pliable to all situations.

My eye! Oh, ’twas nothing, madam. A trifle.

Beware, my good fellow, or I’ll take my vengeance here and now!

Aye, there are savages abroad that make your heathen Nipmuc and Narragansett the very lambs of God!

Tortured? Punished? Heroic? No one knew for sure. He had a thousand stories of imprisonment by Turks; banishment to forests; brigands, highwaymen, pirates.

NO ONE
in Salem, admittedly, was a match for Gabriel Legge. Many were stronger, of course, and as for the disposition to place strength in the service of pugnaciousness, the young men of Salem had few equals in the Bay Colony. But Gabriel Legge had a quality—exercised a charm, some said, cast a spell—over men and women alike. And there was always the absence behind the patch, evidence that if charm and persuasiveness failed him, he knew other, darker devices.

He painted great word pictures of a future Salem as great as London, of wealth and grandeur, noble parks and public buildings, and rows of opulent houses appointed with the finest decorations of the Old World and the New. And Gabriel Legge seemed to embody those qualities in his height and accent; he was truly fit to rule, some said, like the worthy inheritor of a bequest not yet given.

And the men wondered if Hester Manning would be fine enough for Gabriel Legge? Hard to imagine the smith’s daughter dressed as a lady, traveling from court to court, or even holding her own in Salem or Boston. She might have been too refined, too high and mighty, for the likes of local boys, but those very same boys began to see the awkwardness—the dullness—of Hester around Gabriel Legge. They noticed her trying all the harder to please, to be ladylike, however, and they felt a hint of Gabriel’s disapproval, even in his kindly smiles toward her. He is the disconcerting agent of Providence in this history.

HANNAH WENT
for long lonely walks each morning that May to flee the contrary love she detected in her two mothers’ sharp-tongued injunctions. “Moderation!” Susannah Fitch cautioned, afraid not only of the mob psychosis of the street, but also of her daughter’s destiny that was beginning to shape itself. But Rebecca, whose blood quickened her, and whose memory for its very remoteness knew no abatement, counseled confrontation. “Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation!” whispered her mother’s ghost.

The ghost wore the outline of an Indian sewn on her sleeve. Indian lover.

On one such May morning, Hannah was skipping along a sheer, stony promontory near the new clapboard dwelling of Captain William Maverick, her footsteps as printless as an elf’s, when she heard a man’s throaty cry of grief. She loosened the knotted ribbons of her bonnet to see and hear better.

All around her was order, continuity, contentment. Winds scraped sibilant music off the moss. Hardy columbines pushed through the tiniest cracks in the rocks. Spring grass greened afresh between dried-out stalks of mullein. Dead, fallen-off branches ringed and enriched the roots of aged elms.

Who was crying out to her in so much anguish?

Winds lifted the bonnet, freeing her hair to curl around her face and surge around her shoulders in tense, electric waves.

She lunged for her bonnet, but it whirled out of reach and spiraled down to the shore and finally snagged to rest on a clump of weeds. The bonnet was lost. All the same, she inched as close as she dared to where the promontory sheared away. She crept through a thicket of violets. Sorrowful voices floated up to her.

Three fishermen were beaching a small boat, men who pushed their prows through the horizon. Now the horizon had swallowed one of them. She recognized first of all Captain Maverick, the closest inhabitant to the scene. The men were all knee-deep in the water, stumbling on the slippery stones. Maverick pulled the boat to shore, facing her; two others pushed from the stern. She stretched closer to the precipice on her stomach, flattening tufty grass and loosening shallow-rooted lace plants from the interstices of rock.

When the boat was beached, one of the pushers heaved a body out of the gunwales. The smith, Henry Manning, normally a silent, composed man, was screaming words into the wind, words that she couldn’t understand. This was not his part of the town. Nothing but the sheerest tragedy could bring Henry Manning to water, he who despised boats and England and had seen the courtship of Legge and his daughter as an assault upon his dearly held prejudice and authority. And now they were together, for the third man was the mysterious visitor from Ireland, Gabriel Legge, he of the rakish black eye patch, and Hannah knew only one event could bring such enemies together.

She couldn’t see the whole body, only a hand. The hand was rigid and got in the men’s way. Henry Manning was looking older now, frailer, than she had ever seen him. He leaned his full weight on an oar and instructed the younger men. Suddenly she saw it—stuck like a pennant on a hooked pole that Gabriel Legge was sliding under the body for better leverage—a soggy fragment of Hester’s dress. Hannah, keening now with grief, scrabbled down the stony trails.

Hester’s corpse was laid out on grass by the time she got close. The arms stuck way out of the body, stiffened in the posture of a woman who had jumped off the precipice, then tried to slow her fatal descent. The two men of her life weighted Hester’s arms down with rocks as they looked around for rope or cloth to lash them tight to her body. Henry Manning stood by the boat, mopping his angry, red neck.

She must have bobbed for hours in brackish water. Now weeds twined her body like sea snakes. Bruises the blue of violets blossomed on her face.

“Fine things she wanted!” Henry Manning spat in Gabriel Legge’s direction. He heard Hannah’s weeping. Hester’s eyelids were stuck open. Her lips were twisted into a bitter gaping O. Or “No!” It was as though Hester had changed her mind as the water hit her face.

The stranger deflected Henry’s wrath away from Hannah. “Ah, what’s wrong with wanting to cultivate yourself?” Then he and Captain Maverick fell to making a stretcher out of oars and a sail. Hannah slunk away. She could not bear to stay and watch them load Hester up, like slaughtered meat, or a cabinet.

THE DAY AFTER
Hester’s funeral, the stranger, dressed in a cassock of showy blue satin with a matching, embroidered blue silk patch, called on Robert Fitch. He did not come to have furniture made. He introduced himself as Gabriel Legge of Danagadee, son of a shipowner in the business of ferrying families from the Old to the New England. He asked for, and received, permission to court Hannah. She thrilled to his seafaring yarns. He had jumped pirate ship in Madagascar. He had slept in the Garden of Eden, inside an Asian mountain guarded by angels. Children enchanted the deadly cobra with a mere piped melody, the same snake that lurched from its basket and killed an Englishman’s servant dead on the spot. He had traveled to Samarkand on camel-back, and he had been to the court of the Great Mughal, whose ostentatious display of gold and jewels made him ashamed of England’s shabby pretension. The soil of Hindustan was ground-up sapphire, emerald and ruby; the building bricks were pure ingots of gold. Their food simmered in its own spices, quite independent of the application of cooking fire. The women wrapped themselves in silken winding-sheets, and because of their soft, compliant souls, they yielded their lives to flame upon their husband’s death.

She did not believe him, but she, too, longed for escape. And what had become of his suit with Hester Manning, Hannah was bold enough to ask, had he been fearful enough of her broad-backed father not to press his case?

He paid her memory the proper respect. Like many a man before him, he had been led on by her smile, her cheekiness, her apparent boldness. But when the talk had turned to his travels and his dreams, he’d seen her face set in a frown.

“The lass would fair tie me down to England and English ways,” Gabriel Legge said. Her passion was more to leave that place, Salem, and the boys around the forge, and her father, than to settle in another place with him. Especially a place of harrowing discomfort, unfamiliar and uncongenial to her narrow sensibilities. She would go only halfway round the world with him, the tiresome, well-trod half, to England. He had not guessed the depths of her fancy, if not for him, then for some of the stories he told.

“My stories all have a grain, a fair grain, of truth to them, Mistress Fitch,” he confessed, “and none are spun from whole cloth—”

“You are known for your rampant embroidery, Gabriel Legge. I feared only that you had begun to believe them yourself. I may be a simple girl who has seen none of the earth and its truths, and what you say of the oceans and the mountains may well be true. But, Mr. Legge, I know the heart of womenkind, and none do willingly yield their lives.”

“Perhaps this you would believe, Hannah Easton,” he said, and with that he took from the watch pocket of his silken vest a small sachet of gemstones, including a ruby more perfect than any she had ever imagined.

“This is yours. This and a thousand more like it are waiting for us.”

She closed her fist upon it. A cool fire burned her hand. He wanted an Empress of his own, fit for the Emperor of Dreams.

In the negotiations with Robert Fitch he remained the sober businessman, the shipowner’s son. He did not expect a dowry; a healthy, strong, God-fearing woman was all a man could claim a right to, although furniture was always welcome, and the
Swallow
in the harbor was still loading freight. For a cherry-and-maple highboy and dining table of solid cherry, the dowry was set. By the time of the
Swallow
’s sailing, Hannah and Gabriel were married. It would be ten years before she saw Salem again.

WHY WOULD
a self-possessed, intelligent, desirable woman like Hannah Easton suddenly marry a man she recognized as inappropriate and untrustworthy? Why would she accept Hester Manning’s castoff, or betrayer? Guilt, perhaps, a need to punish herself for the secret she was forced to carry? Unconscious imitation of her mother, a way of joining her by running off with a treacherous alien? Gabriel Legge with his tales of exotic adventure was as close to the Nipmuc lover as any man in Salem; she sought to neutralize her shame by emulating her mother’s behavior.

Venn, who listens and is about to get more interested in the tale as it moves away from New England, has his own interpretation. Gabriel was obviously on a wife-hunting mission, the way many Indian students in America go back to India for a week and get married to satisfy their parents, then return with a stranger who can cook, bear children, and, eventually, be loved. In other words,
why not?
She got married because it was her time to get married. Just like you, he says to me, what if you hadn’t read
Auctions & Acquisitions
one morning? What if the name Pearl hadn’t leaped off the page? You got started on this the same way Hannah did when she walked out along the beach one day and saw the boat and the men hauling the body ashore.

So one morning she was content with her passionate needlework, smugly contemptuous of Hester and her suitor; the next morning she walked to the river because it was her time to be in the path of death, to witness grief, to hear Gabriel’s Strange defense of luxury, and expose herself to the possibility of life.

We do things when it is our time to do them. They do not occur to us until it is time; they cannot be resisted, once their time has come. It’s a question of time, not motive.