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Authors: Bharati Mukherjee
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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
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
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