Shore Drive that aimed her toward Salem. She had waited too long already. She needed to see Finch.
Both of the old man’s knees had stiffened to the point that movement had become nearly impossible. Even his arms would not move, and so he stood near the window looking out at Maule’s Well, or at the re-creation of it now on his cousin’s property. After The House of the Seven Gables became well known, his cousin had grown obsessed with re-creating the building as befitted the story. No, not his cousin— his mind was playing tricks on him again. It was not his cousin but someone else entirely. The strands of his memory were breaking. Often now he would struggle to make his way from one room to another only to find when he arrived at his destination that he had no idea why he had come. Names escaped him. Even the simplest of language eluded him now, as if his words, yet unformed, had been stolen by the salt air and blown out to sea.
He looked out over Turner Street at the old house. It had changed so much over the years that it was difficult to picture its reconstruction. At first it had been simple, just a few low-ceilinged rooms. As fortunes grew, the house had been added to, so that eventually there were the full seven gables of his famous book. But Federalist fashion had dictated simplicity, and so gables had been removed, then added back again when his book had made the house so popular. It was amusing, truly, that this woman, whose name he could not even remember, had undertaken to display the house to the public, and more amusing indeed that the public wanted to see it, seemed willing to pay money in fact to see not just the house with its secret room but other things that had never existed in the house before his fictional account, things like Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and Maule’s Well.
He was not certain how he felt about any of it. He was a shy man by nature and did not appreciate the accolades afforded to him. Still, he loved the house more than any dwelling before or since, and he felt a deep responsibility to watch over the property. It seemed his only job now. His hands could no longer hold the pen. And his words were gone. But he was aware (because his writing had made it so) that the gabled house, however cursed it might be, belonged, always and forever, not to the family who originally built it, or to his cousin, or to the woman whose name he could not remember, but to the characters he had created in his story, to Hepzibah and Clifford and Phoebe.
Somewhere in the distance, he could hear a phone ringing. He was not well today. It was not simply his knees. His head was foggy, more foggy than usual. And his hands had a rigidity he could not soften. He had taken something for it. A visitor, one he had at first thought to be his beloved Hepzibah, had given it to him. He was going to die soon. He could feel it. Slow and steady, death seemed to crawl over him. He could sense the rigor mortis already, in his knees. He was leaning against the wall, looking out across the street at his famous house, and he could not move. He had turned to stone, and all he could do was wait for the medicine or for some force of nature to release him.
Where were the ones he had so loved in life? Where was Sophia? Dead, he thought, though he could not remember her passing. He thought then about Melville, and the tears started to fall. Melville wasn’t dead. Couldn’t be. Then an anger rose up in him, an almost murderous rage.
He stood here now, a statue, a formation of cold granite that trapped just a trace of life inside its chill. The statue could see and feel and want. What he wanted now—wanted desperately, it seemed—was to see the gardens across the street where, in his famous story, the old rooster he had named Chanticleer and his two aging hen wives had been able to come up with only one last diminutive egg, which, rather than ensuring the rooster’s aristocratic line, had been served for breakfast. He had found the words amusing when he’d first written them. But today he mourned Chanticleer and the hens and their loss of lineage. But of course it wasn’t real, had been real only in his imagination and on the page. And there was a wall between them now, a very real wall that his vision could not penetrate. Standing here today, he could not see his beloved gardens, though he could still manage to see the ocean beyond.
He wanted to cry out for Hepzibah, though he knew she wasn’t real, and she seemed to him now two different people, the wizened old woman he had created, the one the actual shop was modeled on, and someone as young and beautiful as he might have once imagined her. And he was filled with love for this last Hepzibah, who was really in his mind more like his character of Phoebe might have been, Phoebe who had come into their lives and changed everything and brought the light back to the old house and love to it as well. He started to cry and was aware that he was crying for what once had been, and for what had passed.
More than anything now, he wanted to see his Hepzibah, and he willed her to him with a force so strong that his knees released their grip and his throat loosened. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, he could feel the stone cracking to release him. He moved first a hand and then an arm. Then, carefully, he took a step away from the wall and toward the window.
When he was able, he began his daily work. His strength growing, he raised his shutter and opened the cent shop. It was not Hepzibah’s shop, the one he had created in the book; it was not even a bad rendering of it. But it was the best an old man could do.
The customers bought what he put out. One by one they came, shyly at first like the little boy in his story, but then more boldly.
Zee couldn’t find a parking place on Turner Street. Tour buses lined the lot at the House of the Seven Gables, and the tourists who came in their own cars parked on the sidewalk, ignoring the residents only sign in favor of a ten-dollar ticket they would never pay.
She finally parked on the small patch of green where Finch kept his bird feeders. As she got out of the car, she noticed a tourist walking away with an antique ship’s model, which seemed to fly through Finch’s first-floor window and into his hands.
Her first thought was that Finch was being robbed. Then she noticed the tourist’s bags hanging from the guy’s arm, a small child at his side. As she got closer, she spotted the hand-lettered sign in the top of the window: hepzibah’s cent-shop. And underneath it a smaller sign, also hand-lettered: everything must go.
Finch’s hair stood up in white tufts. His voice was hoarse. He didn’t recognize her until she stood directly in front of him, and when he did, he immediately started to cry.
The tourists moved back, out of the way.
“Dad,” she said. “What’s going on here?”
“Hepzibah,” he said. “My Zee.” He reached out for her, gripping her hand as hard as he could. “I willed it so,” he said, and then turned to his audience, his faith in life itself renewed. “I willed it so!” he cried.
The ancient method of Dead Reckoning or deduced reckoning is often unreliable. Winds, tides, and storms can easily push the ship off course. Every mistake is compounded, altering her passage in critical ways, often with tragic results. For this reason, sailors eventually turned to celestial navigation. The stars are a constant. The earth spins, but the stars remain fixed in the heavens. Even the stormiest sky eventually will clear to reveal them.
Finch practiced touching his thumb to his middle finger as rapidly and accurately as he could. He had succeeded fairly well with his right hand but was slower and clumsier with his left.
“There’s usually one side that’s weaker than the other,” the doctor said, taking notes.
“I’m aware of that,” Zee said. They’d been through the routine at least a dozen times. “We’re here about his medication.”
“Unfortunate,” he said. “But we did know that this one might not work. This particular medication came with warnings. It causes hallucinations in some people.”
“And clearly he’s one of those people. He thought he was Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
The doctor’s eyebrows raised. “Creative. Of course, considering his background . . .”
Zee fired him a look.