If Finch noticed the change in Maureen, he never said so. Smitten as he seemed, he spent the winter photographing her and the rest of the time either teaching his classes on Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers or in his darkroom. And during that time Maureen started writing.
When she found the house on Turner Street, Maureen said, she convinced Finch, who would do anything in those days to make her happy, to purchase the old building and move there, getting rid of the mausoleum on Chestnut Street and firing the staff. He did it to please her, but the fact was that it pleased him, too. The house she had found was only a few houses removed from the ocean, which surely made Maureen happy, and it was almost directly across the street from Hawthorne ’s famous House of the Seven Gables. Since Finch had recently been awarded a grant to study Hawthorne ’s journals as well as his letters from Melville, he could think of no better place to be.
Maureen thrived in the new house. She and Finch were happy for a time, she said. But the winter after they moved in, things went sour. Finch traveled to New York to participate in a guest lecture series on America ’s Romantic writers at Columbia, and when he returned, Maureen’s mood was glum.
She began her fairy-tale collection that winter, a dark assortment that was, in Zee’s opinion, far more Brothers Grimm than Disney. “A fate worse than death” was one of Maureen’s favorite phrases. In her spare time, she began delving into the history of the house, which was so familiar to her that the only explanation she could offer was that she had lived in it in a past life and that it had lured her back. The house had a story to tell, she was certain of it.
Hearing her alarming theory, Finch might have convinced her to move again, except that he’d fallen in love with the house. He had friends at the Gables; he was very fond of their gardens. He loved everything about the place, including the re-creations of both Hepzibah’s Cent-Shop and Maule’s Well that they had added to the property to match Hawthorne ’s story. And the fact that the settlement had recently relocated the house in which Hawthorne was born to the same seaside property as the Gables was an added bonus. All things Hawthorne were now within fifty feet of his front door.
That summer Finch had been offered a teaching post at Amherst at their summer theater, where they would be performing The Scarlet Letter. The college production included a newly created dramatic reading from the young Hawthorne himself, which they had invited Finch to compose. He was excited by the prospect of a summer of Hawthorne, immersed as usual in his hero’s life, but away from the classroom and in western Massachusetts, very close to the place Hawthorne had spent so many of his later years.
But, as she admitted to Zee, it wasn’t a good time for Maureen. As she found herself becoming more and more obsessed with the house and its history, she began to hear it talking to her and would sometimes answer directly in the middle of a conversation about something else.
And though he had planned to take her with him to Amherst, Finch found himself not telling Maureen about his offer. He couldn’t bring her along, not in her current condition, and he was starting to fantasize about escape. He did love her, that was true, but for him it had always been in the way one loves a beautiful painting or Bernini’s sculpture of Daphne and Apollo. It was love of the feminine ideal, and not based in everyday life. In their daily life, he was beginning to see how troubled she was. Finch had always wanted children. It hadn’t happened, and he was growing distant, unable to be near her now, sleeping separately in the downstairs guest room.
But then spring hit and, with it, the lengthening days and bright sunshine. Maureen’s mood brightened as well. She began to gather the things they would need at the island cottage: blankets for warmth, seeds for planting summer corn and tomatoes. Knowing his dream of having children, Maureen went to Finch’s bed at night. She brewed him tea and whispered to him in the dark about the beautiful and brilliant children they would have. They made love. But when Finch began to relax and told her of the summer appointment he had accepted without her knowledge, Maureen refused to go. It was a betrayal, she said. Moving that far from the sea would surely kill her.
And so, Maureen told Zee, Finch went to Amherst, and she went to Baker’s Island. But halfway through the summer, she realized that she was pregnant. She left the island and made her way to Amherst, announcing her impending motherhood in front of the entire cast, one of whom looked stricken, a student playing the young Hawthorne, a beautiful boy who, when in costume, achieved the haunted beauty of Hawthorne himself.
“I should have seen it then,” she often confessed to Zee. “I should have seen what was coming.”
BUT SHE DIDN’T SEE IT for a while, and neither did Finch. The pregnancy itself agreed with Maureen. She had never been as happy, she said. And Finch’s joy was so great that she rode her mania throughout the months of her pregnancy, not descending into sadness with the winter light, and almost to summer before the postpartum depression hit her so hard that she had to be hospitalized.
Maureen was diagnosed as manic-depressive. These days she would have been labeled as bipolar 1, with full-on hallucinations. Maureen heard voices, she saw spirits.
After her diagnosis Finch took over as caregiver, and when Maureen came home, he treated her as one might treat a priceless statue, fussing over her but not getting too close, fearing that the slightest touch might break her.
Maureen came home from the hospital only to remove herself the following summer to the island, where she accepted no visitors, not even Finch. She begged to be left alone, and Finch obliged, partly because he didn’t know what else to do and partly because Maureen had left Zee behind, and it was all he could manage to care for his new daughter.
In the two months that followed, Finch could do little but have neighbors check on Maureen’s safety and make sure she had food. She threw herself into her writing and produced several more fairy tales.
When she returned in September, Finch asked no questions. He was so happy to have his family restored and to have Maureen excited both about her new career and (at long last) about her new child that it never occurred to him that what he’d been witnessing for the last several years was the onset of Maureen’s mental illness, or so he had often told Zee.
Over the next several years, Finch tried his best to get Maureen the help she needed, but treatment was of an era, and though she tried the medications of the time, each new one left her hazy and sluggish and more depressed than the last. Eventually she rejected them all in favor of the wildly manic episodes that fueled her creative energy even as they left her family devastated and exhausted.
One big thing that evolved out of Maureen’s untreated illness was a strange and inappropriate mother-daughter relationship that only got more disturbing as Zee grew older. Sometimes unable to attach to her child, at other times Maureen treated Zee as a best friend, confiding much more than a mother should ever relate to a young daughter, outrageous facts and stories that were more embarrassing than helpfuclass="underline" the far-too-early uncensored facts of life from periods to promiscuity, and even sex tricks and methods of seduction to use on boys, details that no normal mother would ever share with a daughter and that Zee had no business knowing. Such confidences assured two things: that Zee would seldom bring a friend into the house and that, at some point much too early in her childhood, Zee and Maureen would switch roles, with Zee becoming the mother figure and Maureen reverting to adolescence.
Maureen had three more breakdowns that required hospitalization during Zee’s childhood. The first two were short stays, less than a month in duration. And the last one was the long one, when Melville came into their lives.