Ahab's Wife (16 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
, I tried to comb my hair with the Venus comb, and I borrowed a small looking glass from Aunt. But my hair was too thick and curly for the spiny shell, and before I knew it, a prong had snapped off. I contented myself with combing only the more airy ends of my
hair, instead of the whole mass. Since my hair hung to the curve of my buttocks, it was easy for me to see how pretty the unusual comb looked (and my hand holding it) feathering the ends.

As I combed my hair, I asked Frannie to fetch me a damp cloth to wash my face. As always, she was happy to serve me. If I were a true lady, should I not wait loyally for the Red Cross Knight? I looked at my dark hair and thought of the beautiful tinted picture of “Rebecca, the Jewess” in
Ivanhoe
. Then I thought of another story, of Lancelot, and he had Kit's face, Kit's dark-eyed interest in the body.

Giles, it seemed to me, was like a Parsifal. His eyes saw some holy grail, even if they looked at me. I sighed, because in my heart, I knew it was a matter not of loyalty but of preference. And my preference was for the lofty vision of Giles. Let it leave silences in our commerce; let me suffer less than satisfaction. I could not help it. There was in Giles that which I was bound to love, because I aspired to it myself.

But Kit had loved my hair. And Lancelot had seduced the Lady.

I doubt not that true felicity lies in the hearth and the heart
. Giles had known that his letter would engulf me, for he knew me. I knew he knew. My thoughts wheeled round again: perhaps Kit was a means of giving my life broader experience, a breadth that Giles sought for his own life with the longer voyage of the Atlantic crossing. Uncle had already had his life on the sea. For my aunt and my mother, journeying lay in their fingers for the most part. They knew the landscape of colored patches, the rivulets and tributaries of stitchery. They knew the voyage of reading. It seemed an inward journey. But the sea! the sea! How could it not seem freer, wider, more uncharted than anything else one could know?

I
wanted it for Giles. For any man I loved. Perhaps in sending Kit to play the part of companion, Giles wished me to learn that many men could love me, that choice and not inevitability were the lot of both woman and man.

For my mother and my aunt, the thought of babies revitalized their beings. And yet, I did not just want babies, or men who went to sea. I wanted something for myself.

In the drawer of my little table, close to the corner of rose petals, I put Giles's two letters. In the other front corner of the drawer, I put a plum pit. I knew where it came from. I knew the joy of its flavor.

T
HE HOT WEATHER PASSED
. Frannie and I did not start a new line-of-stone calendar, but we measured Aunt, who grew not only larger but more agreeable as the cooler weather came on. Her measuring string was festooned with knots of colored yarn, and it seemed amazing to all of us that Aunt had once been so small.

One day Frannie surprised me by saying, “You're growing, too, Una.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Here,” and she swept her hand across her chest.

Once I had thought breasts would be nothing but an encumbrance, but now I knew I was pleased. And I knew that I was changing.

Once I heard Uncle say to Frannie, “It will be nice for you to have the company of the baby. And soon it will be a real playfellow for you and not just a doll.”

“I have Una,” she said.

“But Una is starting to find the Island small.”

“Really?” Frannie questioned her father.

“Well, I don't know. Perhaps she'll go back to Kentucky to help her mother.”

“Couldn't everybody live here forever? There's lots of room.”

“We can invite them.”

“Kit and Giles, too.”

“So you are a Utopian, Frannie. You'd have a world apart with only those of like mind?”

“Why not?”

“Many have tried it, or dreamed of it. Why not you, indeed?”

 

T
HAT NIGHT
when I wrote to Giles I asked him what he knew of Utopia. I wanted to ask if there was not a society where even among grown men and women there were to be found threesomes, instead of twosomes, but this last seemed a dangerous idea, and one that might hurt Giles's feelings. For Giles's ideal world seemed chivalric, and in the castle of the heart stood two.

We had told Kit (and thus Giles) that we expected to meet my
mother in New Bedford on September 15 at the inn named the Sea-Fancy and that we would be glad to see them, too, if their schedules permitted. Kit had said immediately that he knew the Sea-Fancy, it being distaff to the Spouter-Inn, a somewhat rougher inn where he and Giles often stayed, and if at all possible they would visit with us.

As Aunt grew larger, she decided that not all of us but only I was to go to New Bedford to meet my mother. Uncle thought it would be a fine excursion—after all, I was sixteen—for me to go alone to meet my mother, and I could tell that Aunt believed my mother and I would benefit from a private encounter. When I asked Uncle if Frannie might go with me, he said he thought she was too young, and she would add unnecessarily to the expense.

One cannot be a happy traveler, I think, without taking pleasure in her clothes. It is not her rod and her staff that comfort her—indeed, she carries no such implements—it is her clothes that comfort the female pilgrim, when she fares forth alone for the first time. I know no color so satisfactory for travel as navy blue. There's a color to contain one! It calms the soul and lends respectability to the most wildly beating heart. And if one has re-covered her bonnet frame to match, and if it happens that there are sharp green grosgrain ribbons in the house to sew onto that bonnet, and if those luckily found ribbons have never been creased with tying till the very morning of departure, then one is new and complete indeed. And so I was.

I collected the dried rose petals into a small drawstring pouch. The plum pit I took to the edge of the water. I set the pit, like a small boat, adrift, and turned my back on its fate. And when the supply boat, the
Camel,
turned her bow back toward New Bedford, I alone was aboard, with the captain and mate who manned her.

When the
Camel
was in the middle of her crossing, and I could see neither the mainland ahead nor the Lighthouse behind, I felt myself a regular sailor. The slap-slap of the water on the keel was hypnotic. Almost I forgot where I was going and whence I came—I was simply myself, moving swiftly on a friendly sea, under a kindly sky. Slap-slap.
Forward!
Perhaps Giles was wrong to believe that felicity lay in the home and hearth. I felt it lay in the open sea and the adventure of discovery. I lifted up my eyes to it.

I was so enamored with the vastness of my independence—how high the sky, how wide the sea, how white the foam, how brisk the
breeze—that at first I did not notice the fittings of the
Camel
or the crew that made my pleasant speed possible. At length, humming my internal song of independence, I looked more carefully at the captain. This captain (a new one) of the
Camel
had the most enormous gray, wiry mustache I had ever seen. Its sidebars were the thickness of my wrist. First it swooped horizontally from the parting between the nostrils, and then it made a right-angle turn and grew and hung straight down, well below his jaw, in points like twin awls. He carried his head—probably to display his magnificent mustache—at a thrust forward angle, and his shoulders seemed a frail yoke to support such a head that supported such a mustache!

Of course, I sat in the open air, as near the prow of the ship as possible. Though I was as proper and contained as any bonneted-with-new-grosgrain-ribbons young lady could be, I fancied myself a kind of mermaid, a figurehead of a free spirit.

 

W
HEN THE
C
AMEL
came into New Bedford port, I was swept with sorrow for the forests, for here, it seemed, in the multitudinous masts of ships, stood all the straightest, tallest, most majestic trunks of North America. But their branches were all broken off and stripped away, their roots planted only in the barren pots of boats. Sails might have suggested the cloak of leaf-filled branches, but sails were furled, and the nakedness of the timbers stood in jumbled display. The standing rigging was in place, to be sure, but would you drape the mighty spine of a tree in cobwebs and call it clothed? Bare as crucifixes, the ships at rest seemed nothing like the unfurled fairy-swans that skimmed the oceans.

Is there always, under the glory of white wings and graceful speed, the scaffolding of a cross? This is not a Christian question but one applicable to India and China and Africa. If you meet a woman of whatever complexion who sails her life with strength and grace and assurance, talk to her! And what you will find is that there has been a suffering, that at some time she has left herself for hanging dead.

N
O SOONER
did I enter the Sea-Fancy Inn than I met such a woman. But first, my mustachioed captain upon disembarking, took me by the elbow, saying I was but a young lady, and steered me past the inn named the Crossed Harpoons and past the Sword-Fish Inn, and beyond a place called the Trap, where many finely dressed black people were congregating as though for church, to the Spouter-Inn, of which Kit spoke, and to the inn across, on the left side of the street.

Rebekkah Swain, round as a world, stood behind the desk of the Sea-Fancy. I knew her name because it was written in ribbonlike script, below the name of the inn itself, on the oval board hanging in the street. No sylphlike creature was Rebekkah Swain. She would have been a treasure trove for a whole gang of cannibals, and I suspected she knew some—though her English was of the finest—for her black hair, greased up into a small crownlike knot atop her head, was held by a sharpened bone. Her complexion, though, was more yellow and Chinese-like than black—see how in her person she gathers in the nations? In the middle of her forehead was a red dot, which I since learned was characteristic of a Hindu woman and denoted her caste. Rebekkah Swain's clothing, like her last name, seemed to bespeak the Renaissance, for such silken puffs sat on each side on her hips that she seemed to step from an engraving of the court of Elizabeth, though later—oh how convenient is
later
in the halls of knowledge—I saw that these expanses of cloth were nothing like decorations of fabric over some basketlike contraption of fashion, but necessities! to clothe her ample, rolling flesh. In that moment, she seemed a woman of all time as well as the melded personification of the geographically diverse human race.

Her shoes, mere foldings of brute leather, were of the earliest time: no cobbler's nail or needle had penetrated there; such foot coverings might a cave dweller have bound with the self-same thong and sinew.

Her eyes, tilted up at the corners—the Chinese again!—the lips, full and negroid, and the words they shaped: as I have already said, there was her kinship with the kings and queens of England.

Zest for discovery! Zest! I had but started my odyssey and here already, all exotically, was the world! What next!

“I have had a letter from your mother weeks ago. I expect her in a day or so,” Mrs. Swain said, as soon as she saw me. She had no need of my name. Her voice was rich and full, yet there was a sweetness to it usually reserved for higher, lighter voices. “And I will show you your room.”

Then her great bulk sailed or rather rolled out from behind the counter.

“She is now in my care, Monsieur Whiskers,” she said, dismissing my escort.

She went before me. Her silken-robed girth completely filled the width of the stairs, and I could see that they posed a difficulty for her. She grasped rather than held the handrail, which was itself a beam rather than a rail, and hand over hand hoisted herself up. I slowly followed behind. At the landing elbow, she rotated rather than turned to present her yellow-brown face glistening in sweat, her features wreathed in a smile.

“If you like, you may skitter up to the next level. Wait for me there. Your room is yet beyond, on the top.”

How to say the assurance with which these words filled me:
your room
. There was a friendly calm in her voice. Not an equality but a comprehensiveness in her tone.

My legs long trained in stair-climbing fairly whizzed me to the second floor; my guide-who-came-behind labored a full minute in elevating to the same height. I was not sorry, for her delay gave me ample time to study the scene before me.

The second floor presented a hall, spacious as a lobby and all the more restful for its removal from the bustle of the passing carriages and pedestrians. The wall colors here were pastel such as I had never seen before. The fragile colors of dawn hung here—pale blue, fluffed with paler pink on the ceiling, and woodwork a yellow, the color of a new chick. In various chairs, seeming to be collected from around the world—some from the courts of Europe, others leather and wood slings from the Congo, a lacquered Japanese affair ornamented with a golden dragon—sat women of various colors and origins. It was as though Rebekkah Swain had come apart into her components. But here were the pure types of which she was the amazing composite.

And each sat with some handiwork. The African was stringing beads so tiny they seemed a blur of silver in her dark basket. A
woman whom I felt to be an Eskimo worked a pelt with a bone needle, and while she sewed she chewed! Out came a whole slimy mass, like an awful tobacco wad. My stomach fairly rose in disgust, but I knew she was softening the leather with her teeth. I glimpsed the latter item—her teeth—and saw they were tan and much worn down with their work. A stylish young woman with black ringlets held a cushion full of pins and a web of lacework, an example of which film overlay her blouse collar; I doubted not that she was making Brussels lace. And there were many others: an American Indian woman with the saddest face of all was cutting fringe with a steel razor that I knew was not indigenous with her people. Each worked, each made something beautiful, and then the world rolled up again and said for me to climb to the next level.

All the heat of the building seemed to have come up before me to the third floor, and I wondered if I might raise a window. Did people raise windows in other people's hotels? I did not know. This level's landing was deserted, but on the wall hung a painting of a ship with two keels; I could not say whether it was headed to one side or the other. On one side was a sun-drenched scene, rather like New Bedford. There were pretty houses and iron lace fences, flowers and fruit trees both blooming and ready to harvest (which, of course, one does not find in nature). On the other side, broached by the second keel of the ship, the world was a black void filled with swirling stars. Some were shaped like pinwheels, others were glowing spheres and spirals. One was so large that only an arc of its curve fitted in the frame, and some stars were painted so tiny that the artist must have touched the canvas with the point of a needle dipped in paint, mere pricks of gold—no, there was a silver one, there a red.

The two-fronted ship, Januslike, straddled the middle of the picture, and the whole thing had a naive, fabulous effect, as though it weren't meant to be believed, but rather thought about.

“Now,” sighed Rebekkah Swain, “here is the room reserved for you and your mother.”

I sat on the edge of the bed.

Rebekkah went directly to the window and sent the sash skyward. What power she harbored in her arms! (And legs, too, to be able to transport her bulk!) In my little bedroom, there was but one spindly chair. She gave it not a glance but seated herself in the windowsill,
hundreds of pounds of her silken backside hanging over the edge into the out-of-doors. What a sight, should a passerby look up! It would seem that someone was trying to stuff a feather bed out the window. A woman who used a house as her chair!

Alas, she so completely filled the sole window that very little of the hot air could escape, and none of the cool breeze bypassed the mighty cork of her being.

“Raise the window in the hall,” she told me pleasantly.

So I passed onto the landing again, glanced at the two-keeled boat, and raised the window overlooking the street. The cobblestones below lined up like the tops of endless loaves of bread. However, their hard, curved surfaces seemed ill suited to the rattling wheels of the wagons. The horses were shod in steel, and often sparks flew out as their hooves grazed or nicked the stones.

At home, I knew well that if Uncle started down the path with his creel he was likely going to put out for fishing, or if Aunt moved her chair close to the window in the winter, then likely she would soon start to sew. Here in New Bedford, everything was a meaningless bustle. I chose one couple to watch, but they turned a corner together, with me left none the wiser about where they were going or why. In another street, a black child, dressed like a prince in red with gold braid, zipped from a closed carriage to a tobacco shop. He did not even go into the shop before the door was open and a box thrust into his hands, and the boy ran back to his carriage. A box of cigars, I thought. But was the child a slave, a servant, the scion of a wealthy freeman? His manner was one of alacrity and cheer, and so I thought he could not be a slave. But then through the carriage window I saw a white-gloved hand strike his cheek and the contorting of his previously happy face. With a shake of the reins, the horses pulled away, and if there was a cry from the slaveboy, the clatter of the hooves and the bumping of wheels over the cobblestones drowned out his distress.

“Una,” the musical voice called me, and I left my view from the hall window to sit on the edge of the bed. From her throne in the window, Rebekkah Swain regarded me, a hand resting on each of her knees.

“What would you most like to know?” she asked.

It was a strange question. Like a school of minnows, questions flew through my mind: How long will I wait for my mother? Will I see Giles and Kit? Are people happy here? Why did my father die? Whom
will I marry? What will happen to Frannie? Where are Giles and Kit now? None of the questions seemed right, and then a bigger question swam, mouth open, toward all the others as though to swallow them up. “Why do you ask?” I asked Rebekkah Swain.

“I ask because I would like to know your mind.” Her expression was so merry that I began to wonder if she was mad. But would my mother send me to a madwoman? And could a madwoman own a house and run a business such as a hotel?

“How did you come to be here?” I asked.

And at once, she began to tell her story.

“Your bed was once my bed,” she said. “This house was a great house for one family, not a hotel, and I was a maid. I came from India”—she touched the caste mark on her forehead—“abducted by a whaling captain. I was as tall as you, and like you, as slender as a reed. The captain kept me locked in his cabin, and sometimes I was tied into the bed, which itself was suspended from the ceiling on gimbals. He treated me as a whore.”

Whore
. I watched her mouth go round as she said the harsh word. The world as I knew it seemed sucked into that mouth. With the sound of the word, whose meaning I knew by instinct and the puckered rounding of her thick lips, I lost my innocence.

“Then my face,” she went on, “was sweet as the moon, and my eyes like almonds.”

Certainly her face was still round, her eyes still slanted up at the corners.

“I was very quiet. I did not have the language to speak to my captor. My father was an African, from the great grasslands, a killer of lions. My mother was from Tonga—Polynesia. They met in India, and I spoke their languages, and Hindi, and the language of my part of India, Calcutta, which is Bengali. And English, of course.”

Yes, the flow of her speaking was natural, as though she'd always known it, but her language had a lilt to it, a slight crispness—as though her words had a thin, silver edge.

She rolled up the sleeves of her dress. Her very body was imprinted with pictures of strange people, of spears and crisp hair, the mane of a lion and a long tasseled tail.

“Was the captain the owner of this house?”

“He was not, but his friend was. ‘She is a sweet, resigned girl,'he told his friend. ‘Take her as a servant, for my wife will not want to see her.' They were Quaker captains, and their wives believed them moral.”

“Quakers do not believe in war, at least,” I said.

“There is no axis on which all turns,” she said. She rolled her hands over each other, round and round, as though her hands were a ball of yarn rolling loose across the floor.

“Did you ever go home?”

“Home?” she chuckled. “I have made my home wherever I am. A gimbaled bed, a maid's room, the howdah atop an elephant.” She stopped smiling, tilted her head back, and looked majestically at me over the bulges of her cheeks. “And I advise you to do the same.”

“I have lived in a lighthouse.”

“I know.”

“Before that, I lived in the woods, in Kentucky, close to the Ohio.”

“I know.”

“I don't know which is more nearly home.”

“I know.” With that, she heaved herself up from the windowsill. Her skirts whispered their silk secrets as she passed, but I thought them to say,
Welcome to the world
.

 

T
HUS
I
BEGAN
my wait for my mother at the Sea-Fancy Inn of New Bedford. I positioned the spindly chair close to the window of my room and watched the street. I wondered if I would ever hear the rest of the innkeeper's story—how she rose from maid to proprietor—and I can say now that I never did.

The afternoon light began to fade, and lamplighters lit up the street. I did not want my mother to have to travel in the dark, and I began to grow anxious and hungry. I pictured her as yet contained in a stagecoach, her trunk tied up on the rack, and a box on her knee full of the ashes of my father. When a knock came at my door, it was a maid with a small basket and a cup of milk in her hand, saying that Mistress Swain had sent up some victuals.

I thought of all the other women in the house and wondered if I should join the common table. I imagined them a happy group, convivial,
but I wanted to stay at my window and look out. I was watching for Giles and for Kit, as well as for my mother. As night drew on, I expected more to see the men than to see her, for surely she was too tired to travel at night. Now I could see shops go dark, and I saw a store owner thrust the key into the lock of his chandlery and then shake the knob to be sure it was fast.

The street lamps burned whale oil, and the odor of it wafted about on the late-summer air. My own candle I extinguished so that I might watch the street unseen by those below. I seemed a kind of Rapunzel, though my hair was dark and gypsylike and by no means long enough to let down as a golden ladder for my suitor. If Giles but saw me at the window, though, he would have thought of Rapunzel. And Kit? I could not guess. He was as likely to see me as a sea witch, wild and free—not an imprisoned princess. Again, I asked myself whose vision I preferred. And this time, I was not sure.