Ahab's Wife (39 page)

T
HOSE LATE FALL DAYS
, I
managed
him. He could be guided. He did not get better. Charlotte remained hopeful. “He's not had time enough,” she said, “only a month or so—it's not enough time.”

I took him Christmas Day into the town, thinking perhaps some of the Christmas cheer, the sight of happy faces and families, the aroma of stewing fowl and roasting joint, might conspire to raise his spirits. Charlotte and Mr. Hussey I left to their endless chowder making, though Charlotte was also steaming a pudding. Kit came with me docilely, but he insisted on walking just at my heel. Finally, he said, “Call me Fido, Una, for I am your faithful dog.”

I stopped at once. “You are my beloved husband, my best friend.”

“But scratch behind my ears, anyway,” he replied with the light of teasing in his eye.

“Gladly.”

But as I scratched in his hair, his expression changed and suddenly he snapped at my fingers.

“Let's walk on now,” I said, turning my face so that he would not see my tears. My cheek remembered the terrible slap he had given me on the
Pequod
. A chill went through me, but surely I was not afraid.
And how was my mother spending Christmas? And had Torchy pinned a wreath to the tower?

The Nantucket weather alone was cause enough to shiver. All is gray in Nantucket in winter: the sea, the sky, even the earth is matted with low-growing, twiggy plants, all gray and stark, and the shingles covering not only the roof but also the sides of the houses have weathered a matching shade of gloom.

In the town, the gray doors were bedecked with wreaths of bayberry. Several times we saw a red candle burning in a window, though it was still afternoon. I wanted to walk to the bake shop to buy a cranberry-and-nut cake to share with Kit, and while we walked down Vestal Street, I heard piano music tumbling from one of the houses. At the keyboard sat a young woman of about my own age. Younger brothers and sisters were about her, and a gray-haired man, doubtless her father, turned the pages of the music for her.

“William Mitchell,” Kit suddenly said. “He sets the chronometers for the captains.”

There was something in Mitchell's face, wreathed by his family as he was, that very much pleased me. I wished that Kit and I might have been members of that circle—not as husband and wife, but as children, being instructed and provided for. Just then, the family dog rose up from the door stoop to greet us, wagging his tail as though we were cousins. He seemed to smile in the way that bulldogs sometimes have. Kit dropped to one knee and stroked the massive, wrinkled forehead.

“Here's an inscription on his collar,” Kit said. He read: “ ‘I am His Highness' dog at Kew, / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?' ”

“It's a quotation from some eighteenth-century wit,” I quickly said.

“A philosophical dog,” Kit said.

“He doesn't know what his collar says.”

“Did I say he did? You make mountains out of molehills, Una. It's something I don't like about you.”

I stood quietly for a moment. Yet I felt angry. Was I to be criticized whensoever he liked? Who does not sometimes have a critical judgment of a companion? But we do not have to inflict our thoughts on those who try to be pleasant with us.

Kit stood up, and the Mitchell dog lost interest in us. He walked to a stump and lifted his leg. “Ha,” Kit sneered. “Natural philosophy,
unbridled.” The dog scratched the earth a few times with his hind legs and walked back to his own threshold. As though quoting the dog, Kit muttered, “I piss where I please.” Again the beast's face seemed to smile, but not particularly at us. All the while, the young woman played the piano. “Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” they sang lustily. Her father turned another page and then smoothed it with his hand.

“Shall we get our cake now?” I asked.

“I thirst,” Kit said.

Were those not some of Jesus' own words? Did I now hear portent in every utterance of Kit's? But I followed him as he walked toward the town pump.

Kit worked the handle and bent to drink. After that he walked three times around the pump, eyeing it all the while. With just such a baleful eye, long ago, he had regarded the Argand lamps and spat on the light, just before I was blinded by lightning. Suddenly Kit unbuttoned his trousers, took himself out into the air, and directed a stream of urine onto the pump. I saw that another woman was approaching the pump, and I hurried to stand between her and Kit, to shield him from view. I spread wide my skirt.

“You'll not ruin this,” Kit said.

Then he doused my skirt on one side where I held it out. In a low voice, I urgently admonished him to stop, but it was too late. At the sight of a man pissing on a woman's skirt, the unknown woman let out a shriek. I covered my face with my hands and cried bitterly and publicly.

When next I looked at my husband, two men stood on either side of him. For a moment, he seemed to embrace their waists—all the time with his trousers unloosed and his member bare and nakedly hanging down before him. One of them grasped Kit's trousers, and the other adroitly tucked in his member.

Someone tried to put her arms around me, but I ran away a little distance and stood there and watched, sobbing, almost hysterical, all the while. I would not abandon Kit, but I could not bring myself to stand beside him. The odor of his urine rose from my skirt. A number of women did come to surround me loosely, hiding me in their midst. The constable was summoned, and after some short talk with Kit, he came to me and said Kit must spend the night in gaol, for his acts of exposure and defilement of the public pump, till the judge might be
consulted. With that I broke from the group and ran, half blinded with tears, back toward the Try Pots, my wetted skirt flapping against my knee. I stank with his urine. As I struggled through the streets toward the road, I thought,
I can leave it all behind
—run faster—
I can leave it behind in the town
.

The Christmas Day sun was beginning to set before me—all gold around the sun itself and mauve and purple to the north. Scarcely noticing the roadbed, I stumbled and cried and rushed myself most miserably westward.

When I reached home, Charlotte saw my wet skirt and that I was distraught. She followed me up to my room, and, my own hands shaking too much to unfasten my skirt, Charlotte unhooked the waistband.

“A dog?” she asked. Her nose prompted the question.

“No. Kit did it.”

“Kit?” A stillness descended upon her. “Where is Kit?”

“Gaol. They saw him.”

She gathered up the garment, and my stockings, and said I was to “never mind.” She would wash my clothes for me. I was to get in bed. But I took a rag first, and water and soap from my washstand, and bathed my leg. My skin felt scalded from the urine. Then I did crawl into bed, biting my thumb to keep from wailing.

Why had I yoked myself to a madman? Because he had given me a seashell comb for my hair?
Experimentally,
he had wondered if the Venus comb would fulfill the function promised by its name. Giles had given me a rose in the tradition of high romance and assumed its decay.

Again I saw the yellow stream directed at my skirt, the rosy head of his penis held in his hand. Once I found a dead tortoise and reached for the shell to make buttons or tortoiseshell hair combs. But when I turned it over, the shell was unbearable with maggots. Just so my hand drew back now, when I imagined reaching out to Kit. My body shivered.

Before long, Charlotte appeared with a tray, lighted by a red candle. Thus she brought me a serving of plum pudding, covered with white hard sauce. Between her arm and her body, she carried a square of folded cloth. After Charlotte had me sit up and put the tray across my lap, she shook out the fabric.

“As Providence would have it,” she said, “I made you a new skirt for Christmas.” It was dark, forest green, and I thought of the cedar
trees of Kentucky. Charlotte sat on the bed and chatted with me, never mentioning Kit. My mother had remained loyal to my father, but he had not hit
her
. He had not made water on her.

Charlotte's kindness, as always, soothed and healed me. Before long, she was telling me a light story that she had heard in the inn. She wanted us to be friends. The plum pudding was in itself so sweet, so rich, so savory and plump with figs and currants, that it seemed we were indeed having a bit of Christmas. I ate slowly. The dark, strangely rewarding flavor, the rectangle of my bed, my new skirt, never worn and darkly green, fanned over the counterpane; Charlotte and I together on the bed, her gentle, entertaining talk—taken all together these composed a little world of our own making. Here safety and order, a rich sweetness, reigned.

L
ATE IN THE YEAR
, between Christmas Day and the beginning of the New Year, late in the afternoon, I sat in my room, so generously provided by Charlotte Hussey above the Try Pots, and stared out the window at the pale gray sky and the darker, slate gray of the sea. Even the form of the sea resembled slate, striated with small, rigid-appearing ripples. A flock of gray shorebirds flew by in the distance—a gray blur. “ ‘How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,' ” I thought, quoting Shakespeare, of my existence. Kit would be released in a few days.

I was having my period—at least I was not pregnant—but the monthly condition contributed to my mood of woe and dejection. No letter had come either from the Island or from Kentucky, and I felt completely alone in the world while Kit lay in gaol. The prospect of his release did nothing to brighten the seascape.

Staring out at the drably rolling ocean, I heard a soft plunk. I turned around to see Charlotte's vixen, Folly, making a nest for herself in the middle of my bed. The fox covered her black, pointed nose with a single wrap of her bushy tail, and then peeked out over the ruff with her glittering eyes. It made me mad.

“Shoo,” I cried at her and clapped my hands together. “Get off! Go!” I commanded.

But the vixen contemptuously closed her eyes as though to sleep.

I put my knee on the bed and clapped loudly right at her ear. She did not move. I was afraid to lift her. Well did I remember the sharp nips she had given my ankle. I lifted up an edge of the counterpane to roll her off. Her eyes opened, and she seemed indignant that at a remove, I with my human wit could yet dislodge her.

“With this soft and bending plane,” I told the fox, grasping the counterpane on one side, “I lever you out of my spot.”

I stood high on the bed, lifted up on the coverlet, and thus contrived to roll Folly to the edge. She, being not without her own intelligence, foresaw her fate, jumped down, and quickly ran under the bed. There she hunched. She lifted her lip to show her teeth. Then I wrenched off my shoe and threw it at her. As my aim proved poor, I quickly pulled off the other. She yelped when it hit her and adjusted her position, but she did not leave. The little beast should have selected someone else to harass.

I looked around for something to throw and found a rusty flatiron used to prop the door in summer. I checked under the bedskirt to see which side Folly was closer to, and then I circled. She was not dumb, and as I circled the bed, she again moved. I took the flatiron and beat on the floor with it and yelled.

At this racket, Charlotte soon appeared in the door.

“She was in my bed!” I exclaimed.

“Was she?” Charlotte asked. She snapped her fingers, and to my amazement the fox immediately came out from under the bed and jumped onto it.

“Just like that,” I said.

Then, in the air, Charlotte drew a number of circles, loops like an airy lariat, and then stuck a pointing finger through the invisible figure, toward the door. The fox leapt off the bed and went briskly out the door.

My lip trembling, I turned to the window so that Charlotte would not see my distress. It was her control, her mastery over her world, even the animals in it, that shamed me to tears. “Thank you,” I said.

I heard her walking around the bed to join me. She put her hand on my shoulder.

“You did not see Kit yesterday?” she said.

“No.”

“Nor the day before.”

“There is no use to see him. He lies in his filth. He curses me.”

“But he is mad.”

“And will be so again. And then? He'll be gaoled again. When he raves his worst, he asks me to marry him. When his dementia clears, he tells me he has changed his mind.”

“Was it not a proper wedding, Una?”

“It was at sea.”

“Perhaps then a sea wedding does not bind on land?” she went on. Was her point a legal one, or sarcasm?

“We have shared a bed,” I said. “That binds.”

She took her hand from my shoulder. Suddenly she made strange clicking sounds with her tongue, and instantly the fox ran in and nipped my ankle!

“You caused your Folly to bite me!” I exclaimed. “And to claim my bed.”

“Yes.” Her face was serene and composed. “Would you like to hear her sing again to the glory of God?”

“Charlotte,” I said, “I marvel at you.”

“Your mind is like a bright light, Una. Unable to shine on itself.”

Her serenity and her beauty kept me from labeling her a witch with a fox for a familiar. Perhaps she had worked a witch cure: perhaps I needed to be nipped out of my self-pity and isolation. I put my hand on Charlotte's shoulder, and in touching the point of her collarbone, I knew she was as thoroughly mortal as myself, a woman coping with what life brought her. “Would you explain yourself?” I asked my friend, for she had befriended me.

“Yes,” she said. “But let it be with tea and scones and not in your room.” She turned her gaze and her body from the window, avoided my eyes, and led me out of the room. “Sometimes I like the public space,” she said. “It's where the most private things can be said, confidentially.”

There were, in fact, customers in the tavern, three large men whom I took to be from the South Pacific basin, for they had the kind of blue tattoos on their cheeks that I had seen on wooden artifacts from that region. They themselves, in the color of their skin, had a kind of
mellow, wooden appearance, like sandalwood. Charlotte smiled at her husband and told him she would not be getting up to help with the service. She handed me two brown mugs to carry; she plucked two large scones from the warming oven, wrapped them in a cloth, and set them on a woven tray beside a large brown teapot. She led us to a booth where the backs of the facing seats were so high that we had something of a private alcove, though to my left the business of the tavern continued and to my right, through a small, diamond-mullioned window, lay a patch of the gray world. My eye noted the carvings on the table before me, for one of them was a sailor's name and the word “Sussex” with the date of her last sailing. I sat in the place where a man now dead, one I had surely known, as it was the year of my own passage, had sat.

“Did you know him?” I asked, putting my finger on the incised name.

“Yes. He was from Nantucket. He sailed three times from New Bedford with the
Sussex
. But the last time, of course, he did not return.”

“I suppose then,” I said, thinking that my husband had grown up also on Nantucket though he shipped out of New Bedford, “that Kit knew him.”

“Yes,” she said. “Did you?”

“Yes, but not well.” I felt sad and weak.

“Then you met him in New Bedford before the ship sailed?”

Immediately I saw that she had trapped me, that I had made an error, for Kit had said that he and I had met by chance on the
Albatross
. Charlotte eyed me closely.

“You're not going to make Folly nip me, are you?” I said.

“Do you deserve it?”

“Who are you to judge?” I tried to defend myself.

Our questions were not aggressive, but they were on the edge of it. She unwrapped the warm scone and handed it to me, along with a small crock of butter and a spreading knife.

I tasted the fragrant bread—it was baked with plump, soft raisins in it—and told her sincerely what a wonderful cook she was.

“Mr. Hussey would not have married me otherwise,” she answered. “The first Mrs. Hussey was well known as a cook, and he did not want someone who would bring him down in the world.”

“You bring Mr. Hussey down?” I glanced at him: spry, amiable,
certainly, but wrinkled—much older—bowlegged. Above all, he seemed
ordinary
. Another part of me smiled to think that I had adopted one of Kit's measures for a human.

“Youth doesn't last,” Charlotte said, with a bit of edge in her voice. “I could not through any act of will make my youth last. Cooking recommended me with more assurance.”

“I look to sewing,” I said. “It's how I'd earn our keep.”

“Sewing has no aroma,” Charlotte said, smiling.

“But it lasts longer than a scone,” I answered. I took another appreciative bite of mine, following it with a slosh of tea. “Cinnamon,” I said.

“Yes, with a grate of dried orange peel.”

“I doubt that anyone in the world is a better cook than you, Charlotte.”

“I thought that Kit would marry me,” she said.

“How can you not hate me?”

“Look at Kit.”

“Still he is Kit.”

“And, you're thinking, so is Mr. Hussey yet Mr. Hussey.” Her face turned crimson all of a sudden. It was a tide of blushing swept over her, and I knew she would reveal something remarkable. “Mr. Hussey loves me in such a way, in our bed where it is dark, that I can imagine him to be whomsoever I choose. For he is all men in one. Every night, there is nothing but newness in his touch. His imagination is beyond bounds. He speaks to me, and he never says the same words twice. He touches me in ways that I beg him to remember and do again, but the next night, again, all is new. Mr. Hussey is kind and loving even to my toes. I did not know, could not have known, that yonder nimble, deep-creased man could be such—both servant and king. And most odd is that he says he did not know it himself, that never in his life has it been so before, but he says it is me alone who makes him full of glory, and that it will always be so, as long as I can cook.”

Someplace in the midst of this astonishing speech, she had reached out her hand and held mine. How urgently, how vivaciously, she wanted me to know the quality of her marriage. Could it be so? Involuntarily, I glanced at Mr. Hussey, who was carrying a large tray of chowder bowls up on his shoulder, and at that moment he looked at his wife, and his tongue licked just the corner of his mouth and his
grooved face was washed with—yes, I may as well name it—glory. I saw that it was true. They were inflamed with each other.

“Kit is a good cook,” burst from me.

“Yes. He was. He courted me with buns.”

“And me as well.”

“I thought that Kit was dead. Gone down with the
Sussex
. Una, how he startled me, materializing beyond the steam from the chowder.”

Now it was my turn to reveal the truth. “I was on the
Sussex,
disguised as a cabin boy.”

“You went to sea!”

“Yes.”

“How could you?”

I laughed. “Since I was a cabin boy, no great strength was expected of me.”

“You ran away to sea?”

I thought she had never been so astounded in her life. It pleased me. I nodded.

“Just like a boy?”

I nodded.

“I can't believe it.”

I sipped my tea. “So why do you have Folly-fox bite me?”

“You deserve it, for your disloyalty to Kit.”

“Disloyal?”

Her face, which had blushed with thoughts of her marriage bed, now drained of color to a milky white. As she spoke it seemed to me her teeth grew more pointed and foxlike.

“You let yourself grow discouraged. You neglect to visit him. This is the time between Christmas and the New Year, a bland, waiting time that you could fill with possibility. Kit is your husband. Kit Sparrow, Kit Sparrow! I would have died for Kit Sparrow.”

“I have tried to be a good wife. No, it was not trying. It was my heart's desire.”

“If you leave him, leave him to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Hussey will equip him a room here, with barred windows, and I will tend him. It would be a less lonely cell than the one he lies in.”

“Would Mr. Hussey let you keep Kit?”

Now she looked at me with fury. “Do you doubt my loyalty to Mr. Hussey?
He
would not. He knows me too well. I know myself too well. I've promised him. There is nothing in heaven or earth that could come between Mr. Hussey and myself. The world is not closed off, Una, because a man and his wife make a small, inviolate circle at the center of it.”

“Certainly,” I replied, “you have let me, let Kit and me, hang on to the edge of your world.”

“No, I have made you welcome, and Kit as well, though Kit betrayed me.”

“You were not engaged, I think.”

“I thought him dead and vowed to myself I would give to any husband all the passion that could not be given to Kit. But Kit had no reason to think me dead. And yet he married you. Before he ever came back to Nantucket.”

“His life had changed.”

“As you know well, he was yet Kit; I was yet myself.”

“When the
Sussex
went down, a few of us survived, for a time, in a whaleboat. Giles was there, too.”

“Giles had a volcano in him. I never knew what it was.”

“I don't know if Giles fell by accident or if he killed himself.”

Some of the natural color returned to Charlotte's face. She considered the idea, and, finding no explanation in her own thinking, asked me why Giles might have decided to end his life.

“At the end, in the whaleboat, it was only we three who survived.” But then I stopped. I feared that if I continued the story, she would never look at me again with the same trust in my humanity. We had broken a tabu for which there could be no forgiveness. I regarded the innocence of her face, her plump, chinalike cheeks, her vibrant black eyes and glossy curls.

“You can say,” she said.

“We lived off their flesh and blood—the others.”

“Did you?” She drew back, her eyes round.

I would not say it again.

“Him too?” She put her finger nervously on the name cut in the table.

“I don't know. My mind refuses to remember who. Sometimes I see a pair of pointed shoes. Somebody's watch cap.”

With both hands, she reached across and took mine, my fingers still curled around the scone, though I had ceased to eat.