Ahab's Wife (44 page)

N
EITHER ALARMED
nor embarrassed—for what adult has not witnessed the struggling of her soul?—I walked to him, placed my hand on his shoulder, and said, “Look ye behind, Ahab.”

First his hand covered mine, his hard-as-stone hand roofed mine. Slowly he lifted his head but did still gaze upon the burning town. Then, still on his knees, he turned his head and looked up, all disbelief and wonder.

He said in a broken voice, “Art thou angel or devil?”

“Some of both. Even as you are.”

“Even as I.” He rose to his feet. “Ye have spoken truly. Thou art as I am, though we be female and male.”

Then he encircled me with his arm, and together we stood, all calm inside, and contemplated the flames below.

“I would not have the old town burned to the ground,” he said quietly, “if I were God instead of grateful mortal.”

“Nor shall it.”

“Una, be humble. The gods might take us down from our height.”

I laughed. “Look,” I said, and I pointed up toward the rain clouds blowing toward us.

“Ye have a weather eye indeed.”

“All my life, I have watched the clouds.”

“I remember ye stood aloft for me on the
Pequod
.”

I remembered but did not confess that I had let pass unheralded one cloudy mass slipping whalelike just under the frigid water. And this was the first secret and the last that I kept from my husband.

“Avast!” Ahab shouted to the fire brigade below and pointed upward. Gradually, the people in the streets all stopped and looked up, lifted their faces to the heavens. When the first splatters of rain came down on them, they tucked down their heads, resumed the handing of buckets, augmenting the force of nature that had come to their aid.

“I would have us go back to the
Pequod,
the spot where ye were first wed.”

I nodded, for I knew what was in his mind.

When we were down in Orange Street, he stopped and pointed back to our balcony. “I should have known that the same impulse that sent me up there would send ye there, too.”

“As it was earlier,” I said. “When we met at the halfway on the road.”

It rained hard upon us before we reached the
Pequod,
but it was, for me, like a natural washing, the complement of Mrs. Macy's kind human ministrations to my flesh. And though this water was cold, the glow within warmed me like that very hearth of which Ahab had spoken.

We found our spot on the rain-swept deck—it was as though the
Pequod,
too, were getting her bath, and all her ivory fittings gleamed anew. I knew the red and black harpooners, Tashtego and Daggoo, slept below our feet in the forecastle, perhaps others as well, if they had not stopped at some dockside inn. There was no sound but the pelting of the rain on the boards and into the furled sails.

“Here,” said Ahab, and the lightning flashed in his eye, though his
voice remained calm. I hoped it would remain so. I did not want him to rage again. I wanted to bring him peace. He took both my hands in his flinty ones. If ever there was trust in my life, it was in him and in that moment. The
Pequod
swayed under my feet.

“Here,” Ahab said, “what I did join together, I now put asunder.” What he said was beautiful and true, to me. His voice was quiet and humble as rain. “And here I wed Una and take her for my bride.”

“Even as I take you,” I said. The course being figured and set, our kiss was the sweet, uncanny, effortless drifting toward harbor and blissful home.

“I would not spend this night on the
Pequod,
” I said. Though I flouted the marriage laws and conventions without a qualm, the shadow of my union with Kit aboard the
Pequod
made me shudder.

“Nor would I have us stay here,” Ahab reassured. “Wait.”

He went below and came back with an oilcloth satchel full, I presumed, of dry clothes, and he brought a broad umbrella as well, though I did not realize that he owned such an item. He slid a nuptial bracelet carved from ivory over my hand. A circle of whales swam round my wrist. Ahab no more needed the validation of priest or paper than I.

I was beginning to feel cold, and we hastened ashore. With my hand through the crook of his arm, we hurried away from the wharf over the cobblestones of lower Main Street. Soon Ahab guided us to turn, and we passed the gaol on Vestal Street. We walked down Vine and on. We climbed a hill. Across the street from the judge's home, we stopped before a dark house and then stepped onto its dark portico, where I had seen Daggoo lounging against a column. Ahab thrust a key into the lock of the uninhabited dwelling. Turning to me, he explained that he had bought himself a house, and that now, thank God, he had a place worthy of his wife.

This I could hardly believe. A grand house! We stepped from the wet street through the portal. And I was to live here!

“One day I was driven to it,” Ahab said, “to buy myself a hearth.”

The rooms were huge and empty—no furnishings. Wood was laid in the fireplace, though, and there were candles and matches on the mantel.

“Do ye like it?” Ahab asked. The strange ordinariness of my groom's question almost made me laugh, and I did laugh, but mostly with the joy of the place and the unlikeliness of all that was culminating
here. The candlelight reflected against the bare walls and flickered so unsteadily that the tall walls of the place bent and danced in light and shadow.

“All of it is for us?”

“I'll show ye.”

And I followed my husband from room to room, my soul ever expanding. Our footsteps echoed through the empty first floor, where there were shelves in one room for a library, beautiful fireplaces located at both ends of the house, and along the front and back, large dark windows, unhung with curtains, reflected our candles and us when we passed. I felt a flicker of fear. The walls of the room Ahab said was the dining room were wrapped in wainscoting, and above that a mural of a whaling scene encircled the room. How strange it was to stand in a bare room as though the floor were the deck of a ship, but the painted scene was much busier with ships and whales and whaleboats than any I had seen at sea. I liked best the broad flukes of a plunging humpback whale.

As we ascended to the second floor, my fingertips trailed a curved banister of fine wood. Then again, he showed me too many rooms to count, all bare. “Ye shall furnish them as ye please,” he said. And again I gasped.

At the door of one bedroom, he took out a key, and here in the bedroom there was a large, plump bed, hooked rugs, and curtains at the window. This room was as full and complete as the others were empty. He knelt to light the fire and then several lamps, till the room was bright and cheerful with the clear flame from sperm oil.

Just at the moment I felt acutely shy of asking questions—does one question the genie?—and shy before the worldly wealth implied in being married to a successful whaling captain. Ahab explained somewhat more fully that he only this morning had ordered this room to be furnished. Daggoo and Tashtego had trundled in the furniture. Then Ahab had walked out the Madaket Road to find me. I wanted to ask if he had known we would marry, but again I felt in awe and shy of the power that my husband commanded. His absolute power at sea I was well used to, but, except for the judge across the street, I had never spoken to a man of property on land. I did not question the legitimacy of our marriage, our power to define our lives. Again, in a kind, quiet tone, with none of his sea-gruffness, he told me he had been by no
means sure that we would come together, but he had hoped. “My hope was like a slain whale that sinks before any harvesting—it will sometimes, ye know—but then miraculously buoys and rises again.” He smiled at me. “And the prize the sailor thought was lost to him forever becomes rightfully his.”

I had no nightgown, but Ahab said he would turn his back and I might slide unclothed into the bed. “It has enough of sheets and puffs to cover ten brides,” he jested, and I did as he suggested. Then he went around and made sure curtains were closed, screwed down the wicks to the lamps, and turned the key in the lock. Peeping over the covers, I watched his unhurried preparations. Here was my husband, strong and happy, tucking us in for the night.

When he lifted the covers and came into our bed, I went to him with no shyness at all, but with love and purity and gladness of heart.

T
HE SPURT
of the match woke me while it was still dark, and I opened my eyes to see my husband lighting a lamp. He sensed that my eyes had opened, and he said, still watching the flame mate the wick, that he must go early to the
Pequod,
but I flung my arms open to him and softly called, “My Ahab! My husband!” and he set down the lamp and came to me.

All was given; all was taken. And there was a rising in me and a release and a bliss in me that met the same in him and that I had never known before.

“I would have a child for your returning,” I said.

“May it be so.”

And he kissed me with such a mixture of tenderness and passion that I half felt myself a child, one to whom is given all love and all protection. And yet my woman's body yearned toward him, though I would not ask again, because I knew his need to embark.

Ahab took his leisure, and held me, and kissed my face many times. “If there can be but one night's dent in the marriage pillow, let us at
least tarry over it.” When I reminded him that I knew the ship waited, he said, “But now I'm with my love.”

At times he seemed a dream to me, as we sat together in our luxurious white bed, for starched lace trimmed the linens and hung from the curtains. I had never imagined Ahab resting in aught but his rope hammock. But here plump pillows cushioned and pampered us and everything was ironed and smooth and white as snow.

The nap of it, indeed, was familiar to my fingers, and I asked my husband if, by chance, Mrs. Macy had ironed the linens. He said that she had procured them, but whether she had washed and ironed them he did not know. But I had no doubt of it.

“You did not say the linens were for me?” I asked a bit timidly. And he shook his head no. Would he, then, have had any bride, if I had not been willing? Though my goat-nimble mind thought of the question, to ask it would have been blasphemy. I knew my place in his heart, and I knew that he knew his in mine.

Then I marveled some (to myself) that I had known so little of my own course. I had been like a ship, blown about in dark and storm, suddenly finding, beyond all hope, that the dawn illuminated the port of home. And I thought back, recognizing how even aboard the
Pequod,
obsessed with the state of Kit's mind, I had always been comforted by Ahab's presence.

“I know when I first saw you,” I said. “I was aboard the
Sussex,
looking through the captain's telescope. Standing at the tiller, your legs seemed wedded to the distant
Pequod,
your hands to her strong steering, and your face to the wind. I took away the telescope from my eye and you were gone, but the porthole framed the
Pequod
and the sea and sky.”

“How was it you were aboard the
Sussex
?”

“Disguised as a cabin boy,” I answered without hesitation. I smiled. “But I would have that story keep for another time.” I was not afraid of his knowing any of my secrets, but I did not want to fill our time with a past that pertained only to myself.

“And my stories, too. They'll keep.”

In the gaze that passed between us all was known, all was accepted, all transcended, as we inhabited our moment together.

“There's a room ye have not seen,” he said.

Something in me shuddered. It was a sentence from Bluebeard's tale.

“And I would show it to ye before I leave.”

I stepped immediately from the bed, reassured, and Ahab held a softly woven white blanket for me to wrap about myself. “Come, my lamb,” he said softly.

We stood at the top of the stairs, and he handed me a wooden pole with a hook in the end. At first I thought it some equipment for whaling with which I was not familiar. But Ahab told me to insert the hook in a ring in the ceiling, and to pull. It would not be difficult. When I did so, almost like magic, a small staircase unfolded itself. Taking the pole from me, he bade me ascend the steep little stairs. Up I ran, gathering the wool blanket away from my feet, and there was a small, glass-sided room. An enclosed cupola, with its own tiny flat roof and a window facing each direction.

Dawn had come upon us. The dawn-drenched clouds suggested wings: mauve, purple, rose, gold-outlined—and the sky seemed full of gigantic beings. Though they had no real form, yet they flew and floated in their domain. “Angels” was all I could say.

Ahab joined me and said, “Aye,” and stood behind me with his arms wrapped around me as we looked. For only a few moments those good angels soared as disembodied colors, swirled and thinned themselves in expansion, ever more immaterial. Ahab pointed, and I looked down from the sky to the harbor, to the
Pequod,
sails furled. A few insect-sized people moved about, and I thought the
Pequod
was like a tight-closed peony bud groomed by ants before the flower unfurls its petals. The clouds dissipated into blue.

I turned to inspect the small, glass-sided room. “It's a crow's nest made luxurious,” I said. The little cupola held a rocking chair and beside the chair a brass telescope on a stand. “Here ye might watch for me,” Ahab said. “Protected from the weather, here. And if there is a child, ye might have a cradle here beside ye. And if I am gone a long time, the child might look out the window at the ships and the sea.”

“And I would speak of you, Ahab, of the father who loves his child from faraway waters.” How fervently, how completely, I hoped that my new husband was leaving me with child! I took Ahab's hand and kissed it and watered the back of it with a few tears, and when I looked in his face, I saw that he, too, was ready to weep.

“Now,” he said. “I have left money with the judge across the street,
and I shall write a note of permission for ye to use it as ye will. And I will have Captains Bildad and Peleg, who are owners of the
Pequod,
call upon ye and help ye in any way they can. But they are stingy, and ye shall not be fettered by their ideas of parsimony. Nay, ye will make yourself merry in all your living and spending till I come home, and, meantime, you will write to me, and I to ye, even though we both know letters are often lost at sea. Look, Starbuck is bidding farewell to his wife and babe.”

Though Ahab knew the likelihood of this event well enough to note it with the naked eye, I looked through the telescope and saw their last embrace. The child was but a knee-high bundle, but Mary's face, which I could barely glimpse inside her Quaker bonnet, was serene as any saint's, though her clothing was not resplendent.

Swinging the telescope away, I noted that the
Camel
was putting out. I hoped that my letters were not lost.

“I shall be happy here,” I said. “This home—it overwhelms me.”

“No, Una. I think nothing overwhelms ye. The cupola is the crown of the house, and ye in your person are diamond, ruby, emerald, and sapphire in that crown. I would not have ye overwhelmed by mere stationary boards and window glass.”

I had thought to ask if I might visit the Lighthouse and even beyond to Kentucky, but with these words of Ahab, I changed my request to a statement. “I shall be happy. I know it. And likely I will journey to see my aunt and uncle, and my mother, as well, in Kentucky.”

“But ye will not go to sea?” he asked me.

“No,” I freely answered. And the vastness of the ocean came upon me, and the utter unlikeliness of two boats ever finding one another. The expansiveness of the ocean spread before me, not as one who has never been to sea might imagine it, but as I knew it to be, stretching day after day, and moonlight night, and black night, and star-pierced night after night, and endless swaying, and the creak of wood and rope, and the hissing through the water, and the smack of the wind taking sails. “Godspeed,” I said to my husband. “Godspeed.”

“May angels keep ye.”