Ahab's Wife (55 page)

“And so am I.”

There was comfort in his largess. He was a kind of protector.

“It is partly luck,” he went on, “that we have become friends. But that first time you sat in my parlor with the gaoler, there was nothing abject about you. You had your purpose, your wish. That alone saves
any human from abjectness. You wanted me to let Kit go. Did you get your wish? Yes. In the old fairy tales, it is the strength of the wish that transforms life. The wish is itself the magic wand.

“And you already had a suitor, Una. You were blind to this, but half the unmarried young ladies in Nantucket—at least the ones whose families were not wealthy—were spellbound by the gaoler's kindly nature, his easy strength, and his golden hair.”

“Knowing that Kit is yet alive, will the town count any children I and Ahab might have to be legitimate?”

“Only one person has asked me this. Can you guess who it was?”

“The Unitarian minister?”

The judge laughed. “No, Una. He is probably the most liberal and humane person in Nantucket. After, perhaps, William Mitchell.”

“Mitchell?”

“The scientist? The astronomer who sets the chronometers? No.”

“Who, then, asked you?”

“Think a moment. There is a clue in our most recent discourse.”

“The gaoler.”

“Exactly.”

“Mrs. Macy—Maynard—has just told me he is married and has a golden child.”

“When he asked me, I told Mr. Starbuck I had pronounced Kit legally dead, and your marriage to Ahab was as legal as any marriage, and your children as legitimate. I told him I was the absolute civil authority in the matter.”

“Are you?”

He did not deign to answer. As I looked at him, he seemed to grow larger. I put my hand on my forehead.

“Una, I think you should go back to bed. But you have found home essentially intact. There is nothing here that has the power to stop your world from spinning at the same rate that you left it. You have jumped off and back on the turning top. The power of the law has kept it so, like magnetism or gravity.”

“Ahab divorced me from Kit.” I gasped, for I had not meant to tell him. “And then married me to himself.”

“Ahab did not think kit dead?”

“No.”

“Then he is as powerful as the law.”

“He took me aboard the
Pequod,
and there on the spot where he had married Kit and me, when we were all far out at sea, he divorced us. And took me as his wife.”

“You have left one outlaw for another.”

“Ahab loves me in a way Kit was incapable of. And I him. Kit's vision was double, always ambivalent and double. Ahab's vision has a piercing singleness to it. I am his single choice.”

“This divorce by captain's decree, and the marriage, then—they were what you wished?”

“Yes, I wished it.”

“And you thought you had no power!”

“I feel weak enough right now.” Indeed, the room seemed almost in motion. The painted waves on the walls—while I focused on the clean-shaven, polished skin of my bald judge—seemed in my peripheral vision to sway.

“I meant to make your homecoming light, with crumpets and sweetness.”

I reached my hand across the table to him. It was a broad, shining mahogany board, and only our fingertips could touch. “No,” I said. “The conditions of home needed to be clear to me.”

“Well, they are also much clearer to me.”

“I've troubled your conscience?”

“No. But you have astounded me. You and Ahab.” He fidgeted in his chair. “I had not reckoned his power, in his own lawless way, to be as great as mine. It's a little unsettling.”

I tightened my grip on his fingertips. “I do respect the law,” I said. (Why, having just put my own history into an honest light with him, did my lips so soon bubble out a partial truth?) “You have been a wonderful friend to me,” I added, with all my heart.

He returned the squeeze. “Then very soon we shall settle again into our cozy, neighborly way. I shall introduce you to the Mitchells—a family you will enjoy.”

“I'd like that.”

“Good. Now you should rest.” He released my fingers and pushed back his chair from the dining table. The painted ship over near the corner seemed to move. It was coming closer to home. The judge spoke yet again: “Let me leave you with an abstract question.”

“Yes?”

“You say that Ahab married and divorced you—”

“Divorced and married—”

“Quite right. Married, divorced, married. That he divorced and married you on the same spot on the deck of the
Pequod
where he had earlier married Kit and you.”

“Yes. As nearly as could be told.”

“And that makes a kind of rightness and order of things, doesn't it?”

“Perhaps. In some symbolic but nonessential way.”

“But consider if it really was the same spot, or a thousand miles off the mark?”

“Scarcely that. How could it be?”

“You and Kit were married far out to sea. The
Pequod
moved away from that place, even while you were wed. What is the nature of a spot, a place? Can it remain the same? Is it adequate to give a place only a local definition? Ought it not be global?”

I smiled, pleased with the question. “This is a new line of thought for you.”

“While you were away, I spent a good deal of time with the astronomers, with William and his daughter Maria Mitchell.”

 

A
ND SO
I climbed the stairs toward my room with the happy thought that Nantucket, for all its smallness as an island, had yet new and interesting people with whom I might make an acquaintance. I hoped that Charlotte would find Kit in the wilderness, since she wished it so ardently. I would miss her. Kit seemed scarcely real to me. Nor the horror in the whaleboat. Sorrow for the loss of my mother and child was covering all of that—a new sediment.

I did not stop my climbing with the second floor. I climbed to the third level, to the cupola. There I picked up the brass telescope and swept the horizon for the sails of the
Pequod
. From that line, my eye traversed a zigzag path across the ocean, coming closer with each sweep, scanning the waters for my homeward-bound Ahab. At length my telescopic vision, unrewarded, came to harbor.

How dear a place it was. I could see the gestures and expressions of people disembarking, pleased they had come to port. I put down the
spyglass, and the harbor moved away from me. Now the scene was landscape instead of portrait. The ships and wharf seemed a size to hold in my hand. Dear home, beautiful home.

F
ROM THE CUPOLA
, I came to my room, and then BLAM BLAM BLAM went the pineapple again, and when I dragged myself again to the front door, there was my third set of visitors. And a set they were, that is, a pair: Captains Peleg and Bildad. Two stern old Quakers, Bildad carrying his Holy Book and Peleg a small black satchel. No bearers of sweetmeats, these two.

I bade them sit in the parlor, and I was glad to see that Mrs. Maynard had carried off our cups and plates before she quit the house. She wished to move back to her own place now that I was home.

“We've come to see ye at the very first possible moment,” said Peleg.

No,
I thought,
you've been preceded twice
. There was something perverse in me that made me want to contradict whatever truth these righteous people presented.

“As we were instructed to do by our friend, thy husband,” added Captain Bildad.

“Blast ye, Captain Bildad,” put in Peleg, “we would have come to see the lady in any case, instructions or no.”

“He fears ye dead,” Bildad went on in a dolorous tone.

“Yet she's all as sweet and pretty with black curls as she was before she ever voyaged to the wilderness.”

“She's drawn and pale,” intoned Bildad. He sat very upright on my flowered sofa, with his hands, lest they be contaminated by colorful chintz, resting on the black cloth of his trousers.

“I'm but back from my travels.”

“We know,” Peleg said, “and we've come to call, by our own inclination as well as by the request of Captain Ahab, communicated
by letter, to deliver letters to you at the soonest possible moment. And they are here in my satchel.”

“You'd not give them all to her at once?” Captain Bildad turned harshly to his partner. “She's wan and sickly.”

“Oh, no,” I spoke up for myself. “I'm quite well. You have letters?” I felt swept with joy, that tide quite replacing the sluggishness of fatigue.

As Peleg reached inside the dark satchel, which he had set at his feet, Bildad grabbed his hand. “No, ye don't!” Bildad ordered. “Have ye forgotten the ways of the sea so soon? When a shipwrecked sailor washes ashore, a-clinging to his board, do ye thrust a whole cask of biscuits down his throat? Nay, ye careless devil! Ye ration! Ye ration! Look at her. Shipwrecked if ever I saw a shipwreck.”

Peleg looked at me anxiously. “Hast thy life been hard?”

“I would much appreciate and be grateful if you delivered my husband's letters to me from your satchel.” I spoke as politely but firmly as I could, yet I was shaken.

“Resign thyself to tell the truth,” Bildad said. “Where did thy ship flounder? Where was she stove?”

“Thou, Bildad!” Peleg roared. “Her journey has been by land!”

“I speak all metaphoric,” Bildad said serenely, peering at me through his spectacles and crossing both hands over his chest. “And Mrs. Captain knows it well.”

“Thou shalt not torture her with piety,” Peleg said warningly. “We'll have no talk of what is good and what is best, of what is meet.”

“Thou shalt not kill her with too much joy. I see thy soul, Peleg, sinking down in the fiery pit, a murderer of innocence, a persecutor of Mrs. Captain, who is a lamb of sweetness and resignation.”

“How do I persecute her?”

“With too much joy!”

“Blast ye, Bildad—”

“No need of profane words. Impatience is thy sin. Prodigality—”

“Prodigality of biscuits! Blast ye, I mean letters. 'Tis thou wilt kill her. Look, she's likely to faint with wanting of her rightful letters, which Captain Ahab commissioned us to bring so that when she came home she should not be alone! And I'll give them to her, if ye bite my hand for it!”

But lank Bildad, though the satchel sat at Peleg's feet, bent himself
as fast as a trunk lid could close and snatched the satchel into his own lap. “It was never my intent not to give her something,” Bildad pronounced sanctimoniously. “But thou shalt not kill her with too many biscuits.” He slowly reached his hand into the satchel and drew out a precious envelope. I recognized Ahab's handwriting, large and flowing with crests and valleys like the waves of the sea.

I sighed with happiness and held out my hand. Very grateful, I took my letter and pressed it to my bosom.

“Now, brother Bildad, old shipmate,” Peleg said, quite appeased, “we must cast off and leave her to her reading.”

The letter felt like a dove at my breast.

As they stood up, I said, “Please, how many letters are there?”

“We have received three,” Peleg answered in a kindly voice. “In a few days, I shall bring thee the second.”

“After thou hast had time to masticate and safely digest the first,” Bildad explained, persisting in his biscuit analogy.

I walked with them to the door, still cradling my letter against my throat.

In a quiet, confidential tone, Bildad inquired, “Thou wert where? when thy boat was stove?”

“Kentucky.”

“How many lost?” Bildad murmured.

“Two.”

“God bless ye and have ye in his holy keeping,” old Bildad mumbled, as they left.

I flew up the stairs, pulled back the white covers, and ensconced myself in my plump bridal bed. My hands shook as I opened the envelope, and upon reading his greeting words—“Una, One, My Dearest One”—a great scoop of feeling swooped me up.

BAM! BAM! BAM! The pineapple again. Had I dreamt, or had I read and slept? All exhausted, I crept, half clinging to the stair rail, down toward the front door. There stood Aunt Charity, the sister of Bildad.

“Thou art pale as a ghost,” she said. She held the other two letters, one in each hand. “My brother and Captain Peleg came to me swelled up and proud as peacocks that they were managing thy business so
well. ‘Ye intend to ration her letters?' I asked. ‘I have never been married, nor ever even hoped to marry'—I said to them—‘but I am not lacking in imagination. Do I not fill up thy boats with all the goods of the land that anyone could ever imagine having need of at sea? Yea, I do. And has imagination ever been found wanting in me? Has anyone ever said, “O, if Aunt Charity had but imagined my need of beeswax with which to coat my bunion”—Nay, for I did imagine bunions, beeswax, and blister powder. And now only the slightest consultation of imagination on my part tells me'—I informed those old bachelors—‘without doubt that all her letters must be delivered, and I shall surely do it.' ”

With that she clapped me on each cheek with the letters, followed by two little kisses, soft as butterfly wings, in the same places, then put the envelopes tenderly into my two hands, and left. I walked into the dining room to surround myself with seascape.

And the third letter:

—More he wrote, for this was a long letter, when he took up pen and put it down and took it up many times. He had hopes for our baby and wishes for my health and safety; to my mother Ahab had penned greetings both polite and sincere. But the best of the letter was the closing: