Ahab's Wife (57 page)

A
T
V
ESTAL
S
TREET,
in the small, gray house, the natural sweep of Maria Mitchell was much more evident than it had been when we sat in the judge's stiff dining chairs. Almost as soon as I arrived, the solar system came tumbling down the steps with a great wooden clatter, the planets being represented for instructional purposes as an assortment of proportionally sized wooden spheres. Maria grabbed the largest one, aimed for her brother, and said, “Here, catch Jupiter,” and sent the ball flying. Her younger brothers and sisters were all around her in a web of affection.

The mother, Mrs. Mitchell, I saw only in passing. She, as well as all her daughters, was indeed dressed in silk. She seemed to be a strong woman, but to have no exceptional intellectual leanings; Maria apparently took after her father in that respect. The mother was on the way to bed for a nap, having been up much of the night with a sick child.

“A mother of eight puts in more night hours than an astronomer,” Maria observed, with grave regard for her mother.

“But you were up all night, too, with the stars, weren't you?” a little sister asked quietly.

“But I'm much younger,” Maria responded. Then I noticed the tracery of dark circles under her eyes. “Let me show Una my office.”

Maria's office turned out to be nothing but a closet, literally. It had only width for a desk, each side of which abutted a wall of the cubby. Before the desk there was depth for a chair, and three bookshelves were conveniently mounted on the wall above the chair and desk. The outer wall, to the left, was filled with a window, which would have provided excellent reading light in the closet.

“It's great advantage,” Maria said, “is that it has a door that can be closed.” She gestured to a sign that currently hung on the inside of the door but could easily be hung on the other side facing the hall (and the younger siblings). The sign read:
Maria Mitchell is busy. Do not knock
.

“It's as cozy as a first mate's cabin,” I said. “More so. I have always had an admiration for well-fitted small spaces.”

“Above the bank, I shall have a whole room of my own.”

I saw that the papers on the desk were covered with mathematical calculations.

“What are you figuring?”

“Father and I have reviewed the calculations that tell us Halley's comet should appear again this August.”

“Comets are predictable?”

Her eyes glistened. “Some are. Halley's is. It will not come again for another seventy-six years. This is our only chance to see it.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “We'll likely be dead in seventy-six years.”

“It will be another century—1911 and then again in 1986 and 1987.”

“An unthinkable distance—1987—in time,” I said.

“Not at all,” she laughed. “Astronomically.”

“How far does Halley's travel?”

“Beyond the farthest planets. Then it turns around and comes back, loops the sun, and leaves again for outer darkness.”

I was silent a moment, and then I observed that “outer darkness” was a Biblical phrase, the place for outcast sinners.

Maria just laughed again. “How I should like to ride a comet to Outer Darkness!”

Now I laughed. “I can see you—an astronomical witch with a new broomstick to ride.”

“I fear I will have to content myself with my telescope as a broomstick. Will you watch for Halley's with us?”

“Yes,” I answered, but I knew that if my husband was home my nights would be spent in our conjugal bed. When she took me to her rooftop observatory, a platform with railings such as many houses in Nantucket had, I remarked that she could use my cupola for observation if the weather was bad.

“The cupola has a solid roof,” she said. “And if the weather is bad”—she smiled—“you can't see through the cloud cover anyway.”

I felt embarrassed for my lack of logic. “I like the airiness of this,” I replied, gesturing toward the neighboring roofs. “The openness.” Indeed, I did feel much more a part of the green treetops and the surrounding houses than I did in my little well-roofed, window-sided room perched in the center of my house. Maria pointed out a patch of mulberry trees, for silkworms had been imported to Nantucket and they fed upon the mulberry. She pointed out the factory where the silk was unwound from the worms' cocoons and woven into cloth. But my cupola had a better view of the harbor.

As we two women stood there, queens of the scene, I blurted, “Your life seems somehow so…successful.”

“I am doing exactly what I love to do.”

How blessed, I thought, for a woman to know her path so well. My investments were so much in people, in Ahab now, and before that in Kit, and in Giles. In my mother and my father.

“I had a stormy youth with my father,” I said.

“My father and I are much of like minds. But I do not always succeed. The judge asked me to take Pip, the black child rescued from the fire, into my school. I did so, for a week or so, but he was miserable and so was I. The judge took him away.”

“You don't think his blackness had aught to do with it?” I asked boldly, thinking of my Susan and her eagerness to learn to sew and write.

“Not at all. I have taught other black children with success. But Pip
can scarce sit still. Only dancing and banging on his tambourine truly please him. He wants to go to sea.”

“Perhaps Ahab will take him.”

Again we fell silent, filling our lungs with the sweet, green air.

“Do you not count your own life a success?” she asked.

“I'm happy,” I replied. But I didn't know if I counted that the same as success. Because I wanted her to know me more personally, I added, “Last winter, in Kentucky, I lost my baby and my mother.”

She put her arm across my shoulders and squeezed me. “I am sorry,” she said. She said nothing else for a while, but with her arm across my shoulders, I breathed again, and I could not help but rejoice in my own aliveness. When she spoke, it was to inquire if I had other kin, and I told her that I had failed to reconnect with them.

“There is a registry of all lighthouses. It may not be current as to keepers, but you can write to each.”

Then I knew Maria was, indeed, a friend, in response to my need. Grief seemed a dark storm cloud that was moving off, released, behind my head.

Maria fixed us and the children an efficient lunch, during which time she was much at their disposal conversationally. They were apparently in the habit of asking her questions so that their educations might be advanced as they ate. She was not the least bit dry or pedantic in her answers. Sometimes she mixed in legend and fable. In answer to the question “How was Nantucket formed?” she replied that once there had been a gigantic sachem. When he walked on the beach at Cape Cod, his great weight made his feet sink deeply, and his moccasins filled with sand. Disgusted, he pulled the sand-filled moccasins off and flung them into the sea. One became Martha's Vineyard and the other became Nantucket. “Now,” Maria asked, “how else do you suppose Nantucket might have been formed? Think also that we are in a line with the Vineyard, and with Block Island, and even Long Island.”

After that geological topic was discussed, one of the children fetched a fossiliferous rock. We all stared respectfully at the tiny stone skeleton in the rock. “An autograph of time,” Maria called it. It pleased me that she looked not only to the heavens but also to the earth. These children, and Maria herself, seemed so preoccupied with the outer world that
they left their inner feelings to take care of themselves, and the Mitchell brood all appeared to prosper with the regimen.

As I walked home that June afternoon, I reflected that I, too, had been very happy in the midst of their curiosity about observable phenomena. But what of the inner life and what of the dark issues of our time—of slavery, of the position of women, of temperance, of the crisis in religious belief? William Mitchell had spoken as an ardent abolitionist at the dinner table, but he mainly invested his time in science. Maria seemed content merely to focus on what she herself wanted to do. Perhaps that was as good an answer as any to the question of the status of women.

At home, I climbed up to the cupola, though it was yet midafternoon, but I took my writing box with me and commenced a letter to Margaret Fuller. As soon as I stuck my head into the glass enclosure, I felt the intensity of the boxed-in heat. Quickly I flung up the sashes of my windows in all four directions, and at once the breezes cooled the space. Still, because of the opaque roof, the cupola did not feel so free and open as Maria's roof walk. Yet it was very comfortable and pleasant.

Before I commenced to write, I took up my own brass telescope and scanned the seas for the
Pequod
. I saw one, two ships, their sails beautifully luffed by the wind. Like two swans, they approached Nantucket. But neither was the
Pequod
.

I opened my letter to Margaret by describing the scene—I always enjoy receiving a letter when the writer locates himself or herself in a definite place, and I like to know if there is a cup of tea at hand, or how the light is falling in the room or beyond the window. Such descriptions transcend the barriers of time and space and give reader and writer the illusion that they are together. After fixing myself in space and time, I wrote Margaret something of the judge's dinner party and of my subsequent visit: “Maria of Vestal Street is something like a Vestal Virgin, attending the fires of Science.”

While the subject of fathers had only passingly interested Maria—probably because Mr. Mitchell was so satisfactory—I brought up the issue to Margaret, who like me had been oppressed by hers. A far less balanced man than William Mitchell, Margaret's father had been bent on stuffing her mind—with literature and the arts rather than science—and he often kept her up so late learning Greek and Latin that his instruction became a form of torture. Unlike William Mitchell, he had had no sense of play or spontaneity about him. Even as a child Margaret
had had terrific migraine headaches, and she often dreamt of drowning in a rising sea of blood.

Then I wrote, “I have considered the difference in the ambience at the Lighthouse, when I was a member of that family, and the ambience at the Mitchells'. We at the Lighthouse were more intense and inward, though we, too, were happy. Perhaps our inwardness came from the isolation from other people and from the exposure to the weather. When the value of that haven on the Island, of my aunt, uncle, and cousin sweeps over me, I wince, for I have failed at contact.”

My letter to Margaret seemed heavier than I had intended, for my initial mood had been buoyant. Happy to make a new friend in Maria, I had vivaciously approached writing a letter to my old friend. But my mood had changed, with the thought of my losses, as though a cloud had passed over the sun.

Indeed, a cloud had passed over the sun. I looked to the northeast and saw storm clouds on the horizon, moving swiftly inland. The color of the sky drained from blue to gray. A hard breeze rushed through the window and scattered my papers. Quickly, I put down the opposite window, except for an inch. Soon I partially closed all the windows. Still the air puffed in, fresh with excitement, and I saw a crack of lightning run vertical down the sky. I counted the seconds till the thunder and judged the storm about ten miles off. The cupola was topped with a lightning rod, though I would not linger long enough to risk being blinded again. But here was the advantage of an enclosed cupola: a safe seat for watching the approach of a storm, if not the storm itself. The whole sky above the ocean was a roiling gray mass, and the sea changed color to match it. It seemed to spread out at the same time that it blew shoreward. I picked up the telescope to have a last look, for that day.

There she was! There at the far seam of gray water and gray sky, her white sails filled, running before the storm: the
Pequod
! “There she blows,” I yelled, as though my husband's ship were a long-sought whale. But it is the happiest and most excited cry I know. My heart beat against my eyes. Yes, there she was. With a small twist, I fine-tuned the telescope. Unmistakably the
Pequod,
surely Ahab! The lightning blazed all the way down to the sea betwixt him and me, and I saw the three masts dancing with fire—St. Elmo's fire—like three lit candles. Thus sailed home my fiery Ahab, in power and in glory! She
rode deep, as I knew she would, well laden, not counting the three magic cheeses of golden ambergris.

Could Ahab, with his glass, see me, or at least my little glass house? He would not look. His hand was surely upon the ivory tiller, but in his mind's eye, he saw me. Let me die, if that was not true! My Ahab, my captain!

Every second she plowed the high gray hills and the deeper gray troughs closer toward home. I could see the spray, white and feather-like, off her prow. How the shape of her filled me! I could not put down the glass. Her wooden sides, the decking, the masts, the sails—every part was bent to the proportion and shape that said
Pequod,
husband, home. How truly, how recklessly, she came.

Surely there was no heart on the ship that did not unrestrainedly urge Ahab on toward home. Certainly Starbuck wanted every risk taken, and Stubb with his pipe clamped in his teeth was muttering encouragement. Even Daggoo, whose home lay on the other edge of the Atlantic, sympathetically caught the scent of home. “I smell meat,” I could hear him say to Tashtego. And the noble Tash longed for home, marred as it was by the history of his people; even Tash urged the storm-driven ship toward this place where once his fathers walked in pride and plenty.

My heart left off excitement and went serene. I thought of my white bed, still almost bridal, and how in the hush and lamp glow of the room I would open my arms to my husband. There was peace. There was peace. But it gave way to a new anticipation, as though all the excited waves churned within.