Ahab's Wife (63 page)

I
STOOD OUTSIDE
Ahab's door to listen to him breathe. Rapidly, pantingly, like a man at hard labor, he gasped the air and spat it out. So savage his breathing was, I thought his teeth grasped air and gnashed it into his lungs. I heard myself whimper, as though I were nicked. No leak of light escaped from under the door; darkness sealed the seam.
Not Kit, not Kit again
. My knees weakened, and I feared I would buckle in prayer before his closed door.

He must have heard my whimper, for he said, “There is a kind of divinity in madness. You have it in you. The password's ‘Madness.' ”

“Madness. May I come in?”

“Aye,” he whispered. And then more to himself than to me: “My wife makes me say
Aye,
when I would never say the word again.
No, in thunder. No!
But not to Una. No, for her, Ahab says No to No. Come in.”

I saw him on the narrow bed. Disarrayed. New blood on the bandage of the stump.

“Ye must close the door,” he said, “and abide with me in darkness.”

I closed the door and waited in the Stygian gloom.

“Speak, goblin.”

“No goblin. Una, your wife.”

“There are only goblins here.”

“Then I am a goblin.” I could see nothing at all. One line of light behind my heels. “Let me stay.”

We were silent a moment, he on the bed, I standing. I heard him moving in the covers.

“I've made a place,” he said, so gently I trembled. He patted the
bed. “Here, wife, come sit beside me.” My hand found his hard-as-brick hand, and I remembered how he had comforted me on the moor merely by taking my hand.

“I would not be afraid to die”—the truth blurted from me—“if I held your hand.” Like a vise, his clamped mine and took it to his lips.

“I would kill Death,” he murmured, “before he could take ye. No, I'd not wait like Orpheus and then try to harrow hell. No, I'd stand before Eurydice. No death for ye, Una.” And he kissed my hand and fingers again. His breath was hot. He began to pant, and a groan like a low surf filled the room.

“Let me touch thee, and heal thee,” I implored.

“Ah, Christ visits in the darkness.” His tone bit like vinegar in a wound.

“No, as a wife. I would soothe you as your wife.”

He held my hand even tighter, took my fingertips between his lips. “Beyond the visible,” he murmured, “the whale has dismasted me.”

I leaned over him and kissed his face, but he became still as a corpse. I sat erect again. A gasp like a sob escaped him, and my chest heaved with sobs I stifled as best I could.

“Una,” and again his voice had the quality of the purest, quietest brook in the woods. “I would tell ye a thought of mine.” He hesitated.

“I would listen.”

“There is a tragicalness in being human. In the mere being—”

Yes,
I wanted to say,
but that is only one way. There are many ways. We choose
.

“Because,” Ahab went on, “we are imperfect in strength and power. Without that, choice is an eyeless socket. The promise that man was given dominion over the beasts, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the deep is a false promise. There are secrets God keeps from himself. Perhaps his omnipotence is a sham. We need the Zoroastrian model, or perhaps the Parsee's. The wounds of Christ speak of his compassion for humanity, but what message would my wound impart? I have the spark of an idea. In this dark hole, I've seen a spark of Reason in the chaos of Unreason.”

Again he hesitated, then mused, “Is this fear of Una I am feeling?”

“Fear of me?” I felt the cube of blackness around me.

“Two brave fingers can snuff out any spark. Ye have a mind stronger than any thumb and forefinger. I would not have ye snuff out
my little idea. It must be fanned into a flame, a conflagration. Remember, we stood above time, at South Tower, and watched the world burn.”

“It rained.”

Ahab sighed. “And so ye'll not listen?”

“I'll listen.” I fastened my eyes on the slender light burning under the door. I had promised silence, acquiescence.

“Man perishes, but so long as he breathes he insists on dealing with all Powers on an equal basis. If any of these other Powers choose to withhold certain secrets—why we err, suffer, die—let them. That does not impair my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary.”

Ahab stopped. I was forbidden to cross his speaking, nor would I extinguish any consoling idea. He listed to my silence.

“No addendum?” he asked. Then he mumbled to himself. “He has astonished me. But I will yet astonish him.” He paused. “Astonish. What's its Latin root?
Tonare:
to thunder. There's thunder in astonishment.” He turned his mouth toward me. “That lance of light—it blinds me.”

“I'll cover it.” I reached to the foot of the bed for an unused blanket.

“Go out,” he said. “Leave me to think, dear One. Cover the crack from the outside.”

As I obeyed, I wool-muffled out the light and sealed in his words: “Madness is undefinable—it and right reason extremes of one.
Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris
…”

W
E SOAKED
the tender flesh of the stub in seawater to help it toughen and callus. My pride when he could bear to be fitted again with the ivory peg! My pain to see it there, more permanent-seeming than any real leg, it and the generations of ivory legs to follow. Ahab could walk again, but how angrily he trod his world! That he had once been whole and competent and now was imperfect and clumsy all but
brought despair. Anger, it seemed, was his only antidote to despair. Not love. Not even pride in Justice.

As soon as he could, he stalked the beach. “If I see water, I am
there,
” he told me. “I am about my business. In the white foam I see the forehead of Moby Dick.”

I begged to walk with him.

He replied, “Revenge is ever solitary. Isolating.” He looked at me as though I grew strange and remote.

But ten days before the
Pequod
was to sail, he fell on the rocks and was brought home bleeding again.

“Carry him upstairs. To our bedroom,” I directed.

Treacherously, my heart rejoiced: now he could not sail. Not on schedule. I could try again to calm, distract, dissuade, persuade—beg—him to be content that he was alive.

The bleeding of the stump bloomed like a rose through bandage after bandage.

“Stanch it,” he cried. “Stanch it with fire!”

Mrs. Maynard, horrified, backed up against the door.

“Throw wood on the fire,” I ordered, and I set the poker in it.

She fluttered about the room, her hand at her throat. Seeing her consternation, Ahab said calmly, “Leave my wife and me alone.”

She was glad to flee.

As I pressed a pad to his wound, Ahab and I watched the glow of the metal.

“It's white now,” he mused. “White as Moby Dick.” I could not move. “Now!” his voice rang. “Now!”

And I grabbed the iron and rolled its hot tip over the flesh, searing and sealing the rawness.

That roar—myself, not Ahab.

When he was better, I begged him to wait at least till the New Year, a mere week later, but he would not. He said, “How do ye know I will improve? I may fall again and be utterly wrecked, my vengeance never accomplished.” He spoke propped up in bed. I thought his head seemed grateful for the soft pillow behind it. He was beautiful in the white bed, his head framed by the lace of the pillowcase.

“If ye did not try to walk upon irregular rocks or the beach—”

“Ahab will go where Ahab decides to go, Una.” He did not speak
unkindly, but patiently, for he loved me. I am sure he loved me then. “Note this.” He reached in the pocket of his nightshirt and held up a slender glass tube, closed with a cork. “ 'Tis sand of Nantucket. I scooped it up just before that minion of Moby Dick betrayed me.”

“The whale's minion?”

“The leg! the leg!” He pointed to the spare one, a disembodied bone, standing in the corner. “I do not trust the ivory.'Twas the devil-cousin of this bone that betrayed me. My head dashed against stone? driftwood?—found senseless, brought home senseless.”

Stem the tide—the rage of Ahab would not be stemmed. He had no wish to harm me, but I was battered by his raging. Bruised into quietness. His finger shook as he pointed at the new leg standing in the corner.

“ 'Twas the shaft that bruised the groin—it was my splintered leg has sent me back groaning to bed for these last days before my leaving. It did not pierce the groin—no. But mocks me freshly to incapacity all the same. Yes. That incapacity that so gores my spirit. But here's Nantucket”—he waved the vial again drawn from his pocket—“though Moby Dick send me to the ocean floor, I shall triumph—remember that—for I shall be buried in Nantucket soil.”

“Ye could have a wooden leg!” I exclaimed. “Ye could pursue every whale but Moby Dick.”

“Nay, nay.” He contemplated the vial of sand. “Moby Dick is the King of Dragons, Una. Too many Nantucketeers—he has devoured too many of us.”

“Let some younger knight take up the battle.” I could have bitten off my tongue to say such a thing. Nights he lay beside me, he had muttered,
Injury or age?
and I had kissed his face slowly and more slowly till he slept.

Now he looked at me. Now his face softened. “My girl-wife,” he said quietly.

I stepped toward him, my tears ready to fall.

“Stay.” He held up his hand. His gaze moved back to the ivory leg in the corner, a virgin leg, yet untried. “No, it is ivory, bone of his bone, that will carry me to revenge.” Suddenly he raged again, “What is revenge but extravagant justice?” He did not look to me for answer. He opened his own jaw, curled down his lip, showed his lower teeth, became what he hated—the sperm whale. His body grotesquely lunged
itself upward as far as it could, as leviathan heaves itself from water to air, yet twists its body, eyes its adversary. “Moby Dick! Vanquished! Dead!” Ahab sank back into his bed, his gaze still fastened on the leg standing in the corner.

I stepped between him and the bone.

“Ahab, husband.” My voice shook, not with fear of him but with fear of failing to persuade him. Only the words of my father came to me, “ ‘Vengeance is mine. I will repay,' thus saith the Lord.”

“Yes,” Ahab said, exhausted by his passion. He closed his eyes. “I will repay.”

Something like the smile he had always reserved for me rippled over his lips.

I
N THE SWIRLING FOG
,
on Christmas Eve, I walked with Ahab to the wharf for his third voyage since our marriage. Each step forward was agony to me, a hideous mistake. Ahab's ivory leg tapped on the stones, and the sound rang and echoed in the street.

“Well, it is not the sound of a coffin hammer,” Ahab said. “Not mine. Perhaps it bespeaks a coffin for Moby Dick.”

“He is but a beast.” I envisioned the long, Arctic shape—now made of ice, now pale as the mist around us. Such a mist could conceal a white whale, could conceal the
Pequod
. Let us be lost in fog; let us wander lost till reasonableness be found.

Ahab's whisper was like the release of angry steam. “Dismasted, I am. Unmanned. I leave ye as I swore never to do, unless ye wished it, with an empty womb.” Ahab leaned heavily on my shoulder.

“We have our Justice. He is enough.” I heard the whine in my voice and replaced it with firmness. “I am happy and complete in him and in you.”

“Well, I shall have a second kind of Justice. Not with any woman. With the sea. She shall open her thighs and yield up the whale to me. By thunder, she shall.”

“Aim your harpoon at your own obsession,” I urged. There was the great gray hulk of the
Pequod
. “Fragment this monomania.” Firmly I grasped him round the waist. Would that my arm were a monkey-rope, that whaling device that insures the man on the cutting stage from slipping off into the jaws of the sharks.

He said nothing, but his hard hand squeezed my shoulder.

“My husband, I shall pray for you,” I said desperately.

“What, religious?” He glanced down at me. The fog obscured objects ten feet away, as though they were shrouded in a whitish veil.

“Nay. But I cannot help my prayers for you. They tumble out. They are but ardent hopes and wishes.”

The golden-haired gaoler materialized from the mist, tipped his hat to us, and tried to pass.

“Hold, man,” Ahab said. “You look to be a man without a grudge. How can that be, when Ahab's heart is all grudge and malice? Tell thy bright secret, for ye emerge from this mist and fog like some bright thing.”

“I go to fetch Mrs. Maynard. My wife is about to deliver our fourth child.”

“Heaps of gold, heaps of gold,” Ahab muttered bitterly. “Give me your hand, man. Nay, not to steady me. Hand in hand. A man to a man. Ye spoke of your wife. Look beside me. Here is a wife! Mark her.”

All bewildered, Isaac looked at me, refused evasion in his gaze.

“Not now,” Ahab said. “For later. Come, Una.”

The ghostly mist and fog thickened as we approached the water. Tap—tap—tap, we walked, and I heard many feet about us, strangely furtive. Suddenly Ahab reached out and grabbed a shadow. “Fedallah,” he hissed.

“All is as you have instructed,” the man replied and twisted away into the pale darkness.

Ahab took no further step. “Tell the boy, wife, I will yet come again to rock him on his horse, and I will play with him again from my chair. Don't let him forget me. I'll come again to dance and dandle him between two strong hands.” Ahab smacked his palms together. “Tell him good stories of me, whitewashed stories, of cannibal old me.” He nodded toward a whitish wall of mist. “Yon group of yellow men—I would speak to them.”

“I see no group.”

“There, scurrying in the fog. My special crew. My secret crew. I shall pack 'em in the hold.”

“Not the forecastle?” I could detain him with questions. There were thousands to be asked.

“We'll part now, Una.” He sighed as though he were fetching up words that were known but needed to be uttered. “My infirmity has embarrassed me; know that my heart is yet a man's, and I love thee and cherish thee.”

“And will you look at the moon, the benign, serene moon, and ask Luna to mirror your love to distant Una?”

“Aye, aye. I did that before. I'll not forget thee. Nor thy fresh bread, dainty dishes, juicy berries.” Here he grappled me to him—not the fond and loving embrace I had known before, but a desperate clenching. “Moby Dick slain, I shall return to you not a whole man, but more than I was, avenged, puissant, all puissance.” He hurried on in his speech, his lips in my hair, his voice the rumbling of his thoughts. “But Una, if the bitter time comes when it would be best for thee to forget me, do it.”

I did not try to contradict him; he regarded his own mood and thought as law. The tears came to my eyes. I reached up in the white mist to kiss him. “Peace be with you.”

I pulled my cloak around me—winter was full upon us—and walked homeward in white confusion. I berated myself: I should have spoken better. I pictured my heart upon a platter. If only I could have rightly presented him my heart. Would it have given me the power to convince, gladly would I have eaten my heart. Let my mouth gush with blood if that were a lubricant for language. As my feet came down on the paving, I bit my tongue to punish it, till it bled.