Ahab's Wife (65 page)

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON
Captain Mayhew, a most reasonable and responsible-seeming Quaker, came to call on me at Heather's Moor. Though Harry Macey's letter, impaled on Gabriel's boat knife, had been returned to the
Pequod,
Starbuck had tossed aboard the
Jeroboam
a bag of several letters, which Captain Mayhew laid out on my parlor table: three for sailors' wives, one from Mr. Stubb to his wife, one for Mary Starbuck, and one skinny envelope for me.

“How fared my husband?” I pressed his letter to my throat as though to give it voice.

Captain Mayhew answered, “He pursues the white whale. That much of the mutinous madman's tale was true.”

“In what style does my husband pursue Moby Dick?”

“Moby Dick can be pursued in only two possible styles.” Captain Mayhew had a quiet, sensible bearing. A short white scar sat atop one cheekbone.

“They being?”

“Either ignorantly, foolishly—That were the way of poor Harry Macey. Thy husband is no fool, but full of cunning.”

“Or? The other way?”

“Madly.”

Standing in the double doorway of the parlor, with arms folded across his chest, was my lad of six. “Madly? What do ye mean by madly, of my father?”

Captain Mayhew glanced at me, but answered, “I think thy father is a brave and skillful captain. Perhaps he pursues Moby Dick too hotly.”

“I thank thee for thy answer. But, please, tell me, what ye mean by
hotly
.” Justice's speech was that argot of Quaker and sailor usage that he had heard from his father, but that he never spoke to me.

“With too much singleness of purpose. Too much ardor. Let me pass, lad.” And with that Captain Mayhew walked by Justice and out the front door.

Justice crossed the room to me.

“What is
ardor?
” he asked me. He squeezed my hand.

“It is passionate feeling, great love.”

“My father pursues the whale because he loves him? That's not true, Mother. He hates the whale.” I was startled by my son's logic; it seemed far beyond his years. He spoke like a man of the law—ah, he was borrowing logic from the judge. “How is it, then, that Captain Mayhew said my father pursues Moby Dick with too great love?”

I retreated to the sofa of the parlor and patted the seat. I tried to put my arm around my son, but he would have none of it.

“Thy father—your father—loves not the whale, but he loves the idea of revenge. That is the part of himself that he most loves now, that part that would punish the whale for taking his leg.”

“Moby Dick is a thief.”

“Aye, and he has stolen away more than thy father's leg from us.”

“Could he not forgive the whale?”

“He burns in his heart for revenge.‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' ”

“But Moby Dick has no leg.”

“Thy father requires his life.” I saw Justice's brow knit—so like his father when he was gathering thunderclouds—beneath the dark curls on his forehead. For the first time, he made me think of Chester, the little cabin boy, and his father, the good captain, who hoped to die to save his son. The waters of grief rose up in the well of me.

“Moby Dick's whole life?”

“Your father feels the whale has ruined his life.”

“Ruined!” At that the boy's face contorted with pain, he gasped one mighty, shuddering sob and threw himself into my arms. I could have bitten off my tongue.

“It is a temporary feeling your father has. Once he has killed the whale, your father will feel whole again.” I rubbed the boy's back and felt it grow more still and then more stiff under my strokes. Was I hardening my son by passing on to him his father's passion for revenge? “Of course, your father's life is not at all ruined,” I went on. “How could any person be ruined when he is loved the way you love your father and the way I love him? Do you think it's possible to have a ruined life when you are so beloved?” I waited for his reply.

“I don't know.” His words were muffled against me. He hesitated, then added, “Moby Dick has such a big life.”

I smiled, relieved to hear him speak childishly. But I thought of the tons of blood in that great body, and how it would incarnadine the sea all around if he was slain. I had hoped that Ahab would have a change of heart, that he would forgive the whale, or forget his hatred. Ahab's life was as intact as he wished to perceive it. “Yes,” I answered my son absently, “whales are enormous.” But I wondered, if Ahab did prove victorious, then who would Ahab be?

Presently I reminded Justice, “Captain Mayhew delivered a letter from your father.”

“Let's go up to the cupola to read it,” he said, sitting up.

I hesitated, for I did not know what grown-up news it might hold, but I agreed. “I shall meet you there, but first a trip to the privy for me.”

I hastened down the path, and could not help but notice how nicely the berries, which Ahab loved so much for their juicy freshness and purity, progressed. Enough daylight came into the privy for me to be able to read, but, never lacking for oil, we kept a lamp there, and sulfur matches in a tin canister. Ah, the luxuries of the rich. In that clear glow, I seated myself and read, nay, devoured:

In the cupola, I read of the
Pequod'
s encounter with the meadows of brit to Justice. He thought it pretty—I asked him so—but he said he would prefer his father describe a chase to him. “Then you must write to him yourself and tell him so,” I said.

“Yes, I should learn to write,” he answered. “It's time to learn to read, too.” He looked serious, but pleased and brighter. He glanced about and suddenly knit his brow. “We will have my lessons up here.”

That dark imperialism! I saw the stamp of my own father in his grandson's brow. And Ahab's stamp, as well.

T
HAT NIGHT
I could not sleep for anxiety about my husband.

Was there not a moon tonight?

I left the bedroom and climbed to the cupola. There she was, with the cross of the mullions quartering her face. I sat in my rocking chair, then rose to open two windows a crack, so the cooling night air could visit me. Soon I adjusted a shawl around my shoulders. I rocked and watched the moon. I tried to make my mind as blank of worry as her blank face. Eventually, the moon rose above the roof of my little cupola, and I could no longer see her. Yet I rocked and rocked, incessantly as the sea herself.

When I awoke it was morning, with the sunlight streaming in and heating up the cupola.

To my surprise, Justice was not in his bed. I had just dressed and was about to look for him when Justice with Captain Mayhew appeared at the door.

“I couldn't find you,” the boy said, half sobbing. “I went to the wharf. I thought you might have gone to sea and left me.”

“I tried to tell the boy his mother was no sailor,” Captain Mayhew explained.

“He doesn't know, does he, Mother?”

“Well, here I am,” I said. “I went up to the cupola to watch the moon and fell asleep.”

“He is a fine, bright lad,” Mayhew said. “I've stuffed his ears with tales of whales and ships.”

“I shall go with Captain Mayhew as cabin boy,” Justice said with horrible cheerfulness, “if my father doesn't come back.”

Turning to go, Mayhew said, “Mind your mother, boy. I won't have a cabin boy who doesn't mind his mother.”

“And what has happened to Gabriel?” I inquired.

“The judge says he's too mad to hang, and the gaoler has taken him out to Quaise with the other poor, mad folk.”

“My father is not poor,” Justice said. “He's very rich.”

“Hush, Justice. It does not do to brag.”

Captain Mayhew looked up. “It's as fine a house as any in Nantucket. And beautiful inside.” He sighed. “I invest in oil,” he said.

“What whaling captain does not?”

“Not that sort of lubricant. A new kind of oil, oozed from the ground, lying about in pools over the bogs in Pennsylvania.”

“Pardon me, Captain Mayhew, but it is unusual for a sea captain to turn landward for his profit.”

“Yes, Mrs. Captain, but someday the whales will all be dead, hunted to extinction by the likes of Captain Ahab and myself.”

Justice made a darting motion with his arm. “Let Moby Dick die first!”

 

A
FTERWARD
, I crossed the street to visit the judge.

“What is this new oil that Captain Mayhew speaks of?” I asked.

The judge shook his head. “A sad business,” he said. “No one wants the stuff. When you burn it, it billows noxious black smoke.”

“I fear Captain Mayhew's taken a loss, then.”

“Did Captain Mayhew discuss his business with you?” Austin Lord wished to tease me.

“Why not?” I said, with something of my old sauce.

“Well,” the judge began, scratching the side of his nose thoughtfully, “you scarcely know Captain Mayhew. One does not discuss business with casual acquaintances.”

“Do you think Captain Mayhew will stand a heavy loss?”

“He has already stood a heavy loss, my confidential friend. Now he insists on throwing his money down a sinkhole.”

“Confidential, of course. Why is that?”

“The project is undercapitalized. He got into earth oil too soon. There's no technique for transforming it into something that can be used in lamps. There will be, no doubt, someday. But Mayhew is already living at Absalom Boston's boardinghouse.”

“I should like to invest some of my excess in Mayhew's earth oil company.”

“Too risky. I advise against. Strongly.”

But despite my friend's objections, I made the investment, and substantially. Perhaps I could tide over Mayhew's enterprise; he tided over my son's need for a father, for a few days.

T
HOSE WERE RESTLESS
days and nights for me. My son was taking beginning steps into the broader world. Not only did he go every day to visit the wharf—he soon made friends with many of the mates and crew, and occasionally a captain, for Ahab's sake, would chat with him—but, as he had proposed, he quickly learned to read and write. His first laboriously written sentence was a simple demand to his father:
Tell me about A Chase ye have made this voyage
. I was glad for all of Justice's progress, yet it made me uneasy.

Many a night I kept a moon watch. I saw her through all her phases. My physical tides became tied to her, and when she was dark, and her gravitation pull was added to that of the sun behind her, then my menses were pulled from me. When she circled around to the other side of the earth and her face was fully lit, there was a ripeness and readiness to my body. Sometimes I thought of Mrs. Maynard's porcelain devices, but such things repelled me. I did not merely want my sex to soar; I wanted the entirety of Ahab, body, spirit, and mind. During the full moon, I thought of farmers throughout the great plains of the West, of Indiana and Illinois, and how they planted corn and wheat when the moon was full.

 

A
S THE DAYS
, weeks, months, years passed since our parting Christmas Day, and as we received no further word from Ahab after that delivered by Captain Mayhew of the
Jeroboam,
nor came any ship to port that had seen him, a kind of cocoon spun its slow self around me. Oh, I could still chat amiably, about nothing, with the judge; and the Mitchells would occasionally tell me some interesting fact, but those facts were no more than pinpricks to a determined sleeper. My letters to Margaret were dull, and she wrote back to me more briefly than she had at first. Her observations about her “Summer on the Lakes” seemed intense, but oddly impersonal, and in fact it turned out that she soon published a book of that title, and some of the very phrases and sentences of her private correspondence to me could be read there. I do not know exactly why that disappointed me. Perhaps I should have been thrilled. Only in church did I find some enlivening of my spirit. My minister never failed to say words that seemed to reach down in me and quicken something vital that might lie dormant otherwise.

I thought of the fog and mist that Christmas Eve when I had told
my husband farewell on the cobblestones of Nantucket. There had been strange movement of feet; there had been Fedallah, whom Ahab had reached out and grabbed into our ken. What had been shrouded by that immaterial whiteness? It seemed inside me. It had stopped my throat like cotton and kept me from crying out warnings to my husband and from making enough entreaties to right his mind before he sailed.

He had used my shoulder like a crutch that evening. He would board the ship under cover of darkness so that none of the crew would see him come a-limping down the street.
Stay, husband, stay,
my heart pleaded, even then, with the ship emerging before us in the mist, and something like cotton muffling my spirit.

Now there was a numbness to my life. My son grew. He prospered, for he was eager to learn everything that might fit him for a life at sea. My friends were kind and patient with me during this period, but it was as though they stood on the other side of a many-layered veil.

Once Maria and I were sitting on the same side of the table in the dining room when she said, “Turn your telescope upon the moon. You could map her face. Galileo was almost burned at the stake for saying the face of the moon was blemished with craters.”

“Really?” The bit of history interested me. I wished something would burn away my dull anxiety. “Where was the heresy in such science?” I asked.

“The moon, being a heavenly body, was supposed to be perfect, reflecting the perfection of God's creation. The church would not brook Galileo's observation of irregularity on its surface. The observation of sunspots was also a threat to their system of belief.”

“Surely only a few crackpots would dispute so irrationally?” I poured out tea for us both and told her this was not China tea, but Darjeeling, from India.

“You assume a time as reasonable as our own. Galileo was invited by the Pope, the very head of the church, to recant.”

“Truly?” I was incredulous that a person could rise to such power as a Pope and yet be so foolish, even in a distant time.

“When Galileo refused to recant, the Pope said, ‘Show him the instruments of torture.' ”

“And?”

“Galileo recanted. Now you can use the telescope safely to map the craters of the moon.”

I smiled at my loving friend. “I doubt that I shall ever travel there.”

She returned my smile, yet persisted. “There are
mares,
seas, on the moon, albeit dry ones, as well as craters.” Her eyes glowed over the rim of the teacup. “And one of the seas is called Tranquillity.”

I gazed into Maria's face and saw nothing resembling tranquillity but a face where passion had been transformed into scientific curiosity.

“Do you still search for your comet?” I asked, putting my arm around her.

“Oh, yes.”

She waited for a lover she had never seen.