Ahab's Wife (76 page)

W
HAT AN EMPTINESS
in the house! Justice away. I glanced at the hedge.
Be my friend forever,
he had said, and meant it.
Yes
. But what was I to do with that flare of feeling that comes when a woman loves a man because they are woman and man?

Robben and the judge. I knew of such practices, of course. I knew of my husband Kit with Giles, our friend. When I was a cabin boy, I knew that sailors, in the absence of women, sometimes bodily loved one another.

I left the house and walked down to the beach.

The waves reared and curled and then came crawling to me. How much I admired the deep C in that curl, like a little cave! And the mobile glassiness of the green water. And what was that on the horizon but a whaling ship? No more, no more did Mary or I keep watch for particular ships. I wished it were night and Mary might sing to me.

The water hunched and poured itself. Poured and poured, my ears greedy for the sound.

Do some preachers preach to warm their own hearts? Did Saint Francis preach to the animals of the forest to justify his own speaking? No. For he loved the animals, even as I loved the waves.

Ah, Waves, what do you know of eternity? As much as any force on earth? Down the eons you have poured your cups, twisted up your water-spouts, heaved your great flanks. You have sobbed and sighed, sparkled
and laughed, alternately slammed flat our puny structures and caressed and cradled us in your sweet rocking.

What do you have to teach us? Your capacity to vary, your ability to endure? Your ceaseless energy. The force of you comes ashore and dies there. Yet comes another. Froth, foam, bubbles, nothing.

How, O destructive Element, can I abide the days of your coming in, coming in, coming in? Because you are no single thing. You console with your eternal arch and spew, even though you smite us. You provide the bounty of your myriad fishes, whales, eels, clams, shrimp. But above that you offer us your beauty. You are energy made beautiful, and what are we ourselves but energy? We live by our inner tides and cycles. Our blood is salt, even as you are. We, like you, must always heave and move; may sometimes sparkle, may luxuriate in ourselves. Waves, you are a pattern that fills all the available space. Like stars.

Ah, Waves, you tell me what I am and what I may yet be.

W
HEN
I
RETURNED
from my meditations, I found upon my table a steaming apple pie. I looked out the window and saw that the judge's tall horse was hitched to the lovely carved horsehead on its post. Robben had told me that he had created the head after having seen an etching of the four horses over the portals of St. Mark's Church in Venice.

I sat down, cut the pie, and enjoyed one piece after another till the pie was half gone. It offered a satisfaction. I made myself a cup of tea and looked about me.

This was my home. I paced into my own room, which was the part of the house I loved most. Out its windows, I clearly saw the hedge, and the Gothic opening carved in it. No closing gate at all. An entry, ever available to me; a garden of whimsy and color for me to enjoy, and adjacent to the garden, also open to me, the workshop of an artist.

I accepted my small world, on the outermost rim of Nantucket.

But what was that whiff of scorch? Not the pie. I'd eaten half, and
it was without flaw or blemish. I sniffed about and found the odor everywhere. In the air!

With that realization, I went out to the road to look toward town. There it was, unmistakable, a smudge of smoke in the air. It was not try-pots. Unless you line up a few hundred try-pots. Even so, this was a fire for far too great a rending.

I hurried over to Robben's.

“The town! Is it burning?” I asked them.

The judge stood up as though making an official pronouncement. He leaned forward to extend his arms and long fingers so that the tips rested just on the tabletop. I thought of an illustration of a mangrove jungle tree reaching down its roots.

“The fire started last night about eleven o'clock at William Geary's hat store. Everyone said that a good jet of water could have quenched it, at that point.” He straightened up and clasped his hands behind his back. (I heard the skin of his two hands rasp together.) “Two of the private fire companies answered the call—I have long said we should have a
public
fire company—and they commenced to quarrel. Quarreled about who should have the honor of extinguishing the blaze. They argued till it was beyond either of their controlling, or both put together, or them plus every other bucket, hose, and cistern in the town.”

“Is much lost?”

The judge smiled ruefully. “Property, not lives.”

I thought of the fire Ahab and I had watched from the Unitarian Church.

“My church?”

“Safe. And Maria Mitchell saved the Methodist Church. They were blasting the buildings. It was next, but she made an observation about the convection currents at the head of Main Street and refused to move from the steps.”

How heroical my picture of her there, armed with Science.

“But her observatory next door was destroyed.” He added, “They'll rebuild.”

“Our homes?”

Robben interjected, “I thought this was your home, Una.”

The judge dropped his head. “You have to be told. Both destroyed.”

I gasped.

Surprise gaped at my feet. An abyss of surprise. But I felt no dismay. I did not fall.

Still, they waited for me to recover before speaking.

I paced the room. Then stopped to hear what was next.

“I have been persuading the judge; he must move here,” Robben said.

They both looked hard at me. Robben has told him, I thought, that I know something of their liaison.

“The warehouses on the waterfront burned, loaded with whale oil,” the judge began, recounting again the conflagration, watching me carefully. “The fire was so hot there, not even cinders remained this morning. When the casks burst, the oil poured onto the water, too, and the harbor was a cauldron of flame. Sodom and Gomorrah, people said. What think you, Una, of Sodom and Gomorrah?”

“I am glad you have left that place,” I said. “Here”—I waved at Robben's flower garden, and the green whale swimming in its midst—“is the very place to make a second Eden. At least, I've found it so.”

O
F COURSE
, the judge lost all of his beautiful furniture and china in the fire, as well as his home. The contents of my home were also destroyed, but most of all I hated to think of the little cupola sinking down into flames. In the high cupola Justice and I had created a comfortable localness of feeling. Now my son was so well situated at 'Sconset he scarcely blinked when I told him that the house, much of the commercial district, and even the wharf had burned. “I'm glad we live here, aren't you?” was his pragmatic comment.

I did not burden him with the financial loss, which was great, for the judge had failed to renew the fire insurance on both his place and mine. Likewise, William Mitchell had failed to renew the insurance on the Atheneum. I couldn't think of two living men whom I trusted more; they, like the rest of us, were only human and prone to error.

Fortunately for me, everything at 'Sconset was completely paid for. I had even paid the taxes for the next twenty years. And the Husseys' Try Pots Tavern did not burn. It did a booming business, and every month I received a benefit from my original investment. Thus, we had spending money for new expenses, and I had no need to skimp. While the pillow of excessive means was gone, still my head rested comfortably enough at night. As for Ahab's other assets, I determined not to touch them so that Justice, when grown, might receive his inheritance intact.

The judge did move in with Robben (whose masthead figures sold well in New Bedford and Sag Harbor on Long Island—Nantucket building fewer ships than in the 1830s). Despite the additional financial loss, Austin Lord gave up his judgeship and, quoting Voltaire (“Cultivate your garden”), proposed that he tend a vegetable garden to be located in my back lawn. It would go a long way toward feeding us all, he felt. From life in Kentucky, I knew a great deal about raising vegetables—a beautiful golden squash blossom came to mind, morning-open, golden and five-pointed as a star. I promised to instruct him the next spring, and as the summer waned, the two men taught me to swim in the warmed waters of the Atlantic. The judge also offered to tutor the boys, which benefited me as well as them. Often I sat in on their lessons.

I wrote letters to Margaret Fuller and to Frannie and to David, but he had fallen completely silent. I imagined David in his gnomish home in Virginia; I pictured him rolled up in a white quilt I had given him—why had I given him a quilt in bridal white?—rolled up like an insect in a chrysalis. In a chrysalis, I knew, an insect could melt its organs into a primordial gel and totally reconstitute into something new. Something beloved for its beauty and grace.

Would that I could!

Sometimes I looked at the small wood statue of David in the chair at my hearth and thought of his words that the sculpture would remind me of him, should he never see me again. Yet he was so resourceful and plucky, so capable of change, that I did not worry much about him. And the carving was beautiful and I never tired of its company. Occasionally I rubbed it with oil to keep the wood from drying and splitting.

To appease my restless spirit, I proposed that I go to sea with the
boys, but for a practical purpose. It was my idea that we commence serious fishing from a small boat. Though Jim and Justice were accomplished sailors, everyone agreed that I was the best fisherman among them. No wonder! Not only had I been a-whaling, but Uncle Torch and I had done just such fishing from a small boat. I wrote Uncle Torch about the fish we caught, and he replied with accounts of vast lake fish; Aunt Agatha and I exchanged our thoughts and fears on those issues which so much concerned Frannie and Frederick Douglass. Agatha's own emphasis was more on the voteless status of women than on slavery. We were all progressive in our thinking, and our particular emphases overlapped. For myself, pacifism seemed the most fundamental, if not the most immediate, issue.

Sometimes at night after a day on the water, I thought of the wonderful day when Ahab and I had taken a small boat, spied the old Lighthouse in the distance, but not approached it closer; instead, we had loved each other in splendid isolation on the sea. I thought of this not to torture myself but to celebrate the joy we had had together.

Austin Lord insisted on building all by himself a small smokehouse for the fish. He said such a structure could be very crude—just right for his building skills. Justice told me he imagined the judge's crooked and dark smokehouse was where nightmares lived in the day. I looked at my son sharply, afraid he might suffer from hideous dreams. He understood my glance, shrugged, and said, “Mother dear, it was just an idea. I thought you'd like it.” And I did.

So we sowed seed, cultivated the garden, fished, and smoked our catch. Just such independence had we enjoyed when I lived on the little Island with Uncle and Aunt Agatha. Again, my life seemed to come into balance. But I do not know what I would have done if I could not have taken Justice with me out in the boat, open to sun and clouds, incessantly rocked by the sea. And restlessness was answered by my serenity at night as well as by its expression in the rise and fall of the water.

Sometimes I looked at Justice's turned shoulder as he dropped a line into the depths and thought,
I could have named you Giles, or at least given you that name for a middle name
. Sometimes, as we rocked on the waves, I looked at my son's black curls and thought,
I could have named you Chester
.

I asked the judge once if he missed his refined life, especially his
bone china, of Nantucket town days. “Not a whit,” he answered. “And Robben is willing to experiment with pottery making.”

It was a very happy summer. The judge would say, “Here we have pleasure and peace, Una, instead of property.”

Both Justice and Jim treated me with new respect for my instruction in boating and fishing; sometimes I felt that they treated me as though I were a man. Though I had stitched myself some sailor pants, this troubled me a bit. Certainly, I was turning brown from the glare of the sun above and off the water, and my arms were lean and muscular with rowing.

The earth wheeled round the sun to autumn, and the harvest of the garden was a lovely success. Mary came and we put up and dried and stored the bounty. As we peeled and boiled and stirred with our long wooden spoons, I could not help but compare my brown and stringy arms to her pink womanliness. So had my mother and I worked together, and after Mary left, with several large boxes of produce carted home to Sankaty, I missed both Mary and my mother—the kinship and intimacy. The grief was not sharp, but the absence located itself in my throat so I could not swallow well for weeks. Ensconced with nutritious bounty, I could hardly eat; I thus lost more flesh. For the boys' lessons, the judge constantly ordered new books, which I devoured, but they failed to plump me up. At least I couldn't swim or fish or walk while I read.

On the last morning in September as I walked the beach, I came to a large fragment of a ship washed ashore. Rammed into the sand, the shattered prow could have come from the sky as likely as the sea. Once I'd found on the shore a storm-driven blackbird, dead, with its ivory beak plowed into the sand; though the bird had half rotted, one tattered wing was held up stiffly. Just so, this wrecked prow, twisted into the sand, still held up a sweep of hull, like a wing. I paused and contemplated what was not the
Pequod
.

Ahab's ship was not so lucky. Locked in the cold depths, the
Pequod
rested in profound darkness. Perhaps festooned with glowworms; perhaps a school of tiny phosphorescent fish swam through her wounds. Or did she still wander, though submerged—a shadowy ship drifting waterlike within the deep currents of the ocean? Like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, did she ceaselessly roam? I saw Ahab and his ship becoming water, their old shapes mingled into movement.

Standing on the sand, I stared at the wooden wing, and the wreck stared at me, till we each had told our stories. And my restlessness dissolved.

That night, as I climbed the stairs inside my home to the roof walk, I thought fleetingly of its other name, the widow's walk. But when I emerged on the platform, the glittering road of the Milky Way stretched from one side of the night dome to the other. In such a swarm of light, I was not alone. Perhaps some other being on an unnamed planet looked out across the spangled void and imagined me. And on my own planet, where was Susan? Eyes lifted, lips parted, also enjoying the riches of the Milky Way? I thought of its Japanese name, the Celestial River, and how all of us lived in the glory of its current.