Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

Uncle and Aunt, who were pleased to have visitors, talked very freely and encouraged the sailors to talk, for it was a treat to have company. Kit Sparrow was never at a loss for words, and he himself asked questions and talked to little Frannie as much as to anyone and teased her. He said she should begin by fighting with the gulls on the dock so that she would be ready for eagles when she was a young lady. He made us laugh, and I thought his last name suited him, for he skittered from one topic to another like a land sparrow—we had none on the Island—with no shyness about landing on whatever idea he liked.

  His boldness was infectious to Frannie. I was glad to see her so animated and uncareful, for since her illness, I had thought her never so exuberant as she had been before. She asked Kit if he went to church on the mainland. I was old enough to know such a question was a degree rude, for people did not always want to reveal their religion, but Kit answered promptly and simply: No.

  Frannie asked him why, but this time he avoided a direct answer, though he said that once he had tried visiting the AME.

  “What was that?” Frannie queried.

  Giles said, “African Methodist Episcopal. The slave church.”

  “Did they accept you?” Aunt asked Kit.

  “Yes, but they asked me what I was doing there.”

  “What did you say?” Frannie asked.

  “I said my skin was white but my heart was black.”

  We laughed together, all but Kit. Though there was a trace of amusement in his eye, at the end of his statement there was that breathless suspension again, a strange intensity, as though he had revealed something that was of import to himself, beyond the way he spoke.

  “You make a wonderful chowder,” Giles said to my aunt, as though to change the conversation.

  “It tastes like home,” Kit said, quick to follow his friend’s lead.

  “And where is home?” Uncle asked.

  “For me,” Kit answered, “Nantucket.”

  “Then it may indeed be like home,” Aunt said, “for I got the receipt from Mrs. Hosea Hussey of the Try Pots Tavern.”

  “A very fishy woman,” Kit said. “Guess, Frannie, what her necklace is made of.”

  “Seashells.”

  “Codfish vertebrae, all polished up.”

  “And Mr. Hussey,” Giles added, “has his five account books bound in sharkskin.”

  My aunt turned to Giles and asked sweetly if he, too, then, hailed from Nantucket, but he said he was from Alabama.

  “I don’t hear the South in your speech,” Uncle said.

  “I’ve knocked about enough to lose the accent.”

  “I hear it in the long i,” I said. “Five account books.”

  “I’m still working on that,” he answered.

  “Giles thinks he sounds more educated,” Kit said evenly, “if he doesn’t sound Southern.”

  I thought Kit’s statement, again, to be an impertinence, but Giles took it perfectly at ease. When I knew Kit better, I asked him about his public explanation of Giles’s motives, and Kit said that he and Giles had a pact between them never to be inhibited in what they said to or of each other. I had never heard of people consciously making such an arrangement, and it increased my sense at the time that Kit and Giles were rather special young men, many cuts above the ordinary.

  “Once I was walking on the Madaket Road,” Kit said, “and I saw the Husseys’ cow. She was a brindled cow, and she fed on fish remnants behind the Try Pots. And when she walked down the road to get something green to eat, she wore a cod’s head on each foot.”

  “She did not,” Frannie said.

  “Yes, she did,” Kit answered. “It was to protect her feet from the sand.”

  Giles looked up. “Sand soon files down a cow’s hooves,” he said solemnly. And then we all laughed again. If the conversation had lagged, at a graceful moment, Uncle would have taken out his harmonica and played for us till our talking fires had been rekindled. But so well went our chat together, or gam as our sailormen taught us, that Torchy never checked his shirt pocket to be sure that the mouth organ (which I had not learned to play) was there. After a bit we left the table and went outside to sit on the eastern rocks, which were now in the tower’s shade but gave off a comfortable heat. Kit asked if we sometimes had seal families up to lounge with us on the rocks, and I saw how our relaxed postures did suggest that we ourselves were a seal clan in love with warmth. But Aunt and Uncle did not consider it a bit lazy, when company came, to talk away the afternoon, as we worked hard every day.

  At dusk, Uncle left us to light the lantern, and Giles went with him, but Kit said he would look at the stairs and lantern room later, and he stayed on the rocks to talk with Aunt and Frannie and me. I thought Giles was relieved to get away a bit, for his shyness swept him like the tides, even as mine did, coming and going at intervals, and he at the mercy of it.

  With the other men gone, Kit talked more at length in his speeches. Very considerate, I thought, his not wanting the weight of the conversation to fall on us. He asked me, quite unexpectedly, if I thought to live forever on the Lighthouse Island and become a keeper myself. What with Aunt there, and the question implying some distant demise of Uncle, I felt embarrassed. Kit, seeing this, but not divining the cause, assured me that some women did, indeed, keep lighthouses. I saw Frannie gazing at him as though he were a Greek god visiting mortals.

  “Tell us of your own mother,” Aunt said.

  While he talked, I watched how the low wind over the waves was catching and pushing against the gulls. Though they flapped their wings vigorously, sometimes they seemed to stand in the air, neither falling into the surf nor making forward progress. Kit said his mother, whose name was Hester, had become a baker, standing in for his father, who had made a trip back to England to see his aged parents. He said many women of Nantucket had the jobs of men, since theirs were often gone to sea as whalemen or on merchant vessels. His mother had been up before daylight and had baked many kinds of bread, with nuts and raisins and cinnamon, sometimes with dill or pumpkin flavorings such that the whole of Nantucket talked of it, and the stagecoach took orders of the bread out on the eastern end of the island as far as ’Sconset. One time, Kit told Frannie in particular, the stagecoach driver had been so obsessed by the wonderful aroma of the still-warm rolls that he stopped the coach. The driver stood beside the horses and shamelessly devoured the whole basketful, though the passengers all taunted him. “I couldn’t stand it,” he had said—Frannie’s face shone with glee—and the driver got back up on the box and drove on as though nothing unusual had happened. Such was the fame of Mistress Sparrow’s baking. Kit said he had been an apt boy of eleven when his mother was a baker for his father and that if Aunt would show him her flour and yeast and things he would bake yeast rolls for us in the morning.

  “Is your mother still a baker then?” Aunt asked.

  Kit said that when his father came back from England, he had wanted the bread made in the plain, old way, devoid of special flavorings. “They didn’t get along so well,” Kit explained, “after he came home.” And it turned out that his mother had an affliction of the mind. “One time,” he said, “in anger, she defiled the bread. Afterward, he sent her out on the moors to a family that kept sheep and also kept the mad people of the town.”

  We were all stunned by this. The conversation had been all sunny and generous, and here was this dark and inappropriate cloud. Kit sat silently, as though he had fallen into a bog.

  “What is a defilement of the bread?” Frannie asked, but in a small voice.

  “She urinated in the dough.”

  “Goodness!” Aunt exclaimed. She was disgusted that Kit would say such a thing to a child. For the first time, to me, the contours of my aunt’s mind seemed less broad. It was as though what I had deemed an unbounded plain was, after all, a road, mostly broad, but with narrow places in it. Still I knew my own face was flushed red. I knew what urination was, but I thought Frannie did not, and I thought she would not ask.

  ?
??How did they care for her madness?” I stammered.

  “They gave her dried-berry teas—huckleberry, which grows on Nantucket, and blueberries and cranberries. And rose-hip tea.”

  We ourselves, on our Island, drank rose-hip tea, our cottage being covered with roses, and we were not mad.

  “Did the teas help?” I asked.

  “Sometimes they took the madwomen to the sea, in winter, and made them bathe. They thought the shock of the icy water might cure them.” He added, “All of their patients were women.”

  “How many were there?” Aunt asked.

  “Just four.”

  “What happened to your mother?” I asked. All the color had drained from Frannie’s face, and the rims of the pox marks cast shadows so that her face was all cratered. She looked almost ill.

  For a moment Kit said nothing, and then he said, “She died.”

  “I’m sorry, Kit,” my aunt said.

  “See how the wind beats back the gulls?” Kit said to Frannie. “And the low clouds on the horizon? Likely we’ll have a rainstorm after supper.”

  Not accustomed to scientific observations about weather, or any cause and distant effect, Frannie looked at him with wonder. She seemed in awe of Kit, who talked so freely and told in one day both the funniest tale of a cod-shod cow and the saddest story of a mad-stricken mother that she had ever heard. I could see that Frannie, who was only eight, already idolized Kit. Never having practiced guile, Frannie now asked Kit if when they changed the lens, he would come back with the crew.

  He smiled at her, a happy glance with no trace of condescension, and only said, “Would you like that?” Suddenly I wished he would smile just so at me.

  I saw that Frannie regarded the Lighthouse only as a tower and a lantern, and the changing of the lens was a desirable event that would perhaps occasion the return of Kit. Indeed, since that trip to Boston, or was it since her illness—at any rate, since Kit came, she never spoke again of the Giant as though he were a person.

  CHAPTER 15: A Storm at Night

  OVER THE SUPPER TABLE, there was much talk of lenses, and Giles explained very well, lifting his expressive blue eyes to ours, to check our understanding, how prisms were arranged around the light source, and how the prisms fit around each other, with spaces in between, but with the outside curve of one prism being consistent with the inner curve of the next prism so that the whole apparatus focused and concentrated the light into a powerful beam. He drew on a piece of paper while he talked, and he was just as considerate as Kit in making sure that Frannie, as much as Uncle or anyone, could see the illustration and understand the physics of light. I noticed again Giles’s lovely eyes and how intelligence shone from them.

  In explaining the light, Giles spoke with confidence and happy animation. I said I would like to learn more about the “physics of light”—a phrase I had never heard or said before. “It gives me goose bumps,” I told him.

  “Then I will teach you what I know of optics.”

  “We will all learn,” my aunt said.

  Turning the paper over, Giles said, “Here is a law of light to remember: ‘The angle of incidence equals the angle of refraction.’ ”

  Frannie interrupted, “But what is light?”

  Giles looked at her and smiled, but said nothing.

  “I think,” I said, “that it is a process in the air, like fire.”

  “No one really knows,” Giles said.

  “What is wrong with my idea?” I asked, for I was truly curious and knew that it must be in some way inadequate.

  “Light can shine through water,” he said.

  “Then let light be,” I said, “a process, a movement of brightness through whatever it passes through.”

  “Yes,” Uncle said. “It passes through glass. It must be incorporeal, a process.”

  “But it cannot pass through wood,” Giles said. “Why is that?”

  “I know, I know,” Frannie said, her face glowing. “Wood is too thick.”

  “If you pick up a bucket full of wood and a bucket full of water, which is heavier?” Giles asked.

  “Water is heavier,” I said.

  “And there is an experiment,” Giles went on, “where a glass bottle is pumped out so that it is a vacuum. Nothing at all is in it, neither air nor water. Yet light passes through a vacuum with no trouble at all. Can a process occur when there is no medium?”

  “How,” I asked, “can we know laws about light, and yet we don’t know what it is?”

  “But perhaps we should go on with the laws, anyway,” Giles said. He looked at me appreciatively, and again I liked his face, which seemed more poetical than rational.

  During our scientific lesson over the supper table, Kit listened, but he left all the explaining to Giles. I liked that Kit knew when to be silent, as well as when to talk.

  Suddenly rain was thrown against the small window at the end of the table. It came at first in hard little particles, and then the glass wavered with streams of water. The stone walls of the cottage were thick, but the rain did a muted dance on the shake roof. At a certain point, Frannie walked round the table to Kit, stood beside his chair, and asked if he would like to see her seashells, and I remembered how, during my first night at the Lighthouse, Uncle had had her show me the shells as a step in our getting to know each other.

  Kit quietly went with her to the fireplace; so as not to distract us at the table, he replied softly as she took the shells one by one out of the basket for him to see. I admired his courtesy, and I heard him tell Frannie about a shell he knew called the Venus comb. He sent Frannie to the table to beg a scrap of paper, and on it he drew a picture for her of the Venus comb, which I saw later, as she kept the picture of the shell in the basket with the real shells. The Venus comb was a shell with a row of long, parallel spines, like a comb.

  Giles must have been listening, too, because he looked up from the lens he was drawing and asked me if I knew who Venus was.

  “She was the Roman goddess of love,” I answered.

  “Was she?” Kit asked from the fireplace. “I didn’t know that.”

  “What did you think, then, that the name ‘Venus comb’ meant?” Giles asked him.

  “That the shell was to be found in the vicinity of Venus. That Venus was a place.”

  “So it is,” Giles answered, “but it is a place in the night sky. The place you mean is Venice, in Italy. Venus is a planet. The evening star. I don’t think anyone has collected seashells there. How was Venus born?” he asked me.

  “From the foam of the sea.”

  “Very good,” Giles said. “Now, Una, look at this.”

  Eventually, Aunt went to wash the dishes, and much later Uncle withdrew to a corner. He took out the mouth organ, but he played it softly and privately, as though he were making music with the rain and wind and not with us. Only Giles and I remained at the table bending our heads over the drawings. Giles’s pleasant voice explained on and on.

  He talked not just about light, but also about many laws of motion, that one could calculate the exact force it took to move an object up an inclined plane, that a screw was itself a kind of twisted inclined plane, and, in the tower, the spiral stairs whereby a person lifted himself in air were a special case of inclined plane. He explained how, through tacking, which I had often observed but never fully understood, a ship could sail into the wind. There was nothing he did not know about pulleys and ropes and how they could be assembled to reverse the direction of the force applied or to make the pulling easier.

  “Would you like to be a sea captain someday?” I asked him. Giles seemed so sweetly sure of what he knew that it was easy to imagine him as a remarkable captain, gentle and dignified.

  “It would be an enormous responsibility.”

  “You know so much.”

  He looked embarrassed, but pleased. “Nobody knows how to make the wind blow, or the sun shine, or how to ward off disease. A whole crew can fall too ill to move the sails.”

  “No
one expects a captain to control the waves.”

  “You have a nimble mind, Una.”

  Now it was my turn to be embarrassed with pleasure.

  “Do you know how a wave really works? It only appears to bring water from far out to sea into the shore. The motion is really up and down, not transverse.” And he drew wavy lines to show me.

  But my mind was full of waves as I knew them—splendid walls of water, long swells and humps traveling to the shore with perfect weight and inevitability. The crash of foam unceasing. “ ‘Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean—roll,’ ” I quoted.

  “Byron,” he said. “Childe Harold.”

  “Una,” my uncle said, “if you will bring your eagle feather, I’ll sharpen it into a quill for you. Then we’ll have a song together and off to bed.”

  While he sat by the dying fire, wielding his ivory-handled knife, Uncle told the visitors about fishing around our Island, speaking of the mackerel close in and the great schools of cod farther out, on their way to Cape Cod, which was named for them.

  When he had finished cutting the quill, Uncle handed it to Aunt and said, “What do you think? Will it do for Una to write with?”

  My aunt examined the point and then playfully stuck the feather in my hair.

  “You look like an Indian,” Kit said, “with your dark braids and feather.”

  Many families would have been offended by the comparison, but I knew that Kit had decided we were a group without the usual mainland prejudices.

  Out of a similar thought, Aunt remarked, “You are a liberal fallen among liberals, Kit.” But she looked serious and did not smile when she said it.

  “Our billy goat is a liberal,” Frannie said.

  At that we all chuckled, and Kit’s riposte, though he did not know that she was referring to the goat’s name, was quick: “I am probably as hardheaded as any goat, Fran.”

  Bestowed with Kit’s new, shortened name for her, Fran-Frannie turned quickly away with a hasty “Good night” to all, toward the little room she and I shared. Aunt and Uncle climbed up the ladder to their attic bedroom, and I left the men spreading quilts over the braided rug before the embers.