Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  WHO DOES NOT like to fall asleep with the rain beating on the roof and the wind rubbing the outer walls, while oneself is dry and warm in a comfortable bed? My narrow bunk, covered amply with the log-cabin quilt my mother had made, was a home within home. Frannie’s bunk, since she was younger and more tender, lay along the backside of the rock fireplace, as a winter comfort—though this being summer our cook fire had been too small to heat the chimney rock. By my choice, my bunk was placed so that I could see out the small east window. When the moon was full, there was enough light to make out the colors of the quilt—the red square for the hearth in the center and the surrounding “logs” shading across a diagonal from dark to light.

  But with the driving rain, my window was a blackness, and I had pulled the door tight shut, since visitors were sleeping before the fireplace. With my fingertips, I ran the seams and stitches and waited for sleep to fall.

  But it would not. The day had been too full. Again I heard the eagle scream and my eye went to the dark nostril-dashes at the base of its yellow, horny beak. How, within the egg, when nostrils formed on the eagle chick, how had the horn of the beak known to leave an opening in its smoothness there, so that the bird could breathe? And why did a bird need to breathe?—fishes did not, except whales, which were not truly fish though everyone called them fish.

  Birds may require light for life, not air: usually when my thoughts scrambled unreasonably it was a sign that I was sliding into sleep. But not so that night. I thought of Giles and Kit. It was they, more than the eagle, who had made the day full and remarkable, and yet hanging over all the day there seemed that warning, warring scream and the open beak. I traced the thread of scab across the back of my hand. The fan-shaped tendons could have been cut through, the delicate, long bones exposed. Giles Bonebright, Kit Sparrow!

  There was an evanescence in me when I thought of Kit and Giles, of either of them, of both together. Kit was easier to talk to, but I felt a kinship, an understanding, between Giles and myself, and Kit—there seemed something I couldn’t know about his thinking. They were both kind to Frannie, and I liked that very well. Were they sorry for her pockmarked face? Would that be an impediment for her, if she left the Island and sought a home on the mainland? Surely it was fortuitous that the first men she met after her illness did in no way scorn her but sought her out with questions in conversation. Kit seemed almost too familiar with her, and he had called her Fran. He seemed fascinated with her because she was odd, with her scars. And I seemed unusual to him, too, because I had fought with an eagle, but that had nothing to do with who I was. It was only an accidental circumstance. I perceived, though, that Kit was drawn to what was unusual, for whatever reason, either accidental or intrinsic. Probably he was drawn to Giles because of his unusual mind. Never had I spoken with a person who seemed to have so bright a mind as Giles. He was well named—Giles Bonebright—but his last name should have been Brainbright.

  Thus, while I thought, and the rain beat on the roof, I turned and rolled many times, looking for the posture of sleep. Finally, the bed grew tiresome, and the rain and wind sounded dull and muffled. I listened to the surf booming against the rocks and the slush and suck of it running on the sandy beach, and even those sounds that I loved as an everlasting comfort entered my ears monotonously.

  I threw off the quilt and went to the door. I would peek through the crack at the visitors. There was a form lying before the fireplace. But the other man was up and standing at the door to the stairs! His figure was long and draped, hooded, in one of the quilts—was it the height of Giles, or did the long quilt make Kit look tall? I couldn’t tell. The standing figure disappeared through the wall. With the wind and rain and sound of surf, I could not hear footsteps on the stair, but as I waited, and he did not emerge, I could only conclude that he was climbing the tower.

  I stood uncertain in the crack of the door. I never climbed the Lighthouse at night. Uncle Torchy tended the lamps in the night, but when? I had never asked. I felt annoyed with the dictum of the house—that one must ask in order to know. I remembered my father’s sayings from the Bible: ask and ye shall receive; knock and it shall be opened to you.

  I closed the door and returned to bed. I listened intently to wind and rain, and they began to stir my senses. I would have liked for the moaning of the wind to be louder; I would have liked for the rain to drum more furiously. I wanted to be closer to those living elements.

  If one were up in the lantern room now, would not one be truly in the midst of nature’s storm? The lantern itself would be an awesome power. I wondered if my friend—whichever one—had reached the top. Probably he climbed with his hand on the stone wall to guide him up. It was always dim in the tower, and the night outside would be as black against those windows as against my own. Had the figure carried a candle? I had seen his hands holding only the quilt about him.

  Was it Giles or Kit? I rummaged my mind to know what reasons could compel either of them to make that dark ascent, but no reason came to mind. If I climbed to the top, which of them would I rather see? Again, I found no answer in me, just a puzzlement at the question. But one of them was climbing the tower and one lay sleeping by the fire, and it ought to make a difference.

  It would be startling to find out which one it was. What a strange moment, I thought, when possibility changes to certainty. I realized that my life itself was then all a matter of possibility. Who knew where I would go next or with whom, or whom I would meet? Yet some one thing would happen and not another. Did it mean that things were predestined, as my father thought? I could not accept that, for all seemed free and open to me, with only my own mind to consult as to what I hoped or chose.

  Yet I did not know what I hoped or whom I would choose, and suppose one chose but was not chosen back? A deep shame rolled through me at the thought of that. To be unworthy! Not to be chosen! Perhaps one should not hope or want or plan at all.

  With that, I sat up and swung my feet over the bedside and determined to find out simply who it was who chose to climb the tower. I was in my nightgown, so I took a quilt from my bed to wrap in, but not the precious one from Kentucky. I passed six feet from the form at the fireplace. I could stop and stoop and look, but suppose he, whoever he was, awoke suddenly to find me peering in his face? And besides, the blood of the storm was in me now, and I wanted to be in it.

  On the table, Aunt had left Giles’s drawings of angles and pulleys and lenses. The Fresnel lens looked like an anatomical drawing of a huge gem, a layering of facets. Giles had said that the cavity at its center was large enough for me to stand in. It seemed that my heart was a hard little diamond, sharp and curious, standing in the center of me.

  The window at the end of the table framed perfect black. I wanted the darkness to clap its hands. And yes, there was a low growl of thunder. I opened the door in the wall, stepped through, and closed the door, carefully, behind me.

  The utter blackness of the tower! Here there was no sense of form at all. Perhaps there was a curving wall only an arm’s length away, but my eyes could not tell me this. The wall might be a mile beyond my reach, there might be no wall at all. Only my feet knew. What they touched was familiar stone, smooth and hard, but even the existence of my feet became for my eyes an act of faith, for I could not see toes or ankles or any part of them. Perhaps I had entered a land where I had no body. Yet my feet felt the stone. My legs, calf and thighs, bent and pushed, lifted me, just as they had in daylight. Though I could not measure my progress with my eyes, I was climbing. The ordinary muscles worked, and I rose, but it was like a dream of flying.

  Suppose, I thought, he has stopped someplace along the steps and I bump against him in the dark. He cannot hear me coming. He might think me a demon and wrestle me, hurl me down the steps. And I thought how horribly I had been startled by the sudden being of the eagle. If I was thrown down the steps, as God cast Lucifer out of heaven, I would bruise in a most palpable and purple way. My body cringed at the thought of a descent in stony darknes
s. Better to have fallen through the daylight and air. My hip hurt where the railing had caught me.

  Now the steps were iron, not stone. Metal would scrape and gash as much as bruise. I could have touched the wall as a guide—I had imagined him doing that—but I wanted to trust my legs, let them be the leaders instead of fingertip and touch. And partly, I loved the nothingness. Kit had said that his heart was black—was this what he meant? A blackness like nothingness?

  Then there was a sheet of lightning, and I saw that I was in the middle of the ascent, the portion of the Lighthouse between the windows. For a garish moment, all was familiar, though there was a strange gloominess to the stone walls and the grillwork. In the cities, people moved through the streets—perhaps they were doing it now—but they were as unknown to me as I to them. I tried to think of a girl, sixteen, like myself, a resident of Boston. I pictured her: in a shoulder cape; her shoes fit well, beautifully buttoned and snug above her ankle. Her hands were in a muff, a velvet muff, and they held each other. With my left hand, I touched the scab across the back of my hand. My toes were naked and cold.

  The moment I saw one of them, it would seem that I had known forever. In a sense, my life would be changed, for I could not return to a moment on a stormy night, in the summer when we changed the Lighthouse light, when two ideas were equally possible.

  Yet one visitor was above and one was below, and what difference did that make? In a moment I would talk with one, and tomorrow I would chat with the other. They were both available for conversation.

  As I ascended the tower, I began to climb into vague light. Whoever was in the lantern room had left the iron door open, and light was spilling down the stairs. At first it was only a haze, and then as I climbed higher, ever brighter. The light seemed to fill my ears and the sounds of the storm were muffled. Surely if there was a heaven, one might ascend just this way toward incredible brightness. I no longer thought of my feet or of my body; I myself seemed as vaporous as light. I had left weight with the earth, and I had stepped from corporeal being to that of spirit.

  The figure stood opposite the door. His arms were outspread as though he were a priest or a bird such as a condor. He was spitting on the lamps! It was Kit. The room was a world of light, but at that moment, lightning struck the rod atop and split down the grounding wire on the outside behind Kit so that it seemed to strike his head, and I shrieked as I have never shrieked.

  Blinded, I felt him enfold me, and I knew he was alive.

  “We’re safe,” he said. He loosed me.

  The optics in my brain were swimming in dazzle. “I can’t see,” I said, in a shaky voice.

  “Wait.”

  My eyesight gone, my hearing returned to the boom of thunder and the roar of wind.

  “We’re safe here,” he said again.

  “I know,” I said, for Uncle had explained to me, when I asked, the function of the lightning rod and the wire bradded down the length of the tower. Nonetheless, I could neither see nor stop my quaking.

  “My eyes are seared!” I began to cry.

  “Is it bright or dark?” he asked.

  “Bright! Nothing but bright!”

  He held me again while I sobbed for my eyes. The brightness was all swimming and wild.

  “Can you see?” I wailed.

  “Not well, yet. But my eyes were closed when it passed. My back was turned.” Then he told me that he believed my eyes would be all right and to calm myself if I could. “Smell,” he said. “There’s an odor that lightning leaves.”

  “My father says it’s the odor of the devil.”

  “Why not the odor of God?” Kit asked.

  I breathed it deeply, for I knew it would soon be gone.

  “Have you seen the footprint of the whale from up here?” Kit asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you know about that?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s sit down,” he said. And we slid down, he with his arm still about me. A greater comfort than his unfamiliar arm was the wall I had so often sat against. The thunder clapped and rumbled away from us.

  “Was there lightning again?” I asked.

  “Nothing much.”

  “I couldn’t see it.”

  “You have to wait, Una.”

  We sat quietly. I told myself it was not Kit’s fault. I told myself that surely all would be well with my eyes. Yet I could not see. Still, the world did not seem absent, because I could hear the storm, and its sounds conjured up images to my mind’s eye. Just as when a person reads aloud to you, you see the world suggested by the words, so did the elements read aloud to me.

  At length, I wished to hear Kit’s voice. I asked why he was silent, and at once I knew that he did not wish to intrude on my adjusting. What a strangely tactful man! It seemed almost a reverence for my experiencing. And so he seemed to treat everyone. I had but to speak, and he would speak back to me.

  “What is the whale’s footprint?” I asked.

  “I’ve sailed only merchant ships—though I’d like to go whaling—but once a whale came to the surface close to us, when there was a whaleman aboard. He and I stood at the deck together and watched. The blowhole is as big as your waist. These were humpbacks, neither sperm nor right whale, such as are hunted, but still the whaleman wished he had a harpoon. I tossed a penny to see if I could ring the blowhole, but I missed, and the penny slid off its back into the water, and, right away, the whale submerged. When it went down, the whale-man pointed to a patch of water that had a shape rather like the print of an enormous shoe. ‘It’s the whale’s footprint,’ he said. We watched the print move along the surface of the water. The print just glided along, a patch with a different surface and a distinct form. Gradually the margins of the form gave way, and the footprint slowly dissolved into the greater ocean.”

  If I were blind, yet if people talked to me as Kit did, then yet would I see. But I thought of myself groping along. I could perhaps memorize the Island but not the world. Still, I had not been unhappy on the Island. Almost it was enough, I told myself. But then such an urge to travel independently came upon me that the sentence burst out, “I should like to go whaling!”

  “Why not?” Kit answered. “You could dress as a boy.”

  “You could go with Kit and me,” another voice said.

  “Giles!” I had known who spoke! “Giles, I can’t see!”

  “The lightning blinded her.”

  “And you?” Giles asked.

  “I can see fairly well. There’s a spot in the center of my vision. I didn’t see you till you spoke.”

  “I see nothing but brightness,” I said.

  “It’s the afterimage,” Giles said.

  “Should we go down?” Kit asked.

  Giles said that he and Kit would guide me down the stairs. And he thought my sight would gradually return. He asked us why we had gone up in the Lighthouse.

  “I followed Kit,” I said.

  “I wanted to be in the storm,” Kit said.

  “Why were you spitting on the lamps?” I asked Kit.

  He laughed, but his explanation was brief: “An experiment.”

  The descent was careful. I trusted my guides, and the steps were familiar, but still I was afraid. I made myself trust in a mechanical way, and my brain seemed to go numb with it. Was this brightness any more blinding than the darkness through which I had ascended? Yes, for now I had the sense of injury. They held me under the elbow, on each side—Kit with a consistent firmness, Giles as though he were sometimes uncertain of the propriety of holding on to me.

  At first my body held back from stepping: I wanted to run my foot to the edge of the tread and feel down with my toes before I trusted my weight. But gradually, I did become more confident and trusting. When I judged us to be halfway down, I proposed that we run the rest of the way.

  “We can’t see either,” Giles reminded me, “in this darkness.”

  “Then I’ll lead you both,” I proposed. “The blind leading the blind.??
?

  “No,” Giles said simply.

  I could hear Giles’s feet, for he had put on his shoes, and I could hear the low swish of Kit’s fingertips along the stone wall, as he was on the outside of our turning.

  “Do you know the seashell called the precious wentletrap?” Giles asked. “Its name in German is Wendeltrappe, which means ‘spiral staircase.’ ”

  “Do you know German?” I asked.

  “No. But I would like to.”

  “Why?” Kit asked. His short question sounded cramped, clenched.

  “To read Faust, in the original.”

  “I don’t know about Faust,” I admitted bravely. Where there should have been darkness against my eyes, my mind was filled with the blinding brightness.

  “Goethe’s Faust.”

  When Kit asked Giles why he had an interest in that story, Giles explained that there had been a medieval version of the same foldable, and many other versions as well. “It cautions against intellectual pride.”

  We continued our descent in silence, till I asked Giles why he had gone up in the tower.

  “To find you two,” he answered.

  Then I felt happy, and I wondered if it would be possible to leave the Island with them. I could go in disguise. When my bare foot felt the first of the sixteen stone steps, I was sorry. I wanted us to go on together forever, even if I could not see.

  CHAPTER 16: The Brightness of Brightness

  UNENDING BRIGHTNESS! Surely at the point when I passed from the tower into the familiar chamber, colors would return—at least, the customary dimness in the corners of the room? the small glowing lump in the middle of the hearth? At least, when I passed through that room, guided by Giles and Kit, into my bedroom, then I would cross a border into the ordinary? Here, in my bedroom, would reside a familiar darkness? But it was not so. My mind swam in brightness.

  Kit asked me if I should like my aunt to be awakened. I felt my bed bump against my legs and groped my way under the covers. No, I told him; I would wait for morning. Perhaps by morning there would be nothing to confess. I did not want my aunt to know that I and our guests had walked about together in the night. How quickly her critical glance had shot out at Kit when he told Frannie of his mother’s defilement of the bread dough.