Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  Many years later, a learned lady in Boston, Margaret Fuller, invited me to her home—for conversation, she said—and showed all the women there, most very finely dressed, engravings of famous works of art. One was called The Virgin of the Rocks. Then I remembered my aunt and my presentation of a cucumber, and with the Boston women about me and the steel point engraving before me, I pictured my aunt’s face, and I saw that her countenance had been no less beautiful than that of da Vinci’s Mary.

  How the mind flies forward and backward when writing, and forward again to Margaret Fuller’s invitation to join her parlor gathering. I had been standing at a stall before the shop of a bookseller on Newbury Street when a strange woman stopped beside me, also to page the books. “You’re reading Montaigne’s Essays?” she noted. I replied, “I like the reality he assigns to thought.” The sentence just slipped out; I hadn’t known I thought it till I looked into her asking eyes. “Thus epic journeys are made,” she answered, “in the mind.” I nodded. “But we need to see new things,” she went on, “to have new thoughts. This Tuesday, I will show a group of women pictures they may not have seen before. I invite you.”

  In that way, I came to see the static picture that now, in my telling, I have superimposed on that moving, eating, talking memory of my aunt and me picnicking, seated in a cathedral of a cave, steeped in the light reflected from the sea.

  “I feel more chill than I thought I would,” Aunt said. “I don’t want to stay here to knit.”

  I was not reluctant to start back.

  “Do you mistrust my sense of the tide?” Aunt asked.

  “No, but I want a softer seat.”

  “We’ll sit in the grass for a while. But first I want to show you something.” She untied the bundle. Then she held up a square of knitting, sea-green and edged with a scallop of white, worked on tiny needles. “What is it?” she asked.

  “A little blanket?”

  “A blanket for a new baby.” And she laid it over her stomach.

  I am sure my mouth fell open, for Aunt laughed.

  “In perhaps seven months, there will be a new baby.”

  I saw that she was happy, and I told her I was happy for her, but I was more full of surprise than happiness.

  “Do you know how it is, Una, that a woman comes to be with child?”

  I told her I had deduced something of it from the animals. As we walked back along the margin of sand, she told me I might ask her anything I was curious about in the ways of married folk. She talked anew of tides, those of our female body, and of the cave within.

  THE NEXT DAY, Aunt took Frannie on a walk just to the plum trees, with a basket between them. When they came home, Frannie, seeing me in the garden, released her side of the handle and ran to me. She took both my hands and jumped up and down. “You know, you know, too, don’t you, Una? Isn’t it wonderful?”

  Aunt sent her to get a piece of string and a wisp of yarn.

  “Belt the string around me,” she said, “where I’m biggest.” Frannie circled her waist. “A little lower,” Auntie instructed. “And, Una, tie tight the piece of yarn.” I did so, pulling hard and making a square knot so that it wouldn’t slide down the string. “Now,” she said, “every week you can measure me to see how baby and I increase.” And so, in addition to the lines of stones, Frannie and I had another calendar with which to mark the time.

  CHAPTER 19: The Return of the Petrel, with Three Letters

  SOMETIMES when we look forward to an event with great and happy anticipation, the event itself may disappoint, or be in import so different from what we have expected that we can say the anticipated event did not occur at all but some other experience. When the Petrel returned, rather overloaded, Uncle said, bearing Kit, five workmen, and the Fresnel lens, all disassembled and packed in straw in crates of various sizes, it also transported two letters of much import from my mother.

  The first of my mother’s letters was a matter of joy. Like her sister (though unbeknownst to her in Kentucky), my mother wrote that she, too, was again with child. She was feeling well, though quickly tired and often sleepy. My aunt thought it was a marvel almost of frightening proportions that she and her sister were pregnant at the same time, expecting their babies, indeed, in the same month. Uncle put in that, after all, women all over the globe would be having babies on the same day and perhaps even at the same hour, minute, and second, though they commonly had no knowledge of their sisters also in labor. It seemed a pretty thought to me, one that made all the women of the world more kin to each other, whether really sisters or not.

  Between Agatha and Bertha there was often a congruence: the sisters shared the same plum trees, the same recipe for pumpernickel bread, a love of Lord Byron. The very stitches in the quilts were so similar that one could start a seam and the other finish it, and no one could tell where the needle had been passed off. I myself had been passed, I thought ruefully, from one sister to the other, with no loss of nurturing. Well might they be pregnant at the same time. The simultaneity of their pregnancies seemed less surprising than the mere fact that my mother was with child.

  It was our custom when several letters fell into our hands to open only one a day. We waited so long for news; this practice spread out the tidings and extended our pleasure. From Giles, Kit handed me but one letter. I was surprised—I had ten letters, one for each week, saved up to send back to the mainland—and wondered at first if Kit was teasing me. He smiled mischievously at me and said, “There is only one letter to be delivered, but he said also to give you this—” And with that, before everyone, he hugged me quickly.

  Naturally we had opened the letter from my mother first, and the news was such a sunburst on our world that we basked in it for several hours. It was a sewing day for Aunt and Frannie and me, and we sat outside in the good light. The men were unloading the boat and stacking the crates in the big room near the tower door, so we had the diversion of watching them come and go. Gradually each of the five became distinctive in his shape and clothing and face. I was smocking the bodice piece for a little dress for Aunt’s baby, and I thought happily that I would make its twin for my own little brother or sister. Occasionally, despite the glow from my mother’s announcement and the pleasure there is in drawing up and puckering the fabric when smocking, and the interesting parade of five new people, the waiting letter from Giles would make my breath catch. And after a while, Aunt, being perhaps cognizant of my little gasps, said we would break the rule of a letter a day and I should go ahead and read my Giles letter. “Take it to your room, Una, and enjoy your letter.”

  I saw Kit, who happened to be passing with a tool for unfastening the old lens, look curiously at Aunt, and I wondered if he could tell that she was going to have a baby. Perhaps he had noticed that I was smocking a tiny garment. A blush rose in my cheeks.

  What if he had written only one letter? A letter from Giles would be worth its weight in gold. I sat on the side of my bed, took a hairpin from my coil of braids, and slit the envelope. It was short, I saw with dismay—the front and back of a page, and only the front of the second sheet.

  In his writing, there was a kind of clipped and precise quality, more so than in his speech, though Giles always seemed to choose words with care. I thought that there must be an abundance of feeling pressing against the restraint of his language. In some ways, his restraint was more enthralling to me than a franker expression of feeling might have been. He asked me had our parting rose withered and had I made dried-petal soup of it, as the Chinese were said to do with abandoned birds’ nests!

  I determined to write back that I had (yet it was not true) and thought the flavor of guano was perhaps more stimulating than garlic. I puzzled at the idea of such an exchange—of course he would have known that I had not made a soup of his rose, flavored with garlic or onion or with nothing; it was as though we were blowing a bubble world between us—he with a pipe embedded in one membrane of the bubble, and I on the opposite side with my own pipe slowly pushing air into a
thin-sided reality. I pictured our bubble—a kind of pregnancy of the air; iridescent and shimmering as it bent and trembled to exist.

  In a serious paragraph, he wrote that he had presented himself at Harvard College with the question what must he do to be admitted. The rector had asked him of his family and told him it was unlikely he could ever study there. “I think, perhaps, I’ll ship for broader waters, sail the Atlantic, instead of the coastal merchant service. I want to see more. You, Una, probably understand this very well? At my request, the rector indulged my hubris by asking me ten questions of his choosing, all of which I answered, but it made no difference in the matter of my admission.”

  A fury rose in me for my friend. How philosophically he took his rejection! “Amuse me, Una, by sending ten questions you would like to ask the rector!” At that I smiled. But the letter was running out, and still my soul hungered.

  Then he said he had been reading the First Book of The Faerie Queene. “I presume that you are named Una for the lady of the Red Cross Knight, for you, like her, are pure of heart, steadfast, and clear of mind. What dragons are there for me to slay so that I might be worthy of my lady?” There! I held the page to my bosom.

  And yet it was so quaint and old-fashioned! There was little of chivalry in our century! He closed by saying, as he had said on parting, that I must keep my promise to make Kit’s stay as pleasant as if we were all three together.

  Of course, I read the letter over and over; each turn of phrase was squeezed for its juice. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze—here was a bit of flattery, here some evidence of trust, there the flavor of affection; surely admiration was close to love. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze the sentences: was he putting on a brave front? did he want me to say I would miss him if he set out for broader waters? did he want me to encourage his wanderlust? would his letters be longer if he traveled farther from the familiar? A bitter note to the flavor of the juice: was he trying to give me away to Kit? Perhaps Aunt had a copy of The Faerie Queene that I could read. The last day Kit and I would bake rolls and send them back to Giles.

  So did I milk Giles’s letter for meaning till the fingers of my brain could scarcely close, and that night, I dreamed it was my task to milk a line of a thousand white goats till my fingers and their udders seemed all the same and aweary of pulling. I awoke to find myself milking my own fingers.

  BEFORE the Fresnel crew arrived, since Uncle knew that the lantern in the Lighthouse would necessarily go dark, he had gathered driftwood and constructed a great pile of it on the highest part of the headland to serve as a primitive beacon. By the second night, the Argand apparatus being dismantled, the crew lighted the bonfire and made their camp around it, and we had our privacy again. In the cottage around our hearth fire, in the bosom of my Island family, I opened the second letter from my mother. I was grateful our visitors were not about, for the letter contained dreadful news.

  My mother’s second letter, written a week after the first one, told that my father had fallen into a despair. He feared that he would fail—“again,” she wrote, again! as though I had not forgiven him—in both mercy and justice toward any child that embodied his own passion and rebellion—he, rebellious!—and he had gone to the barn and hanged himself from the beam, among the sides of beef.

  HIS BLACK SUIT, his straight black hair hanging to his shoulders, his beard the same hue as coal but crinkly, all of him a blackness of cloth and hair—I saw him suspended in the air with a rope around his neck, his head pulled to one side.

  No!

  My mother opens the wide barn door. It drags in the soft dirt. Her eyes dart to the rafters, where cracks of light flood the dusty air. There! Among the curing beef!

  No!

  She runs to embrace his knees. Lifts the sagged weight of him.

  No! I screamed till the stones of the cottage screamed back.

  She looks for any sharp thing and sees the scythe. She pushes a bale of hay close to his legs. (He stood on nothing.) (He jumped from the rafters.) With the scythe, she chops at the rope. It frays, breaks, and he crumples to the barn floor.

  Aunt held me, an enormous baby, in her lap. Uncle knelt before us, Aunt sobbing, too, and bathed our eyes and hands with a damp cloth. The cloth he handed to Frannie, who ran with it to the china bowl and then wrung it out as she crossed the floor. Repeatedly, she handed the rag to Uncle and then put both arms around her mother’s shoulders and then about me.

  My father dead: the black hair, his pale skin, the blush of pink on his high cheekbones. Even his eyes, flashing blackly. The long braid of black leather dangling from his hand. But what was his essential part that I loved in utter conviction, with my own black heart? That smoldering. The smoldering power. The strength across his heavy shoulders.

  Now Frannie was instructed to make us tea, to bring shawls for our chilly trembling.

  Sad. Sad. And torn with grief. I saw myself, age three or four, sitting on the stump in the yard. He flicks the lash harmlessly, harmlessly on the rump of the horse; the black buggy rolls forward, and the spokes of the wheels turn to blurs. Over his shoulder, he looks back at me, his teeth smile and he says, “Be back soon, child.” He leaves the smile hanging in the air to look straight ahead. He parts the air with his nose, his arm reaches out, but he does not look down to house the whip forward, in its holster.

  That night, no one went to bed. We sat around the fire wrapped in our quilts, though it was late summer. Uncle kept a big blaze in the fireplace, and still we were cold.

  “It’s the mortal cold,” Aunt said.

  “Didn’t he want his baby?” Frannie asked in a voice so small I fancied a mouse had spoken.

  “Poor man,” Uncle said. “Poor, driven soul.”

  But there was a part of the terrible letter that presented a line of consolation. My mother had written that she would come to the Island to have her baby. In September, I would see my mother, and she would stay through spring. And then?

  Once Uncle went out for lumps of coal, which was stored against the outer wall of the house under a canvas. When he came back in, he asked us to come out with him, said that he wanted to show Frannie and me something, that it would be good, too, for Aunt to walk around a little. Outside, he pointed to the bonfire on the cliff head. Two black figures were silhouetted there. The fire glowed red around their bodies. They seemed to stand at ease, with their hands in their pockets, chatting and watching the flames. How peaceful they seemed! They knew nothing of our misery.

  One turned and picked up a length of driftwood. It, too, was silhouetted, like a stiff, black snake. He poked the fire with its end and dots of sparks rose like a fountain many feet into the air. Then the silhouette man cast the silhouette snake into the flames.

  I thought of the great bonfire more than a thousand years before, at Alexandria, and how its light had served the ships of that time. Though this fire was on the ground, the headland elevated it a hundred feet above the sea.

  In our cliff’s face was a cavity shaped like a ship itself, or the print of a ship. That was the place where one talked of babies waiting to be born.

  “The fire puts me in mind,” Uncle said, “of times we passed whaling ships, when I was in the merchant service.” He stood between Aunt and me and put a hand on each of our shoulders. Both he and Frannie feared that the shocking news might injure my aunt in a bodily way, or the babe she carried.

  “After they kill a whale and begin harvesting the blubber, they fire up the try works. At night, when you pass such a ship, it looks like a frigate from hell. The fires under the pots are blazing away, and you can see the dark figures of the men moving back and forth to bring blubber to the pots. The whole ship glows, and the stench and heat of it can be felt as you pass. They frantically feed the flames with rinds of whale, then dip off the oil into cooling tubs, and all is done in a fury because the sharks are always working the carcass. Once I felt a shark, in his haste, I suppose, for the carcass chained shipside to the whaler, run headlong against the hull of the ship I stood
on. Not a night for falling overboard.”

  We stood some minutes watching the much more peaceful scene beyond the Lighthouse of the beacon bonfire. At a short distance from the fire sat the pile of driftwood, almost the same shape and size as the burning pyre. Unhurried, from time to time a figure would pass between the waiting stack and the burning one.

  As we watched, I heard an unfamiliar sound behind me, a line flapping against the stone column of the Lighthouse. Turning to look, I saw high up, extending from the lantern house, a projecting wooden brace, which the men used with rope and pulley to raise and lower large parts of the lenses. The rope dangled and swayed indolently beside the long stone side of the tower. Suddenly it seemed to me like a gallows. I put my hand to my throat.

  “Let’s go in,” Frannie said, as though she knew my thought.

  AS WE SAT beside our tame and friendly fire inside, I thought of the frenzied spectacle of the whale ship’s try works. I knew the furnaces were built of brick on brick on the wooden deck, and I thought of the men furiously working as though to contain and appease the flames. From the passing merchant vessel, the fiery whaler must have seemed the living image of nightmare—a ship aflame. I remembered Kit’s saying that he should like to try whaling. There was in Kit himself something smoldering, if not bursting into flames.

  Finally I fell asleep in my chair, till, too soon, I saw the dawn and felt Aunt shake me, saying that soon the men would come in for breakfast, and I should go to my bed.

  I lay in my room and listened to them come in, their voices strange except for Kit’s. Why should they be alive and not my father? Who were they to me? And yet each of these workmen was son or father or friend, I knew, to some person whose grief would be as real as mine if their bodies fell lifeless.