Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  The first real food I ate was a kind of miracle, though. A flying fish jumped through the open porthole of Sallie’s cabin and landed in her lap! She seized the fish and called the cook. My recovery was somewhat faster than that of Giles and Kit—they still could drink only broth—so I got to eat most of the fish myself. Sallie generously declined, saying I needed it more than she. Thus she became my savior, and the love I would have given to Bob of the striped shirt I transferred to Sallie Swain. Bob had no use for my female devotion anyway.

  I preferred to spend all my days with Sallie. This may seem like an odd betrayal of Kit and Giles; indeed, I would have thought it so myself, if my mind had pondered my conduct, but I preferred not to think of it at all. I know why I wished not to see them, though. I did not want to see in their eyes the reflection of what we had done together. Sallie was delighted simply with my sisterhood. Once she asked me about the ordeal; I began to tremble, and she put her pretty hand on my wrist and said, “Never mind.” She had had no companion woman for many weeks, and then came the gift from the sea of me. Her pet name for me was Undine, and it made me smile in a smug and crafty way. Such a sea-clean name.

  Perhaps I should have felt only shame. But let any of you suffer damnation and return to the living! Put a plaid dress or butternut trousers upon you, and I defy you not to feel a smidgen of smug. We survivors! There is a cult of pride among us—as surely as there are demons who come for us just when we think we deserve some good fortune or peaceful moment.

  Did you survive at your fellow’s expense and not have the demons at your throat? No inexplicable rage? No blackest melancholy? No fear that the cosmos was a mouth ready to swallow you? No terror of Nothingness itself? The wrath of God? Then you are a blessed angel, or an automatic man made of blacksmith’s iron and less than human. Or a demon yourself.

  I had had enough of this: mouths like that of the moray eel. In nightmare, a boat full of eels, some slipping over the side, some devouring others. Some falling with fountains of blood before the sword. Till we were only three, and Giles threw the saber into the sea. Through the air, the saber spins on itself, climbs in hyperbolic ascent, faster and steeper than the sun. That picture: the saber spins, climbs like a wheel between strings, fast and steep till it joins the sun. That picture: always in the present tense, always available.

  To survive again, on the Alba Albatross, I felt I must clear my being of Kit and Giles. I must sit beside Sallie and learn to tat.

  Lace must fall from our fingers—a blunt shuttle, no sharp needle, thread not piercing fiber, not binding cloth to cloth, but purest thread knotting on itself. Thread mixed with air, the lace of snowflakes. My lap rising with the purity and lightness of new-fallen snow.

  CHAPTER 46: Ganglion

  TAKE SOME thread of yourself—say it is your ability to love—put your finger on it and trace it back in time. Not far, and your finger finds a lump, a bump, a tangle, a ganglion. Here the thread loops back on itself, encircles and chokes itself, convolutes till you know: it is a knot.

  Now you can begin to pull, and you learn (say you are six now) how the limpsy string becomes a nubbin, a recalcitrant, tiny, in-laced rock, and with each impatient tug you convert energy into a minute hardness. You cannot make a knot unloose itself with this external force; no, you can make it smaller, but you cannot make it disappear. Perhaps all matter is really made of knots! Perhaps fire, like love, can unloose a knot of coal into a free and dancing heat.

  So it was with Giles and Kit and me. We three had become a strand with three plies. We embraced only ourself: a firm knot. Oh, there’s much that is good to say about a knot—its security, its steadfastness, its strength. Its mysterious overs and unders—the way it occupies three dimensions in space, unlike the lowly two-dimensional line. We looped ourselves together in the cannibal boat. Our loyalty to each other firmed us against the world of other men and nature. But who was who and what was what in that knot of love?

  Oh, mankind, you must learn to tat if you would live content. The thread of yourself must form a knobby loop that takes in a larger, growing shape: where you make your home and who is at your hearth and whatever you do for a livelihood, from whaling to mending roads, from raising roof beams to baking bread. Three cannot tie together, turn their backs on all else. Tuck it all in, toward the center! And then let that loop join hands with other loops till the structure is intricate, multifaceted, predictable but growing as a cathedral. Yes, for that piece of stone lace studded with colored glass is the work of centuries. Don’t think you belong only to your own time! To your moment of survival. What you do or don’t do is left behind.

  There was a clinching in the knot we three made—Giles and Kit and I. We could say, “I did it for him,” “I did it for her.” If we held each other close, there was justification. There was love. Oh, let me knot my thread of life in grace and beauty; let me not be entangled by accident, desperation, hopelessness.

  But so we were, I felt. Having survived, our spirits demanded that which we granted to the other but could not grant ourselves. What’s that? This little phrase that which—what’s the meat encased in those two halves of a walnut shell? We would come to want, entangled again, from each other the love that we could not grant ourselves.

  Pardon me, I needed to say to myself, not hear in touch and glance and word from Kit or Giles. Pardon me, dear human self, capable of the most heinous degradation, capable of soaring.

  Let me know that into the knot of self comes the thread called time, and that what I am, disgraced or blessed, came from what I was, goes to what I yet may be.

  CHAPTER 47: Postscript on the Above

  ISOLATO! Do you think yourself a string too short to save? Do you think that you are lank and straight, a linear bit with no connection fore or aft? Fear not your insignificance. Nature has a drawer for you. Yes, nature garners all the string too short to save, and mice visit that drawer. Here’s nesting material! Yes, you will be interwoven, be it now or later.

  CHAPTER 48: Soaring

  DID I PROMISE myself soaring? It has been a long time coming.

  As the lace fell from my fingertips, as I wove the thread-loaded shuttle into and out of its own creation, a skeleton came walking across the deck.

  He came as a shadow. A flicker at the corner of the eye. Sallie had left me there, seated in her deckhouse, a small room with all its windows open to the ever warming, ever lightening day. Cape Horn had been rounded eastward in my delirium. We were sailing north toward the temperate zone, to Spain. We were not headed home.

  Why was it that he seemed blown toward me, puffed along by air? Because he was himself insubstantial, light as milkweed fluff, except he was gray, not bright white. And the filaments had no seed like center. No, he hung like gray smoke.

  “Una,” he said. “We walk now. Kit and I.”

  “Do you?”

  “You’re looking well.”

  He rested his hand on the windowsill. His bony fingers, his blue veins, the transparent encasing skin, lay half inside the deck cabin with me.

  He spoke again, his voice frail but the words lined up, certain of themselves: “What are you making?”

  “Beauty. Yards and yards of beauty. Edging for a bride’s pillow. No, no, no. For her sheet, for her shroud.”

  “For a bride. May she walk in beauty.”

  “ ‘Like the night,’ ” I finished the phrase for him.

  “At night,” he said. “Practice climbing the rigging. I want us all to go aloft together. It’s as close to heaven as we ever came, isn’t it?”

  “There is not much to eat here.” Then I covered my lips with my hands, horrified, as though blood had dripped from my mouth. Then I reached for his skeletal hand. “I only mean it’s hard to gain strength without food.”

  “I will steal some extra.”

  He turned to go, but I stopped him with my voice. Ask, if you would know: the dictum from the Lighthouse prompted me. “And Kit?”

  “It will benefit Kit to ride high
—up there. With us.”

  We both looked up to the topsail of the Albatross.

  “She has no crow’s nest,” I said.

  “But you can stand a yardarm, Ulysses. I’ve seen you do it.”

  “It’s like having your own wings up there,” I said.

  Giles’s attention focused sharply on me, then curiously. “Whose wings, Una? For I had the same thought.”

  But I hadn’t a sure picture in my mind. I tried to get it, willed yardarms and flapping cloth to emanate from my shoulder blades.

  “The albatross herself?”

  “Wrong. Guess again.”

  “Raphael, the archangel?”

  “Which one was he?”

  Was this the only thing in the world that I knew that Giles did not? Thanks be to my father!

  “The angel who appeared to Mary, the angel of the Annunciation.”

  “Wrong wings again.” He ducked his head through the open window into my deck cabin. He put his lips close to my ear. “Guess right this time, and I’ll give you a kiss.”

  Did I want a kiss? Behind the lips are teeth. His were tenacious, I remembered.

  “On the cheek, goose. Tenderly.”

  The whaleboat! “You swung the blade too high. You missed the neck. The cheek was laid open. To the bone.”

  “Hush.”

  “Heathen!” I labeled him. “What wings do you want?”

  “Close. Much closer. Try pagan. Try Icarus.”

  He withdrew himself from my interior. He stood upright a moment looking in at me and then stooped his body through the opening again. He touched my ear.

  “This earring,” he said. “Would you give it to me?”

  I slid the hoop out of my earlobe and handed it to him. My fingernails brushed his palm as I left the hoop in his hand.

  “Generous Una.” He lowered the sash.

  I watched him go, the glass between us.

  In the west, the yellow-yoked sun broke bloody, like a bad egg.

  I clinched my eyes shut. Now let me see an eagle. Let me see an eagle soaring above the Lighthouse that elevated me in my youth. Let some steady pedestal rise up from the earth herself, stone of her stone. Let clouds swirl, let the tides heave up the sea incessantly, but let me find stillness again.

  And let it be a high platform for viewing eagles.

  CHAPTER 49: Portrait of a Virgin Listening

  ONE NIGHT my stomach troubled me so that I got up and went to knock at Sallie’s door, for she kept the ship’s medicine chest. Before my knuckle touched the wood, I heard the sounds of the captain knowing his wife. What else could it be? It took my breath. My love, Sallie whispered, her voice as lovely as a wisp of lace, but silky. My darling, I heard him gasp, his voice suffused with passion.

  Turning away from their door, I heard an urgent clicking, like a clock rushing to make up time, as the gimbal moved in its socket.

  CHAPTER 50: Icarus

  A RAINY DAY, and I sat in the stateroom belowdecks, at Sallie’s invitation, watching the raindrops fall into the sea. So some mystics say it is with the soul: we are the individual drops; at death, our boundaries all dissolved, we join the oneness. Salvation, home, is universal; as natural as rain joining the ocean. Whose voice? My aunt? My mother?

  The idea pleased me because it seemed independent of belief. That belief makes anything happen was discordant with all my experience of nature. If I dispensed with belief, did all the feelings go? Trust and hope and love? I thought that they were all lenses, which were indispensable to the human condition. Even the natural eye is a lens. And Shakespeare is right again! Nothing is a heaven or a hell but believing makes it so.

  But I defy you, Shakespeare, and all the other gods—Milton, Bunyan, Homer (not you, Byron; you can be heroic, but that’s only half-god)—to make a heaven of that hell-boat of Three.

  The rain, so innocent and unhesitant, pattered down into the sea.

  Frequently it rained on us. For three days, Giles’s new calendar showed, there had been nothing of them with us. But stains. We had cups. Giles had insisted that we make cups. I think we were adrift three months altogether. When it did rain, we had a way to catch water. The ship’s keg had been broken in some of the fighting. During the night, sometimes Giles held the sword to keep the others at bay, sometimes Kit. The others were not allowed to move. One cried that we would not torture him with waiting his turn and slipped over the side.

  Does it make any difference if I swear that neither Giles nor Kit nor I ever enjoyed a moment of what we did? It was torture for us, too.

  So we had cups. And when it rained we did catch water. And drank it. It rained three days before the Alba Albatross swooped into view. There had been so much rain that it had puddled in the bottom of the boat. We bathed in it by turns. We were clean. Each of us naked. There are worse embarrassments than nakedness. This was not a cold rain and yet it was a long rain. Giles called it the Impossible Rain.

  Perhaps believing made it so, and warm was really cold! I’ll never know.

  Then we put our clothes down in our tub, and we used the convex of our cups to scrub at stains. We bailed out the dirty water—the color of wine. And still it rained. Nature’s ablution, nature’s absolution. Well, doesn’t it rain on wolves and wash their maws clean?

  Our clothes dried out, so lovely in their crumpled cleanliness. We put them on. We waited. I laid my cheek on the gunwale. Look!

  At first she seemed a cloud on the horizon. We smiled. When her coming was a clear matter of square sails and wooden hull, of prow and jib, Giles took our cups from our hands. He stacked them together and plunged the hideous stack beneath the water. I watched him wait to be sure they filled, and then he let them sink.

  And then he swooned.

  Thanks be to rain.

  “YOUR FRIENDS want you to promenade.” It is Sallie, down from the deck, water beads caught in her brown curls, her cheek pink and fresh. My love, my darling, they had said, and the gimbal ticking like a clock.

  “In the rain?”

  “They have borrowed umbrellas!”

  A WALK in the rain on ship’s deck has a touch of home about it. There is a pleasant incongruity, too. Here we are afloat on water, high above that enormous wetness. And do we escape? No, the heavens open and say: Here’s rain, just as it is on land. And it can make you wet. (Even under umbrellas, there’s a bit of drip and blow.)

  Walking between Giles and Kit, my hands lodged in the crooks of their elbows—was it not the echo of an idyll? I asked them what story they had told Captain Swain of our survival. They had said our whaleboat had become separated from the other two. (Giles fingered his earring, as he recounted the tale for me.) We knew nothing of their fate. In our boat, the captain and his son, and all the others, had died.

  We were getting stronger. When the larder got distressingly low, Captain Swain sent out a small fishing boat, and after a day of anxious waiting, she returned to us with an enormous marlin lashed to the side. His sword was as long as a walking stick, and the captain later nailed it to his cabin wall as a decoration. The fish’s flesh was fixed in all the ways imaginable while it was fresh, and the rest put down in vinegar or dried and salted.

  During our rainy promenade, when we came to a puddle on the boards, they swung me over it. “Fragonard!” I exclaimed, for he once painted a happy girl in a swing, her shoe kicked high in the air. I had seen a copy in Boston when Frannie caught the pox.

  “Watteau,” Giles corrected. With what dry self-irony he spoke—as though it were his distasteful duty to make things right.

  The pendulum in me swung back to wanting their company and connection, under Sallie’s borrowed umbrella. Afterward, I wrote letters to the Island and to Kentucky, and a few days later we met with the Thistle, New Bedford–bound, to convey my reassuring letters.

  Far from scorning Kit and Giles, now I loved their company so much that I could scarcely abide sweet Sallie’s, though our time together was always pleasant. She felt that my clothes (borrowe
d from her) must fit, and so there was much taking in of seams, and then gradually letting out. “Look,” she’d say, holding up a new-pinned seam, “it’s going out an entire half inch!”

  That I climbed the rigging at night I concealed from Sallie. At the foot of the mast, I unhooked my skirt. Giles brought me trousers, and I pulled them up over my long pantalettes. I think there was no more modesty about the body left in me.

  What did we do those nights? We climbed to a low yardarm and stood there, talking, like convivial birds perching on a limb. But, of course, our fingers were laced into the rigging, and we were perpetually adjusting our balance with the plowing of the ship.

  As we gradually climbed higher, our talk became freer, for there was less chance of being overheard. And it became darker.

  What do you remember? was often the question. Usually it was asked by Giles, of Kit. Without fail, he had some new and ghoulish image to relate. Once I asked him to stop, but Giles admonished me to let him talk.

  But I think I may have been right in trying to dam up that black river. As we climbed higher by night, and memory compiled, Giles’s own face became sadder by day.

  One night, when we were truly aloft, perhaps a week’s sail from the Azores, where new groceries would be purchased, Giles said simply, “Perhaps we made the wrong decision to live.”

  “I think not,” I said promptly. I surveyed the quiet night around me—the ship below, serene water encircling us. I was glad to be there.

  “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori,” Giles quoted.

  “Translation?” Kit asked.

  “ ‘It is sweet and decorous to die for one’s country.’ It’s the motto for a Roman soldier.”

  “We were not soldiers,” Kit said.

  “A ship is always the ship of state,” Giles said quietly. The night breeze gently flapped our sleeves and trousers. I gloried in my strength, that I was well enough and still uncowed enough to stand in the mast.