Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  As I made many journeys there, I began to speak to the people of the town, and once I walked in merely to attend a lecture at the Atheneum. Nantucket town was a pleasant place, with many independent and intelligent women. When men were home from the sea, they were happy to socialize along with their wives. I much liked the gabbiness of the town, for the talk was not mere gossip but of ideas and politics, spiced with the customs and sights from all around the globe.

  CHAPTER 78: Churches

  IT WAS DURING this time that I began to attend first the Universalist Association and, later, the Unitarian Church on Orange Street, the gilt dome of which Kit and I had admired as we approached Nantucket aboard the Pequod. The message of both groups was much more hospitable to the human spirit than that of the Kentucky Christians, whose emphasis was on human sin and God’s wrath. I came to the Universalists through Charlotte, and with that context, I understood much better her unwillingness to cast me into outer darkness for my unspeakable sin. The Universalists believed, quite simply, in universal salvation: no soul was eternally damned, as Mr. Stubb had reported during the maple-candy dinner that last night on the Pequod.

  They argued that if Jesus was the Savior of mankind, then this was a fact, universally true, and whether one believed the fact or not did not matter, Christ having died for all. Further, the minister explained that while there might be some punishment for sin after death it was not of eternal duration, the word eternal having been mistranslated from the Greek in many scriptures. Their position was that everlasting punishment was entirely inconsistent with the idea of a benevolent Father, since even earthly fathers could and did forgive their offspring for criminal acts. All their tenets were refreshing ideas to me. At meeting I found the congregation, simple farming people, to be a kindly group, slow to cast even verbal stones at one another. I cannot say how they might have responded, specifically, to my own crime, for I had had enough of confession for a while.

  When I was with the Universalists, I felt a kind of peace, and I wished that both Kit and Giles had heard their message. To believe it was not necessary. Merely to know that some people had invented a more liberal view of Christianity loosed the bonds of the old dogma and its dependence on damnation. I had thought there to be only one Christian Way, straight, narrow, exclusive. And here was a road that went off at right angles, that could bend and double back, that was open to whatever sheep might wander onto it.

  Though I did not think of Kit as dead, during the long-coming spring, there was a finality to his leaving. I did not expect him ever to come back. Yet my heart held a quiet hope for him. If there was hardship in the wilderness, it would distract him from his mental travail. If he was strange among the Indians, so long as he was not violent, then that strangeness itself might protect him. Elaborations of language had been a snare and a delusion for his thinking. The words that were the names of animals, of nuts and berries, those for fire and for shelter, would suffice.

  Once, walking home from meeting, Charlotte asked me, “Do you not wonder where Kit is, fret for him?” Her question surprised me. She had kept silent till she judged I was strong enough to speak of Kit.

  “I have taken a page from your book,” I replied. “I live the life that is before me.”

  The gray moor about me, bathed in sunshine, was comfortably unprepossessing. I remembered that long, cold nighttime crossing of this same moor with a small shudder.

  “Does your heart not search for Kit?” Her voice took on urgency.

  “I loved Kit, but I count him gone.” I spoke slowly, wanting to speak truthfully. “My consolation is that I believe him to be alive. If I cannot be with him, I can bear that.” I paused and saw the windmill, its arms fitted with canvas now, slowly turning. “Gladly would I have said good-bye to Giles, if it meant that he could live and walk the earth, though I never see him again.”

  “Sometimes my heart yearns for Kit.”

  “I am surprised to hear you say so.”

  “I’ve sensed your letting go of him. As you let go, I miss him more. We grew up together. I had always thought to marry Kit Sparrow.”

  I was astonished: because of her account of life with Mr. Hussey, I had counted Charlotte to be the most contented of women. “Kit is not fit to be any woman’s husband.”

  “Sometimes I think that he has met an Indian woman. In my mind’s eye, he crawls under a deerskin with her.” She swept her hand about—the Try Pots lay ahead. “All this I would give up to be that wild woman, traveling with Kit.”

  “Charlotte, your life is too full of chowder making. But there’s no romance in being pissed upon. He slapped me once. He has reviled me many times.”

  Here Charlotte fell silent. Finally she said, taking my hand first, “But, dear Una, I have not done what you have done.”

  It was as though I had been slapped again. The taste of blood flooded my mouth.

  “Your unforgivable sin would be adultery,” I said to her, for I knew Kit would find something unforgivable about any person who dwelt in a world that was itself unforgivable in its cruelty. “We all are unforgivable to him, and he punished us.”

  “I think that I would lie,” she said. “He wouldn’t know. I would tell him that Mr. Hussey had died.”

  DURING THE WEEK that followed, while we worked together serving the tables or stirring the great pots, Charlotte questioned me about the onset of Kit’s madness. She rightly guessed that I had seen a glimpse of aberration on the Sussex. I told her how, at the Lighthouse, I had come upon Kit high in the lantern room worshiping the lamps or trying to work some magic over them, and then how he had made mud for my lightning-blinded eyes, hoping to reenact the miracle of Jesus. I asked Charlotte about Kit’s mother, who surely was the root of his madness.

  “The urine!” she exclaimed. “His mother liked to squat behind a bush, only half shielded. She wanted to make the private into the public.” And then Charlotte hurried on with her serving.

  That night when Mr. Hussey was snoring loudly, Charlotte came and knocked on my door. I was almost asleep, but she climbed up onto the bed with scarcely an invitation and commenced to talk.

  “When I was just a little girl, I saw Mrs. Sparrow squatting at the privy ditch, this one well out of view, but she said to me, ‘Come, little one, come and confess with me.’ I never knew what she meant by confession, but today it came to me. For them to take what is usually secret and hidden, shameful even, and make it public is to confess. They want to confess the animal side of their nature. To be as nonchalant and natural as animals.”

  Charlotte was much excited about her reflections on the logic of madness. “Each night I shall tell you his history before you knew him, and then you shall tell me the history afterward, and together we will make sense of it—where the ideas come from, what they mean to him.”

  I had not heard her speak in such a rush since the time we sat in the booth and she had told me Mr. Hussey was all lovers in one. That revelation had made me happy to hear, but now Charlotte herself seemed obsessed. After her season of patient silence, she was ababble with questions. “Will talk of Kit be too painful for you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. I sat up in bed. What I felt was not pain. “Charlotte, I doubt that we shall ever see Kit again. He will walk west. I know him. Even an addled brain can walk toward the setting sun. With a fierce determination. To what end do we plow up his history from our brains?”

  “After he has reached the edge of the continent”—her eager face reminded me of Frannie and her fascination with Kit—“what will he find there?”

  “The Pacific Ocean,” I answered.

  “But Kit will have the habit of walking. When his quest is ended, he will turn around and walk east. I know him, too. I would like to be prepared when our paths cross.”

  “He might ship to China.”

  “I think that Kit has had enough of the ocean.”

  “As you said, he may find some tribe where he feels at home. He may stay there. Take a new wife. Father children
.”

  She clutched my wrist. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that. How can you say that?”

  “I wish him well.”

  Here we fell silent for a moment. We both listened to Mr. Hussey’s stentorian snoring.

  “I thought you were content with Mr. Hussey,” I whispered, almost teasing.

  “I was,” she said soberly. “I was. But now I am not. You have given up Kit. He could be mine.”

  All that week, soon after Mr. Hussey’s snores filled the upper floor like a gemshorn, Charlotte came to my chamber to tell the story of Kit. Folly the fox usually came to lie between us, and I felt we were something like characters from a fairy tale.

  THE NEXT SABBATH, as we walked into town, I felt increasingly impatient with Charlotte. I wanted not to be so much in her company, for she sealed and stamped every step of the journey into town with images of Kit and her together, in a time innocent of my existence. As we walked down Orange Street, I suddenly said I would visit the Unitarians that day and walk home alone. “My aunt was a Unitarian,” I explained. “I’ve been curious about their creed.”

  “You’ll find them less Christian, but with little to replace it,” she said.

  I thought but did not say: Good. Then I shall ponder my own beliefs.

  “Mostly they pride themselves on their skepticism.”

  “All my life,” I answered, “I have been a natural skeptic.” And I turned my life—is it too much to say?—away from her. My body seemed a boat, my clothes the sails, myself the captain.

  IT IS A somewhat unnerving experience to enter a house of worship when you neither have a companion nor expect to see a familiar face. One feels an intruder. Almost as soon as I settled myself, however, I saw two whom I did know: Captain Ahab, with his shaggy, gray-white head, occupied a pew across the sanctuary behind me; and, just in front, was the kindly gaoler.

  Captain Ahab sat with his face uptilted and his eyes closed. His brow was slightly drawn in concentration so that a line ran vertically between his eyes. He seemed the very image of a seeker; yet I knew him to be as much a skeptic as myself, and I felt, as I often had in his company, that we had something in common. He was oblivious to his surroundings.

  The gaoler—Isaac Starbuck—somehow sensed my presence, turned, nodded, and smiled at me. I could not help but study the back of his head from time to time. His hair was indeed a fine cap of golden curls.

  The sermon was one that saw Jesus as a great teacher, but at no time did the minister suggest he was divine, except insofar as he affirmed that all humans were divine, and, therefore, Jesus, too. What of the animals? I wanted to ask him. They have life, and their intelligence is only of a different order. Did not Saint Francis preach to the forest creatures?

  I wondered if Ahab questioned in like manner, if Ahab considered the divinity, perhaps even the sanctity, of whales. The minister skipped over the animal question and went on to extol the beauty of nature, by which he largely meant the landscape. He spoke of God the Creator as an artist, and while this seemed a bit fanciful to me, I liked the poetry of the idea. As though he read my mind, the minister then considered metaphor and what relationship it had to truth. “Metaphor is a lens,” he said. “Metaphor is a mirror, a magic glass by which we see what we would otherwise not see.” To my amazement, instead of quoting scripture, the Reverend Mr. Peal quoted the poet John Keats:

  “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

  It was a puzzling conclusion to his sermon. I felt unsettled by his ideas in a pleasant way and resolved to visit the surprising Unitarians again. I doubted that the Universalist minister had ever heard of John Keats.

  In the foyer, the gaoler spoke to me politely, saying that he hoped that I was doing well, and he inquired after the Husseys. I’m sure that if he had further news of Kit, he would have given me some indication of it. Over his shoulder, I caught the eye of Captain Ahab—oh, gloomy countenance—but then, a lantern of delight—seeing me—lit his eyes and then his whole face. At that moment, the gaoler suddenly asked if he might walk home with me.

  “No,” I said. “No, thank you for your kindness.” And I hurried out into the street. Ahab was not long in approaching me.

  “And might you want a gray-haired escort along the Madaket Road?”

  “I think, sir, that you have walked that road with me before now, and at a time when I was sorely in need of comfort.”

  “Aye.”

  A silence fell between us, and the Sunday sun, crisped by the breeze of early spring, bounced from our shoulders. We both knew what that night had been like: there was no need to speak of it further.

  “I’m surprised to see you, a Quaker, under a gaudy golden dome, Captain Ahab.”

  “I grew up a Quaker. This morning I wanted change, fresh air.”

  “What did you think of the message?”

  “I wish that he had preached on Judas.”

  “How so?” I felt shocked.

  “It may well be that in the heart of man there is a goodness that is divine, that we are Jesus-kin. But that is only half.” His face contracted and darkened. “The other half is the Betrayer, the Liar, the Murderer, the Fornicator, the Cannibal, the Prince of Darkness. And I know, by thunder, that I have kinship there. It’s that half of me that wants to be called brother.”

  So ready was his pain, so anguished his speech, that a word leapt from me to him, as lightning might leap from one cloud to another: “Brother,” I said.

  “Do you call me brother, Una? You do not know me.”

  “I have said what I have said,” I answered and turned from him and began my walk home. Neither of us wanted further conversation after all.

  AS I WALKED HOME, I thought about the gaoler. Was Unitarianism the source of his civil demeanor, as Universalism was the ground of Charlotte’s acceptance? Did I want him as beau? His interest was evident. No. I did not want an admirer whose work it was to imprison others, no matter how civilly. He is not his work, my fair-minded, skeptical voice suggested. I replied: He has chosen his work, though. Fairness insisted: And Ahab has chosen to slaughter whales. Yes, I answered, but Ahab is an altogether different case.

  Ahab knows me, and I know him, and that transcends all else.

  CHAPTER 79: Baptismal

  I SAW NOTHING else of Ahab for a month, while the spring came on. Twice the gaoler walked out the Madaket Road to eat at the Try Pots. I myself now felt shy of the town that I had just begun to explore. I did not want to go back to the Unitarians—though I was full of curiosity about not so much their beliefs as their modes of thinking—lest it seem to Captain Ahab that I hoped to see him there. On the Pequod, I had overheard him speak of me as Spring.

  I am ashamed to say that I made quick use of Isaac Starbuck when he came to the Try Pots; by chance I had a large bundle of mending ready to go back to Mrs. Macy, and I asked him to carry it for me. He promptly volunteered to walk out with a new batch. Twice I used him thus, but after the second time, I told Mr. Starbuck I must do my own walking and take care of my own business. Yet that seemingly independent declaration was devious on my part, for I knew that Captain Ahab would surely sail in the spring, the usual three months in port for restocking the ship and hiring crew now being well past. Perhaps if I encountered him while I was on my business, I would feel no embarrassment.

  Since Ahab knew the way to the Try Pots as well as the gaoler, I hypothesized that Ahab had wanted nothing more of me but a passing (and parting) recognition. And for what reason did I seek out a man who was about to embark on a voyage of possibly three years? I did not know exactly. It seemed I needed to wish Godspeed—whatever that might mean—to a kinsman.

  With my bundle of mended, washed, ironed, and neatly folded sailors’ clothing on my back, I set out for Nantucket town. When I was within sight of the place that I had calculated to be the halfway mark, I saw a man standing there. He neither approached nor receded. It seemed he stood there watch
ing me. Within a few steps more, I recognized the man to be Captain Ahab. With this identification, I began to laugh. I quickened my pace and, despite my heavy bundle, half ran to meet him.

  Ahab did not laugh, but there was a full smile upon his face.

  “So, girl,” he said. “We have mutually decided to close up the distance between us.”

  I do not know what devil possessed me, but I laughingly said, “Nay, Captain. I’m only bringing my mending-work to Mrs. Macy.”

  How dark the cloud that blighted all his smile. He turned abruptly away from me. I had embarrassed and humiliated him with my dishonesty. Quickly, I caught him by the arm.

  “I did hope that I would see you. To say good-bye.”

  “Well then”—and he smiled again, but with only half the radiance of his initial greeting—“let us walk together.”

  “This is the halfway mark,” I said.

  “It might be a good omen that we each come halfway to the other.”

  My heart began to boom like a loose sail in the wind. Like Cordelia, I could not heave my heart into my mouth. I looked at his gray-white locks and thought that he was a kind of Lear, though his domain was watery and he faced his storms at sea.

  “The Pequod sails tomorrow,” he went on. “I have news of Kit to give you.”

  “News of Kit?” I was much surprised, even alarmed.

  “It comes by way of Tashtego, who spoke to a friend of his from a tribe in Maine. Kit is better. He wintered with the Penobscot. For a month now, he has been on his journey west. He has taken the St. Lawrence as a highway, canoed the Great Lakes, gone through the chains of lakes in Minnesota that the voyageurs marked. He makes friends wherever he goes, and the word is passed back and back along the eastward track that he fares well.”