Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer
“ ’Twas he you were learning to love then,” Mrs. Macy said.
“No,” I sobbed. “Not nearly enough.” But I did not mean as a beau.
I spent myself crying, leaned against Mrs. Macy’s shoulder, so watering her apron shoulder strap that it loosed the starch in the fabric, and I tasted the sourness of the starch. I thought of all Isaac Starbuck’s aliveness—his quick nod of recognition in the church; his compassionate discourse with the judge the night of Kit’s liberation; his pleasure in the little sandwiches and tea we were served; the way the palm of his hand unconsciously brushed and enjoyed the nap of the velvet couch; the way he swung my bundle of mending onto a clean table at the Try Pots and smiled. Who else in Nantucket would remember his friendly ways? I had not had enough interest in Isaac to find out whom he knew.
Finally, I wiped my nose with the back of my hand as though I were again a sailor myself. My grief for Isaac was excessive. It was beyond my connection to the man. Yet those tears had washed out something of the old grief. I asked Mrs. Macy if Captain Mustachio had visited her, and she replied that she must have missed him. I let the frivolous-seeming matter drop.
Again my ear registered the roaring of the fire, and my eye fell on the unmistakable shrouded human shape lying on the ground. They were bringing up a hand wagon because the horses would not come close to the flames. Two men approached with a broad board.
“I’ll go now,” I said, not wanting to see the gaoler taken away. I thought, I’ve missed him. Not as a beau. I had missed his goodness, his humanity—I had failed to acknowledge those. Some were saying that Isaac was a hero, but I thought only that he was dead.
The fire continued to crackle and spread. Sparks flew so high that their red flicks mingled with the yellow stars. In the streets, the pandemonium multiplied. I turned away from it.
I walked the dark streets as though they were a labyrinth. I met no one. Eventually the human misery and the elemental fury of the flames beckoned me back. I would find a vantage point from which to view the fire. When I mounted the stairs to the South Tower, as the Unitarian structure was sometimes called, my body confided encouragement. Oh, I was a climber of stairs! The muscles had not forgotten. So easy was the ascent, I only lightly skimmed the tops of the stairs. But now I was not a girl, and I climbed to see neither clear sky and bountiful clouds from the Lighthouse nor the vast and wrinkled sea pleating itself in blue or green below the masthead. No. My mind’s eye saw the inert, shrouded body, the low earth-resting sheet over Isaac. The drapery of the covering sheet.
As I climbed inside the church tower, I passed the gears and mechanisms of the timepiece and noted a circle of red around the edges of the fire-facing clock, where the fit was imperfect. The rippling and flickering of the flames could be seen even in the thin line around the clock rim.
A door led from the interior of the tower onto a railed balcony, which was situated on the square portion of the building, just above the four-faced clock. I thought fantastically that I had climbed beyond time. But my body yet made the ordinary gestures. I opened the door cautiously, in case other viewers might be standing in such a way as to be hit by the opening door, but others, it seemed, had not thought of such a vantage point.
No, not others, but one other. One. To that one my heart flew out. Never does a heart leap so but toward a beloved, when his face is turned, your presence unrealized. You must become real to him. Though you stand quietly, your heart has already leapt forward. Where the railing made a corner, a hand on each of the perpendicular rails, facing the fire, stood Ahab, speaking.
CHAPTER 81: Ahab Addresses the Flames
NATURE, ye term yourself. Fire, earth, air, and water. Essence of nature, ye pretend to be. But what is natural, Fire, about eating men half my age and sparing me? But I have seen the little one snatched from your glowing jaws, your deadly black breath. (I imagine him so black and small, his rescuer would not have found him except for his whimpering. A puppy? I have visited the heart of the inferno, that rescuer would think, for the sake of a puppy. The judge can put him to school here, and when I come back, I’ll take him—Pip—with me as my cabin boy. How he clung to the judge’s neck—tighter than barnacles to the pier, tight as his own curls to his scalp.)
No, I’ll not call ye Natural, even if ye be set by lightning spark. Ye can burn naturally in the forest, or gallop naturally over the prairie like bison with collars of flame and crackling hoofs. But here ye feed on timbers torn from the forest, planed and tamed, and shaped and nailed by men. Ye take their toys one by one—so they seem from this height—toys—and my own ship Pequod safe beyond at anchor, another kind of toy among these stationary ones. These little houses are the hopes of men. Habitats for us naked creatures who having less of fur and feather need more of shingle and brick.
How come ye here, Fire, ravaging the homes of humans? Ye are will-less. I know it well. Leibniz claimed this was the best of all possible worlds, and so he would say, Lick away, little flames, toast all those who live on this street—it’s for the best. Indeed, the next street would be worse for all. A stupid faith, this best-of-all-possible notion. Let Leibniz stick to calculus. Let him invent one that calculates human misery and holds God accountable.
This town pays for Prometheus’ insolence. Yet contained in the hearth, Fire, thou art the most comforting of friends. I’ll have one yet! Hearth, that is. Friend, too. Friend of my bosom. My eye seeks for her, but I cannot find her in that labyrinth. I saw her wiping the face of the black boy, and then she moved and the roof of the building shielded her from view. (The man who bore the boy from the flames—him I love, too. For he alone risked himself for the cinder boy.)
“Una,” I’ll shout for her. Una! Let me bay it like a solitary, shaggy wolf. Roar, Fire, you will not quench my howling till she look up, and like a visitor to the Vatican, she will look up and see not God, but Ahab in the clouds, reaching down to her, quickening her even as the Creator touched Adam.
“Ahab Addresses the Flames”
Fire, I see thou art my brother, for with such heat Ahab rages. The fires of hell, the fires of creation—they are all one—and they burn all knotted in Ahab’s bosom’s heart. Burn, my heart! Burn, my town! Burn! For thy Flames are like a refiner’s fire, and thou shalt purify them—
Why come these sobs?
Thou shalt purify me!—
Let not sobs come and quench the flame within till it has done its work and I am fit for hearth and home—
Let this church and its tower be my stake. Here let the demonic in me writhe into nothingness. Una!—Obsession! I fear ye more than flames!
[Here he sank to his knees, still clutching the railings, as though the church’s altar had come external, bent itself into a corner where he might kneel so as to better relinquish his pride and sin.]
CHAPTER 82: Ahab’s Wife
NEITHER ALARMED nor embarrassed—for what adult has not witnessed the struggling of her soul?—I walked to him, placed my hand on his shoulder, and said, “Look ye behind, Ahab.”
First his hand covered mine, his hard-as-stone hand roofed mine. Slowly he lifted his head but did still gaze upon the burning town. Then, still on his knees, he turned his head and looked up, all disbelief and wonder.
He said in a broken voice, “Art thou angel or devil?”
“Some of both. Even as you are.”
“Even as I.” He rose to his feet. “Ye have spoken truly. Thou art as I am, though we be female and male.”
Then he encircled me with his arm, and together we stood, all calm inside, and contemplated the flames below.
“I would not have the old town burned to the ground,” he said quietly, “if I were God instead of grateful mortal.”
“Nor shall it.”
“Una, be humble. The gods might take us down from our height.”
I laughed. “Look,” I said, and I pointed up toward the rain clouds blowing toward us.
“Ye have a weather eye indeed.”
“All my life,
I have watched the clouds.”
“I remember ye stood aloft for me on the Pequod.”
I remembered but did not confess that I had let pass unheralded one cloudy mass slipping whalelike just under the frigid water. And this was the first secret and the last that I kept from my husband.
“Avast!” Ahab shouted to the fire brigade below and pointed upward. Gradually, the people in the streets all stopped and looked up, lifted their faces to the heavens. When the first splatters of rain came down on them, they tucked down their heads, resumed the handing of buckets, augmenting the force of nature that had come to their aid.
“I would have us go back to the Pequod, the spot where ye were first wed.”
I nodded, for I knew what was in his mind.
When we were down in Orange Street, he stopped and pointed back to our balcony. “I should have known that the same impulse that sent me up there would send ye there, too.”
“As it was earlier,” I said. “When we met at the halfway on the road.”
It rained hard upon us before we reached the Pequod, but it was, for me, like a natural washing, the complement of Mrs. Macy’s kind human ministrations to my flesh. And though this water was cold, the glow within warmed me like that very hearth of which Ahab had spoken.
We found our spot on the rain-swept deck—it was as though the Pequod, too, were getting her bath, and all her ivory fittings gleamed anew. I knew the red and black harpooners, Tashtego and Daggoo, slept below our feet in the forecastle, perhaps others as well, if they had not stopped at some dockside inn. There was no sound but the pelting of the rain on the boards and into the furled sails.
“Here,” said Ahab, and the lightning flashed in his eye, though his voice remained calm. I hoped it would remain so. I did not want him to rage again. I wanted to bring him peace. He took both my hands in his flinty ones. If ever there was trust in my life, it was in him and in that moment. The Pequod swayed under my feet.
“Here,” Ahab said, “what I did join together, I now put asunder.” What he said was beautiful and true, to me. His voice was quiet and humble as rain. “And here I wed Una and take her for my bride.”
“Even as I take you,” I said. The course being figured and set, our kiss was the sweet, uncanny, effortless drifting toward harbor and blissful home.
“I would not spend this night on the Pequod,” I said. Though I flouted the marriage laws and conventions without a qualm, the shadow of my union with Kit aboard the Pequod made me shudder.
“Nor would I have us stay here,” Ahab reassured. “Wait.”
He went below and came back with an oilcloth satchel full, I presumed, of dry clothes, and he brought a broad umbrella as well, though I did not realize that he owned such an item. He slid a nuptial bracelet carved from ivory over my hand. A circle of whales swam round my wrist. Ahab no more needed the validation of priest or paper than I.
I was beginning to feel cold, and we hastened ashore. With my hand through the crook of his arm, we hurried away from the wharf over the cobblestones of lower Main Street. Soon Ahab guided us to turn, and we passed the gaol on Vestal Street. We walked down Vine and on. We climbed a hill. Across the street from the judge’s home, we stopped before a dark house and then stepped onto its dark portico, where I had seen Daggoo lounging against a column. Ahab thrust a key into the lock of the uninhabited dwelling. Turning to me, he explained that he had bought himself a house, and that now, thank God, he had a place worthy of his wife.
This I could hardly believe. A grand house! We stepped from the wet street through the portal. And I was to live here!
“One day I was driven to it,” Ahab said, “to buy myself a hearth.”
The rooms were huge and empty—no furnishings. Wood was laid in the fireplace, though, and there were candles and matches on the mantel.
“Do ye like it?” Ahab asked. The strange ordinariness of my groom’s question almost made me laugh, and I did laugh, but mostly with the joy of the place and the unlikeliness of all that was culminating here. The candlelight reflected against the bare walls and flickered so unsteadily that the tall walls of the place bent and danced in light and shadow.
“All of it is for us?”
“I’ll show ye.”
And I followed my husband from room to room, my soul ever expanding. Our footsteps echoed through the empty first floor, where there were shelves in one room for a library, beautiful fireplaces located at both ends of the house, and along the front and back, large dark windows, unhung with curtains, reflected our candles and us when we passed. I felt a flicker of fear. The walls of the room Ahab said was the dining room were wrapped in wainscoting, and above that a mural of a whaling scene encircled the room. How strange it was to stand in a bare room as though the floor were the deck of a ship, but the painted scene was much busier with ships and whales and whaleboats than any I had seen at sea. I liked best the broad flukes of a plunging humpback whale.
As we ascended to the second floor, my fingertips trailed a curved banister of fine wood. Then again, he showed me too many rooms to count, all bare. “Ye shall furnish them as ye please,” he said. And again I gasped.
At the door of one bedroom, he took out a key, and here in the bedroom there was a large, plump bed, hooked rugs, and curtains at the window. This room was as full and complete as the others were empty. He knelt to light the fire and then several lamps, till the room was bright and cheerful with the clear flame from sperm oil.
Just at the moment I felt acutely shy of asking questions—does one question the genie?—and shy before the worldly wealth implied in being married to a successful whaling captain. Ahab explained somewhat more fully that he only this morning had ordered this room to be furnished. Daggoo and Tashtego had trundled in the furniture. Then Ahab had walked out the Madaket Road to find me. I wanted to ask if he had known we would marry, but again I felt in awe and shy of the power that my husband commanded. His absolute power at sea I was well used to, but, except for the judge across the street, I had never spoken to a man of property on land. I did not question the legitimacy of our marriage, our power to define our lives. Again, in a kind, quiet tone, with none of his sea-gruffness, he told me he had been by no means sure that we would come together, but he had hoped. “My hope was like a slain whale that sinks before any harvesting—it will sometimes, ye know—but then miraculously buoys and rises again.” He smiled at me. “And the prize the sailor thought was lost to him forever becomes rightfully his.”
I had no nightgown, but Ahab said he would turn his back and I might slide unclothed into the bed. “It has enough of sheets and puffs to cover ten brides,” he jested, and I did as he suggested. Then he went around and made sure curtains were closed, screwed down the wicks to the lamps, and turned the key in the lock. Peeping over the covers, I watched his unhurried preparations. Here was my husband, strong and happy, tucking us in for the night.
When he lifted the covers and came into our bed, I went to him with no shyness at all, but with love and purity and gladness of heart.
CHAPTER 83: A Sky Full of Angels
THE SPURT of the match woke me while it was still dark, and I opened my eyes to see my husband lighting a lamp. He sensed that my eyes had opened, and he said, still watching the flame mate the wick, that he must go early to the Pequod, but I flung my arms open to him and softly called, “My Ahab! My husband!” and he set down the lamp and came to me.
All was given; all was taken. And there was a rising in me and a release and a bliss in me that met the same in him and that I had never known before.
“I would have a child for your returning,” I said.
“May it be so.”
And he kissed me with such a mixture of tenderness and passion that I half felt myself a child, one to whom is given all love and all protection. And yet my woman’s body yearned toward him, though I would not ask again, because I knew his need to embark.
Ahab took his leisure, and held me, and kissed my face many times. “If there c
an be but one night’s dent in the marriage pillow, let us at least tarry over it.” When I reminded him that I knew the ship waited, he said, “But now I’m with my love.”
At times he seemed a dream to me, as we sat together in our luxurious white bed, for starched lace trimmed the linens and hung from the curtains. I had never imagined Ahab resting in aught but his rope hammock. But here plump pillows cushioned and pampered us and everything was ironed and smooth and white as snow.
The nap of it, indeed, was familiar to my fingers, and I asked my husband if, by chance, Mrs. Macy had ironed the linens. He said that she had procured them, but whether she had washed and ironed them he did not know. But I had no doubt of it.
“You did not say the linens were for me?” I asked a bit timidly. And he shook his head no. Would he, then, have had any bride, if I had not been willing? Though my goat-nimble mind thought of the question, to ask it would have been blasphemy. I knew my place in his heart, and I knew that he knew his in mine.
Then I marveled some (to myself) that I had known so little of my own course. I had been like a ship, blown about in dark and storm, suddenly finding, beyond all hope, that the dawn illuminated the port of home. And I thought back, recognizing how even aboard the Pequod, obsessed with the state of Kit’s mind, I had always been comforted by Ahab’s presence.
“I know when I first saw you,” I said. “I was aboard the Sussex, looking through the captain’s telescope. Standing at the tiller, your legs seemed wedded to the distant Pequod, your hands to her strong steering, and your face to the wind. I took away the telescope from my eye and you were gone, but the porthole framed the Pequod and the sea and sky.”
“How was it you were aboard the Sussex?”
“Disguised as a cabin boy,” I answered without hesitation. I smiled. “But I would have that story keep for another time.” I was not afraid of his knowing any of my secrets, but I did not want to fill our time with a past that pertained only to myself.