Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  Here again, all was changed. The table was in the middle of the room, not with one end lodged against the window. Different rugs were upon the floor. No basket of shells sat on the hearth.

  The stone walls were the same; the tower had appeared the same, but these were like empty shells, inhabited not by their natural spirits but by hermit crabs. These people shocked me in their physical beings, for not being Aunt, Uncle, and Frannie. They seemed grotesque.

  Eventually, I learned that my kinsfolk had moved.

  Where had they gone?

  Inland. Inland. They were gone to the Great Lakes. That coastline also needed lighthouses and keepers. They had gone to the inland sea. I was invited to eat, but I could not. As soon as I had my wits about me, I told the boatman we would leave. Though he thought me not altogether well and proposed he take me back to Nantucket, I told him I had everything I needed for the trek to Kentucky, and I directed him to sail to New Bedford.

  I sat in the stern of the boat. The weather was coming in on us, and an ever-thickening mist veiled the cottage and the tower. While the place seemed dreamy and unreal, I knew it was solid enough. The buildings were of stone and endured. But the soft life within, the past I had assumed was immutable and permanent, had fled like a ghost, like forgetting.

  I made myself look forward. Then, like Lot’s wife, I felt compelled to look back. I saw the column on its bulge of earth, like a monument on a grave. As I watched, the tower seemed to break in the center and fold itself, headfirst, into the sea.

  I made no cry, for I had no faith that anything was real.

  CHAPTER 88: The World of Rebekkah Swain

  YOU DON’T get it back,” Rebekkah Swain said to me. Like a gigantic furnace, powerful enough to heat all of New Bedford, she glowed behind the desk in a dress of red satin with a golden panel, wide as a road, down the center. “At least not the same room.” Floating above the registration counter, her face seemed rounder than the sun. On the counter sat a magnificent globe of the world, such as might have graced a rich man’s library instead of the desk of the Sea-Fancy Inn. I wondered if the proprietress recognized me. Her own mixed and multiple heritage presented itself in her countenance. “And who are you now?” Rebekkah Swain asked, even as I attempted to puzzle out the essence of her identity.

  “The wife of Captain Ahab of the Pequod. Una.”

  “Ahab! That volcano! Has he erupted yet?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She did not reply, but studied me. “So you’ve married him. He’s old.”

  “I am with child.”

  With her hands, she smoothed her own enormous belly. There could have been ten babies lodged there, or a hundred. She smiled and continued to rub her belly. “Another baby?”

  “It is my first.”

  “Another baby,” she repeated. “And you yourself have traveled a long way.” With one finger she poked one side of the hemisphere of her stomach; with the other hand, she indented the other side. “From here to here, yes? Halfway around the world and back?”

  “Partway back,” I replied, following her metaphor. “I’ll travel overland to Pittsburgh and then steamboat down the Ohio, to home.”

  “Here. Sign the book.” She handed me a quill. “Wait.” She turned the page. “I’ll give you a clean page. It’s more than most get.”

  “And you have a room for me?”

  “For you? People have moved on. Graduated, you might say. I think a vacant room is on the ground floor now. Next to mine.”

  “Then I’ve come down in the world instead of up.”

  “Turn the world upside down, and you’ve come up.” From its cradle on the counter, she grabbed the globe and inverted it. “It depends on you, how you count my meaning.”

  If anything, she was more enormous, this woman who had used her house as a chair. Swollen with living, she seemed. Her face and head were nearly the size of a small tub; her body was far fuller than any washtub I had ever seen. Her head, her body, and the globe seemed like three gigantic soap bubbles stuck together. They grew larger, trembling, as I watched.

  “I’m dizzy. May I go to a room?”

  I LAY DOWN at once, hanging my feet over the edge of the strange bed so as not to sully the coverlet.

  When, as a virgin in a navy-blue dress, I last rested at the Sea Fancy Inn, Rebekkah Swain had seemed more friendly. Now she radiated heat, glowing and glowering, ready to melt me down for recasting. Then I had imagined her protective, instructive. She had sent me aloft, so to speak, to the top of the house; she had given me a view. Now she was not quite menacing, but I did not understand her at all. She seemed unpredictable, and for all her solid flesh, insubstantial, as though she quivered at the threshold of disappearing into nothingness, as bubbles do.

  I myself felt unmoored, drifting. It was my disappointment at the Lighthouse, I thought. Frannie and I had played at making the tower a kind of god. But the granite shaft had only been the most conspicuous feature of the godhead, like a gigantic nose supported, after all, by surrounding features and the rocky skull. The stone cottage, the people who dwelt there, the Island itself—they all composed the icon of my childhood. What did it mean that the column buckled and fell into the sea, that the mist shrouded all? Had I sailed irrevocably to another land? Suppose my mother was dead!

  When I had left what was dear to me, at sixteen, I had scarcely considered remaining on the Island. My life had seemed away. Seeming, seeming—it is a world of seeming, and Mrs. Swain was right: what I had lightly left was now most precious, and my struggle was to reclaim it. Perhaps pregnancy made me dizzy. Topsy-turvy, I seemed to walk on the ceiling, my head hanging down, and I looked up to look down.

  Below, with my mind’s eye, which perhaps is the only true eye, I saw a sinuous river, the Ohio, brown, freighted with mud, curving through the mixed green of hardwood and pine, toward home.

  My perspective floated yet upward, past clouds and through the thinnest blue. I traversed clear nothingness to a ghostly daytime moon. From thence, across the space of nothing, Earth tumbled and bounced, untethered, like a child’s runaway ball. Mutating, the world took the shape of Mrs. Swain, looking like a Chinese pincushion such as sailors bring home for their wives. Bent over in a satin sheen, holding her ankles, Mrs. Swain’s back, big as the curve of the world, presented itself as a stable for gigantic pins.

  I gulped and swallowed myself back inside my brain, my room, where I lay fatigued, with my feet over the end of the bedstead. Sleep sat beside me and soothed my brow with the hand of a woman. Almost asleep, floating down the corridor of memory to the second floor of Mrs. Swain’s Sea-Fancy, I sought the hall of women, where each had bent her eyes to her art. I could not see them; they had vanished. My fancy denied me their figures. Neither the Aleut with her cud of leather nor the Belgian with her web of lace pinned to the cushion in her lap, nor any woman, remained, but, in their empty seats, they had left their work.

  CHAPTER 89: Kentucky Seasons

  I FIRST SAW her bent, cultivating the garden. Even as my hired driver stopped the buggy, she straightened and peered to see who was arriving. In an instant, she knew me, dropped the hoe, almost stumbled over its long handle, and ran toward me with both her arms spreading out like wings. And I to her.

  My mother! Found. Found again in all her softness and love, generosity and intelligence. Holding me. Almost, the pleasure in her face assumed the lines of pain.

  Inside, the cabin was dark in the way log houses are, but I saw that her bed was covered with a new quilt, and a new braided rug was upon the hearth. The interior seemed at once both strange and familiar, and it held a strange quietness. Dangling from a peg on the mantel, a shiny popcorn popper glinted. After the driver placed my travel chest at the foot of the smaller bed, I watched my mother pour sassafras tea—we were together, yet caught in a strange medium of air and time that never stirred—watched her cut a slice from a loaf of bread and butter it for me. Two chairs were placed already facing each other across a table before
the spring fire, but she moved her chair so that we were side by side and passed her arm around my waist.

  “You are my Easter,” she said.

  Only my letters from New Bedford and those borne by the Thistle from the Sussex had ever reached either her or the Lighthouse folk, from whom she had received communications.

  She fingered the ivory bracelet I wore instead of a wedding band, the circle of whales. “You have had much to do with the sea?”

  “I am married to the captain of a whaler. We will have a child. He’s gone back to sea, and I’ve come home to you to have my child.”

  She smiled at me a slow, tired smile. “It takes the place of the child I lost.”

  I held her in my embrace, and we rocked each other. With our rocking I felt that sometimes I mothered her and sometimes she mothered me, and that was how it should be.

  Releasing me, she said, “Eat your bread, Una.” And she straightened her back.

  I asked her about Aunt Agatha and Uncle Torchy and learned that they had been yet unsure which of the Great Lakes they might settle on when they had last written to her.

  “They have reversed themselves,” I mused. “Once they were on land surrounded by ocean, and now their water is embraced by land.”

  Their baby thrived, as did Frannie. “Do you notice?” my mother asked. “I’ve reversed the room so that I can lie abed and see the rising of the full moon.”

  “I have been married before, Mother. I married Kit Sparrow, about whom I wrote you when they visited the Lighthouse.”

  “Kit and Giles.” She rose and took a worn envelope from under her pillow. “It was the last letter I received from you from the Lighthouse.”

  I let it lie on the table. I did not want to clutch after the hopeful girl who had written that letter. Her disappointments made me sad.

  “When did Kit die?”

  “I don’t think he is dead. I hope he is alive. But as a husband, he is dead to me, Mother. He became insane. I heard he’s traveled to the far West. He sent word he would never return.”

  My mother squeezed my hand, and that was the last we said of my marriage to Kit. But of Kit himself, and of Giles, of Ahab, of Charlotte, of Sallie of the Albatross, we spoke freely during that spring, as we worked the earth. Through the days, we planted vegetables, picked wildflowers, cooked, sat outside before the sunny door to sew. I did not tell my mother of the hardship I had undergone in the open boat—only that we had been stove by a whale and rescued by the merchant ship.

  “Stove?” she asked. “Stove?”

  And this and many other seafaring terms that appeared in my speech I explained to her. I had brought the Goethe translations with me, and, to my surprise, she liked the tale of Young Werther very much. “That is how much it hurts sometimes,” she said, and I knew she spoke of the loss of my father.

  I sensed that she felt delicate about discussing him with me. “Religion closed his mind with a darkness,” she said one night, sensing my questions. “He was not always that way. He once loved light things.” She shook the popcorn popper above the embers. “Popcorn,” she said. “And honey. He would guzzle honey like a bear.”

  Through the spring, we cultivated and planted, expanded the old garden in anticipation of even greater bounty. In the barn she kept but one cow, and once a week some neighbor would usually come by to exchange game for our excess of dairy products, or some of our eggs. Sometimes my mother swapped a few chicks for venison, saying I needed to eat some red meat, but this meat was stringy, the deer not yet having fattened very much.

  Though we did not hitch the mare to visit—people came to us—I was delighted to find the same old mare in the barn that my father had had when I was a small child. She nickered and seemed to know me, and we took her out once a week just to keep her used to the harness.

  “The barn was difficult for me,” my mother said. And she pointed to the rafters from which his body had hung. It was not hard to imagine him darkly swinging there, where dust motes danced in a shaft of sunlight. “The neighbor men came and cleaned the floor and the stalls and the loft, and that seemed to help. They offered to take this one down and build me another smaller barn from the boards. Two offered to buy the whole place.”

  “You could come home to Nantucket with me. Our house is very large.”

  “I’ll visit you. When you have your next baby. I don’t want to leave my home. Not yet.”

  That summer we often walked the woods; several times Mother and I walked as far as the river and baited up our hooks and fished. Sometimes a paddlewheeler would pass, and we would wave.

  All the time, my baby grew within me. My body was completely at ease. I loved my roundness, the way my stomach bloomed under my apron. My mother made a little quilt for the baby, and its stitches were but half as long as ordinary. I told her it seemed that it had been sewn by an ant. I had brought delicate cotton batiste with me in the sea chest, and I made the baby seven little dresses, one for each day of the week, and each with a bit of embroidery in a different color around the collar or sleeves or hem. Sunday’s dress had a purple cross-stitch about the neck, and Monday was a yellow chain running across the bottom of the yoke. Tuesday was a feather stitch, cardinal red, around the tiny sleeve cuff. Thus, I moved through the week in a rainbow, with the trim a bit lower, on the collar, the yoke, the sleeves, the waist, and down the skirt, for each day. Saturday was represented by a double row of green and blue scallops, for the sea, at the hem of the little garment. I didn’t know why I did this: it pleased my fancy.

  I described the Pequod to my mother, and she gave me the back of an old envelope to sketch it on. The preciousness of paper was a sign of how backward we still were on the Kentucky frontier.

  “Though Lewis and Clark ran short of nearly all their supplies,” I remarked, “when they wintered beside the Pacific, they always had plenty of paper.”

  “Clark’s brother died at Locust Grove, down the river ten miles or so. I imagine they had plenty of paper, too.” She lifted her eyebrows and smirked. “But this ain’t Locust Grove.”

  Although my drawing was wobbly, my mother used it as a pattern to work a cross-stitch sampler of the Pequod. “You must hang it in your cupola,” she said. “Show it to the baby, and tell him to watch through the spyglass for that ship.” Under it she worked a rhyme, which she said she had heard in her Boston Quaker school. The cross stitched verse was supposed to encourage boys to stay home and be scholars instead of running off to sea:

  A Ship Is a Breath of Romance

  That Carries Us Miles Away.

  And a Book Is a Ship of Fancy

  That Could Sail on Any Day.

  I did not tell her that a whaling ship could be more like a Butcher’s Shop than a Breath of Romance. It sometimes amazed me how well I knew, now, with my mother, what to say and what to omit. I was sure she did the same for me, and always had, though our discourse was unusually free. But we would not give each other pain.

  Always on her face was her love for me. Even if I had only been out in the yard a few moments, when next she saw me, her face shone out in gladness, and always there was a steady radiance. Many times she thanked me for coming home to share the joy of my waiting with her.

  Of Ahab I thought chiefly at night, as I lay in bed waiting for sleep. I missed him and loved him. I thought in his direction, but I did not try to write to him. The fate of letters, as I knew it now, seemed too precarious. Before I left Nantucket, I had sent Ahab a letter to tell him of our coming babe and of my pleasure in our home. Sometimes as I waited for sleep and watched the full moon sail up the window (my mother and I decided to share her bed), I imagined what might be in Ahab’s letters. Certainly he would describe the sea to me and report what whales they took. I hoped that he might write of his love for me, but so much of the bond between us had traveled the path of the eyes that I did not require, with Ahab, a stream of romantic words.

  Often I remembered our wedding night, the gentleness of his hard hands upon my body, the joy
of our uniting. Had it been after that last time, that morning when I held out my arms to him, that his seed had impregnated me? I thought so.

  I had told my mother that at the dawn after our wedding night, we had entered the cupola and angels of resplendent hues had flown around us, for I wanted her to know how I loved my husband, his mind, body, and spirit.

  WHILE I THOUGHT of Ahab by night, by day those summer and fall hours were filled with the love between my mother and me. Perhaps it would have been a more ordinary time if we had both not known that at the end of the next spring, our year together would be over, and I would take my babe of five months age or so back with me to Nantucket.

  When the fall vegetables were ready to gather, Mother got out her Keats volume and read his “Ode to Autumn” to me, and I loved the full sadness of the poem as never before. Especially the description of the gnats moved me—that such a small part of nature was yet worthy of a place in his lines about that remote English world of harvest.

  Our root cellar, with its new stock of vegetables which we ourselves had not only grown but also harvested, dried, preserved, and pickled, seemed as rich a treasure house as Keats’s granary. The burlap sacks were lumpy with cobs full of dried corn, and we had large jars of beans and tomatoes on the rough shelves. Against the dirt walls we had baskets of black walnuts we’d gathered in the woods and boxes of dried blackberries. We had a store of turnips and radishes, carrots and potatoes. It was a pleasure to crunch through the fallen leaves down into the ravine, to open the heavy wooden door, and to add to the bounty. When we entered the cellar, we deeply inhaled the aroma of vegetables mixed with earth. “We’ll run out of room,” we told each other, proclaiming the success of our agriculture.