Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  “So it is among the brown island people, when they mate,” Ahab said. “Why not us?” Those picnic spots were secluded enough. No one knew but the sheep and omniscient clouds. Often we sat down with our picnic basket, lavishly stocked by the judge’s jam and jelly cupboard, and with those sweets we had breads, cold meats, cheeses, fruit, and often a flask of wine. How Ahab loved these fresh, dainty foods! I sat with my skirt over my legs, but after we had eaten, Ahab would pull back my skirt to my knee, and always I smiled fully at him. We lay back in one reclining—remarked some—quietly—on the clouds, but not too long of chat—and then he would come to me. My welcome was that which the eager earth gives the sun when she turns round each day to greet her fiery lord.

  One time we shed all our clothing to wallow and lounge in sunlight, and then I saw the scar like lightning that traversed from his temple to his heart. I traced it with my finger, but I did not ask whence it came. Of our pasts we seemed to know all we needed to know. Nothing was concealed, and though nothing was overtly revealed, all was known. In guilt and in forgiveness we counted ourselves equals, and always had. The sun himself envied us.

  Our joy at night by lamplight and candlelight was no less than when we made the sunny moors our bed, and once in his eagerness Ahab asked if we might not lie together on the carpet before the parlor fire.

  How well we loved, too, to sit in our library, both reading, occasionally reading aloud a paragraph or two, but neither attempting to instruct the other, and then with the beginnings of fatigue for either one of us, that person remarking, “Might we go upstairs soon?” and the reply “As soon as I finish this page.” Then our clasping hands and climbing up. Or almost equally pleasing was to come home from some entertainment, to mount the steps directly, wordlessly, urgently, to help each other with buttons and hooks, fall into goose down, and glory in our privacy.

  Our friends remarked, “Ahab grows younger every time we see him.” They would add, “And you, Una, also go backward in time. You yourself will soon be but a babe.” And here I would blush for fear that they alluded to my ambition for an infant.

  When the third week of July rolled around, but no menses for Una, I thought my hopes fulfilled and confided as much to Ahab. His eyes spoke the soft love of his response; his lips said, “But if thy menses come yet again, then I shall enjoy thee in thy bloody time as well as now.” Yet we both felt we had got our child. In our marital bliss, we ceased not, but modulated to the key of celebration, of triumph, of tenderness and brimming gratitude.

  At this point, fearing his departure and his yearning for the sea, I asked my captain if he would take me out in a small boat, toward the old Lighthouse of my youth. He rented a beautiful sloop, easily handled by two, and one bright and bonny morning we sailed southwest. Once away from Nantucket, I put on boy’s clothes, for the fun of it. We flew before the wind. “Ye have made me sail for the sheer pleasure of it, Una!” Ahab exclaimed, his long gray hair billowed back from his brow. “If ye have secretly harbored a harpoon, throw it overboard and let me not lay eye upon it.”

  In early afternoon, we spied the Lighthouse, upright, rising against a slight haze. “I’ve seen it,” I said. “Now I would turn back.”

  “Not gam, not put in?”

  “Nay.”

  “But let’s tarry a bit in these waters,” Ahab said. He trimmed the sails. While the sloop drifted, he made sweet love with me, my eyes often resting on the gray shaft of the Lighthouse in the distance. I felt a completeness, my girlish self united with the woman and mother-to-be.

  After our fill of love, when we sat on the deck, eating our grapes, our fresh-sliced crescents of apple, our bread and cheese, the sparkling little waves all around us seemed to laugh and clap their hands in glee. We entered Nantucket harbor just as it was aglow with sunset, a pool of gold.

  BY THE THIRD WEEK of August, my menses had not appeared again. Mrs. Maynard declared me surely pregnant and that she would not be obliged to swim underwater and bore holes in the Pequod.

  The last week of August, William Mitchel reported that with the telescope he had spied Halley’s comet and invited us to come to watch. “To think,” he said, “that to my knowledge no man has seen it for seventy-six years!” But our nights were too precious to Ahab and me for that kind of stargazing. Now, we sat up in bed and talked and talked.

  As a young man Ahab had traveled occasionally on land, as well as by sea, and he wanted to share those sights of the Norway fjords and mountains with me. “Their churches are wooden and humble, made of beams and staves, like landlocked ships,” Ahab said, “for they seem to know the Spirit dwells not there but amongst the rocks of the high mountains.” When he spoke next of the old cathedrals of France, I knew that the questions haunting him before this voyage were those concerning the spiritual. When he spoke of Mont Saint-Michel beside the Normandy coast, on an island joined to the mainland by a single road, and that road covered by the tides twice a day, it seemed natural to me that for him a holy place might ultimately be haloed by water.

  “I’ve felt that way,” I said, “about my Lighthouse on the Island. There height and air spring upward from the rock—”

  “The rod of Jesse,” he interrupted.

  “—and water surrounds.”

  He went on to say that for him the most holy of man’s constructs was the cathedral of Chartres. “I saw Chartres rise, a small mountain itself, out of a wheat field on a plain. Inside, stone ribs, like those of a mighty whale, arched over me. I felt myself swallowed, like Jonah, and within that sepulcher of stone wondered, might I, too, find salvation?

  “On the floor,” Ahab continued, “twists the pattern of a labyrinthine path, like entrails. Pilgrims travel it on their knees to the central place, the navel of goodness. It is a shrine that acknowledges it is a dungeon”—my husband set his jaw even as he spoke—“but the stone walls are pierced with light shining through thick glass of unnatural, intense saturations of red and blue. This was a man-god-stained light,” he concluded, “that made me gnash my teeth—so much did I want to act upon it and for it to act upon me.”

  Here I touched my husband’s brow, and my fingertips remembered the try-pots, and I thought of the hot butchery of the business to which my husband was about to return, after this idyllic summer.

  “Might you not stay home?” It was the first time I had asked such a question.

  “Una, why burns this room so brightly? Whale oil. I bring light to the world. If it is not the colored light of Chartres, still it is a pure and useful light.”

  “Think of Prometheus.”

  “Punished for his hubris. But I wage an honest battle with the deep. I do not steal from the gods.”

  “Sometimes I fear I have stolen my happiness from the gods, for my life with you is beyond my due.”

  “Then let us smile and lounge while we may,” he said, strangely bemused, suddenly relaxed. “For they will have it back again. In no corner of the earth have I found a happiness that lasts.”

  “Nor an unhappiness!” I said.

  “Well spoke!” And Ahab smiled again, that rare, sweet cracking open of his face. Often a chuckle would break from him, but his grim lips seemed usually disconnected from the muscles that made for smiling. His smile honored me, and I have treasured it.

  “I have seen,” he spoke again, “the cousins of those colors at Chartres, of red and blue, in the petals of little alpine flowers. Their stems are thin and wiry, and they dance their colors on the high mountainsides the world over. They are much the same in Switzerland, or Vermont, or the foothills of the distant Himalayas.”

  So we talked our nights away. My dozing to sleep was with the blue and red of swaying flowers. But I dreamed more deeply that night of stony, time-gnawed Chartres; I was inside the vault, crawling on bloody knees, but no window and no light pierced those lofty white-dark ribs.

  That morning I found some spots of my blood on the sheets. Mrs. Maynard said it meant nothing at all, yet Ahab stayed on, well into September, to
be sure that I would not miscarry. “Fear not,” he said. “I shall not leave thee with an empty womb.” Those days he cuddled me and brought me treats and books, and even, when I asked it, hummed a lullaby for me.

  When he was assured that all was well, there being no more bleeding, Ahab prepared to sail. Little Pip was deemed too young to go as cabin boy, but in the presence of Captains Peleg and Bildad, the judge, and Maria Mitchell, Ahab promised that if Pip would wait patiently and be obedient, he would go on the next voyage. Like a whirling dervish, Pip beat on his tambourine and danced for joy, till Ahab caught him and sent him outside to the pavement (where there were no Irish teacups about) to do his spinning.

  “PRETTY SHIP, thee hast thy ballast within thee,” Ahab said to me.

  “Do not kiss me, but smile at me once more,” I entreated for our good-bye on the wharf.

  “Let time be a pleasant wind, Una, in thy sails.” Long his gaze at me, and long my eyes on him. “Send thy thoughts of me to the moon, Una, and Luna will beam thy serenity back to me. Every night we will see the same moon. But write letters, too.”

  “I shall use my eagle quill till it is short as a sewing needle.”

  Then, Ahab smiled at me. But he could not stop at that and took me again in his arms. I trembled, as alpine flowers do against their mountain.

  CHAPTER 105: The Comet

  MY HAND on my belly, only so slightly swelling, I stood on the dock and waved my Ahab off. Then I rode in a buggy with Mary Starbuck out to ’Sconset, and we stood on the sandy beach and saw the last of the Pequod rounding Nantucket, far out to sea; finally its sails blended to a single white handkerchief against the sky, and then a dot, and then gone.

  Mary asked if I should want to spend the night with her at ’Sconset, but I said I wanted to return to town. And I invited her to visit me soon, and she returned the invitation. Superficially, I had not gotten to know her very well. Ahab seemed to feel that he saw quite enough of Mr. Starbuck at sea. The toast of Nantucket, we had visited ’Sconset not once. But I did know Mary anyway, profoundly, from that day in the rain on the wharf when she had seemed my double.

  When I got home, Mrs. Maynard opened the door for me. “My captain is away tonight, too,” she said, “I thought I might spend the night with you. Here’s a hot toddy for you to sip.”

  Gladly did I share the parlor with her, she knitting and I sewing. We were pleasantly and cheerfully at work, but as I heard the clock bong through the night, I could not help but think how many strokes of that hammer would fall before Ahab came home again.

  Shortly after ten, Mrs. Maynard and I were both surprised by a late-night knock at the door, which I opened to an excited Maria Mitchell.

  “Halley’s comet’s visible tonight to the naked eye,” she said. “Come see it.”

  Mrs. Maynard declined, but I put on a wrap and hurried out with Maria. A number of people were coming out of their houses and pointing up. “Don’t look yet,” Maria instructed, as she and I walked beyond the houses to the old mill hill. “Wait till we get to the top.” From the crest of the hill, with the sound of the creaking timbers of the mill at my back, I viewed the celestial visitor, a beautiful bright streak in the sky. I wondered if Ahab was watching it.

  “Come home with me,” she urged, “and see it also through the telescope.”

  “The Comet”

  I did not want to leave Mrs. Maynard alone too long, but I hated also to disappoint my excited friend. “Some night, soon,” I promised, “I’ll come at night and watch with you through the telescope.”

  “Would you?” She clutched my arm.

  “Maria,” I said, “you are overwrought. I’ve never seen you so stirred.”

  “If you would but watch at night with me sometimes!”

  “Indeed, I promise.”

  “There is a prize,” she confided. “The king of Denmark has offered a medal, a gold medal, to the first person in the world who discovers a comet with the aid of a telescope. No one has ever done so. Every night, with the telescope, I watch for a comet no one has ever seen before.”

  “But that would not be Halley’s comet,” I said.

  “Oh, no. It must be a comet never before seen, and one first seen with a telescope,” she reiterated. “I think if any new celestial object appeared in my field of vision, I would know it was new. I’ve learned the known sky so well now. Father thinks I am ready.”

  “Perhaps he will make the discovery.” I pulled my shawl about me and gazed reverently at the comet I had never viewed before.

  “I think not. I think it will be I, for Father is not so ardent as I.”

  “At least I will look at Halley’s comet with you some night,” I assured, and Maria assured me in turn that the phenomenon would be visible for many nights.

  As I walked home, I thought of how the comet was traveling past, even as Ahab was traveling away. My child would not see such a sight till he was an older man than Ahab was now. And our lives would be gone. I glanced up to see that bright spark again, but the tops of dark buildings obscured the view.

  I wonder if Maria’s life was less content and complete than I had thought. If she was not the first to spy a new comet telescopically, would it be a great loss to her? Perhaps she would discover another, if not the first. A Nantucket woman to win the gold medal from the king of Denmark! A woman in her observatory on top of a bank. Would they even let it count? I decided to ask Maria exactly how the king’s announcement was worded.

  When I entered the parlor, Mrs. Maynard said that comets had ever been heralds of disaster and that she wished I had not looked at this one on the night of my husband’s sailing.

  “But it’s there,” I said, “whether I look at it or not.”

  She announced that she herself did not ever intend to even so much as glance at Halley’s comet.

  CHAPTER 106: Frannie’s Letter from an Inland Lighthouse

  WHAT HALLEY’S COMET ushered in, despite Mrs. Maynard’s misgivings, was a blessed connection reestablished at last. Having stopped at the post office, Maria appeared at the door again the next morning (her eyes as dark-circled as a raccoon’s from late stargazing) with letters from Frannie and Aunt Agatha.

  Dearest Una, cousin and friend of my childhood,

  Mother says I am not to write to you because you are not to be trusted. Father climbs up the tower when she talks about you that way, but he says nothing. Butch is now four years old, which is the age I was when you came to the Island Light, and I always remember how kind you were to me and how you played with me, and I try to be as good to Butch.

  Butch is not so isolated here as I was, since we are on the mainland and there are farms not too far away. It is as though my childhood landscape has been turned wrong side out, with the land surrounding the great water instead of the sea encircling the island.

  I hope you do not think too bad of Mother. She was worried to death. We all went to New Bedford looking for you. Captain Maynard said he did not know anything about where you had gone. He said he had not taken you to the boardinghouse to wait for your mother as he was supposed to do, and Mother reached out and grabbed down on one of his mustaches. She was furious, and I have never seen her so angry before or since. However, she is angry with you because she said you betrayed her trust. She says it is a Sin to leave home and leave your loved ones behind to worry about you. Father said that he had never heard her speak of Sin with a capital S, and she said that it was Warranted (I could hear the capital W in her voice) because you had not been considerate of the people who loved you most and you had thought only of what your own heart told you to do.

  This is part of why I write to you. I wonder what you think now, many years later, of that issue. But I have to say you must not write the answer to me, for Mother would then know that I have disobeyed her by writing to you. Perhaps I too have betrayed her.

  I do not want to go to sea, but I want to travel west. Perhaps you could write here without referring to this letter, but give me some advice. I don’
t think you have forgotten what it was like to be young. I am now twelve years old, but I know that my maturation has not been as rapid as is probably normal. Still, you left your Kentucky home at twelve and left us when you were sixteen.

  I want to travel west because I believe that Kit is there. I heard from a young man who comes to help clean the lens—we have only the old type here, not a Fresnel—that a strange white man among Indians passed through the town. Why do I think it was Kit? For one thing, the description, but also, it is what he said. They asked him why do you, a white man, travel with Indians? Kit answered, “My skin may be white, but my heart is red.” Do you remember when he said that at the Island Light? I remember everything Kit ever said. Then he said it about black people and attending the black church in Nantucket—that he felt at home there because his heart was black. It has to be Kit.

  I was surprised that you and Kit did not get married. The letter we have from you referred to the fact that Giles had gotten killed in a fall from the masthead. It did not tell what had happened to Kit. You said that you were expecting your second child, that you were married to Captain Ahab, and that you were rich and happy. I am sure letters have been lost. That is all I know about your life, except that the first baby died, and your mother died in the wagon accident. I am truly sorry you lost them.

  My mother cried and cried for her sister. She said that was your fault too, that when you betrayed us by running away you started a long chain of consequences. Father quoted, “As in Adam all die, so in Christ are all made alive.” It made Mother so mad that she burst into tears, because she could see the parallel bad logic. Even I could see that it was wrong to blame you for every bad thing that happened to any person you knew.