Across all the distance from Portugal the water rushed to us, and still it snorted and billowed, indefatigable, and sent flashing plumes into the sky. With the sky-splashing water, fountainlike, plumed with joy, my spirit climbed higher and higher. Lifting my hands above my head, I clapped them together, rippled my fingers like fringe tasting the air. And so did Mary and Jim and Justice clap their hands above their heads and tickle the sky. From our seats in the stopped buggy, we mimicked and saluted the sea.
The sea, the sea defined me!
Excitement and fresh resolve almost made speech impossible, but I had to tell Mary—and as soon as the boys had slid out and begun to run the beach, I spurted, “I shall live here all the rest of my life!”
She smiled and said nothing. Perhaps she was incredulous at the absoluteness of my declaring.
“Not for Justice,” I said. “For me. Whether he wills it or no.”
I could hardly contain myself. I wished to return immediately to town and tell the judge that I must buy the property that was now for let. And I would buy two ponies as well, one for each of the boys, and have a stable built. But I bit my lip, for I did not want Mary to think that I had taken leave of my senses.
“Don’t you want to see the houses?” she asked.
(Houses, of course! We must have them. But it was light and sky and spume of sea I wanted to buy!)
“Mine is over there.” Mary pointed. Her plain, gray cottage was caught in a mesh of roses.
What could I do but gasp, and then weep a bit, joyfully. “It’s like the house on the Lighthouse Island. Like home.”
“Yours is up there.” She pointed to a somewhat higher bank, where there were several houses. “Yours is the small one closest to us, set back from the road. The one of that group closest to the beach.” A tall hedge stood between my cottage and the neighbors beyond so that I was curtained from the houses to the north.
“There is no house between you and me,” I said, pleased, but I also felt a bit disappointed, for my house was not bedecked with roses, as Mary’s was.
“It doesn’t take long to grow a quilt of roses,” Mary said. “Our houses are almost twins.”
So they were, both of gray shingles in the typical Nantucket manner, both with roof walks. Mary’s yard had a low stone wall like a loose necklace for the cottage.
“I built the wall,” she said. “With my own hands. It’s a windbreak for the ocean breeze, to protect the flowers in the lee.”
“It’s a beautiful wall. Without mortar. The Shakers in Kentucky build walls thus.”
“Shall I tell you how I laid its circumference?” She shaded her eyes with her hand, regarding her work. All the time the sea surged and tossed, and its wildness sang a counterpoint to me, under Mary’s gentle words. “For the first voyage when my husband was gone,” Mary went on, “I placed a stone, one for each day, on the ground. He was gone almost three years, and the bottom course of stone numbers one thousand and one, laid end to end.”
“And did you tell yourself a thousand and one stories?”
“No. I sang myself to sleep. The buggy is borrowed from the last house in the group. We’ll drive there and walk to see your place.”
MY PLACE! Because I had discovered and chosen it myself? A place in the middle way—not so small or crude as a one-room cabin in the woods of Kentucky; yet a place far from being so grand as even one floor of my house in Nantucket. In size and convenience my place reminded me again of the stone house on the Island.
When we entered my house, the space seemed to have been waiting for us. On the ground floor were a large room for keeping and two smaller rooms; one was a bedroom with a double bed made up with a white candlewick counterpane, but the other room, unfurnished except for sunshine, jutted out toward the ocean and had windows on three sides.
“I envy you this room,” Mary said. “It is the only house at ’Sconset with so much glass and view. In winter, it must surely be cold.”
But the sunny room shared the fireplace with the main room; I bent and looked through the opening back into the main room. I hoped that the empty room might be warm enough in winter, for here I would have my books, my desk, my sewing cabinet. Before the hearth I imagined a braided rug, dyed with cranberries like Mr. Starbuck’s on the Pequod, but larger.
Upstairs, two small rooms were tucked under the eaves, each with a large window in the end. When Mary and I climbed the narrow steps to the roof walk, I saw that the platform embraced the chimney and extended out a way over the gable of the sea-view room. I could sit here in winter with my back against the chimney and look out to sea.
The inside walls of the house were finished with a soft gray plaster. The two bedrooms upstairs were so small that they would hold little more than a bed, a chest of drawers, and a chair, but the downstairs bedroom was somewhat larger, the keeping room was spacious, and the window room was beautifully proportioned as well as large and full of light.
“The house is unusual,” I said. “Built in its own style.”
“It suits you, doesn’t it?” Mary asked.
“I love it already. It crimps a bit, here and there, but it expands just where space is most welcome. A wise little house.”
Justice liked only the big keeping room, at first glance, and announced that we would both sleep in there, or in the window room, and I decided I would humor him on the point. “When we know the house better,” I said, “we may want to rearrange.”
As we walked back to the Starbucks’ cottage, we crossed a little dell which would be just right to shelter the stable I intended to have built. It would be halfway between the boys, and far from the neighbors without stables. The buggy people at the end had also considerately built their stable north of the settlement. “Except for the man next door to you,” Mary said, “these are summer people.” She added warningly, “They all say the wind is too strong out here in winter.”
“It wouldn’t be too strong for me or Jim,” Justice asserted.
“It’s not,” Jim replied.
Our visit was entirely happy, and when Justice and I returned to town, we were both itching to be at ’Sconset.
WHEN I TOLD Mrs. Maynard of the migration to ’Sconset, she said, “There’s nobody there. It’s a wasteland.” And my friend the judge was not at all pleased to hear that we were moving. “Just rent,” he counseled. “That’s all Mary ever suggested.”
“I am going home,” I said. “And home is at ’Sconset. I want to buy it free and clear. I want a stable big enough for winter chickens, a nanny goat, and four horses.”
“Four!”
“Who knows? Mary and I may take up riding.”
“What about this house?”
“Rent it for a year, rent it for five years. Sell it.”
“Oh, no.” The judge grew pale. “I am sure Ahab wouldn’t want you to sell it.”
“No, I suppose not. He loved this house.” I glanced around the pretty parlor. “It was the only one he bought. But now I must do what’s best for Justice and me.”
I decided the furniture I owned was far too polished and elegant for ’Sconset, so I bought new furniture, all made by folk living on Nantucket. I ordered new china, though, from Boston; each plate had a large scallop shell in the middle. Pointing at the catalog illustration, I explained to the judge, “The shell is the sea’s handprint. I don’t want ever to forget, even at the supper table, that I am next to the sea—the sea, the glorious sea.”
And so it was, after two impatient weeks, we rode with three wagons full of furniture out to Our New Home, the lumber for the stable and the animals to arrive later. The judge came with us and watched dolefully as the rented furniture was carried out and I had my furniture placed first here and then there. I did bring to ’Sconset Ahab’s and my polished cherry bed.
In the late afternoon, when the judge said he must return to town, he suddenly took both my hands in his at the door. “My dear neighbor, you have no idea how lonely I shall be without you across the street.”
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“You must come to visit often,” I said, seeing his pain.
“I think you have done right. I see the boy is happy here.” He peered down at me through the spectacles bridging his long nose just over his nostrils. “I’ve left Justice a new box of chocolates. I hope he doesn’t forget me.”
“Of course not.”
“I’ve often thought, Una, how well you named him. What is justice but some combination of singleness of vision wed to compassion, of Ahab’s intense focus and of Una’s quick heart? And I like to think, too, that in his name there is an honoring of my profession, if not my person.”
CHAPTER 125: The Hedge
WHEN I AWOKE in the morning, I ran to the high back edge of my yard. Below me were three narrow bands, one of small trees, one of nodding sea grass, and one of sand, then the ocean. I registered her sheer size—another Giant to live beside. She took my breath and gave it back again. Deliriously happy, I stood and admired her fluid expanse, her great light-reflecting surface, the air above her, the incessant sound of breaking waves, till I had my fill.
When Mary had pointed out my cottage from a distance, I had noted the tall, wall-like hedge between my house and the next. It attracted my curiosity. The privet hedge was perhaps eight feet thick and sixteen feet tall—a virtual fortification composed of small, green, oval leaves and their twiggy stems. I couldn’t begin to see through it. I wondered if I chose to hurl my body into the mass whether I would pass through. I thought not, for I would be caught by the twigs and held suspended in the hedge, like a bug in amber.
So I walked along the hedge, amazed at its bulk, sheared into a perpendicular face and squared off at the high top, until I came to an opening. Something like a pointed Gothic arch had been carved out of the lower five and a half feet of greenery. Above the passageway, the top of the hedge was still perfectly knit together. I entered this hedge’s opening, and with no trouble at all walked into my neighbor’s yard.
Here was a garden! A world of purple, pink, rose, and white flowers—hydrangea, cosmos, rose of Sharon—and in the middle an enormous green sperm whale. He was fashioned of privet, but not at all angularly. In him all was fluid curve and beveling, from the bulging forehead to narrowing torso to spreading tail and flukes. And from his forehead sprouted a perfect green plume of privet-spray. I could see only six inches or so into the creature before the density and multiplicity of leaves became impenetrable to vision. By no means did the size of this whale rival that of a flesh leviathan; this was a garden whale. Yet in comparison to myself, he was impressive and overwhelming.
He had no expression, though I have never seen a real whale that was not able to project by some facial means and bodily gesture an attitude toward himself, his world, and his assailants. Here all was a green, vegetable blankness.
Around the base of the privet monster, hundreds of white cosmos tossed their airy heads, somewhat resembling the foam of the sea. Then the collar of flowers became a ring of bubbly blue hydrangeas, mixed here and there with a purple rose of Sharon shrub, and the outer ring was dotted with rosebushes and other rose-colored flowers, so that the whole effect was that the green whale swam haloed in a sea reflective of a sunset palette.
I had never seen anything quite so charmingly artificial. The whole yard was walled in by the mighty privet hedge. I felt as though I had entered the labyrinth of Crete, which held in its center not the Minotaur, but a bull whale. Whether he was captive or king, and how he regarded his green self, I could not tell, for as I said there was a blankness about the sculpture. Beginning to feel myself something of a trespasser, I slipped back through the hedge to my own grassy yard.
From the back edge of my own yard, I descended a set of wooden steps lying against the slope down to the beach. From the foot of the stairs, a path passed through some stunted apple trees, bearing misshapen yellow fruit, and led me through scrubby white pine trees. Then the path parted sea grasses for perhaps twenty feet and stopped on a lip of sand where the beach sloped more abruptly to the sea. I stood on the lip of sand before the broad water. And so began my habit each morning, not only to acknowledge the sea from my house and yard but also to go down to her, to commune with her close at hand, intimately.
I SEE IT NOW: the first morning on the beach at ’Sconset, the waves roll in on long diagonals. The water builds and builds to a steep, high crest and then folds in the middle into a high line of foam which quickly dips in front and spreads on each side in a widening scallop. Rolling in, the wave scampers itself into a flowing, milky apron of white. How densely white this froth, more cream than milk! And behind this turbulent flounce of white, from the backside of the translucent crest, floats a broken net of thin foam, patterned like a mosaic.
The mosaic is lifted by the next long, unbreaking roll, which passes under it without disturbing the netting, only stretching it here and there. The ceaselessness of the whole greeny-gray and startling-white drama of it! The casual constant, unmonitored crashing goes on and on, like the pulse of a body. So it was and so it is.
THAT RESTLESSNESS lay open-faced before me. With the sea there was no secret longing for change, for at no moment did it even pretend to hold still. Why did people speak of the eternal sea? An unwanted answer rose up from my own depths: perhaps because all her heaving and sighing were endlessly futile.
I decided to waken Justice and to cook him an egg.
CHAPTER 126: Journey Toward the Starry Sky, in Present Tense
IT IS A SPLASHING, spanking surf tonight. Earlier, there were fists in it, and the water pow-pounded the shore.
Sometimes it is pouring, pouring, as though there were two oceans—one continually pouring into the beaker of the other, and back and forth between them a watery juggling. Whose hands hold those beakers?
Sometimes it’s the swish and swirl of it and the whistle of the wind, many pitches at once, like a mouth covering ten pipes on a harmonica, this wind breathing right at the window glass. And now the slight rattle of wood against wood, of the movable window against its frame.
Now I imagine roses in the surf—bushels of roses being emptied headfirst against the shore. In the morning I will find heaps and heaps of them in a long row that stretches for miles along the ’Sconset beach. Their imaginary stems will lie across and over each other weaving their own pattern of stemmy X’s, and the heads of all the roses will lie sodden and limp as clusters of red rags.
Sometimes I can hear the ocean jumping—I mean there is a discontinuity; it gathers itself and then a leap—silence—and a landing of heavy water. Like an athlete leaping forward, there is a takeoff—the wave pushes off from the other water, lifts its feet entirely into the air where I cannot hear it, and lands. Ha! Water “lands” though water falls back into water.
Here Ahab would say I quibble-fiddle with the language. Oh, where is Ahab tonight? Here at ’Sconset I listen, listen (in the night what good are eyes?), for the sound of wind in canvas far at sea, or the special hissing water makes when parted by a ship’s prow, but all I hear is the sound of black ocean wringing its hands over and over.
So I will walk the roof walk and look for Ahab. If the try-pots be burning, I can see him far out in the sable Atlantic. Probably this is what has happened: they were almost to Nantucket, and there was one more whale. The Pequod was already rich as an autumn honeycomb, every cell brimful of oil, sealed and stored in the hold. Once I was like a cask of grief storing myself there, just a girl hiding from my mad young husband, but then the sea sent up its strangest flower, the droplet-bushy exhalation of a whale, and there was calling from the masthead, then excited feet on the deck, lowering of boats, and the chase. Avictorious chase, and there was the chaining-in of the great carcass, snugged beside the ship like a natural, fleshy shadow for the artificed boat (with its delicate, noble construct of masts and lines, of layered decking, of internal staircases and ladders, fitted drawers with china knobs, and closet doors). All this I imagine again to justify the try-pots, surely burning now out in the darkness like t
wo red eyes of a moving sea monster.
Oh, the constant rhythm of the sea in the dark—its patient, long application to shore, like a lover coming into her and into her, ponderous with age and experience, heavy and full of groaning love.
Though it be night, I could see the Pequod out at sea, if the try-pots burned.
I’ll just arrange the lamps—the whale oil lamps—along a path through the room leading to the stairs. Now one on the bottom stair…now one on the top. I look back and find them pretty, each with the wick turned low, steady-burning glowworms to show Justice the way, if he should wake up and miss me. His logic will follow mine, and he will know I’m on the roof. How strange that he should so urgently miss his father, when he can scarcely remember the father who danced him and told him stories, whose ivory leg Justice smoothed and petted as though it were a sleek white cat. Justice spoke as he stroked—“Nice leg, good leg. You are a good leg to serve beneath my father.” Well, here’s the lighted way, Little One, if you would follow me.
And here’s the creaking hatch to the roof walk.
TO MY PLATFORM I carry no lamp, for it would ruin vision for distance. There is Mary Starbuck’s house. She has a wisp of smoke in the chimney. Probably before the hearth she has made Jimmy’s pallet, for he has had a cold in his chest. There’s a water-filled iron pot, herbs swimming on the surface, bubbling in the embers, to help open his breathing. I imagine Mary’s sweet face in the fireglow too dim to sew by, but she crochets a line of lace to ornament her underdrawers, where it will be safe from the eyes of all the Quakers, save one. Her fingers know the stitches; the hooked needle, like a shining harpoon, darts down to pluck up the thread. Her fingers know, and she does not need to see. She has learned how to wait better than I have. But then she has never been to sea, cannot begin to imagine the vastness of that ever-shifting bend and bulge of water.