Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  Mary stepped back inside the door and reached up for the brass telescope, where it always hung between large hooks, as a shotgun might hang in a Kentucky cabin. When she held the instrument to her eye, concern passed over her countenance, and she said, “She sails sadly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She handed me the glass, and I looked for myself. All was tidy aboard, but two whaleboats were missing. Usually the ship’s carpenter could refashion what was stove, and rarely had I seen a ship with less than its full component. Observing further, I saw that the number of men on deck was sparse, and those that were there moved slowly. Indeed, they did seem sad, as though they hesitated to bring home sorrowful news.

  “Yes,” I said. “I see.”

  “Do you see the captain?” she asked.

  “He stands very still at the wheel.”

  “Yet a captain may bring news of a captain,” she said.

  “And I see the first mate, too,” I replied. But the sight of the man was not reassuring. He was gaunt and stooped. I handed her the glass.

  “It would only be their own sorrow that weighs them so,” I said.

  “One of us must go to town, and one stay here with the children.”

  “Do you wish to go this time? It’s been a long time since you were in Nantucket.”

  “I would rather stay,” Mary said. “We know that this is not the Pequod. Hereafter, we will take turns.”

  A sleepy-faced Justice had followed me. Now he took my hand. “Mother, do you think the Mitchells would still give us Pog?”

  “I’m going to town. I’ll ask. They can bring him for the Perseid, if they want to.”

  THE ROAD between me and the wharf seemed not to exist, nor the time between the farewells at ’Sconset and the moment I stepped from the harbor dinghy into a loop of rope so as to be hoisted to the deck of the Delight. When I introduced myself to the captain of the Delight, I thought, Ironic name!—for he appeared to be the captain of Sorrow. This hollow-cheeked captain started as though at an apparition when I told him I was Captain Ahab’s wife.

  “You’ve seen the Pequod then?”

  “Aye, and that old, wild man.”

  “What of my husband, sir?”

  “I baptized your husband with death or resurrection. I don’t know which.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When first I beheld the Pequod at a distance, he was aloft, hatless, risen high in a basket, keeping lookout himself, as though he had no trust of the usual lookouts.”

  At this my heart constricted in guilt, for I myself had betrayed such a lookout trust, and my betrayal had been at the sighting of an almost immaterial Moby Dick. Yet Ahab, by means of this mechanical basket contrivance, had flown aloft again! and a spark of happiness for him dashed across the dark field of my apprehension.

  “On the end of the rope,” the captain went on, “he had Starbuck, and just such a mate I’d want on the end of a pulley rope.”

  “What of Ahab?” I insisted.

  “He stood on his vessel and I on mine, but I showed Ahab the salvaged skeleton of our whaleboat, up there”—he pointed back to the shears. “Naught but boat bones. Moby Dick, I told him, and worse than a mere stove boat has been the monster’s work. ‘You sail on the grave of four of my men, gone down alive and dying,’ I told him, as very soon I must tell yon weeping clutch of wharf women. I must tell them after you have your portion.

  “I pointed your husband’s gaze to my deck, where lay a shroud inhabited by the fifth dead man. ‘And all of those lost,’ I said, ‘were Nantucketeers like ourselves.’ Even as Ahab and I stood talking at our taffrails, I with my trumpet, he only with his stentorian voice, my sailors were taking the last stitches in the canvas shroud, sealing shut the sides.

  “Ahab’s anxiety was only that I might have killed the white whale afore him—now, Ahab’s good wife, I see the darkening of thy bright countenance—but I told him no harpoon forged would ever do that.

  “Angrily, he defied me—let me finish the tale for you. Over there, on the wharf, they want different characters in the cast. Ahab snatched his harpoon and brandished it about. ‘Look ye, Nantucketeer; here in this hand I hold his death!’ ”

  Ah, in this captain’s tale, I heard Ahab, I saw Ahab!

  “ ‘Tempered in blood,’ Captain Ahab shouted. ‘Tempered by lightning, to be triply tempered in the hot heart of Moby Dick.’ ”

  Though I trembled in all my being, I shivered out my question. “Was he mad, then?”

  “ ‘Tempered in blood, tempered by lightning, to be triply tempered in the hot heart of Moby Dick where the white whale most feels his accursed life!’—those were the last words I heard him speak—‘accursed life!’ ”

  The captain of the Delight averted his eyes from mine, as though he was ashamed. He added quietly, “But my last words to him were ‘May God keep thee, old man,’ and then, the last stitch having been made and the body placed on the plank, I began the funeral words ‘May the resurrection and the life…’ But Ahab sailed away. Yet we splashed him with the bubbles from the sea-struck corpse.” The captain seemed to fetch a sigh from the very depths of the ocean. “Perhaps ye know, Mrs. Captain, did I baptize him in that splash of bubbles with death or with life?” Still he would not look at me but continued to gaze at the decking of the Delight. “Now I have five more tales to tell, and each of them ends in certain death.”

  “So you do not know what became of my husband?”

  “That is all I know of him—with certainty. Don’t ask for more report.” He turned away from me. Was he so anxious to disburden himself to the women waiting on the wharf that he had no civility for me? He muttered as he turned from me, “What I heard with my own ears and saw with my own eyes. That’s all I’ll tell ye.” Then he stopped, as though he remembered one last sight, and looked at me. “And the last I saw of the Pequod—at the stern, for the life buoy, hung a coffin.”

  “I thank you for your telling.”

  AHAB ALIVE! and still pursuing the white whale! Closing, perhaps, on the whale! Ahab possibly alive! But what was the sequel?

  My dinghy deposited me among the fearful women. I did not need to say that some crew had been lost; their only questions were who. On my walk to the Mitchells’, to ask about the dog, I passed Aunt Charity, and she, too, as the captain had, startled to see me.

  “Am I so infrequent a visitor in town as to startle you?” I asked gaily, but she merely nodded, tucked her head down, and hurried on. Perhaps she already knew that the Delight brought news of death. Captain Bildad probably had gone out with the pilot boat.

  Mr. Mitchell was not home, but I conversed with Maria in their apartment above the bank. Like me, she thought that one could not draw any certain information about Ahab from what the captain of the Delight had told me. I stayed perhaps an hour with Maria—she said they would be happy to deliver Pog to Justice, since they had several other dogs and they had hoped to give him away, he being the largest of their dogs, with the most extensive appetite. I remembered to inquire of my patient scientific friend how her search was going for a telescopic comet, but she had no news. I saw no hint of despair in her face, such as one sees in the faces of wives of sailors who have been too long at sea. Maria would wait trustingly through all eternity, if she could, for a comet to swim into the ken of her telescope.

  “Will it not be a relief,” I asked, “to come out to ’Sconset and see dozens of meteorites?”

  She laughed and ducked her head. “Of course it will be a pleasure to see you.”

  I thought she dissembled a bit; she really did not want to leave her lover for even one night. I almost teased her thus, but remembering her maiden state, decided not to embarrass her. All the time I was taking an interest in her work and in Justice’s dog, my heart beat quickly with possibility—Ahab, my lover, my husband, yet Alive!

  Next, I went to call on Mrs. Maynard, whom I found with Captain Maynard, and she was crying. Before she saw me, I heard her snuffle, “And I
once thought him an old warthog!”

  “Dangerous as Vesuvius,” her husband replied.

  Then they both saw me. Mrs. Maynard jumped up. “Land sakes, there she is, poor Mrs. Sparrow!”

  The appellation gave me a turn, but I smiled and said, “I have not been so called for a long time.”

  She entreated her husband, “Oh, leave us, leave us.” He seemed quite ready to do so, twirling his right-hand mustache as he went. “Oh, my dear, the captain of the Delight has confided to the captain of the Camel the most dreadfully disturbing news!”

  “I have spoken to him myself,” I answered. “Five crewmen lost.”

  “But Captain Ahab!”

  “Last seen well, but in pursuit of the white whale.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, fiery and eager.”

  “That was not how he was last seen.”

  “But the captain of the Delight took particular pains to say that was the last he saw of the Pequod.”

  “Yes, but not the last heard. Not the indirect news. And what Delight heard later, he has confided to another captain—my captain—and it is most dreadful.” She sank into her chair and sobbed.

  Oh, slow wit that I was, I was yet amused by this latest round of miscommunication. She reached out, took my forearm, and drew me into the chair beside her.

  “Not the last heard, dear Una, for on his way back, Delight had a gam with another captain, who himself had had a gam with Captain Gardiner of the Rachel—”

  “The Rachel is also of Nantucket.”

  “Aye—and he said—”

  “But that is too far removed a hearsay!” I cut her off; I was alarmed.

  She gathered herself together, stopped crying, smoothed her starched apron, and said, “You must listen to what I have to say.”

  I nodded, terribly afraid.

  “Captain Gardiner of the Rachel lost his son. He crossed paths with the Pequod and wanted to charter her for two days to help him find his son, gone, in a whaleboat. Ahab would not.”

  My gladness sank to hear of this heartlessness of my husband to a man whom he knew, a father. It would not be Ahab to so lose his humanity, without his own soul writhing and anguished. But alive! My heart did not dive to the coldest depths.

  “Then someone else has seen Ahab,” I said hopefully.

  “The Pequod herself, shortly after meeting the Rachel, was stove by the whale—”

  I was stunned. Like the Sussex.

  “Stove and sank—by Moby Dick. Listen! One man only surviving. Picked up later by the Rachel herself. Picked up from off a coffin used as a life buoy.”

  “He was?”

  “He was not one of ours. No one’s heard his account firsthand. We do not know his name. They say he sailed for South America.”

  HOW I WALKED back to my buggy, I do not know. Mrs. Maynard was beside me. I put my hand on the dashboard, ready to spring up, then stopped and said to Mrs. Maynard, “I cannot go back without something more definitive. I must go see Captain Peleg.”

  Mrs. Maynard kindly went with me, hurrying to keep up. We were not surprised, when we went in that owner’s parlor, to see huddled there with him—all three in deepest black—Captain Bildad and his sister, Aunt Charity.

  “I could not bring myself to tell thee,” Aunt Charity said. “Forgive my passing you in silence.”

  “Is the Pequod lost then?”

  Captain Bildad slowly rose from his chair, the patriarch of the group. “The Pequod has gone down, Captain Ahab gone, Starbuck gone. Stubb, Flask, every Nantucketeer, every Vineyardman, every man, gone.”

  “Save one?” Mrs. Maynard amended.

  “Save one—a fellow of former marchant experience.”

  “Quohog by name,” said Captain Peleg.

  “Nay, that name was the infidel harpooner.” Bildad shook his head quietly, but produced no further name.

  I stood listening, incredulous. “Are you sure, Captains? Are ye sure of it? I have my son to tell, and Mary Starbuck and her son.” My eyes were burning dry, but every internal organ gushed tears.

  Captain Bildad walked slowly to me, and slowly he put his arms about my shoulders. “Shall I come with ye, to help ye tell it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  I AM SURE that as soon as Mary saw me drive up with the black-clad, somber Bildad at my side she knew.

  He called the boys to him and, with a hand on each of their shoulders, told them their fathers were lost. Then he quickly said a prayer. “Come to me, lads, if ever ye need,” he added, departing. “Perhaps there’s a bit I could do to help ye, if it comes to that, ever. And ye’ll have my prayers. Till the crack of doom.”

  The boys fell into each other’s arms, and over them, Mary and I leaned inward, making a tent.

  MY SADNESS at this final, stunning word was more for the other three than for myself. I but gave up false hope, hope I had harbored for only an hour, above the Union Pacific Bank, talking with my friend. Before that, I had known for some time that Ahab was dead. I had accustomed myself to that knowledge.

  I tried not to imagine the awful final moments of Ahab’s life. I did not care to know the name of the survivor, or to milk the captains for any details of frenzy, or blood, or suffering, they may have heard. I had known none of that, nor needed to know of that violence, when my grieving had begun.

  I think things went the hardest for Starbuck’s Jim. Justice had made an intuitive connection with my own resignation and with the spiritual life that was becoming not only my solace but my definition. But Jim, though a steady, sympathetic lad, had not listened to the intuitive messages that had informed the rest of us. Some Quaker elders came out to talk with Mary and Jim, and their conviction gave the boy a sort of tortured comfort. He felt that his father was in a better place, but he could scarcely bear the loss of him.

  The Unitarian minister and several members of that congregation—a party of three buggies with perhaps twelve people—soon called on us. Two of them were Isaac the gaoler and his wife, Betsy. They did not bring their children, but she was pregnant again. As always, the sight of them was a bright thing for me. We had little to say to one another, but I was glad that they had come and I told them so.

  I invited Mary and Jim to meet our church friends, as she had invited Justice and me to meet hers. Even the members of this group of people who only slightly knew Mary could scarcely keep their eyes from her. I saw then that she was a bit above the average in height and that this lifted her gleaming head more into the light. She and Isaac and Betsy, who was also fair, looked like three angels, Mary in our midst and those two together at the periphery. Mary Starbuck’s hair, I irrelevantly noted, was more silvery and metallic in quality than the softer, golden curls of Betsy. I do not know why these visual matters preoccupied my mind. Somehow beauty was more consoling than conversation.

  CHAPTER 132: The Perseid

  THAT DAY we learned of Ahab’s death, my minister asked on behalf of the Mitchells if they should postpone their coming. The meteor phenomena would have an impressive decrescendo for a full two weeks, but Mary and I decided that the Mitchells should come as scheduled at the peak of the shower. It would help the boys to have company, and there would be much distracting talk of unimaginable numbers.

  The tone of our scientific party was subdued, of course, and we all felt sensitive and careful about our human fragility. Twice, I saw dear Jim run off over a sand dune (we had our watching station on blankets on the beach) for a cry—both times shortly followed by a compassionate Justice, and then by two or three of the cheerful Mitchell boys.

  Having retold the story of Perseus, for whom the meteor shower was named, Mr. Mitchell suddenly mentioned Chartres Cathedral. He said that at the center of the penitents’ labyrinth, inlaid on the floor of the cathedral, was a mosaic of the head of Perseus, who had slain the Minotaur of the labyrinth at Crete. I wondered if Mr. Mitchell had confused Perseus with Theseus, but I said it was odd to have a pagan figure as th
e endpoint for devout Christians, traveling on their knees. More strange—I did not speak of it—to have an image of Chartres, originally in my mind through Ahab’s words, embellished by Mr. Mitchell.

  “Perhaps those medieval Christians were less narrow than we think,” Mr. Mitchell offered. “Perhaps the cathedral designers knew the old myths also carried light for humans.”

  “I sometimes thought of Ahab as a Prometheus.” Yes, I could speak of him. “Did you know that as a young man, he went to Chartres?”

  “Ahab was a visionary,” Mr. Mitchell said. “He fought metaphysical battles in a physical world.” He added, with feeling, “I thought you were a lovely pair of birds.”

  OUR LITTLE TRIBE spent that night on the beach. We counted—forty, sixty, eighty—meteorites and watched them slash the sky. Mr. Mitchell pointed out that they all emanated from a central station in the dark. He said they were the residue of a burst comet.

  As I tried to sleep, the ceaseless crisscrossing of the waves made a lattice of sound in my mind. I hid beneath that sound. Before sleep took me, I turned on my stomach and wept into the sand for my Theseus, slain by the beast, because he could not find his way out of the labyrinth of revenge. I thought that the name of the needed thread was forgiveness.

  I wished that my beloved could have heeded the words of my father, reciting: “Love your enemies as yourself, bless those that curse you, and forgive those who trespass against you.”

  Before dawn, I was called from sleep by Justice. Without rising, I held out my arm to him, and he lay beside me with his head on my shoulder. I held him close against my body, and the prince-of-a-dog, Pog, came and lay close to him on the other side. Never have I felt such gratitude to a beast.

  I myself needed to love a beast—never so desperately as that night when the stars skated over a black night. A beast had stolen my beloved.