Again, I felt as though I had been jolted. I stopped my cooking preparations and sat down at the table.
“Frannie, what an idea,” I said.
“Don’t you love reading? How is that so different from writing?”
I said nothing, but my mind seemed to hold the night sky streaming with fast-moving constellations. I was dizzy with it.
“Go now,” she said. “Right now. Take your quill and paper, sit on the sand, and write.”
“I believe I could.” I felt stunned, mesmerized.
I did exactly as she told me to do.
WHEN I SAT upon the beach, I wondered where I should begin. I had thought before of Sir Philip Sidney’s muse’s injunction: Look in your heart and write. But I could only look at the sand and the waves and the bright sky. Finally I picked up one grain of sand, and I wrote the little description of putting it in my mouth that I have included near the beginning of this long narrative that you now read.
That was all I could do that day. I stayed there on the sand, on that mild, blue day, a long time. Perhaps, I thought, I have made this solitude and peace for myself so that I can write. Is such a prerequisite to writing? Surely not for all, but perhaps yes, for me.
While my quill was poised in the air, not writing, I formed my first principle as a storyteller. I will not be governed by time. Time does not march; it swirls and leaps. Time is a dancer, not a soldier. And the second: adherence to fact is slavery. Think how Shakespeare distorted, compressed, rearranged historical events in his history plays. Such license would be mine, if I wrote. When I pieced a quilt, I did not place the pieces in chronological order, the oldest in the upper-left-hand corner! A pleasing design, color, beauty—could those be my business?
Spangled, spangled—as I looked at the sun on the water, that is what I thought, and it seemed a good word to me, a chosen and accurate word, such as fiction might admit. And I thought of other words that I had loved for their truth and beauty.
BY THE TIME I had climbed the steps to the edge of my yard, the odor of cinnamon and cooked apples, the fragrance of piecrust, reached my nostrils. I hurried. Seeing the pies on the table, I exclaimed, “Ah!” and then laughed, for all around the table, some sitting, some standing, were Austin Lord and Robben, Mary and Isaac, assorted children, and Frannie with the knife in her hand, ready to cut.
CHAPTER 142: Liberty and the Dolphins
THAT DAY, as he ate Frannie’s pie, Isaac’s heart was strangely warmed. Frannie did leave ’Sconset to work in Nantucket town as the judge’s housekeeper (and to attend to what she had identified that remarkable night as her life’s work), and her residence in the town made it possible for Isaac to see her often. Their religious and political views were compatible, both being Unitarians and abolitionists, and Frannie loved his four golden children.
Because of Frannie’s distaste for his work as gaoler, Isaac did apply for and eventually secure the job at Sankaty Light, and then he begged Frannie to marry him and to live at the lighthouse with him and his family. She accepted the second idea—to live at the lighthouse with him—but not the first. I would have predicted it would be the other way around, because she was truly devoted to the abolitionist cause, which centered in the town. Perhaps I had spoken to Frannie too convincingly of the bondage I had felt to Kit, once I was married to him.
“Would you marry again?” she asked me.
“Whom?” I replied, startled.
She only smiled.
Frannie wrote to her mother about the arrangement with Isaac she wished to make—to live with him at Sankaty but not to marry—and Aunt Agatha replied that though her own marriage had been exceptionally happy, of course the marriage of her sister (my mother) had been troubled, and that Frannie should make her own decision about the institutions of chastity and marriage. It touched me that Frannie wished so much to spare her mother any pang or anxiety that she would consult her on such a delicate question before she herself took action. (Frannie’s frank consultation gave me a pang of old guilt.)
The matter of the distance between Sankaty Light and the Unitarian-abolitionists on Orange Street Frannie addressed by asking me to buy her a fast horse, which I did. Soon (after a number of falls into the sand of the beach) Frannie rode pell-mell, astride, past the cranberry bogs and scrubby heath, down the road to town, whenever she had abolition work to do. Frannie made no pretense at marriage, even when she became pregnant. Though Mrs. Maynard had a fit of protest and both Mary and I cautioned Frannie not to ride, pregnant, at such breakneck speed, she ignored us. Her child was a healthy girl, and Frannie named her Liberty, in memory of my own lost child.
ONE SPRING DAY, about a year after Frannie’s baby was born, Justice and I were picnicking on the beach when suddenly we saw dolphins leaping out of the ocean not far offshore. One, two, three, four, five gray bodies arced into the air. They challenged each other, leaping higher and higher, and then disappeared altogether when Frannie and the five golden children came through the sea grass toward the beach.
Frannie was sitting astride the horse, the baby at her bosom, with the two smaller Isaac Starbuck offspring riding fore and aft. The two older stepchildren led the horse. They were such bonny children and the horse was so willing and nice that I thought I hardly ever had seen such a surprising and pretty sight. None of the children wore hats and their golden hair sparkled in the sunlight. Baby Liberty’s hair was a different hue from that of the other children, having something of Viking red mixed with the gold, the inheritance from her red-haired grandfather. For all of the pleasure and happiness radiating from Frannie I could not help but notice how rough her visage was amidst all of the petal-smooth children.
I went to take the baby so that Frannie could dismount, and Justice held the horse’s head. “Look out to sea,” Justice told the children. “The dolphins are breaching.”
“We saw you through the spyglass,” Frannie said. “We decided to intrude.”
“Welcome intrusion,” I said.
Frannie said, “I am pure joy today.”
At that moment Liberty began to whimper.
“Give her back to me,” Frannie said. “She’s not quite finished her lunch. Untie the basket. I’ve brought goodies for all of us.”
She seated herself on our blanket and nursed her beautiful baby. For us, she brought slices of Kentucky jam cake. “Your receipt, Una,” she said. When I tasted the cake, it tasted exactly like mine. I thought of our mothers’ shared plum jam, and vinegar eggs, and other receipts. Our connection continued theirs, and with baby Liberty at her breast, I felt that love could spiral down the decades. My heart was heavy with longing when I thought of having another child myself.
My son had taken to the baby almost as much as I. When she’d finished her lunch, under a discreet fold of Frannie’s blouse, Justice asked to hold her. He tucked her up against his chest just the way Frannie had held her, as though he, too, would nurse the baby.
Looking into her eyes, Justice said, “She loves her brother, doesn’t she? Yes, she does,” laying claim to his cousin with the logic of his heart.
But soon baby Liberty wanted her liberty and toddled off to join her half siblings on the beach. I was surprised that Justice was content to stay with Frannie and me, but he watched the baby with an unself-conscious smile. “She’s partway between being a baby and being a real child,” he pronounced.
When she plopped down on the border of wet sand, Justice saw immediately that an incoming wave, though small, would be enough to topple her, and he ran to lift her up before I could shout to the other children.
He raised her up to sit on his shoulder, while the ocean ran around his ankles. She waved one hand gleefully, pleased with her perspective atop the boy-tower. Their two heads conspired in contrast—black and gold.
Just then, a slick gray body arced into the air far out to sea, like a gray crescent moon. We watched as three other dolphins, close in, breached and continued to cavort. How heavily they slapped back into the water. From her
shoulder seat, Liberty smacked her little palms together in response to the dolphins.
ONLY WEEKS LATER, the child had toddled into the sea, despite the watchful eye of her mother and her four half sisters and brothers, and drowned.
The oldest Isaac Starbuck child came riding on the fast horse, and Mary and I went in the buggy as rapidly as we could. We feared that Frannie would throw herself from the cliff, so Mary and I took her from Sankaty to stay with us at ’Sconset. We were completely vigilant, taking turns watching her door all night. Only Justice was admitted to the room. When I looked in, he sat beside Frannie’s bed holding her hand. His face was like a weeping wall. His swollen lips contorted silently. None of us could have been the least prepared, and my heart was wrung for Liberty and for Frannie and wrung again for my boy’s anguish. Justice had to bear what I would have borne, so many years ago at the Island Lighthouse, had Frannie died of the smallpox.
Frannie refused to see Isaac or any of her stepchildren, which I thought was unfair and unfortunate, but Frannie’s extreme state of mind was not to be argued with. She screamed at the mention of Isaac’s name. I was about to write to her mother to come when Frannie became calmer and announced she would move back into town. She said she could never bear again to live at the lighthouse, or with Isaac and his children. Since she and Isaac were not legally married, the decision was available for Frannie. Still struggling with grief, my heart went out to Isaac and the injustice dealt him. For a time, one of his sisters came to help him.
In town, Frannie kept house again for the judge, until she exchanged letters with the antislavery league that resulted in her attaching herself to travel with Frederick Douglass’s party.
My cousin and I have the indissoluble link of shared childhood between us, and we keep up a regular correspondence. She is always alert for any news of Susan, and I am grateful to her for that as well as for a thousand other kindnesses. But never again has there been the bliss of connection between Frannie and me that I felt the day we watched the dolphins. Of the many interesting observations Frannie has written to me is this one, of Frederick Douglass: “He does not look at my skin, my face, and think ‘disfigured,’ any more than I look at him and think ‘black.’ No I think ‘Great Soul’ and ‘True Warrior’ when I listen to him address the crowds.”
Each in our own way, we sought relief from our loss. I took Justice up on the roof walk, where I did find for myself consolation and connection. But Justice merely gazed across the darkness to the lonely Sankaty Light.
Gradually, over months, his grief lessened, and he and Jim spoke enthusiastically, to my dismay, of going to sea someday soon.
CHAPTER 143: A Suitable Marriage
AFTER THE PUBLICATION of his book The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Frannie helped the Quakers raise money in America to purchase Douglass’s freedom. She also worked on his newspaper The North Star, in which he wrote: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color…” Frannie attended the first women’s rights convention in the United States, with Aunt Agatha, in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, where Douglass demanded that women be given the right to vote.
SOME SIX MONTHS after Frannie left the Sankaty Light—to take up his history—Isaac began to call again upon Mary Starbuck. Neither she nor I had any doubt that he was courting her. Mary had always had a shining serenity to her countenance, but now she began to shine with life renewed. When the proposal came, she accepted.
They were married in the Unitarian Church, to which Mary transferred her church membership, and I thought there was no emblem more appropriate than its golden dome, presiding over the beginning of their life together.
With the height of the lighthouse, her new home, Mary fell in love as much as I had done at age fourteen with my Lighthouse tower. She loved, too, the service to the light, and the fidelity that it required. She had had no desire to stay in the home that she had shared with the first Mr. Starbuck. The cottage was a house, I told Mary, with its low stone wall, that seemed married to the land. I told her that a lighthouse is married to the air.
I was truly happy for both Isaac and Mary (she had not even to change her last name, since it was already Starbuck), but now I felt much more alone, since my neighbor to the south was gone, and her house stood empty. Increasingly, Justice and I turned to our neighbor to the north, Robben Avalon, for company.
CHAPTER 144: What Has Proved to Be a Last Visit
JUDGE LORD rode out to visit with Justice and me, and with Robben, every three or four days. He took over the horse I had bought for Frannie, saying that if she could learn to ride, he could. But he was really too big for her “lady’s” horse, and I persuaded him to write to David Poland to purchase him a Tennessee walking horse and to bring it up from the South.
David not only brought the horse to Nantucket on the ferry but also rode the animal out to ’Sconset himself. As we watched his approach, David seemed as small as a monkey atop the tall animal. I noticed David’s teeth shining in his beard in a big bow of a smile, whether with pleasure at seeing us again or in self-conscious amusement at how he looked aboard a Tennessee walking horse, I could not tell. The animal’s running walk was a marvel to see coming down the road.
Judge Lord hurried to meet them and actually held up his arms to David, as though he were a child, to help him dismount, so high up he sat, at fully sixteen hands. And David jumped into the judge’s hands without embarrassment. I saw, in general, that David was much more easy with all aspects of himself and his life than he had ever been before.
“It’s the furniture,” he explained to me one night by my hearth. “That and my house. I have a world I’m normal in.”
“I have a roof walk,” I replied.
He smiled and nodded, knowing my explanation would come later.
David would take no pay from the judge for his trouble of delivering the horse, though I urged him to do so; he insisted that the miniature furniture had already paid him enough. His sister had, indeed, remarried, he said, and he had built himself a small place of his own. It was literally small—everything to his scale. I liked to imagine how someone lost in the Virginia woods might feel that he had stumbled into fairyland when he came to David’s little house and how when bearded David himself emerged such a person might turn tail and run. David stayed at my house in the upstairs bedroom across from Justice.
It comforted me to have David in the house. I liked to see him and Justice standing together, one a bearded, short man, the other a curly-headed, beanstalk boy, talking to each other with the respect of equals. So we all are—equals—I mused, and what does stature, or skin color, or age have to do with it?
To my surprise, after their gruff beginning at the Frederick Douglass Atheneum speech, Robben and David now got along very well. Robben requested David to serve as a model for him, and David said Robben might do the sculpture, if he would do it at my house instead of in his studio.
Robben agreed, and so we all got to see the image of David emerge from a short cypress stump. Day by day we watched Robben chisel and carve a remarkable sculpture, about half David’s real size. He was seated in a chair with a high back. Not on David’s head, but in an incision in the chair back, Robben carved a suggestion of a crown. David’s short arms and legs were represented accurately and proportionately, but they were scarcely to be noticed. It was the face, the expressiveness of the large eyes, that drew the viewer. It made my heart sing. With this piece, Robben passed into creating or suggesting emotion and intellect of an individualized nature in his figures. And yet, there was something unmistakably idealized or romanticized about the figure that rendered it not false but more true to the vision of the carver.
“You like it, Una,” Robben said, “because I am absent from the figure. This sort of work requires the artist to give himself to his subject. It’s a Keatsian aesthetic—a negative capability.”
But I thought there was a union of subject and artist in the carving.
David spent long hou
rs happily contemplating his smaller artistic self. Near the end of David’s visit, we spread a blanket for a celebratory picnic at the edge of the grass. The guest of honor was the statue of David, seated permanently in his chair, a centerpiece for the bread and meat, while we all lolled about on the blanket. We were all there—Mary and Isaac, all the children, the judge, and Maria Mitchell and her father.
At the picnic, Robben asked David what we should do with the sculpture.
“I’d like you to make me a drawing of it,” he said. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Robben answered. “A quick sketch would be best.” And he asked Justice to run into his house for pencil and paper.
“After that, I’ll have the drawing,” David said. “I’d like to give the sculpture to Una and let her keep it close to her hearth, as a decoration.”
I was surprised. But moved and pleased. “Our first conversations were by the hearth,” I said. “In Kentucky, when you came to my cabin the second time. That was a rocking chair, though.”
“That makes no difference,” David said firmly.
And of course he was right. Again I thought, that night as I lay in bed, of how David surprised me in his ability to evolve.
WE INSTALLED the icon at the hearth—David was very satisfied with it—and he said he planned to leave Nantucket soon. “Now if I never see you again,” he said to me, “you will have a way to remember me and think of me.”
CHAPTER 145: A Song
HIS WORDS haunted me. I did not believe that I would not see him again—why shouldn’t he come to Nantucket again, having done so twice?—and yet David’s words had the resonance of truth. I felt more pain at parting from him than I ever had before.