Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  As soon as David left, I went to Robben’s studio to talk about the sculpture. Robben said that his little wooden piece of a small American person named David Poland was in some ways a response to the grandeur of the standing, marble figure of Michelangelo’s David. He said that the idea that he was claiming his own territory and that he had a right to his own vision had come to him as he worked, not from the outset. “But doing the piece has changed me, Una,” he added. “And changed what I want to do.”

  With my heart thudding like a mallet against my breastbone, I told Robben I had taken up writing, at Frannie’s encouragement on the apple-pie day. “I have sailed between Scylla and Charybdis, right at the first,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The two hardest things in my life have been the deaths of my first baby and of my mother.” Suddenly I was overwhelmed with grief. I covered my face with my hands, peeked through my fingers, and blurted, “Robben, in all the universe, there is nothing so dead as a dead baby!” I erupted in sobs. Through my spasm, I heard my friend crooning, “Una, Una.” Eventually I calmed myself and continued, “I wrote about them first. I was afraid that if I saw them looming in the distance of my narrative my courage to move forward would fail me.”

  “The death of the second Liberty,” he observed gently, “would not be much easier to tell. Or Ahab’s.” When I made no reply, he continued, “Every week I will cook you a pie—tasty as Frannie’s—to remind you of your commitment.” He winked at me and added that he was an excellent baker.

  He was indeed, and his creations over the following weeks were not only delicious, but very pleasing to the eye. There was an intensity about Robben’s mind, a keenness—though it was tuned to an artistic rather than a scientific pitch—that reminded me of Giles, and, of course, the baking reminded me of Kit. I have already said that in his understanding not only of my moods but also of who I was, he resembled Ahab. In short, I found much of what I had loved in other men in him. While I developed for him the most ardent friendship, I experienced none of the physical excitement that had drawn me to both Kit and Ahab. Still I began to feel a physical restlessness.

  One lonely night—Justice was away at the Mitchells’—I went up on the rooftop, looking for solace in the stars. I wanted to feel again that I was a part of some large entity. Under Maria’s tutelage, I could easily map the sky now, but I only wanted the glitter. With my hand on the rough chimney, I dwelt among stars, and my heart became quiet and happy. It was no philosophical idea that brought peace. With the stars, as had occurred that first night on the roof walk of my new home at ’Sconset, all of my inward activity grew still. I resolved into Being. No longer Una, I was one with all that was.

  Then, strangely in the air, I heard singing. I knew that voice. It was Mary Starbuck. She sang the old Shaker hymn “ ’Tis a gift to be simple; ’tis a gift to be free.” And I knew that she was standing at the top of the Sankaty Light, singing. Her singing floated like filaments through the universe.

  Out at sea, I saw the fire from a whaler, her two try-pots joined in the distance to make a blazing red spot.

  CHAPTER 146: A Squeeze of the Hand

  EVERY DAY, I knocked on Robben’s door, or he on mine. I felt a happiness at our being merely in the same room that transcended any specific language. Strange it was that as I used language, as I shaped it into re-creations of people and places, I also felt its inadequacy. It could serve to describe the past; it could not capture what I presently felt.

  Sometimes I wrote in the woodworking studio while Robben chiseled. I liked the sound of his tool moving into the wood, the thunk of the mallet. When he sharpened the chisels, even the grindstone on the metal pleased me. “It zizzles,” I told him. “Sizzles?” “No, zizzles my nerves.”

  He was carving a bust of Frederick Douglass, working in a deep ebony, which he said was a very hard wood, and it was quite beautiful. I asked him why he had made it slightly larger than life. “Because Frederick Douglass is slightly larger than life,” he answered. And I felt deep satisfaction in his answer.

  “And why did you make David’s statue smaller than he is?”

  “I was a relative beginner then. But still it was right. To show that it didn’t matter.”

  One day when I was wandering the beach, looking at the clouds, I wished that Robben could chisel a bust of Ahab. But of course he had never seen him. Perhaps it was for me to embody Ahab—in words. I looked at the clouds and saw Ahab’s visage there. I was surprised when I went inside that Robben promptly asked me if I would like him to make a bust of Justice. Of course I said yes.

  So I would have a version of my Ahab, for Justice resembled him, but restored and idealized. And I smiled, for in the Justice bust I would also have the bust of myself, which long ago I had wished that Robben would want to make.

  “The boy’s curls are like yours,” Robben said.

  “His face is much like his father’s.”

  “I love doing the hair of Frederick Douglass,” he said. The cross-hatch marks did make the wooden hair look crinkled, like Douglass’s. “My own hair feels as I would imagine Douglass’s to feel.” He put his left hand into his hair. “I’ve always thought I was partly black.” He continued to chisel away. So matter-of-fact! An idea that would certainly scandalize most! My body flared.

  I put down my pen, walked to him, and held out my hand. “Robben,” I said, and smiled.

  He stopped still, his mallet poised above the head of the chisel. Many expressions passed over his face. I saw alarm. I saw a flicker of sadness, for me. I saw a warm affection. Slowly he put down the tool. Slowly he held out his hand to me. I took it.

  He waited a moment, then said, “Tell me, Una, truly. How does my hand feel to you? Now?”

  “It’s cold,” I said. “It’s a bit moist.” I laughed, for the description did not sound complimentary. The flare of romance was already settling back into friendship.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s very dear to me,” I said quickly.

  He squeezed my hand. His remained strangely cold and lifeless. “There is nothing I admire more about you than your honesty,” he said.

  What was this warmth in his face—warmth without passion? He looked more heated when he sculpted the wooden breasts of masthead figures. What was this kindness in his expression? Ah, behind it—so like Giles!—a plea for understanding.

  “What is it?” I asked. “We are friends,” I added. “Tell me what is in your heart.”

  “Be my friend forever,” he said fervently.

  “I will.”

  “There is only one hand for me. Another friend has come to me. I never expected it.”

  “A soul mate?” I asked.

  “When I squeeze that hand, and the squeeze is returned, then my hand is warm. Then my hand is home.”

  He squeezed my hand again, and again I felt the cold dampness of his.

  “Whose hand?” I asked.

  “You can guess, Una. Guess.”

  I found myself smiling.

  “My two best neighbors,” I said. “The woodcarver and the judge.”

  But I went home soon, strangely shaken.

  CHAPTER 147: Una Preaches to the Waves

  WHAT AN EMPTINESS in the house! Justice away. I glanced at the hedge. Be my friend forever, he had said, and meant it. Yes. But what was I to do with that flare of feeling that comes when a woman loves a man because they are woman and man?

  Robben and the judge. I knew of such practices, of course. I knew of my husband Kit with Giles, our friend. When I was a cabin boy, I knew that sailors, in the absence of women, sometimes bodily loved one another.

  I left the house and walked down to the beach.

  The waves reared and curled and then came crawling to me. How much I admired the deep C in that curl, like a little cave! And the mobile glassiness of the green water. And what was that on the horizon but a whaling ship? No more, no more did Mary or I keep watch for particular ships. I wished it were night and Ma
ry might sing to me.

  The water hunched and poured itself. Poured and poured, my ears greedy for the sound.

  Do some preachers preach to warm their own hearts? Did Saint Francis preach to the animals of the forest to justify his own speaking? No. For he loved the animals, even as I loved the waves.

  Ah, Waves, what do you know of eternity? As much as any force on earth? Down the eons you have poured your cups, twisted up your water-spouts, heaved your great flanks. You have sobbed and sighed, sparkled and laughed, alternately slammed flat our puny structures and caressed and cradled us in your sweet rocking.

  What do you have to teach us? Your capacity to vary, your ability to endure? Your ceaseless energy. The force of you comes ashore and dies there. Yet comes another. Froth, foam, bubbles, nothing.

  How, O destructive Element, can I abide the days of your coming in, coming in, coming in? Because you are no single thing. You console with your eternal arch and spew, even though you smite us. You provide the bounty of your myriad fishes, whales, eels, clams, shrimp. But above that you offer us your beauty. You are energy made beautiful, and what are we ourselves but energy? We live by our inner tides and cycles. Our blood is salt, even as you are. We, like you, must always heave and move; may sometimes sparkle, may luxuriate in ourselves. Waves, you are a pattern that fills all the available space. Like stars.

  Ah, Waves, you tell me what I am and what I may yet be.

  CHAPTER 148: The Great Fire: June 1846

  WHEN I RETURNED from my meditations, I found upon my table a steaming apple pie. I looked out the window and saw that the judge’s tall horse was hitched to the lovely carved horsehead on its post. Robben had told me that he had created the head after having seen an etching of the four horses over the portals of St. Mark’s Church in Venice.

  I sat down, cut the pie, and enjoyed one piece after another till the pie was half gone. It offered a satisfaction. I made myself a cup of tea and looked about me.

  This was my home. I paced into my own room, which was the part of the house I loved most. Out its windows, I clearly saw the hedge, and the Gothic opening carved in it. No closing gate at all. An entry, ever available to me; a garden of whimsy and color for me to enjoy, and adjacent to the garden, also open to me, the workshop of an artist.

  I accepted my small world, on the outermost rim of Nantucket.

  But what was that whiff of scorch? Not the pie. I’d eaten half, and it was without flaw or blemish. I sniffed about and found the odor everywhere. In the air!

  With that realization, I went out to the road to look toward town. There it was, unmistakable, a smudge of smoke in the air. It was not try-pots. Unless you line up a few hundred try-pots. Even so, this was a fire for far too great a rending.

  I hurried over to Robben’s.

  “The town! Is it burning?” I asked them.

  The judge stood up as though making an official pronouncement. He leaned forward to extend his arms and long fingers so that the tips rested just on the tabletop. I thought of an illustration of a mangrove jungle tree reaching down its roots.

  “The fire started last night about eleven o’clock at William Geary’s hat store. Everyone said that a good jet of water could have quenched it, at that point.” He straightened up and clasped his hands behind his back. (I heard the skin of his two hands rasp together.) “Two of the private fire companies answered the call—I have long said we should have a public fire company—and they commenced to quarrel. Quarreled about who should have the honor of extinguishing the blaze. They argued till it was beyond either of their controlling, or both put together, or them plus every other bucket, hose, and cistern in the town.”

  “Is much lost?”

  The judge smiled ruefully. “Property, not lives.”

  I thought of the fire Ahab and I had watched from the Unitarian Church.

  “My church?”

  “Safe. And Maria Mitchell saved the Methodist Church. They were blasting the buildings. It was next, but she made an observation about the convection currents at the head of Main Street and refused to move from the steps.”

  How heroical my picture of her there, armed with Science.

  “But her observatory next door was destroyed.” He added, “They’ll rebuild.”

  “Our homes?”

  Robben interjected, “I thought this was your home, Una.”

  The judge dropped his head. “You have to be told. Both destroyed.”

  I gasped.

  Surprise gaped at my feet. An abyss of surprise. But I felt no dismay. I did not fall.

  Still, they waited for me to recover before speaking.

  I paced the room. Then stopped to hear what was next.

  “I have been persuading the judge; he must move here,” Robben said.

  They both looked hard at me. Robben has told him, I thought, that I know something of their liaison.

  “The warehouses on the waterfront burned, loaded with whale oil,” the judge began, recounting again the conflagration, watching me carefully. “The fire was so hot there, not even cinders remained this morning. When the casks burst, the oil poured onto the water, too, and the harbor was a cauldron of flame. Sodom and Gomorrah, people said. What think you, Una, of Sodom and Gomorrah?”

  “I am glad you have left that place,” I said. “Here”—I waved at Robben’s flower garden, and the green whale swimming in its midst—“is the very place to make a second Eden. At least, I’ve found it so.”

  CHAPTER 149: Reflections on a Wreck

  OF COURSE, the judge lost all of his beautiful furniture and china in the fire, as well as his home. The contents of my home were also destroyed, but most of all I hated to think of the little cupola sinking down into flames. In the high cupola Justice and I had created a comfortable localness of feeling. Now my son was so well situated at ’Sconset he scarcely blinked when I told him that the house, much of the commercial district, and even the wharf had burned. “I’m glad we live here, aren’t you?” was his pragmatic comment.

  I did not burden him with the financial loss, which was great, for the judge had failed to renew the fire insurance on both his place and mine. Likewise, William Mitchell had failed to renew the insurance on the Atheneum. I couldn’t think of two living men whom I trusted more; they, like the rest of us, were only human and prone to error.

  Fortunately for me, everything at ’Sconset was completely paid for. I had even paid the taxes for the next twenty years. And the Husseys’ Try Pots Tavern did not burn. It did a booming business, and every month I received a benefit from my original investment. Thus, we had spending money for new expenses, and I had no need to skimp. While the pillow of excessive means was gone, still my head rested comfortably enough at night. As for Ahab’s other assets, I determined not to touch them so that Justice, when grown, might receive his inheritance intact.

  The judge did move in with Robben (whose masthead figures sold well in New Bedford and Sag Harbor on Long Island—Nantucket building fewer ships than in the 1830s). Despite the additional financial loss, Austin Lord gave up his judgeship and, quoting Voltaire (“Cultivate your garden”), proposed that he tend a vegetable garden to be located in my back lawn. It would go a long way toward feeding us all, he felt. From life in Kentucky, I knew a great deal about raising vegetables—a beautiful golden squash blossom came to mind, morning-open, golden and five-pointed as a star. I promised to instruct him the next spring, and as the summer waned, the two men taught me to swim in the warmed waters of the Atlantic. The judge also offered to tutor the boys, which benefited me as well as them. Often I sat in on their lessons.

  I wrote letters to Margaret Fuller and to Frannie and to David, but he had fallen completely silent. I imagined David in his gnomish home in Virginia; I pictured him rolled up in a white quilt I had given him—why had I given him a quilt in bridal white?—rolled up like an insect in a chrysalis. In a chrysalis, I knew, an insect could melt its organs into a primordial gel and totally reconstitute into something new. Someth
ing beloved for its beauty and grace.

  Would that I could!

  Sometimes I looked at the small wood statue of David in the chair at my hearth and thought of his words that the sculpture would remind me of him, should he never see me again. Yet he was so resourceful and plucky, so capable of change, that I did not worry much about him. And the carving was beautiful and I never tired of its company. Occasionally I rubbed it with oil to keep the wood from drying and splitting.

  To appease my restless spirit, I proposed that I go to sea with the boys, but for a practical purpose. It was my idea that we commence serious fishing from a small boat. Though Jim and Justice were accomplished sailors, everyone agreed that I was the best fisherman among them. No wonder! Not only had I been a-whaling, but Uncle Torch and I had done just such fishing from a small boat. I wrote Uncle Torch about the fish we caught, and he replied with accounts of vast lake fish; Aunt Agatha and I exchanged our thoughts and fears on those issues which so much concerned Frannie and Frederick Douglass. Agatha’s own emphasis was more on the voteless status of women than on slavery. We were all progressive in our thinking, and our particular emphases overlapped. For myself, pacifism seemed the most fundamental, if not the most immediate, issue.

  Sometimes at night after a day on the water, I thought of the wonderful day when Ahab and I had taken a small boat, spied the old Lighthouse in the distance, but not approached it closer; instead, we had loved each other in splendid isolation on the sea. I thought of this not to torture myself but to celebrate the joy we had had together.

  Austin Lord insisted on building all by himself a small smokehouse for the fish. He said such a structure could be very crude—just right for his building skills. Justice told me he imagined the judge’s crooked and dark smokehouse was where nightmares lived in the day. I looked at my son sharply, afraid he might suffer from hideous dreams. He understood my glance, shrugged, and said, “Mother dear, it was just an idea. I thought you’d like it.” And I did.