Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

  “That is not possible.”

  His gaze unfocusing, the storyteller seemed haunted.

  “I was the one left, the one picked up by the Rachel, the one buoyed up by the coffin.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll proffer you a name. Ishmael.”

  CHAPTER 151: Celestial

  AT THAT MOMENT, Maria Mitchell squeezed my elbow. “Una, Una!” she said urgently. “I must speak to you.”

  Never had I seen her so excited. In her excitement, she did not notice that I had received a shock.

  “I have seen it,” she said. “Through the telescope. I think that I am the first person in the history of the universe to have done so.”

  “Seen what, Maria?”

  “I have discovered a comet telescopically. My endeavor—all these years!”

  Now I clutched her in return. “Maria!” It was all I could say at first. Not triumph, but fulfillment irradiated her features. “Are you sure?”

  “I am as sure as I can be. I’m going to ask my father to look. Would you come, too?”

  And so the three of us ascended to the rooftop. For sixteen years now, the king of Denmark’s gold medal prize had been offered to him who found a comet telescopically. As we emerged onto the rooftop observatory, my senses thrilled at the dark open air, the vast sky in contrast to the closed, bright room below, crowded with humans and the voice of the handsome sailor.

  Without a word, Maria looked through her large mounted instrument. It was as long as a broom. Then she turned to her father. With his eye to the telescope, he studied the night sky carefully, consulted charts, looked again.

  “It is an unrecorded comet,” he said. “But we should check again tomorrow and perhaps for a few more days before we announce it.”

  “Yes, of course,” Maria said. But I had never heard her speak with such fervor. I wanted to run downstairs and herald it to the party.

  They had me look through the telescope, and I, too, saw the small dot of light with a hint of a stubby tail, that traveler who swam into our ken from some immense distance. To think that I, no scientist, but only a friend, might be the third person since time began to behold it. “I feel like Noah seeing the white dove,” I said. “What strange joy it brings.”

  My joy was twofold. What I beheld humbled and awed me. At least as important: the victory of my beloved friend; she had watched and waited and won. I softly asked, “Will you proffer it a name?”

  All night I stayed with Maria, and we watched till the pink light of dawn obliterated the comet, and the pleasure party below was long since over.

  CHAPTER 152: A New Friend

  WHEN I ARRIVED the next morning, red-eyed and sleepless, at the home of my old friend Mrs. Maynard, she said, “They told me you were to be on the platform with Maria Mitchell till dawn, so I wasn’t worried. But mercy! you look a fright!”

  With that she put me to bed and promised to stand guard like a dragon. Nonetheless, when in the late afternoon two callers appeared, she woke me up. “I won’t have done it,” she said, “but one of them is Phoebe Folger, and who knows when she’s going to suddenly die.”

  Phoebe’s hearing was keen, and she promptly said, from the next room, “I have too much to do to die, my dear.” And she and Maria, who had been enlisted as a kind of backup, were upon me.

  In a manner clearly preliminary, Maria asked, “The house next door to you is still for let, isn’t it?”

  The intrepid Phoebe Folger took over: “I have in mind to take all the Mitchell children there and Mrs. Mitchell for a seaside holiday before the weather turns.” She spoke in a hoarse, conspiratorial whisper. “I do it so I can be next door to you. Now the question is, my dear, if you intend to visit me, and perhaps help Mrs. Mitchell a bit with the children from time to time?”

  “Father and I feel we would benefit from having the house to ourselves,” Maria said, self-consciously mysterious.

  “How I used to hate being interrupted in my calculations,” Phoebe said. “I can sense something very important is afoot, but they won’t tell me.” She paused to inspect Maria’s visage for clues. Finding none, Phoebe went on, “They need peace and quiet—I’m sure of that. And I’d like to live as close to the sea as I can for a time, before I die.”

  “The house stands empty,” I said. “And nothing would please us more than to have you and the less scientific Mitchells as neighbors.”

  “Very good. We’ll come.” Phoebe spoke and acted without hesitation. It was as though she had said, “One plus one is two. Definitely.” She added, “We’ll drive in a buggy alone so we can talk.”

  THUS IT WAS we caravaned back to ’Sconset. As we traveled, Phoebe told me she had been born a Quaker, but she saw that the Unitarians suited her better philosophically, and she intended to change when she came back from ’Sconset. I was startled that a person with such a long history among one group might in old age have new thoughts and take action. My admiration for my new friend increased.

  She had arranged that she and I ride in one buggy to ’Sconset and that Justice and the Mitchell family (minus Maria and her father) come along behind. In a succinct manner, Phoebe told me something of her long mathematical studies and personal life. I had thought that Maria stood alone among Nantucket’s women, but here was Phoebe Folger, who had not only preceded Maria but encouraged her.

  “You know,” she said, returning to the issue of religious affiliation, “the Quakers have disappointed me in the question of the Africans.”

  “How is that?”

  “To get his daughter in the white high school, Absalom Boston had to file suit against the town.”

  “I know Absalom Boston,” I said. “When was this?”

  “Two years ago. You see, dear, there are disadvantages in isolating yourself so completely from civilization.” Her voice teased me. “His daughter was seventeen, when he filed in ’45, and she didn’t get admitted till last year. And Eunice Ross. In ’40, Eunice Ross was seventeen. She graduated from the African School on York Street and passed the entrance exam for the all-white school. Did the Quakers stand up for her? No. They worked against her. Oh, they’re all for abolition, but that’s faraway justice. They might look to effect justice closer to home.”

  “Did you attend Frederick Douglass’s talk?” I asked. We could hear children jabbering behind us and their pleasant laughter, but how wise she had been to isolate us. The horse clopped along nicely, and Phoebe held on to a beautiful, tightly woven oval basket in her lap.

  “Indeed I did,” she answered.

  “And?”

  “Well, it was magnificent. What did you think?”

  “The same. My cousin Frannie works with him.”

  “Does she? I remember seeing both of you there. You so pretty and alive, and she terribly pockmarked, poor child.” She sighed. “It must be difficult for her.”

  “She had a child who died. Drowned at Sankaty.”

  “That’s something I didn’t know,” she replied.

  We fell silent for a few moments, until Phoebe asked, “Tell me, what do you think of the afterlife?”

  I was a bit nonplussed. I had no idea what she thought, but I knew that the question must be of greater interest to someone of her age than to me. But our conversation had been completely honest, and before I could speak, honesty and tact had joined hands in my answer. “I have no faith at all,” I said, “but sometimes I have hope.”

  “I rather think,” she replied, “that total annihilation is the most comfortable position.”

  I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us.

  “When I die,” she said, “I don’t expect to see any of my loved ones again. I’ll just become a part of all this.” She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. “That’s all right with me.”

  “Sometimes I think the spirit may continue in some way,” I said, “after the body’s death, might know other spirits, might be happy. I like to entertain the idea
. I don’t know.”

  “Time is something of an enemy,” she opined, “for us mortals. And yet I love it”—she fluttered her fingers in the air—“I love this moment, and it’s a child of time.”

  “At the party,” I said, “there was a man—the man—the only man who survived the wreck of the Pequod. I had heard of him before. He floated on a coffin till the Rachel picked him up.”

  “I thought as much,” Phoebe said. “He told the Steelkilt and Radney story. The ‘Moby Dick as god of justice’ story. That Elijah, whom Charity drowned, had some such theory.”

  “No, it was Gabriel, from the Jeroboam, who believed that.”

  “But Charity drowned Elijah, didn’t she?” How cold-bloodedly she repeated that fact!

  “Yes.”

  I did not tell Phoebe that I had seen this Ishmael some years before. I did not tell her that once, in an awkward moment, I had looked so deeply into him that I had concluded his eyes held an unfathomable profundity, and that I had remembered him, in some buried way, all those years.

  “I’ve avoided knowing—I haven’t wanted to know—about the last moments of the Pequod,” I said. “I don’t want to have it in my imagination. But now I could talk to him—the survivor. I could settle how it all happened.”

  “Well, you don’t have to.”

  “No, I don’t.” I envisioned the gaping maw of Moby Dick, the sockets in the upper jaw where the lower teeth housed themselves. His great mass. Bloody water. “But perhaps it’s something I should try to settle.”

  “It may be.”

  “Do you have an opinion?”

  She slowly turned her body toward me, to look at me. It was the first time that she had spent the energy to twist herself toward me, though I had felt her eyes shift toward me as she spoke. I glanced at her. “No,” she said slowly. “You’ll decide. I can’t tell you whether ’tis best or not to settle the Pequod with the sailor’s account. That’ll be fine, Una, whatever you decide.”

  I laughed. “You will make a good Unitarian, Phoebe Folger.”

  “I expect so.”

  “But who was Ishmael, anyway?” I asked. “In the Bible?”

  “An outcast. Somebody who lived on the edge of things.”

  I glanced at her. “As I do.”

  “No. You come and go. Sometimes going out, sometimes coming in. Like the waves.”

  “What became of Eunice Ross, when the Quakers kept her out?”

  “She’s in now. She was twenty-four years old, but they let her in, with Boston’s daughter.”

  I refused the request from the vehicle behind to stop at Altar Rock, not wanting to prolong the journey for Phoebe, and we clopped on to ’Sconset. By the time we arrived at the sea, I was full of admiration and affection for one very old Phoebe Folger, mathematician, philosopher, and advocate of social justice.

  CHAPTER 153: A Sermon Overheard

  MRS. MITCHELL, being used to cooking and keeping up with her children, really required very little help from me, and she quickly told me that my job for the seaside week was to entertain Phoebe Folger. As this arrangement suited Phoebe and me as well, all fell into place in a way that seemed almost predestined.

  I had not expected to make a new friend, let alone a friend who was a very old woman who had lived in Nantucket all along, but she somewhat filled the vacant place left by the demise of my own mother. Phoebe was more outspoken than my mother, and I associated her with Great Affection, rather than with love, but still my tie to her was fully rewarding.

  Although she was a little tottery, one day Phoebe insisted I help her down the steps so that she could walk directly on the beach. Descending was a strain for her, and she suggested we stand in the shade of the fragrant pine trees before we expose ourselves to the sun again.

  When I said we might sit down, she said pleasantly, “No, I’d rather stand. It’s too difficult for me to get up off the ground.” What a sensible person she was. “I once promised myself,” she went on as though she had read my thoughts, “that I wouldn’t be one of those tiresome old people who refused to accept help when they needed it. Or one who talked about her aches and pains all the time. But I won’t get into unnecessary trouble, either. I know what I can do.”

  The ocean rumpled itself before us, and a few pale clouds hung on the horizon. It was a bright day, but not so hot as to threaten, and besides, we stood in the shade. The shadow of a spray of pine needles danced on Phoebe’s cheek. My hand reached for my own cheek: so long ago my father left the print of his hand there; and there my husband Kit violated my visage, no, sought to displace my identity, with his assaulting hand. I had hidden in the Pequod’s hold, among the barrels of harvested whale oil. The massive ribs of the ship had curved around me as though I were Jonah inside the whale.

  Phoebe and I inhaled the sweet fragrance of pine resin. I felt enormously happy to be there with my new friend. Seaside, with Phoebe Folger, I felt this was a world that gave back as well as took.

  Then she surprised me by telling me about her daughter Nan, a bit older than I, who had died. I was much moved by the story. A cancer had killed her, but Nan had had some episodes of derangement as well.

  “I know the pain of it for you,” I said. “My husband before Captain Ahab became mad.”

  “And did he get over it, too?”

  “No, he never did.”

  She stepped forward on the path into the sunshine; the pine-spray shadow slid from her cheek. She looked back over her shoulder and smiled. “Now, let’s go on to the water. I want my shoes off, if you’ll help me.”

  If she was something of a mother to me, I was something of a daughter to her. I supposed Maria Mitchell had been, too.

  “You know,” Phoebe said, lifting the hem of her skirt above the water, “Nan was not very mathematical or science-minded, but she was interested. Like you.”

  AFTER OUR RETURN from the beach, Phoebe was tired enough to ask to lie down to rest, and I took the opportunity to go visit Robben. As I knew the judge was still lingering in town, I thought Robben might enjoy some company. I let myself in without knocking, and then was surprised to hear a male voice speaking:

  “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide underwater, unapparent for the most part—”

  (It was the voice of the storyteller from the pleasure party. It was Ishmael.)

  “—and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea—”

  My heart constricted. Did he know my secrets as well as Ahab’s?

  “Consider, however baby-man may brag of his science and skill, how forever and forever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make—”

  The man was preaching a sermon, not to the sea, but about the sea. I heard no word from Robben, the assumed but out-of-sight audience for Ishmael’s lecture.

  “Yes, foolish mortals”—did he imagine he addressed a multitude?—“Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two-thirds of the fair world it yet covers. And wherein differ the sea and the land?”

  He paused as though he expected Robben to answer, but I knew that Robben was enjoying this philosophical run of rhetoric and would not reply.

  “Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.”

  With that I noiselessly turned and fled through the Gothic Ach into my own territory. Too much this man traced the path of my own life. Oh, it was done all abstractly, but too accurately, too closely.

  My vegetable garden was already plucked over, but I distractedly found myself walking among the bent stalks, the
leftovers of the harvest. I kicked a clod of soil. I got a hoe and chopped away at the row, though it would not want weeding till the earth had traveled halfway around the sun again.

  This is stupid, I told myself. And then I claimed to myself that despite all, I was glad that I had left my particular, insular Tahiti. Where would Justice be if I had not? Nor would I have had any of the friends who were so dear to me. I was sure Phoebe Folger would not offer such conservative advice as Ishmael. (But then she had been born on Nantucket and never left.)

  I threw the hoe down among the dry stalks and passed again through the arch in the hedge. Robben’s flowers were yet radiant, and I would enjoy them. I inspected the docile green whale, and walked around the circle of his flowery pond.

  Whales! One black, one white—how they had stove my life! And yet, unlike Ahab, I could not blame them. What were they but the largest life-form? Were they our own animal self inflated like the pig’s bladder turned balloon? Nonetheless, I preferred this pretty green fellow. This bloodless, vegetable, well-pruned artifact. His spout and he, all privet, all one. Oh! Here came Robben with Ishmael in tow.

  “Una,” Robben called. “Meet a new friend, Ishmael.”

  “We’ve met before,” he said, as they walked toward me.

  Suddenly my bad temper was gone. “Twice met,” I said and smiled at the sailor. “You are a wonderful narrator.” (All our sensibility is surely tied to blood, not vegetable juices.)

  “I would suppose that you yourself have a story to tell,” he answered, his pontificating manner all evaporated.

  Robben said, “He’s writing a book of his experiences. Ishmael wants to understand all that is possible to know about ships and whales. Mrs. Maynard sent him out to interview me on masthead figures. He came to Nantucket to interview Captain Pollard, whose Essex—”

  “And I have given him a foretaste of my thoughts on the sea—as they may appear in my book, more or less.”