Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “Would you like one?”

  “A dress made for me by a captain’s wife!”

  “By Una, whom you employed and who can never adequately repay you for that.”

  “You are a dear,” she said, kissing me on the cheek.

  I proposed that she come with me and select whatever fabric she wished, but she said she must tend to the washing to keep on schedule, and that we would do it later. “Besides, I must sit down and recuperate,” she said. “To think I really did bathe you for your bridal! And such a fortunate marriage.”

  So I left Mrs. Macy and commenced my shopping myself. Nantucket had so much beautiful fabric; I began to quiver as I touched it. I could have whatever I wanted. What was to keep me from buying miles of cloth?

  My own good sense. I knew full well how long it took to stitch a dress. From much experience, I knew what yardage corresponded to practical ambition. So I chose fabric for two dresses and for underthings and breathlessly watched the clerk flop off yardage from the bolts, pull a thread across, straighten the diagonal, and flash his scissors through the fabric. My parcel was heavy enough that I decided to carry it home before visiting the baker’s and the meat shop, for I knew I could not always eat with the judge. Yet when I reached home, there was in fact a note under my door inviting me to lunch across the street. Blithely I went.

  This time the judge had me into his dining room, where places were set on a mahogany table, and he served apple jelly and crackers and thin beef soup until the main meal was ready.

  “You had a caller,” he said. “Captain Bildad.”

  “I think I noted him knocking,” I said. “A rather dark captain?” I let my eye twinkle, for I felt that I had not just a neighbor but a friend in the judge.

  “Indeed,” he answered, with a corresponding twinkle. “He asked about your furnishings, Ahab having told him the house was bare in most rooms. Did you see some furnishings you liked in town?”

  I replied I had not, though I had pursued other objects. “Where can I buy a door knocker fashioned like yours, like the pineapple?”

  “Ah, that’s from Boston.”

  “Boston?”

  “Now, Captain Bildad tells me that he and his spinster sister will return and that they will personally help you buy; he is confident that all your needs can be met, with his guidance, by Main Street. He saw a black chair that he fancied for Captain Ahab.”

  “May I ask about your sofa? Was it purchased on Main Street?” The sofa was not a frank red, but more a cherry color—a delicious, subtle color.

  The judge was chewing, but he shook his head and simply said, “Boston.”

  “And your lace curtains?”

  “New York.”

  I laughed, and so did he. “Would you rather have his guidance or mine?” He was all atwinkle, and we were not only friends, but conspirators.

  “I think we’d better slip off to Boston this afternoon,” I said. “On the ferry.”

  “You need a proper chaperone. None more proper than myself.” Mrs. Macy was forgotten. Besides, I knew she was busy.

  AND SO it was that Judge Austin Lord and I took the ferry around Provincetown and on to Boston. We chatted the whole way, till we were hoarse. He was full of gossip about all of Nantucket and filled me in on the Coffins and the Crosbys, the Hadwens and the Barneys, the Starbucks, Swifts, and Swains, all intermarried to each other and dominating Main Street. The triplet houses, three bricks recently completed by Joseph Starbuck for his three sons, had cost a scandalous amount, the three together requiring an outlay of over $40,000. I asked if Mr. Starbuck of the Pequod was of that family, and the judge said certainly he was, but very distantly, the Main Street Starbucks being whaling merchants, but not actually whalers, as was the first mate, who lived more humbly out at Siasconset or ’Sconset, as the natives called it. Isaac Starbuck, the gaoler, was yet another strain of Starbucks.

  We were gone perhaps three weeks. The sight of Quincy Market reminded me of how happy I had been seeing it for the first time with Aunt Agatha, Uncle Torchy, and Frannie. And how I had yet to face the terrible suspense of Frannie’s illness. Then, when I admired the monuments, I hadn’t known the Petrel existed.

  In terms of Boston shopping, Judge Lord was as indulgent as ever my husband had instructed him to be. But I soon learned from a slight frown or lift of an eyebrow what my chaperon considered a good buy or a tasteful, well-made item. An expensive rug he actually urged me to buy, saying it was from India, while most people in Nantucket had rugs from China; and, further, that the pattern was rare—a kind of tree of life filled with birds and fruit. Yes, I wanted that. A tree of life.

  It was a wonderful trip. Sometimes I regretted that neither Charlotte nor Mrs. Macy was there with me to share the excitement. I had written them both notes before I left home. Never again would I leave dear ones wondering what had befallen me. I knew too much now about how anxiety could wring the heart. In this mood, when I was alone in my hotel room at night, I dispatched additional letters to the Lighthouse and to my mother, telling them of my new, happy state, reminding them of what we had shared, and assuring them that I would soon come to visit.

  Not only did we buy furnishings, china, and silver, but also books by the boxload. I told the judge to choose what he thought a well stocked library should have, and I myself chose many books—often they were by authors whom I had read perhaps in a single volume, but now I swept my hands over the Complete Works of such writers.

  IT WAS WHILE I was at a bookstall that I fell into conversation with the remarkable woman writer Margaret Fuller. As we stood on the sunny street, she showed me engravings of great art works—of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and La Gioconda—and invited me to attend one of her Conversations for Women. Surprised by her spontaneous and intense invitation, I regarded her more closely.

  Quick in her movements and speech, she had large and dreamy eyes. Her hair, parted in the middle, was the most smooth and glossy I had ever seen. Her claret dress fit beautifully, and I thought her the picture of elegance. I was glad that at least I had been in Boston for a fortnight and was not totally unused to sophisticated fashion. Because I felt timid, nonetheless, about accepting her invitation, I equivocated till I thought I might ask Judge Lord for an opinion.

  He did not encourage me. But when I thought again on my own of Miss Fuller, her intensity and intelligence, I informed him that same afternoon that in fact I did intend to go. He but lifted an eyebrow. In some way, he seemed pleased that I had not taken his advice.

  HOW WISE I was! At Margaret Fuller’s salon, women talked of magnificent ideas, of poetry and art, of science and travel. Never had I heard such discourse among women. Not one word of family or home or food or even sewing. I interjected the question did they not think that quilting could be an art form and perhaps the only art available to frontier women, and several, including Miss Fuller, quite agreed with me, though not all. “Quilts don’t last,” one said. “Ars longa, vita breva.” Though I did not know Latin, I surmised what she was saying. “Nor would a painting last,” I said, “if you covered yourself in bed with it. You might choose not to use a quilt, but simply admire it. Then I think it would last. My stitches would, I know.” I was sorry I was wearing a dress, tailor-made, purchased in Boston, and so could not display my own fine stitches.

  “What then is the purpose or purposes of art?” Margaret Fuller asked the group. And we went on to discuss the question of utility and beauty. She was very versed in German views, and often she quoted Goethe, whom she herself had translated. Very considerately, though Miss Fuller quoted fluently in German, she always followed with a translation for those of us who did not understand the language. But at one point, I could not help myself from saying simply how beautiful the German was.

  “Shall I quote you one of my favorite lines? It’s from a song.”

  We all waited, aglow. I felt so honored.

  “ ‘Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin.’ ‘I don’t know
why I am so sad.’ It’s the first line from ‘Die Lorelei.’ But the rhythm is so much better in German, isn’t it?”

  We all agreed that it was. I wondered if there was some particular circumstance making Margaret Fuller herself sad, but the question seemed too intimate to ask in a chiefly intellectual discussion. Suddenly she told me I might call her Margaret, as the others did.

  We returned to the subject of beauty, and our leader mentioned that some of the oldest art was associated, perhaps, with religious expression. She mentioned cave drawings, and the idea that those people had worshiped animals.

  My mind began to buzz with ideas, and I remembered my question in the Unitarian gathering about their intelligence and souls—those of animals, that is, not Unitarians—and as though she read my mind, Margaret went on to speak of Mr. Emerson, who was dissatisfied with the Unitarians and wanted a less conventional, more philosophical worldview, which was being called Transcendentalism. And again my brain buzzed with the idea that no matter how liberal, how radical an idea might seem, and certainly Unitarianism had seemed more free than Universalism to me, one’s thought could always be more free, and freer and newer still. I was so excited I could not speak, and many of us were speaking at once, so ignited were we by the breadth and flexibility of Margaret’s mind.

  When it was time to go, I asked Margaret when the next Conversation would occur, and I felt much disappointed to learn it would not be for another week, at which time I would have returned to Nantucket. She was interested that I lived in Nantucket and asked if I knew Lucretia Mott, but I did not. She saw I was disappointed at not being able to come again, and she kept me standing, chatting, at the door, after the others had floated like bright bubbles, though they wore winter coats, down the street. That I was from the wilderness of Kentucky also intrigued her.

  I cannot begin to say how much I admired her. Though I guessed her to be only eight or ten years older than I, I associated her with my mother and my aunt, and her erudition was far more dazzling.

  At the hotel, I tried to convey to Judge Lord some of the breadth of Margaret Fuller’s allusions, but he was not nearly so interested as I had expected another book lover to be. “I should rather have you, my dear,” he said, “describe to me exactly what you are seeing and thinking at this moment than listen to Margaret Fuller’s dusty learning.” A bit of me was flattered, but in the main, I was disappointed and frustrated that I could not rouse the judge with my enthusiasm. I was sure that he was wrong not to value Margaret.

  The next day being our last for shopping, we arose early, but as we were going out the door, the desk clerk called that there was a note for me. It turned out to be an invitation from Margaret Fuller to spend the day with her in private conversation.

  “Surely you’ll not miss our last day of shopping?” the judge interjected.

  “Dear Judge Lord,” I replied, “please, you must shop. Buy whatever seems best. Don’t spend too much, though. I would swap the whole boatload—except for the books—for this opportunity.”

  And what a breathless day! I think that it changed me forever, as some days do. As did the day when the Petrel came to the Lighthouse. “What was it like to live on the frontier?” Margaret asked, and how did those conditions affect thought? Might one be more bold and innovative there, and not only in meeting practical needs—but did practical needs enslave one? What was the role of fear? Did nature seem a moral guide? She said she was so interested that she was resolved to go herself to the West. “I would choose Illinois and Wisconsin,” she said. “They are free of the scourge of slavery.” The scourge! Yes, I thought, that was what it was. But she quickly passed on to speaking of the condition of women and spoke about the way we were bound in invisible chains.

  When we had lunch, the conversation turned to art, and I mentioned that, much as I loved the engravings she had shown us, since they had no color, it seemed to me they falsified the art they represented. Here Margaret defended the gray engravings as yet allowing the form of those distant masterpieces to be available to us, even if their splendor was not. “Perhaps form is the more essential element,” she suggested.

  I thought, though, of the colors in the sky, and how they moved me, whether or not they assumed form, and I advanced the notion that art had both emotional and intellectual force. “Emotion may be embodied more readily in colors,” I said, “while ideas might reside in the relationships of the forms to each other.”

  Margaret smiled; she called me “dearest Una”; she said I was a joy to talk with.

  I was almost in a swoon, almost as much in love with her as I was with my husband. Yet I knew there was something magic and ephemeral about the day. After lunch we went for a walk on the Common, and she spoke again of the artificial restrictions that society had placed on women. I thought to tell her of my own life as a sailor, but I wanted to leave that life behind me. Margaret and I walked arm in arm, and she commented on historic spots and on architecture.

  When we returned to her apartment, both of us a bit weary, we had tea, and I asked her if she would read some more German aloud to me. She saw this as a chance for a game: “I shall read only passages that in some way deal with a topic we have discussed during the day. And then, without translation, you must guess at their meanings.” Had I not grown to feel that I could trust Margaret with all my uncertainties and questions, I would never have made myself vulnerable to committing such colossal errors. But Margaret said one might learn a language partly by guessing and intuition.

  “I will give you a clue for our first passage,” she said. “The word Schicksal means fate.” Now I was ready, for we had much discussed whether women had a natural fate or only a conventional one in the present day, and I did remarkably well, many times, in guessing at the meanings of the German sentences. Much of the time Margaret’s facial expression, and my growing knowledge of what ideas appalled or pleased her, came to my aid.

  At length, she closed all her books and smiled at me, and I felt it was a sign that our day was over. Yet I could not let it go. “Would you not recite the line from ‘Die Lorelei’ for me once more?”

  She did so, and then I gathered my courage and asked—for everyone needs a sister—if there was some particular instance that made her sad.

  “I have spoken much,” she said, “of the conditions men have imposed on women, of our deprivations, which are so unnecessary and wasteful. Of course, some men do understand this. There have also always been some men who were fair-minded and possessed imagination. I think that imagination is an important part of what makes change possible. One must be able to imagine what it is like to be a woman, or a slave, if one is moved to remove artificial barriers. To remove unjust legalities. But, Una, I have also found that even among men with transcendent minds there can be a lacking.”

  “What sort of lacking?”

  “It is in the realm you spoke of so eloquently at lunch. Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply. That is perhaps the sorrow that you sense in me.”

  “But then, you do know why you are sad.”

  “I know it only by fits and starts. I cannot accept the idea. I do not accept it. I want to burst through it. I want to strike through the wall that separates thought and feeling, and let there be free-flowing commerce. I want to know a great mind among men, one in whom beats a passionate heart and who recognizes me.”

  This last part was said almost savagely. Much later I came to realize she meant Mr. Emerson. Her own passion seemed to have ravaged Margaret’s mind, and she put her hand to her forehead. “There now,” she said, “I’ve said too much. I shall have a migraine.” Her heavy eyelids hooded her eyes.

  I tried to thank her for the day she had given me. At first, she smiled a little weakly, and still held her forehead, but as I talked, she gradually lowered her hand. “It has passed,” she said. “I’ve had these headaches since I was a child—from studying too much Latin and Gree
k. My father was a demanding teacher.”

  “Was he? So was mine, in his own way.” I thought that the similarities in our fathers might be an element in our own rapport.

  “He had me reading Ovid by age eight, in the original. Yet, I am grateful for the pains he took with my education.”

  “With my father, it was only the Bible. But he was exacting.”

  “But the Bible is among the greatest literature,” Margaret replied.

  I did not want to overstay my welcome. At the very end, Margaret said, “I should be glad for you to write to me. Someday I shall write a book about women. At the beginning, I shall say: ‘Let them be sea captains—if they will!’ ”

  I wanted to tell her I knew we women could at least be sailors, for I had been one, but that would be to initiate a new topic. So I went away, her glorious words singing in my mind: Let them be sea captains.

  WHEN I returned to my house on Nantucket, I noted with a start how empty the rooms were. Restlessly, I walked about in all that walled space. It was mine, yet I had not properly filled it or inhabited it. I was eager to unload our Boston prizes and position them.

  Only the bedroom was a haven of comfort. I was tired, and I lay upon the bed to rest. And I missed Ahab very much. I wondered if he would be pleased with the furniture and china I had bought. What would Ahab think of a woman captain? He was not conventional, and I did not anticipate that this idea, or any idea, would shock him. But his daring and independence seemed more spiritual than intellectual to me.

  I bethought me to count the days since I was married to Ahab. And then I counted back again. Why, where were my menses? I leapt from the bed and paced around and around the house. Perhaps the emptiness of the rooms belied my own state, for perchance I was not empty! I stood in the middle of my dining room and enjoyed the mural of the surrounding ocean. I placed both hands tenderly on my own belly and smiled at the painted sea.

  CHAPTER 86: The Office of a Friend