Ahab's Wife, or the Star-Gazer

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  I know that I do not want to upset my mother by leaving. She doesn’t deserve to go through that again. I would like to convince her that I am smart enough to take care of myself, even in the West. But at some point, everyone must become independent, I think. I found out recently that Mother’s father did not want her to marry my father! And he is, as always, the best father in the world.

  You are the best friend I ever had. I do forgive you for worrying us so much. I cried every night for a month when you left. Finally, your letter came, explaining what you had done. But we had already been missing you so terribly. I guess, like Mother, I am a little mad at you about that. But I still trust you and love you more than anybody almost.

  Frannie, your devoted kinswoman

  CHAPTER 107: An Angry Letter from Aunt Agatha

  Una,

  Frannie has confessed to me that she has written to you for advice. My heart sank like a diving bell. Why does she ask you for advice? You who betrayed not only me but all of us at the Island. We had been entrusted by your mother with your care. Do you have no concept of the anguish you caused us? First, for love of you. Yes, we loved you. Loved you as though you were our own child. You were a gift to us. We longed for another child. You were so bright. So in need of a fatherly love such as Torchy freely gave you. Your own father’s mind had turned black with religion. Torchy was the keeper of the light, of enlightenment, of tolerance. Surely you felt that when you were here.

  And my love for you! Little sister you seemed, part woman and part child. Insofar as you were not my child, I loved you the way a teacher might have loved her student. Your qualities stood objectively before me. I appreciated and admired you. I took pride in who you were and who you were becoming under our guidance. Let Frannie find a model in Una—that was my thought. I hoped my own child might aspire to your honesty with yourself, your ability to puzzle about large issues, your generosity and care for others, your self-reliance and inventiveness, your unstinting commitment to do your share and beyond, your brave vivacity.

  But where was your honor? Did you not think it dishonorable to sneak away?

  I cannot account for your thinking on this matter.

  If I prayed to God, I would give thanks that Frannie has had a sense of honor, that she felt guilt over having written to you. Her disobedience has gnawed at her for five days. It has not been two hours since she confessed to me.

  Three days have passed. Torch and I have talked much of you these three days. Of your grief when we heard your father was dead—the night of the bonfire on the headland, while the lens was being installed. How you struggled earlier with your homesickness and we tried to make you merry at Christmastime. How you visited with your parents in New Bedford—you were fourteen—but were happy to come home with us and climbed to the top of the lighthouse as though you were lord of all you surveyed. It was the midpoint of your stay. Torch and I spoke of your great anxiety, after Boston, for Frannie when she was ill. How you were bewildered by the arrival of not one but two eligible young men in the Petrel.

  It is enough that I have told you how I felt and suffered. To be free of this, now I have another need. And that is to tell you, or at least myself, that I forgive you. I do believe that you wronged us. But my rage is over. I wish you every happiness.

  I know that you would not give bad advice to my daughter. Torch agrees with me.

  And so I end with another wish. First that our letters do reach you. Second that you will respond. If you do respond and then hear no reply from us, know that your letter simply did not reach us. Write again. We wish to claim our Una. My words begun in anger and anguish have ended in good wishes for you. We hope you will want to claim us.

  Your Aunt Agatha

  CHAPTER 108: Letter to an Inland Lighthouse

  Dearest Aunt Agatha, Uncle Torch, Frannie, and Butch,

  First and foremost, I beg you to forgive me for the pain and anxiety I caused you by my precipitate leaving. At the time, I did not think of it as running away. But, as an adult, I can easily imagine the anguish it caused all of you who loved me. I am heartily sorry. I ask forgiveness.

  I am especially grateful to you, Aunt Agatha, for arguing with yourself about me and for finding an abiding love in your heart as well as the justly deserved anger. If I have learned to be honest with myself about the nature and origin of my own feelings, it is due in no small part to the example I had before me in you. My gratitude also to Uncle Torch and to Frannie for their love and faith. Dear Butch, I have long wondered what kind of boy you are and hoped that someday I would know you.

  Frannie, I believe you should content yourself till age sixteen. We will all exchange long letters till that time. Then I will send money, and a guide to bring you to Nantucket, if Aunt and Uncle approve.

  With all love,

  Una

  CHAPTER 109: The Minister in the Woods

  IN OCTOBER, I thought how I must now keep my promise to Margaret Fuller and visit her again, before the winter set in. I made the crossing alone, on the Camel, with Captain Maynard, who was a little huffish with residual embarrassment over having once proposed to me. But such standoffishness did not trouble me. Mrs. Maynard had very much wanted that her husband be selected to transport me; of course, I never told her that Captain Maynard had once approached me with a marriage offer. I occupied myself with reading from my old volume of Wordsworth.

  Although I had sent Margaret a note of my intention to visit, when I reached the city I found she had not received it, and, in fact, her housekeeper said she had gone to Concord, to visit with Mr. Emerson, Mr. Hawthorne, and Mr. Alcott. It excited me to think of Margaret among three famous men. Concord was nearly a day’s drive away by coach, but having come so far, I determined to go on. The housekeeper fed me, noted that I was pregnant, and advised me not to go, but I did it anyway. I left my larger bag in Margaret’s Boston apartment and took only a valise.

  After hours of jouncing through the autumn countryside, a new coachman had me exit the coach too soon. Through inquiry at the crossroads, I learned that Mr. Emerson’s house was but on the other side of the forest and that if I took the footpath through the woods the walking would be much shorter than going by the road. The path was fairly clear, and I might walk there in less than an hour. Scarlet and gold with the fall colors, the woods beckoned me.

  There was no such forest on Nantucket, and the Concord fall display of hardwood forest thrilled me and reminded me of the crimson dogwoods in Kentucky. I felt scarlet come to my own cheek in an attempt to fit in with the autumn splendor. As I walked along and the trees grew more dense, the light became more muted. I relished all the color about me and loved the great thickness of the tree trunks and the pleasing shapes of the oak and maple leaves. I thought of my passion with Ahab, and the flamboyance of the colors engulfing me seemed an emblem of ardor.

  Squirrels were about, and their chattering and the scurrying of their little feet pleased my ear. At one point, I thought I heard a larger animal moving, but I did not see him.

  I stepped over a little stream, using the flat creek rocks for stepping-stones, and then I seemed to be in a somewhat different realm. The moving water of a stream has a freshness that the ocean, for all its inspiring movement and size, can never suggest, and I was glad to baptize the tips of my shoes in the gurgling water. Beyond the stream, the woods were cooler, and again the light seemed to dim. There were more evergreens here, and I saw fewer squirrels, but I could hear birds in the upper boughs. To my surprise, I heard the hoot of an owl, which is not common in late afternoon.

  Then I came to a branching of the footpath. My informants at the crossroads had said nothing of a fork in the path, so I felt disconcerted. Perhaps I had already taken the wrong path. Still, my heart was light, I was not very tired, and being alone among the sort of trees I had known as a child made me feel I had traveled back a bit in time. I would linger in the timeless zone. My baby, still so small, rode comfortably within me, and my shoes and clothes were perfect for t
he walk. The valise had grown heavy, and I considered abandoning it at the fork. The valise was not worth the weight. I could borrow nightclothes from Margaret when I needed.

  Thinking that most folk would choose the right path, I chose the one on the left hand. I do as I please, I thought, and a lovely thought it was. The feeling of independence that accompanied me when I was on the road with Milk and David came back to me; but now I was more independent, for I traveled by myself and on my own feet. And I was blessed with four months of loving between Ahab and me, and the fruit of that love within my body.

  Again I heard an animal, perhaps a fox or badger, perhaps as large as a wolf, move to my right over the crackling leaves. All such creatures would be shy of me, a human, and I felt more curiosity than fear. A great scolding of jays and mockingbirds occurred in the trees. Just so had I heard them squabble in Kentucky, for their territories are mutually exclusive.

  Then I saw a man coming toward me on the path. He was well dressed, all in black; I took him for a minister at once, but he had an odd black veil over his face.

  “Good day,” I called ahead so as not to startle him.

  “What’s this?” he replied.

  “A traveler, like yourself,” I answered.

  “But you are alone in the woods, my good woman?” There was a sternness about him that I did not like. He seemed to be critical that I was where I was, but he himself was alone in the woods.

  “Aye. I seek Mr. Emerson’s house. My friend Margaret Fuller visits him.”

  “Farther on,” he said. The veil swayed. I assumed he was not Mr. Emerson.

  “My name is…” And then he stopped. “Can you guess my name?” What a sudden whimsy, for a man so encased in blackness!

  “Nay, sir.” I was amused that he would want me to guess. “Mr. Alcott?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Mr. Hawthorne, then?” I spoke a bit impatiently.

  With his identity tendered (though not acknowledged), he rattled on, “Where do you come from? Shall we sit and talk? It’s not every day that I meet an unattended woman on this path.” While he spoke, the lightweight veil puffed about on his face, but he made no effort to remove it. Perhaps, I thought, he’s blind—he had spoken almost as though he had no sight, or perhaps he was disfigured. The eternal zone of solitude, nature, and childhood airs being violated, I hesitated to take time to talk.

  He went on, “Let me assure you, I come from Mr. Emerson’s house, and I am a friend of his, and I know your friend.”

  “I would be obliged if you would point the way to Mr. Emerson’s.”

  “What is your name?” Again, his voice had the chill and authority of an Inquisitor.

  “Una.”

  “That is not possible. I plan to name my daughter Una, named from Spenser.”

  “And so, sir, was I.”

  “And have you read Spenser?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I see you are, indeed, a friend of Miss Fuller, part of her coterie. Please, you must be tired—if you don’t wish to retreat to a fallen log, let us stand here in the path a bit and swap philosophies.”

  “Philosophies! I would but learn the way.”

  “Your face is flushed”—he was not blind—“and you are with child. Chat a bit.”

  I sighed. “Because I am pregnant”—I said the word boldly, and he stiffened—“my feet may swell if I stand still. Let us walk toward Mr. Emerson’s house and chat as we go.”

  “But I was going the other way,” he protested. “This will take me back along the way that I have come. I don’t wish that.”

  “Then point the way.”

  “I will walk back partway,” he conceded.

  And so we started off, slowly, through the brilliant woods. We both were silent.

  “There is a particular reason I don’t wish to return to Mr. Emerson’s house.”

  “What is that?”

  “We have quarreled. Your Margaret Fuller and I have disagreed.”

  “To disagree is not necessarily to quarrel,” I answered.

  “She is exasperatingly opinionated. She is too vivid, too bold and tenacious, too instinctual!” He thundered these words as though he were behind a pulpit instead of treading on the fallen leaves through the woods. “Even Mr. Emerson says that she is addicted to the superlative. ‘The grandeur of this fall is unmatched by any other.’ ‘The crimes against the red man and the black man are the greatest possible national sin.’ ‘The body is the most wondrous gift bestowed by God on man.’ ” He mocked her with his tone of voice as he pretended to quote my friend. Yet she did hold such views.

  “And what is your opinion of her opinions?”

  “Jesus Christ is God’s greatest gift to sinners. The body embodies and perpetrates Original Sin. It is the very vessel of the devil.”

  “I think not,” I said coolly. “Are you a minister?”

  “Nay. I am a writer.‘Nothing from America has yet to match the literature of mighty Europe’—she says that, too. She reads German and French, Latin, and even some Greek as though they were English.”

  I smiled, for I recognized my own envy of Margaret’s erudition in languages. I said nothing. Here was a man who resembled my father, philosophically, but I did not feel intimidated. He amused me, whoever he was.

  “What do you write?”

  Here he apparently quoted a sentence he had written or intended to write: “ ‘I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.’ ”

  “What a pretty sentence! It touches me, beyond its internal charm and coherence, in two quite strange ways.”

  “What associations does it set to resonating?”

  “My husband is the captain of a whaling ship, and he sometimes brings home ivory artifacts. And Susan. Susan is the name of the best friend I ever had.” Here I would very much have liked to be able to see the expression in his eyes, to have some clue to what degree of respect he was willing to grant my private associations. I would have liked to talk about my dark sister Susan to this black-clad man. Perhaps we were all congenial beneath the outer layers.

  “But when you speak of the intrinsic coherence of my little sentence—what are you thinking of?”

  I sighed. “Recite it again.”

  “ ‘I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.’ ”

  “Oh, I do love the sentence,” I said.

  “Please, speak! Just ramble on as you like. I won’t criticize whatever you say.”

  “Well then, I like the concepts. A cottage for two people—especially one built by one person for the other—is as cozy and contained as can be, but straightway you give the place a gateway and the outer world is admitted, after all. Then you surprise me by moving from humble, domestic architecture to a term used for the great cathedrals of Europe—the Gothic Arch. But then comes a totally surprising idea: the Gothic Arch is made of whale’s jaw bones. There’s nature, most unexpectedly and grandly evoked. If man has produced Gothic architecture, well, nature has produced the whale.”

  “Perhaps now you’re straying into associations with your husband’s domain?”

  “Anyone knows that whales are mammoth. That no greater creature exists on earth and that man has had nothing to do with creating that wonder.”

  “I grant your point. You do speak impersonally about the sentence itself. I thank you.”

  “I have not finished. But perhaps man is not ascendant in your sentence after all, for the whale is out of his element, rendered useful inland by man. Ah, but the bones suggest death, and in that, man is very much a part of nature, his cottages—or cathedrals—notwithstanding.”

  “Has Margaret instructed you in literary analysis? But you are not only more concise than that long-winded, superlative-addicted lecturer but more precise, too.”

  “I grew up at the knee of a mother who loved poetry, and I have trie
d to understand not just what it means but how it achieves its meaning, all my life. Your sentence gleams like poetry.”

  “Go on.”

  “I wanted to speak of the sounds in the sentence. Please say it again.”

  “ ‘I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale’s jaw bones.’ Proceed, please.”

  I confess I felt a bit heady with the writer’s attention. “Well, from the first hearing, I noted what a nice phrase ‘Susan and myself’ is. Because there’s an s right in the middle of Susan and in the middle of myself, the two seemed linked, a sort of internal congeniality. And then Susan is so s-rich in herself, and the last phrase, ‘setting,’ et cetera, starts with an s and the last word ends in s—bones. Then there’s the middle phrase, ‘made a gateway in the form of a Gothic Arch.’ The m of made is tied back to the m of myself that ends the first phrase—”

  “Are you a musician?”

  “No. And made and gateway, both have long a’s in them, and gateway and Gothic both start with g, and the o-sound in Gothic ties it back to the o-sound in cottage. And so it’s all knit together, the three phrases, so well. Oh, that b-sound in built right at the beginning and the b-sound in bones at the very end—I suspect that helps to contain the whole utterance.”

  “We will stop and talk,” he muttered and took me by the wrist. “I cannot walk through these hideous colors and talk of deep philosophy. Let us turn to that.”

  All amusement left me. Never since my father had a man held my wrist by force.

  “I will talk,” I said, “only if you let loose my wrist.”

  He dropped my wrist. I noted that beneath the dark cloth his chest was heaving. “Why do you wear the black veil?” I asked softly. “I am not used to speaking to a man alone in the woods who covers his face.”