Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  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 Greek. 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

  WHILE THE FURNITURE was being moved into my house (the door constantly opening to fan the flames of the four small fires I had lit in the fireplaces), while I was in the midst of directing the movers, who should walk in next—not my china cabinet—but Charlotte. She carried a small bundle of my things. I threw my arms around her. I asked the men to bring us two chairs and a small table, and we camped before the marble hearth of the parlor.

  As soon as we were settled, I realized that Charlotte, in the five or so weeks since I’d seen her, had been ravaged by grief and was even now in a most unsettled state of mind.

  “I received the letter from the judge,” she began, “so I’m not at all surprised, and I am happy for your good fortune—”

  “Captain Ahab,” I interrupted, “like your dear Mr. Hussey, is quite a bit older—”

  “But Kit—” And here she burst into tears. She hunched her shoulders and hung down her head and sobbed. The name of the flower “Bleeding Heart” came to mind, and I reached out with both hands to soothe her trembling shoulders. Behind her chair, the movers carried rolled rugs and boxes of china, never glancing at us.

  Yes, Kit. Was I so unmoved by his situation? Then I remembered: I knew him to be alive; Charlotte thought him dead because the judge would have written her so. Indeed, I had hoped that he would pass on to her his own mistaken notion that Kit was dead, so that Charlotte would forgive my marrying Ahab. But her inconsolable pain! She was the image of my own grief at Giles’s death. I scooted my chair closer and leaned my bosom into hers. I found her hand in her lap and squeezed it hard.

  “Have you no grief for Kit?” she finally burst out. “I am devastated,” she wailed.

  I resolved to tell her that Kit was not dead, but I did not want to shock her sensibility, so I started obliquely. I began quietly, “I have news to tell you. May I?” She grew more calm and nodded assent. “Ahab and I had but the one night, Charlotte. But, Charlotte, I find that I am with child.”

  At this she entirely stopped weeping. “So you are to have a child!” And then she burst out crying again in a strange mixture of joy and continuing sorrow. She added, “I think I shall never have a child, for it has been months with Mr. Hussey and me.”

  Then I felt very bad for her.

  “But I don’t want to have a child,” she blurted out. I saw one of the movers swing his head in our direction. “I want Kit.”

  “Charlotte, Charlotte,” I cooed. “You must stay with me for a while. I will cheer you up. You must help me get my kitchen in order, and I will make you a dress. I’m going to make one for Mrs. Macy. Such measuring and snipping and sewing we’ll have! And I’m to have a housekeeper, so we’ll do no work at all but what we choose. You’ll go with me to lectures, and we will have an endless gam.”

  “What will Mr. Hussey do without me?” She sniffled, but her crying was over. “Una, could we place a plaque to Kit in my church?”

  “We can buy anything we please. Captain Ahab is very rich. Oh, Charlotte, why don’t you and Mr. Hussey move the Try Pots into town? You’d have much more business if the sailors didn’t have to walk down the Madaket Road. Let’s do. Oh, please, let’s do it. I will help you. I’m to do just as I please with the money.”

  At this, she jumped from her seat, threw her arms around me, and sobbed anew. I began to feel aquiver myself in sympathetic vibration with her overwrought state. Consciously, I tried to calm myself. For the baby’s sake, I hoped that having her in the house would not disturb my equilibrium. I condemned the selfishness of such thinking, for this was Charlotte, who had taken Kit and me into her home when a lesser soul would have protected the peace of her own household. Though I duly prevailed upon her to spend the night, to sleep in my own bed with me, she eagerly prepared to leave, saying she would return to the Try Pots to discuss its relocation with Mr. Hussey.

  I had not amended her knowledge of Kit’s situation.

  Might not Charlotte pro
ceed on a more even keel if she grieved for Kit as dead and gave up the idea of him? The joy of all the society of town might make up for the loss of one Kit Sparrow, who was, at best, half a figure created by her fantasy. All the time I directed the movers and unpacked my bright silver, I mused over this question and another: What about my reputation with myself for truthfulness? Perhaps it was only self-serving not to tell her the truth about Kit.

  I looked up to see Judge Lord, along with a freckled woman. She was Mrs. Macy’s sister Lenora Sheffield, and the judge proposed I hire her as my housekeeper. I was glad to do so, Mrs. Macy herself having declined. Straight off, leaving Lenora in charge, the judge carried me away from the bustling to his house to take tea. Here civilization was already in place.

  “And how will you arrange the books of your library, Mrs. Captain?”

  “Why, alphabetically, by the author’s last name,” I replied.

  He opined that the books should be put in coarse categories, such as literature, history, science, and art, and within the sections be arranged by date of publication. “In each discipline, knowledge evolves,” he said, “and this way you will have a picture of the development of ideas. Alphabetizing is arbitrary.”

  I could not but agree his plan was a more rational one, though mine might be more convenient in some ways. Nonetheless, I acquiesced to his system. While we talked and ate—he had noted my fondness for exotic jams and had stocked up on them (secretly) in Boston—a part of my mind began again to contemplate the truthfulness issue.

  I had not corrected his erroneous assumption about Kit’s fate; nor did I have any impulse to do so. Of course, it was not an important issue to him, though it was to Charlotte. Neither had forced me to fabricate details of Kit’s supposed death. And my allegiance to Charlotte, my integrity as Charlotte’s friend, was for me a spiritual issue, not merely a moral one. Still, I was troubled and pondered many times if I was being honest with myself in considering the reasons for silence. I was glad their assumption of Kit’s death arose from their own simple misunderstanding, and I had not compounded it with details. Perhaps Charlotte thought I was not possessed of much information.

  Wondering what Margaret Fuller would say to such a distinction between spiritual and moral matters, I asked the judge if he thought there was a difference. He liked the question.

  “Many churchmen would say, Una, that the spiritual is the foundation of the moral. Belief in a just God causes us to be good.”

  “Yet there are moral folk who are not religious.”

  “Do you truly think so?”

  “I myself am one.”

  “You have an interest in the Unitarians.”

  “Because it is a church that grants me freedom of thought. It does not dictate my actions.”

  “You probably have the potential for highly immoral acts, if none of God’s commandments bind you. But I believe that God’s laws are the foundation for the laws of a just society.”

  “Do you find Moses’ commandments a complete guide for behavior?”

  “Of course not: Jesus added the laws of love.”

  I remembered that he was an enthusiastic Methodist. “Do you think that love can be governed by law? I think love is a disobedient emotion.”

  “ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ The law is in place to meet that unruliness.”

  “ ‘Thou shalt not eat thy neighbor.’ There is no such law.” What a boldness had come upon me! “Yet all civilized folk abhor the practice. It is an absolute tabu.”

  “Well, I rather think ‘Thou shalt not kill’ takes care of the matter.” He stirred his tea triumphantly.

  “But suppose someone else has done the killing?”

  “I think that loving your neighbor as yourself covers the case. How would you like to be eaten?” The judge looked mischievous.

  “I think I should not mind it,” I said soberly. “If I were dead.”

  “I certainly could not bring myself to eat another human being.”

  There was something in his smugness, his erect posture on the needlepoint seat of his chair, the unswaying stability of the room, that made me burst out at him: “Suppose you were starving. Starving unto death. And those about you whom you loved, on the very verge of death. And one of the company dies. Would you not urge your companions to take and eat? I would! I know I would! And were I the dead person, it would have been my last wish that I be consumed so that others might live.” And with this declamation, I crumpled into crying.

  “My dearest Una, let us change the topic. Such extremity need not be imagined. You are not in a wilderness. There is no starvation here. These issues are gruesome and hypothetical. They are morbid and Germanic. Are you quite well? Exhausted by the travel and the excitement, I think?”

  I thought to tell him I was pregnant, but I was shy of such a disclosure. “Germanic?” I thought of Margaret Fuller’s great interest in the Germans’ thought.

  “Oh, Goethe,” he said. “The Sorrows of Young Werther. It swept Europe in morbidity. People fancied themselves too sensitive to live, if they could not have the object of their love. Werther committed suicide because his beloved Charlotte was married to another. Young people throughout Europe followed suit.”

  “Did we buy this book?”

  “Not I.”

  I instantly resolved that I would write to Margaret, who, after all, was an expert on Goethe, and ask her to send the text and to comment on the inclination to morbidity as engendered by that writer. Perhaps there was in Margaret, in her essential sadness, a certain love of sorrow?

  “Why do you shake your head?”

  “Did I? It was at my own line of thinking. For myself…” I spoke slowly, for with the judge, as with Margaret, and with Ahab—though how different each was!—I could discover my thought in his presence. “For myself, I reject sorrow as essential to my being. I would pursue joy.”

  “It is part of your essential health.” My friend smiled at me, though there was still a trace of concern about his eyes.

  We changed our tea topic to the Try Pots, and I divulged my plan. In response, the judge stayed carefully neutral. Not even the lifting of his black eyebrow betrayed whether he thought my plan foolish or wise. I rather admired this careful neutrality. And he was helpful, making various suggestions about vacant lots and their availability for building. Suddenly he said, “It would be nice for you to have your close friend at hand, wouldn’t it? With your permission, I will make further inquiries.”

  Soon our discourse was broken off by a knock from the foreman of the movers, saying all was complete, and they were leaving.

  “Would you like me to accompany your inspection?” the judge asked.

  “Thank you, but…but I think I should like to amble my house by myself.”

  AS I WALKED through my home, furnished with the beautiful objects that I had bought, occasionally adjusting a chair, lifting a curtain, or tugging out a wrinkle in a rug, I felt myself blessed beyond any deserving.

  And I thought that I would not tell Charlotte that Kit was yet alive. Though it left me a liar, it left me having placed a higher value on Charlotte’s happiness than on my own clean conscience. But was it not arrogance in me that made me think I knew best in the matter, that my hand at the stopcock had the wisdom to regulate the flow of truth?

  The image oddly caused me to see myself as a male wizard in the midst of experimentation. And oddly that image gave way to one of Ahab, his hand on the tiller of the Pequod. The ship parted the waves at his will. I missed my husband.

  Everything being in order, the house being left with Mrs. Macy’s sister as guardian housekeeper, not to mention Judge Lord across the street and Mr. and Mrs. Hussey in residence while they directed the construction of their new inn, it was time to commence my journey to the silent Lighthouse and thence on to Kentucky.

  CHAPTER 87: Childhood as an Island

  SENTIMENTALLY, I wished I could hire the Camel to take me back to the Island, as it had taken me away. But Captain Musta
chio was away. I hired a sloop to take me directly from Nantucket to the Lighthouse.

  As I sailed away from Nantucket, I felt the final loosening of the bonds that marriage to Kit had imposed upon my spirit. Now I was married, but because my husband was independent, so was I. Yet I missed Ahab, and a lump rose in my throat whenever I thought of him. I thought of John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in which one is to imagine a compass describing a circle. The woman is the fixed point of that inverted V formed by the stance of the two-legged compass upon the paper. While the circle is drawn, the woman who is at its center merely turns in place. The man makes his circular voyage. Donne says that if the circle of the man’s voyage widens to a larger radius, then the fixed foot “leans, and hearkens after it,” which is true: as the circle becomes larger the compass stretches ever flatter to the page. So I felt myself to ever be harkening and leaning after Ahab as he sailed farther and farther away, even though in my case I had my own little journeys to make. In spirit, I was fixed in place, yearning, if not mourning, for my husband.

  And when the voyager comes home—to complete the compass figure—the twin arms embrace; he stands perpendicular to the page, erect, his wife beside him.

  During the last three weeks in Nantucket, waiting for spring as a safe time for my own travel, my longing for Ahab, my strong desire that he should see his hearth and home so beautifully and completely furnished, that he should take happy pride in my pregnancy, that he should share again with me that bed where our heads had made but one dent—all such desires had grown every day. My waist was thickening ever so slightly; in my breasts a special tenderness rapidly developed. I needed much sleep, and my appetite, particularly for the judge’s jams and jellies, increased geometrically. (The judge had found an importer of the wares of missionaries’ wives; hence, my jellies might be based on mangos from India, kiwi, coconut, pomegranate from the Holy Land. From the California territory came an avocado paste that I adored on salty crackers.)