Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  He stood as unyielding as a cliff against the onslaught of the sea and held me steady.

  All movement ceased.

  Like a double-trunked tree, we stood rooted to the wharf—so rooted that Mr. Starbuck had Tash row to another ladder so that he might meet his Mary. When I heard her soft cry behind me, I knew that they, too, had come together. I turned my head and saw the two of them walk down the wharf, arm in arm, under her umbrella.

  Where my second umbrella had landed, I had no idea, and the rain streamed off both Ahab and me till finally he said, “Home.” Someone placed the umbrella in his flinty, reddish hand, and we, too, moved side by side. He steered us along, with an occasional fond glance down at me. I could not take my eyes from him. I wanted to stand, facing him, on his shoes, as children do when learning to dance.

  CHAPTER 104: Idyll

  WHEN WE GOT to our door, Mrs. Macy-Maynard emerged, saying, “For all it’s being June, I thought you’d like a bit of fire to dry you out.”

  My husband and I merely nodded. I could not speak to any but him, but I’m sure she felt our thanks. The parlor fire was the picture of home, and before it she had set the tea table. What? A second good fairy, vigilant and provident, had visited, for on the tea table were the judge’s creamy, thin Irish dishes, and dainties that all bespoke the goodness of home: hot, fragrant bread, cranberry and huckleberry jam, fine slices of beef, a pat of goat cheese, a small basket of Nantucket apples. But Ahab and I could not eat for a long time, for embracing one another.

  Those things that I had thought would be difficult to say were somehow said without effort. “Safe in the bosom of Abraham” I remembered my father singing once, but I was safe in the bosom of Ahab. I do not know where he learned his kindness—known to all as an unapproachable, moody, hard, and forbidding man, most of his life spent at sea. Now his face had the soft glow reflecting the hearth, not the demonic burning from the try-pots. When I asked him how he had learned his kindness, he replied, “At thy knee, Una,” as though he had been my child.

  Finally, we ate, and his appreciation of the food was very great. I was surprised that he seemed quite as charmed by the dishes as the judge had been. “Ye can almost see through it,” Ahab remarked, holding his teacup toward the fire. “How wondrous delicate.” Then he turned and looked long into my face. “Never till this moment, in my home, beside my dear wife, have I felt so strongly that there might be a God, and he might be good.”

  I kissed him again.

  “Thy lips are sweeter than the berry,” he said. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length. “My eyes need to drink thee in.”

  Gladly did I take his gaze, and gladly return it, too. My Ahab, healthy, comfortable, his soul a sweet glowing. Yet this image is linked to the next homecoming.

  OUR SON, Justice, is there, a boy of four. Ahab is carried through the street on a stretcher. The white whale has taken his leg. Half out of his mind with pain, he yet holds my hand while they carry him home. “It’s bleeding again,” Ahab says to me. He is wrapped round and round in blankets, for it is a mean October wind. He is like a cocoon on a stick. When we breach the door, Justice is holding Mrs. Maynard’s hand, afraid, but Ahab calls the boy to him, kisses him, and then says, “Aloft, aloft,” and they carry him up to our bedroom. No longer bridal white, but the patchwork is cozy as a Kentucky home, greens and reds of the Christmas season to come.

  Let not the nightmare come to me so soon!

  Let me spin instead the idyll of Ahab and Una, those summer months in Nantucket when he returned intact from his first voyage after our marriage! Let me sing of dinner parties and picnics. Let me remember our white chamber all lit with whale oil lamps, and the tiny cheerful fire in the grate. Goose down and ironed linen. The fragrance of lavender. Ahab and Una joining as husband and wife.

  AT THE JUDGE’S BOARD, my husband and my friend Maria Mitchell honored each other with much courtesy and information, for Ahab was not lacking in lore of either stars or seas, both that which he had experienced and that he had found in books. Let me tell how Ahab gave the judge an enormous wooden trough, bought off Africa, for a fruit bowl. How he discoursed with the judge on the law systems of the Polynesians, and the ruin the well-meaning missionaries had wrought on that culture. Was there no subject on which Ahab could not discourse? No. All tastes and interests of others he cordially accepted. Let me tell how people stopped me on the street and asked if it was true: three caches of ambergris! How Ahab insisted that we accept the invitation of the Gardners, and how the old banker said, “Ahab, never have I seen anyone so improved by marriage!” And Ahab but chuckled in his throat, though I saw the fiery glance shoot from his eyes like a harpoon as soon as Mr. Gardner turned to admire Mrs. Coffin’s lace jabot.

  Afterward I asked Ahab if he felt himself much changed and if he liked such drawing-room discourse. “I think ye like it,” he answered. “And I will bridle up my tongue, or unleash it, in whatsoever way suits thy world.” But he seemed more himself when we had Captains Peleg and Bildad to dinner, with Aunt Charity.

  She told the tale of the letters and how she had had to pry them away from the caretaking captains, and Ahab laughed and said she was an angel of mercy as well as of charity. Old Bildad was so astonished by Ahab’s demeanor that he must have said a dozen times in the course of the evening, “Thou art changed, Ahab. Thou art changed.” Each utterance more dark than the one before.

  I would savor that first homecoming, be ever nourished by the idyll of that homecoming. For then it was that our marriage bed knew no limits, and I became pregnant with Justice. Together Ahab and I walked the moors and the meadows, and with sheep grazing in the distance we lay down among the violets and clover, the curly-cup gumweed, the heathers and heaths, on mosses and lichens, and studied the sailing clouds, took our bliss in the sunshine.

  “So it is among the brown island people, when they mate,” Ahab said. “Why not us?” Those picnic spots were secluded enough. No one knew but the sheep and omniscient clouds. Often we sat down with our picnic basket, lavishly stocked by the judge’s jam and jelly cupboard, and with those sweets we had breads, cold meats, cheeses, fruit, and often a flask of wine. How Ahab loved these fresh, dainty foods! I sat with my skirt over my legs, but after we had eaten, Ahab would pull back my skirt to my knee, and always I smiled fully at him. We lay back in one reclining—remarked some—quietly—on the clouds, but not too long of chat—and then he would come to me. My welcome was that which the eager earth gives the sun when she turns round each day to greet her fiery lord.

  One time we shed all our clothing to wallow and lounge in sunlight, and then I saw the scar like lightning that traversed from his temple to his heart. I traced it with my finger, but I did not ask whence it came. Of our pasts we seemed to know all we needed to know. Nothing was concealed, and though nothing was overtly revealed, all was known. In guilt and in forgiveness we counted ourselves equals, and always had. The sun himself envied us.

  Our joy at night by lamplight and candlelight was no less than when we made the sunny moors our bed, and once in his eagerness Ahab asked if we might not lie together on the carpet before the parlor fire.

  How well we loved, too, to sit in our library, both reading, occasionally reading aloud a paragraph or two, but neither attempting to instruct the other, and then with the beginnings of fatigue for either one of us, that person remarking, “Might we go upstairs soon?” and the reply “As soon as I finish this page.” Then our clasping hands and climbing up. Or almost equally pleasing was to come home from some entertainment, to mount the steps directly, wordlessly, urgently, to help each other with buttons and hooks, fall into goose down, and glory in our privacy.

  Our friends remarked, “Ahab grows younger every time we see him.” They would add, “And you, Una, also go backward in time. You yourself will soon be but a babe.” And here I would blush for fear that they alluded to my ambition for an infant.

  When the third week of July rolled around, but
no menses for Una, I thought my hopes fulfilled and confided as much to Ahab. His eyes spoke the soft love of his response; his lips said, “But if thy menses come yet again, then I shall enjoy thee in thy bloody time as well as now.” Yet we both felt we had got our child. In our marital bliss, we ceased not, but modulated to the key of celebration, of triumph, of tenderness and brimming gratitude.

  At this point, fearing his departure and his yearning for the sea, I asked my captain if he would take me out in a small boat, toward the old Lighthouse of my youth. He rented a beautiful sloop, easily handled by two, and one bright and bonny morning we sailed southwest. Once away from Nantucket, I put on boy’s clothes, for the fun of it. We flew before the wind. “Ye have made me sail for the sheer pleasure of it, Una!” Ahab exclaimed, his long gray hair billowed back from his brow. “If ye have secretly harbored a harpoon, throw it overboard and let me not lay eye upon it.”

  In early afternoon, we spied the Lighthouse, upright, rising against a slight haze. “I’ve seen it,” I said. “Now I would turn back.”

  “Not gam, not put in?”

  “Nay.”

  “But let’s tarry a bit in these waters,” Ahab said. He trimmed the sails. While the sloop drifted, he made sweet love with me, my eyes often resting on the gray shaft of the Lighthouse in the distance. I felt a completeness, my girlish self united with the woman and mother-to-be.

  After our fill of love, when we sat on the deck, eating our grapes, our fresh-sliced crescents of apple, our bread and cheese, the sparkling little waves all around us seemed to laugh and clap their hands in glee. We entered Nantucket harbor just as it was aglow with sunset, a pool of gold.

  BY THE THIRD WEEK of August, my menses had not appeared again. Mrs. Maynard declared me surely pregnant and that she would not be obliged to swim underwater and bore holes in the Pequod.

  The last week of August, William Mitchel reported that with the telescope he had spied Halley’s comet and invited us to come to watch. “To think,” he said, “that to my knowledge no man has seen it for seventy-six years!” But our nights were too precious to Ahab and me for that kind of stargazing. Now, we sat up in bed and talked and talked.

  As a young man Ahab had traveled occasionally on land, as well as by sea, and he wanted to share those sights of the Norway fjords and mountains with me. “Their churches are wooden and humble, made of beams and staves, like landlocked ships,” Ahab said, “for they seem to know the Spirit dwells not there but amongst the rocks of the high mountains.” When he spoke next of the old cathedrals of France, I knew that the questions haunting him before this voyage were those concerning the spiritual. When he spoke of Mont Saint-Michel beside the Normandy coast, on an island joined to the mainland by a single road, and that road covered by the tides twice a day, it seemed natural to me that for him a holy place might ultimately be haloed by water.

  “I’ve felt that way,” I said, “about my Lighthouse on the Island. There height and air spring upward from the rock—”

  “The rod of Jesse,” he interrupted.

  “—and water surrounds.”

  He went on to say that for him the most holy of man’s constructs was the cathedral of Chartres. “I saw Chartres rise, a small mountain itself, out of a wheat field on a plain. Inside, stone ribs, like those of a mighty whale, arched over me. I felt myself swallowed, like Jonah, and within that sepulcher of stone wondered, might I, too, find salvation?

  “On the floor,” Ahab continued, “twists the pattern of a labyrinthine path, like entrails. Pilgrims travel it on their knees to the central place, the navel of goodness. It is a shrine that acknowledges it is a dungeon”—my husband set his jaw even as he spoke—“but the stone walls are pierced with light shining through thick glass of unnatural, intense saturations of red and blue. This was a man-god-stained light,” he concluded, “that made me gnash my teeth—so much did I want to act upon it and for it to act upon me.”

  Here I touched my husband’s brow, and my fingertips remembered the try-pots, and I thought of the hot butchery of the business to which my husband was about to return, after this idyllic summer.

  “Might you not stay home?” It was the first time I had asked such a question.

  “Una, why burns this room so brightly? Whale oil. I bring light to the world. If it is not the colored light of Chartres, still it is a pure and useful light.”

  “Think of Prometheus.”

  “Punished for his hubris. But I wage an honest battle with the deep. I do not steal from the gods.”

  “Sometimes I fear I have stolen my happiness from the gods, for my life with you is beyond my due.”

  “Then let us smile and lounge while we may,” he said, strangely bemused, suddenly relaxed. “For they will have it back again. In no corner of the earth have I found a happiness that lasts.”

  “Nor an unhappiness!” I said.

  “Well spoke!” And Ahab smiled again, that rare, sweet cracking open of his face. Often a chuckle would break from him, but his grim lips seemed usually disconnected from the muscles that made for smiling. His smile honored me, and I have treasured it.

  “I have seen,” he spoke again, “the cousins of those colors at Chartres, of red and blue, in the petals of little alpine flowers. Their stems are thin and wiry, and they dance their colors on the high mountainsides the world over. They are much the same in Switzerland, or Vermont, or the foothills of the distant Himalayas.”

  So we talked our nights away. My dozing to sleep was with the blue and red of swaying flowers. But I dreamed more deeply that night of stony, time-gnawed Chartres; I was inside the vault, crawling on bloody knees, but no window and no light pierced those lofty white-dark ribs.

  That morning I found some spots of my blood on the sheets. Mrs. Maynard said it meant nothing at all, yet Ahab stayed on, well into September, to be sure that I would not miscarry. “Fear not,” he said. “I shall not leave thee with an empty womb.” Those days he cuddled me and brought me treats and books, and even, when I asked it, hummed a lullaby for me.

  When he was assured that all was well, there being no more bleeding, Ahab prepared to sail. Little Pip was deemed too young to go as cabin boy, but in the presence of Captains Peleg and Bildad, the judge, and Maria Mitchell, Ahab promised that if Pip would wait patiently and be obedient, he would go on the next voyage. Like a whirling dervish, Pip beat on his tambourine and danced for joy, till Ahab caught him and sent him outside to the pavement (where there were no Irish teacups about) to do his spinning.

  “PRETTY SHIP, thee hast thy ballast within thee,” Ahab said to me.

  “Do not kiss me, but smile at me once more,” I entreated for our good-bye on the wharf.

  “Let time be a pleasant wind, Una, in thy sails.” Long his gaze at me, and long my eyes on him. “Send thy thoughts of me to the moon, Una, and Luna will beam thy serenity back to me. Every night we will see the same moon. But write letters, too.”

  “I shall use my eagle quill till it is short as a sewing needle.”

  Then, Ahab smiled at me. But he could not stop at that and took me again in his arms. I trembled, as alpine flowers do against their mountain.

  CHAPTER 105: The Comet

  MY HAND on my belly, only so slightly swelling, I stood on the dock and waved my Ahab off. Then I rode in a buggy with Mary Starbuck out to ’Sconset, and we stood on the sandy beach and saw the last of the Pequod rounding Nantucket, far out to sea; finally its sails blended to a single white handkerchief against the sky, and then a dot, and then gone.

  Mary asked if I should want to spend the night with her at ’Sconset, but I said I wanted to return to town. And I invited her to visit me soon, and she returned the invitation. Superficially, I had not gotten to know her very well. Ahab seemed to feel that he saw quite enough of Mr. Starbuck at sea. The toast of Nantucket, we had visited ’Sconset not once. But I did know Mary anyway, profoundly, from that day in the rain on the wharf when she had seemed my double.

  When I got home, Mrs.
Maynard opened the door for me. “My captain is away tonight, too,” she said, “I thought I might spend the night with you. Here’s a hot toddy for you to sip.”

  Gladly did I share the parlor with her, she knitting and I sewing. We were pleasantly and cheerfully at work, but as I heard the clock bong through the night, I could not help but think how many strokes of that hammer would fall before Ahab came home again.

  Shortly after ten, Mrs. Maynard and I were both surprised by a late-night knock at the door, which I opened to an excited Maria Mitchell.

  “Halley’s comet’s visible tonight to the naked eye,” she said. “Come see it.”

  Mrs. Maynard declined, but I put on a wrap and hurried out with Maria. A number of people were coming out of their houses and pointing up. “Don’t look yet,” Maria instructed, as she and I walked beyond the houses to the old mill hill. “Wait till we get to the top.” From the crest of the hill, with the sound of the creaking timbers of the mill at my back, I viewed the celestial visitor, a beautiful bright streak in the sky. I wondered if Ahab was watching it.

  “Come home with me,” she urged, “and see it also through the telescope.”

  “The Comet”

  I did not want to leave Mrs. Maynard alone too long, but I hated also to disappoint my excited friend. “Some night, soon,” I promised, “I’ll come at night and watch with you through the telescope.”

  “Would you?” She clutched my arm.

  “Maria,” I said, “you are overwrought. I’ve never seen you so stirred.”