Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  He raised her up to sit on his shoulder, while the ocean ran around his ankles. She waved one hand gleefully, pleased with her perspective atop the boy-tower. Their two heads conspired in contrast—black and gold.

  Just then, a slick gray body arced into the air far out to sea, like a gray crescent moon. We watched as three other dolphins, close in, breached and continued to cavort. How heavily they slapped back into the water. From her shoulder seat, Liberty smacked her little palms together in response to the dolphins.

  ONLY WEEKS LATER, the child had toddled into the sea, despite the watchful eye of her mother and her four half sisters and brothers, and drowned.

  The oldest Isaac Starbuck child came riding on the fast horse, and Mary and I went in the buggy as rapidly as we could. We feared that Frannie would throw herself from the cliff, so Mary and I took her from Sankaty to stay with us at ’Sconset. We were completely vigilant, taking turns watching her door all night. Only Justice was admitted to the room. When I looked in, he sat beside Frannie’s bed holding her hand. His face was like a weeping wall. His swollen lips contorted silently. None of us could have been the least prepared, and my heart was wrung for Liberty and for Frannie and wrung again for my boy’s anguish. Justice had to bear what I would have borne, so many years ago at the Island Lighthouse, had Frannie died of the smallpox.

  Frannie refused to see Isaac or any of her stepchildren, which I thought was unfair and unfortunate, but Frannie’s extreme state of mind was not to be argued with. She screamed at the mention of Isaac’s name. I was about to write to her mother to come when Frannie became calmer and announced she would move back into town. She said she could never bear again to live at the lighthouse, or with Isaac and his children. Since she and Isaac were not legally married, the decision was available for Frannie. Still struggling with grief, my heart went out to Isaac and the injustice dealt him. For a time, one of his sisters came to help him.

  In town, Frannie kept house again for the judge, until she exchanged letters with the antislavery league that resulted in her attaching herself to travel with Frederick Douglass’s party.

  My cousin and I have the indissoluble link of shared childhood between us, and we keep up a regular correspondence. She is always alert for any news of Susan, and I am grateful to her for that as well as for a thousand other kindnesses. But never again has there been the bliss of connection between Frannie and me that I felt the day we watched the dolphins. Of the many interesting observations Frannie has written to me is this one, of Frederick Douglass: “He does not look at my skin, my face, and think ‘disfigured,’ any more than I look at him and think ‘black.’ No I think ‘Great Soul’ and ‘True Warrior’ when I listen to him address the crowds.”

  Each in our own way, we sought relief from our loss. I took Justice up on the roof walk, where I did find for myself consolation and connection. But Justice merely gazed across the darkness to the lonely Sankaty Light.

  Gradually, over months, his grief lessened, and he and Jim spoke enthusiastically, to my dismay, of going to sea someday soon.

  CHAPTER 143: A Suitable Marriage

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION of his book The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Frannie helped the Quakers raise money in America to purchase Douglass’s freedom. She also worked on his newspaper The North Star, in which he wrote: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color…” Frannie attended the first women’s rights convention in the United States, with Aunt Agatha, in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, where Douglass demanded that women be given the right to vote.

  SOME SIX MONTHS after Frannie left the Sankaty Light—to take up his history—Isaac began to call again upon Mary Starbuck. Neither she nor I had any doubt that he was courting her. Mary had always had a shining serenity to her countenance, but now she began to shine with life renewed. When the proposal came, she accepted.

  They were married in the Unitarian Church, to which Mary transferred her church membership, and I thought there was no emblem more appropriate than its golden dome, presiding over the beginning of their life together.

  With the height of the lighthouse, her new home, Mary fell in love as much as I had done at age fourteen with my Lighthouse tower. She loved, too, the service to the light, and the fidelity that it required. She had had no desire to stay in the home that she had shared with the first Mr. Starbuck. The cottage was a house, I told Mary, with its low stone wall, that seemed married to the land. I told her that a lighthouse is married to the air.

  I was truly happy for both Isaac and Mary (she had not even to change her last name, since it was already Starbuck), but now I felt much more alone, since my neighbor to the south was gone, and her house stood empty. Increasingly, Justice and I turned to our neighbor to the north, Robben Avalon, for company.

  CHAPTER 144: What Has Proved to Be a Last Visit

  JUDGE LORD rode out to visit with Justice and me, and with Robben, every three or four days. He took over the horse I had bought for Frannie, saying that if she could learn to ride, he could. But he was really too big for her “lady’s” horse, and I persuaded him to write to David Poland to purchase him a Tennessee walking horse and to bring it up from the South.

  David not only brought the horse to Nantucket on the ferry but also rode the animal out to ’Sconset himself. As we watched his approach, David seemed as small as a monkey atop the tall animal. I noticed David’s teeth shining in his beard in a big bow of a smile, whether with pleasure at seeing us again or in self-conscious amusement at how he looked aboard a Tennessee walking horse, I could not tell. The animal’s running walk was a marvel to see coming down the road.

  Judge Lord hurried to meet them and actually held up his arms to David, as though he were a child, to help him dismount, so high up he sat, at fully sixteen hands. And David jumped into the judge’s hands without embarrassment. I saw, in general, that David was much more easy with all aspects of himself and his life than he had ever been before.

  “It’s the furniture,” he explained to me one night by my hearth. “That and my house. I have a world I’m normal in.”

  “I have a roof walk,” I replied.

  He smiled and nodded, knowing my explanation would come later.

  David would take no pay from the judge for his trouble of delivering the horse, though I urged him to do so; he insisted that the miniature furniture had already paid him enough. His sister had, indeed, remarried, he said, and he had built himself a small place of his own. It was literally small—everything to his scale. I liked to imagine how someone lost in the Virginia woods might feel that he had stumbled into fairyland when he came to David’s little house and how when bearded David himself emerged such a person might turn tail and run. David stayed at my house in the upstairs bedroom across from Justice.

  It comforted me to have David in the house. I liked to see him and Justice standing together, one a bearded, short man, the other a curly-headed, beanstalk boy, talking to each other with the respect of equals. So we all are—equals—I mused, and what does stature, or skin color, or age have to do with it?

  To my surprise, after their gruff beginning at the Frederick Douglass Atheneum speech, Robben and David now got along very well. Robben requested David to serve as a model for him, and David said Robben might do the sculpture, if he would do it at my house instead of in his studio.

  Robben agreed, and so we all got to see the image of David emerge from a short cypress stump. Day by day we watched Robben chisel and carve a remarkable sculpture, about half David’s real size. He was seated in a chair with a high back. Not on David’s head, but in an incision in the chair back, Robben carved a suggestion of a crown. David’s short arms and legs were represented accurately and proportionately, but they were scarcely to be noticed. It was the face, the expressiveness of the large eyes, that drew the viewer. It made my heart sing. With this piece, Robben passed into creating or suggesting emotion and intellect of an individualized nature in his figures. And yet, there was somethi
ng unmistakably idealized or romanticized about the figure that rendered it not false but more true to the vision of the carver.

  “You like it, Una,” Robben said, “because I am absent from the figure. This sort of work requires the artist to give himself to his subject. It’s a Keatsian aesthetic—a negative capability.”

  But I thought there was a union of subject and artist in the carving.

  David spent long hours happily contemplating his smaller artistic self. Near the end of David’s visit, we spread a blanket for a celebratory picnic at the edge of the grass. The guest of honor was the statue of David, seated permanently in his chair, a centerpiece for the bread and meat, while we all lolled about on the blanket. We were all there—Mary and Isaac, all the children, the judge, and Maria Mitchell and her father.

  At the picnic, Robben asked David what we should do with the sculpture.

  “I’d like you to make me a drawing of it,” he said. “Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” Robben answered. “A quick sketch would be best.” And he asked Justice to run into his house for pencil and paper.

  “After that, I’ll have the drawing,” David said. “I’d like to give the sculpture to Una and let her keep it close to her hearth, as a decoration.”

  I was surprised. But moved and pleased. “Our first conversations were by the hearth,” I said. “In Kentucky, when you came to my cabin the second time. That was a rocking chair, though.”

  “That makes no difference,” David said firmly.

  And of course he was right. Again I thought, that night as I lay in bed, of how David surprised me in his ability to evolve.

  WE INSTALLED the icon at the hearth—David was very satisfied with it—and he said he planned to leave Nantucket soon. “Now if I never see you again,” he said to me, “you will have a way to remember me and think of me.”

  CHAPTER 145: A Song

  HIS WORDS haunted me. I did not believe that I would not see him again—why shouldn’t he come to Nantucket again, having done so twice?—and yet David’s words had the resonance of truth. I felt more pain at parting from him than I ever had before.

  As soon as David left, I went to Robben’s studio to talk about the sculpture. Robben said that his little wooden piece of a small American person named David Poland was in some ways a response to the grandeur of the standing, marble figure of Michelangelo’s David. He said that the idea that he was claiming his own territory and that he had a right to his own vision had come to him as he worked, not from the outset. “But doing the piece has changed me, Una,” he added. “And changed what I want to do.”

  With my heart thudding like a mallet against my breastbone, I told Robben I had taken up writing, at Frannie’s encouragement on the apple-pie day. “I have sailed between Scylla and Charybdis, right at the first,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The two hardest things in my life have been the deaths of my first baby and of my mother.” Suddenly I was overwhelmed with grief. I covered my face with my hands, peeked through my fingers, and blurted, “Robben, in all the universe, there is nothing so dead as a dead baby!” I erupted in sobs. Through my spasm, I heard my friend crooning, “Una, Una.” Eventually I calmed myself and continued, “I wrote about them first. I was afraid that if I saw them looming in the distance of my narrative my courage to move forward would fail me.”

  “The death of the second Liberty,” he observed gently, “would not be much easier to tell. Or Ahab’s.” When I made no reply, he continued, “Every week I will cook you a pie—tasty as Frannie’s—to remind you of your commitment.” He winked at me and added that he was an excellent baker.

  He was indeed, and his creations over the following weeks were not only delicious, but very pleasing to the eye. There was an intensity about Robben’s mind, a keenness—though it was tuned to an artistic rather than a scientific pitch—that reminded me of Giles, and, of course, the baking reminded me of Kit. I have already said that in his understanding not only of my moods but also of who I was, he resembled Ahab. In short, I found much of what I had loved in other men in him. While I developed for him the most ardent friendship, I experienced none of the physical excitement that had drawn me to both Kit and Ahab. Still I began to feel a physical restlessness.

  One lonely night—Justice was away at the Mitchells’—I went up on the rooftop, looking for solace in the stars. I wanted to feel again that I was a part of some large entity. Under Maria’s tutelage, I could easily map the sky now, but I only wanted the glitter. With my hand on the rough chimney, I dwelt among stars, and my heart became quiet and happy. It was no philosophical idea that brought peace. With the stars, as had occurred that first night on the roof walk of my new home at ’Sconset, all of my inward activity grew still. I resolved into Being. No longer Una, I was one with all that was.

  Then, strangely in the air, I heard singing. I knew that voice. It was Mary Starbuck. She sang the old Shaker hymn “ ’Tis a gift to be simple; ’tis a gift to be free.” And I knew that she was standing at the top of the Sankaty Light, singing. Her singing floated like filaments through the universe.

  Out at sea, I saw the fire from a whaler, her two try-pots joined in the distance to make a blazing red spot.

  CHAPTER 146: A Squeeze of the Hand

  EVERY DAY, I knocked on Robben’s door, or he on mine. I felt a happiness at our being merely in the same room that transcended any specific language. Strange it was that as I used language, as I shaped it into re-creations of people and places, I also felt its inadequacy. It could serve to describe the past; it could not capture what I presently felt.

  Sometimes I wrote in the woodworking studio while Robben chiseled. I liked the sound of his tool moving into the wood, the thunk of the mallet. When he sharpened the chisels, even the grindstone on the metal pleased me. “It zizzles,” I told him. “Sizzles?” “No, zizzles my nerves.”

  He was carving a bust of Frederick Douglass, working in a deep ebony, which he said was a very hard wood, and it was quite beautiful. I asked him why he had made it slightly larger than life. “Because Frederick Douglass is slightly larger than life,” he answered. And I felt deep satisfaction in his answer.

  “And why did you make David’s statue smaller than he is?”

  “I was a relative beginner then. But still it was right. To show that it didn’t matter.”

  One day when I was wandering the beach, looking at the clouds, I wished that Robben could chisel a bust of Ahab. But of course he had never seen him. Perhaps it was for me to embody Ahab—in words. I looked at the clouds and saw Ahab’s visage there. I was surprised when I went inside that Robben promptly asked me if I would like him to make a bust of Justice. Of course I said yes.

  So I would have a version of my Ahab, for Justice resembled him, but restored and idealized. And I smiled, for in the Justice bust I would also have the bust of myself, which long ago I had wished that Robben would want to make.

  “The boy’s curls are like yours,” Robben said.

  “His face is much like his father’s.”

  “I love doing the hair of Frederick Douglass,” he said. The cross-hatch marks did make the wooden hair look crinkled, like Douglass’s. “My own hair feels as I would imagine Douglass’s to feel.” He put his left hand into his hair. “I’ve always thought I was partly black.” He continued to chisel away. So matter-of-fact! An idea that would certainly scandalize most! My body flared.

  I put down my pen, walked to him, and held out my hand. “Robben,” I said, and smiled.

  He stopped still, his mallet poised above the head of the chisel. Many expressions passed over his face. I saw alarm. I saw a flicker of sadness, for me. I saw a warm affection. Slowly he put down the tool. Slowly he held out his hand to me. I took it.

  He waited a moment, then said, “Tell me, Una, truly. How does my hand feel to you? Now?”

  “It’s cold,” I said. “It’s a bit moist.” I laughed, for the description did not sound complimentary.
The flare of romance was already settling back into friendship.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s very dear to me,” I said quickly.

  He squeezed my hand. His remained strangely cold and lifeless. “There is nothing I admire more about you than your honesty,” he said.

  What was this warmth in his face—warmth without passion? He looked more heated when he sculpted the wooden breasts of masthead figures. What was this kindness in his expression? Ah, behind it—so like Giles!—a plea for understanding.

  “What is it?” I asked. “We are friends,” I added. “Tell me what is in your heart.”

  “Be my friend forever,” he said fervently.

  “I will.”

  “There is only one hand for me. Another friend has come to me. I never expected it.”

  “A soul mate?” I asked.

  “When I squeeze that hand, and the squeeze is returned, then my hand is warm. Then my hand is home.”

  He squeezed my hand again, and again I felt the cold dampness of his.

  “Whose hand?” I asked.

  “You can guess, Una. Guess.”

  I found myself smiling.

  “My two best neighbors,” I said. “The woodcarver and the judge.”

  But I went home soon, strangely shaken.

  CHAPTER 147: Una Preaches to the Waves

  WHAT AN EMPTINESS in the house! Justice away. I glanced at the hedge. Be my friend forever, he had said, and meant it. Yes. But what was I to do with that flare of feeling that comes when a woman loves a man because they are woman and man?

  Robben and the judge. I knew of such practices, of course. I knew of my husband Kit with Giles, our friend. When I was a cabin boy, I knew that sailors, in the absence of women, sometimes bodily loved one another.