Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “I rather think,” she replied, “that total annihilation is the most comfortable position.”

  I was shaken. The horse clopped on. The children laughed behind us.

  “When I die,” she said, “I don’t expect to see any of my loved ones again. I’ll just become a part of all this.” She waved her hand at the surrounding countryside. “That’s all right with me.”

  “Sometimes I think the spirit may continue in some way,” I said, “after the body’s death, might know other spirits, might be happy. I like to entertain the idea. I don’t know.”

  “Time is something of an enemy,” she opined, “for us mortals. And yet I love it”—she fluttered her fingers in the air—“I love this moment, and it’s a child of time.”

  “At the party,” I said, “there was a man—the man—the only man who survived the wreck of the Pequod. I had heard of him before. He floated on a coffin till the Rachel picked him up.”

  “I thought as much,” Phoebe said. “He told the Steelkilt and Radney story. The ‘Moby Dick as god of justice’ story. That Elijah, whom Charity drowned, had some such theory.”

  “No, it was Gabriel, from the Jeroboam, who believed that.”

  “But Charity drowned Elijah, didn’t she?” How cold-bloodedly she repeated that fact!

  “Yes.”

  I did not tell Phoebe that I had seen this Ishmael some years before. I did not tell her that once, in an awkward moment, I had looked so deeply into him that I had concluded his eyes held an unfathomable profundity, and that I had remembered him, in some buried way, all those years.

  “I’ve avoided knowing—I haven’t wanted to know—about the last moments of the Pequod,” I said. “I don’t want to have it in my imagination. But now I could talk to him—the survivor. I could settle how it all happened.”

  “Well, you don’t have to.”

  “No, I don’t.” I envisioned the gaping maw of Moby Dick, the sockets in the upper jaw where the lower teeth housed themselves. His great mass. Bloody water. “But perhaps it’s something I should try to settle.”

  “It may be.”

  “Do you have an opinion?”

  She slowly turned her body toward me, to look at me. It was the first time that she had spent the energy to twist herself toward me, though I had felt her eyes shift toward me as she spoke. I glanced at her. “No,” she said slowly. “You’ll decide. I can’t tell you whether ’tis best or not to settle the Pequod with the sailor’s account. That’ll be fine, Una, whatever you decide.”

  I laughed. “You will make a good Unitarian, Phoebe Folger.”

  “I expect so.”

  “But who was Ishmael, anyway?” I asked. “In the Bible?”

  “An outcast. Somebody who lived on the edge of things.”

  I glanced at her. “As I do.”

  “No. You come and go. Sometimes going out, sometimes coming in. Like the waves.”

  “What became of Eunice Ross, when the Quakers kept her out?”

  “She’s in now. She was twenty-four years old, but they let her in, with Boston’s daughter.”

  I refused the request from the vehicle behind to stop at Altar Rock, not wanting to prolong the journey for Phoebe, and we clopped on to ’Sconset. By the time we arrived at the sea, I was full of admiration and affection for one very old Phoebe Folger, mathematician, philosopher, and advocate of social justice.

  CHAPTER 153: A Sermon Overheard

  MRS. MITCHELL, being used to cooking and keeping up with her children, really required very little help from me, and she quickly told me that my job for the seaside week was to entertain Phoebe Folger. As this arrangement suited Phoebe and me as well, all fell into place in a way that seemed almost predestined.

  I had not expected to make a new friend, let alone a friend who was a very old woman who had lived in Nantucket all along, but she somewhat filled the vacant place left by the demise of my own mother. Phoebe was more outspoken than my mother, and I associated her with Great Affection, rather than with love, but still my tie to her was fully rewarding.

  Although she was a little tottery, one day Phoebe insisted I help her down the steps so that she could walk directly on the beach. Descending was a strain for her, and she suggested we stand in the shade of the fragrant pine trees before we expose ourselves to the sun again.

  When I said we might sit down, she said pleasantly, “No, I’d rather stand. It’s too difficult for me to get up off the ground.” What a sensible person she was. “I once promised myself,” she went on as though she had read my thoughts, “that I wouldn’t be one of those tiresome old people who refused to accept help when they needed it. Or one who talked about her aches and pains all the time. But I won’t get into unnecessary trouble, either. I know what I can do.”

  The ocean rumpled itself before us, and a few pale clouds hung on the horizon. It was a bright day, but not so hot as to threaten, and besides, we stood in the shade. The shadow of a spray of pine needles danced on Phoebe’s cheek. My hand reached for my own cheek: so long ago my father left the print of his hand there; and there my husband Kit violated my visage, no, sought to displace my identity, with his assaulting hand. I had hidden in the Pequod’s hold, among the barrels of harvested whale oil. The massive ribs of the ship had curved around me as though I were Jonah inside the whale.

  Phoebe and I inhaled the sweet fragrance of pine resin. I felt enormously happy to be there with my new friend. Seaside, with Phoebe Folger, I felt this was a world that gave back as well as took.

  Then she surprised me by telling me about her daughter Nan, a bit older than I, who had died. I was much moved by the story. A cancer had killed her, but Nan had had some episodes of derangement as well.

  “I know the pain of it for you,” I said. “My husband before Captain Ahab became mad.”

  “And did he get over it, too?”

  “No, he never did.”

  She stepped forward on the path into the sunshine; the pine-spray shadow slid from her cheek. She looked back over her shoulder and smiled. “Now, let’s go on to the water. I want my shoes off, if you’ll help me.”

  If she was something of a mother to me, I was something of a daughter to her. I supposed Maria Mitchell had been, too.

  “You know,” Phoebe said, lifting the hem of her skirt above the water, “Nan was not very mathematical or science-minded, but she was interested. Like you.”

  AFTER OUR RETURN from the beach, Phoebe was tired enough to ask to lie down to rest, and I took the opportunity to go visit Robben. As I knew the judge was still lingering in town, I thought Robben might enjoy some company. I let myself in without knocking, and then was surprised to hear a male voice speaking:

  “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide underwater, unapparent for the most part—”

  (It was the voice of the storyteller from the pleasure party. It was Ishmael.)

  “—and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea—”

  My heart constricted. Did he know my secrets as well as Ahab’s?

  “Consider, however baby-man may brag of his science and skill, how forever and forever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make—”

  The man was preaching a sermon, not to the sea, but about the sea. I heard no word from Robben, the assumed but out-of-sight audience for Ishmael’s lecture.

  “Yes, foolish mortals”—did he imagine he addressed a multitude?—“Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two-thirds of the fair world it yet covers. And wherein differ the sea and the land?”

  He paused as though he expected Robben to answer, but I knew that Robben was enjoying this philosophical run of rhetoric and would not reply.

  “Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yo
urself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.”

  With that I noiselessly turned and fled through the Gothic Ach into my own territory. Too much this man traced the path of my own life. Oh, it was done all abstractly, but too accurately, too closely.

  My vegetable garden was already plucked over, but I distractedly found myself walking among the bent stalks, the leftovers of the harvest. I kicked a clod of soil. I got a hoe and chopped away at the row, though it would not want weeding till the earth had traveled halfway around the sun again.

  This is stupid, I told myself. And then I claimed to myself that despite all, I was glad that I had left my particular, insular Tahiti. Where would Justice be if I had not? Nor would I have had any of the friends who were so dear to me. I was sure Phoebe Folger would not offer such conservative advice as Ishmael. (But then she had been born on Nantucket and never left.)

  I threw the hoe down among the dry stalks and passed again through the arch in the hedge. Robben’s flowers were yet radiant, and I would enjoy them. I inspected the docile green whale, and walked around the circle of his flowery pond.

  Whales! One black, one white—how they had stove my life! And yet, unlike Ahab, I could not blame them. What were they but the largest life-form? Were they our own animal self inflated like the pig’s bladder turned balloon? Nonetheless, I preferred this pretty green fellow. This bloodless, vegetable, well-pruned artifact. His spout and he, all privet, all one. Oh! Here came Robben with Ishmael in tow.

  “Una,” Robben called. “Meet a new friend, Ishmael.”

  “We’ve met before,” he said, as they walked toward me.

  Suddenly my bad temper was gone. “Twice met,” I said and smiled at the sailor. “You are a wonderful narrator.” (All our sensibility is surely tied to blood, not vegetable juices.)

  “I would suppose that you yourself have a story to tell,” he answered, his pontificating manner all evaporated.

  Robben said, “He’s writing a book of his experiences. Ishmael wants to understand all that is possible to know about ships and whales. Mrs. Maynard sent him out to interview me on masthead figures. He came to Nantucket to interview Captain Pollard, whose Essex—”

  “And I have given him a foretaste of my thoughts on the sea—as they may appear in my book, more or less.”

  “Do you like her?” I asked.

  “The sea or Mrs. Maynard?” Robben put in puckishly.

  I laughed. “That’s just the sort of confusion Mrs. Maynard fosters.”

  “I did not expect to see you again,” Ishmael said. “I think that you must surely have a gloomy association with me. At the party, when you found out I was the survivor, you quickly turned away.”

  “Do you like the sea at all?” I repeated. His answer was important to me.

  “No one who knows the sea—no, let me say more narrowly, more close to my own experience: no man who worked a whaling ship did not both hate and love the sea.” His countenance grew contracted and dark. I had seen Ahab draw into himself in just such a mood. “When we kill her mightiest creature,” he mumbled, “her great, oil-saturated baby, surely we show that we hate the oceanic mother.”

  “Did you know my husband well?” My heart quailed. I did not know how far I wanted to pursue the subject.

  “As I said, the last voyage of the Pequod was my first one with Captain Ahab. In the beginning, he was quite mysteriously removed from all of us. We sailed on Christmas Day—”

  “I remember.” Even to Ahab, even then, that had seemed an unfortunate, sacrilegious gesture.

  “And only after the weather moderated did Captain Ahab come on deck.”

  “He had had a fall,” I said. “He was not entirely well. Before he left, the ivory leg splintered and gored him.”

  “So I came to understand.”

  We all paused. He seemed to look at me for permission to continue. Again, his eyes bewitched me. I must have granted assent; I do not know what my own countenance said.

  “So after the weather was better, Ahab was much on deck—”

  “I hope there were beautiful days.”

  “Days as lovely as a Persian sherbet, held in a great glass.” Another pause. “And Queequeg—”

  “Queequeg?”

  “Yes. A friend as dear to me as though we were a married couple. Our acquaintance, our appreciation, began, in fact, with the renting of the same bed at the Spouter-Inn. Queequeg.”

  “Then this is the fourth and not the third time I’ve seen you. I saw you going aboard with Queequeg, in the fog, accosted by Elijah.”

  “Whose prophecies all were true…. Did I know Captain Ahab well? Queequeg and I often heard him speaking to Starbuck or Stubb, the carpenter, the cook, Pip. He rarely spoke to me, for I was the greenest of the green at whaling. As green as yonder green fellow.” He gestured toward the centerpiece of the garden.

  “But sometimes I heard him speaking to himself. It may be impudence in me to say so, but yes, I think I knew him well. I think I knew him as someone connected to myself, as though I were a man on a monkey rope—you know the device?—and he held the other end.”

  “Whatever possessed you to go a-whaling?” Robben asked his guest. And I was grateful to Robben, for I had heard enough, for the time being.

  “Well, I had been several times in merchant vessels. I wanted not just to cross the ocean like an errand boy, but to live with her, to live upon her heaving breast, to know her creatures, not to consort with some silly merchandise in the hold. I had no money in my purse, and I had a melancholy in my head.”

  How melodiously he spoke. Whole paragraphs rolled from his tongue.

  “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; whenever I feel like deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. Which of you has not sometimes felt that way—half in love with death, senselessly combative, restless, and what do you do with yourselves then?”

  “I’ve walked. Sometimes in deep snow, to unpredictable destinations.”

  “I grab my chisels and mallets and a block of wood and have a go at it.”

  “Sometimes,” I added to my declaration, “I have climbed aloft.”

  “Ah, a very philosophic perch,” Ishmael put in.

  “Sometimes I sew, or read, or even write,” I added. “Or fish.”

  “You have too many resources. I can go to sea or, like Cato, throw myself upon my sword. But I don’t. At least not so far. I quietly take to the ship.”

  “You can also write your story,” Robben said mildly.

  “Ishmael,” I said, “you have an unusual name.”

  “My name is David Pollack.”

  “David Pollack!”

  “Yes. Is it so remarkable a name?”

  “I know a David Poland. He is a very dear friend.”

  “Well, then, the name augurs well, though I would seem to be an informal, bastardized version of your friend. I call myself Ishmael, and I ask that you do also.”

  CHAPTER 154: Plans

  HE STAYED a few days at Robben’s house, during which time my tongue wagged like a bell clapper, right and left. To the south a new friend, female, old, wise, a kind of dispassionate mother. To the north a new friend, male, of my own decade, a whaler, a seeker, the survivor of a wreck. I rebounded between them—and it was a joyous clanging of that clapper, my tongue, for they both listened as well as they talked. And always in the background was the sound of children let loose, self-sufficient, ordering their own small society with minimal interference from adults. How would any one of them have remembered those October days on the sand? What would
Pog have said of his multiple playmates, the bright and cooling weather?

  But then the south house fell vacant again, and Ishmael, too, returned to the town. Robben must have felt my loneliness, for he and Judge Lord appeared with a hot pear flan. I was in my own window-faceted room watching the sea, but I smelled the flan and heard them enter into the main room and the scuff of chairs on the floor. How comfortable to have separate neighbors, but all our houses open to one another. I imagined them seated at the table, the pie upon it, waiting patiently; and when I entered the room, all was just as I had envisioned.

  “We have a proposition, Una,” the judge said.

  “And?”

  “To come to the point,” he smiled, “Robben and I have decided to travel together to Italy and Greece.”

  “How fine!” Then the north house, too, would be vacant? The distant flashing light my closest friend? The summer people were already gone. No house in ’Sconset was inhabited.

  “And we want to take Justice and Jim with us,” Robben said.

  “You may think them contented children—” Austin said.

  “We think they may run off to sea, otherwise. Probably you did not notice. The day after Maria’s comet—the judge said you were sleeping late—they spent that day at the wharf, interviewing captains. The judge received a visit from Captain Mayhew—”

  “The Jeroboam?” I asked. “The Jeroboam was in port?” Would they all come back, again and again, but not the Pequod? What of the Samuel Enderby? I heard the clack of ivory, of Boomer crossing his bone arm with Ahab’s whalebone leg.

  “The same Jeroboam. Mayhew said he had given Justice a promise long ago to take him—”

  “By all means, he and Jim must travel with you two instead. Believe me, I know too well what can happen to cabin boys.” I thought of Chester, whose curls resembled Justice’s. “I know it far better than either of you. I will never be able to thank you enough if you will take them.”