by Amy Brill
“I think she’s false,” Hannah said flatly. “I don’t think you see everything there is to see.”
“And you do? You see only the saturated ends of the spectrum, my dear. Dark or light. True or false. Yet we live upon what might be the greyest place on Earth.”
* Even under the cloudy First Day sky, Hannah found it painful to look at Mary directly. Her pale skin was nearly translucent, but her eyes were a bright, demanding shade of blue. In every weather, her gold hair shimmered as if reflecting summer sun. Gazing upon something so inarguably lovely was lulling. Whenever she looked at Mary, Hannah wanted to keep looking, and then she found herself tongue- tied and confused, awkward even in the simplest conversations.
Hannah had tried, as a child, to penetrate the mysterious web of Island girls her age. They seemed bound to one another as tightly as their stitches. The last time she’d joined a tatting circle had been when they were twelve or thirteen years of age. Hannah had sat rigid as a flagpole in the chair she’d been offered, and studied the hoop in her lap. The easy chatter of the girls around her was as unfamiliar and intimidating as a foreign tongue, and Hannah felt sorry that she’d come.
Tallulah Barnes had been there, Hannah recalled, and Lilian Archer, and Mary of course. Hannah had picked at her forlorn skein of slender thread until Tallie leaned over and gasped with a kind of shocked pity, and the other girls had ceased talking and gathered around. “Hannah, you’ll ruin it!”
Lilian had brightened for a rescue, laying her own work aside and
turning to Hannah’s.
“I’m certain we can put it to right,” she said.
“Hannah despises tatting, isn’t that right?” Mary asked. “Well, it takes practice,” Lilian offered, picking at the threads. “My mother says that it’s part and parcel of a lady’s education. Tatting is, I mean.” Tallie rolled her eyes but didn’t look as if she really thought the idea was silly. “If we hope to marry eventually.”
All the girls had giggled, but Hannah hadn’t understood the joke. Mary said something about a boy, and then there was silence, and Hannah realized that she’d been asked a question.
“Pardon?” More giggling. Tallie and Lilian exchanged a look Hannah couldn’t interpret. Her face had flushed. What did they want from her?
“Tallie was only asking what you thought about Peter Macy,” Mary said, not unkindly.
Hannah had kept her eyes on the mess of silken thread in Lilian’s hands. What was she expected to say? She chose the truth.
“I haven’t any thoughts of him,” she stammered.
“What about Nathaniel Starbuck?” Tallie asked.
“Or Zachary Phillips?”
“Zachary? Don’t be absurd. Why would Hannah think on him?”
“Well he’s quite bookish,” Mary said calmly. “And Hannah likes books. Don’t you, Hannah?”
“Maybe Hannah isn’t interested in boys,” Lilian said, patting her on the knee. “She’s smarter than all three of them put together, anyway.”
“My mother says that women who read too much—” Tallie began, but Mary broke in.
“Hush, Tallie.” She took Hannah’s hoop from Lilian and handed it back to her. “It wasn’t so bad after all. Go on with the stitch—you’ll get it in time.”
But Hannah had shaken her head and risen from the chair so abruptly that the girls scattered like startled birds. They’d called after her, but she hadn’t gone back, not that evening and not afterward.
It wasn’t true that she never thought of boys; she just had no concept of what to say to one who didn’t happen to be her brother. The other girls seemed steeped in such things; Hannah had often watched them as they giggled and ran after each other, and she even pretended she was speaking to Peter Macy once or twice, addressing her own wavering reflection in the glass windowpane of her bedroom. But she’d felt so foolish and vain that she never bothered to make the attempt in life. Over the years, her sense of ineptitude, along with her injured pride, had only hardened, and she’d shunned most of the attempts the women made to include her in their activities. Eventually, they had stopped trying, all except for Mary.
Whenever she looked at Mary now, though, Hannah saw Edward’s empty chair in the garret, his empty trunk, his empty seat at the table.
Hannah scanned the crowd outside the Meeting House for her father, but all the men looked alike in their wide-brimmed hats.
“Have you had any letters?” Mary asked, swaying slightly to try to meet Hannah’s roving eye. Hannah looked back down at her. Mary’s hand floated up to pat a stray lock of hair into place. Her fingers were white as worms.
“We haven’t had a letter in at least a month,” Hannah answered. That was the excruciating truth. Each day, en route to her job at the Atheneum, she checked their little wooden box at Riddell’s store—an ancient, dilapidated structure right in the center of Town, whose sun-bleached wooden shingles, sagging porch, and squeaky door belied its importance as the housing for all the Island’s correspondence. The enormous canvas sacks stuffed with letters hung from the rafters like fat men on gallows, each labeled with a destination—Pacific grounds, Cape of Good Hope, North Atlantic. Women and girls flowed in and around them like a school of fish, hoping for news or trying to deliver their own. The bags were full of words describing deaths and births, grievances and reprieves. Above all, Hannah knew, they contained oaths of everlasting love. She averted her eyes from the bulging repositories of so many hopes and dreams; staring at them felt like inviting disappointment.
“I’ve had none for a fortnight,” Mary sighed. “More. Let me think. The last one came the day we had Debating. You weren’t there, were you?”
Hannah shook her head. She never went to the Debating Society, though Edward had insisted that she’d be a hundred times more convincing on any subject than most of its participants.
“The necessity of comprehensive education for both Sexes, for example,” he’d said one evening in their kitchen. “Or the importance of proper alignment of one’s furniture in the perpendicular.”
“As far as education goes, I doubt anything I might say at such a gathering would hasten an onslaught of colleges for women,” Hannah answered, sweeping as if the broom were responsible for the pathetic number of baccalaureate programs open to members of her Sex, all of which she could count on one hand.
“Of course, I attend only for amusement,” Edward added, a trail of crumbs from his toast with jam following him across the just-swept kitchen to his seat at the table.
“Is there any other reason you do anything?” she asked. “Pick up your feet.”
He obliged, his knees knocking the underside of the table.
“You’d rather enjoy the spectacle of our local windbags pecking at each other’s already porous arguments. With the exception of Mary Coffey, I didn’t hear a single speaker that had a passion for their topic or an ability to express it in a manner not guaranteed to provoke immediate slumber. It’s better than a tonic. Was that a snort?”
Hannah attacked the floorboards so that a little cloud of dust and ash rose around her broom.
“Mary Coffey? I expect your eyes overruled your ears if that’s what you came away with.”
“I don’t know,” he said, brushing crumbs carefully into his long palm. “Maybe you’d be surprised.”
Hannah hadn’t gone to Debating, and she declined repeated invitations from the Ladies’ Temperance Auxiliary and the Book Club, which seemed anxious to have an Atheneum employee as a sort of trophy member. The thought of speaking in front of them was enough to cause her pulse to race and sweat to bead on her lip. All those eyes upon her. It was the last form of entertainment she’d choose.
As their neighbors drifted into Meeting, Mary prattled on about the Society’s last meeting.
“The question that week was, ‘Has the world at the present time arrived at a degree of civilization to which it has never before attained?’ I remember because Fritz—you know Fritz Gardiner—said something utterly
surprising. Yet it made perfect sense. I love when that happens. Don’t you?”
Hannah squinted at Mary.
“I suppose so,” she muttered, wondering when she could slip away without being completely rude, and Mary took it as a sign that she should go on talking, seizing Hannah’s elbow as if they were now the best of friends, then tugging her in the direction of the wide double doors. Hannah was electrified by the contact, the strange sensation of being pulled close to another body. No one in the Price house was prone to embrace. Mary tipped her chin up toward Hannah’s ear, and her warm breath tickled her neck.
“Anyway, Fritz said one must use caution when imposing one’s own definition of civilization upon everyone else in the world, for each people have their own set of rules for living which we might find impossible to understand or support but which make perfect sense to them.” They paused outside the doors, and Hannah extracted her arm and fiddled with her bonnet strings, looking in vain for her father.
Worshippers crowded the entryway. Nearly everyone nodded at Mary first, then at Hannah. She felt pinned in place, queasy under the gaze of so many observers.
“Anyone who assumes that view could regard a murderer as perfectly justified in his own mind,” Hannah said, raising her chin and wondering if she was being baited. “Certainly such a position isn’t a Christian one.”
Instead of recoiling, Mary seemed to levitate with excitement.
“That’s just what Dr. Hall said! It promised to be an extremely interesting exchange. But unfortunately Mr. Rubens brought up the unChristian behavior of our own citizens at the antislavery rally in ’42, and how throwing rocks and stones wasn’t civilized in the least, and then all the men began shouting.”
Mary sighed, and flashed a bright smile at a young girl who’d offered a tiny, shy wave. The girl beamed and ran to catch up to her mother. Before Hannah could excuse herself, Mary went on.
“Hannah, you really should come to the next meeting. Edward always said you’d put us all to shame with your reason. And I’m certain he’s right. Oh, there’s my mother. Good talking to you! Very good.” She blinked rapidly and backed up a step, then turned and went toward Charlotte Coffey, who looked as if she’d eaten something unpleasant. Something she’d have to eat again.
Hannah felt a hand on her elbow, and then her father was beside her. Hannah exhaled, relief flooding her body. She tilted her head to get a look at him. He hardly looked worn from his long journey from Philadelphia. If anything he looked refreshed. His brown eyes, so similar to Hannah’s, lacked the dark circles that surrounded hers. He’d trimmed his beard and hair, eliminating the boulder-colored grey swoop that usually impaired his vision. Someone had mended the hole in the shoulder of his jacket with tidy stitches, and Hannah squinted at them, wondering who could have sewn them; the only needle she’d touched in months was the one she’d used to repair the crosshair.
“I was looking for thee,” he said. “Dr. Hall wished to say hello.” “I’m sorry I missed him.” Hannah turned, expecting to see her old mentor and teacher.
“Thee shall have another chance— I’ve invited him to supper tomorrow evening.”
“Oh. Very well. I hope there’s enough of the roast left over. I suppose I could do a chowder if someone has clams.” They began moving through the crowd, walking easily in step.
“Ever practical,” he said. “We’ll make it enough. He has simple taste. I’m sure a home-cooked meal from thee will warm him sufficiently, even if it be stone soup.”
“It may taste thus,” she said, only half joking. Among the many things Hannah wished her mother had lived to pass along was her renowned ability to cook. Ann Gardner Price had died when Hannah and Edward were only three years old, and Hannah had found it difficult in the years since to learn much about her beyond her cooking, though Miss Norris, the senior librarian and Ann’s former classmate, had once said something startling: “Thy mother was a force to be reckoned with,” she’d intoned, lowering her voice as if she were committing treason. “She was never settled in matters of Discipline. Thy father indulged her, some said, though in my opinion there’s aught a man can do about a wife with ideas.” “What sort of ideas?” Hannah had asked, remaining perfectly still for fear that Miss Norris might stop speaking.
“Ah, well. She didn’t much like keeping house, outside of the garden and the kitchen. She had a difficult time with all things plain, though she grew up in the Discipline, too. And she wasn’t the quiet type. Questions, questions, questions—that was thy mother. Like a child in that way, she was. In any case, the past is past, and thee can be glad to take after thy father. Not a hint of impertinence in thee, I’m glad to see. One wishes the same could be said about thy brother. But boys, there’s no sense in them but what a woman knocks in.”
Hannah and Nathaniel reached their row. The assembly began to settle as the Prices parted. Nathaniel dipped to the left while Hannah took her place on the right, with the women.
There was no need to look to know who was present. In the front, facing the room, Dr. Hall took his place with the other elders. At their feet sat the Starbuck and Folger clans, along with the rest of the original families, descendents of the first Friends who’d made landfall upon Nantucket two hundred years earlier and never left.
Behind them, the Coffeys and their kin occupied two more benches, along with other families whose fortunes grew greater each evening as people up and down the eastern coast from Penobscot to Atlanta read and sang and prayed by lamps filled with right whale oil.
Farther back were the families whose fortunes depended upon those of the people in front: the mapmakers and milliners, importers and outfitters. Without the captains and shipowners and their families, they would be out of work, as would Hannah and her father. His job at the Bank was to ensure that the banknotes from New York and Rhode Island and Connecticut were exchanged for local notes the owners could deposit into their accounts on Federal Street. As their accounts grew, so would Nathaniel’s—but he’d only been in the position for nine months, and Hannah had yet to see any increase in their finances.
She wondered if they ever would. For the first time in history, more whaling vessels were shipping from New Bedford than Nantucket. Her fishery still held its own—and proudly—but the economic winds were blowing west. There were the great manufacturing centers springing up across the eastern seaboard, promising jobs that took a man away from home for ten hours at a stretch instead of four years. There were mills and factories to be staffed clear to the Louisiana Territory, railroad track to be laid and land to be claimed.
Nathaniel Price frowned upon factory workers almost as much as he did upon whalers: he said they were too lazy to find an occupation of the mind. He believed in expansion, but not if one had to sacrifice intellectual pursuits or squander one’s morals in the process.
Hannah peeked at her father. He sat silently, head bowed, as always, but he opened his eyes a crack just as she looked at him. He didn’t wink before closing them as he had when she was a girl. Hannah sighed. Perhaps his job weighed upon him. The contract with the Bank took him to Providence and Boston, New Bedford and Philadelphia, every month. She wondered today, as she often did, surrounded by their neighbors’ wives, if he still missed her mother.
* As the silence deepened, Hannah remembered her long-overdue reply to the letter George Bond had sent over a week ago. She’d put it off because she felt herself unhealthy with envy, though she couldn’t blame George for his circumstances. He hadn’t chosen to be the son of the man who oversaw the greatest observatory in the United States. Nor had he chosen to be his father’s assistant. If anything, the job had been thrust on him; George would rather be sketching a newt than observing a nebula. But he did his duty, as did she. It was one of the things that bound their friendship, along with the loss of their mothers at an early age. Their ongoing correspondence was full of playful jabs at each other’s flaws and weaknesses. In his letter, George had told her that his father had been able to partially r
esolve the nebula in Orion:
I saw it too—it is truly spectacular. There are several clusters of stars, near the head, and then a mass about the trapezium. You should come to Cambridge soon and see for yourself. Though it pains me to say so, your presence would likely lighten the atmosphere of our ever-active, understaffed hive—but knowing you, perhaps I’d be more likely to lure you with a promise of more work and less diversion.
Hannah envisioned the cloud of indistinct, milky light resolving into discrete bodies, as if in a dream: there, a pinkish star of the fifth magnitude; here, a cluster; there, another.
She would never see such things with the Dollond. The observatory at Cambridge was only a half-day away by steamer and carriage, but it might have been an ocean that separated Hannah and George. He diverted a stream of astronomical news and publications her way each month, and recounted a flurry of occupation and advancement in every letter, along with a regular exhortation to visit. Sometimes Hannah wondered where he found the time to write so often; he sent twice as many missives as she could respond to, and those notes she did dash off in return were nowhere near as long. His intentions were good, but the secondhand news only reminded her how small their garret observatory was by comparison. No matter how long and hard she looked, George could observe more in a night than Hannah could in a lifetime.
She tried to still her mind and focus on the object she’d seen in the night sky a few nights earlier. But as she recalled the milky nebula— if it was a nebula—and the dark ribbons threaded within it, the picture began to dissolve into inky darkness.
13 mo. 4, 1845. Nantucket. via the Liberty
Dear Edward, I hope you are well and under fair wind tonight, or this morning I suppose, where you are. We are ever in hopes of letters from you for none have come since 2nd month. Winter still grips us nights. I look forward to the milder days ahead, for this winter tried my fortitude. I wish you’d been here. But there is no use in that.
How go your advances in Navigation? Do you understand now how to work the preparations for taking a lunar? I hope so. If not I shall explain it in a different way, though by the time my “lecture” as you will doubtless call it reaches you I am certain you’ll already have worked it out.
