Ahab's Wife

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  I had no nightgown, but Ahab said he would turn his back and I might slide unclothed into the bed. “It has enough of sheets and puffs to cover ten brides,” he jested, and I did as he suggested. Then he went around and made sure curtains were closed, screwed down the wicks to the lamps, and turned the key in the lock. Peeping over the covers, I watched his unhurried preparations. Here was my husband, strong and happy, tucking us in for the night.

  When he lifted the covers and came into our bed, I went to him with no shyness at all, but with love and purity and gladness of heart.

  CHAPTER 83: A Sky Full of Angels

  THE SPURT of the match woke me while it was still dark, and I opened my eyes to see my husband lighting a lamp. He sensed that my eyes had opened, and he said, still watching the flame mate the wick, that he must go early to the Pequod, but I flung my arms open to him and softly called, “My Ahab! My husband!” and he set down the lamp and came to me.

  All was given; all was taken. And there was a rising in me and a release and a bliss in me that met the same in him and that I had never known before.

  “I would have a child for your returning,” I said.

  “May it be so.”

  And he kissed me with such a mixture of tenderness and passion that I half felt myself a child, one to whom is given all love and all protection. And yet my woman’s body yearned toward him, though I would not ask again, because I knew his need to embark.

  Ahab took his leisure, and held me, and kissed my face many times. “If there can be but one night’s dent in the marriage pillow, let us at least tarry over it.” When I reminded him that I knew the ship waited, he said, “But now I’m with my love.”

  At times he seemed a dream to me, as we sat together in our luxurious white bed, for starched lace trimmed the linens and hung from the curtains. I had never imagined Ahab resting in aught but his rope hammock. But here plump pillows cushioned and pampered us and everything was ironed and smooth and white as snow.

  The nap of it, indeed, was familiar to my fingers, and I asked my husband if, by chance, Mrs. Macy had ironed the linens. He said that she had procured them, but whether she had washed and ironed them he did not know. But I had no doubt of it.

  “You did not say the linens were for me?” I asked a bit timidly. And he shook his head no. Would he, then, have had any bride, if I had not been willing? Though my goat-nimble mind thought of the question, to ask it would have been blasphemy. I knew my place in his heart, and I knew that he knew his in mine.

  Then I marveled some (to myself) that I had known so little of my own course. I had been like a ship, blown about in dark and storm, suddenly finding, beyond all hope, that the dawn illuminated the port of home. And I thought back, recognizing how even aboard the Pequod, obsessed with the state of Kit’s mind, I had always been comforted by Ahab’s presence.

  “I know when I first saw you,” I said. “I was aboard the Sussex, looking through the captain’s telescope. Standing at the tiller, your legs seemed wedded to the distant Pequod, your hands to her strong steering, and your face to the wind. I took away the telescope from my eye and you were gone, but the porthole framed the Pequod and the sea and sky.”

  “How was it you were aboard the Sussex?”

  “Disguised as a cabin boy,” I answered without hesitation. I smiled. “But I would have that story keep for another time.” I was not afraid of his knowing any of my secrets, but I did not want to fill our time with a past that pertained only to myself.

  “And my stories, too. They’ll keep.”

  In the gaze that passed between us all was known, all was accepted, all transcended, as we inhabited our moment together.

  “There’s a room ye have not seen,” he said.

  Something in me shuddered. It was a sentence from Bluebeard’s tale.

  “And I would show it to ye before I leave.”

  I stepped immediately from the bed, reassured, and Ahab held a softly woven white blanket for me to wrap about myself. “Come, my lamb,” he said softly.

  We stood at the top of the stairs, and he handed me a wooden pole with a hook in the end. At first I thought it some equipment for whaling with which I was not familiar. But Ahab told me to insert the hook in a ring in the ceiling, and to pull. It would not be difficult. When I did so, almost like magic, a small staircase unfolded itself. Taking the pole from me, he bade me ascend the steep little stairs. Up I ran, gathering the wool blanket away from my feet, and there was a small, glass-sided room. An enclosed cupola, with its own tiny flat roof and a window facing each direction.

  Dawn had come upon us. The dawn-drenched clouds suggested wings: mauve, purple, rose, gold-outlined—and the sky seemed full of gigantic beings. Though they had no real form, yet they flew and floated in their domain. “Angels” was all I could say.

  Ahab joined me and said, “Aye,” and stood behind me with his arms wrapped around me as we looked. For only a few moments those good angels soared as disembodied colors, swirled and thinned themselves in expansion, ever more immaterial. Ahab pointed, and I looked down from the sky to the harbor, to the Pequod, sails furled. A few insect-sized people moved about, and I thought the Pequod was like a tight-closed peony bud groomed by ants before the flower unfurls its petals. The clouds dissipated into blue.

  I turned to inspect the small, glass-sided room. “It’s a crow’s nest made luxurious,” I said. The little cupola held a rocking chair and beside the chair a brass telescope on a stand. “Here ye might watch for me,” Ahab said. “Protected from the weather, here. And if there is a child, ye might have a cradle here beside ye. And if I am gone a long time, the child might look out the window at the ships and the sea.”

  “And I would speak of you, Ahab, of the father who loves his child from faraway waters.” How fervently, how completely, I hoped that my new husband was leaving me with child! I took Ahab’s hand and kissed it and watered the back of it with a few tears, and when I looked in his face, I saw that he, too, was ready to weep.

  “Now,” he said. “I have left money with the judge across the street, and I shall write a note of permission for ye to use it as ye will. And I will have Captains Bildad and Peleg, who are owners of the Pequod, call upon ye and help ye in any way they can. But they are stingy, and ye shall not be fettered by their ideas of parsimony. Nay, ye will make yourself merry in all your living and spending till I come home, and, meantime, you will write to me, and I to ye, even though we both know letters are often lost at sea. Look, Starbuck is bidding farewell to his wife and babe.”

  Though Ahab knew the likelihood of this event well enough to note it with the naked eye, I looked through the telescope and saw their last embrace. The child was but a knee-high bundle, but Mary’s face, which I could barely glimpse inside her Quaker bonnet, was serene as any saint’s, though her clothing was not resplendent.

  Swinging the telescope away, I noted that the Camel was putting out. I hoped that my letters were not lost.

  “I shall be happy here,” I said. “This home—it overwhelms me.”

  “No, Una. I think nothing overwhelms ye. The cupola is the crown of the house, and ye in your person are diamond, ruby, emerald, and sapphire in that crown. I would not have ye overwhelmed by mere stationary boards and window glass.”

  I had thought to ask if I might visit the Lighthouse and even beyond to Kentucky, but with these words of Ahab, I changed my request to a statement. “I shall be happy. I know it. And likely I will journey to see my aunt and uncle, and my mother, as well, in Kentucky.”

  “But ye will not go to sea?” he asked me.

  “No,” I freely answered. And the vastness of the ocean came upon me, and the utter unlikeliness of two boats ever finding one another. The expansiveness of the ocean spread before me, not as one who has never been to sea might imagine it, but as I knew it to be, stretching day after day, and moonlight night, and black night, and star-pierced night after night, and endless swaying, and the creak of wood and rope, and the hissing through
the water, and the smack of the wind taking sails. “Godspeed,” I said to my husband. “Godspeed.”

  “May angels keep ye.”

  CHAPTER 84: Resurrection

  AFTER AHAB blessed me and bade me farewell, I stayed up an hour in the cupola and watched with the telescope as the Pequod was towed out of the harbor. Then she unfurled her sails and moved away. With the glass, I could view his expressions to some extent, and I was surprised to see the hard, captainlike lines in his face. I knew them well, since I had sailed with him, but of the softer radiance that he offered me when we were alone together I saw not a trace. And how masterfully his feet came down upon the boards! All his movement, hands and shoulders as well as feet, had the gestures of an athlete or warrior.

  The three officers—Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask—were familiar to me, as were, of course, the new harpooners, Tashtego and Daggoo. A few others I also recognized, but there were many new faces among the crew, and I supposed that there was often a shuffling of crew members among the various whalers. I had seen Ahab shake hands with someone I took to be either Captain Bildad or Captain Peleg, the principal owners of the Pequod. This man seemed of an age with Ahab, and equally able-bodied and energetic.

  I recalled an item Crèvecoeur wrote of his Nantucket visit in the 1770s: “You will hardly find anywhere a community…exhibiting so many green old men who show their advanced age by the maturity of their wisdom rather than by the wrinkles of their faces….” Not that Ahab was an old man—his hair was more gray than white—and his body had a lean hardness to it, for all his gentleness with me, that carried no hint of aging. And his wrinkles were more a matter of facing into the weather than anything else.

  After the ship was beyond the eastern horizon and after I had paced through my empty rooms many times and tidied my bedroom, I thought that I would cross the street (my spread clothes having dried out by the fireplace) and get some money of the judge. But who was the first person I saw when I stepped through my portico (houses of the Federal–Greek Revival style typically have recessed doorways, Ionic porticos, and granite steps, as well as the four end chimneys and squarish cupolas) but Isaac Starbuck, the gaoler, whom I had left for dead, his face and body covered by a sheet.

  He was as startled to see me emerging from a fine house as I was to see him risen from the dead. We stuttered and stumbled with our speech till eventually we had communicated that when they bent his chest up to lift him onto the stretcher, he had gotten his breath again, and though weak and light-headed, he was quite all right, and (for my part) that I was now married to Captain Ahab and was a resident of the home between whose Ionic columns I was standing! The essentials having been exchanged, we said a hasty good-bye. On my part, nothing could have pleased me more than the enormous surprise of seeing that Isaac had survived and might now be hailed (I hoped) as the fireburnished hero he was. But I knew, for his part, that the surprise of my sudden marriage—he had not asked how it came about—surely left something of an ashy taste. Perhaps he felt as had Gulliver after his travels—that he was not quite the same person nor his home the same place, upon his return.

  And I felt ashamed of having seen him shirtless, the little cloud of golden hair upon his chest, in his extremity, though of course when I was a cabin boy I had seen all manner of male nakedness, which, along with the crude language of sailors, I have not tried to report in my narrative. But on Nantucket, I was a woman and a young wife who felt embarrassment. (I smile now at that self who could blush and tremble before the conventional, in spite of the terrible experiences I had survived. The time has come when taking off my own clothing is a confident, unafraid act, the most natural way to meet the waves.)

  Nonetheless, I proceeded to cross the street, employ the brass pineapple knocker (deciding in the act to purchase a similar one for my home to advertise my hospitality), and present Judge Lord with the paper Ahab had left with me. After the judge invited me in (and again I sat upon the velvet sofa, this time making more careful note of items in his parlor that found particular favor with me), he went to his desk and drew out certain other papers Ahab had left with him and glanced back and forth between them, to compare—I was sure—the signatures. His surprise at finding Ahab to be a providing husband had engendered something close to incredulity.

  But very soon, he looked up over his spectacles, smiled, and said, “Captain Ahab has long needed a wife and a family, and I am glad that it is you.”

  “Thank you.” I am sure I blushed.

  “And so you received word that Kit—”

  “Yes, that Kit—” I began.

  “—is dead,” he finished. “And Captain Ahab, being due to sail, lost no time. Nor does he have time to lose, being a mature person. Even more so than I. But that’s beside the point. The news about Kit came—?”

  “Yesterday—oh, he’s never never coming back!” I suddenly wailed. That yesterday inscribed the end of one life and the immediate beginning of another overwhelmed me.

  “There, there,” the judge answered. “Perhaps it’s for the best. Most decidedly it’s for the best. You mustn’t weep. You’re newly married! Think, you’re just across the street. You must take tea with me, Mrs. Captain. An old bachelor like me would be honored. And, why, it will be no time—two years or so, why, maybe less—till Captain Ahab will come sailing back. Now, dry your tears. Here’s a hankie.”

  He was so kind and so inept in his bachelor-but-dignified-judge way that I began to laugh as suddenly as I had cried. He tried to laugh along with me, but seeing nothing funny, he began to urge me not to become hysterical, but to calm myself. He rang furiously for his servant to bring us some tea. “And have you eaten, Mrs. Captain?”

  “Not a bite.”

  “Well, then. We must get some ballast in ye—as a seaman might say.”

  And very soon I was eating buttered toast, followed by bacon, followed by fish, followed by oatmeal—all to ward off hysteria. And it worked very well. After a while, the judge took up business again.

  “Did you read the letter that Ahab has addressed to me?”

  Although it was merely folded and not even placed in an envelope, it had not occurred to me to read it.

  “It says that you are to have a housekeeper. He suggests a Mrs. Macy.”

  “My friend. I worked for her.”

  “Captain Ahab says that I am to trust in your good sense about every financial matter—he has underscored ‘every’—and that if it should seem you are a little extravagant at first, I am to encourage rather than discourage you! What a remarkable instruction! Well, what are you going to do?” Looking a bit like Ben Franklin, Judge Lord peered at me over small spectacles.

  Now there was a question. I didn’t know what I was going to do, which I said. And so I changed the subject for a time and asked about the little black boy. The judge replied that he would send him to Maria Mitchell, the daughter of an astronomer and banker on Vestal Street, to be educated in whatever way she saw fit.

  “She takes both boys and girls together in her school,” he went on, “and she will not object to a black child, being more liberal than even her Quaker forefathers.”

  “Would the Quakers not admit the boy?” I asked.

  “No. Not at their meetings. There are separate black churches here on Nantucket.”

  “It’s a bit disappointing,” I said, “about the Quakers.” I said it timidly, for I did not want to get in a dispute.

  “They tried to make the Mitchells quit their piano,” he went on.

  Then I bethought myself of the family around the piano that Kit and I had noticed when we walked to town together that last time on Christmas Day. That had been on Vestal Street. The memory made me sad, and I became quiet.

  I must say that at this point the judge, too, became quiet, and though he did not know the cause of my quiet, he did not try to fill up the silence, as so many would have done, but waited patiently. “I think that I will use some of the money to travel back to my old home,” I said, and added, noticing
his dismay, “After I furnish my new one. How long do you think it might take to furnish the house?”

  “Did you know the house comes with a name?” First he told me it was Heather’s Moor—for at its back, the heather-covered moor began and there were no more houses—and then he suggested that a month might be required to buy furnishings, if I was careful about my selections. “You might want to take the ferry for a short trip to Boston, to see what sofas and carpets and dishes they have there. And then come back.” He was so kind as to offer to accompany me. “And Mrs. Macy, too,” he added, with a bow to propriety.

  To neither proposition did I give a definite answer, but I told him I much admired his furnishings.

  Breakfast being over, he asked if he might be of any further service that morning. Rather to my own surprise, I asked him if he would mind to write to Charlotte out at the Try Pots and tell her the things that had happened. And to tell her I would not come out for my clothes for perhaps a week (here my eye noted my own reflection in the cherry top of the butler’s table that held my breakfast), there being no urgent need of reserve clothing and I having much to do in town (I admired a scallop shell cast into the top of the handle of my silver spoon), but if Charlotte should come in, she must be sure to call on me.