by Nancy Thayer
“You’re going to get it later,” Anne threatened, and everyone laughed and the tension broke. People rose, pushed their chairs back, went into the living room. Anne asked about coffee, tea, and the conversation turned to other things.
Willy watched John, who seemed more at ease now, perhaps because he was engaged in a conversation with Diana, who was nice, or perhaps, Willy thought, Willy hoped, because George Glidden, for all his pomposity, had somehow helped John. And George was smart, a fine psychiatrist—he could be right. He really could be right. The creative mind was an odd thing. She had wondered before what she would have thought if Pablo Picasso had been her husband and had wandered in with one of his abstracts; would she have thought to praise him, or would she have called the doctor?
Anne served the coffee and brandies, then sank down on the sofa next to Willy.
“Old times,” she said. “Lovely having you two here.” She leaned closer, said sotto voce, “And we can gossip about them when they’ve gone.”
Willy smiled back, a conspirator’s smile, but she didn’t feel it in her heart. There was a distance now between her and Anne. First of all, Anne talked about little else but the baby that was due in a month; she went on and on about how it kicked, about labor and childbirth tales she had heard and names she and Mark were deciding on.
It seemed to Willy that Anne had talked of nothing else these past three days. Yet Anne meant to be close; she told Willy the most intimate details about her body changes and her sex life now with Mark. It was Willy who had drawn back and caused the distance, really. She did not feel comfortable talking about John’s “ghost” with Anne, for one thing; she had not yet been able to decide just how she felt about it.
Actually she was frightened—and jealous, and angry. And then she and John had agreed not to tell anyone about that final night when he felt someone fondling him. They had tacitly agreed not to discuss it with each other, either; it was just too difficult to discuss—and what could they say? That it was bizarre? They both knew that. There were no precedents they could follow in dealing with this, no how-to books on the subject. They were just muddling along, hoping that it would all go away—hoping the ghost would go away and leave them alone with their lives.
But now Willy thought: It was possible that George Glidden was right. It was possible that John, in his great desire to develop his art, had put himself under the sort of mental stress that would make him create a muse, need a muse. Willy didn’t pretend to understand how the mind worked, especially the artistic mind. She wasn’t an artist, and yet there were times when she needed to be alone, when she needed her solitude and whatever daydreams floated through her mind as she embroidered. She could not have worked in the presence of company. Perhaps it was the same sort of thing for John, taken to an extreme degree. He needed his solitude and the visions that his creative energies provided him.
Willy decided to try to relax about it all. To believe that somehow George Glidden’s theory was on the right track. To let John have his muse, his “ghost,” and not to mind. After all, if this vision, this muse, this thing, whatever she was, from wherever she had been called forth, helped John in his art, she would be valuable; she would help John be happy, and in the long run, she would help Willy and John in their marriage.
The next evening, as they drove to Hyannis to take the car ferry back to Nantucket, Willy said some of these things to John. She told him that perhaps George Glidden had been right; that perhaps they shouldn’t fight the “ghost” or be afraid of her, but rather let her into their lives.
“Let’s see what happens,” she said.
John had been quiet, listening to Willy. “George is such an ass,” he said.
“I know,” Willy agreed. “But he’s not stupid. He knows a lot. And what better explanation can you provide for the presence of your ghost? I prefer it to anything else I can think of.”
John took a deep breath, holding down anger. “All right,” he said at last. “All right. Fine. That’s fine with me. Let’s leave it at that, can we? I’m sick of it.”
He felt his wife’s gaze on him then, felt her worry and compassion directed toward him, even sensed how she was now searching for the right words to say to him, how she was working on it rather than just speaking naturally. So before she could go on, he said more gently, “Please, Willy. Let’s leave it alone.” He looked over at her, forcing himself to smile for her. “Let’s talk about something else in the world,” he said. “I think we’ve beaten this topic to death.”
Willy reached over and stroked John’s hair briefly. “Sweetie,” she said. Then—and Thank God! John thought—she yawned and removed her hand and leaned against the car door. “I’m going to take a little nap if you don’t mind,” she said. “All those late nights …”
“Go ahead,” John said. “We’ve got a good forty-five more minutes before we reach Hyannis.”
When she was asleep, John’s relief was enormous. It had been hard to keep from unfairly directing his anger at Willy; it had been a strain all during this “vacation.” It was not really Willy’s fault, or if it was, she had only meant well, had only meant to be helpful. Still, he felt violated. Betrayed. Insulted. To have that egomaniac George Glidden analyzing what was deepest and dearest to him had been infuriating. Even to have the man possess that knowledge was horrible. It had been hard enough to let Willy, and then Mark, and then his colleagues at the agency know that he wanted to be an artist, a real artist. They were his friends; he could trust them, and if he failed, they would not laugh. But it had been almost intolerable to have a roomful of people discussing how the strength of his need was making him hallucinate. It was as if he had been coerced into stripping off his clothes and parading around naked, showing off some strange, slightly disgusting, slightly erotic growth on his body. No one had the right to such invasions of privacy. Not even Willy, really.
His mistake had been not to build up sufficient defenses, to speak to others of his art, assuming the others would have the sense to give him the dignity of distance. He had been friendly, including them, making his art seem a sort of communal thing, and it was not that way at all. This was not a topic for a committee and could not be passed around and democratized like the decisions for advertising copy for artwork. He was the one most at fault for talking about it in the first place. If he wanted them to leave him alone, he had to learn to deal with it—all of it—by himself. He could do that. He would do that.
Even deal with the ghost. God, what was she, after all, what did she do? Nothing so terrible, nothing destructive or harmful. She was an adolescent boy’s fantasy, in a way. The beautiful woman who comes unbidden to do unspeakable things to his body in the middle of the night. If he couldn’t deal with that by himself, what kind of man was he?
He had to change. Pull in. Withdraw. Isolate himself, delve into himself, if he was going to get any real work done. Willy could stand it; she knew what he was up to, and she could let him have that freedom, knowing that it was only another part of their lives together, only another time in their marriage. She knew how much he loved her. And she was strong, she had her own resources.
This time, John thought as he steered the car around the rotary toward the long road that paralleled the Cape Cod Canal, this time I’m really going to settle in and work. This time I’m serious. This time I’m not going to let anything stop me, not self-doubts or friendly temptations or ghostly interruptions.
The ferry approached over dark water. Fathoms deep lay treasure, jewels and gold, sunken boats, lovers lost forever, their white bones gleaming, caught in the streaming seaweed, washed along with stones and rubies and brass buckles from belts and shoes, froth and plunder of the sea.
John leaned on the railing of the ferry, liking the cold slap of wet wind, the darkness. The lights of Nantucket were in the distance. Beneath him now lay mysteries, joys and terrors he could not imagine. And he thought how the land was all man knew of civilization and security; the sea was all he could bear to know
of the wild, the amoral, the unguessed.
It was just after midnight when Willy and John unlocked their front door and entered their Orange Street house. It was silent inside, and cold, for they had left the heat turned down while they were gone.
They turned up the thermostat; then Willy, who was tired in spite of her nap in the car, headed for the bedroom.
“Coming?” she asked John, and when he shook his head and said he wasn’t sleepy just yet, she only paused a moment, then swallowed whatever it was she had been going to say and went on into the bedroom alone.
John poured himself a brandy and soda and, keeping on his parka, because it would be coldest of all in the attic, where there was no heat, pulled on the light chain and went up the stairs into the cold, bright attic.
She was there, as he had thought she might be. She was in the darkest corner of the attic, without her cape now, dressed simply in a long dress of creamy, lacy cotton; her hair was pulled back and up in thick, dark sloping loops secured with ivory-headed pins. Somehow it amused him that she had a shawl of gray wool wrapped loosely around her shoulders, as if she were guarding against the cold. As if a ghost could feel cold, or warmth.
“You’ve come back,” she said, smiling, advancing just one step toward him. Her face was so beautiful, her expression so sweetly pleased by his presence.
“I’ve come back,” he agreed. He had vowed to himself not to be afraid, not anymore, and it wasn’t only fear that he felt now, really, though his heart knocked in his chest.
“It was cruel of you to go away,” she said, again smiling that sweet smile, almost flirtatiously.
“It is cruel of you to come here,” John responded, but he smiled, too, as he spoke to show this apparition he was friendly.
She drew back, surprised. “But this is my home!” she said.
“Was your home, perhaps,” John said. “It’s mine now—mine and my wife’s.”
The woman dropped her eyes. She was offended.
“I don’t like your wife,” she said petulantly, and then she let her shawl drop off one shoulder and trail to the ground. She began to wander around the attic, slowly, trailing her shawl along the ground as she walked. Every now and then she would glance sidelong at John, with a sweet, challenging smile, and as she turned this way and that, as she traced her seemingly aimless path, John realized that she was showing off for him. Showing off her winsome beauty. She was petite and very slender. Thin as a wraith, he thought, and smiled to himself at the expression. He thought he would easily be able to close his hands around her waist. Through the stuff of her dress he could see the push of her breasts, which were like a girl’s, still small and high and peaked.
“Who are you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
“Such impertinence!” she said in reply, stopping still in her movement. She had turned toward him, full face, and she was indignant. A flush rose up her neck, a rosiness so vivid against her pale skin that John almost felt the heat of it. They were only a few feet apart. “This is my house. My dearest husband built it for me. For me to come into as his bride. And you ask who I am!”
She was so angry that John would not have been surprised if she had hit him; he felt her anger that strongly.
But she turned away and walked slowly back to the end of the attic. Her shawl still trailed gracefully over one arm, its feathery tips dancing against the wooden floor.
She stopped, looked over her shoulder at him, and now she was smiling again, a different sort of smile, a suggestive, provocative, openly sexual smile.
“Perhaps you should find out who I am,” she said. “Perhaps you might like to make my acquaintance.”
Then she was gone.
She had vanished, disappeared, before his eyes. Now John was not surprised. He had told himself he should expect such a thing, and now that it had happened, he really was not surprised. He was, though, admiring. And curious. But not unhappy. And strangely, not frightened anymore. He felt invigorated. But now he turned and went back down the stairs and stood next to the bed, where he stripped off his parka and clothes and let them fall into a pile where he stood. He sank heavily into bed next to Willy and fell asleep at once.
The great white columned neoclassic library, with the name Atheneum announced in huge gold letters on the facade, looked forbiddingly grand compared to the modest village buildings surrounding it. Inside, it was surprisingly cozy. John was directed by a librarian to the section along the side of one wall that was devoted entirely to books on Nantucket. There were dozens. He selected a few of the oldest histories and carried them to a corner where the afternoon sun fell from high windows across the wooden table, making the yellow oak gleam.
There were entire books or sections of books devoted to the most famous families of the island, the Coffins and Starbucks and Macys and Husseys. There were ships’ logs and chronicles and lists and charts and documents by the score, but it wasn’t until the library was almost ready to close, two hours after he had started his search, that John found what he wanted. In a dog-eared, cottony-paged leather-bound book published in the 1920s, in the section entitled “Tragedies, Disasters and Bizarre Misfortunes,” among tales of shipwrecks and mutinies, town fires and scandals, was an entry about “The Widowed Bride.”
One of Nantucket’s most romantic and saddest histories is that of Captain John Wright and Jesse Orsa Barnes.
Captain Wright met Miss Barnes in 1823 when he was twenty-four, a young Nantucket man who had just finished his first and extremely successful whaling cruise. Captain Wright had gone to Boston on legal matters and had visited at the home of relatives, where he met Miss Barnes, who was then seventeen and already known for her beauty. She is said to have been a slight, slender woman, graceful and delicate, with large dark eyes and long, thick, lustrous dark hair. (This in contrast to the descriptions of the island women, who, according to reports, tended to be large, husky, practical, and strong enough to perform the work of men—which, as their men were always gone, they had to do.)
Captain Wright was smitten at once and vowed to make young Miss Barnes his bride. He stayed on and on in Boston, delaying the next sailing of his ship, in order to meet Miss Barnes and persuade her to be his wife. Miss Barnes was reluctant to leave the society of Boston for the isolation of Nantucket, but Captain Wright persuaded her by saying that if she would be his wife, he would build her a fine, elegant home on Orange Street, which was where the “aristocracy” of Nantucket lived at that time. In addition, it must be stated that Captain Wright was himself a fine figure of a man, though not overly tall, still of noble bearing, and strikingly handsome, with blue eyes and dark hair and a graceful demeanor.
Finally, against the advice of her friends and guardian (for Miss Barnes was an orphan and an only child), she agreed to marry Captain Wright when he returned from his next whaling expedition. Miss Barnes’s love for her fiancé must have been strong, for during the three years he was away, she was proposed to many times by men far wealthier than the captain, with far more to offer her in the way of culture and position and society. But for three years she waited for her affianced, attending only small gatherings and spending most of her time hand-sewing her wedding trousseau.
In May 1826, Captain Wright returned home from his second and even more profitable whaling voyage. In the summer of that year the work was completed on the elegant neoclassic house he had had built on Orange Street, complete with servants’ quarters, six fireplaces, and a widow’s walk.
In September of that year, Captain Wright married Jesse Orsa Barnes in Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and brought her home to Nantucket to live. Because Captain Wright was so wealthy, she had servants and did not have to perform menial tasks, as earlier Nantucket whaling wives had had to. It is reported that because of Jesse Orsa’s beauty and refinement and education, she was shunned by the women of the island and considered to be haughty and even arrogant. And although the Quakerism of the island was waning at this time, still she was considered by t
he island to engage too often in frivolities and improprieties: She had her harmonium brought with her from Boston, and she often played and sang, with the windows open so that the music could drift out onto the streets and be heard by passersby. She had been seen, through those same open windows, dancing by herself to the tunes from her music box. She also drank liquor openly, engaged in smoking in her own house, and ordered books sent to her from the mainland that the librarian would never have allowed in the Atheneum. She rarely socialized with the island women and never attended any of the churches.
Captain Wright’s ship, the Parliament, was due to leave Nantucket on another whaling cruise in November, but according to accounts, the departure was delayed time and time again due to Jesse Orsa’s pleas to her new husband not to leave her so soon. It was said by those who visited the couple that never before had they seen a woman so obviously enamored of and devoted to her husband.
Unfortunately, Jesse Orsa was lucky to have detained her husband for as long as she did, for the Parliament left in the spring of 1827 and returned in the summer of 1830 with the tragic news that young Captain Wright was dead. He had not left his young bride with child when he set out, and so she had no child of his for solace. She had no friends on the island and no living relatives in all the world. She lived alone in her elegant, large house on Orange Street, the house her fiancé had promised her if she would be his bride, until she died at the age of eighty-one, a lonely and bitter woman.
Here the account ended at the top of the page so that on the left page and the right two portraits could be shown, in black and white: oils of Jesse Orsa Wright and Captain John Wright. John Constable stared at the pictures, transfixed. There was no denying the remarkable resemblance between himself and the young captain. And there was no denying that the picture of “The Widowed Bride” was a picture of the ghost, the beautiful young apparition he had spoken with only the night before.
