Ahab's Wife (12 page)

Yet I did not know what I hoped or whom I would choose, and suppose one chose but was not chosen back? A deep shame rolled through me at the thought of that. To be unworthy! Not to be chosen! Perhaps one should not hope or want or plan at all.

With that, I sat up and swung my feet over the bedside and determined to find out simply who it was who chose to climb the tower. I was in my nightgown, so I took a quilt from my bed to wrap in, but not the precious one from Kentucky. I passed six feet from the form at the fireplace. I could stop and stoop and look, but suppose he, whoever he was, awoke suddenly to find me peering in his face? And besides, the blood of the storm was in me now, and I wanted to be in it.

On the table, Aunt had left Giles's drawings of angles and pulleys and lenses. The Fresnel lens looked like an anatomical drawing of a huge gem, a layering of facets. Giles had said that the cavity at its center was large enough for me to stand in. It seemed that my heart was a hard little diamond, sharp and curious, standing in the center of me.

The window at the end of the table framed perfect black. I wanted the darkness to clap its hands. And yes, there
was
a low growl of thunder. I opened the door in the wall, stepped through, and closed the door, carefully, behind me.

The utter blackness of the tower! Here there was no sense of form at all. Perhaps there was a curving wall only an arm's length away, but my eyes could not tell me this. The wall might be a mile beyond my reach, there might be no wall at all. Only my feet knew. What they
touched was familiar stone, smooth and hard, but even the existence of my feet became for my eyes an act of faith, for I could not see toes or ankles or any part of them. Perhaps I had entered a land where I had no body. Yet my feet felt the stone. My legs, calf and thighs, bent and pushed, lifted me, just as they had in daylight. Though I could not measure my progress with my eyes, I was climbing. The ordinary muscles worked, and I rose, but it was like a dream of flying.

Suppose, I thought, he has stopped someplace along the steps and I bump against him in the dark. He cannot hear me coming. He might think me a demon and wrestle me, hurl me down the steps. And I thought how horribly I had been startled by the sudden being of the eagle. If I was thrown down the steps, as God cast Lucifer out of heaven, I would bruise in a most palpable and purple way. My body cringed at the thought of a descent in stony darkness. Better to have fallen through the daylight and air. My hip hurt where the railing had caught me.

Now the steps were iron, not stone. Metal would scrape and gash as much as bruise. I could have touched the wall as a guide—I had imagined him doing that—but I wanted to trust my legs, let them be the leaders instead of fingertip and touch. And partly, I loved the nothingness. Kit had said that his heart was black—was this what he meant? A blackness like nothingness?

Then there was a sheet of lightning, and I saw that I was in the middle of the ascent, the portion of the Lighthouse between the windows. For a garish moment, all was familiar, though there was a strange gloominess to the stone walls and the grillwork. In the cities, people moved through the streets—perhaps they were doing it now—but they were as unknown to me as I to them. I tried to think of a girl, sixteen, like myself, a resident of Boston. I pictured her: in a shoulder cape; her shoes fit well, beautifully buttoned and snug above her ankle. Her hands were in a muff, a velvet muff, and they held each other. With my left hand, I touched the scab across the back of my hand. My toes were naked and cold.

The moment I saw one of them, it would seem that I had known forever. In a sense, my life would be changed, for I could not return to a moment on a stormy night, in the summer when we changed the Lighthouse light, when two ideas were equally possible.

Yet one visitor was above and one was below, and what difference
did that make? In a moment I would talk with one, and tomorrow I would chat with the other. They were both available for conversation.

As I ascended the tower, I began to climb into vague light. Whoever was in the lantern room had left the iron door open, and light was spilling down the stairs. At first it was only a haze, and then as I climbed higher, ever brighter. The light seemed to fill my ears and the sounds of the storm were muffled. Surely if there was a heaven, one might ascend just this way toward incredible brightness. I no longer thought of my feet or of my body; I myself seemed as vaporous as light. I had left weight with the earth, and I had stepped from corporeal being to that of spirit.

The figure stood opposite the door. His arms were outspread as though he were a priest or a bird such as a condor. He was spitting on the lamps! It was Kit. The room was a world of light, but at that moment, lightning struck the rod atop and split down the grounding wire on the outside behind Kit so that it seemed to strike his head, and I shrieked as I have never shrieked.

Blinded, I felt him enfold me, and I knew he was alive.

“We're safe,” he said. He loosed me.

The optics in my brain were swimming in dazzle. “I can't see,” I said, in a shaky voice.

“Wait.”

My eyesight gone, my hearing returned to the boom of thunder and the roar of wind.

“We're safe here,” he said again.

“I know,” I said, for Uncle had explained to me, when I asked, the function of the lightning rod and the wire bradded down the length of the tower. Nonetheless, I could neither see nor stop my quaking.

“My eyes are seared!” I began to cry.

“Is it bright or dark?” he asked.

“Bright! Nothing but bright!”

He held me again while I sobbed for my eyes. The brightness was all swimming and wild.

“Can you see?” I wailed.

“Not well, yet. But my eyes were closed when it passed. My back was turned.” Then he told me that he believed my eyes would be all right and to calm myself if I could. “Smell,” he said. “There's an odor that lightning leaves.”

“My father says it's the odor of the devil.”

“Why not the odor of God?” Kit asked.

I breathed it deeply, for I knew it would soon be gone.

“Have you seen the footprint of the whale from up here?” Kit asked.

“No.”

“Do you know about that?”

“No.”

“Let's sit down,” he said. And we slid down, he with his arm still about me. A greater comfort than his unfamiliar arm was the wall I had so often sat against. The thunder clapped and rumbled away from us.

“Was there lightning again?” I asked.

“Nothing much.”

“I couldn't see it.”

“You have to wait, Una.”

We sat quietly. I told myself it was not Kit's fault. I told myself that surely all would be well with my eyes. Yet I could not see. Still, the world did not seem absent, because I could hear the storm, and its sounds conjured up images to my mind's eye. Just as when a person reads aloud to you, you see the world suggested by the words, so did the elements read aloud to me.

At length, I wished to hear Kit's voice. I asked why he was silent, and at once I knew that he did not wish to intrude on my adjusting. What a strangely tactful man! It seemed almost a reverence for my experiencing. And so he seemed to treat everyone. I had but to speak, and he would speak back to me.

“What is the whale's footprint?” I asked.

“I've sailed only merchant ships—though I'd like to go whaling—but once a whale came to the surface close to us, when there was a whaleman aboard. He and I stood at the deck together and watched. The blowhole is as big as your waist. These were humpbacks, neither sperm nor right whale, such as are hunted, but still the whaleman wished he had a harpoon. I tossed a penny to see if I could ring the blowhole, but I missed, and the penny slid off its back into the water, and, right away, the whale submerged. When it went down, the whale-man pointed to a patch of water that had a shape rather like the print of an enormous shoe. ‘It's the whale's footprint,' he said. We watched the print move along the surface of the water. The print just glided
along, a patch with a different surface and a distinct form. Gradually the margins of the form gave way, and the footprint slowly dissolved into the greater ocean.”

If I were blind, yet if people talked to me as Kit did, then yet would I see. But I thought of myself groping along. I could perhaps memorize the Island but not the world. Still, I had not been unhappy on the Island. Almost it was enough, I told myself. But then such an urge to travel independently came upon me that the sentence burst out, “I should like to go whaling!”

“Why not?” Kit answered. “You could dress as a boy.”

“You could go with Kit and me,” another voice said.

“Giles!” I had known who spoke! “Giles, I can't see!”

“The lightning blinded her.”

“And you?” Giles asked.

“I can see fairly well. There's a spot in the center of my vision. I didn't see you till you spoke.”

“I see nothing but brightness,” I said.

“It's the afterimage,” Giles said.

“Should we go down?” Kit asked.

Giles said that he and Kit would guide me down the stairs. And he thought my sight would gradually return. He asked us why we had gone up in the Lighthouse.

“I followed Kit,” I said.

“I wanted to be in the storm,” Kit said.

“Why were you spitting on the lamps?” I asked Kit.

He laughed, but his explanation was brief: “An experiment.”

The descent was careful. I trusted my guides, and the steps were familiar, but still I was afraid. I made myself trust in a mechanical way, and my brain seemed to go numb with it. Was this brightness any more blinding than the darkness through which I had ascended? Yes, for now I had the sense of injury. They held me under the elbow, on each side—Kit with a consistent firmness, Giles as though he were sometimes uncertain of the propriety of holding on to me.

At first my body held back from stepping: I wanted to run my foot to the edge of the tread and feel down with my toes before I trusted my weight. But gradually, I did become more confident and trusting. When I judged us to be halfway down, I proposed that we run the rest of the way.

“We can't see either,” Giles reminded me, “in this darkness.”

“Then I'll lead you both,” I proposed. “The blind leading the blind.”

“No,” Giles said simply.

I could hear Giles's feet, for he had put on his shoes, and I could hear the low swish of Kit's fingertips along the stone wall, as he was on the outside of our turning.

“Do you know the seashell called the precious wentletrap?” Giles asked. “Its name in German is
Wendeltrappe,
which means ‘spiral staircase.' ”

“Do you know German?” I asked.

“No. But I would like to.”

“Why?” Kit asked. His short question sounded cramped, clenched.

“To read
Faust,
in the original.”

“I don't know about
Faust,
” I admitted bravely. Where there should have been darkness against my eyes, my mind was filled with the blinding brightness.

“Goethe's
Faust
.”

When Kit asked Giles why he had an interest in that story, Giles explained that there had been a medieval version of the same foldable, and many other versions as well. “It cautions against intellectual pride.”

We continued our descent in silence, till I asked Giles why he had gone up in the tower.

“To find you two,” he answered.

Then I felt happy, and I wondered if it would be possible to leave the Island with them. I could go in disguise. When my bare foot felt the first of the sixteen stone steps, I was sorry. I wanted us to go on together forever, even if I could not see.

U
NENDING BRIGHTNESS
!
Surely at the point when I passed from the tower into the familiar chamber, colors would return—at least, the customary dimness in the corners of the room? the small glowing lump in the middle of the hearth? At least, when I passed through that room, guided by Giles and Kit, into my bedroom, then I would cross a border into the ordinary? Here, in my bedroom, would reside a familiar darkness? But it was not so. My mind swam in brightness.

Kit asked me if I should like my aunt to be awakened. I felt my bed bump against my legs and groped my way under the covers. No, I told him; I would wait for morning. Perhaps by morning there would be nothing to confess. I did not want my aunt to know that I and our guests had walked about together in the night. How quickly her critical glance had shot out at Kit when he told Frannie of his mother's defilement of the bread dough.

“Good night,” they told me.

I pulled the quilt up under my chin and fervently hoped for morning and for the world to reappear to my eyes even as it was already reappearing for Kit. But his eyes had been closed, his back turned away from the lightning bolt, and I had looked at it straight. I listened for Frannie's gentle breathing, and there it was. I pictured her curled away from me, her face to the rock of the chimney. I thought of Aunt and Uncle up in their attic above the big room. Such a private room they had—I had been in it only a few times during my four years on the Island. Did the odor of the roses on the shingles above Aunt and Uncle visit them as they lay in bed? In the summer, were their dreams rose-scented? The rain droned on, and I thought of it tearing off petals from the flowers. But all in my mind was veiled in brightness.

What is the brightness of brightness? A sizzle of the nerves? At first it had seemed a scalding of the sense of sight, but now there was no more sense of seeing anything. It was as though the imprint of brightness was directly in my brain. I did not see it. I dwelt in brightness.

When I was a small child, I had asked my father to describe heaven, and he had said it was eternal light. There, there was no more pain and no more death; he had lifted his eyes as though they were focused on an invisible realm. With my brightness, there was no pain. Was this
brightness but a forerunner of the eternal light of heaven? Was not bliss an implied component of that brightness? My world—not bliss—was very much with me; still, I could die into brightness. For Father's heaven, there was the counterbalance of eternal darkness, of hell. This brightness was absolute.

The contours of my universe were altered. It was as though I lived in a star. Or a star had come to fill me.

How could I, Una, become blind? What trajectory intended for me, determined by me, could include the subtracting of sight from the sense of me? It was as though I were climbing the tower but instead of the reliable next step, I stepped into nothingness.

All the underbelly of my soul seemed falling, plunging down an abyss whose limit I had not yet found. I shrieked as I fell. The noise of the storm outside seemed distant and muffled. Would something in me scream all my life if I was forever cursed with this blinding brightness?

I heard a step in the room. And Kit's voice saying quietly, “Una?”

“Kit?” I whispered.

“You're not asleep?” he asked.

I felt him sit on the edge of the bed, and I reached my hand toward him. His clothing was wet.

“I went outside,” he explained. “I wanted to make some clay.”

I had no understanding of what he wanted, but I was glad he was with me. Clay? He began to speak again—gently, coaxingly, but with some strange and steely imperative.

“When Jesus made the blind to see, he spat on the ground. He reached down and took up the clay and mixed it with his spittle into a paste.” He paused, then said, “Feel what I have,” and he took my fingers and put them in the cup of his hand. Kit had brought in mud.

“The paste he used to anoint the eyes of the afflicted.”

The scream within me turned to ice. As calmly as I could, I said, “I do not believe in miracles. Nor in Jesus.” I felt afraid for Kit. Did he hope to work a miracle?

“Probably some of the miracles happened,” he said with unusual intensity. “Or some form of them. Would people make things up out of absolutely nothing? Maybe there was a healing element within the clay. Maybe it could be widespread as dirt itself, and we but have to reach down to the earth and take what she offers us.”

“Kit?” Frannie's little voice spoke. “Kit, is it you?”

“Don't be afraid,” he said.

“I'm not afraid,” she answered. “Are you awake, too, Una?”

“The lightning hurt her eyes. She can't see.”

“Una?” Her voice swooped up in alarm. “Una, you can't see?”

“My sight will come back,” I said.

She rushed to me and flung herself on me, her arms around me, softly calling my name.

“I think it will be all right,” Kit said. He told her how his own vision had returned. “I was going to put some mud on her eyes, to speed their healing.”

“Your clothes are wet,” she said.

“That doesn't matter,” he said evenly.

“I want to wait, Kit,” I said.

Kit stood up and walked to the door. “Good night,” he said. His voice was stiff.

“Can I get in with you?” Frannie asked me, as soon as Kit left.

She slid in beside me, and, cuddled together, we both fell asleep.

 

I
N THE MORNING
, I woke to a visibly returning world. First there was a rim of movement around a central blankness. When color became discernible in patches around the rim, I felt a bit reassured.

I said no more to Aunt and Uncle than that the lightning had blinded me. Uncle said that he had heard the bolt come down the tower to the ground. They were both full of tender concern for me. Uncle said he had known a sailor who had been temporarily blinded in a lightning storm off the coast of New Zealand.

Of climbing the tower, of seeking the company of one of our visitors, I said nothing. Even deeper in my heart, I buried the idea that Kit had gone out into the rainstorm, found some muddy place, and gathered the mud into the palm of his hand, with the intent of healing me. Had spoken of Jesus and miracles. I asked Aunt if she thought any sort of poultice would help my eyes.

She suggested that we protect them with a thin cloth, that we let the light back in only gradually. So that day, I lay much of the time with a double thickness of cheesecloth over my face. Giles visited me briefly and explained that he and Kit would be taking measurements of
the space in the lantern house, and of the stairwell, and of the tower itself, to see what lengths of ropes and beams and pulleys they would need if the new lens was hoisted up rather than carried up. He said he would come and read to me, if he had time, and we agreed on Wordsworth. But the day passed without his return.

Kit also visited, and he spoke cheerfully for a time, but then he said, “We have not brought you luck, Una.”

“I think I am lucky to know you both,” I said.

“Your life was more peaceful before we came.”

“I could die of peacefulness.”

“I used to wonder what it would be like to grow up with very few other people, no society. One of the things I admire about all of you is your contentment.”

“What do you like about content?”

“I have so little of it.”

“Giles, too?”

“We're very different.”

As I lay under the cheesecloth, I asked myself if this was true. I could not tell. They both seemed wondrous to me, and that wonder was like the brightness. Within it, there were no distinctions. On my bedsheet, my fingertips felt a crust of dried mud, and I picked at it and flaked it, and brushed it away. Then I asked Frannie to bring me a damp cloth so that I might clean my fingers.

By dusk, I could see in a broader circle around a bull's-eye of blindness. It seemed like an unwanted sun masking the humans who were dear to me. When I tried to look into a face, there was only abstract brightness, but if they raised their arms and hands to gesture, I could see that my bright spot had human appendages.

Kit said that the phenomenon had been the same for him, but more short-lived. “I wanted it to last longer,” he said, and I asked him why. “People are always composed of a combination of the real and the abstract,” he said. “We make each other up.”

 

I
WAS NOT SICK
, but there was a weakness about me, and a timidity. I moved as though I were recovering from an illness. Uncertainty seemed to me a kind of illness, and I felt as though I wanted special
food to strengthen me. Aunt was wonderfully sensitive to this and asked me what I would enjoy eating, and I asked for rose-hip jelly on toast. My mother had made jelly from calves' hooves, which I did not like, but Aunt's jelly seemed to bring to me all the clear goodness of the sun and the rooftop roses.

For supper, I particularly enjoyed a mess of herring fish. Every person at the table picked out the tiny bones of a herring for me, since my sight would not permit such fine work, and I enjoyed the flavor and meat of the fish without any of the tedious labor. Then Giles brought out a sack of pecans that someone in Alabama had sent, and the adults separated the meat of the nut from the pith for Frannie as well as for me, Aunt saying that the pith was so bitter it would turn your mouth inside out. Though I could not see it, she placed the nut-meat in my hand to feel and told me that some people thought that pecans nourished the brain, because half a pecan resembled the human brain.

“And some people believe,” Kit put in, “that if you eat cucumbers, your nose will grow long. Or other parts.”

“What parts?” Frannie asked.

“Your feet,” Aunt said. Then she asked Giles when the measurements and plans would be complete.

Giles said they would stay but one more day and leave the next morning, if the weather held.

“Then I'll certainly bake the famous rolls in the morning,” Kit said. “If I may.”

“I want to help,” Frannie said.

“And I'll help, too,” Aunt said.

But I had no fondness for cooking and merely looked forward to the eating.

After the lanterns were lit in the Lighthouse, Giles read from Wordsworth, “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” and the image of the narrator standing above the great city of London came before us. How the speaker looked down on all the buildings and all the life that they contained and felt a kind of love and awe for our lives and our multitudinousness.

My own response included the thought that should my eyesight not have returned, never would I have seen for myself such an expanse of
city. Yet, again, I thought how the mind's eye sees, and if it was as Kit said that halfway we make up what we see, then already, through the words of Wordsworth, I was seeing.

Then Giles read the poem about the daffodils that begins “I wandered lonely as a cloud” and how, suddenly, the poet came upon “a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils,” which were “tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” The sight became a mental treasure for Wordsworth, to which he could return in memory, and when he did, then his heart once again, Giles read, “dances with the daffodils.” I thought how the two poems fit together—one of the city with compassion for humanity and our composite creation, and the other about the beauty of nature and one's individual joy of it.

Giles read in such a manner as to increase my understanding of the poems. It was as though with his own mind, his tempo, and where he made the emphasis fall he presented the lines with more clarity than they might have had in themselves. The cadence of his voice curved the thought of the poem, and we were enriched by Giles's interpretation as well as by the words composed by Wordsworth. Then he read “Tintern Abbey.”

I had always felt kin to Dorothy, Wordsworth's sister, who often accompanied him on his rambles through the English countryside, who relished the wildness of nature, its “dizzy rapture.” But there was a phrase in the poem that I had overlooked before. The line put me in mind of Kit's theory—Wordsworth said that nature was half created, half perceived. I glanced at Kit, but his body made no movement of recognition. It was as though, for Kit, the idea had only his own particular twist to it, and if the twist was not there, he did not recognize it as a kindred thought. Or so I read his stillness. I could not yet see his face.

Were many people in the world cut from the same cloth as Kit and Giles? I wondered. Were there many men like Giles with such a gentleness and wide learning about them and who were yet sailors? Or those like Kit, with such a strange originality to their minds that they left mine reeling? There was a kind of dizzy rapture for me in talking with Kit. With Giles, his thought was not so much original as deep and complete; I did not think many people could know so much about such different things—certainly not I. But I thought I knew how Giles felt.