Ahab's Wife (56 page)

W
HAT MAGIC
there was in the word when it named all that I would be! Mother, daughter, neighbor, friend—I let go of all those names, except my own, for that of wife. I drank the word as though it were wine. Every night as I pulled up the coverlet, I let myself have one sip, “Wife,” and I fell asleep intoxicated. For breakfast, before I broke my bread, I murmured “Wife” to myself and smiled down at my blurry reflection on the mahogany tabletop.

Twice a day I climbed to the cupola and swept the sea with my spyglass. I visited that little glass-sided room upon awakening, and then again during the last light of day. My impulse was to run aloft every hour, but I would not allow it. I kept my house as though my husband were there so that when he did come, every household task would be practiced and perfected. All day I cooked and cleaned, and occasionally I purchased some new item from town. When housekeeping work was done, I read or sewed.

I had the judge to many a meal, and also the sweet, practical, imaginative Aunt Charity, and good Mrs. Maynard since her captain was usually away, so I did not lack for company. Some of the richer citizens from Main Street came to call, but I had not known them when I was poor, and I did not encourage them now. I wanted my world, even the people I knew, to be intact for Ahab. I did invite each month Mr. Hussey and the new Mrs. Hussey, who was far less refined than my dear Charlotte, and each month he brought to dinner a small bag of gold coins which he said was my share of the Try Pots earnings. “That it is,” Mrs. Hussey would boom out, “to the penny!” I always served them beef, knowing they must be saturated with chowder.

From Margaret Fuller, I received a few letters and also an invitation to visit her in Boston, which I declined, as I did not want to miss Ahab's return by so much as a day. He must find his wife at home. But I promised Margaret that after Ahab set sail again—alas, I knew that was inevitable—I would promptly visit her.

My judge did insist that I make the acquaintance of the Mitchell family, and I have been forever glad I did. “Word of the
Pequod
would come up from the wharf,” Judge Lord said, “in plenty of time for you
to scurry down, or to wait at home, if you can contain your eagerness.” If Margaret Fuller was the preeminent woman of letters with whom I was ever so fortunate to make a connection, Maria Mitchell became the preeminent woman of science.

T
O BEGIN
our acquaintance, my judge invited me across the street for dinner to meet Maria Mitchell and her father, William Mitchell. I had had time to stitch up a new dress of sprigged chintz, but my handiwork could not have been of less interest to either Maria or her father, despite the elaborate smocking of the bodice. Her dress was a fine, rich brown, simply made, and I immediately commented, “What a lovely silk, Miss Mitchell.”

She said quietly, “We wear the silk, Mother and all of us at home, so as to avoid the cotton.”

“Why is that?” I queried.

Her father put in, “The Southern slaves pick the cotton for our textile industry. We don't wish to be a market for what begins with slave labor.” His tone was one of sad information but with no reprimand aimed at my own cotton frock.

Then they both exclaimed over the bounty and beauty of the dinner table.

Before us on the judge's platter sat a white mound of baked scrod, seasoned with paprika and cracker crumbs, garnished with new peas and new potatoes, and surrounded by many side dishes of squash, cabbage, radishes, and the like. I had furnished a twelve-egg pound cake for our dessert, capped with a sugar drizzle, and the judge had placed it on a cake stand with a pedestal to honor my culinary creation. He and I sat at the ends of the table, set with the Irish china he had seen in Boston, so thin I feared breaking it with a fork.(Never had I met a man so fond of pretty china as my judge. He seemed to have an insatiable appetite for it—as though the plates themselves and not what
they presented could be eaten! I knew that his cabinets were stuffed with large sets from the Orient, from England, from France, and beautiful blue-lattice-marked plates and dishes from Russia. But on that night, it was the newly acquired Belleek.)

William Mitchell pleased me; he seemed the essence of an ideal father. Kindly, comfortable, and above all reasonable, yet he had an ability to identify sympathetically with his listeners. Maria said he had been a wonderful teacher for her, and he returned the compliment by saying that of all his eight children, she was his most apt student.

“She sets the chronometers for the captains, when I am away,” he said, taking a large helping of fish. “And has, since she was twelve years old.”

Knowing from my own days as a sailor how essential that instrument was in determining longitude, I understood that she had earned the trust not only of her father but of the captains as well. I myself had never used the instrument, and when I asked her to teach me how, she promptly said she would be glad to do so and that I must visit her the next day at Vestal Street. Since the invitation was issued so early in the meal, while I was still helping myself to the peas, I felt Maria to be of an open and trusting nature.

“We shall soon be moving from Vestal Street,” Maria went on, “to the Union Pacific Bank, where Father has a new job, but I prefer that you know me in the place I think of as my natural habitat.”

Her voice was rather deep in pitch, and she, like myself, had naturally curly dark hair, but hers was neatly smoothed on the sides and defined in sausage curls in the back. As the evening progressed, I noted an evenness and quietness in her manner that seemed almost too even to me: a young woman brought up in the Quaker tradition. But her father had a sparkle in his eye, and his conversation roamed freely over matters of education, the slavery issue, the Quakers and the Unitarians, his weather records, and his correspondence with other scientific men up and down the coast and even in England.

“Have you become something of a naturalist, living in Kentucky?” Maria asked me in her even, well-modulated tones.

William seemed curious about what I could tell him of my life in the forest, while Maria wanted me to share my observations of nature. She had much less curiosity about me in any personal sense. Yet I began to want her as a friend. I'd not known anyone like her.

I told them I had not only lived in the heart of the continent, in Kentucky, but also on a lighthouse island.

“Compare the flora and fauna,” Maria quickly said.

“Did you take notes on the weather?” her father asked. Then they both laughed at themselves, and my judge and I joined them. “The Scientists in Pursuit of Data,” Mr. Mitchell murmured.

“Well,” I replied, attempting to perform, “you might think that squirrels have a prodigious memory to bury their nuts and then remember where they are and come back to dig them up. But in fact, squirrels just dig in a place where it seems likely nuts are hidden. Squirrels dig up nuts hidden by quite different squirrels. I noted it during the years when I was nine and ten.”

“Brava!” exclaimed the judge.

“How did you keep the squirrels straight?” Maria asked. “Did you tag them?”

“No. If you look closely, each is an individual. Like the humpback whale—if you look carefully, each whale has distinctive markings on its flukes.”

Maria's eyes glowed as though she saw in me a kindred spirit, but, alas, I really had very few naturalist observations to make, unless they had bearing on surviving in the wilderness. I told them that one must not put in a garden close to a black walnut tree. At least not tomatoes, cabbage, or radishes, as some substance from the walnut roots would poison the vegetables.

“I notice the weather,” I went on, “and respond to it. On the frontier, the weather is sometimes the only news. Sometimes it is a matter of life or death.” I saw again the great drifts of snow that had nearly covered the cabin only some half a year previous. I thought of my mother's body trapped under the overturned buggy and of her freezing. Such was not the stuff of dinner conversation. “But I have never made a systematic notation of the weather. I wrote a paragraph describing the recent Great Meteor Shower.”

“November twelfth through thirteenth, 1833,” Mr. Mitchell interjected.

The judge said, “The uneducated thought it a sign of the end of the world. The entire firmament blazed with meteors for hours. I myself felt uneasy.”

“Visible from sixty degrees west in the Atlantic to one hundred
degrees west in the Great Plains,” Maria said, “and from Lake Superior to the southern shore of Jamaica.”

“Where were you, Una?” Mr. Mitchell asked, and we went on to compare our whereabouts during the shower. Although we four had not been acquainted at that time, now in reference to the event it was as though we shared an experience. It made us cozy.

William Mitchell then mentioned the Annular Eclipse of 1831—“The superstitious believed that just such a darkness had engulfed Egypt in Bible times,” he said. Then he spoke of the Luminous Arch of 1827, about which he had given a public speech, bits of which he now rehearsed for us, to the Philosophical Institute: “I first noticed it about ten o'clock. It was a well-defined, radiant belt extending itself from the east to west, of the most brilliant magnificence. Its center passed the bright star Deneb in the constellation of the Swan, at fifteen minutes past ten; by twenty-five past ten the western extremity passed the bright star Arcturus in the constellation Boötes.”

“How did the arch move?” I asked.

“With a slow and majestic motion toward the south. There was a quick undulating motion of its component parts comparable to the rippling surface of the sea, in a steady wind.”

We sat in silent admiration as his words conjured up the awe inspiring arch of light. I myself was thrilled with this history of the Nantucket skies, and Mr. Mitchell, moving ever backward in time, I noted, in his celestial history, obliged my taste for the sensational by then describing the comet of 1825 (the tail being some twelve degrees in length and split into five branches) and the “Great Bright Comet” of 1811, with two tails, one of which grew to a length of seventy degrees.

“How long is seventy degrees?” the judge asked.

With a sweep of her arm, Maria pointed her outstretched fingers toward the horizon and then swung her arm up, remarking, “Forty-five degrees of a circle,” and then continued beyond. In her sudden gesture, a salute to measurement, there was such spontaneity, such unconventional desire to instruct, such speed, perhaps even haste to make clear the point, that I determined I should have a very interesting time coming to understand her nature.

“W
AS IT
a success?” my host wanted to know after the Mitchells had left. Alluding to Maria, he suddenly held out his arm in the horizontal and swung it up to a salute of seventy degrees.

“Indubitably,” I replied.

“You liked them?”

“It would be lovely to have Mr. Mitchell as a father.” I knew I would have grown up with a less romantic and tempestuous nature if he had directed my education. Yet I liked myself and did not wish to be Maria.

“And what of the daughter? Can she be a friend for you? She knows so much! You're about the same age. Both with such exceptional minds.”

“What a connoisseur of young women you've turned out to be!” As to what Maria might come to mean to me, I was uncertain, but Charlotte's absence had left me with a vacancy.