Dark Nantucket Noon (24 page)
Moby Dick
All of a sudden it was summertime. The tourists who had begun to trickle to the island on Memorial Day were increasing in number every week. From a midwinter low of forty-two hundred souls there would be a high of twenty thousand after the Fourth of July, with more thousands pouring off the boat every Saturday and Sunday for a quick look around. The island's resident citizens detested the off-islanders, but offered them a wary hospitality just the same because most of Nantucket's revenue was derived from the tourist trade. The vacationers were a kind of repulsive but plentiful natural product like the quahogs in the harbor, to be harvested for gain at so much apiece.
They flowed off the boat every day, the tourists, and billowed up Main Street. Eddies of them swirled into the Whaling Museum and the gift shops and the restaurants and Mitchell's Book Corner; swells and surges of them rolled along the narrow streets in the direction of the Maria Mitchell birthplace and the Jethro Coffin house and the Old Mill and the seventeenth-century jail; pools and puddles of them collected in the Hadwen house while the lady guide repeated herself tirelessly on the subject of the Hepplewhite table and the Sheraton sofa and the ivory button on the newel post that meant the house was all paid for. Jets and spurts of tourists streamed out the straight country roads, doggedly pedaling bicycles to Siasconset to see roses, pink and red and white, scrambling over the cottage rooftops and fences. They went swimming and splashing and wading in the quiet water of the northern beaches along the southernmost edge of the cold tidal basin that extended northward to the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, or they ran shouting into the pounding surf on the south side, which was the northernmost edge of the warm mid-Atlantic Bight. They visited the shops before they went home again, and bought souvenirs shaped like whales, or real whales' teeth, or T-shirts printed with whales, or lightship baskets. The police arrested outraged youths with tents and knapsacks and sleeping bags camping on the beach. The season was at its height.
Kitty kept running into Joe Green. There he would be at the end of a bookstack in the Atheneum or driving past her as she walked up the road to the Doves' house or turning a corner and coming upon her as she hurried up Main Street. In these encounters he was forever recoiling, turning, fleeing, averting his face. Kitty didn't come to town more often than she could help, partly to avoid the look of recognition in the eyes of strangers on the street, partly in fear of these disastrous convergences.
But on so small an island it was impossible not to meet. And even when she was alone at home Kitty was aware that Joe was not far from where she stood. She was rather like an iron ball, a magnetic pole on one end of an axis that was balanced on some sort of fulcrum, and at the other end of the axis there was another iron sphere, Joe. She could never rid herself of the knowledge that he was there on the island somewhere, and that his end of the axis was moving about, bobbing here and there, lifting and pausing and descending in massive counterpoise to her own. The solid axis between them was made of accusation and guilt, of suspicion and vexation and repugnance, but it had fixed them together in a bond of wretchedness and despair.
Kitty was sick of it. She went back with relief to her study of spartina and arenaria and hudsonia and the small scuttling animal life of the beach. In the cheerful sunlight of a June morning the fiddler crabs were more amusing than they were carnivorous.
“Cosmic resignation, clam!” shouted Kitty, as a herring gull dropped one in front of her on the crumbling asphalt at the end of Hummock Pond Road.
And one Sunday morning she asked Bob Fern to take her out into the harbor in his scalloping boat and to put her ashore at the northern end of Coatue, the fragile scalloped strip of land that protected the harbor from the sea.
From the other side Coatue had looked barren and bleak, but now she could see that it was like the rest of the island in the strong twisted individuality of its vegetation, its windblown cedars and low-growing bearberry, its rugosa roses flowering pink and red and white. Kitty strolled along the curving shore, heading southwest from Wyer's Point to Bass Point, from Bass Point to Five-Fingered Point, and then at the tip of Five-Fingered Point she turned and looked back. What she wanted to find was prickly pear cactus, which was supposed to grow out here somewhere, bristling in the face of New England's harsh coastal storms. But instead she was attracted by the commonplace eelgrass that had drifted up from under water and lay in dried black drifts, carried up by the incoming tide. The water had gone back down, but the eelgrass still lay there, marking the rim of high tide. Then Kitty thought about what Alice had said about the tides, and she looked higher up the beach. Yes, there was another line of eelgrass there. Was that where the water had come up in the highest spring tide of all? Back in March or April? Kitty walked along the upper line of eelgrass, and followed it farther and farther from the shore up toward the low crest of the narrow peninsula. The tide must have come very high here indeed. The eelgrass had washed right over the crest and down the other side. All of the low vegetation was dead here. There was nothing left of the bearberry but brittle gray dead twigs. It must have been killed by the salt water running over between the harbor and the sea. Kitty looked at the quiet harbor and shook her head. It was a wonder this narrow crust of land sufficed to hold the water in at all.
She headed southwest again and walked the length of Coatue, found a prickly pear cactus and started back, hungry for the lunch she had hidden in a paper bag under a thorny rosebush above Wyer's Point. By the time she had walked the mile and a half of the return journey and looked under thirty rosebushes before she found the right one, she was tired. She sat down and ate her way through the sandwiches and the cookies and the orange, and then, feeling lively again, she jumped up, twisted the paper bag into a narrow wad that would fit in her pocket, and set off around the curve of the harbor in the direction of the Coskata Woods. She had to wade across the shallow inlet to Coskata Pond, her tennis shoes slung around her neck with their strings tied together. Then she swung along easily, enjoying the baking warmth of the sun on her bare shoulders. Alice was going to drive over to Wauwinet and pick her up at three. Plenty of time yet. Kitty watched the darting shadows of the terns. They were cheeping lightly over her. Then she winced, as one of the shadows sharpened and darted at the shadow of her head. The bird had plunged at her. Then there was another sharp cheep and another darting shadow. She looked up. The terns were circling over her, uttering light wind-borne cries, dropping at her one by one like small strafing planes. What if their sharp long beaks were to pierce her scalp and hurt her? Then Kitty remembered about the terns. It was June; they were nesting on the beach. She must be walking among their eggs, which looked just like the pebbles on the stony shingle. She started to walk faster, watching her footing, careful to step only on large stones or on the sand. But the terns were still dropping at her. She clasped her fingers over her head, and then she could feel the breath of their wings on her fingers. She began to be frightened. She started to run in earnest.
Suddenly she saw a house on the beach, with a big four-wheel-drive vehicle parked beside it. The windows were shuttered but the door was open. Kitty ran toward it, the terns in pursuit. Or perhaps it was other terns now, new waves rising above her in alarm as she invaded new territories. She ran toward the rough board steps of the house, and as she ran she had an odd sense that the house was shrinking away from her, withdrawing. The door was shutting! Stubbornly Kitty ran up the steps and stood on the sun-bleached boards of the little stoop, tapping hesitantly on the door. The warm boards creaked under her feet. There was no answer.
“Hello?” called Kitty There was still no sound, and yet she was certain that someone was standing on the other side, breathing silently, waiting for her to go away. She rattled the latch. “Please let me in!”
The door was jiggling a little at last. She could hear the tiny noise of the hook being removed from the screw eye, and rattling down, and now the door was opening slowly. Well, it was about time. Then Kitty felt the color rush from her face and flood back in, in pulsing waves of beating blood. Her heart began thumping in her breast. It was Joe.
“Get out,” he said. “Get out, get out.”
Kitty stumbled backward and half fell down the steps. She ran, head down, blindly, her feet white arrows flying out in front of her, the terns diving at her over and over again. At last it occurred to her to run into the water. Surely they wouldn't have built their nests in the water! And there, splashing in the warm shallow water, Kitty cursed herself for a fool. If she hadn't been so stupid she would have figured it out before, and then she would never have knocked on that accursed door. What evil genius was it, what damnable poltergeist, that tormented her this way, thrusting her, shoving her, pushing her again and again into these grotesque intrusions? How he despised her! Well, she despised herself.
Kitty thought for a while that nothing could be worse than that encounter. But there was another one to come. It was her own fault, she realized afterward. Curiosity had killed the cat again. One rainy day she had decided to brave the tourists and visit the Whaling Museum. She manufactured a disguise, a genuine cloak of invisibility like Homer'sâa pair of dark glasses, a kerchief tied over her head and a tremendously long oilskin coat that had belonged to Mr. Biddle. The oilskin drooped and dragged. It came down to her ankles. It felt wonderful. Confidently Kitty set forth, feeling altogether comfortable, a shapeless shambles, a deranged maiden aunt.
The Whaling Museum enthralled her. In the library she hung over the glass cases, reading the seamen's logs. Downstairs she admired the scrimshaw, and the ruddy faces of Folgers and Boatwrights and Ropers and Colemans and Coffins and Husseys in gold frames on the wall. In the great room where whale oil had been pressed for the making of candles she gaped at the jaw of a sperm whale as tall as a house, and looked up at the towering press, and inspected the lump of ambergris, and examined the harpoons and cutting-in spades on the wall, and then suddenly she was attracted by the harsh grating sound of a familiar voice. It was Mr. Biddle. He was a museum guide. He was giving a lecture, standing at the stern of a whaleboat. Visitors had gathered around him, listening. Charmed, Kitty started toward him. Mr. Biddle was talking in a high thready voice, his head nodding and trembling. Someone asked him a question, but he heard not. Perhaps he was a young boy again, thought Kitty, and his hearing was tuned to the shouts and sharp commands of his shipmates, to the hissing rope and the clash of the oars in the oarlocks. As his cracked voice droned on and on, Kitty ran her hand along the smooth gunwale of the boat and imagined it red with spouted blood, the five oarsmen spattered, tossing, clinging, as the vast hulk of the sperm whale rolled in its last convulsions. A small boy squeezed in beside her and patted the gunwale too with his hand. Kitty smiled at him and moved over. Then she smiled at his mother and moved over still further.
