Ahab's Wife (7 page)

W
HEN FRANNIE
jumped into her father's arms and thrust her hands boldly into the burning hair atop his head, the sensation I felt was
envy
. O, to be so little!

“You're like a
torch,
Papa,” she said, tugging at his topknot.

He smiled down at me. “What do you say, Una? Am I now your Uncle Torchy?”

Frannie pulled a tuft of his red hair, as though to test how well it was rooted to his head, but he made no move to stop her. I smiled at them.

I remembered my father, sitting on a stump, holding me on his lap. “Now, I'll put on your golden gloves,” he had coaxed; he slid his fingers over each of mine, starting with the thumb and saying with each stroke, a word: “Do-unto-others-as-you”—changing hands—“would-have-them-to-do”—and then he buttoned the fanciful gloves, having run out of fingers—“unto-you.” Then he cautioned me, holding both my hands tightly, “Whenever you do wrong, Una, the gloves come off. You must then say the verse again and put them on with new resolve.” I also remembered his hand, when I was twelve, swooping for my cheek, and the impact that turned my head. And after that picture, another appeared, unwanted, of him framed in the narrow door, his whip in his hand, of my mother rising, standing between us, saying, “No.”

Uncle Torchy began to hum and to waltz around, holding his little daughter against his chest.

That night when I lay in bed, I listened to the wind humming in the tower. Did the Giant emit sounds? Along with
Stillness
one of his great attributes was
Silence
. Yet when the wind, like a horsehair bow, rubbed him as though he were a long stone string, he sang.

Or did the breath of God make the Giant into a lone Pan-pipe? I fingered the hard stone wall beside my bed. As the velocity of the high wind increased, the column of air inside the Giant's long hollow throat was set to mournful vibrating. I wailed back till I woke Frannie, and
she left her warm bed to crawl in with me to offer comfort.
Don't be homesick,
she whispered.
I'm here
.

 

“I
EXPECT
the
Camel
to appear any day,” Uncle said to me at breakfast. “Are your letters ready?”

“I have one for every month for my mother.”

“And for your father?”

“I'll write him at the end of summer.”

Uncle only slightly frowned, but he looked away.

Aunt said quietly, “We understand.”

 

A
BOVE ALL
, Aunt Agatha was a pacifist who was unyielding in her abhorrence for violence. She labeled war not only the greatest of human evils but also the silliest. One summer evening, while we stood on the beach to enjoy the sunset colors, she told us—she seemed blushing, in that light—of women in ancient Greece, who had withheld their bodies from their husbands as long as they pursued war. That, she believed, was probably the only effective way to end strife among men.

Uncle Torchy put in the statement that sometimes the Greek men loved each other, like sailors at sea without women. Not only his red hair but the skin of his face and bare arms reflected red.

Auntie said firmly, “Wait till she's sixteen, Torch.” She took Frannie's hand and walked back toward the cottage.

Since there were so few of us on the Island, Aunt Agatha's views about war were of remote importance to me—our peace, marked off by the inevitable shadow of the Giant, seemed unending—but Aunt's attitude toward education was an immediate matter—one from which my spirit, if not my mind, benefited greatly. She said that Plato believed children should not learn to read till they were ten, but instead spend their time with music and exercise—so Frannie was exempt from formal instruction. Since I came to the Island at age twelve, my reading (and I did a lot of it) was acceptable. But Frannie, now age five, lived a life as free as the goats', and more so, for she could come inside, or thrust her nose in the roses, if she liked. Of course, she was curious about her small island world, and whatever questions she asked, at five, at
six, at seven, were promptly and kindly answered by both my uncle and aunt, but they volunteered no information whatsoever, as far as I could make out.

This seemed a bit of a lapse to me, and that second summer with Frannie on the Island, I endeavored to tell Frannie everything I knew so that she would not grow up ignorant. On June 1, I told her that I was a University of One, Una University, and that all day she should listen to me talk. I traced the letter U in the sand and said it had two sounds, when the U was like the vowels in
moon,
or in Una, and, in that U-sound in
university,
when the U-sound was like
you
. Promptly I moved on to what I likened to the contents of an encyclopedia. But when I began to expatiate, it amazed me how little I knew, and that, really, it did not require the day, but only the morning to get through it all. That afternoon, in the shade of the cottage, we pretended to eat from our pantry of mud pies and gossiped about the goats as though they were people.

More glorious than the gulls, the clouds alone dominated the tower. If it was stolid permanence, they were playful change. They filled my head even as they filled the great dome of sky, and when I thought of sewing my mother the promised quilt, I wanted to fill it full of clouds. “Patched Clouds” my aunt and I called it, and the quilt was such variations of white and blue, and a full year in the fashioning, that Auntie almost cried to say good-bye to it and to fold it in the box to send back to Kentucky. I promised Aunt to make her a quilt representing the waves, which would be easy triangles, tipped with red at sunset. Aunt said that I learned much of geometry in making quilts, and that a proper tessellation took a kind of imagination. I did like to control the colors. My first sewing in Kentucky, which my mother had commenced in the same effortless way as my reading, had been a sampler of the alphabet, with the motto
Love One Another
.

As the summer reached its conclusion, Uncle Torchy asked if I had my letters ready for the
Camel
and if there was one for my father. I surprised myself by saying I would write it that evening.

Why, when I tried to write to my father, did my thoughts turn dark? I had never thought that before.

I sighed and looked unhappily at my letter. He had written a kinder letter to me, of pumpkins and yarn balls. Again, I saw his hand diving for my cheek. I thought of how the sea eagle smites the sea and comes away with a fish in its talons.

The
Camel
did come the next day, but she had a new master, and he had not known to gather our letters from the post office in New Bedford. We were able to send out letters, and our groceries and fire-wood were aboard, but there was no news from Kentucky to savor. My second summer on the Lighthouse closed sadly.

 

T
HAT SECOND WINTER
, bereft of the letters from my parents, I became gray with isolation and loneliness for the world. That winter was fiercer than the one before, and when I went around to the backside of the tower in the late afternoon, I found that spray had been blown all the way up the hundred-foot cliff, and it coated the stones with silver rime. We saw only a few ships a week plying the rough ocean.

That second November I felt especially hemmed in by grayness, for not only the tower but also the sea and sky were paler shades of gray. It occurred to me one evening when I knew it was time for sunset, though the sky had been a uniform colorless hue the whole day, that if I could elevate myself, I might get above the gray ceiling and see some color before sundown. How welcome a flash of crimson would be, a billow of pink. I determined to try to climb up the tower to get a better view.

Without asking permission, I creaked open the door to the Lighthouse and disappeared. I carried a candle with me, and its weak light shone on a world more dismal than that outside. The barren gloominess of stone and steps presented a silent indifference to my presence. I climbed only to the slot of the western-facing window. The sky held no blush of sunset for me, but I sat down and waited. Perhaps the sky would change.

When it did change, it was to darken from gray to black, and then all at once there were hosts of stars. I felt afraid, as though a swarm of yellow jackets had appeared in the distance. Behind glass, encased in stone a hundred times thicker than an elephant's hide, what did I have to fear, even if they had been a host of stinging wasps? But they entered my mind, through my eyes, and buzzed of my loneliness and insignificance. Disconcerted, I sprang up, slapped first one cheek and then the other, as though to swat insect pests, and hurried down the steps.

As I descended, I heard Uncle opening the door, carrying up his light for the Argand lamps.

“I'm late tonight,” he said. “Without the sunset, I was careless.”

Then he asked me if I wanted to go up with him. I quickly declined, and as I went down carefully, I heard him hurrying up the steps, higher and higher. I wanted to shout up for him to look out for the star swarm, but I knew my November fancy was bleaker than the reality. Stars were only stars, but I shuddered at the thought of them.

That Christmastime, sweet Frannie, to distract my depression, suggested we make a holiday wreath to encircle the Giant. Then she asked Uncle if we might cut some branches from the cedars—trees and wood being scarce enough on the Island so that no one would ever thoughtlessly mutilate any of the trees. Uncle replied that a full, encircling wreath would require too much greenery, but we might make a small
wreath to place on the side, and he would drive a hook, or we might make a garland.

I chose a garland, and all four of us stood in the afternoon wind, while Uncle hammered two iron nails into crevices at either end of one of the five-foot granite blocks. I winced at the sound of the blows. How could one stand such nails going through the palms of his hands? The ends of the garland tossed freely in the wind, and the swag of the midsection luffed out.

That night, after Uncle had come down from lighting the high lantern, I suggested that we all come out to see the garland. Aunt suggested that we each carry our own lantern, and we did. As we stood in the cold, my eye traveled from the holiday greenery up the gray tower to the top. “Now it looks like the Star of Bethlehem,” I said, with satisfaction, and Aunt hugged me with her free arm.

And the year turned round the tower again.

 

D
URING ALL THAT TIME
, my aunt, and my uncle, too, proved as liberal in their attitudes toward religious belief as ever my mother had described. During the third and fourth winters on the Island, we celebrated Christmas royally, with much preparatory baking, and the making of gifts as fall gave way to the blowing cold. We sang Christmas songs, and each did as he or she wished in terms of exact belief.

Aunt Agatha renamed Billy the goat “Liberal,” for challenging the preeminence of the Giant. She herself challenged not only the narrowness of the prevalent Christianity but also the rigidity of education, the inhumanity of the slave economy, and the position of women.

For me, Aunt's liberality in education meant essentially that I, like Frannie, might learn what I liked when I liked. I learned at least one new word every day, and all kinds of random facts springing from the words adjacent in the dictionary. Aunt encouraged me to write in tiny print beside any word I looked up my initials US (for Una Spenser) and the date.

I have already mentioned that Aunt herself had a collection of the poems of Byron, and she also had
Lyrical Ballads
by Wordsworth and Coleridge, which had been published in 1798. Her volume was the twin of one my mother had in Kentucky. Another collection, in a small green
binding, was by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, though Uncle always affectionately called him Bobby Burns, as though he knew him. I should like to say sometime what those poems meant to me, line by line. When I read Wordsworth in the hammock, tended by the summer breeze, the poet's reverence for Nature helped to fill the vacancy left by my father's toppled God.

Giles and Kit had yet to materialize out of thin air.

 

W
HEN
I
THINK
of Kit and Giles, I think of the summer birds that wheeled through the sky all the daylight hours. The Lighthouse seemed to organize us—the house and garden, the larger scallop of the Island. Those of us who lived there—four years for me—had our paths, our predictable rounds, all referenced to the Lighthouse. And these were lovely paths, for Torchy and Agatha had set about to make something of a little paradise of their Island, our Arcadia.