Ahab's Wife (74 page)

F
RANNIE WAS DELIGHTED
with her room above the sea, and she enjoyed all the pleasantness of nature, but she had no passion for it.

Our best times were when we sat on a blanket, watched the waves, and talked. When we were girls together, we had gotten along splendidly, accepting each other simply as the children of the family, and at 'Sconset we both felt happy again to be kinswomen. Frannie took fine responsibility for herself and for the household, so I had very few extra duties because of her. Instead, those household chores that I did were made lighter by her help and conversation. But I knew that these charms of sea and shore, of familial intimacy and cooperation, lacked excitement for her. She had experienced all this before.

For myself, I continued to savor everything, those days when Frannie first came to 'Sconset. My delight was to see only people I loved with all my heart, and animals as well! Our horses, goats, chickens—Pog the dog above all other animals! Sea, sky, sun, stars! The vegetation around me, my house, my stable in the dell, the things that inhabited my rooms with me—why should such simple items be enough? But they were. And every day the flavor of them grew sweeter and more nourishing. I loved the turning of the day to night, the slower turning of summer toward late summer and toward fall. Love of the passage of time and of all of us caught in time's flow evoked in me a deep movement, like the largest waves that start deep down in the ocean and roll inexorably to satisfaction.

The Woodcarver's Studio

I
VISITED
Robben Avalon for a tour of the wooden women almost as soon as we returned to 'Sconset. When I complained that they had no expression, Robben replied that expression could not be seen at a distance—only the larger form of the sculpture.

“Still, they are incomplete,” I said, hoping my honest response was welcome. “I think that their facial features are too typical. Was it that way with the Greek statues?”

“As the civilization became more decadent, they sank to realism—wrinkles and warts. In the most classical period, everyone was idealized.” How pleasant he looked as he spoke. He did not mind my questions.

“And you prefer?” I asked.

“The ideal. And you?”

I did admire his work. It was a most strange experience to walk among these figures. Some seemed like dryads with only a face materializing out of wood. For others the upper torso leaned out at me, and I might touch a woody shoulder or cheek. Many were in various stages of being painted, and I loved the vividness of the colors, which had an extra depth to them so as to longer withstand the salt water. With the completed figureheads, the colors were sealed under shiny varnish. Such ruby reds and emerald greens—as rich and mysterious as jewels! But the faces of the women, even of the completed ones, were disappointingly lacking in expression.

“I prefer the real to the ideal,” I answered, but I also felt real admiration for his work. And I believed I had been granted a privilege in being admitted to his studio.

“I would be interested in sculpting the actual features of Frederick Douglass,” Robben Avalon added, with pleasant quickness. “In him, the ideal and the real are conjoined.”

“As they are in Mary Starbuck.”

He did not reply.

This conversation with Robben Avalon reminded me of ones I had had with Margaret Fuller about the nature of art, but in this case, Robben was himself an artist. As with Frederick Douglass, his statements were of particular interest to me because of his own experience. I thought of Margaret's saying I preferred the poem to the poet, a preference that gave, finally, but an incomplete picture of the poem, and decided she was right. Or at least I was inconsistent, for it was not the actual words that made me prefer Douglass on slavery to Garrison, or Robben Avalon on art to Margaret Fuller, but my knowledge of the history of the speaker of the words.

Of my own history, to Robben, I had no desire to speak. He knew, of course, that I had been married to Captain Ahab, and he had died. Yet from the beginning and in all my long future with Robben, I felt, oddly, that despite my reticence he, like Captain Ahab, thoroughly knew me. He knew me artistically, intuitively, without a factual history—the contours of my shape. He knew who I was, without the clutter of details. And, so I discovered, I knew him intuitively, too, or at least knew what seemed his essence.

I knew him to be lonely, something of a misfit, passionate, joyful about his carving and his garden; a person of integrity and concern for justice, a man spiritual but not religious, seasoned with a dash of pride, or even arrogance. Save for the defect I have mentioned, I thought Robben's work quite wonderful. Like the judge, he was a perfect neighbor, I felt, and soon-to-be friend.

 

A
FEW DAYS
after our return to 'Sconset, our townfolk began to come to see us. I was surprised, however, to note one day Austin Lord's buggy not stopping at my house but continuing to my neighbor's. That the judge and the artist had much in common surprised me. Yet, there was the judge's buggy passing me by and stopping at Robben Avalon's wooden hitching post (a beautifully carved horsehead). The judge's horse reached out his neck to sniff the impostor horse, and I called Frannie to watch. The real horse, finding no familiar scent, tossed his head and rolled his eye. We both laughed.

“Una,” Frannie said, watching the judge and Robben heartily shake hands, “I do feel restless here.”

“Return to town with the judge, if you wish,” I said, smilingly. “This is a decision that conveys no hurt to me, if you wish to make an arrangement with the judge. I am not your gaoler.”

“No,” she replied. “But here comes the gaoler.”

“Sure enough,” I reported aloud. “In a borrowed buggy, full of children. Look, he stops to visit Mary Starbuck.”

I turned from my window. Suddenly it seemed odd for my neighbors on both sides to have visitors while I had none. For the first time, I felt lonely at 'Sconset.

“Let's cook,” Frannie said energetically. “We will smell so good that they'll all come running.” She picked up a bowl, filled it with apples from the barrel, and immediately began to cut them up. I put water to boil, got out cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, lard, flour, sugar, salt, saleratus, vinegar, and all the other things for apple pies. We both laughed happily. How easy it is, we thought, to make a decision, to implement a remedy, to act.

Ah, it was the we of us—Frannie and Una, Una and Frannie—so beautiful was our accord as we turned to the making of apple pie.

“You know,” I said, “I have never found Hamlet convincing.”

Frannie laughed out loud at the unexpected nature of my pronouncement. Then she asked, “Why is that?”

“All that hesitation. A person would either kill the king or go to another country.”

“Hesitation is more natural for some of us than it is for you, Una.”

“What is your favorite play?” I asked.

I was surprised to find that Frannie was nothing like the reader of literature that I was. That difference made no difference at all in the harmony of our spirits. May every woman have such a kinswoman or friend. Frannie had read
Hamlet,
but no other Shakespeare.

“What I like is for you to tell me stories,” she said. “Someday you must write it all down.”

“Do you think so?” I asked. I was stunned. “I have enjoyed writing down a few thoughts. I do it when I want a moment to live forever.”

“Not philosophy,” she said. “Not about time or stars. The things you've seen and done. The people you've met. You describe people very accurately, I think.”

Again, I felt as though I had been jolted. I stopped my cooking preparations and sat down at the table.

“Frannie, what an idea,” I said.

“Don't you love reading? How is that so different from writing?”

I said nothing, but my mind seemed to hold the night sky streaming with fast-moving constellations. I was dizzy with it.

“Go now,” she said. “Right now. Take your quill and paper, sit on the sand, and write.”

“I believe I could.” I felt stunned, mesmerized.

I did exactly as she told me to do.

 

W
HEN
I
SAT
upon the beach, I wondered where I should begin. I had thought before of Sir Philip Sidney's muse's injunction: Look in your heart and write. But I could only look at the sand and the waves and the bright sky. Finally I picked up one grain of sand, and I wrote the little description of putting it in my mouth that I have included near the beginning of this long narrative that you now read.

That was all I could do that day. I stayed there on the sand, on that mild, blue day, a long time. Perhaps, I thought, I have made this solitude and peace for myself so that I
can
write. Is such a prerequisite to writing? Surely not for all, but perhaps yes, for me.

While my quill was poised in the air, not writing, I formed my first principle as a storyteller. I will not be governed by time. Time does not march; it swirls and leaps. Time is a dancer, not a soldier. And the second: adherence to fact is slavery. Think how Shakespeare distorted, compressed, rearranged historical events in his history plays. Such license would be mine, if I wrote. When I pieced a quilt, I did not place the pieces in chronological order, the oldest in the upper-left-hand corner! A pleasing design, color, beauty—could those be my business?

Spangled,
spangled
—as I looked at the sun on the water, that is what I thought, and it seemed a good word to me, a chosen and accurate word, such as fiction might admit. And I thought of other words that I had loved for their truth and beauty.

 

B
Y THE TIME
I had climbed the steps to the edge of my yard, the odor of cinnamon and cooked apples, the fragrance of piecrust, reached my nostrils. I hurried. Seeing the pies on the table, I exclaimed, “Ah!” and then laughed, for all around the table, some sitting, some standing, were Austin Lord and Robben, Mary and Isaac, assorted children, and Frannie with the knife in her hand, ready to cut.

T
HAT DAY
, as he ate Frannie's pie, Isaac's heart was strangely warmed. Frannie did leave 'Sconset to work in Nantucket town as the judge's housekeeper (and to attend to what she had identified that remarkable night as her life's work), and her residence in the town made it possible for Isaac to see her often. Their religious and political views were compatible, both being Unitarians and abolitionists, and Frannie loved his four golden children.

Because of Frannie's distaste for his work as gaoler, Isaac did apply for and eventually secure the job at Sankaty Light, and then he begged Frannie to marry him and to live at the lighthouse with him and his family. She accepted the second idea—to live at the lighthouse with him—but not the first. I would have predicted it would be the other way around, because she was truly devoted to the abolitionist cause, which centered in the town. Perhaps I had spoken to Frannie too convincingly of the bondage I had felt to Kit, once I was married to him.

“Would you marry again?” she asked me.

“Whom?” I replied, startled.

She only smiled.

Frannie wrote to her mother about the arrangement with Isaac she wished to make—to live with him at Sankaty but not to marry—and Aunt Agatha replied that though her own marriage had been exceptionally happy, of course the marriage of her sister (my mother) had been troubled, and that Frannie should make her own decision about the institutions of chastity and marriage. It touched me that Frannie wished so much to spare her mother any pang or anxiety that she would consult her on such a delicate question before she herself took action. (Frannie's frank consultation gave me a pang of old guilt.)

The matter of the distance between Sankaty Light and the Unitarian-abolitionists on Orange Street Frannie addressed by asking me to buy her a fast horse, which I did. Soon (after a number of falls into the sand of the beach) Frannie rode pell-mell, astride, past the cranberry bogs and scrubby heath, down the road to town, whenever she had abolition work to do. Frannie made no pretense at marriage, even when she became pregnant. Though Mrs. Maynard had a fit of protest and both Mary and I cautioned Frannie not to ride, pregnant, at such breakneck
speed, she ignored us. Her child was a healthy girl, and Frannie named her Liberty, in memory of my own lost child.

 

O
NE SPRING DAY
, about a year after Frannie's baby was born, Justice and I were picnicking on the beach when suddenly we saw dolphins leaping out of the ocean not far offshore. One, two, three, four, five gray bodies arced into the air. They challenged each other, leaping higher and higher, and then disappeared altogether when Frannie and the five golden children came through the sea grass toward the beach.

Frannie was sitting astride the horse, the baby at her bosom, with the two smaller Isaac Starbuck offspring riding fore and aft. The two older stepchildren led the horse. They were such bonny children and the horse was so willing and nice that I thought I hardly ever had seen such a surprising and pretty sight. None of the children wore hats and their golden hair sparkled in the sunlight. Baby Liberty's hair was a different hue from that of the other children, having something of Viking red mixed with the gold, the inheritance from her red-haired grandfather. For all of the pleasure and happiness radiating from Frannie I could not help but notice how rough her visage was amidst all of the petal-smooth children.

I went to take the baby so that Frannie could dismount, and Justice held the horse's head. “Look out to sea,” Justice told the children. “The dolphins are breaching.”

“We saw you through the spyglass,” Frannie said. “We decided to intrude.”

“Welcome intrusion,” I said.

Frannie said, “I am pure joy today.”

At that moment Liberty began to whimper.

“Give her back to me,” Frannie said. “She's not quite finished her lunch. Untie the basket. I've brought goodies for all of us.”

She seated herself on our blanket and nursed her beautiful baby. For us, she brought slices of Kentucky jam cake. “Your receipt, Una,” she said. When I tasted the cake, it tasted exactly like mine. I thought of our mothers' shared plum jam, and vinegar eggs, and other receipts. Our connection continued theirs, and with baby Liberty at her breast, I felt that love could spiral down the decades. My heart was heavy with longing when I thought of having another child myself.

My son had taken to the baby almost as much as I. When she'd finished her lunch, under a discreet fold of Frannie's blouse, Justice asked to hold her. He tucked her up against his chest just the way Frannie had held her, as though he, too, would nurse the baby.

Looking into her eyes, Justice said, “She loves her brother, doesn't she? Yes, she does,” laying claim to his cousin with the logic of his heart.

But soon baby Liberty wanted her liberty and toddled off to join her half siblings on the beach. I was surprised that Justice was content to stay with Frannie and me, but he watched the baby with an unself-conscious smile. “She's partway between being a baby and being a real child,” he pronounced.

When she plopped down on the border of wet sand, Justice saw immediately that an incoming wave, though small, would be enough to topple her, and he ran to lift her up before I could shout to the other children.

He raised her up to sit on his shoulder, while the ocean ran around his ankles. She waved one hand gleefully, pleased with her perspective atop the boy-tower. Their two heads conspired in contrast—black and gold.

Just then, a slick gray body arced into the air far out to sea, like a gray crescent moon. We watched as three other dolphins, close in, breached and continued to cavort. How heavily they slapped back into the water. From her shoulder seat, Liberty smacked her little palms together in response to the dolphins.

 

O
NLY WEEKS LATER
, the child had toddled into the sea, despite the watchful eye of her mother and her four half sisters and brothers, and drowned.

The oldest Isaac Starbuck child came riding on the fast horse, and Mary and I went in the buggy as rapidly as we could. We feared that Frannie would throw herself from the cliff, so Mary and I took her from Sankaty to stay with us at 'Sconset. We were completely vigilant, taking turns watching her door all night. Only Justice was admitted to the room. When I looked in, he sat beside Frannie's bed holding her hand. His face was like a weeping wall. His swollen lips contorted silently. None of us could have been the least prepared, and my heart
was wrung for Liberty and for Frannie and wrung again for my boy's anguish. Justice had to bear what I would have borne, so many years ago at the Island Lighthouse, had Frannie died of the smallpox.

Frannie refused to see Isaac or any of her stepchildren, which I thought was unfair and unfortunate, but Frannie's extreme state of mind was not to be argued with. She screamed at the mention of Isaac's name. I was about to write to her mother to come when Frannie became calmer and announced she would move back into town. She said she could never bear again to live at the lighthouse, or with Isaac and his children. Since she and Isaac were not legally married, the decision was available for Frannie. Still struggling with grief, my heart went out to Isaac and the injustice dealt him. For a time, one of his sisters came to help him.

In town, Frannie kept house again for the judge, until she exchanged letters with the antislavery league that resulted in her attaching herself to travel with Frederick Douglass's party.

My cousin and I have the indissoluble link of shared childhood between us, and we keep up a regular correspondence. She is always alert for any news of Susan, and I am grateful to her for that as well as for a thousand other kindnesses. But never again has there been the bliss of connection between Frannie and me that I felt the day we watched the dolphins. Of the many interesting observations Frannie has written to me is this one, of Frederick Douglass: “He does not look at my skin, my face, and think ‘disfigured,' any more than I look at him and think ‘black.' No I think ‘Great Soul' and ‘True Warrior' when I listen to him address the crowds.”

Each in our own way, we sought relief from our loss. I took Justice up on the roof walk, where I did find for myself consolation and connection. But Justice merely gazed across the darkness to the lonely Sankaty Light.

Gradually, over months, his grief lessened, and he and Jim spoke enthusiastically, to my dismay, of going to sea someday soon.