Ahab's Wife (9 page)

“And if Jesus, God's own son,” he spoke softly, “was determined by a will greater than his own, would it not be blasphemy to think that we mere mortals were not so governed? Our minister presented that thinking and many other arguments against us free-willers as forcefully as if they were his own. And, amazingly, as though through sheer sympathy”—he scrubbed his hands furiously together—“he became convinced of our opponents' reasoning. And I with him.” He opened his hands and his arms as though to embrace us. In a normal voice, he uttered a single sentence: “In the middle of the sermon, my minister did change his mind.” Then my father whispered, “Never have I seen a man so transfigured.”

Again, my father's hand rose above his head, as though suspended by a rope. The hand went before him, leading him, leashed, in the circle around our table. “In that godly man, the light of truth shone brighter and brighter as he spoke. And its reflection in me, and in half of the congregation. Truly, all was determined by the will of God Almighty. We were not like him. He was entirely Other. At the end of the sermon, the minister said, ‘All who believe as I have this day been led to believe, follow me through the western door,' and almost half of us stood up and walked out of the old church, and there on the grounds at Mulkey, we formed a new church.”

As my father finished his story, he stopped in his circling of us and lowered his arm. Still, I did not so much see him as that brave minister who had started with one idea and through the paths of his own mind found a new place.
Yes!
He had done this in public, not giving blind allegiance to the position that all knew him to have, but daring to think and to change before their very eyes.

“Your pudding grows cold, Ulysses,” my mother said.

My father sat down and took up his spoon, but then he glanced around at each of us. He seemed lost, disoriented, and my heart swelled in pity for him. I had no idea what to do. I started to reach out, to cover his hand with mine, but when I saw the hairs growing there, like black, frost-bitten grass bent by a breeze, I did not.

I looked at my own dish and realized I had not seen the serving girl bring dessert. Half-tranced myself, I made myself recognize it as the Indian pudding I loved so well—a cornmeal mush flavored through
and through with molasses. I took a spoonful to my mouth and enjoyed the sweet, still slightly warm graininess of the flavored cornmeal. I pressed the mush against the roof of my mouth, as though to extract more warmth from it.

 

W
HEN I EMBRACED
my parents in parting the next day, my mother seemed encased in glass—fragile and brittle. My father's hug seemed dangerous as a bear's. My body wanted other sensations. Yet I loved them and was glad to have seen them. I wanted a noble perch, a place to flap my wings.

Upon our return from New Bedford, I climbed the Lighthouse, at noon, by myself. Boldly, I passed the gloomy western window. Halfway up I became tired. An eastern window pierced the stonework, and I looked down. The height made my stomach toss. I looked out to sea, where the waves moved only as lines of white foam; the water appeared as blue as though a bag of indigo had been dropped in it. There were depths in it. I saw a school of fish move like a dark cloud. My knees were shaking with fatigue, and I felt all jelly like and queasy, but I climbed again.

As I climbed, I was anxious that the door at the top might be too much for my strength, but it yielded to me. And then! The glory of the sky! Light and air all about me! The earth and the enormous sea at my feet. “Mine!” I shouted, and flung open my arms to embrace it.

F
ROM THAT MOMENT
,
my appreciation of the Lighthouse changed from reverence for its imposing presence, as we below moved around it, to affection. It admitted me to its interior. With the work of my own legs, it elevated me. I shared the splendor of its view. Knowing the structure from the inside, I loved it and counted it more friend than father. Thus, the book of my life on the Island fell into two testaments.

In my sixteenth year and my fourth year on the Island, but before
Kit and Giles came to visit, Torch and Agatha and Frannie and I went to Boston instead of to New Bedford, for they wanted me to know something of the variety of the cities and also the variety within Boston. Perhaps Aunt Agatha detected in me a certain restlessness.

When we approached the city, by sea, I saw a sweep of structures from one side of the horizon to the other, and out of this mass of buildings arose six sharp steeples, and also, on their right and apparently built on a hill, a dome, which I soon learned was the State House. The steeples and the dome seemed to me like fingers and a thumb reaching impiously from humanity to the heavens. I could not but gasp at such a display of human achievement and thought that if there was a God with eyes, he was surely impressed with this.

Frannie was also impressed with this hive of humanity and sensibly asked, “Where do they grow their food?”

Torchy promised to show us not where it was grown but where it was marketed, and as soon as our bowsprit crossed Commercial Street, we all cried out at an enormous and harmonious community of buildings fashioned of glittering white granite. Our Lighthouse was granite, but it was gray, single, and devoted to the vertical. Here the horizontal, the sheer amount of land covered by three structures stretching back and back with long streets between, awed us almost to tears. A gleaming central building, adorned with a dome and a portico of four columns, resembled a temple. However, this was a market building, and the two long granite buildings on either side were warehouses for the produce, which we saw being delivered in an endless line of wagons. Even Torchy was impressed, for the Quincy Market, as it was called, had been constructed only in the last few years. He speculated that the three buildings stretched back for at least five hundred feet. Everything was new and fabulous; even the vegetables were carted in shining heaps of all one color. I thought of the word
Xanadu
.

When we began to walk the streets of Boston, I saw many rectangular buildings fronted by columns, and Aunt Agatha pointed out that their architecture was similar to that of the Greek Parthenon.

“Are we in Greece then?” Frannie asked.

“Everyone has read Lord Byron, who died fighting for Greek independence from Turkey,” she said. “We honor him by reviving the Greek style.”

I was astonished that a poet who dealt in airy words should have
influenced the shape of substantial structures. But when we visited the Bunker Hill Monument, Aunt said it was in the Egyptian mode. I smiled and echoing Frannie said, “Then perhaps we've come to Egypt.” But Aunt, explaining they were the residue of Napoleon's famous Egyptian campaigns of 1798, pointed out a number of obelisks and cemetery gateways of post-and-lintel construction. We also saw something of the Gothic medieval influence.

After much walking around, Frannie and I both developed a desire to see inside. What I loved most, perhaps because of the way the sun was streaming in the high arched windows above the balcony, was King's Chapel. Within its vast volume, fluted columns stood in pairs, like a queen and king, and each was crowned equally in an ornate Corinthian capital. The columns stood companionably together, two by two around the sun-filled room, and I thought if ever I should marry so would I like to stand with someone so like myself that we had a certain majesty.

In a curiosity shop, we saw more of the wonders of the world. The window and counters displayed gods and goddesses—an ivory Buddha with a tummy like a keg and elongated earlobes; hairy faces made of coconut shells with eyes of inlaid mother-of-pearl. Aunt pointed out an Egyptian god, Bastet, in the form of a cat with a tiny silver hoop in her ceramic cat ear.

“Do you know why sailors wear gold in their ears?” Uncle asked me. “It was the law, long ago, that a sailor had to have on his person enough gold to bury him should he wash ashore. So the seaside folk wouldn't be out of pocket at the funeral expense.”

I shuddered, and Frannie said she would like to have a cat, like Bastet, someday, as a pet. I was most pleased with a bronze statuette of many-armed Shiva dancing in a circle of fire.

The streets themselves unfolded like an argument of question and answer. Where were we now and where would we go? they asked. Street ran squarely into street till I felt fatigued with the rectangular geometry of it and was pleased when an avenue swooped or curved in a more natural or streamlike way. We walked through an area called the Crescent where all the dwellings linked onto each other, and in front they shared a common park.

While we tramped about Boston, at the mariner's supply, Uncle Torch saw a model of a new sort of lens for the Lighthouse lantern.
Our light had produced a steady star, which was, to me, of astonishing brightness, but the new lens, which was called a Fresnel lens for the French physicist who had invented it, promised luminosity of far greater magnitude. Furthermore, the new light would rotate.

All expenses connected with the Lighthouse had to be approved by the Nation, and so that evening Uncle spent several hours at a desk in our hotel room composing the letter to the Governor asking him to recommend to Congress the new lens. He tried out his sentences on Aunt and me and Frannie. He said that sentences were like blubber and that you must send them to the try works to render out the fat.

“It must be so clearly written,” he said, “that an eight-year-old will comprehend how the invention works.” He looked at Frannie to enlist her greater attention. “Then there is some hope that the lawmakers will understand the logic and science of it.”

“Perhaps you had best leave out the science, Uncle, and write only in terms of the economic logic,” I said.

“Could we have dinner sent up?” Frannie asked. She had seen a wheeled cart, on which lay a tray loaded with food, being pushed down the corridor, and I was sure she wanted just such a magical and unexpected conveyance to enter our room.

I told her, “Under the small silver dome on the cart we saw is the hotel mouse. And we are supposed to let it eat up our crumbs when we've finished because it is very dainty and leaves nothing to be scraped off.”

“Really?” Frannie said.

“Una has quite taken up your brand of teasing,” Aunt said to Uncle. “Under the small silver dome, Frannie, there is a round of butter.”

“ ‘Honored Sirs,' ” Uncle read from his position at the desk, “ ‘Today I have become newly acquainted with an apparatus, invented by Augustin Fresnel, that is vastly superior to the Argand Fountain Lamp, currently used in most lighthouses in this country. The apparatus has been duly tested in France, having been installed on July 25, 1823, at the great Cordouan Lighthouse—' ”

Aunt put in quietly, “Torchy, you'd best tell the Governor about the Fresnel's efficiency.”

Uncle referred to his notes jotted down at the mariner's supply and reported that with the best parabolic reflectors set in the Argand lamp, 17 percent of the light was used, whereas with the dioptric apparatus
83 percent was saved. What with his numbers and a patriotic appeal not to let our country lag behind France, Uncle wrote a splendid and, as it later proved, convincing letter. Although, for reasons not entirely clear to me, subsequent historical accounts credit New York with installing the first Fresnel lens in this country, in 1842, let the record show that, in fact, the first Fresnel, when I was sixteen, became the blinking eye of our Lighthouse.

The first night we were back on the Island, we moved chairs out onto the dock and admired the steadiness of our light. I felt half in a trance—that Boston was gone, and it was replaced with our own simple vista. Aunt Agatha nodded at the beam and said, “How strange that sometimes things as well as people deserve some formal farewell.”

Uncle agreed. “Once I heard a sailor sing good-bye to the crow's nest, the last night he stood watch.”

“May I be as constant as that good light,” Aunt said.

“You are, dear wife.” Uncle reached out and stroked her cheek with the curl of his finger.

 

A
LL THE NEXT WEEK
, Frannie and I took an old, worn quilt to the elbow of beach and lay on the sand to watch the steadfast light. Its sides widened, like a megaphone, as it shone out and finally diffused itself into the dark with no boundary definition.

How would we feel to have that steady illumination replaced by something intermittent? Something that swooped and darted far above our heads? Lying on the quilt on our strip of sand, I felt subdued, as people sometimes do, at the end of an era.

Suddenly Frannie said, “Feel my forehead, Una. I'm glowing.”

I touched her skin with my fingertips and felt the extraordinary heat immediately.

“We must go in.”

 

F
RANNIE WAS
rapidly very sick with the fever and blisters. They were so tight with fluid that they seemed to shine. In her delirium, she imagined the Giant to be walking. Once her eyes opened wide while I sat with her, and I quickly told her there was no such thing as the Giant. She nodded her head feebly and whispered through parched lips,
“I know. He's only a leg.” Quickly I gave her a spoonful of water. Then she shouted, “He has a hinge at the knee!”

When one night we saw she might die of the smallpox, a terror gripped me such as I had never experienced. Helpless, I stood aside while Aunt bathed her forehead and Uncle held both of her hands. I wanted him to hold on to her forever. Once he let go, and I feared Frannie had died, but then he reached farther up and held her arms. Suddenly for myself I had to break the stasis of our waiting.

I slipped outside and climbed up the stone boulders to the tower. I leaned my head against the stone. A hundred feet below the waves crashed against the headland, but the breeze was soft on my back, like a kindly touch. I didn't know why I went there, but quiet words formed on my lips. With my forehead pressed against the stone, I prayed, “O Tower, who joinest earth and sky, O Lighthouse, who warnest of the danger of the sea, impart Thy cool temperature to Thy little servant Frannie, who hast served Thee well in the past. Be our Friend now. And guard over her and keep her safe from death.”

I recalled the small religious objects from around the world I had seen in the shop window in Boston. I imaged and prayed to them all—Buddha, Bastet, Shiva, the wooden mask—to preserve the life of Frannie. To the sunlight bathing the interior of King's Chapel.

When I returned to our bedroom, I pressed my forehead against Frannie's, as though to transfer coolness. Then I sat down and held her vacant hands, while Uncle grasped her arms. Aunt brushed her lips with a wet rag, bathed her forehead, pulled up her nightgown to bathe her blistered ankles and shins.

Frannie lived, though the skin of her face was left forever pockmarked. After her illness, her body elongated and lost its delightfully sturdy and churnlike appearance. I couldn't help noticing that some of the pits on her skin were just like those in the stone of the tower, and, thus, through her illness, she had come to look a bit more kin to our Friend.

Before the government sent out the Fresnel lens and the dozen men to install it—how strange it was to see our Island population so inflated, to see foreign ropes and pulleys dangling from the tower, to hear shouts more shrill than gulls, and to regard the jackets and cast-off gloves of the installation crew lying on our rocks and grass, to glance shyly at
their mouths chewing above the extended board of our table—before all that, the government sent two young men to survey the scene. They arrived in a small dark boat named the
Petrel:
Giles Bonebright and Kit Sparrow.