Dark Nantucket Noon (15 page)

Alice was silent again. The door had slammed shut. “I don't know,” she muttered.

Then Alice stopped walking and lifted her field glasses. “There they are,” she said softly. She pulled the glasses off and handed them to Kitty.

There was something white in the edge of the marsh, there below the hill where the gray-shingled side of a large house was washed in bright morning light. Kitty aimed the glasses at the patch of white. The swans were skimming slowly, arching their long white necks to peer down into the water. Kitty thought of poor Jupiter, limping clumsily around his muddy pen. This was what he must have been before, pure grace. “How did they get here?” said Kitty. “Have there always been swans on the island?”

“Oh, no. The first pair was imported, years ago. But they migrate now, and nest in the wild.… What's that?” she said sharply. She reached for the field glasses.

Kitty could see something too, a double flicker of sunlight, another pair of lenses. Somebody was looking at them. She thought of the swan-destroyer. Were the swans in danger? Then the two spots of light vanished, and a man appeared, climbing the slope in the direction of the house at the top of the low hill.

“It's Joe Green,” said Alice, lowering her field glasses, her face and voice noncommittal. “He lives over there. That hilly part of the shore belonged to Helen Boatwright.”

Kitty turned abruptly and started back. Alice followed. In the car Kitty struggled with herself and tried to make polite conversation, asking about the swans. Were they increasing every year?
Damn, oh, goddamn.

“I'm afraid not.” Alice started the car and headed southwest along the Polpis Road. “There are accidents—disasters. Some of the cygnets don't make it. Maybe it's snapping turtles. Then again, maybe it isn't. Malicious vandalism.
Murder.
It amounts to the same thing.” Alice's face was glowering. “Martha Biddle found some little ones with their necks wrung last year at S'achacha Pond. She's your landlord's daughter.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Biddle.” Kitty looked at the fence-rails running along beside the road, and thought about her landlord. Living in his house, she had begun to form a picture of a rugged and simple old man. “I wish I could meet him,” she said. “I'd just like to see what he looks like. But I suppose he'd be like other people. Maybe he'd tell me I couldn't stay in his house anymore.”

“Oh, don't worry about Obed Biddle,” said Alice. “He's deaf as a post, and most of the time he lives in the past.” Her face cleared, and she glanced at Kitty. “I'll tell you what you should do if you want to meet him. You should go to Friends Meeting. He goes there every Sunday. Ten o'clock this morning. This time of year they meet in the Maria Mitchell Library on Vestal Street instead of the Quaker Meeting House, because there's no heat in the Meeting House. Unless you're afraid of a bunch of Quakers.”

18

I sat a considerable Time in the Meeting before I could see my Way clear to say anything, until the Lord's heavenly Power raised me, and set me upon my Feet as if one had lifted me up.…

JOHN RICHARDSON,
Quaker evangelist in Nantucket, 1701

Kitty came in late and sat down in an empty seat in the circle of chairs. Nobody looked at her. Good. Discreetly she examined the Friends, who were all sitting quietly. The room was lined with windows and bookcases. Another room opened off it, with more bookcases, tables covered with coats, a brass telescope on a tall stand.

Was that Mr. Biddle, that baldheaded gentleman? He didn't look quite right somehow. Then the door opened and another old man came in, and Kitty smiled. Surely this was Obed Biddle. She watched him shuffle to a chair, supported by a bulky woman in a purple sombrero. That would be his daughter, Martha. The old man had a cane, and he leaned on it heavily. Then he tried to hook it over the back of his chair but it clattered to the floor. “Shit!” said Mr. Biddle.

“There, there, Daddy,” said his daughter, speaking right into his ear, helping him to settle down.

“All right, all right,” quavered the old man noisily, waving his twisted hand. There was hair in his ears and in his nose like dragon smoke, and unkempt white hair trailed over his forehead. His long scrawny neck swayed forward like a camel's, leaving his shirt collar far behind. He coughed and barked.

Kitty lowered her head and stared at her shoes, not looking up as the door opened behind her. The circle of chairs was filled. The newcomers would have to sit somewhere else. Earnestly she struggled to imitate the thoughtful calm of the Friends who were sitting beside her. But her mind had become a restless twitching sea, niggling with small detail. It pulsed and raced. She invented two-word rhymes to use in comic verse. Her stomach growled. She had not had enough breakfast. Why didn't somebody speak up? Wasn't anybody going to be moved by the spirit to say anything? Would a whole hour go by with no sound but the echoing utterances of her own digestive tract?'
Oh, Lord, let my stomach be
soothed
, prayed Kitty:
Hush thou the inward groanings of this Christian flesh.
Were the Quakers Christians? Maybe not. Maybe they didn't even read the Bible. Maybe they didn't need any revelation but the inner light:

But Mr. Biddle had read the Bible! He cracked all his bones erect and coughed and gathered his spit and cleared his throat and began reciting the first chapter of Genesis. Kitty listened enraptured. His voice was grating and discordant but it was dire and threatening at the same time, like that of an Old Testament prophet.

“In the beginning,”

whinnied the old man,

“God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

He droned on and on, his voice alternately dying away and then bursting out again in a tuneless crescendo, grand and pitiful at the same time. Kitty thought of Mrs. Magee, the real estate lady, who was trying to swindle him out of his land. Could anyone warn him? But how could you warn and caution and persuade someone who was deaf as a post? Perhaps he would have to stand up against Mrs. Magee like the monument he was, a kind of very old but natural force, all by himself in his age and isolation against the petty thrusts and pinpricks of lesser men and women. At least he seemed to have Jehovah beside him, and Noah and Moses and Jeremiah, and surely the lot of them could hold off a lady realtor. Kitty saw him as a primordial patriarch, Moses holding aloft the tablets of the law, crying aloud the commandment about covetousness:

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house … nor anything that is thy neighbor's.

But it was not Exodus now, it was Genesis, and Mr. Biddle had arrived at the howling climax of his recitation.

“And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind …”

His voice kept cracking, rising suddenly an octave in pitch, penetrating to the skulls and marrowbones of his listeners like the deep knockings of a shuddering radiator.

“… and God saw that it was good! And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas … And the evening and the morning were the fifth day”

Suddenly he sat down.

Was that all? wondered Kitty sleepily. What about the sixth and seventh days? Perhaps Mr. Biddle's memory had given out. She yawned. She wished she had taken off her coat. She was too hot in the warm room. Drowsiness was overwhelming her. Her head fell forward. She jerked it back. But in a moment it fell forward again, and her eyes rolled up under her closed lids, and she slept. She was in the same room, she was here in Quaker Meeting, but the Maria Mitchell Library had become a seagoing vessel, and she was at that very moment being pitched overboard. She was plunging with great smoothness, deeper and deeper down, fathoms beyond fathoms, the waters opening before her silently and closing just as silently behind her in a silvery bubbling froth. Now she was aware of shapes moving past her, great forms hidden in their own sleek streams of water, massive enormous presences, Mr. Biddle's great whales, newly created by God but hidden in streams of silver water, until at last one of the shapes turned toward her and opened its cavernous jaw. Kitty slowly revolved and faced it, poising in the water, ready to be engulfed. It was Leviathan. The jaw was gigantic, inviting, a chamber of velvet black. But then there was a muffled clatter and a general exhalation of breath and a rustling and a rising murmur of voices, and Kitty woke up, her head jerking back. The Meeting was over. She stood up. The man next to her was standing too, nodding pleasantly, reaching out to shake her hand. He probably didn't know she was a murdering sinner, or maybe he was a good man and he forgave her for her sins.

“Was that Obed Biddle?” said Kitty. “The man who spoke?”

“Oh, yes, that was Mr. Biddle. He's quite a tradition here. He knows the Old Testament by heart. A remarkable old gentleman. Do you know what he was referring to this morning? I don't suppose you do. He was talking about the scallop fishery.”

“The
scallop fishery?
”

“It's been so poor lately. He was reminding God that the seas were meant to be fruitful and multiply.” The man smiled, picked up his hat and departed.

Kitty looked at Mr. Biddle. She wanted to speak to him, to pluck his sleeve, to tell him how much she liked his house. Above the murmur of polite departing Friends she could hear him cursing his daughter. She started to move forward. How could she make him hear?

And then she was suddenly face to face with Arthur Bird. “Why, Arthur,” said Kitty, feeling suddenly jovial and tyrannical. “I didn't know you were a Quaker.”

“Oh, Miss Clark,” said Arthur, “if there's anything I can do. Anything at all.”

“But, Arthur, you already have.” Gaily Kitty clapped him on the shoulder, and then she saw why he was there. Following Joseph Green. Because Joe was there, he was turning his back, the sleeves of his coat were shuddering, he was wading through chairs in his anxiety to get away.

Jonah, she was Jonah.
She had failed to heed the word of God. She had gone where He had not bidden her to go, and then of course the sailors had thrown her overboard, to calm the storm of which she was the cause.
She was guilty, it was true that she
was guilty.
From that first moment when she had seen the look of horror and revulsion in the eyes of Letty and Richard Roper, and Arthur Bird, and Joe himself, from that instant she had felt sunken in a sea of guilt, as though it didn't matter whether she had driven a knife into Helen's heart or not; she was foul with the deed just the same. She had gone to Tarshish, or wherever it was, instead of Nineveh, like Jonah. She had come where she was not wanted, where every instinct had told her it was wrong to come. She had blundered into something of great perfection and destroyed it. Her sin had seemed to her from that first moment not simply a venial but a mortal one.

19

… We sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.

Moby Dick

Alden woke Homer at sunrise. “If you're coming with me, you've got to get up now,” he said.

“Good God, it's the middle of the night.” Homer rolled away from the horrid sight of Alden with all his clothes on.

“No, it's not. Look out the window. The sun's up. It's late. I got up late on purpose because the annual meeting of the Nantucket Protection Society is tonight. I have to be wide awake to give a speech. Come on, Homer.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Look, I don't give a damn if you come or not, hut it's March thirty-first, the last day of the scalloping season. You said you wanted—”

“Oh, I was a damned fool.” Homer rolled back again and sat up, grinning sleepily at Alden, scratching his head. He got out of bed, put on all the clothes he could find, and ate the eggs Alden had fixed for him.