THE SPURT of the match woke me while it was still dark, and I opened my eyes to see my husband lighting a lamp. He sensed that my eyes had opened, and he said, still watching the flame mate the wick, that he must go early to the Pequod, but I flung my arms open to him and softly called, “My Ahab! My husband!” and he set down the lamp and came to me.
All was given; all was taken. And there was a rising in me and a release and a bliss in me that met the same in him and that I had never known before.
“I would have a child for your returning,” I said.
“May it be so.”
And he kissed me with such a mixture of tenderness and passion that I half felt myself a child, one to whom is given all love and all protection. And yet my woman’s body yearned toward him, though I would not ask again, because I knew his need to embark.
Ahab took his leisure, and held me, and kissed my face many times. “If there can be but one night’s dent in the marriage pillow, let us at least tarry over it.” When I reminded him that I knew the ship waited, he said, “But now I’m with my love.”
At times he seemed a dream to me, as we sat together in our luxurious white bed, for starched lace trimmed the linens and hung from the curtains. I had never imagined Ahab resting in aught but his rope hammock. But here plump pillows cushioned and pampered us and everything was ironed and smooth and white as snow.
The nap of it, indeed, was familiar to my fingers, and I asked my husband if, by chance, Mrs. Macy had ironed the linens. He said that she had procured them, but whether she had washed and ironed them he did not know. But I had no doubt of it.
“You did not say the linens were for me?” I asked a bit timidly. And he shook his head no. Would he, then, have had any bride, if I had not been willing? Though my goat-nimble mind thought of the question, to ask it would have been blasphemy. I knew my place in his heart, and I knew that he knew his in mine.
Then I marveled some (to myself) that I had known so little of my own course. I had been like a ship, blown about in dark and storm, suddenly finding, beyond all hope, that the dawn illuminated the port of home. And I thought back, recognizing how even aboard the Pequod, obsessed with the state of Kit’s mind, I had always been comforted by Ahab’s presence.
“I know when I first saw you,” I said. “I was aboard the Sussex, looking through the captain’s telescope. Standing at the tiller, your legs seemed wedded to the distant Pequod, your hands to her strong steering, and your face to the wind. I took away the telescope from my eye and you were gone, but the porthole framed the Pequod and the sea and sky.”
“How was it you were aboard the Sussex?”
“Disguised as a cabin boy,” I answered without hesitation. I smiled. “But I would have that story keep for another time.” I was not afraid of his knowing any of my secrets, but I did not want to fill our time with a past that pertained only to myself.
“And my stories, too. They’ll keep.”
In the gaze that passed between us all was known, all was accepted, all transcended, as we inhabited our moment together.
“There’s a room ye have not seen,” he said.
Something in me shuddered. It was a sentence from Bluebeard’s tale.
“And I would show it to ye before I leave.”
I stepped immediately from the bed, reassured, and Ahab held a softly woven white blanket for me to wrap about myself. “Come, my lamb,” he said softly.
We stood at the top of the stairs, and he handed me a wooden pole with a hook in the end. At first I thought it some equipment for whaling with which I was not familiar. But Ahab told me to insert the hook in a ring in the ceiling, and to pull. It would not be difficult. When I did so, almost like magic, a small staircase unfolded itself. Taking the pole from me, he bade me ascend the steep little stairs. Up I ran, gathering the wool blanket away from my feet, and there was a small, glass-sided room. An enclosed cupola, with its own tiny flat roof and a window facing each direction.
Dawn had come upon us. The dawn-drenched clouds suggested wings: mauve, purple, rose, gold-outlined—and the sky seemed full of gigantic beings. Though they had no real form, yet they flew and floated in their domain. “Angels” was all I could say.
Ahab joined me and said, “Aye,” and stood behind me with his arms wrapped around me as we looked. For only a few moments those good angels soared as disembodied colors, swirled and thinned themselves in expansion, ever more immaterial. Ahab pointed, and I looked down from the sky to the harbor, to the Pequod, sails furled. A few insect-sized people moved about, and I thought the Pequod was like a tight-closed peony bud groomed by ants before the flower unfurls its petals. The clouds dissipated into blue.
I turned to inspect the small, glass-sided room. “It’s a crow’s nest made luxurious,” I said. The little cupola held a rocking chair and beside the chair a brass telescope on a stand. “Here ye might watch for me,” Ahab said. “Protected from the weather, here. And if there is a child, ye might have a cradle here beside ye. And if I am gone a long time, the child might look out the window at the ships and the sea.”
“And I would speak of you, Ahab, of the father who loves his child from faraway waters.” How fervently, how completely, I hoped that my new husband was leaving me with child! I took Ahab’s hand and kissed it and watered the back of it with a few tears, and when I looked in his face, I saw that he, too, was ready to weep.
“Now,” he said. “I have left money with the judge across the street, and I shall write a note of permission for ye to use it as ye will. And I will have Captains Bildad and Peleg, who are owners of the Pequod, call upon ye and help ye in any way they can. But they are stingy, and ye shall not be fettered by their ideas of parsimony. Nay, ye will make yourself merry in all your living and spending till I come home, and, meantime, you will write to me, and I to ye, even though we both know letters are often lost at sea. Look, Starbuck is bidding farewell to his wife and babe.”
Though Ahab knew the likelihood of this event well enough to note it with the naked eye, I looked through the telescope and saw their last embrace. The child was but a knee-high bundle, but Mary’s face, which I could barely glimpse inside her Quaker bonnet, was serene as any saint’s, though her clothing was not resplendent.
Swinging the telescope away, I noted that the Camel was putting out. I hoped that my letters were not lost.
“I shall be happy here,” I said. “This home—it overwhelms me.”
“No, Una. I think nothing overwhelms ye. The cupola is the crown of the house, and ye in your person are diamond, ruby, emerald, and sapphire in that crown. I would not have ye overwhelmed by mere stationary boards and window glass.”
I had thought to ask if I might visit the Lighthouse and even beyond to Kentucky, but with these words of Ahab, I changed my request to a statement. “I shall be happy. I know it. And likely I will journey to see my aunt and uncle, and my mother, as well, in Kentucky.”
“But ye will not go to sea?” he asked me.
“No,” I freely answered. And the vastness of the ocean came upon me, and the utter unlikeliness of two boats ever finding one another. The expansiveness of the ocean spread before me, not as one who has never been to sea might imagine it, but as I knew it to be, stretching day after day, and moonlight night, and black night, and star-pierced night after night, and endless swaying, and the creak of wood and rope, and the hissing through the water, and the smack of the wind taking sails. “Godspeed,” I said to my husband. “Godspeed.”
“May angels keep ye.”
