5

Napoleon was a great man, a great soldier, and a great statesman; but he was an off-islander.

NANTUCKET SCHOOLBOY

Next day, Homer Kelly sat down in his accustomed chair in the library of the Whaling Museum on Broad Street and looked over the letter he had started to his wife on Friday—an eon ago, a couple of eons ago now.

Dearest Mary,

By the time you get this I will have beheld the eclipse, which is supposed to begin throwing its shadow over the island tomorrow around noon. I’ll write you a flabbergasted letter tomorrow night.

In the meantime I’m spending my days here in the library of the Whaling Museum, where I sit in monkish solitude, looking up the men who sailed with young Melville in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet. This is a grand place. After a couple of hours in the company of these seamen’s logs the floor of the library begins to feel like a quarterdeck. It tips beneath my feet. The winds of the Horn whistle around my chair. I can hear the creaking of the masts, and there’s old Daggoo in the mainmasthead, crying, “There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead! The White Whale, the White Whale!”

For an abominably lonely and wifeless man, I’m feeling fairly settled in at last. Do you remember those comic maps of the United States with a few little states squeezed in around Texas? Well, a Nantucketer’s view of this continent is pretty much like that. I now see North America as a large but rather vague and somewhat hostile island over there across Nantucket Sound somewhere, a place called “America” or “away,” absolutely chock-full of ignorant off-islanders. I only wish I were a Boatwright or a Roper or a Coffin or a Macy or a Folger or a Starbuck—then I wouldn’t feel like such an oafish outsider. But of course everybody has been enormously kind to me, especially Mrs. Deerborn here in the library of the museum, and Miss Abernathy at the Atheneum, which is what they call the public library, and of course Alice and Alden Dove, who are renting me a room in their place out on the moors. Alice works part time in the bank, and Alden is a scalloper during this season of the year, but they also tend a bunch of chickens and goats and dogs and a crippled swan and I don’t know what-all. Reminds me of your sister’s place back home in Concord, sort of a messy busy place, things happening all the time, work going on. You’d like it.

God damn it, I wish you were here right now. Do you really think those British feminists are going to keep you there so long, waving their brollies and stamping their feet? I know, I know that marvelous fellowship is supposed to last all summer, but I worry whether or not your life can be sustained that long in the desert wastes of the British Museum.

As for me, I expect I will have exhausted the records here on the island in about a week’s time. Then I’ll go over to New Bedford and see what I can dig up there, and then I’ll go home to Concord and write up my little piece. But when you come home again at last, Mary, darling, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have a holiday on this island. I want to show you around. I want to gesture grandly like an Indian sachem or a First Purchaser or a Proprietor. I want to say, “Lo! see where the boat comes in! Avast! here’s where my tire went flat! Behold! a place to buy fried clams!”

Good-bye for now, my sweeting. The library’s closing. (It’s starting to pour. Maybe we won’t see the eclipse after all.)

Your loving husband,
Homer

… Maybe we won’t see the eclipse after all. Good God, thought Homer, it would have been better for Katharine Clark if the storm had gone right on howling, because then maybe she would never have come to the island. He thrust his letter aside, jerked another sheet of paper out of his briefcase and began again.

Mary, the world has turned upside down, the veil of the temple has been rent in twain, all hell has broken loose. The sky was clear and we saw the eclipse, all right, and it was all you said it would be, spectacular, astounding—but unfortunately it was a lot more than that. The two minutes of darkness turned out to be a period of wicked grace for somebody who used that little interval of blackest midnight in the middle of the day to murder a woman. I’ve been called in by the poor girl who was found hanging over the body. Remember those verses we liked by someone named Katharine Clark? It’s her. The accused, I mean, not the victim. It’s a ghastly business. The grieving husband is Joseph Green, who wrote that novel that was all over the place for a while. We didn’t read it, I remember, because we were on our honeymoon at the time and indifferent to other people’s passions. At any rate, Katharine Clark is supposed to have killed Green’s wife because she was in love with Green. Kitty is a downy-cheeked child who reminds me sadly of Melville’s Billy Budd, who was strung up on the yardarm for killing somebody in a moment of fury and frustration. Not that I think Kitty killed anybody. I’m positive she didn’t. It’s her helpless sort of innocence that reminds me of Billy. She’s in the jelly of youth, to use a Melvillean expression. And of course unless I can save her she’s going to get the yardarm treatment.

But me they’ll lash me in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep.

Oh, they won’t hang her, naturally; they’ll just drop her fathoms down, fathoms down, in Framingham Women’s Reformatory.

I went off this morning to rent a four-wheel-drive vehicle, so that I could go out to the lighthouse where this disaster took place, because it’s just a long sandy neck out there and our old Chrysler would never make it. Picture your lordly husband sitting high above the world wrestling masterfully with the wheel of a great lumbering object called an International Harvester Scout. I spent the rest of the morning in it, out there on the sandy wastes at the northeastern tip of this island. Didn’t learn much. It’s a wild lonely place, worthy of a Captain Ahab, that neck of sand, with a rip shoal running off the end of it highly suitable for violent deaths and spectacular shipwrecks, like the ghastly sinking of the Pequod at the end of Moby Dick.

But I must say there’s not much else that’s reminiscent of Moby Dick here on this island anymore. Except for the Whaling Museum and a few other antiquarian places, there’s nothing much left of the life of the old Nantucket, unless it’s the scallopers dredging along the shore of the harbor, making miniature voyages in feeble imitation of the whaling men. And of course instead of a bunch of healthy young Quakers setting sail across the world, all we’ve got here is a lot of Unitarians and Methodists and neo-Buddhists selling crewelwork and perfumed candles to the tourists. It’s rather sad.

Homer tipped back in his chair and stared up at the portrait over the mantelpiece, seeing the serene face of Mary Kelly instead of master mariner Timothy Folger. Then he bent forward over his letter again and finished it with a tender paragraph. He could have spent the whole afternoon writing to his wife, because as long as his pen was moving across the paper she seemed present in the room, an effusion given off by the ink on the page, a vapor in the air, but as soon as he put down the pen she withdrew, sucked back across the Atlantic to the dim island of England, where she was studying the women’s suffrage movement, writing a book. Ah, well, it was high time he got back to work anyway.

Homer put his letter away, shuffled through his notes, shoved his chair back heavily, stood up, smiled at Mrs. Deerborn, and consulted the shipping file behind her desk. In his hand was his list of vessels, the Nantucket whalers encountered by Melville’s ship on the Pacific Ocean in 1842—the Henry Astor, the Columbus, the Congress, the Enterprise, the Ganges, the Richard Mitchell, the Ontario, the Phenix, the Potomac. Were the logs of any of those ships in this library? If they were, then surely they would contain some mention of their meetings on the high seas with the Acushnet.

Homer fumbled through the file, looking for the first ship on his list. There was a whole big folder of A’s. He took it out of the drawer and glanced through it at the table. To his surprise, most of the material in the folder had to do with another kind of ship altogether, the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria. Good God, it had sunk, he remembered that now. It had been an immense seagoing hotel, and it had gone down off the coast of Nantucket some time back. What had happened to it? Inquisitive in spite of himself, Homer was soon lost in clippings from the Inquirer and Mirror, and Life magazine, and The New York Times. There were accounts of the collision with the Swedish-American liner Stockholm, stories of the various adventures of the passengers, details of the air-sea rescue, articles about a number of unsuccessful attempts at salvaging the thirty-million-dollar vessel.…

Jesus. Everybody and his brother had gone down there to take a look at the sunken hulk. Even Jacques Cousteau. Some of them were just curious, but most of them had been greedy for the riches that were supposed to be on board, the gold bullion and the jewels and the works of art and the two tons of provolone cheese and the millions of dollars that were reputed to be locked up in vaults and safes.

And dangerous! Christ, how many fools had gone down into those abysmal depths in that gruesome cold and darkness? And there had been sharks, good God. Well, he shouldn’t be surprised at what people were willing to endure for the sake of some crazy dream of sunken treasure. Greed was a pretty powerful incentive for all sorts of violent and perilous adventure. Take murder, for example. Homer found himself staring at a fuzzy photograph of a poor wretch of a diver, his mask thrust up over his grease-blackened forehead, his features twisted, agonized, because he had just witnessed the accidental drowning of his diving partner. God, what a tortured face! Homer scrabbled at the clippings, shoveled them back into the file and wished he had never examined it. Pictures like that could stick in your mind and ruin your digestion the rest of your life. And anyway he was just wasting his time. He bent over to pick up a last clipping from the floor, glanced at it as he put it back in the folder, took a second look, and then decided he hadn’t been wasting his time after all.

The clipping was from the Inquirer and Mirror, and it was a long account about the death of a Nantucket couple in the disaster, Chambers and Dorothy Boatwright. Jesus Christ, they were the parents of Helen Green. She had been Helen Boatwright. She was listed as their only child.

The poor kid. Unnatural death certainly seemed to run in her family. She must have been born under some malign astrological influence, some accursed conjunction of planets, some goddamned unlucky star.