13

… to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.

Moby Dick

Kitty got out of bed, encouraged, bounded down the stairs, ran out to her car and drove to town. First she would stop at the drugstore on Main Street for some aspirin and a toothbrush, and then it was on! on! to the supermarket.

Her mettle was tested immediately. Half of the people drifting down Main Street in the direction of Steamboat Wharf had come to Nantucket because of its recent notoriety in the news. The particular arrangement of a thousand dark and light dots that was the published version of Kitty’s face was photoengraved inside their heads, so that when she parked her car on the cobblestoned hill of Main Street and got out, her presence was discovered quickly, and the discovery was passed along. It’s Kitty Clark, Kitty Clark. The wave crested, smashing into new boulders, sending up her name in splinters of broken glass. Clark-ark-ark-ark-ark.

Head down, Kitty dodged into the drugstore, dodged out again and hurried downhill, the wave retreating the other way in front of her, reminding her of the day she had met Joe Green. He had said that the ocean was saying her name.

No, no, don’t think about that now, said Kitty to herself, stumbling across the cobblestones. But once under way, the memory would not be quelled. Huddling behind the wheel of her car, the smashed shell in her pocket grinding into her thigh, she backed out too fast, jammed on her brakes, stalled and started up again. Then Kitty said, “Oh, the hell with it,” as the sunshine of that ancient day poured down upon her bare back, and the old waves curled in and out, and the problem she had been working on rose up again in her mind.

She had been lying on the sand at Crane’s Beach on the north shore, juggling a complex collection of eight lumpish pieces on a kind of mental chessboard. She had been trying to combine the four humors of the soul, melancholy, sanguinity, choler and phlegm, with the four elements, fire, water, air and earth—it was an old problem, she was still working on it, she. had thought of it again there on the beach just last week—and then a shadow had fallen across her, and she had looked up to see someone kneeling beside her. “Aren’t you Katharine Clark?” he had said. He was wearing a shirt and rolled-up trousers. His feet were bare. “My name is Joseph Green.” Kitty had flushed with pleasure and sat up, brushing the sand from her shoulders, which were still dead white with winter classrooms and dark libraries and the thin winter sunlight of her apartment. They had known about each other before they met, their heads were swimming already in clouds of common understanding, and then with one stride they went the rest of the way. Before long he was telling her the surf was saying her name. “Listen to it,” he said. “That’s Claaaaaaaaaaaaark.”

“No, no, the ocean doesn’t make those k sounds. It’s more like Greeeeeeeeeen. Hear that? Greeeeeeeeeen.”

“Greenberg. It would have to be Greenberg. Except for a couple of Nantucket Quakers, my great-grandparents were all German Jews. The waves aren’t saying Greenberg. The ocean isn’t Jewish.”

“Yes, it is. Those waves have come straight across the ocean from the Mediterranean, from Tel Aviv and Jaffa, from—”

“The ocean is a woman. It’s always been a woman.”

He had taken her hand, and then on the way home in the back of somebody else’s car, sun and water and mouth and eyes and hair and sunburned arms and legs had become rapturously entangled, and at the door of her apartment building Kitty had tumbled out of the car, gasping, desiring not to be cheap, but the next morning Joe had come back, and they had walked together the whole day, except for an hour Kitty had been forced to spend in class.

Part of the time they had lived in his apartment, part of the time in hers. They had been planning a wedding with wine flowing like water. Each could not believe in the good fortune that the other existed.

It had lasted through Christmas. But with the new year it had suddenly come to an end. An old Nantucket relative of Joe’s had died and he had gone to the funeral. It was the first time he had ever been to Nantucket, and he had never come back. She had not seen him again. He had sent a letter at last, explaining about his third cousin Helen Boatwright, and how it had all seemed destined to happen, the union of two branches of an old family. But of course the letter hadn’t explained anything. The stroke of the headsman’s ax does not explain.