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.