Summary

From the opening line-"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last"-you will know that you are in the hands of a master storyteller and in the company of a fascinating woman hero. Inspired by a brief passage in Moby-Dick, Sena Jeter Naslund has created an enthralling and compellingly readable saga, spanning a rich, eventful, and dramatic life. At once a family drama, a romantic adventure, and a portrait of a real and loving marriage, Ahab's Wife gives new perspective on the American experience.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Author Biography

Sena Jeter Naslund is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville and is on the MFA faculty of Vermont College. She is confounder of The Louisville Review and of the Fleur-de-Lis Press.

List of Illustrations	p. xvi
Extracts	p. xvii
A Mild Blue Day	p. 1
The Dirge	p. 10
The Crossing	p. 13
Reverie	p. 17
The Window	p. 20
The Steamboat	p. 23
The Paddlewheel	p. 28
The Island	p. 29
A Diffieult Farewell	p. 36
The Giant	p. 40
Winters. Summers	p. 45
New Bedford	p. 52
Boston	p. 59
The Petrel	p. 65
A Storm at Night	p. 77
The Brightness of Brightness	p. 89
A Rose	p. 97
Our Lady of the Roeks	p. 99
The Return of the Petrel, with Three Letters	p. 108
A Comb	p. 115
The Fourth Letter	p. 117
The Camel	p. 123
The Sea-Faney Inn	p. 128
The Sussex	p. 136
The Cabin Boy	p. 142
The Companion	p. 151
Captain Coffin's Story--Secondhand	p. 158
A Whaleboat by Moonlight	p. 165
Captain Morrell's Story--Thirdhand	p. 168
Captain Ahab's Story--My First Acquaintance with Him	p. 173
Aloft	p. 178
"Pardon Me"	p. 181
Reunion	p. 185
Revelation	p. 190
Sea Storms	p. 192
The Frost Wind	p. 198
Collision	p. 201
The Course	p. 209
The Distance of the Stars	p. 212
The Sentence	p. 217
What Do You Fetch for Your Mouth?	p. 218
The Beginning of the Debate	p. 222
Father and Son	p. 224
The Human Animal	p. 225
The Alba Albatross	p. 225
Ganglion	p. 231
Postscript on the Above	p. 233
Soaring	p. 233
Portrait of a Virgin Listening	p. 235
Icarus	p. 236
The Test	p. 242
The Funeral	p. 244
The Contest	p. 246
I Am Married	p. 249
Aboard the Pequod	p. 253
The Hurricane House	p. 259
Ahab's Jottings	p. 261
Kit's Ruminations	p. 262
Starbuck Introduces Himself	p. 263
Ahab Overheard	p. 264
A Letter to the Lighthouse	p. 265
Poor Kit's a-Cold	p. 267
Arctic	p. 268
Ahab in His Cabin	p. 277
Aloft, the Pequod	p. 279
Starbuck: Ship's Log	p. 283
Starbuck Communes with Mary, His Wife	p. 284
In the Steward's Pantry	p. 288
Ahab's Comfort	p. 289
Nantucket--the Faraway Isle	p. 292
Ahab Prepares for the Next Voyage	p. 300
Breakfast	p. 311
Shame	p. 314
B'twixt	p. 318
Enter: The Gaoler and the Judge	p. 325
On the Moor	p. 330
A Slow Spring	p. 334
Churches	p. 337
Baptismal	p. 344
Fire	p. 352
Ahab Addresses the Flames	p. 356
Ahab's Wife	p. 358
A Sky Full of Angels	p. 362
Resurrection	p. 366
The Purpose of Art	p. 370
The Office of a Friend	p. 380
Childhood as an Island	p. 386
The World of Rebekkah Swain	p. 389
Kentucky Seasons	p. 392
A Winter Tale	p. 402
The Burden	p. 405
The Lontern	p. 410
Shakespeare and Company	p. 415
The Guide	p. 420
Getting Started	p. 425
Forest Murmurs	p. 427
In the Cupola	p. 440
To Summer	p. 450
Wife	p. 457
The Mitchells	p. 458
Vestal Street	p. 462
Ahab	p. 469
From Cupola to Wharf	p. 470
Idyll	p. 473
The Comet	p. 480
Frannie's Letter from an Inland Lighthouse	p. 483
An Angry Letter from Aunt Agatha	p. 485
Letter to an Inland Lighthouse	p. 487
The Minister in the Woods	p. 488
The History of Snow and Restlessness	p. 497
Altar Rock	p. 499
Mothering	p. 501
Chowder Swirls	p. 505
The Birthing Room	p. 508
The Leg	p. 510
Christmas Eve	p. 513
A Last Glimpse of the Pequod: Christmas Day	p. 516
The Jeroboam Returns	p. 519
The First Part of Ahab's Third Voyage After His Marriage	p. 524
Moon Watch	p. 529
Letter from Susan	p. 533
The Samuel Enderby of London Puts in for Repairs at Nantucket	p. 538
The Distress of Justice	p. 542
To Siasconset	p. 546
The Hedge	p. 550
Journey Toward the Starry Sky, in Present Tense	p. 553
Sconset Morning	p. 559
More of Morning: Tashtego's Feather Makes the Letter S	p. 560
The Neighbor Beyond the Hedge	p. 562
The Roar of Guilt	p. 569
The Return of the Delight	p. 572
The Perseid	p. 580
The Woolsack	p. 582
Letter from Margaret Fuller, from England	p. 589
Letter from David Poland, Virginia	p. 592
Letter to Beloved Kin	p. 593
Letter from Margaret Fuller, from Italy	p. 594
The Judge's Invitation	p. 596
Mrs. Maynard's Note	p. 597
Preparations	p. 598
Frannie	p. 599
Liberty and the Dolphins	p. 611
A Suitable Marriage	p. 615
What Has Proved to Be a Last Visit	p. 616
A Song	p. 618
A Squeeze of the Hand	p. 620
Una Preaches to the Waves	p. 622
The Great Fire: June 1846	p. 623
Reflections on a Wreek	p. 625
During the Pleasure Party	p. 629
Celestial	p. 636
A New Friend	p. 637
A Sermon Overheard	p. 641
Plans	p. 647
Recitation by Beach Fire	p. 649
Letter from Susan, Forwarded	p. 655
The Roof Walk	p. 661
Epilogue	p. 664
Acknowledgments	p. 667
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

Ahab's Wife
Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel

Chapter One

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last. Yet, looking up—into the clouds—I conjure him there: his gray-white hair; his gathered brow; and the zaggy mark; I saw it when lying with him by candlelight and, also, taking our bliss on the sunny moor among curly-cup gumweed and lamb's ear. I see a zaggy shadow in the rifting clouds. That mark started like lightning at Ahab's temple and ran not all the way to his heel (as some thought) but ended at Ahab's heart.

That pull of cloud—tapered and blunt at one end and frayed at the other—seems the cottony representation of his ivory leg. But I will not see him all dismembered and scattered in heaven's blue—that would be no kind, reconstructive vision; no, intact, lofty and sailing, though his shape is changeable. Yesterday, when I tilted my face to the sky, I imaged not the full figure but only his cloudy head, a portrait, glancing back at me over his shoulder.

What weather is in Ahab's face?

For me, now, as it ever was in life, at least when he was looking at me alone and had no other person in view, his visage is mild—with a brightness in it, even be it a wild, white, blown-about brightness. Now, as I look at those billowed clouds, I see the Pequod. I half-raise my hand to bid good-bye, as it was that last day from the east-most edge of Nantucket Island, when, with a wave and then a steadfast, longing look, till the sails were only a white dot, and then a blankness of ocean—then—a glitter— I wished his ship and him Godspeed.

Nantucket! The home where first I found my body, my feet not so much being pulled into this sandy beach as seeking downward, toes better than roots; then, my mind, built not to chart this blue swell of heaving ocean, but the night sky, where the stars themselves, I do believe, heave and float and spin in fiery passions of their own; Nantucket!—home, finally, of my soul, found on a platform eight-by-eight, the wooden widow's walk perched like a pulpit atop my house. These three gears of myself—body, mind, and soul—mesh here on this small island—Nantucket! Then, why, when I look into the mild, day sky, do the clouds scramble, like letters in the alphabet, and spell not Nantucket, but that first home, Kentucky? And those clouds that did bulge with the image of Ahab show me the map of that state, flat across the bottom and all billowed at the top? I did not consult Ahab about my decision to spend my pregnancy in a rough Kentucky cabin with my mother, instead of staying in the gracious home of a captain's wife on Nantucket. But I wrote him, of course, and sent the letter after him on the ship called the Dove, so he could imagine me aright. That time spent with my mother outdoors in the sweet summer and golden Kentucky autumn was augmented by our indoor companionship of sewing baby smocks and cooking and reading again those great works of literature my mother had brought with her to the wilderness, green-bound books I had read as a child or she had read to me.

Sometimes my mother and I stood and looked at our faces together in the oval mirror she had brought with her from the East. Along with her library chest of books, the mirror with its many-stepped molding distinguished our frontier cabin from others. Thus, elegantly framed, my mother and I made a double portrait of ourselves for memory, by looking in the mirror.

When in early December the labor began but tried in vain to progress, my mother went from our cabin, driving the old mare in the black buggy through a six-inch crust of snow, for the doctor. In my travail, I scarcely noticed her leaving. When my mother did not come home and did not come home, and the pains were near unbearable and the chill was creeping across the cabin floor and into my feet as I paced, I grasped the feather bed from my bunk and flung it atop her bed. In desperation, between spasms, I gathered all the gaudy quilts in the house, and then leaving the latchstring out so that I would not have to venture from my nest when she returned, I took to my childbirth bed. There, softness of two mattresses comforted me from beneath and warmth of myriad quilts, a cacophony of colors, warmed me from above, but still I worked my feet and legs and twisted my back.

Despite the heat of my labor, I could feel my nose turning to ice, long and sharp as a church steeple all glazed with frost. Parsnip! I thought of; frozen and funny—a vegetable on my face! I chortled and then prayed, wondering if prayer and laughter gurgled up, sometime, from the same spring. Let nose be parsnip, parsnip be steeple, steeple be nose-whatever that protuberance, it is frozen to the very cartilage. Warm it! Save me, gods and saints! Wild and crazed by pain, my thoughts leaped about in antic dance, circling one picture after another. Nose! Steeple! Parsnip! My desperate, laughing prayer from within that quilted hump below its parsnip was only that I should be delivered and nothing at all for the welfare of the rest of the world. I wanted to wait for my mother's return and I was afraid because I had little idea of how to catch the baby. So even as I prayed, I prayed against myself, that time would not pass nor take me any closer to the port of motherhood. I thought of Ahab, as if his ship were wallowing, going neither forward nor drifting back but immobile in a confused sea.

Excerpted from Ahab's Wife: Or, the Star-Gazer: A Novel by Sena Jeter Naslund
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