The Rathbones (2 page)

But I did hear the voice that night, and what I found when I
followed it compelled me to flee the house with cousin Mordecai and to shed the fog in which we had both so long lived.

Though we were seeking Papa, we found our own history as we went, and that of all the Rathbones. It was a sometimes patchy tale, woven from such thread as I found: oral histories passed down and with each step altered, unfinished ship logs, journals washed and bloated by the sea until little could be read. Cousin Mordecai gathered much of it, while he could. Later I took it up from him. What wasn’t provided, I had to surmise. You may think it would be difficult to assemble a story in such a way. I was used to such piecework, growing up as I did in a house populated only by remnants. It was as easy for me to see the golden wives arrive at Rathbone House four generations ago as it was for Moses to see a school of sperm streaming through the deep.

The night I heard the singing voice began like any other that summer. I had gone to my mother’s room, as usual, to help her undress. Mama’s room, at the front of the house, had the best view of the sea. Its line of tall windows were kept always open, the white curtains swaying in every weather.

Each day Mama wore a dress of deep-dyed indigo with a wide collar of white linen, boiled and bleached, starched and pressed, that lifted off her shoulders and unmoored her face when the wind rose. Her underclothes were sewn from soft muslin and smelled of the cedar chest in which she kept them. Her corset was of whalebone, fine strands borrowed from a fin that had once turned in the lightless deep.

When she lifted her gown and leaned to let me unlace her, I saw again how she was double-ribbed, bone on bone. When I lifted the corset off, her body kept the corset’s form, as though she always held her breath, but when I pressed my face against her for a moment, I felt the shallow rise and fall of her ribs. She placed the corset on the chair by the window. It stood sentinel there, a spare torso. For each year that Papa was at sea, she’d slid a slender bone from its channel
and made me lace it tighter. The end of the ninth year was approaching. Soon Mama would be reduced. The next morning she would go down to the shore to find new sand for the hourglass she kept by her window. Her eyes turned to it whenever she walked by.

Suitors had begun showing up at the house in recent months—a retired captain, two lieutenants on leave—drawn by Mama’s beauty and by the stories of Rathbone wealth. After ten years, cousin Mordecai had told me, Papa would be considered by the law to be dead. But Mama never appeared for visitors. Each suitor was ushered into a golden parlor on the second floor by Uncle Larboard and Uncle Starboard, served a plate of dry ship’s biscuit and a pot of tea brewed from nettles and saw grass, and then ushered out again, hat in hand.

Mama uncoiled her braids and let them down and waited for me to unwind them. In truth, she had only to shake her head and the braids unfurled, but she knew I loved to feel the tight plaits go soft and free in my hands. When she wasn’t too tired, she let me sit next to her on her bed and practice my seaman’s knots on her hair: sheet bend and monkey fist, timber hitch and lineman’s loop. Her hair hung in a long pale wave that she sometimes allowed me to brush. I counted the strokes slowly to make them last, her hair popping and crackling as the dark bristles moved through it. When I finished, she let me step inside the curtain of hair, into her warm breath that smelled of cloves, close to the shine of her green eyes. They focused for a moment on me, and she smiled a little, then returned to her watch for Papa, her eyes trained on the sea. Long after sunset they held the horizon in each iris, split dark and pale.

I knew the tide was in when Mama smiled. I waited, hoping this would be a night for Arcady. She leaned back against her pillow, gazing out the window until the last light faded, then turned her face to me. I lay back with my head on her breast and closed my eyes as she began. It was the only story she ever told, and one I had heard since I was very young. I was, it’s true, too old by then for bedtime stories, but I took what was offered. She spoke slowly, her eyes still on the sea,
her fingers fondling the fine silver chain she always wore around her neck, tucked under the collar of her gown. The story always started the same way.

“A race of giants once lived on a faraway island. It was a tall island, a high atoll of pink granite, thickly sown with pine and oak and blessed with soft winds.”

Here she always paused and waited to be prompted. Her hand, which had been stroking my arm, stopped. Her body went still.

“Tell me about the giants, Mama.”

She breathed out and began again to stroke me, her arm so soft, the palm of her hand rough from her work.

“They lived in caves high in the pink cliffs, side by side with the swallows in their nests. They wore garments woven of rockweed and slept on beds of gull down. For breakfast they milked the manatee. At dinnertime they leaned back on the sun-warmed rock, eyes closed, while perch and mackerel leapt from the sea into their mouths.”

Mama paused. I held my breath, hoping she would follow one of the pleasant paths down which her tale sometimes led: the giants diving down a waterfall that plunged from the high rocks into the sea, sporting on the sandy beach, or singing each evening to the deer who came close at twilight. I lifted my head and turned to look out the window, down to the dock, and marked by starlight where the water stood: an inch or two lower on the pilings of the pier. Mama’s hair went a shade paler, her eyes a duller green. The tide was on the wane. Mama’s tale took a turn.

“The giants had enough to eat and more but still they were hungry. They scoured the sand with the nails of their hands for turtle eggs until the rock was bare. They lay in the surf and sieved the sea with their teeth for spawn until the fish swam no more. They sang to the stag at evening and when he reared up to dance they speared him. They grew so fat that they lay gasping on their backs on the rocks, arms waving, while the gulls pecked out their livers. The next day their livers grew back, and the gulls pecked them out again.”

The sea moved back and forth in Mama’s blood. Her moods could not be depended upon.

I had felt such ebbing and flowing before. One evening, a season earlier, she had let me stay longer than usual in her room. Warm spring had arrived, and she was shifting her summer gowns into her wardrobe, first taking them from her chest to air. They hung from hooks above the open window, swaying in a salt breeze. The slanting rays of the setting sun lit the gowns to a brilliant blue, though in daylight they were a deep indigo, all the same near-black hue. Like Mama’s, my frocks were all alike, except that mine were a dun color and still had the childish shape of a jumper, while Mama’s conformed to her figure. I had, at fifteen, the first outlines of a figure of my own, of which I felt vaguely ashamed but also curious. I would have preferred less shapeless frocks, but Mama made me wear them, as though I were still a little girl.

Mama seemed in good humor; at least she had not yet sent me away. I took off my loose frock and pulled one of her sea-freshened gowns over my head. I fastened its long row of mother-of-pearl buttons up the front and stood before the tall mirror that leaned against one wall. The gown, though far too long in skirt and sleeves, fit well in the bodice, and I turned from side to side, pleased with what I saw in the mirror. My crows, who had been napping atop the wardrobe, dropped down to my shoulders and began to preen. They had come with the last crate from Papa a year ago and had followed me about ever since.

Mama turned from the trunk where she was rearranging clothes and stared at me. I hoped she would offer me a gown or two; it would have been easy enough to shorten them to fit. Her eye brightened, and she seemed about to pay me some small compliment. Then her eye dulled, and she gave my figure a hard gaze.

“It will do you no good,” she said. “It will bring you no joy.”

She took up an awl from among her tools and in three strides crossed the room to me. She grasped a handful of my skirt to hold
me firm and sliced up the front of the gown. The buttons popped and my crows scattered, squawking. The gown gaped on my breast; I felt a stinging and looked down. The sharp point of the awl had cut through the gown and grazed a fine pink line from my belly to my throat. Mama looked stricken and seemed about to embrace me. Then she drew back, composed herself, and returned to folding her clothing.

We are all descended from the fishes, Mordecai had once told me, and are still subject to the ocean’s tides. So I was not surprised, these three months later, when Mama’s mood changed, and her story ended not with the giants romping on the beach but gasping on the rocks, their livers coming and going.

Her story finished, she rose from her bed and returned to her work. She sat at the long black table that stood at the center of her room. The table had once been as pale and salt-scoured as the floor and the walls, but Mama had it painted black, fresh every year, so that each detail in the white bones would shine clear against the dark surface as she worked.

Each day she carved the whalebone that Papa shipped home. The crates began to arrive a year after he disappeared. Once or twice a year, a freshly docked seaman, legs still unsteady on dry land, would show up at our door, shouldering a crate trussed with chains and stamped with runes. Sometimes the crates were filled with whalebone, a single great jawbone snapped in half and packed in seaweed, or a dozen smooth sperm teeth, each as long as my forearm, nestled in a bed of kelp. Sometimes the crates held other gifts, souvenirs of Papa’s travels: China Trade bowls from the Orient, cobalt blue and creamy white, big enough for me to bathe in; silk pajamas woven thick with dragons; nesting dishes for a doll, the innermost so small a cricket could drink from it; a tiny Peking dog, wrapped in a length of paisley cloth, that died of the cold soon after it arrived, having known only the warm South Seas.

Mama would question the sailors when they knocked on our door. Where did you sail from? Have you seen my husband? Do you know
Benadam Gale? But the sailor never knew. His ship would have only stopped by Naiwayonk, on the way home to Nantucket or New Bedford, to deliver the crate. It had been passed from some other ship, a brig in the South Atlantic, which had it from a clipper in the Java Sea, or was it the Indian Ocean? But the crates began to come less often, and it had been more than a year since the last arrived, with my crows.

Mama kept a bouquet of bones in a willow basket on the hearth, the long curved sections of a mammoth rib, their ends sawed clean. She was working on her boat that evening. She had for some years been shaping a boat of bone, as long as her, which grew slowly in the center of the table, resting on a frame of wood. The ribs and strakes were complete, lashed together with line made from baleen, so that the form of the boat was clearly limned against the black table, though it still lacked planking. Tonight she was grinding along the edge of the keel with a rasp, smoothing its shape. She looked up at me for a moment, then back at her work.

I sat down next to her and put my hand on hers. She stopped, her hands quiet on her tool. Her fingers were raw, bleeding on the tips and crisscrossed with scars. I took the white rasp from her and felt its rough surface with a finger.

“Mama, wouldn’t it be easier to use tools made from metal?”

She took the knife back from me and ran the rasp across her palm.

“Like finds like,” she said. “Bone finds the true shape.”

She carved no common items such as sailors made, no jagging wheels or ditty boxes, though most everything in her room but her bed and wardrobe was fashioned of bone. Her chair was bone with a caned seat, its seat posts capped with teeth. The mirror over her dressing table was framed in sperm ribs trained into an oval. Tucked into the frame was a page torn from a book with a picture of the floor of the ocean with all the sea sucked out; at the bottom stood a barren range of mountains. Scattered on the table around the boat were other objects on which she was working, among them a lantern, square-sided, its walls honed to a fine thinness.

Mama set her tools aside and walked to the hearth. She drew a
soft piece of blue paper from her sleeve and held it up to the firelight to read. Light shone through the cracked seams where it had been folded and folded again. She finished reading and refolded the paper, tucking it into the sleeve of her gown. A moment later she took it out and again began to read, her eyes moving along the same lines.

I was sure the blue paper was a letter from Papa. I had often looked for other pieces of that blue paper around the house. Once, when Mama was on the widow’s walk, I had searched every inch of her room, every pocket and seam of her clothing, but found nothing. I wondered if there was only one letter, the one she kept tucked into her sleeve.

“Good night, Mama.”

She looked up at me, and her eyes seemed to connect with mine for a moment, then slid away. She returned to her work, her rasp scraping along the edge of the boat’s keel, stopping, scraping again.

Uncle Larboard and Uncle Starboard shuffled slowly around the room, dusting the furniture. I did not then know their given names; I called them Larboard and Starboard because wherever Mama went, so they went, one to either side of her. Their bedrooms were to either side of Mama’s, too. They were about her age, as tall as her, and neat in all their ways. One looked much like the other. They might have been twins. Their hair hung in tidy white queues down their backs. They wore sailor smocks washed until they were as thin as tissue, so that through the faded blue linen their old bones showed. Each had one eye slightly higher than the other, in heads that were overlarge, wobbling a little when they walked. They were mutes and never spoke, but I could usually tell what they wanted to say. Now they gently patted my head and led me to the door, pressing me away with long dry fingers. I headed for my room.

My bedroom, down the hall from Mama’s, was one of the small white rooms that ran around the perimeter of the third floor. Mama’s room had been made from three or four such bedrooms as mine strung together. Some of the little rooms had unfinished walls, partially plastered or ribbed with raw joists. Others were missing their
outer walls altogether, except for the tall white columns between which the blue sky burned. In winter the snow would fly in and drift on the floors. Larboard and Starboard swept it away each day.