CHAPTER 100: The Mitchells
TO BEGIN our acquaintance, my judge invited me across the street for dinner to meet Maria Mitchell and her father, William Mitchell. I had had time to stitch up a new dress of sprigged chintz, but my handiwork could not have been of less interest to either Maria or her father, despite the elaborate smocking of the bodice. Her dress was a fine, rich brown, simply made, and I immediately commented, “What a lovely silk, Miss Mitchell.”
She said quietly, “We wear the silk, Mother and all of us at home, so as to avoid the cotton.”
“Why is that?” I queried.
Her father put in, “The Southern slaves pick the cotton for our textile industry. We don’t wish to be a market for what begins with slave labor.” His tone was one of sad information but with no reprimand aimed at my own cotton frock.
Then they both exclaimed over the bounty and beauty of the dinner table.
Before us on the judge’s platter sat a white mound of baked scrod, seasoned with paprika and cracker crumbs, garnished with new peas and new potatoes, and surrounded by many side dishes of squash, cabbage, radishes, and the like. I had furnished a twelve-egg pound cake for our dessert, capped with a sugar drizzle, and the judge had placed it on a cake stand with a pedestal to honor my culinary creation. He and I sat at the ends of the table, set with the Irish china he had seen in Boston, so thin I feared breaking it with a fork.(Never had I met a man so fond of pretty china as my judge. He seemed to have an insatiable appetite for it—as though the plates themselves and not what they presented could be eaten! I knew that his cabinets were stuffed with large sets from the Orient, from England, from France, and beautiful blue-lattice-marked plates and dishes from Russia. But on that night, it was the newly acquired Belleek.)
William Mitchell pleased me; he seemed the essence of an ideal father. Kindly, comfortable, and above all reasonable, yet he had an ability to identify sympathetically with his listeners. Maria said he had been a wonderful teacher for her, and he returned the compliment by saying that of all his eight children, she was his most apt student.
“She sets the chronometers for the captains, when I am away,” he said, taking a large helping of fish. “And has, since she was twelve years old.”
Knowing from my own days as a sailor how essential that instrument was in determining longitude, I understood that she had earned the trust not only of her father but of the captains as well. I myself had never used the instrument, and when I asked her to teach me how, she promptly said she would be glad to do so and that I must visit her the next day at Vestal Street. Since the invitation was issued so early in the meal, while I was still helping myself to the peas, I felt Maria to be of an open and trusting nature.
“We shall soon be moving from Vestal Street,” Maria went on, “to the Union Pacific Bank, where Father has a new job, but I prefer that you know me in the place I think of as my natural habitat.”
Her voice was rather deep in pitch, and she, like myself, had naturally curly dark hair, but hers was neatly smoothed on the sides and defined in sausage curls in the back. As the evening progressed, I noted an evenness and quietness in her manner that seemed almost too even to me: a young woman brought up in the Quaker tradition. But her father had a sparkle in his eye, and his conversation roamed freely over matters of education, the slavery issue, the Quakers and the Unitarians, his weather records, and his correspondence with other scientific men up and down the coast and even in England.
“Have you become something of a naturalist, living in Kentucky?” Maria asked me in her even, well-modulated tones.
William seemed curious about what I could tell him of my life in the forest, while Maria wanted me to share my observations of nature. She had much less curiosity about me in any personal sense. Yet I began to want her as a friend. I’d not known anyone like her.
I told them I had not only lived in the heart of the continent, in Kentucky, but also on a lighthouse island.
“Compare the flora and fauna,” Maria quickly said.
“Did you take notes on the weather?” her father asked. Then they both laughed at themselves, and my judge and I joined them. “The Scientists in Pursuit of Data,” Mr. Mitchell murmured.
“Well,” I replied, attempting to perform, “you might think that squirrels have a prodigious memory to bury their nuts and then remember where they are and come back to dig them up. But in fact, squirrels just dig in a place where it seems likely nuts are hidden. Squirrels dig up nuts hidden by quite different squirrels. I noted it during the years when I was nine and ten.”
“Brava!” exclaimed the judge.
“How did you keep the squirrels straight?” Maria asked. “Did you tag them?”
“No. If you look closely, each is an individual. Like the humpback whale—if you look carefully, each whale has distinctive markings on its flukes.”
Maria’s eyes glowed as though she saw in me a kindred spirit, but, alas, I really had very few naturalist observations to make, unless they had bearing on surviving in the wilderness. I told them that one must not put in a garden close to a black walnut tree. At least not tomatoes, cabbage, or radishes, as some substance from the walnut roots would poison the vegetables.
“I notice the weather,” I went on, “and respond to it. On the frontier, the weather is sometimes the only news. Sometimes it is a matter of life or death.” I saw again the great drifts of snow that had nearly covered the cabin only some half a year previous. I thought of my mother’s body trapped under the overturned buggy and of her freezing. Such was not the stuff of dinner conversation. “But I have never made a systematic notation of the weather. I wrote a paragraph describing the recent Great Meteor Shower.”
“November twelfth through thirteenth, 1833,” Mr. Mitchell interjected.
The judge said, “The uneducated thought it a sign of the end of the world. The entire firmament blazed with meteors for hours. I myself felt uneasy.”
“Visible from sixty degrees west in the Atlantic to one hundred degrees west in the Great Plains,” Maria said, “and from Lake Superior to the southern shore of Jamaica.”
“Where were you, Una?” Mr. Mitchell asked, and we went on to compare our whereabouts during the shower. Although we four had not been acquainted at that time, now in reference to the event it was as though we shared an experience. It made us cozy.
William Mitchell then mentioned the Annular Eclipse of 1831—“The superstitious believed that just such a darkness had engulfed Egypt in Bible times,” he said. Then he spoke of the Luminous Arch of 1827, about which he had given a public speech, bits of which he now rehearsed for us, to the Philosophical Institute: “I first noticed it about ten o’clock. It was a well-defined, radiant belt extending itself from the east to west, of the most brilliant magnificence. Its center passed the bright star Deneb in the constellation of the Swan, at fifteen minutes past ten; by twenty-five past ten the western extremity passed the bright star Arcturus in the constellation Boötes.”
“How did the arch move?” I asked.
“With a slow and majestic motion toward the south. There was a quick undulating motion of its component parts comparable to the rippling surface of the sea, in a steady wind.”
We sat in silent admiration as his words conjured up the awe inspiring arch of light. I myself was thrilled with this history of the Nantucket skies, and Mr. Mitchell, moving ever backward in time, I noted, in his celestial history, obliged my taste for the sensational by then describing the comet of 1825 (the tail being some twelve degrees in length and split into five branches) and the “Great Bright Comet” of 1811, with two tails, one of which grew to a length of seventy degrees.
“How long is seventy degrees?” the judge asked.
With a sweep of her arm, Maria pointed her outstretched fingers toward the horizon and then swung her arm up, remarking, “Forty-five degrees of a circle,” and then continued beyond. In her sudden gesture, a salute to measurement, there was such spontaneity, such unconventional
desire to instruct, such speed, perhaps even haste to make clear the point, that I determined I should have a very interesting time coming to understand her nature.
“WAS IT a success?” my host wanted to know after the Mitchells had left. Alluding to Maria, he suddenly held out his arm in the horizontal and swung it up to a salute of seventy degrees.
“Indubitably,” I replied.
“You liked them?”
“It would be lovely to have Mr. Mitchell as a father.” I knew I would have grown up with a less romantic and tempestuous nature if he had directed my education. Yet I liked myself and did not wish to be Maria.
“And what of the daughter? Can she be a friend for you? She knows so much! You’re about the same age. Both with such exceptional minds.”
“What a connoisseur of young women you’ve turned out to be!” As to what Maria might come to mean to me, I was uncertain, but Charlotte’s absence had left me with a vacancy.
CHAPTER 101: Vestal Street
AT VESTAL STREET, in the small, gray house, the natural sweep of Maria Mitchell was much more evident than it had been when we sat in the judge’s stiff dining chairs. Almost as soon as I arrived, the solar system came tumbling down the steps with a great wooden clatter, the planets being represented for instructional purposes as an assortment of proportionally sized wooden spheres. Maria grabbed the largest one, aimed for her brother, and said, “Here, catch Jupiter,” and sent the ball flying. Her younger brothers and sisters were all around her in a web of affection.
The mother, Mrs. Mitchell, I saw only in passing. She, as well as all her daughters, was indeed dressed in silk. She seemed to be a strong woman, but to have no exceptional intellectual leanings; Maria apparently took after her father in that respect. The mother was on the way to bed for a nap, having been up much of the night with a sick child.
“A mother of eight puts in more night hours than an astronomer,” Maria observed, with grave regard for her mother.
“But you were up all night, too, with the stars, weren’t you?” a little sister asked quietly.
“But I’m much younger,” Maria responded. Then I noticed the tracery of dark circles under her eyes. “Let me show Una my office.”
Maria’s office turned out to be nothing but a closet, literally. It had only width for a desk, each side of which abutted a wall of the cubby. Before the desk there was depth for a chair, and three bookshelves were conveniently mounted on the wall above the chair and desk. The outer wall, to the left, was filled with a window, which would have provided excellent reading light in the closet.
“It’s great advantage,” Maria said, “is that it has a door that can be closed.” She gestured to a sign that currently hung on the inside of the door but could easily be hung on the other side facing the hall (and the younger siblings). The sign read: Maria Mitchell is busy. Do not knock.
“It’s as cozy as a first mate’s cabin,” I said. “More so. I have always had an admiration for well-fitted small spaces.”
“Above the bank, I shall have a whole room of my own.”
I saw that the papers on the desk were covered with mathematical calculations.
“What are you figuring?”
“Father and I have reviewed the calculations that tell us Halley’s comet should appear again this August.”
“Comets are predictable?”
Her eyes glistened. “Some are. Halley’s is. It will not come again for another seventy-six years. This is our only chance to see it.”
“Yes,” I said slowly. “We’ll likely be dead in seventy-six years.”
“It will be another century—1911 and then again in 1986 and 1987.”
“An unthinkable distance—1987—in time,” I said.
“Not at all,” she laughed. “Astronomically.”
“How far does Halley’s travel?”
“Beyond the farthest planets. Then it turns around and comes back, loops the sun, and leaves again for outer darkness.”
I was silent a moment, and then I observed that “outer darkness” was a Biblical phrase, the place for outcast sinners.
Maria just laughed again. “How I should like to ride a comet to Outer Darkness!”
Now I laughed. “I can see you—an astronomical witch with a new broomstick to ride.”
“I fear I will have to content myself with my telescope as a broomstick. Will you watch for Halley’s with us?”
“Yes,” I answered, but I knew that if my husband was home my nights would be spent in our conjugal bed. When she took me to her rooftop observatory, a platform with railings such as many houses in Nantucket had, I remarked that she could use my cupola for observation if the weather was bad.
“The cupola has a solid roof,” she said. “And if the weather is bad”—she smiled—“you can’t see through the cloud cover anyway.”
I felt embarrassed for my lack of logic. “I like the airiness of this,” I replied, gesturing toward the neighboring roofs. “The openness.” Indeed, I did feel much more a part of the green treetops and the surrounding houses than I did in my little well-roofed, window-sided room perched in the center of my house. Maria pointed out a patch of mulberry trees, for silkworms had been imported to Nantucket and they fed upon the mulberry. She pointed out the factory where the silk was unwound from the worms’ cocoons and woven into cloth. But my cupola had a better view of the harbor.
As we two women stood there, queens of the scene, I blurted, “Your life seems somehow so…successful.”
“I am doing exactly what I love to do.”
How blessed, I thought, for a woman to know her path so well. My investments were so much in people, in Ahab now, and before that in Kit, and in Giles. In my mother and my father.
“I had a stormy youth with my father,” I said.
“My father and I are much of like minds. But I do not always succeed. The judge asked me to take Pip, the black child rescued from the fire, into my school. I did so, for a week or so, but he was miserable and so was I. The judge took him away.”
“You don’t think his blackness had aught to do with it?” I asked boldly, thinking of my Susan and her eagerness to learn to sew and write.
“Not at all. I have taught other black children with success. But Pip can scarce sit still. Only dancing and banging on his tambourine truly please him. He wants to go to sea.”
“Perhaps Ahab will take him.”
Again we fell silent, filling our lungs with the sweet, green air.
“Do you not count your own life a success?” she asked.
“I’m happy,” I replied. But I didn’t know if I counted that the same as success. Because I wanted her to know me more personally, I added, “Last winter, in Kentucky, I lost my baby and my mother.”
She put her arm across my shoulders and squeezed me. “I am sorry,” she said. She said nothing else for a while, but with her arm across my shoulders, I breathed again, and I could not help but rejoice in my own aliveness. When she spoke, it was to inquire if I had other kin, and I told her that I had failed to reconnect with them.
“There is a registry of all lighthouses. It may not be current as to keepers, but you can write to each.”
Then I knew Maria was, indeed, a friend, in response to my need. Grief seemed a dark storm cloud that was moving off, released, behind my head.
Maria fixed us and the children an efficient lunch, during which time she was much at their disposal conversationally. They were apparently in the habit of asking her questions so that their educations might be advanced as they ate. She was not the least bit dry or pedantic in her answers. Sometimes she mixed in legend and fable. In answer to the question “How was Nantucket formed?” she replied that once there had been a gigantic sachem. When he walked on the beach at Cape Cod, his great weight made his feet sink deeply, and his moccasins filled with sand. Disgusted, he pulled the sand-filled moccasins off and flung them into the sea. One became Martha’s Vineyard and the other became Nantucket. “Now,” Maria asked, “how
else do you suppose Nantucket might have been formed? Think also that we are in a line with the Vineyard, and with Block Island, and even Long Island.”
After that geological topic was discussed, one of the children fetched a fossiliferous rock. We all stared respectfully at the tiny stone skeleton in the rock. “An autograph of time,” Maria called it. It pleased me that she looked not only to the heavens but also to the earth. These children, and Maria herself, seemed so preoccupied with the outer world that they left their inner feelings to take care of themselves, and the Mitchell brood all appeared to prosper with the regimen.
As I walked home that June afternoon, I reflected that I, too, had been very happy in the midst of their curiosity about observable phenomena. But what of the inner life and what of the dark issues of our time—of slavery, of the position of women, of temperance, of the crisis in religious belief? William Mitchell had spoken as an ardent abolitionist at the dinner table, but he mainly invested his time in science. Maria seemed content merely to focus on what she herself wanted to do. Perhaps that was as good an answer as any to the question of the status of women.
At home, I climbed up to the cupola, though it was yet midafternoon, but I took my writing box with me and commenced a letter to Margaret Fuller. As soon as I stuck my head into the glass enclosure, I felt the intensity of the boxed-in heat. Quickly I flung up the sashes of my windows in all four directions, and at once the breezes cooled the space. Still, because of the opaque roof, the cupola did not feel so free and open as Maria’s roof walk. Yet it was very comfortable and pleasant.
Before I commenced to write, I took up my own brass telescope and scanned the seas for the Pequod. I saw one, two ships, their sails beautifully luffed by the wind. Like two swans, they approached Nantucket. But neither was the Pequod.