Queequeg’s coffin, now a life buoy, rises from the sea; it floats by Ishmael’s side. And Ishmael says: “On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”
“Read it again—the whole story,” I said to my grandmother, when she got to the end.
“When you’re old enough, you can read it again—to yourself,” Nana said.
“I will,” I told her, and I would—again and again.
But that first time I also asked my grandmother: “You named my mom for ‘the devious-cruising Rachel’—you named her for a ship?”
“Not devious in the bad way, Adam—devious can also mean wandering, or without a fixed course. And not just any ship!” Nana exclaimed. “The Rachel rescues Ishmael. Well, dear—truth be told—your mother rescued me.”
“You were at sea? You were drowning, Nana?”
“Heavens, no!” my grandmother declared. She explained that Abigail, her eldest, had just been sent away to the school for girls in Northfield; in the following year, Nana told me, Martha would also be sent away. What my grandmother meant was that the birth of my mom rescued her from being left alone with Principal Brewster. While I had not found the principal emeritus to be a lot of fun, I didn’t consider him in the same category as drowning at sea.
“Oh,” was all I managed to say. I suppose I sounded disappointed.
My mother had chosen to be with her winter job—for almost half the year—instead of choosing to be with me. I know Nana could detect my disillusionment with my mom; after all, she’d been somewhat less than a Rescue Ship Rachel for me.
“Listen to me, dear,” my grandmother then said. “Your mother had her reasons for naming you—you’re not the first Adam, you know.” Thus getting my attention, my grandmother maintained—much to my surprise—that my mom had named me Adam for the following reasons: “You’re not only the first man in her life, dear; you’ll be the only one. You’re all that matters to her, Adam—as far as men are concerned,” Nana told me.
This completely contradicted my earliest impression of my pretty, young mother. From my sexually innocent perspective—long before I embarked on my own misguided sexual path—I’d presumed that my mom’s foremost love was being single. And didn’t she choose to be single because she liked meeting men?
I was not yet a teenager—ten, eleven, twelve—when my grandmother read Moby-Dick to me. Yet Nana seemed to be saying that my mother wanted nothing to do with men—only me. At the time, the truest thing I knew was this: my grandmother was my mom’s most constant advocate; therefore, I didn’t entirely believe her.
My devious-cruising aunts—I mean devious in the bad way—had done their treacherous best to undermine Nana’s efforts to make me love and trust her Rescue Ship Rachel.
“Little Ray,” Principal Brewster had named my mother. The nickname the principal emeritus had given her was not as astonishing to me as the evidence that the former headmaster had ever spoken.
“But of course he used to talk, dear,” Nana told me. “How could a head of school not speak? And Principal Brewster was a teacher before he became—in his own way—a headmaster. Oh, dear—you can’t imagine how that man could talk!”
“But what happened to him, Nana?” I asked her. “What made him stop talking?” I must have wrung my hands.
“When you’re old enough, Adam,” my grandmother began; then she stopped. “Someone will tell you when you’re old enough,” she said. “Please don’t hurt your hands—they’re so small.”
“Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha, maybe,” I ventured to guess.
“Someone else, I hope,” my grandmother said. “Little Ray herself, maybe,” she added softly, without conviction.
“Little Ray is a one-event girl—I already told you,” Aunt Martha reminded me, when I asked her to fill in a few missing details. Yes, but Martha’s earlier reference to my mom as a one-event girl had to do with her being strictly a slalom skier; it was connected to her being small. Now Martha was implying that all three Brewster girls were inclined to one event—in the specific sense that they all wanted one, and only one, child. This was sheer manipulation on Aunt Martha’s part. I was used to it, and used to worse from Aunt Abigail—the firstborn Brewster, and proud of it, the cow.
“Little Ray was an accident—an unplanned child. She wasn’t meant to be born,” Aunt Abigail told me, when I pressed her to tell me what she knew.
“A latecomer,” Aunt Martha chimed in. “It’s annoying, Adam—how you wring your hands.”
You can imagine how confusing this was to me. My mother was named for the Rachel in Moby-Dick—a rescue-ship girl—and she’d named me after the Garden of Eden guy. According to my grandmother, my mom was a one-event girl—but not in either of the two ways Aunt Martha meant it.
Nana meant my mother wanted nothing more to do with men. Was my grandmother actually telling me that my mom was that kind of one-event girl—namely, had Rescue Ship Rachel chosen the one and only time she would ever sleep with a man, strictly for the purpose of giving birth to me?
You can imagine how clumsily I must have formed the words, in order to ask my grandmother exactly what she meant about my being an Adam. I can’t remember the tortured way I would have phrased the question; I can’t see myself asking my grandmother such a thing in a clear and forthright manner. Such as: “Nana, are you telling me my mother had sex just once—because she wanted a child, just one—and now that she has me, she’s never doing it again?”
Can you imagine asking your grandmother that? Well, I did—in no comprehensible sequence of words I can recall.
It’s not hard, on the other hand, to summon to memory my grandmother’s answer. In a way, I’d already heard it, when I asked her to read Moby-Dick again—the whole story.
“When you’re old enough, Adam,” Nana began, “I’m sure Little Ray would prefer to tell you the story herself—the whole story.”
7. ALL ABOUT SEX
Keep in mind that my mother was the baby in the Brewster family, and then I was—hence the alleged accident of Little Ray’s birth was perceived as a precursor to the unplanned nature of my own coming into this world. This was the threefold, presumptive opinion of my aunts: that Little Ray and I were both unplanned; that a resultant chaos attended our births; that an ongoing haplessness would doom the rest of our lives.
To this joyless conviction, steadfastly upheld by Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, my grandmother had (albeit briefly) shone on my birth an unverified but undimming light—namely, what if I had been planned? What if I were no accident at all? If Rachel Brewster had intended to have me, didn’t that make me the sole reason for my existence? Since I had a mom who chose to spend six months of the year away from me, you can perhaps appreciate why I would cling to this hope.
I don’t mean I never saw my mother in the ski season. She never came home for Christmas and New Year’s, or for my March break; she was working as a ski instructor, and those were the busiest times in the ski season. However, she came to North Conway to see me—in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and again for the week of my March break.