The Last Chairlift

6. LITTLE RAY

What I remember of my winters, when I was a child and in my early teens, is that my grandmother was my mother. Nana, my name for Mildred Brewster, was my winter mom. And she was my mother’s most devoted apologist—for a while, it seemed to me, her only apologist.

“No one asks to be born,” I grew up hearing Mildred Brewster say—to which my audibly breathing aunts, Abigail and Martha, would roll their eyes and breathe more heavily.

“The poor-Rachel routine,” Aunt Abigail labeled it.

“Here comes the whaling ship,” Aunt Martha would whisper in my ear, “just when we were hoping it had sailed beyond the horizon.” But I loved listening to Nana’s story about my mother’s name. Mildred Brewster had studied English and American literature at Mount Holyoke, a Massachusetts liberal arts college for women; her favorite novel was Moby-Dick, the reason my mom was named Rachel.

Nana’s copy of the novel was always on the table beside her reading chair. Even as a child, I noticed that Moby-Dick was a more constant presence than the Bible; my grandmother consulted the story of the white whale more than she turned to Jesus. “One day, dear, when you’re old enough, I’ll read this to you,” Nana told me, holding the huge book in both her hands. She didn’t wait for me to be old enough. I was ten when she started reading the novel aloud to me; I was twelve, almost thirteen, before she finished. It’s a slow novel, but the chapters are short. An ocean voyage goes slowly, except for the sinking.

“Keep your eye on the cannibal, dear—Queequeg is important,” Nana was always saying. “He’s not just any harpooner; Queequeg isn’t a Christian. He’s referred to as an ‘abominable savage’ for a reason—not only to get your attention. Queequeg travels with a shrunken head; he’s heavily tattooed. And there’s his coffin. Please don’t forget about Queequeg’s coffin!”

How could I forget a coffin? Listening to Moby-Dick made me anxious. I was relieved to discover that there was nothing abominable about Queequeg; Melville doesn’t even take him to task for not being a Christian. “For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal,” as Melville puts it. Listening to Moby-Dick—for close to three years—had a life-changing effect on me. It not only made me want to be a writer; according to my cousin Nora, it essentially shaped and screwed up the rest of my life.

My grandmother was a tireless Moby-Dick reader, but I interrupted her, I asked a hundred questions, I was interested in all the wrong things—such as whale vomit, or what makes whales sick in the first place. Chapter 92, the “Ambergris” chapter, raises a lot of gastrointestinal questions. Highly valued by perfumers, ambergris is (in Melville’s words) “an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale!” It is produced only by sperm whales. I made my grandmother explain what would happen to a mass of ambergris that was too large to pass through the whale’s intestines. Nana took pains to tell me that such a large mass of ambergris would have to be vomited by the whale. Ambergris can float for years, before washing ashore. Lumps have been found weighing as much as fifty kilograms—imagine 110 pounds of whale vomit! This is the kind of thing that distracted me from what was important in Moby-Dick. My interest in whale puke drove my grandmother crazy.

But Nana and I understood one thing. We loved Queequeg, the cannibal harpooner. We were thrilled that he was heavily tattooed, and that he traveled with a shrunken head. We were excited that Queequeg wasn’t a Christian, because this meant he was capable of doing anything. Whatever came into Queequeg’s head, he might do it. He might even eat you. The savage from the South Seas was the opposite of an uptight, white New Englander. Nana and I knew what they were like.

Years later, when I read Moby-Dick to myself, I kept a close eye on Queequeg. My grandmother was right. If you pay attention to Queequeg, the cannibal harpooner, you will appreciate Moby-Dick. No amount of whale vomit will turn you against what D. H. Lawrence called “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.”

Not being a Christian has a marvelous effect on Queequeg. One day, Queequeg has a fever. He decides he’s going to die. Queequeg is right, but it’s not the fever that’s going to kill him, and he’s not the only one onboard the Pequod who’s going to die. Queequeg asks the ship’s carpenter to make a coffin. Queequeg even lies down in his coffin, to be sure he fits. But Queequeg’s fever goes away, and he uses the coffin for his clothes. This is not extraneous detail! Not long later, a life buoy is lost overboard. Queequeg hints that his coffin would work as a life buoy—he is a practical cannibal. The ship’s carpenter goes to work on the coffin, nailing down the lid, caulking the seams.

“Queequeg sees the world differently than his shipmates aboard the Pequod,” my grandmother explained. “Only someone like Queequeg would ask the ship’s carpenter for a coffin.”

I somewhat struggled to make this part fit with Queequeg’s not being a Christian. “Does Melville mean a Christian wouldn’t ask for a coffin while he’s still alive?” I asked my grandmother.

“The ones I know wouldn’t,” Nana answered me. “That’s more in keeping with what a cannibal would request, I think.”

Nana and I were a long way into Moby-Dick when we got to the moment when Captain Ahab comes on deck and makes whimsical remarks (mostly to himself) about the suitability of putting a coffin to use as a life buoy.

Dedicated lit student that she was, my grandmother often interrupted herself when she was reading aloud to me; she wanted to be sure I had noticed certain things. In the chapter where Ahab is musing to himself on the meaning of a coffin as a life buoy, Nana stopped reading to me and remarked: “I hope you noticed, Adam, that this is the same ship’s carpenter who made Ahab’s prosthetic leg.”

“I noticed, Nana,” I assured her.

Moby-Dick is a story about a seemingly unkillable whale. It’s also a story about absolute authority—a man who won’t listen to anyone. The captain of the Pequod, Ahab, is obsessed with killing Moby Dick. The white whale is responsible for Ahab’s losing a leg. Nana and I knew that Ahab should just get over it. Ahab refuses to assist the captain and crew of the Rachel, another whaling ship. The Rachel has encountered Moby Dick; the Rachel has lost a whaleboat with all its crew. Won’t Ahab help the Rachel search for its missing sailors? The son of the Rachel’s captain is among them. No, Ahab won’t help. Ahab only wants to find and kill Moby Dick.

We know what’s going to happen. Ahab finds what he’s looking for—the white whale kills him and sinks the Pequod. But wait a minute. There’s a first-person narrator. Ishmael is the storyteller. What can possibly save Ishmael? Did you forget that Queequeg’s coffin floats? It’s a good thing not everyone onboard was a Christian. Let this be a lesson to you: never take an ocean voyage without a tattooed cannibal.

“Do you see, dear?” Nana interrupted her reading to ask me. “It is Ahab’s refusal to help his fellow men at sea that dooms him—and all hands, but one, aboard the Pequod.”

“I see,” I said. How could I miss it? It took three years.

The white whale sinks the Pequod. Everyone, except Ishmael, drowns—“and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” as Melville puts it. That’s pretty clear.

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.”