The whales are wearing party hats. “Let’s be precise: The curators have adorned the cetacean skeletons to look as if they’re wearing party hats,” Zeke would say if he were here and not in the hospital bed that’s supplanted the couch in their living room back in Vermont. If not for Zeke’s stroke, Lucinda would never have found herself sitting through — so far, according to the book in Jonathan’s lap — 91 chapters of “Moby-Dick” read aloud in 10-minute morselsby a parade of earnest devotees, many of them motley in appearance and less than brilliant in their delivery.
Without pretending to ask her out of anything more than pity, her son Jonathan insisted she join him and Cyril in New Bedford for the readathon. Both Jonathan and Cyril, the man she is now accustomed to thinking of as her second son-in-law, had hugged her at the airport more firmly than usual. “Now you will see a world you never dreamed of, the world of Melville geeks,” said Cyril, grinning as if deranged.
“But you’ll have fun, I promise,” Jonathan said. “Cyril had to drag me by the ears the first time I came along. Now I’m hooked.”
“Correction: harpooned.” Nudging each other, they shared the laughter of the happily married — or of couples who know how to look as if they are.
The skeletons, massive as moving vans, hang at the summit of the atrium to appear as if they are swimming overhead. Two of the whales wear large cardboard top hats; the third wears an explosion of colorful, curly ribbon. And now Lucinda notices the little one — the baby — its smaller skull sporting a pirate’s hat trimmed with glitter, more Halloween than New Year’s.
A man in a plaid shirt with a shaggy, ashen beard is reading about one more high-seas encounter between the Pequod and another ship. He looks as if he’s taking a break from splitting wood. He reads well enough until he gets to the dialogue between the sailors, which he performs in ludicrous accents. His misplaced conceit is embarrassing.
Lucinda chides herself for being so judgmental. She doesn’t go for confession too much anymore; if she did, she’d already be composing her recitation for Father Jess. She’d have to confess, as well, her inability to feel thoroughly proud of Jonathan and the life he’s made. He and Cyril are professors at Berkeley: Jonathan in gender studies, Cyril in American literature. (Jonathan’s “Sexual Identity in Firstborn Children” and Cyril’s “The Fine Hammered Steel of Woe: Ecclesiastes and Melville’s Ambivalent Soul” sit on her bedside table, beneath other books she is far more likely to read.) They were married the previous summer. At 50, Jonathan is almost 10 years older than Cyril. When Lucinda found herself giving advice about the wedding, what disoriented her was not that her son would be marrying a man but that, after so many years alone, he would be settling down in any conventional sense.
“I’m going to stretch my legs,” she whispers.
Jonathan whispers back, “Cyril should be up in about 10 minutes.” Jonathan read yesterday afternoon, the scene in which Ahab makes his brooding entrance. But Jonathan is just the sidekick. This is Cyril’s show.
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