Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices Read online

  Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices

  Jodie Picoult

  Back in print by popular demand, national bestselling author Jodi Picoult's acclaimed debut novel treats fans old and new to a beautiful, poignant story of family, friendship and love. Jodi Picoult's powerful novel portrays an emotionaly charged marriage that changes course in one explosive moment.

  For years, Jane Jones has lived in the shadow of her husband, renowned San Diego oceanographer Oliver Jones. But during an escalating argument, Janes turns to him with an alarming volatility. In anger and fear, Jane leaves with her teenage daughter, Rebecca, for a cross-country odyssey. Charted by letters from her borther Joley, they are guided to his Massachusetts apple farm, where surprising self-discoveries await. Now Oliver, an expert at tracking humpback whales across vast oceans, will search for his wife across a continent, and find a new way to see the world, his family, and himself: through her eyes.

  Jodi Picoult

  Songs of the Humpback Whale:

  A Novel in Five Voices

  TO TIM, FOR EVERYTHING YOU’VE GIVEN ME

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author is grateful to many people and institutions for the detailed information they provided: Sarah Genman, the librarian at the New England Aquarium; the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies; the Long Term Research Institute in Lincoln; Honeypot Orchards and Shelburne Farm in Stow. Special thanks to Katie Desmond and her tireless work at the Xerox machine, to everyone in my family who read the manuscript and supported my efforts, and to those people whose lives and experiences I borrowed to create fiction. Finally, this book would not have been published without the help of Laura Gross, my agent, who always believed in me; and Fiona McCrae, my editor, whose expertise and faith were invaluable. For this special paperback edition, I’d also like to thank Emily Bestler, who had the delightful idea that my fans would want to read everything I’d written, and then made it possible.

  Prologue REBECCA November 1990

  In the upper right hand corner of the photo is a miniature airplane that looks as if it is flying right into my forehead. It is very tiny and steel-blue, a long bloated oval cut in the middle with its own wings. It is the shape, really, of the Cross. It was the first thing my mother noticed when we received the photo in Massachusetts. “You see, Rebecca,” she said. “It’s a sign.”

  When I was three and a half, I survived a plane crash. Ever since, my mother has told me I am destined for something special. I can’t say I agree with her. I do not even remember. She and my father had had a fight-one that ended with my mother crying into the garbage disposal and my father taking all of the original paintings off the walls and stashing them in the trunk of his Impala for safekeeping. As a result, my mother took me out to my grandparents’ breezy yellow home near Boston. My father kept calling. He threatened to send the FBI if she didn’t send me back home. So she did, but she told me she couldn’t go with me. She actually said, “I’m sorry, honey, but I can’t stand that man.” Then she dressed me in a little lemon knit outfit with white gloves. She turned me over to a stewardess at the airport, kissed me goodbye, and said, “Now don’t lose the gloves. I paid a bundle.”

  I don’t remember much about the crash. The plane broke all around me; it split in half right before row number eight. All I recall was trying so hard to hold tight onto those gloves, and the way people didn’t move, and not being sure if it was all right to breathe.

  I don’t remember much about the crash. But when I was old enough to understand, my mother told me that I was one of five survivors. She said that my picture was on the cover of Time- me crying in a burnt little yellow outfit with my arms outstretched. A farmhand had taken the photo with a Brownie camera and it had gone out to press and into the hearts of millions of people in America. She told me about fires that reached the sky and singed the clouds. She told me how insignificant the fight with my father was.

  A trucker took this photo of us the day we left California. In the corner is that airplane. My mother’s hair is tied up in a ponytail. Her arm is casually draped around my shoulder, but her fingers rest unnaturally tight on my neck as if she is trying to keep me from running away. She is smiling. She is wearing one of my father’s shirts. I’m not smiling. I’m not even looking at the camera.

  The trucker’s name was Flex. He had a red beard and no moustache. He said we were the best scenery he’d seen since Nebraska. Flex used his own camera-we’d left in too big a hurry to take ours. He said, “I’ll take your picture and you give me your address and I’ll send it.” My mother said what the hell, it was her brother’s rental address. If Flex turned out to be a lunatic and burned the place down no one would really be hurt.

  Flex sent the photo to us care of Uncle Joley. It came in a used, readdressed manila envelope snaked with a line of twenty-five one-cent stamps. He attached a Post-it note for my mother that she did not let me read.

  I’m telling you the story of our trip because I’m the only one who has really put it all together. It involved all of us-Mom, Daddy, Uncle Joley, Sam, even Hadley-but we all see it different ways. Me, I see it going backwards. Like a rewinding movie. I don’t know why I see it like this. I know, for example, that my mother doesn’t.

  When we got the photo from Flex, we all stood around the kitchen table looking at it-me, Mom, Joley and Sam. Joley said it was a nice picture of me, and where did we take it? Sam shook his head and stepped back. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “No trees, no canyons, nothing.”

  “We’re there,” my mother said.

  “That’s not why you took that picture,” Sam said. His voice hung at the edges of the kitchen like thin silver. “There’s more. We just all can’t see it.” And like that, he walked out of the room.

  My mother and I turned to each other, surprised. This had been our secret. We both looked instinctively at a spot in the highway to the right of our bodies. It is the place where California becomes Arizona-a change that truckers can sense in the pavement; that for everyone else remains unmarked.

  1 JANE

  The night before I got married I woke up, screaming, from my sleep. My parents came into the room and put their arms around me; they patted my head and smoothed my hair, fine, and I still couldn’t stop screaming. Even with my mouth closed, I continued-the high, shrill note of a nocturnal animal.

  My parents were beside themselves. We lived in a button-down suburb of Boston, and we were waking up the neighbors one by one. I watched the lights come on in different houses-blue and yellow, blinking like Christmas-and wondered what was happening to me.

  This wasn’t a common occurrence. I was barely nineteen, a straight-A student fresh out of Wellesley College and in 1976 that was still an accomplishment. I was marrying the man of my dreams in a prototypical white clapboard New England church, and the reception-a lavish one with white-gloved waiters and Beluga caviar-was going to be held in my parents’ backyard. I had a job waiting for me when I returned from my honeymoon. There was no foreseeable problem that I could articulate.

  To this day, I don’t know why that happened to me. As mysteriously as it all started, the screaming went away and the next morning I married Oliver Jones- the Oliver Jones-and we just about lived happily ever after.

  I am the only speech pathologist in this town, which means I get shuttled back and forth to different elementary schools in the San Diego suburbs. It’s not such a big deal now that Rebecca is old enough to take care of herself, and since Oliver is away so much of the time, I have less to do at home. I enjoy my work but certainly not the way Oliver enjoys his work. Oliver would be content to live in a
sailcloth tent on the coast of Argentina, watching his whales sound in warm water.

  My job is to help children find their voices-kinds that come to school mute, or with lisps or cleft palates. At first, they come into my little makeshift classroom one at a time and they shuffle their Keds on the floor and shyly glance at the formidable recording equipment and they are absolutely silent. Sometimes I stay silent too, until the student breaks the ice and asks what he or she is supposed to do. Some students cover their mouths with their hands at this point; I have even seen one little girl cry: they cannot stand to hear their own voices, pieces of themselves that they have been told are ugly. My role is to show them there’s someone who is ready to listen to what they have to say and the way they have to say it.

  When I was seven, I tell these kids, I used to whistle every time I said the letter S. In school I got teased and because of this I did not have many friends and I did not talk very much. One day my teacher told the class we’d be putting on a play and that everyone had to participate. I was so nervous about reading aloud in front of everyone else that I pretended I was sick. I faked a fever by holding the thermometer up to a light bulb when my mother left the room. I was allowed to stay home for three days, until my teacher called, and my mother figured out what I was doing. When I went back to school, my teacher called me aside. All of the parts had been taken in the play, she said, but she had saved a special role for me, offstage. I was going to be the Manager of Sound Effects, just like in the movies. I practiced with my teacher every day after school for three weeks. In time I discovered I could become a fire engine, a bird, a mouse, a bee, and many other things because of my lisp. When the night of the play came, I was given a black robe and a microphone. The other students got to be just one part, but I became the voice of several animals and machines. And my father was so proud of me; it was the only time I remember him telling me so.

  That’s the story I give at those Coastal Studies cocktail parties Oliver and I go to. We rub shoulders with people who’ll give grant money. We introduce ourselves as Dr. and Dr. Jones, although I’m still ABD. We sneak out when everyone is going to sit down to the main course, and we run to the car and make fun of people’s sequined dresses and dinner jackets. Inside, I curl up against Oliver as he drives, and I listen to him tell me stories I have heard a million times before-about an era when you could spot whales in every ocean.

  In spite of it all, there’s just something about Oliver. You know what I’m talking about-he was the first man who truly took my breath away, and sometimes he still can. He’s the one person I feel comfortable enough with to share a home, a life, a child. He can take me back fifteen years with a smile. In spite of differences, Oliver and I have Oliver and I.

  In this one school where I spend Tuesdays, my office is a janitorial-closet. Sometime after noon the secretary of the school knocks on the door and tells me Dr. Jones is on the phone. Now this is truly a surprise. Oliver is at home this week, putting together some research, but he usually has neither the time nor the inclination to call me. He never asks what school I head to on a given day. “Tell him I’m with a student,” I say, and I push the play button on my tape recorder. Vowel sounds fill the room: AAAAA EEEEEIIIII. I know Oliver too well to play his games. OOOOO UUUUU. Oh, you. Oh, you.

  Oliver is Very Famous. He wasn’t when we met, but today he is one of the leading researchers of whales and whale behavior. He has made discoveries that have rocked the scientific world. He is so well known that people take pictures of our mailbox, as if to say, “I’ve been to the place where Dr. Jones lives.” Oliver’s most important research has been on whale songs. It appears that whole groupings of whales sing the same ones-Oliver has recorded this-and pass the songs down over generations. I don’t understand much about his work, but that is just as much my fault as Oliver’s. He never tells me about the ideas burning in his mind anymore, and I sometimes forget to ask.

  Naturally Oliver’s career has come first. He moved us to California to take a job with the San Diego Center for Coastal Studies, only to find out East Coast humpbacks were his true passion. The minute I got to San Diego I wanted to leave, but I didn’t tell Oliver that. For better or for worse, I had said. Oliver got to fly back to Boston and I stayed here with an infant, in a climate that is always summer, that never smells like snow.

  I’m not taking his phone call.

  I’m not taking this again, period.

  It is one thing for me to play second fiddle; it is another thing to see it happen to Rebecca. At fourteen she has the ability to take a survey of her life from a higher vantage point-an ability I haven’t mastered at thirty-five-and I do not believe she likes what she is seeing. When Oliver is home, which is rare, he spends more time in his study than with us. He doesn’t take an interest in anything that isn’t tied to the seas. The way he treats me is one matter: we have a history; I hold myself accountable for falling in love in the first place. But Rebecca will not take him on faith, just because he is her father. Rebecca expects.

  I’ve heard about teenagers who run away, or get pregnant or drop out of school, and I have heard these things linked to problems at home. So I offered Oliver an ultimatum. Rebecca’s fifteenth birthday next week coincides with Oliver’s planned visit to a humpback breeding ground off the coast of South America. Oliver intends to go. I told him to be here.

  What I wanted to say is: This is your daughter. Even if we have grown so far apart that we don’t recognize each other when we pass, we have this life, this block of time, and what do you think about that?

  One reason I keep my mouth shut is Rebecca’s accident. It was the result of a fight with Oliver, and I’ve been doing my best to keep something like that from happening again. I don’t remember what that argument was about, but I gave him a piece of my mind and he hit me. I picked up my baby (Rebecca was three and a half at the time) and flew to my parents. I told my mother I was going to divorce Oliver; he was a lunatic and on top of this he’d hit me. Oliver called and said he didn’t care what I did but I had no right to keep his daughter. He threatened legal action. So I took Rebecca to the airport and told her, “I’m sorry, honey, but I can’t stand that man.” I bribed a stewardess with a hundred dollars to take her on the plane, and it crashed in Des Moines. The next thing I knew I was standing in a farmer’s cornfield, watching the wreckage smoke. It still seemed to be moving. The wind sang through the plane’s limbs, voices I couldn’t place. And behind me was Rebecca, singed but intact, one of five survivors, curled in her father’s arms. She has Oliver’s yellow hair and freckles. Like him, she’s beautiful. Oliver and I looked at each other and I knew right then why fate had made me fall in love with a man like Oliver Jones: some combination of him and of me had created a child who could charm even unyielding earth.

  2 OLIVER

  Hawaiian and West Indian humpbacks seem less unhappy to me than the whales off the coast of New England. Their songs are playful, staccato, lively. Violins, rather than oboes. When you see them diving and surfacing there is a certain grace, a feeling of triumph. Their slick bodies twist through a funnel of sea, reach toward the sky; with flippers outstretched, they rise from the pits of the ocean like the second coming of Christ. But the humpbacks in Stellwagen Bank sing songs that fill you to the core, that swell inside you. They are the whales with which I fell in love when I first heard the calls-eerie, splayed, the haunted sound your heart beats when you are afraid of being alone. Sometimes when I play the tapes of the Northern Atlantic stock, I find myself sobbing.

  I began working with Roger Payne in 1969, in Bermuda, when he and colleague Scott McVay concluded that the sounds made by humpbacks- megaptera novaeangliae -are actually songs. Of course there is a lot of leeway in the definition of “song,” but a general consensus may be “a string of sounds put together in a pattern by its singer.” Whale songs are structured like this: One or several sounds make up a phrase, the phrase is repeated and becomes a theme, and several themes make up a song. On the average song
s last from seven to thirty minutes, the singer will repeat the song in its same order. There are seven basic types of sounds, each with variations: moans, cries, chirps, yups, oos, ratchets, and snores. Whales from different populations sing different songs. Songs change gradually over the years according to the general laws of change; all whales learn the changes. Whales do not sing mechanically but compose as they go, incorporating new pieces into old songs-a skill previously attributed solely to man.

  Of course, these are only theories.

  I did not always study whales. I began my career in zoology lookingat bugs, then progressed to bats, then owls, then whales. The first time I heard a whale was years ago, when I had taken a rowboat off a larger ship and found myself sitting directly over a humpback, listening to its song vibrate against the bottom of my boat.

  My contribution to the field was discovering that only the male whales sing. This had been hypothesized, but to get concrete evidence required some way of determining a whale’s sex at sea. Viewing the undersides of whales was possible but dangerous. Taking a clue from genetics, I began to consider the feasibility of cell samples. Eventually I created a biopsy dart, fired from a modified harpoon gun. When the dart hit the whale, a piece of skin a quarter inch thick was removed and retrieved by a line. The dart was covered with an antibiotic, to prevent infection in the whale. After many unsuccessful attempts I finally amassed a body of evidence. To this day, the only recorded singers in the whale community are male; no female has ever been recorded.

  Twenty years later we know a lot about the varied songs of humpbacks but little about their purpose. Since the songs are passed down through generations of males and are sung in entirety only at the breeding grounds, they are seen as a possible method of attracting females. Knowing a given stock’s song may be the prerequisite for sex, and variations and flourishes may be an added inducement. This would account for the complexity of whale songs, the need to know the song currently in fashion-females choose a mate depending on the song they have to sing. Another theory for the purpose of the songs is attracting not females, but other males-acoustic swords, if you will, that allow male whales to fight over a female. Indeed, many male whales bear the scars of competition from mating.