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

  Whatever the message behind the beautiful sounds, they have led to much speculation, and much information about the humpback whale’s behavior. If a whale is a member of a specific population, he will sing a certain song. Thus if the songs of each whale population are known, a singing whale can be traced to its origins no matter where the song is taped. Whale songs provide a new method of tracking whales-an alternative to tagging, or to newer photographic fluke identification. We can group male whales by the songs they sing; we can connect females to these groups by attending to the songs to which they listen.

  This is my latest professional question: Should we be paying more attention to the individual singer? Won’t the personal histories-who the whale is, where he has been sighted, with whom he has been sighted-tell us something about why he sings the way he does?

  I have conducted exhaustive research. I have been featured in Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times. Along the way I got married and had a child. After that, I never felt like I was giving enough time to my family or my career. In limbo, that’s what I call it. In limbo. Whales never sleep, you know. They are voluntary-breathing mammals, and have to constantly come up for air. They drift in the depths of ocean, unable to rest.

  I used to try to mix the two. I took Rebecca and Jane on trackingvoyages; I played tapes of the New England humpbacks in the house, piping the melodies into the kitchen and the bathroom. And then one day I found Jane hacking at a speaker in the kitchen with a carving knife. She said she couldn’t listen anymore.

  Once, when Rebecca was five, all of us sailed to Bermuda to observe the breeding grounds of the East Coast humpbacks. It was warm then, and Rebecca pointed at porpoises we passed on our way out to the reefs. Jane was wearing my rain gear-I remember this because there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but she preferred it to the goosebumps she got from the wet wind. She stood at the railing of Voyager, my hired boat, with the sun beating down on her hair, turning her scalp a shade of pink. She gripped the rail tightly; she never was firm-footed on the water. When we docked she’d walk with tentative steps to convince herself she was on solid ground.

  Whales play. When we got to the exact spot and lowered the hydrophone into the ocean, there was a group of whales several hundred yards away. Although we were recording a whale singing way below the surface, we couldn’t help but watch the others. Their flukes slapped against the water; they rolled, languorous, stroking each other with their dorsal fins. They shot out of the water, ballistic. They slipped in and out of the waves, marbled in ebony, white.

  When the melancholy notes of the whale’s song filled the boat, it became clear that we were watching a ballet, executed artfully, except we didn’t know the story being told. The boat pitched from left to right and I watched Rebecca grab Jane’s leg for support. I thought, My two girls, have they ever been so beautiful?

  Although she was only five, Rebecca remembers many things from our trip to Bermuda. The whales are not one of them. She can tell you of the texture of pink sand; about Devil’s Hole, where sharks swim below your feet; of an estate’s pond with an island shaped the same as the actual island of Bermuda. She cannot remember her mother in yellow rain gear, or the slow-moving humpbacks that frolicked, or even the repeated cries of the whale below, to which she asked, Daddy, why can’t we help him? I don’t recall if Jane offered her opinion. In regard to whales, she has largely remained silent.

  3 JANE

  My daughter is the family stoic. By this I mean that while I fly off the handle in given situations, Rebecca tends to hold it all inside. Case in point: the first time she experienced death (a beloved guinea pig, Butterscotch). She was the one to clean out the cage, to bury the small stiff form in the backyard, while I cried beside her. She did not cry for eight and a half days, and then I found her washing dishes in the kitchen, sobbing, as if the world had ended. She had just dropped a serving platter on the floor, and shards of pottery radiated from around Rebecca’s feet, like the rays of the sun. “Don’t you see,” she said to me, “how beautiful it was?”

  Rebecca is in the living room when I get home from work. This summer she’s working as a lifeguard and her shift ends at two, so she’s already home when I get home. She’s eating carrot sticks and watching “Wheel of Fortune.” She gets the answers before the contestants do. She waves to me. “A Tale of Two Cities,” she says, and on the TV, bells ring.

  Rebecca pads into the kitchen in her bare feet. She is wearing a red bathing suit that says GUARD across her bust and an old baseball cap. She looks much older than fourteen and a half, in fact sometimes people think we are sisters. After all, how many thirtyfiveyear-old women do you know who are just having their first babies? “Daddy’s home,” Rebecca warns.

  “I know. He tried to call me this morning.” Our eyes connect.

  Rebecca shrugs. Her eyes, the shape of Oliver’s, dart past my shoulder but seem to have trouble finding an object of focus. “Well, we’ll do what we always do. We’ll go to a movie he wouldn’t like anyway, and then we’ll eat a pint of ice cream.” She opens the door of the refrigerator lazily. “We don’t have any food.”

  It’s true. We’re even out of milk. “Wouldn’t you rather do something different? It’s your birthday.”

  “It’s not that big a deal.” Suddenly she turns to the door, where Oliver is standing.

  He shifts from one foot to the other, a stranger in his own home. As an afterthought, he reaches for me and kisses my cheek. “I’ve got some bad news,” he says, smiling.

  Oliver has the same effect on me each time I see him: he’s soothing. He’s very handsome-for someone who spends so much time outside, his skin isn’t dry and leathery, it is the color of iced coffee, smooth as velvet. His eyes are bright, like paint that hasn’t dried, and his hands are large and strong. When I see him, his frame filling the doorway, I do not feel passion, excitement. I can’t remember if I ever have. He makes me feel comfortable, like a favorite pair of shoes.

  I smile at him, grateful for the calm before the storm.

  “You don’t have to say it, Daddy. I knew you wouldn’t be here for my birthday.”

  Oliver beams at me, as if to say, See? There’s no reason to make a fuss. Turning to Rebecca he says, “I’m sorry, kiddo. But you know the way it is-it’s really in everyone’s best interests if I go.”

  “Everyone who?” I’m surprised I say it out loud.

  Oliver turns to me. His eyes have gone flat and dispassionate, the way one looks at a stranger in a subway.

  I slip out of my heels and pick them up in my right hand. “Forgetit. It’s done.”

  Rebecca touches my arm on her way into the living room. “It’s all right,” she whispers, stressing the words as she passes.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Oliver says. “Wait till you see your birthday present!” Rebecca doesn’t seem to hear him. She turns up the volume on the TV, and leaves me alone with my husband.

  “What are you getting her?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”

  I press my fingers together-this is a habit I’ve acquired for dealing with Oliver-and head up the stairs. At the first landing I turn around to find Oliver following me. I think about asking when he is going to leave, but what comes out of my mouth instead is unexpected. “God damn you,” I say, and I actually mean it.

  There is not much of the old Oliver left. The first time I saw him was in Cape Cod when I was waiting with my parents for the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. He was twenty, working for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He had straight blond hair that fell asymmetrically across his left eye, and he smelled like fish. Like a normal fifteenyearold, I saw him and waited for sparks to fly, but it never happened. I stood dumb as a cow near the dock where he was working, hoping he’d notice me. I didn’t know I’d have to give him something to notice.

  That might have been the end of it except he was there when we came back over on the ferry two days later. I had wised up. I
tossed my purse overboard, knowing it would float with the current in his direction. Two days later he called me at home, saying he’d found my wallet and would I like it back. When we started dating, I told my mother and father it was Fate.

  He was into tide pools back then, and I listened to him talk of mollusks and sea urchins and entire ecosystems that were ruined at the whim of an ocean wave. Back then Oliver’s face would light up when he shared his marine discoveries. Now he only gets excited when he’s locked in his little study, examining data by himself. By the time he tells the rest of the world, he’s transformed from Oliver into Dr. Jones. Back then, I was the first person he told when something wonderful cropped up in his research. Today I’m not even fifth in line.

  At the second landing I turn to Oliver. “What are you going to look for?”

  “Where?”

  “In South America.” I try to scratch an itch in my back and when I can’t reach it Oliver does.

  “The winter breeding grounds. For whales,” he says. “ Humpbacks.” As if I am a total moron. I give him a look. “I’d tell you, Jane, but it’s complicated.”

  Pedantic asshole. “I’ll remind you that I am an educator, and one thing I have learned is that anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.”

  I find myself listening to my own words, like I tell my students, to hear where the cadences change. It is as if I am having an outofbody experience, watching this weird one-act performance between a self-absorbed professor and his nutty wife. I am somewhat surprised at the character Jane. Jane is supposed to back down. Jane listens to Oliver. I find myself thinking, this is not my voice. This is not me.

  I know this house so well. I know how many steps there are to get upstairs, I know where the carpet has become worn, I know to feel for the spot where Rebecca carved all of our initials into the banister. She did that when she was ten, so that our family would have a legacy.

  Oliver’s footsteps trail off into his study. I walk down the hall into our room and throw myself onto the bed. I try to invent ways to celebrate Rebecca’s birthday. A circus, maybe, but that’s too juvenile. A dinner at Le Cirque; a shopping spree at Saks-both have been done before. A trip to San Francisco, or Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine-I wouldn’t know where to go. Honestly, I don’t know what my own daughter likes. After all, what did I want when I was fifteen? Oliver.

  I undress and go to hang up my suit. When I open my closet I find my shoe boxes missing. They have been replaced by cartons labeled with dates: Oliver’s research. He has already filled his own closet; he keeps his clothes folded in the bathroom linen closet. I don’t even care where my shoes are at this point. The real issue is that Oliver has infringed on my space.

  With energy I didn’t know I had, I lift the heavy boxes and throw them onto the bedroom floor. There are over twenty; they hold maps and charts and in some cases transcriptions of tapes. The bottom of one of the boxes breaks as I lift it, and the contents flutter like goosedown over my feet.

  The heavy thuds reach Oliver. He comes into the bedroom just as I am arranging a wall of these boxes outside the bedroom door. The boxes reach his hips but he manages to scale them. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “These can’t stay.”

  “What’s the problem? Your shoes are under the bathroom sink.”

  “Look, it’s not the shoes, it’s the space. I don’t want you in my closet. I don’t want your whale tapes-” here I kick a nearby box, “-your whale records, your whales period, in my closet.”

  “I don’t understand,” Oliver says softly, and I know I’ve hurt him. He touches the box closest to my right foot, and his quiet eyes hold the contents, these ruffled papers, checking their safety with a naked tenderness I am not accustomed to seeing.

  This is how it goes for several minutes: I take a carton and stack it in the hall; Oliver picks it up and moves it back inside the bedroom. Out of the corner of my eye I see Rebecca, a shadow behind the wall of cartons in the hall.

  “Jane,” Oliver says, clearing his throat, “that’s enough.”

  Imperceptibly, I snap. I pick up some of the papers from the broken carton and throw them at Oliver, who flinches, as if they have substantial weight. “Get these out of my sight. I’m tired of this, Oliver, and I’m tired of you, don’t you get it?”

  Oliver says, “Sit down.” I don’t. He pushes me down by my shoulders, and I squirm away and with my feet shove three or four cartons into the hall. Again I seem to take a vantage point high above, in the balcony, watching the show. Seeing the fight from this angle, instead of as a participant, absolves me of responsibility; I do not have to wonder about what part of my body or mind my belligerence came from, why shutting my eyes cannot control the howling. I see myself wrench away from Oliver’s hold, which is truly amazing because he has pinned me with his weight. I pick up a carton and with all my strength hold it over the banister. Its contents, according to the labels, include samples of baleen. I am doing this because I know it will drive Oliver crazy.

  “Don’t,” he says, pushing past the boxes in the hall. “I mean it.”

  I shake the box, which feels like it is getting heavier. At this point I cannot remember what our argument is about. The bottom of the carton splits; its contents fall two stories.

  Oliver and I grip the banister, watching the material drift through the air-paper like feathers and heavier samples in Ziploc bags that bounce when they hit the ceramic tile below. From where we stand we cannot tell how much has been broken.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, frightened to look at Oliver. “I didn’t expect that to happen.” Oliver doesn’t respond. “I’ll clean it all up. I’ll organize it. Keep it in my closet, whatever.” I make an effort to scoop nearby files into my arms, gathering them like a harvest. I do not look at Oliver and I do not see him coming for me.

  “You bitch.” He grabs my wrists in his hands.

  The way he looks at me cuts inside me, says I am violated, insignificant. I have seen these eyes before and I am trying to place them but it is so hard when I can feel myself dying. I have seen these eyes before. Bitch, he said.

  It is in me, and it has been waiting for years.

  As my knees sink, as red welts form on my wrists, I begin to take ownership of my own soul, something that has been missing since childhood. Strength that could move a city, that could heal a heart and resurrect the dead pushes and shoots and stands and (bitch) concentrates. With the sheer power of everything I used to dream I could be, I break away from Oliver’s hold and strike his face as hard as I can.

  Oliver drops my other wrist, and takes a step backward. I hear a cry and I realize afterward it has come from me.

  He rubs his hand across his cheek, red, and he throws his head back to protect his pride. When he looks at me again, he is smiling, but his lips are slack like a carnival clown’s. “I suppose it was inevitable,” he says. “Like father, like daughter.”

  It is only when he has said this, the unspeakable, that I can feel my fingers striking his skin, leaving an impression. It is only then that I feel the pain spreading like blood from my knuckles to my wrist to my gut.

  I never imagined there could be anything worse than the time Oliver struck me; the time that I had taken my baby and left him; the event that precipitated Rebecca’s plane crash. I believed the reason there was a God was to prevent such atrocities from happening to the same person twice. But nothing prepared me for this: I have done what I’ve sworn I could never do; I have become my own nightmare.

  I push past Oliver and run down the stairs. I am afraid to look back, or to speak. I have lost control.

  From the dirty laundry pile I quickly grab an old shirt of Oliver’s and a pair of shorts. I find my car keys. I pull a Rolodex card with Joley’s address and walk out the side door. I don’t look back, I slam the door behind me, and still wearing only a bra and a slip, climb into the cool refuge of my old station wagon.

  It is easy to get away from Oliver, I think.
But how do I get away from my own self?

  I run my fingers over the leather of the seat, raking my fingernails into pits and tears that have developed over the years. In the rearview mirror, I see my face and I have trouble placing it. Several seconds later I realize that someone is echoing my breathing.

  My daughter holds a small suitcase on her lap. She is crying. “I have everything,” she tells me. Rebecca touches my hand; the hand that struck her father, that struck my own husband, that resurrected those dead and buried gaps.

  4 JANE

  When I was ten I was old enough to go hunting with my father. Every year when goose season came, when the leaves began to turn, my father became a different person. He’d take his shotgun out of the locked closet and clean the entire gun, down to the insides of the barrels. He’d go to the town hall and get a hunting license, a stamp with a picture of a bird so pretty it made me want to cry. He’d talk about that roast goose dinner he was going to get us, and then early on a Saturday he’d return with a fluffy grey bird, and he’d show Joley and me the place where the shot went in.

  Mama came into my room at four A.M. and said if I was going goose hunting I’d have to get up. It was still pitch dark when Daddy and I left the house. We drove in his Ford to a field, owned by a buddy, that was used to grow field corn in the summer, which-Daddy told me-is what geese love the most. The field, which had sported stalks of corn much taller than me just weeks before, had been razed; there were false pillows of dust caught between stumps of corn left from summer.