When Ishmael joins the Pequod in Chapter Sixteen of Moby Dick and signs on for a three hundredth part of "the clear nett proceeds of the voyage", he expresses his curiousity about the ship's captain, and is given the following answer by Captain Peleg:
" ... I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is - a good man - [...] I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of moody - desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So good-bye to thee - and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife - not three voyages wedded - a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities!"
Peleg speaks up for Ahab's basic humanity, maintaining that beneath his rough exterior there beats a good heart, capable of loving a sweet girl. Quint's carapace, however, hides no such soft centre. He has no wife ("I never saw the need for one.") and his laugh - "a short, derisive bark" - seems, in Peleg's terms, to make him a bad rather than a good captain.
Ahab's wife - like Lady Macbeth's children - has been the subject of whimsical scholarly speculation and more recently has inspired a novel. We can imagine a life for her beyond the pages of the book in which she briefly appears. Widowed by the white whale with her child - like Ishmael - made an orphan, she would erect a tablet in the chapel to her late husband's memory and "wear the countenance if not the trappings of some unceasing grief" for the remainder of her life.
The prospect of a similar fate comes to Ellen at the end of Chapter Twelve. With the textual equivalent of a cross cut, Benchley switches the action from the Orca to the Brody household without even the benefit of a single line spacing. Ellen is fixing the children's supper when Larry Vaughn appears at the kitchen door. He heads directly for the liquor cabinet, pours himself "a glass full of gin" and explains that he has come to say farewell. Ellen is shocked by his wan appearance (his eyes are "a pasty gray") and she recalls the last time she saw him (two weeks earlier, or at the end of Chapter Six) - the day she flirted with Hooper in the hardware store.
In fact, there are echoes of that earlier conversation in the exchange she has with the mayor. Just as Hooper pays Ellen a compliment ("If David had any sense, he would have known when he had it good and he would have held on to you."), so Vaughn makes a belated claim for her affection (" ... you and I would have made a wonderful couple."). In both cases Ellen blushes. Typically, and less romantically, Larry Vaughn then goes on to describe the lost opportunity in monetary terms ("You would have been a real asset to me."). Ellen picks up on the word herself ("I don't know what kind of ... asset I would have been."). Earlier in the novel, when she was standing naked before a full-length mirror and planning adultery, she viewed herself in similar terms: "Were the goods good enough? Would the offer be accepted?"
After Vaughn has left Ellen goes upstairs to the bedroom. As she contemplates his retrospective promise ("I could have given you a life you would have loved."), she comes to realise "the richness of her life [...] an amalgam of minor trials and tiny triumphs [...] something akin to joy." And with the realisation she becomes aware of her absent husband and suddenly fears that - like Ahab - he might not return from the sea. At that same moment the front door opens. Ellen races downstairs and greets Brody with a full-mouthed kiss, wrapping her arms around his sunburnt neck.
