I often began reading to Nana from Pip’s prayer. Pip is the Black cabin boy on the Pequod. At the end of the “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter, Pip has overheard the sailors swearing their allegiance to Ahab—“that anaconda of an old man,” Pip calls Captain Ahab. Pip is afraid. “Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness,” Pip prays, “have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no bowels to feel fear!”

“Poor Pip,” my grandmother always said, sighing. We both knew what would happen to him; in a sense, the cabin boy would drown twice. Lost overboard, alone on the sea, and then rescued, Pip goes mad. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.” Pip would live, to drown again—the last time, with the rest of the Pequod’s crew.

Or I would begin with “The Blacksmith,” the gloomy Chapter 112, because Nana said she knew nothing as comforting on the subject of death as the line she loved in that dark chapter. “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried.” Melancholy comforted my grandmother.

Nana liked the door to her room at River Bend left open. The doors to the residents’ rooms were closed at night—“for fire reasons,” Emmanuelle had told me—but during the day, my grandmother insisted that her door remain open. Some of the residents who’d lost their marbles would wander in when I was reading, but they never stayed to listen. Moby-Dick wasn’t written for passersby.

“Just keep reading, dear—perhaps ‘The Shark Massacre’ would be an appropriate chapter,” Nana would tell me, when one of the marbleless trespassers entered her room, picking up photographs and putting them down, and otherwise aimlessly snooping around.

I would, as directed, turn to that passage in Chapter 66, where the sharks are snapping “at each other’s disembowelments”—especially that bit where “those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound.” These images were sufficiently unpleasant to make most of the trespassing residents leave my grandmother’s room—even though they’d lost their marbles, or perhaps because they’d lost them. Only occasionally did I need to read to the end of the chapter, where poor Queequeg almost loses his hand to a dead shark on deck. In his semiliterate way, the savage speculates on what kind of irresponsible god could have created the shark. “Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” the cannibal says, “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.” Queequeg’s irreverent, sacrilegious dialogue did the trick. Even the most marbleless of the intruders were offended; the trespassers quickly left Nana’s room, not wanting to hear more of Moby-Dick.

“If you would close your door, Mrs. Brewster, the other residents would not wander into your room,” one of the older nurses was always telling my grandmother.