by John Hersey
A drone of engines came overhead, at last, giving an eerie effect of being outside an enclosure, of being heard through windows; Tom and the girls stood in a house of vapor, and the plane flew back and forth over its roof. In the radio shack voices sounded like crockery being shattered. The three sidled over to a screened window and heard, through static, the acknowledgments of the pilot, who sounded dangerously grouchy about being hauled down to earth on a kite string of radio waves. Guided to an approach, he tried once to land, but the plane, never visible from the ground, pulled away with a snarl of power. The controller sent the pilot off on a time-killing pattern. Before long the mist did seem to thin. Another balloon went up, and voices on the air sounded more warm-blooded.
The thrumming of motors returned—and bang, there it was: silver, pregnant, an awkward hybrid built for backwater carriers. The girls let out their breaths in a unison sigh. The airship waddled in from the runways. A door popped easily free like an oval of tangerine skin, and an inner ladder let itself down.
Just then a new bank of fog rolled across the field, and Tom could barely see the file of passengers coming from the plane. For a moment he caught at a surprisingly happy thought: There’s been a mistake; Flick isn’t among them. The girls were tensely receptive; Tom had the feeling that they both wanted to run forward, find some man, and throw themselves on him, one on each shoulder, sharing him. But the certain one wasn’t there! Tom, astonished at himself, was on the edge of a raucous, perverse laugh—when a close couple floating through the mist suddenly divided, and the man veered, and it turned out to be Flick striding toward the three of them with an easy, arrogant bearing, in a gray business suit, with a plaid cloth bag in one hand and flapping the other perhaps to signal what fun the blind landing had been. The grin on Flick’s face seemed to come forward in the fog ahead of the rest of him. He threw his soft bag to the ground and, placing kisses on the extended fingers of his right hand, he patted the kisses at arm’s length onto the cheeks, first of his wife, then of Audrey. And he pounded Tom on the back, a bit too hard, as if Tom had a fish bone caught in his throat. And all the time he was talking away:
“…It could be really terrific coming down through that crap. It’s shallow—we were in blue sky at a thousand feet—this soft big old mattress of fog down under you—didn’t begin till this side of Block Island. But Jesus, Tom, it’s incredible they don’t have guided landing in a place like this. On a foggy island? I mean with some of the equipment they’ve developed by now it would be just like coming down on iron rails. To depend on tower voice guidance on altitude—that’s medieval! That joker chickened out on the first approach—you realize that? He wanted to bugger off to Hyannis, I guess, but it was worse over there, so they finally talked him down back here. You know about the system they’re experimenting with at Kennedy? Really terrific—it’ll sneak you down through haggis pudding. But boy, expensive! I heard the cost of the gear on a single plane is equal to the entire value of the rest of the plane. Beautiful, sophisticated stuff: servo on top of servo on top of servo that actually take over from the pilot and fly the plane down…”
Flick had apparently seen the girls’ shining eyes, taking him in but not his words, and he lifted his hatless head and stuck out his lower lip. There had been no expression at all as the recurrent explosive word—“terrific”—had come popping out. The ridge of Flick’s big straight nose ran right down in line with the plane of his forehead, which was slanting and unusually shallow, for his flaxen hair hooded part of it; in the gray atmosphere and above his gray suit his skin was pinkly tanned and freckled. He was wholly in tune with the times—that was the maddening thing about him. His first word beyond praise of the danger he had just come through was a sarcastic complaint. “This is that terrific August weather you kept giving us a hard sell on,” he said to Tom, thumping him again. Flick’s eyes in this atmosphere were piscine and chilly, of a pale transparency of lake ice under gray skies, yet their hardness seemed to suggest, if only by a protective glaze on the surface, much feeling somewhere deep down.
At last the girls began to get their voices going, and the four drifted toward the taxis. As they walked Tom had a feeling of seeing Flicker for the first time: an air of superiority, relaxation, a staggering capacity for imposition. It was as if Hamden had chartered Harmony; Tom had a moment of feeling like a hired crewman. The morning up to now had been quiet; the girls had been strung up tight. Now a squall of friendliness and outgoing warmth broke out, and everyone was talking at once, even Tom, to his own surprise, and Flicker’s laughter rattled like a punching bag. They drew the same taxi man as before. Somehow Flick made it in back between the two girls, and he began to elbow them like mad, while Tom huddled sidewise in the jump seat.
Flick said, “I hear there’s a hell of a storm coming.”
“Sunny McCloud says she’s hung up.”
“Who says?”
“Weatherman from Boston. You know she’s called Esmé? Those government meteorologists really must be getting hard up. He—this McCloud—says she’s probably losing her oomph.”
Between the two girls Flicker shot his jacket cuffs. His shirt sleeves were rolled up under his suit coat, and his thick, blond-hairy wrists sliding briefly forward from the cloth gave hints of covered physical power. “God, aren’t these tracking systems beautiful? You think of all the thousands of variables in a storm like this—they have the whole picture at their fingertips…I say let her come!”
In flinging out this dare Flick seemed to be inviting not a rage of winds and seas but rather a great cyclonic turbulence of data, of verifiable and classifiable and trackable phenomena. Let Esmé come in all her shimmering raiment of symbols and numbers!
But then, ebullient and down-to-earth, Flick began to tell the latest jokes from the city. The girls, over-responding, rocked off to the verge of hysteria, weeping through extremities of laughing.
It was not until they were well down Center Street in Edgartown that Flick asked Dottie how the children were.
“Didn’t you even call?” Dottie asked.
“I assumed you would.”
“I did yesterday. They’re fine,” Dottie blithely said, quickly drawing back from challenge. “I guess I ought to phone again before we go out to the boat.”
Audrey was looking out the taxi window with an expression that appeared to be vacant—at what cost, Tom wondered, of control. The casualness of the Hamdens about their three small girls with pouty mouths and halos of golden ringlets, presently parked on grandma in Rumson, must have struck a kind of terror into Audrey, Tom thought; but her eyes were hooded, secret.
At the harbor a light southwest breeze was blowing and fog patches were still rolling through. Dot put through her call from a glass booth; the kids were, again, no more or less than “fine.”
In the launch Flick asked, “Where are we off to?”
“I was figuring on going round to Menemsha,” Tom said, “but we only have about an hour more of fair currents. I don’t know. It’s sort of borderline.”
Flick snorted. “The current doesn’t make that much difference, does it?”
“It makes plenty. When it’s running strongest you have more than three knots going out there. Nearly four off the Chops. I’m not about to beat up the Sound against that sort of stuff.”
“My God, we have an engine, don’t we?”
Tom did not answer that question. There had been all that talk about how much Flicker doted on pure sailing, all those tales of cruising—the famous casual boast of diving over the side in Cuttyhunk to look for a bracelet that had fallen overboard, and miraculously finding it on the muddy bottom; and many other suggestions, oblique to be sure, of “experience.” Tom looked at the ripples on the steely water; he could not face down Flicker’s scorn, for which scorn in return was no answer, though he felt it.
There lay Harmony, as they swung in from the channel line, ahead, in profile, a wh
ite statement of sturdiness and endurance. Her wound was invisible. Her mild sheer rose toward the dark bowsprit thrust out over an old-fashioned clipper bow, with trailboards above the cutwater in lieu of a figurehead, light blue panels with carved gilt scribing and letters. In pride Audrey pointed her out to Flick. Tom looked at his face and saw the immediate disappointment. This martini-time swab didn’t want to be on a powerful, waisty, hard-bilged, wide-quartered old girl that would stand up like a church in a blow; he wanted to lollop on some sweet-lined yacht, a money boat. Yet Flick raised himself in the bows of the launch and lied with fabulous bravery, “Oh, she’s a honey, Tom! She’s really a sexpot. I like her.”
* * *
—
Then he began to grind his teeth. They rounded the stern, with its lovely oval transom, of the same pale blue, with a carved gilded low relief of a skein of grapevine heavy with fruit and the name standing out in stark black.
* * *
—
Flick went forward to unpack and change, frequently bumping his head and cursing and laughing at himself and calling out his enthusiasm for this and that. Tom fiddled around inconclusively with the current tables. The girls fixed drinks and sandwiches; suddenly their co-operation had turned out to be the most natural thing in the world. Flick came aft soon in tan shorts and a long-sleeved Basque shirt. How young he looked—how blank! Life hadn’t printed a single word on his face.
“This is terrific down here, all this space. I guess it’s her beam.” Not the nicest thing he could say about Harmony—like remarking that a woman had a fat behind. His eyes were scouring the main cabin. “What communications have you got?”
“Communications?”
“Well, Jesus, Tom, stuff like ADF.”
“What the hell is that?”
“You’re kidding. ADF? Doohickus that beams you in on any city radio station? You never heard of ADF? It’s ancient. Don’t you even have a maritime direction-finder?”
“I have a pretty good transistor radio.” Tom felt a tiny push of malevolence, and he added, “I forget what make it is.”
“My God, no ship-to-shore?”
“Telephone? A telephone here? Why do you think I own a boat?”
Flicker couldn’t seem to field that question; he rolled his eyes upward and then looked at the two girls as if for agreement that the skipper was missing some central buttons.
Tom decided to deflect Flicker with hospitality. “Find room for everything?”
“I guess so. I just flung stuff around.”
“The waterproofs,” Tom said, “go in the locker opposite the door to the head.”
“No problem. Didn’t bring.”
The cordiality was promptly skinned from Tom’s voice. “But you said you have some.”
“I do.”
“Well, for Pete’s sake, I assumed you’d bring them. I would have had a set aboard for you.”
“I like to be rained on.”
“Don’t be asinine.”
“Honest. I like the rain on my head and shoulders. I go out walking in the rain all the time in town. Right, Dot?”
“Not on a boat you don’t. Not on my boat. Not if you have to sit at the wheel for hours on end. It gets chilly here—when it’s ninety degrees in New York you shiver here till your teeth fall out. I thought you said you’d done all this…”
Audrey was slicing a tomato, and in the hanging silence after Tom stopped one could almost hear the knife going through the deep-red vegetable flesh.
Tom announced that they would have to go ashore to buy a set of waterproofs.
Audrey groaned, “Oh, no.”
Pliant and passive even as she protested, Dottie said, “He doesn’t deserve them, if he’s so stubborn—”
“It’s my ass to get wet, not yours,” Flick broke in.
Audrey said, “Come on, drink your drink, Tomaso. Relax.”
Tom said with hurt eyes to Audrey, “He told me he’d bring them, so I left the extra set on the beach. Of course I’d have brought ours if—”
Dottie said, “What difference does it make?”
“It makes a great deal of difference. If we had really bad weather it might make all the difference.”
* * *
—
Tom made them go. After they had eaten, he tooted for the launch again, and all four trooped ashore cross and bewildered. The afternoon breeze had come in off the sea to the south, and the last of the fog was scudding in tatters of low cloud toward the Cape; burgees on masts and flags ashore showed their rippling colors straight out. White sails were flying out the harbor mouth. Tom let it be known, however, as they ambled up the brick sidewalk in front of the Harbor View, that for cruising the day was shot. As he spoke his slim figure, passing through fluttering shadows of the leaves of an overhanging tree, seemed to be alive with lights and darks of exasperation. It would be far too late after this errand to try to get around to Menemsha; the currents were already turning in the Sound. If they hurried they could go out for a sail toward Cape Pogue and back. But on a day like this a solid bank of fog was liable to roll back in about five o’clock—might as well just make the best of the remainder of the afternoon in Edgartown, and lay over. He promised, pulling back suddenly from his accusatory sharpness, that they’d have a really terrific sail the next day. Flick’s word.
So they went to Hall’s, and Flick, making it clear that he was only doing this to humor Tom, tried on heavy-weather gear, and they settled for a big orange suit of it, and Tom paid with good grace, and they strolled idly along the sunny streets and wandered into Stinchfield and the Country Store and the Orient Trader just to look at things. Flicker threw himself into the mock shopping as if it were the most vital of work, holding up silk prints and sailing shirts and Italian blouses against the fronts of both Dot and Audrey, and he cocked his head, and he snatched the cloth away from them with ogling face-bursts of lifted eyebrows and open mouth as if stripping them time and again right down to the skin. The girls responded with rising excitement, running over to triple mirrors to see themselves, front, side, and back, and fingering the most expensive items, and whispering to each other, now, in an almost conspiratorial intimacy. Tom tried hard not to sulk. Those three made a solid mass of joyful indifference to sailing.
By the time they had returned to Harmony, the fog had indeed come back, and it was a legitimate cocktail hour. They sat below in the cozy confinement of the main cabin, and Audrey put out some Crema Danica and crackers, and Tom, chipping with a pick at a chunk of ice in a small wooden bucket, was the host again, on his boat again, and he felt that Aud and Dot had begun to play up to him for a change. Now it was Flick who seemed subdued. Games had teams of threes. They sat a long time over drinks in the darkling cabin.
By the time dinner was over, Flick was bellicose and thick-tongued. His two eyelids seemed to be on independently operated hinges. At one point he challenged Tom: “Why a sailboat?”
Tom spoke then of the sense a man got on a sailboat of dealing with forces. Perhaps that sense was “worked up”; but there weren’t many ways left, he said, for a civilized man to fight for survival—against anything other than himself. “Ever been out in a sailboat when a line squall hit? You go from dead calm to a fifty-knot wind in one solid knockdown, you know. And that black edge of cloud that comes rolling out off the beach? With those boiling inverted mushrooms at the front of it? If you’ve ever seen that, you can’t forget it. Then when it hits you have maybe ten minutes, or up to half an hour, of wind and rain you just can’t face—water’s green, with this scum running on it, and a real stiff chop gets up, and the lightning all around you …You damn well have to know what you’re doing—douse your sails at exactly the right time and run off ahead of it; or if you’re on a lee shore keep your jib and jigger and claw off. Yet it’s really not that dangerous, really it’s not that bad; you just have the illusion of a triumph
over nature, over the evil side of nature. When it’s finished the wind drops out to nothing and the sun comes back, in cleared air, and you think, ‘I made it, that was something I did, I got us out of that.’ ”
Flick said, “Our hero. Shee-it. If you had even minimal communications you’d know about the squall hours ahead of time and get into harbor and be in some bar when the thing hit.”
“But the whole point is being out in it. Coming through it.”
“That’s real prime stupid. Human beings ought to be in better control of their environment. You have the means. Or if you had the sense you would have. This boat’s a death trap.”
“It’s not just that, anyway,” Tom hurriedly added, a sharp pique darting through his drink-loosened impulse to sentimentality. “There’s something aesthetic: the business of heeling slightly in a gentle breeze—two insubstantial things, air and canvas, working with all those marvelous curves and lights and shadows to move tons of wood through solid walls of water. It’s…it’s majestic.”
“No, no, come on, Tom, you’re ducking the issue. If I were going into boating, I’d want to be in my own century, I’d buy me one of those fiberglas jet jobs—have you seen them going along with those marvelous white rooster tails of water trailing behind? The jet’s the most exquisitely simple engine there will ever be on this earth. You talk about canvas! Jesus, Tom, it’s all Dacron. Chemical synthesis. Lab stuff. You can’t turn the clock back just by pretending it’s cotton cloth.”