by John Hersey
All four fell in their bunks early, not exactly tight but discordant and heavy-headed, and Tom slept fitfully, often turning on the creaking frame of his berth, until, in the middle of the night, he woke to thunder and a few minutes of hard rain splashing on the deck. After that, knowing that a loop of new weather had come through and that the morning sky would be high and glass-clear, he slipped into a deep, safe, harbor-like darkness.
* * *
—
Tom was up early with his Eldridge’s, figuring the currents, and at six o’clock he began roaring the others out of their bunks. It was a sparkling morning with a dry, gentle breeze out of the north; the front had been weak, and these light airs would not hold all day. Time to get going!Groans and blasphemy forward. Audrey got up in an uncharacteristically sulky mood, clumsy-fingered and speechless. Flicker came blustering out as Tom was laying out the course lines to East Chop on the Edgartown chart, and the guest began to ride his host for all his finicky pencil work. “Christ, man, can’t we just heave up the hook and plunge out into the dawn?” Flick began to chant like an idiot traveloguist: “And so, dear voyagers, we leave fair Pago Pago hull down on the palm-fringed horizon. From here we sail to bournes of purple sunsets…”
Dot feelingly said she needed coffee.
Audrey snapped at her: coffee was coming.
Tom said, “Only trouble with the Pago Pago approach, around these waters, is that you’d spend your vacation hung up on Middle Ground or L’Hommedieu Shoal or Squash Meadow. Look here at the chart. Look at these shallows—here, here, here, here.”
Flick said, “You were giving us all that savage-forces-of-nature talk last night—but isn’t what you really love all this farting around with protractors and tide tables? These figures you squiggle in your log book? Creaky, it’s creaky. Give us five years, five-six years, we’ll design you a computer no bigger than a portable typewriter that’ll do all this bloody navigating for you. And better than you can. No human error. We’ll program the damn thing with every buoy from Maine to Florida. Figure in current and drift and leeway and whatever else you want, you name it—and give us five more years and we’ll give you a box that you’ll just press a button and it’ll steer right to your destination for you.” Flick stuck out his chin as if delivering an ultimatum.But there was a strange moment when the time came to leave the mooring. The mizzen was up. Tom, in the cockpit coiling the main sheet and freeing cleated lines while the others forward prepared to hoist the mainsail and genny, was aware that something odd was happening among those three. Flicker, reaching up along the main halyard, was suddenly white as the sailcloth beside his face. Tom’s spirits were soaring, as they always did just before he felt the first surge of sailpower on the motionless boat, and, for a flashing moment, seeing the thinly clad figures of Dot and Audrey in sharp relief against the pure sky, he experienced a flashing recall of those searing, chaotic desires that had shot him out of bed the previous morning. At that very instant he saw Flick hesitate. The man was faltering. Good God, Tom thought, he can’t pull the sail up, the big shouter wants order, he wants things tied down, he wants the mooring, he doesn’t want to leave the mooring! The clarity of the air brought this conviction into dazzlingly sharp focus. Tom saw Flick’s clenched jaw.
Then it passed. With a rattle of slides on the track the mainsail rose. The breeze and the current worked at cross purposes, and as the main took hold the boat began to inch up on its mooring.
“Cast off,” Tom called forward, “and then get the genny up right away.” His first overt commands to Flick.
They were free and moving! Tom spun the wheel and wore off toward the channel, and the current took Harmony’s keel broadside and swept her swiftly down for Edgartown, till she gibed and came round with a swish; Audrey, who understood everything, was already back in the cockpit trimming up the sheets, and the glistening tower of Dacron began to lean and pull as lines went taut and blocks creaked erect and the whole yawl sighed at the feel of her power. Tom’s heart was pounding. What a glorious swift glide down the rows of boats!
Tom tacked close aboard the pilings of the yacht club landing stage, and as Harmony heeled to her renewed grip on the wind he looked up and saw Flicker gesticulating and cavorting on the port side of the foredeck like a mad ape, greeting all Edgartown with bombastic political fervor, shouting his exuberance at a grossly unsuitable hour—a calisthenic display after that moment of shocked paralysis at the halyard. Yes, this was Flick’s famous zest for life—but Tom had glimpsed a strange prelude to it in that pallor at the hoist, that frozen bite of the big jaws as the man had tried to overcome something in himself.
Bearing off at the curve of the harbor mouth, Tom thought: To hell with him. All the same, it was not so easy to dismiss him as that, for Flick’s noisy exultation had dampened Tom’s own deep joy at this nearly silent motion through the low-slanting clear rays of the sun. The metabolism of that buffoon was enough to kill anything quiet and heartfelt.
The lighthouse tower out on the sand in this whiteness should have, usually would have, given Tom the peak of his almost dreamlike pleasure, not only in its molded simplicity of form but also because of its symbolic force, standing for the concern of those on shore for those who have gone to sea; whalers’ wives waiting for ocean-worn ships to come home; vigilance at night; fellow feeling; a small flame in front of a concave mirror that would send out such a piercing shaft of worry toward the edge of the known world. But all Tom could think at this moment was that the lighthouse was automated now. Electronic controls. Flick’s world, a-human and ineluctable.
* * *
—
Tom sailed out toward Cape Pogue until he could come about and fetch the Chops. Now that the trip was under way Flicker simply would not calm down. The air was bracing; he talked like a terror. He was good company. There was no denying that he kept the ball bouncing. “There’s this character at the computer center…Did you catch the Buchwald piece on …So we wandered up to the bar car, since it looked like the train would never …They have these real high-smelling cheeses, in the downstairs part…” Tom wanted the others to see how perfect the day was—the geometries, complex and dark, of the ferry dock at Oak Bluffs, bits of the faraway Cape seeming to be raised on space-colored floats, the shore-to-shore fabric of royal blue laid out ahead; but Flicker pulled the whole earth into the cockpit and held it there by the throat. Dot’s earrings twinkled under softly blowing waves of her hair. Audrey was listening, listening, one hand limp on the fall of the genny sheet. Tom saw that the teaming had gone against him again.
Harmony flew across the gap between the Chops, and Tom tried to shut his ears to the energetic fanatic he’d invited aboard. He scanned the summerhouses on the bluffs of the Chops, with salt-silvered shingles and white trim, and towers and dormers and wide porches, nostalgic images of an old world of which Flicker Hamden would be contemptuous not because it represented privilege, gentility, and bigotry but because it was—to use his word—creaky: few of the houses even had television masts. Tom felt argumentative. He was a mender of suffering human beings, an old-fashioned gut man; this ever-talking futurist made him feel a little dizzy on the brink of obsolescence. He wanted to get something back. “See how the current takes us,” he said at the West Chop bell, where the weird sliding of the sea was most visible. “It would be murder against it”—justifying yesterday’s painful layover if not the trip for the rain gear.
Flicker went right on, however, his bland, expressionless face opening at the mouth to let out a ceaseless flow of buoyant, null, enthusiastic, insensitive explosions.
But near the northern end of Middle Ground, where the black can buoy was almost pulled right under by the rushing current, Harmony hit a tide rip—nothing much in this moderate northerly that came in diminishing puffs, but enough to make the yawl jump and shudder. At the first lurch Tom saw a moment’s shadow, no more than a tern’s wing’s worth, cross Flick’s open face, and F
lick blurted out—the thought given tongue before his slow inner censor could do anything more than dampen the tone and erase the question mark at the end, “I suppose this fat thing is pretty good in a seaway.”
That she was. Tom did nothing with the opening Flick had given him to say what he felt, and what he knew, about the qualities of “this fat thing,” Harmony; about how the shrewd Maine fishermen had designed their boats to be sailed out to make a hard living in all four seasons, under huge sails in light airs in summer yet also able in winter—what men!—to come thrashing back in from offshore banks in the teeth of whistling sub-zero nor’westers. So they had thought of stability, of making their craft capable of standing up to all sorts of malice of the elements, yet they had thought of footing along, too, to get to market ahead of the others, for dollars’ sakes. Hard bilges, flaring sides, great flanks and hips—power, probity, and that strength of character in boats known as weatherliness. What a mockery yacht-racing rules had made of sound design! Men’s lives, not their vanities, were designed into the Maine boats. But all Tom said was, “You’ll see, she’s solid as a stone house.”
Later, beyond the rip, out in the Sound abreast of oak-tufted islands, Nonamesset and Vekatimmest and long Naushon, as it became evident even to Flick that the land breeze was dropping out, the puffs having less body and the intervals growing warm and breathless, an inevitable question came about the engine down below. Tom was not surprised; he had guessed that this hard-talking bundle of wires would not be able to stand slatting sails in a dead calm, for he would want to “get some place.”
This time Tom rather relished being free with his answer. Oh, yes, he cared about having a power plant you could depend on. Harmony secreted a two-year-old four-cylinder Gray which took her along at six knots in flat water. Which would start at the touch of a button, guaranteed. Had just changed the coil, the plugs, the points, the condenser. Said he did this three times a summer, needed or no—corrosion by salt moisture in one of those spots was the cause of nine-tenths of the heart failure on yachts. Talking this way, Dr. Meticulous felt the edge of his own smugness. “I hate to use the kicker,” he said, “except when it’s really needed.” He saw Flick chew that; you could easily read the code of this guy in the involuntary labors of his jaw muscles, for he seemed to eat tough thoughts and bad feelings raw.
“There’s no hurry today,” Tom said. “Look how we’re moving on the land, just riding the current.” He sensed that he had worked the issue of the current for all it would give; so he shot one right past Flick to Audrey. “What would you think of ducking into Tarpaulin Cove—or Quicks Hole would be even better—and anchoring for a swim and lunch? It’ll be nice and hot in an hour from now; this is pooping out. Then when the afternoon sou’wester comes in, we can scoot across to Menemsha.”
It was Dottie who reacted first to this idea. “Yes, let’s,” she said, leaning forward as if dizzy with fervency and putting out one hand to steady herself on the binnacle hood. There would be a hand stain on the brass: salt and oil from the flesh. Tom would have to wipe it away that evening, with a rag and some Noxon; a prick of annoyance spurred his surprise at the eagerness of Dot’s response. Audrey came in fast with a seconding; she urged Quicks Hole. Tom, looking aloft to keep the mainsail full as he headed up toward the islands, was suddenly thoughtful about the sun glints he had seen in both girls’ eyes just now. Some sort of kindling had been laid out unbeknownst to him; he didn’t want to be a dumb bunny; he must keep sharp.
The last of the breeze, wavering in direction so that Tom could take good advantage of the shifts as he short-tacked on the favorable current into the gut between Pasque and Nashawena, barely had the weight to cut Harmony out of the swift tidal stream running through the Hole and to take her up to the empty curve of dunes and bright shallow-shelving beach on the southwest side. They were lucky; there were only a couple of power boats anchored in the bight. Tom slipped Harmony closer toward the beach than the power cruisers and swung north away from them and casting off sheets luffed up until she was dead in the glassy water; he called forward to Flick to heave the anchor. Splash! Sails down. There they were. A deserted place under a still, hot sky. After a flurry of furling and tying stops and coiling lines, all four on the yawl stood wherever they were and stared in silence at the empty place: sand, rocks, grass, water, and a huge blue sky for white gulls to write on. But for the horrible stinkpots (those two cruisers simply had to be put out of mind) this was away, away; four human souls in a wild place.
And a wildness seemed to be rooted in three of them. Flicker suggested daiquiris, wanted to know where the rum lived—did they have any limes? Tom said he never drank on Harmony until the evening anchor was down; but go ahead. All three of those others skinned down the companionway to squeeze lemons (no limes) and crack ice and change into swim suits. And soon they were in the cockpit—both girls in bikinis. Audrey had had a Cote d’Azur bikini for two years, which she had never had the nerve to put on, but all things were easy in this liberating sunshine. Flick had slipped three old-fashioned glasses in the ice chest; they were fogged now briefly with cold as the pale drinks gurgled from a silver spout. Audrey produced picnic eggs. White grains flew from a tiny cardboard saltcellar; teeth glistened biting into the yolks. The sunbaked boat lay on a plastic bay. There seemed to be much traffic into the cabin and back out to the sun—more rum, something cheesy to munch on; limbs grazing, bare flanks brushing against each other in passage up and down the companionway, breathless laughter, casual hand play (wiping away a splash of daiquiri, patting on sun oil, caressing home a talking point)—Flick’s palms in joke and the girls’ own fingers in self-loving pleasure flowing over the long stretches of warm skin between the kerchiefs at the loins and the kerchiefs at the breasts. All was indiscriminate. They dived, dried off, drank, ate, licked lips, touched each other as if by accident. Tom was set off to one side by his own prudence, yet he grew slightly drunk on the animal exultation of the others: heat, the salt on the skin, the rum in the veins, the stretch of golden days leading across blue water toward nowhere, nowhere. Dot’s bikini was so trivial that the rippling reflection of lights on the water gave a tremulous glow to the undercurve of her abdomen as she stood outside the lifelines, one hand reaching down to steady herself while she waited to dive, her knees bent and spread apart as if she were overcome with lust, and when a few moments later she climbed up the swimming ladder the skimpy dark blue cloth below had been pulled down by her plunge so that circlets of hair showed and pearls of seawater glistened in the creases between her thighs and the now wetted roundness of her belly. Tom saw a bald man on the nearer power boat shamelessly looking across through a pair of binoculars. Sun oil was getting on the teak of Harmony, but for once Tom did not care. Flick bellowed like a moose; Dot raised her arms, a post-impressionist’s odalisque, and squeezed the water out of her hair. Audrey’s eyes were vague, and Tom thought of a Yeats phrase: “dream-dimmed.” They unshipped the dinghy and they rowed, several hands on each oar, hilariously catching crabs with the blades, to the curve of sand, and they baked themselves till they had to wash off and hurry back, those three, for thirds and fourths from the silver shaker. Tom drifted with their sensuality. Every moment was sun-warmed, invitations and temptations flew out in ease and heat, glands must have been giving freely of their lubricants. What loose laughter!
In the midst of this Tom realized that he had not listened to a single weather report all day.He scrambled down into the cabin as if shot out of a gun and turned on the radio and got the Ronettes singing “Walking in the Rain.” At once there was motion against the sky in the companionway: Flicker luring Audrey into doing some kind of rock-and-roll chugging thing. The big man pretended he had to duck to avoid the boom, though it was a foot above his head. All three laughed loud, himself the loudest, at his jack-in-the-box motions. Tom turned the button in search of another station, and at the cutting off of the music boos and groans came down the steps from the others. It was the
wrong phase of the hour; no news was on. Tom snapped off the set.
Audrey leaned her flushed face into the opening and called down, “Ah, come on, Tommy, that was pretty music.”
“Have a heart,” Tom said. “It’s on dry cells—it’s for weather reports.”
Audrey looked at Tom for a moment as if he were a total stranger and said, “Good God, Dr. Medlar, you have a whole inventory of spare batteries down there under the seat. Haven’t you?”
How could he say that it was the principle of the thing? That that device was what Flicker wanted more of on this “fat thing”—a predictor. She was tight and Tom was cold; he was bound to seem to be in the wrong. Perhaps, besides, he was in the wrong, and he was choked by that thought and climbed above.
The mood of those three shaded off after that, and fifteen minutes later Audrey and Flicker were below, stretched out on the padded settees on opposite sides of the cabin, sound asleep, and Dot, her body all pink in her two bits of cloth, had sprawled into a limb-flung sleep on the canvas cushions on the cockpit seat.
Tom sat near the other man’s nearly nude wife waiting for the wind. The bald gent on the power boat, with his binoculars slung on his neck at the ready, was smoking a huge cigar. Gulls were crying in circles above the lily pond beyond the dunes. Tom felt rueful. He knew that it would have been the very top of folly to drink in mid-passage, especially now that it was clear he would have to sail single-handed over to Menemsha. Drunk skippers wreck boats. But he thought of the skins grazing against one another; he thought of Flicker Hamden’s handsome abandon, and of the undecipherable dreams clinging like pale-colored lenses to Aud’s eyes, and of Dot’s pathetic yet touching eagerness to give, to do, to be whatever was wanted. Tom keenly felt his separateness from the others. Dot stirred and sighed; he stood up. He saw a piece of bread left on top of the cabin trunk, and he began to break it up and to toss bits into the clear water. The gulls, alert at a great distance to this opportunity and suddenly muted by greed, banked and glided down to swoop and snatch at the floating food. One was a bully. Tom, furious at its cutting-out tactics, threw his Coke bottle at it, but it flew safely away with leisurely strokes of its rain-cleaned wings.