by John Hersey
The hulls were turning, and the wind caught them. The big craft, while still headed mostly upwind, was sailing on its pontoon sides and was drifting across-wind. The skipper accelerated his motor—too late. What was bound to happen, happened. The trimeran gathered speed. Its anchor, only a few feet off the bottom, picked up the anchor lines of three peacefully anchored yachts, aboard which, as it chanced, there were no crews just then. Flicker whooped, half joyous, half furious. Audrey’s head came up to see what had occasioned that bellow. The tangle was beyond belief. The trimeran, buzzing like a hornet, was tugging at the entire raft of vessels.
Tom thought of those crews, having gone ashore from their shipshape boats, decently anchored, probably to enjoy a lobster in peace at the Home Port, coming back later to this mess.
“Cut your motor, you bat brain!” Flicker roared.
But the skipper of the trimeran was too busy shouting garbled phrases at his wife to hear instructions from any quarter. The blue smoke of the laboring motor’s exhaust blew off in sun-touched puffs. The skipper looked around, head held high, as if out on a perfectly normal run in his elegant craft and waiting to drink in the pretty sights; he had become aware that many eyes all around the basin were on him, and he would look nonchalant at any cost. The four vessels nestled together in a hopeless snarl. Tom felt helpless himself, a mere onlooker just as during the noonday picnic. Audrey was reaching out Flick’s new drink. Flick seized it, gulped it half down, jumped to the quarterdeck, pulled in the dinghy painter, crashed down into the cockleshell, and was pulling away with the short oars hell-bent for rescue before Tom could even catch his breath to decide what to call to him.
Something made Tom look at his watch: it was just before six-twenty-five. “Jiminy,” he said, and he rushed below, as though nothing were happening out on the surface of the basin, and he snapped on the radio and tuned it for Providence. A newscaster came on strong, with a horrifying bulletin about a babysitter whose dogs, a Doberman Pinscher and a Weimaraner, had attacked and killed the baby she was taking care of, and at the same time Tom heard Flicker and the skipper of the trimeran shouting rancorously at each other. Flick’s advice sounded poor; the skipper had found a meddlesome target for his rage. The newsman said the crazed dogs had turned in due course on their own mistress. Tom kept listening with two distressed minds, and when a weatherman, replacing the gruesome newscaster, finally spoke about the wavering of Esmé—she was now lazing back toward the Carolinas—the report was all mixed in with cries of “Get the hook down” and “Christ, man, what do you think I’m trying to do?” So that in the end Tom had no more than a layered, ambiguous impression—the storm veering indecisively toward the mainland again, the two fools up there crying their manhood into the wind. Tom turned the set off, but he had no desire to go above. It was going to be a good cruise; that had been decided, that was all set. He sat thinking about Audrey—that look of a cat, poised, waiting.
Then he heard a powerful motor, and several new voices all shouting, and he did climb up the ladder. The Coast Guard was having difficulties over there with Flicker, who was waving his arms like a symphony conductor and sounded very drunk. It took an hour to straighten everything out. By the time the Coast Guard came across the water towing a subdued Flick in the dink, it was nearly dark and the wind had died and tiny gnats were flying.
2
The Swimmers Beneath the Bow
They were barreling into the blue west with a good capful of breeze. What a morning! The dome of winds sparkled like a child’s eye. Gay Head was already far astern, pale against paleness, and Harmony was coming up now on the Texas tower, Buzzards Bay light, which stood up stark and angular out of the swells on its tall, hollow, red steel shanks, a mechanical monster, alien to the sea. Flick thought it beautiful.
From here, from this known point, Tom would set his bearings for the long run in the open ocean.
They passed close to the tower’s hissing feet, where barnacles clung to the steel, and they all looked up at the underside of the dizzying platform, so high, to where a derrick peeped over one edge dangling a swaying cable with an ominous bare steel hook on the end of it. Just then a Coast Guard sailor condemned to duty up there slammed a metal door in its metal frame in the metal housing, and the crash rushed down the metal legs, and it seemed as though the very waters of eternity clanged.
The course Tom set, with that everywhere-sound still ringing in his mind, was two hundred sixty-six degrees, for Block Island, twenty-six miles away across the open sea.
There had been a change in plans. As they had sat at the cabin table, at anchor in Menemsha, looking at, but not eating, the canned peaches and glazed coffee cake that Audrey had set out for the early breakfast Tom had insisted upon, they had all heard together the morning weather report from Providence. For once the forecast had been precise, because the Weather Bureau was now issuing detailed advisories:
At six a.m., Eastern Daylight Saving Time—in the hesitant, semi-literate voice of a meteorological technician, a man used to reading drift meters and pressure gauges but not pages with words on them—the tropical disturbance designated Esmé was centered two hundred and eighty miles south-southwest of Cape Fear, North Carolina. It is presently moving northwest-by-west at approximately five miles per hour. Wind speed now seventy miles per hour, an increase from last evening. This intensification may continue. The erratic path of the storm makes it impossible to predict its future course. Seaside property owners from Cape Hatteras, Virginia, to Cumberland Island, Georgia, are advised to prepare for exceptionally high tides, heavy seas, and damaging winds.
Tom, ballpoint pen poised over his open log book, had talked about this bulletin in the reassuring tones of a calculating fellow. These cyclonic storms, he said, had a tendency to loop around in a clockwise curve and go out to sea, as this one had seemed to be planning to do the day before but seemed not to be doing at this moment. Esmé was a good four hundred and fifty miles away from Martha’s Vineyard, as of that broadcast, he said, and if she did decide to swing up and out, and supposing that she might graze these offshore islands, as these babies had often done in the past, and guessing that her forward motion might be a bit faster than at present, then you could expect that conditions in these parts would become a mite unpleasant after two or three days….
There was silence from the others. Flick’s cheeks were flushed. The girls both seemed to be staring at the red patches on Flick’s face and not listening to Tom at all.
As though sitting in chilly cross drafts, Tom felt two sorts of danger, and neither was the danger of the storm. That absent-minded fixedness of both Audrey’s and Dottie’s eyes! And Flick: Tom imagined that Flick wanted to talk again about storm-tracking; that it was not reality, but rather the beautiful linking up of circuits that might whisper to each other about fragments of reality, a process rather than an essence, something very far from this real boat and that real storm, that interested the man. Doubly frightened, Tom sat and listened to his own tongue running away.
There would eventually be heavy rains around here for a day or two, the tongue was saying, even if Esmé carried straight along her present path and pasted the Carolinas. The tongue therefore suggested that instead of puttering around the Elizabeth Islands and Buzzards Bay for half a week, as they had thought they might do, and then gradually piling up the westing toward home, they should rather take advantage of the fine weather that was likely for the present and hit right out for Long Island Sound. If there had to be a storm, the chances were good that doing this would put them out on its harmless fringes. If there had to be a real snootful, it would be best if Harmony could be snug on her own three-hundred-pound mushroom anchor at home. The tongue suggested either Block Island or Newport for the first night—either one a superb sail on a day like this—then Hamburg Cove the second; then home. They could sit out the rains ashore, if rains came, and then sail around the Sound for the rest of the time. How did that strike
them?
How could it strike them? They had accepted it; Tom himself in his cold sweat had accepted it. And ever since then the girls had been in skittish moods—Dottie talking a lot, laughing often, on the razor’s edge of being wild, and Audrey irritable yet inexplicably glowing.
Flick’s response had been to turn on the full flood of his charm. As they heeled along he kept exclaiming and flinging his arms in praise of the adventure they were having, and somehow these acrobatics seemed to result in his constantly being waited on by both women. Subtly he required their services but not what they served. They brought him sun cream, coffee, Kleenex, binoculars, a pillow, a hat, dark glasses, sourball candies, his camera, a chart, a book of crossword puzzles. He spread all these commodities in a casual display around him, using and consuming nothing, keeping the things, in some mysterious expectation, for “later.” The coffee grew cold, and Audrey threw it overboard, prudently to leeward, and replaced it with hot, which in turn grew cold. The collection of the loot of the girls’ pampering constantly increased.
For the third successive morning Flick had not shaved, and a seedy crop of blond bristles covered his chin and cheeks; he apparently felt that he was roughing it in the hardy way of a seaman, but Tom could not help thinking him lazy and vain in the worst sense—convinced, that is, that women would think sloppiness an irresistible corrective on a man who would otherwise perhaps have been too handsome.
Now Flick stepped below, alone—going to the head, Tom assumed. Apparently it crossed Audrey’s mind that Flick might have repented his stubble and might be intending to shave after all, and she called down after him, “Let me know if you want some hot water—won’t take a minute.”
“No, thanks, doll,” he called up from the cabin. “Don’t anybody come down here for a while.”
Perhaps, Tom thought, Flick was changing into bathing trunks—but why in the main cabin, why not forward?
In Flicker’s absence the cockpit grew silent. Audrey gazed off to the southward, scanning the horizon, it seemed, for a black cloud the size of a man’s hand, a harbinger of Esmé. Dottie took the binoculars out of the case, and without looking through them she began to flex them at the central joint that controlled the distance between the eye pieces, open, closed, open, closed, over and over, until Tom felt like yapping at her for God’s sake to knock it off.
Then noises of a catastrophe suddenly began to come up from below—a garbled roar, falsetto shrieks, a clatter of pots and pans. The girls both sat up straight, and they looked at each other in a reflexive and intimate sharing of a preparation to laugh. And now indeed the racket below was capped by a long run of bass laughter of operatic villainy. One last pathetic falsetto outcry. The bass ho-ho-ha of a desperado once again.
One hairy hand, then another, gripped the sill of the companionway, and slowly up over the edge came Flick’s head wrapped in a bandanna he had made from a Hermes scarf of Dottie’s; there was a black cardboard patch over one eye, tied on with marlin cord. The big nose, reddened with lipstick, perched on the sill in a stealthy pause. The uncovered eye darted here and there.
Rills of pretended fright and laughter poured from the girls. Tom felt a warmth at the center of the puzzling glumness that had settled in him even during this glorious sail, and he smiled.
Up came the rest of the face. Between the teeth, its line transecting the unshaven jowls, was Audrey’s breadknife dripping ketchup.
Both girls shrieked, and Dottie flew across the cockpit, and the two wives hugged each other, giggling and squealing.
Very funny and attractive, Tom thought, already analyzing, tidying; what made it so attractive was Flick’s having gone to such trouble for one moment’s naive gag. But the prank was spoiled for Tom by the globes of tomato sauce falling on the pallid, scrubbed teak, marking circlets of crimson, and he tried without success to be casual as he dived into the lazuret for his sponge to wipe the spillage away.
As he sat back down at the wheel he looked at the girls, both still gasping at the end of the flurries of their laughter, and he thought of their coolness with each other when they had been aboard with him before Flick’s arrival. Then he began to wonder where that black patch had come from.At that moment it occurred to him, as for some reason it never had before, that Harmony had a bad liver. Her flaw was a rotten liver down there in her belly next to her spine. She was a sick boat. Then Tom saw that that small cold core of glumness he had been feeling all morning had to do with his sincere hatred of livers, the hatred that was forever invading his mind, his hatred of every element of the huge, viscous, muddy, reddish-brown gland that took up so much housing in the human gut, hatred of any and all Spigelian lobes, Glisson’s capsules, omental tuberosities, fissures of ducti venosi—detailed and closely focused hatreds which he had begun to suspect were simply encodings for other kinds of deep, deep hatreds lying there against his wishes in the right side of his own abdomen, manufacturing gallons of spiritual gall. To his mind the liver was surely where the worst sins had their bed: anger, pride, envy, and laziness. In this century the other sins, having other seats, had become almost virtues: lust was a sign of vigor and civil liberty; covetousness was the hot key to success; gluttony was excusable because merely compensatory. But those other four, the ones he now thought of as the liverish sins, they were the miseries that caused most misery. He didn’t want them in himself; he wanted to be a decent man. He had used to believe in surgery, but you could not isolate anger and carve it out from all that slippery tissue, pride was not divisible, and envy grew on being cut. Laziness—the biggest trouble-maker of all, the enemy of the word “exact”—was wildly self-regenerative.
He suddenly wanted to go below and be by himself. The girls were still intermittently chuckling. Flick in his pirate get-up seated himself again in his nest of spoilage, and he began giving the girls foxy looks with his uncovered eye. That patch?
“Listen, big bad boy,” Tom said. “Will you take the helm a few minutes?”
Tom stood up, realizing that this was the first time since the Hamdens had come aboard that he had yielded the wheel to anyone else. “The course is two six six. Try to keep right on the button, O.K.?”
Flick stepped to the wheel and, with one hand on a spoke, remaining standing, he bent his knees and shaded his eyes, buccaneer-style, and scanned the horizon and sniffed at the air for a scent of hostility. He started to growl and then as Tom plunged down the companionway he gave out several deep barks and finally began to bay like a moon-broken bloodhound. The girls flew into new giggles.Tom wanted to confide in his log book. He had checked the very minute of Harmony’s passing the Texas tower but had not written it down; and he had other messages of precision to enter: course, wind direction, wind velocity, barometric pressure, tide and current data. And inner measurements? Vectors of mental drift? He dropped onto the settee on the port side and slid in under the cabin table, and for a moment he covered his face with his hands. And he saw vividly against the darkened screen of his eyelids: Audrey. She seemed to be waving him back, pushing air with her hands, warning him against something unseen; there was an urgency about her gestures, yet it seemed to him, without his seeing it at all clearly, that her face was serene, radiant, and sensuous. Tom tore his hands away and opened his eyes, and he turned on the seat, reached up to the bookshelf, lifted out the little maplewood lee-bar, and took down his precious log book.
The book fell open at the front cover, and Tom knew at once why he had wanted to come below.
Into the black, cardboardish end paper of the book ran a ragged gash which, deep into the page, began to circle and scoop, and it ended in a hole about the size of a hen’s egg. Tom searched then for other clues and soon found on the settee beside him, crudely and tactlessly left in the open, a pair of nail scissors, his ball of marlin twine, and numerous scraps and trimmings of the black stuff. He picked up the ball of twine and put it to his nose and drew in the smell of boats, caulking smell, rop
e-locker smell—the smell which, savored in deepest gloom of wintertime, had the power of evoking faraway sunlit wavetops, a canted mast, splashing bow waves, a warm summer breeze on a helmsman’s cheek. But the smell did not help him this time; the breeze was right there, above, and he was on the heeling boat right then.
He flipped the pages of the log book and carefully entered the figures that were in his mind.
Then he went above again and walked the length of the cockpit and said, “Thanks, Flick, I’ll take it.”
“Kee-rist!” Hamden said, harking back to the old joke about the parrot whose cage was covered in daytime by its female owner just long enough for her to couple with a lover. “That was a short night!” Didn’t Tom trust him? He shrugged, winked his one eye at the girls, and gave way to the skipper.
Tom sat down astraddle the wheel box and looked at the compass. Flick, having kept the girls in stitches, had obviously not been paying the slightest attention to the course and had worn off by nearly twenty degrees.
Tom said nothing. Bringing Harmony up to her course he hated himself for saying nothing.
* * *
—
“Oooh, Tommy! Look! Over there!”
Audrey, on the high side of the slanting cockpit, was leaning forward and pointing to leeward with a bare arm flung straight out to its fingertip, and her face was wearing a mask of pure childishness—eyes huge, mouth hanging open, cheeks reddened with circus delight.
Tom, turning his eyes to see whatever she had seen, warmed to her reflex of calling out to him. Had she realized how angry he was? She had called him Tommy, and he knew that she used the diminutive only at the extreme ends of the range of her feelings: when she was full of love and when she was furious. This time the sound had been good, and he was taken aback by the strength of his gratitude.