by John Hersey
“Whee! There!”
He saw three porpoises leaping. In the sunlight the wet gray backs gleamed like stainless steel. There came two more! A calf! All on Harmony cried out with envious pleasure at the sight of such carefree play; each strong jump built a shining arch of exuberance. Silver games on a clean blue day! There must have been a school of a dozen, and all of them, with bursts of aspiring to a higher element and splash-less falls to the home one, were driving in at a shallow angle toward Harmony’s fish-like hull.
“They’re coming in. They’ll be at the bow,” Tom said. “You’d better get up there to see them.”
The other three ran forward, and soon they were perched at the windward side of the bow, Audrey gripping the jib-stay, the pirate next, and Dottie outside with a hand on the lifeline, all three bent at the waists, Flick with his arms around the two girls; and Tom was alone—at his own suggestion, alas. Often he had seen these friendly creatures playing at the forefoot of Harmony, shimmering blue-gray under the surface, seeming to speed through the water with no effort at all, nuzzling at the breast of the boat, rolling, listening perhaps to the bow waves’ rush or to the wind’s singing poured down to them through the thrumming stays and chain plates and hull, looking upward with little pig eyes, their undershot mouths seeming to smile and smile; and now, as the school came close aboard, some leaping alongside with wet blowing sounds and others taking turns at the bow under the eyes of those three, and as Tom could see the human backs jerking in response to exhilarating glimpses of the sheer fun of those swimmers, and as the three heads turned to shout and share and almost rub cheeks and kiss, Tom felt a flood of melancholy self-pity. He had told his crew to go forward; he wished he had not; he wished he could see the bow-play himself. Was the little calf there, learning a new sport? Could the porpoises, rolling to turn up their eyes, see the human faces looking down? Did they with their good minds think the people were having a gloriously happy time up there on the boat?
Audrey, leaning forward with that florid arm across her back, drew his attention and held it. What was the hint of grief in her straining now at such pleasure? He remembered; seeing her bending over in this way reminded him. One morning at breakfast time, about a month before, he had gone into the kitchen of the apartment and had come on Audrey, bent forward over the counter with almost this very curve of the back, with her forehead down on a wooden cutting board, her hands flat on the Formica on either side of her head, in an attitude of sudden illness or profound worship—an attitude, at a level of myth that seeped into his shocked mind, of preparation for human sacrifice; light blue smoke poured out of the toaster, whose timing mechanism was flawed and which she had apparently been watching. He put a hand gently on her back, feeling the two rounds of the pushed-together shoulderblades. Her face came up, streaked with runnels of tears, and she looked at him as if from beyond an unbridgeable gulf. She turned away and would not speak. He tried to connect her pain with a minor quarrel they had had a couple of nights before, when each had downed an extra martini before dinner and both had, as the evening unfolded, made less and less sense about their lives.
But only now, at Harmony’s wheel, seeing her back bent again, being hugged, did he make the true connection. He saw that small bedroom in their first apartment, with the faded cornflower-patterned wallpaper and the brass bedstead Audrey had found, which he loved to polish, and the fragrant Bouvardia, for which she had such a specific green thumb, in the small sunny window; a Sunday afternoon, a series of unsatisfactory games of backgammon, restlessness, a dark turn away from the benign mood of the second third of her term, off to the flicks to try The Hustler, a worried murmur, taxi home, lying on her back with legs up, brow wet and sheet-white, the gynecologist away for the weekend, the g.p. off for the day and the answering service for his cover vaguer with each call, the unmistakable pulsing of the pain, its rhythm speeding up with the inexorability of a bolero, the look dawning on Audrey’s face that all the euphoric plans, the dollhouse anticipations, the before-handed purchases—the bassinette, the tiny nightgowns soft as chick down, the insanely premature Winnie the Pooh, bought to appease recollections—all those things were looming as folly, as embarrassment. Then from this tone of genteel loss the occasion suddenly went to the outer limits of grimness: the mythic flood loosed on the bedspread, a writhing struggle on the bathroom floor to hold, to keep, or else to bear, and at last the empty, cauterized, never-to-be-the-same look…Tom could not remember much about the second time, which had been much less violent, perhaps because far less a surprise, but all the myriad pictures of the first were arranged and stored in his mind like the frames of a stop-action film…
The show was over. The three up forward straightened up, and looking off to starboard Tom saw the porpoises wheeling away toward shallows again.
As the crew came aft Tom half expected to see tears streaming down Audrey’s face again; not at all, she was in a rapture.
Flick began shouting to Tom. “They want to talk with us! They’re trying to get in touch!”
Dottie’s face was oddly twisted, and as she jumped over the high coaming down onto the cockpit seat and then to the deck, she said with an edge of impatience, “Oh, Flick, let it rest.”
But Flick couldn’t, and he began to rattle on about the Lilly experiments with dolphins in the Virgin Islands, and about the patterns of dolphin speech, which, squeaking, he began to try to sound out, and about their responses to synthetic stimuli, and about the possibility that they might be trained one day to help with fishery as sheep dogs help with flocks—and then he was saying that some day computers might help us find the keys to open talk with all the creatures around us. There was a rapidity and a flatness to Flicker’s utterances now that seemed tuned by some rheostat of obsession—his talent, his joy, his limitation.
Dottie, hearing that mechanical rigidity in his voice, began to kick up her heels—talked loudly about the porpoises’ dear little eyes, cutting into, and breaking off, Flick’s steady hum.
Tom searched Audrey’s face. He could not find the portentous shadows, bending-over shadows, he had fully expected to see. He only saw that she was welded by some kind of solid-state connection to that monotone of inner passion in Flick’s voice. Communication, indeed! Who could ever begin to know what another being was really trying to say?
* * *
—
In the next hour the breeze slowly dropped away. Long before the chop began to flatten out Tom felt the softening of the air on his cheek, and he saw the needle of the Kenyon slip from six through five and four until Harmony was easing through the sea at just better than three knots, and he felt her big genny go weak each time the mast fell away from the wind on the rise of a swell; he knew he would have to start the engine sooner or later.
A subtle change was coming over the sky. The air was still clear; they were out of sight of land, and the horizon was sharp as the edge of a table all the way around. It was far ahead, to the west and south, and very high above the earth, that a huge transparency of vaporous change was becoming visible. A thin gray hood was being pulled up the sky.
Tom doubted whether the others had noticed any of this. He had heard the brass clock strike eight times—the strokes of noon according to ship’s-clock code; and he suggested beer and sandwiches, and the girls went below.
Flick was still going on about understanding wild animals. “Like the mix of voices on the overseas phone—you know how the bits of sound are all scrambled up on the transmitting end and then reconstituted into words by the receiving end? Some day we’ll be able to do that—more than that—with say a cat’s meow: unscramble the tonality and inflection of the meow and reconstitute it into human words that the cat meant. We already have translating devices for human languages.”
“Cats might be a good place to start,” Tom said. “They see right through people.”
Tom observed for a moment the literalness of Flick’s mind causing him
trouble with this line. He would have to reject the idea of cats’ having X-ray eyes before he could understand that Tom had meant that it might not be altogether comfortable to get into conversation with them.
“No,” Flick said, “I was thinking of the vibrations of their voices—so easy to chop up and analyze.”
By the time lunch was over the sails were slatting. Tom knew he should turn on power, but he wanted Flick to demand it. He went below and dead-reckoned Harmony’s noon position and noted the tenuous weather change in his log book, which first fell open again, as if of its own sense of outrage, to its violated endpaper. As he was sitting at the cabin table, hearing the boom sway and the loose cable of the topping lift drum along the big sail, the expected call came from the cockpit.
“Hey, Medlar, fella, whatever you do, don’t shoot that albatross.”
That was all Tom wanted. He went above at once, his expectancy eased, and started the engine. Audrey moved forward to lower the sails, and Flick, suddenly happy, followed her.
Within an hour the sea was flat and shiny and immense, and the afternoon lights were eerie, for Harmony seemed to be moving into a huge open mother-of-pearl-lined shell of weather, one wing sky, one wing sea. A tip of a bluff of Block Island was visible now at the inner hinge of the shell, twenty-five miles away, and so pellucid was the air that Tom thought that with a powerful glass he would have been able to see men on that cliff-tip, perhaps bending and rising in a steady persistence of some kind of stone-lifting work; in his imagination the sight of them was sharp. The afternoon looked silent, but all the evident stillness was held at a distance by the sounds of Harmony’s exhaust, now popping in the open, now steamily muffled, as the gentle glazed swells rhythmically lifted the boat’s little metal anus out of the water awhile, then put it under awhile. The dinghy, under tow from the stern on its taut painter, whispered on its path of foam.
Audrey, peering into the vast distances of the afternoon, saw a mast ahead, a bit to the right, so far away that the hull under the swaying spar was not yet to be seen. She pointed it out to Tom, and he, thinking to please her, and with the landfall already made, changed his course slightly to pass close to the oncoming stranger.
This vessel, approaching near at hand many minutes later, turned out to be a jewel of a cutter with a brightwork hull, its mahogany planks deep red under the glistening varnish. Everyone on both boats waved, and Tom, looking at Audrey as he spoke and holding her eyes, told a story of a hailing at sea—how old Joshua Slocum, at the turn of the century, having taken three years to sail around the world single-handed on his sloop Spray and having floated through raptures and nightmares of seamanship, standing one day under full sail homeward along the north coast of Brazil, met a steam vessel which proved to be the battleship Oregon. She came alongside him, flying signal flags that meant, “Are there any men-of-war about?” Slocum in his tiny craft, not knowing that the Spanish-American war had recently started, knowing little more than that he had done a great thing in sailing around the world alone, hoisted an answering signal: “Let us keep together for mutual protection.”
Let us keep together. Audrey’s eyes turned casually enough to the passing yacht. She asked for the binoculars, and Dottie handed them to her.
“It’s called Vesta,” Audrey said behind the glasses.
Tom went below and took Lloyd’s Register of Yachts from the bookshelf and carried the fat book above and laid it like an offering in Audrey’s lap. She loved to look up passing boats, and she read aloud the description of Vesta, and while Flick sat silent she and Tom and Dottie made up scandalous stories about the owner, who was from Houston, Texas, and had shamelessly rendered his sea-going adventures tax-deductible by registering the boat in the name of his firm.
* * *
—
But: “You didn’t tell me…” It was true that he never uttered a word to her about certain things—some that seemed not worth telling, some that would have burned his tongue to tell, some that he thought, rightly or wrongly, she should be spared out of kindness. Not a word had he ever said about that afternoon in the boatyard.
He had decided to do Harmony’s fitting-out himself that spring—the second year the fat boat was his. Boatyards dislike having owners playing at working on their own boats: dilettantes of labor having “fun” sandpapering, arrogantly mislaying tools, leaving scars of incompletion, making idiotic mistakes that fall back on the yard crews to rectify in a hurry just when the worst rush is on; but Tom, willing to pay for hours safe from a phone that might be connected to a liver, had bribed old Burkett to break his rules. Tom sat in the cockpit awhile, that afternoon, getting in a boat mood. It was a day at the end of April when the soft air bore sun-drenched promises. Harmony was cradled near the top of the launching track not far from a great-headed weeping willow down whose undulating tresses the gold of a new season’s life seemed to trickle and drip as if the sun’s rays were condensing and accumulating on the sap-sticky tendrils. The whole tree was a celebration. Tom, putting off going down into the winter-musty cabin, dreamily watched the tree’s big slow hula dance. But then he thought of the puzzle down in Harmony’s guts, and he made himself go below.
He had seen the strange clue the previous weekend, on his first day of work that spring. He had been cleaning out the bilges and, lifting the forward floorboards out, had come on it: the huge bronze ring-nut at the head of the forward of two great bolts that ran all the way down to the lead keel. The nut stood free of the wood of the keelson by a full eighth of an inch. In winter storage the boat sat on her keel instead of dangling it, and the weight of the hull had driven the flaw up into full view.
Thinking about it during the week he had remembered two happenings from the previous season that he had not previously connected in his mind: in midsummer the jib had sagged and he had taken up firmly on the forestay turnbuckle, and in late summer there had been a pesky seepage into the bilges. Had he pulled her up too hard and somehow hogged her bow?
Now, armed with an enormous wrench and a tiny can of penetrating oil, he went below to tighten the nut. He lifted up the floorboard. He could not see too well, and he climbed above-decks to take the canvas hood off the cabin skylight. Below again, drenched with a shimmering light reflected from the willow, he took a close look. What he saw sent him hurrying to the ice chest to fetch his ice pick.
There was a washer-shaped depression in the wood of the keelson around the throat of the bolt. Tom probed with the ice pick at the edges of this circle, and then his heart really sank. The wood was spongy.
He drenched the little wound with red lead and fitted a steel plate under the nut to distribute the pressure, and he took up hard on the bolt.
Boats, like men, all have flaws. Perhaps it was knowing this that had led Tom to be charitable and to forgive Harmony hers. Since the earliest pushing off from a sea beach of a dugout log, sailors have searched for the perfect craft and never found her. Every vessel seems to have her weak point—an overhang aft that will take a spanking from steep following seas; a prow giving way too generously to cheeks which pound a heading chop; an obscure leak, elusive, dormant in fair weather, always there again whenever the boat begins to work her seams in a seaway. The sea’s seeming denial of the very possibility of perfection is one of its lures. It took Tom a year, until after he saw how the plate he had installed had bitten into the diseased wood, and after he had begun a thorough study of dry rot, to realize that his red-leading and the plate itself had not halted the infection but had in fact sealed it in and undoubtedly made things worse. There was only one thing to do: remove the sick wood from the boat. Take it out and burn it. But how? Every frame and floor beam was tied to the keelson. It was a surgeon’s nightmare—not liver at all, come to think of it, but a non-regenerative vital organ that simply could not be excised either in part or as a whole, a very spine. Nothing to do but trust the thickness of the timber and tighten the nut again and again, a thread at a time
, winter and summer, year after year. Only this summer he had not done it.
Last winter with the help of old Burkett’s disenchanted eye Tom had found out the cause of the rot: In a moment of laziness, or carelessness, or making-do in the old Yankee way to save a few pennies, the boatbuilder had made an unforgivable choice of wood for the keelson. Harmony and her gear were exquisitely assembled, like a masterwork of parquets and inlays, from great woods from the corners of the earth: Honduran mahogany for wheel and coaming trim, seats and decks of teak from Burma, Norway-pine planking, a dinghy of Port Orford cedar, spars of spruce from Nova Scotia, hackmatack knees, white-ash battens, honey-locust cabin bulkhead, cherry-faced drawers against butternut cabinetwork—and timbers and frames of white oak, as hard as the screws that bound them. But when it came to the biggest piece of wood of all, the keelson, running like an inoperable backbone all along the hull, the builder had settled for a timber of cheap wood from roundabout his shipyard—a piece of local red oak. Burkett, on his hands and knees, reaching with the oilstone-narrowed blade of his clasp knife down into the bilges to chip at the big timber, had shaken his grizzled head and said, “Knew bettuh. He knew bettuh.” There just wasn’t any doubt. It was a lousy piece of red oak, Quercus borealis—notorious for checking and cracking and harboring insidious spores.
You could be sure the builder had not told the man for whom he had built the boat. It was a secret place in Harmony. Tom, sitting now at the wheel, staring off into calm air that was pure and limpid as elemental truth, reflected that he had not told his crew, his companions in pleasure and danger, about that secret place. He had never told his wife Audrey about that secret place. Her accusations were absolutely justified. There were things which—assuring himself that “honesty” was too often used in human intercourse as an outlet for vicious cruelty—he was satisfied to keep to himself. But Flicker, damn him, harping on transmission of data, with even his porpoises who wanted to tell us something. What was it they had wanted to say just now at Harmony’s forefoot? What was it? What was it?