Under the Eye of the Storm

by John Hersey

  This time the shock of emerging into the gale, though expected, was almost worse than the first time, perhaps precisely because experience did not seem to ease it. The shock in Tom’s mind was at the possibility that a dead and usually bland and even sweet thing, air, might be capable of a schemed, not simply random, malevolence, as it hit, tested, tried to upset, probed for a man’s weakness, and hinted with its howling voice at deliberately evil intentions. Tom, gulping for breath and bringing every canny ability he had into play to steady himself, remembered the word “majestic” he had used in speaking to Flick of the concept of smooth sailing; the dark side of majesty would be tyranny. Dictator wind: the only aim of despotic power was to satisfy insatiably sick drives. Kill! Kill! Find scapegoats! Punish the innocent till they seem guilty! These thoughts rushed through Tom’s mind as he clung once again, to gather his resources, to the upright pipe of the boom gallows; then his reserves slipped a sickening notch as he thought (with a curse on the common fund of “modern” psychiatric understanding in which he, like everyone else, crudely shared) that he might be projecting something of himself onto the surely inhuman wind.

  The sail. He had come up to take care of a detail. Holding on tight with every move, he made it to the lazuret and reached down inside and put his hand on one of the spare lines—a spinnaker guy. Realizing that the wind, whether or not it meant to be evil, would make an irretrievable snarl of the line if he tried to carry it forward coiled, he unstopped the hitch around the loops and grasped the bronze fitting at one end and drew the rope out free. It flew out at once astern like a long gay streamer. He fought his and its way forward to the mainsail in its slings, and literally lying across the bag of synthetic cloth he applied this additional lashing, webbing it back and forth around the handrails on either side of the trunk, and took it all up as tight as he could. This left him hot and weak, and it showed him what it was like to do even a small jag of work out in a whole gale—or perhaps it was a hurricane now.

  He lay resting on the trapped sail, and he looked out over the harbor. Worse confusion than ever. The boats that remained were sheering wildly back and forth; two stinkpots were entangled, one of fiberglas beating to splinters the broken beam-ends of an old wooden sister. While Tom watched, the anchor of a small cutter tripped right out and the vessel went down the Pond broadside to the wind, nearly capsizing altogether. No one seemed to be aboard. Tom watched until the boat, almost lost in the rain, seemed to have struck a rock along the shore beyond the marina. All sorts of debris was floating in the water: timbers, floats, flotsam, planks; and there went a motorboat awash! Tom did not want to look to windward to see what might be bearing down on Harmony.

  Harmony! A thought of her flaw struck Tom like a poke in the ribs. He scrambled with recovered energies back to the cockpit, raised the starboard seat lid, and began to pump. As he rocked up and down, he was taken with a vision of himself in safety—but what a strange picture! He was at the table in the dining alcove in the apartment at home, and papers were spread out across the tabletop, and he was chewing a pencil—making out his income tax return. He was in the act of cheating the United States government of thirty dollars here, eight dollars there, forty-five on another item. Only he didn’t think of it as cheating, really, for these were merely those small everyday short cuts and white lies and “clean” peculations that everyone indulged in, consciously or unconsciously, as a matter of course; indeed, began to think of as part of one’s natural rights; took advantage of for fear of thinking oneself a damned fool otherwise. They were one’s private levies against government policies with which one disagreed. Tom, swaying over the bilge pump yet holding on to the coaming for dear life as he watched the sportsmen’s toys on the Great Pond being ripped from their moorings, began to laugh out loud at his glimpse of safety—the long columns of figures, the tiny and easy and respectable untruths! The wind tore the laughter from his lips and flew off with it along with all its other captive wreckage.

  The pump ran dry quite soon; the push of the storm seemed not to have told on Harmony’s sore place. He dropped the seat cover.

  Now he wanted to see whether the engine would start. Not that they were going anywhere—but just in case the time might come when he needed to take some strain off the anchor line. Not wishing to alarm the crew he pushed the hatch six inches open—good Lord, they were playing cards on the cabin table—and he shouted, perhaps far too loud, for what with the rain crashing on the hood over his ears he could hear only the storm, “Going to crank up the motor. Don’t panic. Just testing.” And he pulled the cover shut, not waiting to read their upturned looks.

  Sliding to the rear of the cockpit, he checked to be sure the gears were in neutral, and he cracked the throttle and advanced the spark, and he turned the ignition key—and then, as though not really caring to know the answer, he paused. An inflated, much-patched inner tube floated past: some summer-visiting youngster’s water plaything, crazily turned loose now. There was so much storm noise; would he be able to hear the engine? He pressed the button. He did hear the clang of the starter. But the rain tattooed his hood and he heard nothing else. He advanced the throttle and, bending down, looked at the panel of instruments on the lazuret bulkhead: Good old engine! He could see the tachometer needle, a wavery line of white through a wash of rain, standing at the angle for eleven hundred revolutions per minute. He turned off the key at once and felt pleased.

  But the satisfaction was brief; he was restless. He thought perhaps he’d better go below again; he could only take so much of this breath-snatcher of a wind. He climbed over and down.

  With his back to the three and the hatch closed he stripped off and hung up again his streaming slickers, and this time he pulled off his boots. He was bent over fussing at his drippings with the deck sponge when Audrey said, “You really are hell bent on going some place, aren’t you?”

  “Just in case, just in case,” he said toward the floorboards.

  He stood and faced his boatmates. Flick had the girls playing blackjack. They had emptied a box of wooden matches and were using them for chips; Tom had a quick thought, which he recognized as pretty mad in the context of a hurricane, that you could set fire to a boat playing with kitchen matches that way. Flick was dealing. He faced an ace on his own hole card and bet it up and up. The girls stayed. He turned his hidden card—a lousy three! The girls laughed at his bluffing with rippling delight that overrode the wailing above. Dottie won. Her face was suffused with a pink glow of pleasure.

  They had shut him away again, their three. Tom tried to tell himself that they didn’t understand as much as he did about the storm, and that therefore they sheered, like these boats at anchor, between unknowing fear at one extremity of the swing and equally blind overconfidence at the other. They thought him finicky. He was the one who hadn’t taken a drink at Quicks Hole. For each of his precautions they had to make some gesture—Flick egged on the girls in this—of indifference.

  But how, above all, could Dottie sit there blushing with the fun she was having? How could she look so radiant? She must have some need for defeat, Tom thought, remembering the hand-holding of that pair coming out of the forward cabin. All this must have happened to her, to them, before; perhaps often. Watch out, Audrey! They’re using you for their game!

  But Audrey was saying, “Sit down and take a hand, Tomaso.”

  “I want to see if I can get some weather,” Tom said, and he slid in by the radio.

  At this moment the storm furnished its strongest gust of the morning. The boat was on the port tack, so to speak, and the grappling hooks of this sharp flurry pulled at the masts, and Harmony heeled farther than ever, and shuddered, too.

  “Watch your matches,” Flick warned, and he put a hand over the dealer’s pile and reached his other hand out, fingers outspread, to cover Audrey’s stack, but she had moved quickly with both her hands, and when his came down it folded over both of hers. It stayed there, conveying wha
tever needed to be conveyed, until the fat boat had righted herself and the shriek of that particular blast had fallen to a moan. Then his hand came away as from a hot stove.

  Tom, fiddling with the turning knob of the radio without having turned the set on, in order to pretend he had not seen the handplay, wondered how all of them could sit there in such peril and not come out with some big truths that they would have to face sooner or later; but the thought of truths reminded him of his vision of safety a few minutes earlier, and of his packet of untruths over Form 1040. He barked out a short, involuntary laugh.

  Dottie asked, with her head tipped to one side, really wanting to share in any jokes that were going, “What was that about?”

  “About verities.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Tom,” Audrey said. “Cool it.”

  “No,” Tom said, suddenly wanting to justify himself, and covering up by taking a new direction, “I’d just said I wanted to see if I could get some weather, and then we got that sample of it.”

  “Har-de-har,” Flick said, and Tom noticed, perhaps for the first time, that Flick’s two front teeth were awfully big, almost as prominent as the Mad Hatter’s. Cuckold’s contempt, he told himself, the old Calvinist juices flowing strong.

  It was time to cool it, and he almost pounced on the radio, and this time he kept sweeping the bands until he found a good loud Long Island station which seemed to be interested in little besides the storm—a man kept repeating warnings to shore dwellers to evacuate their homes, and he announced the locations of emergency shelters in various public schools and firehouses, and in due course, on the hour of nine, he paraphrased the latest Weather Bureau advisory. He was no meteorological technician; he sounded as if he had theatrical ambitions. Esmé’s skirts now whirled in winds of seventy to eighty miles an hour. It was now expected that the eye would be off Montauk—less than thirty miles away, Tom immediately calculated—at about one o’clock that afternoon, and if the rate of advance remained constant the whole show should be over by six or seven in the evening. The winds could be expected to shift more and more toward the south and then west, and it was expected that skies would be clear before sundown. Then the announcer began to give free play to warnings about what such winds could do, and he recalled many lurid details from the blows of 1924, 1938, 1944, 1954; from storms named Carol, Diane, Hazel. He was beginning to sound a bit like Batman, and Tom was in the act of reaching out to throttle him with a turn of his thumb and forefinger when they were all startled—Tom so much that he stood up, ready to grab his waterproofs—by a loud crashing sound. It took some moments for him to realize that the clatter had been on the radio. Now the announcer’s voice came back part way, and it had lost all its lisp and orotundity; it was far away and small-boyish. “My God! The tower. The tower’s going. Am I still on? Are we on, Larry? It’s buckled, the big tower, the guy wires must be holding it from falling. It’s aimed right for…Am I on? Larry? Supposed to go ahead?…A technical problem has just risen at the studio shack of—” And that, with a little crackle, was the end. Silence.

  They had all heard clearly enough. They sat speechless for some time. Then Audrey, perhaps angry that Tom had now indeed let the storm into the cabin, said rather petulantly, “You kept telling us it was stalled. ‘Hung up off the Carolinas,’ that’s what you kept saying.”

  “Darling,” Tom said, “that’s what they kept saying. Don’t hold me responsible”—he couldn’t resist the chance—“for the Weather Bureau’s think-boxes not knowing what was going to happen next.”

  In this moment of defending himself, Tom felt his first deep stab of fear. It was connected with his not-quite-rational uneasiness of a few minutes earlier about the possibility of a deliberately malicious intent in the searching wind. What if the whole storm had a mind? What if it was a willful living organism that refused to be predicted, much less controlled, by arrogant puny human beings—Flickers with their mechanical extensions of their tiny arms and brains? Tom felt like an ant hearing thuds, through the ground, of approaching footsteps; the mouth of the anthill was darkened by the shadow of a huge shoe. He’d seen some orchard trees being sprayed once. What about the inchworm, or whatever it was, in the apple tree—what did he think of the wet fog of poison that came from nowhere and enveloped the whole banquet-tree and choked him and his brothers to death? Mindless chance—a kind of storm of death? This fear hadn’t to do with any big phony idea of a divine plan. This was the thought—which he knew in the moment of thinking was unscientific and probably worse than that, but the knowledge did not shut off the thought—that Esmé might be alive, intelligent, and bitch-mean. And looking for, among many other objects, the yawl Harmony, with its cargo of human beings who had made a mess of their lives.

  Flick’s way of meeting an explosive situation seemed to be to ignore it. He asked Tom, quite pleasantly, “Shall I deal you in?”

  “Sure, I’ll take a hand.”

  “Wait a minute, Flick,” Dottie said in a most cheerful voice, “we’ll have to give him some matches.”

  Matches were money. They were going to give him some money, with which he, too, could play their game. He wondered why he kept his mouth shut. Audrey! Audrey! Watch out! This involves us both!

  As the matches were counted out and the first deal of hole cards came around Tom had another glimpse of a scene of safety. His office. A woman, Josephine Lawlor, a boozer, who had been in two or three times before. She felt twinges. Down there on the right side. He knew she would not believe that she had had her money’s worth unless he gave her what she called a “complete physical,” so he sent her into the examining room, and there, in time, he came to her; she was in a split starched white examining gown, and Miss Spellacy, also starched and very white, both in cloth and skin, was standing by for propriety’s sake. Blood pressure—low enough for a fine longevity of endless hypochondria. A close lamplit look into sticky yellow eyes. A laying on of hands, a kneading of flaccid meat. Rubber gloves; apertures. “We’ll shoot a couple of pictures, Mrs. Lawlor. Miss Spellacy will take care of you.” And a murmur to Miss Spellacy: Get blood and urine. And when Mrs. Lawlor came back, dressed, she quite obviously felt much better already. He wrote out a prescription, “temporary—till the tests are in,” and called her drugstore after she left to tell the pharmacist to give her placebos. And he made a notation for Miss Spellacy’s later attention: Mrs. Lawlor, O.V., $25….

  A smile—not pleased, not bitter, but tentative, puzzled—on his lips, he bet twenty-five matches on his first hand and lost.

  And so they played cards, eroding the cliff-like minutes with little waves of non-committal activity. Few words were needed for their transactions. After a number of hands Dottie won the deal, and her love of the dealer’s power, so odd for one so accommodating, made her seem greedy and a tiny bit fierce. But it was all for fun—just matches. The wind pummeled Harmony and made the shrouds cry. At last the game grew dull, and Audrey, who by then was dealer, simply stopped passing out the cards, and she picked up the big matchbox and began stuffing the matches into it any old way, but the box soon filled, and she had to take them all out again and align them to fit them in. Flick kept bringing up one topic after another, cheerfully enough, but the conversation, like the storm, was gusty, intermittent. Occasionally Tom stood up and checked the pier and the gable. Often he looked at the clock. For a time the rain seemed to be letting up, but the wind squalls were bad. Audrey served Cokes.

  Crump.

  Something hard and heavy dealt Harmony a blow, with a sound of cracking wood, on her right flank, forward. Tom was on his feet in an instant. His first thought was that a boat had tripped out and run down on her, though he did not remember having seen any craft to windward—and for more than an hour the wind had not shifted. That horrible cracking sound: had a rib gone, or some planking? It was ten twenty-three; he must put that in the log book with its endpaper ruined.

  Crump—it hit again. Tom
pressed his cheek against the porthole on the starboard side, but all he could see was deck and rain and waves. He plunged into his waterproofs and boots and climbed above.

  The shock of the wind was undiminished; perhaps it was worse than ever, this time, because now there was a hazard that had not been there before. He held to the gallows pipe, gulping for breath.

  Then he moved to the right and went over the coaming onto the starboard deck, and he saw at once that there was an enormous dark shape—a capsized hull?—lodged against the bows. He hauled himself rapidly forward by the handrail and bulwarks. He looked over the bow and saw a roof.

  A cabin—a shed—a small boathouse. It was skewed to the right, three quarters under water. It was snarled on the anchor line, had pulled the Nylon rope straight down from the chock, and was caught somehow.

  Crump. Even here in the outer noise he heard that blow, or felt it all through his frame. Those assaults were too serious; they would demolish Harmony. He crept aft and undid the light lashings that held the boathook and mop. In this wind every act took far more time than usual; the cords of the lashings were wet and had seized up, and he had to brace one foot against a lifeline stanchion and wrap the crook of one arm around a ventilator funnel to keep himself from being blown away, and he had to tie the mop back down once he had loosed the boathook, meanwhile wedging the boathook under a thigh so it would not take off.

  At last he was able to creep forward again, this time to the very pulpit of the bow, and he reached down along the anchor line to see if he could free it from this nightmarishly misplaced structure, whatever it might be. Holding the hook straight downwards off the bow took all the strength of both his arms. How swift was the wind that was trying to snatch it away from him—eighty miles an hour?—a hundred miles an hour?