Under the Eye of the Storm

by John Hersey

  The yawl was heaving under him, and Tom was aware that he was expending great amounts of energy on what amounted to a fool’s labor of political liberalism; nevertheless, he secured every last one of those whips. Then he started carefully aft to take back the helm, his anger assuaged, his fear of the dark, endless world of the storm outside the harbor for some reason diminished.

  He crept past Dottie on his way into the cockpit. She turned up her face and gave him all she could give him, which was a trusting smile. It seemed to him that her endurance would be inexhaustible, and in fact that mere endurance was somehow refreshing to Dottie. She was growing sweeter as the wind grew more harsh. Audrey looked cross; she seemed to be in a fury, yet Tom was aware how quietly responsive she had been, all along, to his seamanship. Maybe she was angry at the opera singer. Flick had made his point; his joy was getting boring, and in truth it was beginning to look trumped up.

  Seated again at the wheel, Tom checked the bearing of the end of the jetty. Harmony was excelling. She was sailing; she was not falling away much from the land, if at all; she was, good ship, not going very fast in the miserable chop, and that meant it would take her a fair amount of time to go down the five or six sheltered miles.

  Which caused Tom to remember that the engine was running, and at a high speed at that. They might need the motor badly later; better try her under her handkerchief alone and see how she would manage. Tom leaned down and switched off the ignition key. For the next few minutes he could feel no difference at all in her painful progress. Glorious little trysail!

  Tom, settling to close care of his helmsmanship, thought how really odd had been that vivid photographic glimpse, a few moments ago, of his father, in the naval uniform of the middle of the nineteenth century, with the looped scourge in his hat, standing by the gratings near the mast in the place where ship’s court was held. In school and college, and actually through medical school, Tom had bridled at his father’s schoolteacherish droning about steadfastness, hope of a better world, loyalty, service to others, honor, kindness—as totally sentimental and obsolete; Tom had laid the foundation for this momentary snapshot of the thin man on the frigate deck by having thought for so long of his father as a nineteenth-century soul, one who rationalized self-service with mouthings of altruism and liberalism. Tom’s father simply had no understanding of how Korea and the bomb tests and the Calcutta famines and the white response to the Montgomery bus boycott and the exposure of Stalinism and (especially for Tom) the shock of his hero Camus dying in an automobile accident as if encapsulated within the full irony of his own writings—the downhillness of everything since the Korean war—how all this had made the generation of sons in this time mistrustful of slogans, sharply sensitive to cant and hypocrisy, suspicious of big and good words…Yet…Yet how that picture had burned itself in his mind just now, as he had fought those spontaneous whips of loose cordage! Father, Father! I didn’t do it! Don’t look at me like that! No! No!

  Tom turned his eyes to the water to evade that piercing stare of the man who wanted his son to be a good boy. There was a queer phenomenon on the waves: Wherever the wind could get at any flattish surface of water it made a new pattern of tiny ripples of fantastic swiftness of phase, so that with tremendous speed small wavelets were being built on the backs of the bigger chop, and chop on waves, and waves on swells as they backlashed around from the open ocean. The generation and regeneration of roughness was—majestic. That word had a way of renewing itself in his mind.

  And gripped by the majesty, looking briefly into the dark bowl of fury to leeward, Tom was suddenly aware of Harmony’s isolation. They four were alone on the sea. No eye was watching. The Coast Guard would not know to come for them; futile entry in the log! They were alone in the storm with their private troubles. Tom thought of fighting his way onto the Lexington Avenue subway in the afternoon rush hour on a summer day. Numberless humanity, rancid and struggling for breath under the slow, dusty, wood-bladed rotary fans. How often, gripping the overhead handles, he had thought: There are too many people—that’s what stirs up the impulse to violence, to riot, to war: mere crowding. Give me air! I’ll kill for a lungful of air!…And here was air coming at a hundred miles an hour, in plentiful supply; of all humanity there was no one else anywhere. Just three other pairs of lungs besides his on the whole sea.

  Those other three were glancing at him from time to time; each in his own style—Audrey irritable yet answering with alacrity his most obliquely suggested commands of abstract skipper to abstract crew, not as his wife but as a nautical hand, reacting even to gestures and motions that he had no idea implied demands or requests for action; Flick more subdued now, his solo tapering off, for he must have realized his inner resources of wildness were never going to rise even to the level of parody of those of Esmé; and Dottie, this Dottie who had worked up a sharp little quarrel earlier on this dangerous morning, seeming now to digest every horror and fright and make her own kind of carbohydrate of it—each looked around at the skipper now and again to read his face, as though it were a barometer of some sort, a dial of the pressure of their fate. Their looks—each with its own accent—were trusting and confident, and he found that he was gaining faith in himself. Harmony was plunging along; he had thought of things, and they had come this far. He reveled in his preparedness. What did they think of his prudence now, his cautiousness that showed in every tiny detail of the regime on Harmony? What did these three free spirits, who had expressed, whether they had consciously intended it or not, such contempt for his prudence that hot, still afternoon at Quicks Hole, think now of his trait of being careful? Their lives depended on it. They adored it. They looked at his face to scan it for readings of just that very thoroughness of mind. How grateful they were for the spoilsport now!

  And just as they checked the dial of his face again and again, he came to realize that he was repeatedly checking the face of his watch, as though he could push the hands forward faster with the rays of his eyes. But those hands were incredibly sluggish. He wanted the worst to be over soon, but, it seemed, the swifter the wind, the slower the minutes. Eight minutes past ten. The eye was promised for one o’clock. He could get through three hours. Then the eye; he wouldn’t even think of what lay beyond the eye. Three hours were nothing. Where had most mornings of his life flown to? Three hours?

  But now he waited as long as he could, felt the tiredness in his shoulders from fighting the monstrous weather helm set up by that tiny sail, waited, alertly watching the oncoming seas to try to avoid combers hitting broadside and cross-chop slamming the bows, and waited and waited, checking gear all over the boat with a roving eye, and waited, giving his boatmates, with whom he was in such deep personal trouble, encouraging looks as the man who thought of details and would watch out for them, and waited as long more as he could, and waited still longer, and finally looked at his wrist again. Three massive minutes had managed to struggle away. It was eleven past ten.

  He could not let himself think any more about space and time; with a tremendous effort of mind he tuned himself in on Harmony. Details. Saving details of his yawl. If he could concentrate all his energies on keeping his boat intact—forget human lives, which were in shambles anyway, and think only and always of Harmony—perhaps he could get through the immeasurably empty and ominous storm-area and the gaping eternity this side of the eye. Would the main sheet blocks tear their straps out of the boom? Would the splice of the halyard, wire to rope, hold out? Would the rudder gear take the strain? But br-r-r-r. No! This was no way! To catalogue the details that might go wrong, and about which he would be able to do absolutely nothing? No, no. For details to have the capacity to rescue one from fear, they must be manageable. He could steer, that was about all. Be alert, steer. So what could he do but count on Harmony? He did, he did! Look at her rise to that attack of water! Listen to that rapid firing of the tough cloth—and feel her tremor under it! Harmony! Beautiful old tub!

  Sick boat. She
was diseased. Remembrance of the flaw hit Tom and intermittently struck him again and again, just as the rope end had kept at him, distracting him as he tried to keep his mind on his helmsmanship. Why had he not hauled Harmony out this summer to take up on the big keel bolt? He went back and back to try to trace what had kept him from doing as he had done every year since his discovery of the soft-fibered place in that lazily chosen timber; the answer dodged away from him. He thought he might have been able to trace the source of a decision affirmatively taken, but this was just a not-doing, a putting-off, an accumulation of days when he simply forgot, or omitted, or inwardly refused, to do what should have been done. How could you get at the root of procrastination? He tried to remember whether there had been occasions—in the city, at the office, speculating over a patient’s dysfunctional liver; in a taxi, stuck in traffic, enjoying escapist musings about the free play of movement on the sea—when he had suddenly remembered the flaw and said to himself, “I’ve got to haul her out; I really must; it’s overdue; I’ll have it done next week.” But search as he would, he could find no trace this summer of such determination. At the same time he had kept Harmony wonderfully spruce in other ways. He had had refinements and improvements much on his mind. He had rigged new shock cord for quick-furling of the mainsail, he had installed snatch blocks for easier cleating of the sheets, he had varnished and polished and always carried scraps of boat lists in the pockets of his business suits.

  Audrey turned her head and looked at him—Audrey, in whom he had not confided about that small fault of spongy wood: after all, it was a trifling matter. Harmony was thirty-two feet long, and this place in her guts could not have been more than four inches from edge to edge; perhaps less. Exceedingly small in the whole picture. If he had plagued her about every detail of Harmony’s existence, she would have screamed with boredom. Sailing was his obsession; she had been willing to indulge it—up to a point. The flaw had somehow always seemed, until yesterday and today, something he should not bother her with.

  But now, as she faced around and drank at his expression, he had an overpowering wish to tell her about it at last, before it might be worse than a shame not to have told her, and he actually shouted into the screaming gale, “Harmony has a bad place down around the forward keel bolt. It’s dry rot! I said DRY ROT! I never told you. I’m sorry, darling. Audrey, darling. I’m sorry. Keel bolt! Dry rot!” He knew, in the very act of getting this off his chest at last, that she could not hear a blessed word.

  Audrey let go the coaming for a moment and made a gesture, palms of the hands turned up to the sky, shoulders lifted, clearly meaning, “I haven’t a clue what you’re saying. What do you want of me now?”

  Tom beckoned. Helm. Take the helm.

  Tom wanted to make an inquiry of Harmony by pumping. What was the working of the seams by these vicious seas doing to her? What was this pounding doing to that place?

  Dottie was sitting over the pump. Her big eyes were watching everything; she had seen Tom mouthing his confession into the wind, she had seen the beckoning motion, she had seen Audrey relieve Tom. Tom wondered briefly whether Dottie could lip read, whether she was more acute than Audrey in certain areas of intuition. But now when he moved toward her she looked stricken, as if she had inadvertently done something wrong to the depths of wrongness, and she in her turn let go of the coaming and put up her hands in a pathetic gesture of trying to stop his probably punitive approach toward her. He could not stand in the wind on the lurching cockpit deck; he thumped down heavily beside her and began to make motions to her to move—please move aft—want to pump—you move—change places. But it appeared that Dottie was used to that seat; it must have become her safe place. She turned her back on Tom and grasped the coaming again. Tom put his hands on her shoulders, and he felt through the waterproofs the rigidness of Dottie’s arms. She would not budge. Then he thought to unsnap her safety belt and refasten it abaft the lifeline stanchion—just as Audrey did with her own each time she moved back to the wheel. Then he rose and, keeping one hand on the coaming behind her back, placed the other in front of her, also on the coaming, and he leaned over her that way, seeming to keep her safe in his arms, and jerking his head toward the after part of the seat when she looked up wide-eyed at him, and signalling with his eyes that he wanted her to move, and pressing her with his left arm, he felt her give a little, and he smiled to encourage her, though he felt that the wind was constantly molding and reshaping his face into clownish grimaces, but apparently the smile did show, and gradually she slid aft, little by little, moving her tight-clutching hands one by one and inch by inch along the coaming. How shallow her sweet looks and trusting smiles, which had seemed so sincere, must have been! Finally she was settled out of the way.

  He went at the lid of the seat and scrabbled for the pump handle like a man dying for a drink and lunging at the pump of a suddenly discovered sweetwater well. Oh, how he thirsted to know! He barked a knuckle and saw blood but felt nothing. Pumping was not easy; Harmony lurched when he wanted her to buck into a downstroke, and she threw him sidewise when he tried to draw the piston straight up. But soon the pump primed itself and he felt the weight of suction in the pulls. He began to count. A marvelous serenity came over him…nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-twoߪArithmetic must surely have been man’s earliest tranquilizer…twenty-eight, twenty-nine—what? air in the cylinder?—thirty, thirty-one…Yes! That was all! Nothing but foam! So little water in the bilges!

  Tom let the seat cover slam down and he turned and threw his arms around Dottie. Her stiffness slackened at once, and she eased into his embrace. But he was not hugging her! He was hugging Harmony! He loved his yawl just then more, he thought, than he had loved anything or anyone in his whole life. How brave and sturdy she was! And how loyal to him! She would cover up his negligence. No one—not Audrey even though he had roared it at her at the height of the storm—would ever know.

  But the memory of his confession made him think, in the moment of turning toward the wheel with a heart leaping with relief and joy, and in the act of patting Audrey on the shoulder to say he would take her place—made him think of her unfaithfulness, of his predicament within and beyond the storm; and that same heart of his suddenly felt like a bag of damp sand lodged in his chest. This letdown heralded the return of anger. Flick sat there looking drunk. His lips were bluish now, and for some reason he appeared smaller than usual, as if all his gestures and bellowing had deflated him, and his bigness had merely been gusto. Tom had a moment’s thought, which he recognized at once as irrational—but somehow this unceasing shrieking wind made irrationality more accessible and admissible than usual—that this man who refused to wear waterproofs or life preserver was in league with the hurricane. He had been shouting something to Esmé all morning. What had it been?

  Dottie was leaning over the coaming to leeward. She was throwing up.

  It was getting rougher all the time—there was no doubt of that—perhaps because Harmony was moving down the coast and more and more slop was curving round Southwest Point, or perhaps because the first seas of the shifted winds beyond the eye, outrunning the storm as waves could do, were coming in from the south off the open ocean, or perhaps because there was a great rip of tidal currents here, or perhaps all three. Harmony was acting like a wild Brahma bull just out of the rodeo chutes. Was she trying to throw Flick off her back? A moment would come when she would rush up a wave front and simply keep going, until half her bare flanks were raised up into the sky. Could the wind pick her up by the belly and flip her over on her back? No! Eight tons? Eight tons of Yankee workmanship, all of it sound as a silver dollar—save for that one lousy piece of pinchpenny lumber? Even this wind couldn’t make Harmony fly. But when she shot up like that, naked in mid-air to the hips, and hung for a moment on the lip of a wave, it really did seem as if she might become wholly disconnected with the affairs of this earth. But then she came back down—and with what a thump! And out from the cheeks
went two curving planes of smooth green shot silk, which disintegrated forthwith into a million driven drops of brine.

  The inimical waves were coming at her from every direction. To think of the seas as confused might no longer be accurate; there seemed a plan, a deliberate malice, in the unpatterned turbulence of this water. Esmé the bitch knew what she was doing. The moment Harmony leaned to that little trysail’s work, a counterwave, driving with macabre ferocity against a ninety-knot wind, would heave up under her leeward chines and tip her right into the teeth of the hurricane, so that the trysail would go dead, rattle, shiver the boat along her whole length, and then, on another rise from another quarter, the sail would pop full of air and begin to draw again, and then still another contrary surge would knock Harmony flat to leeward till Dottie’s vomit would be flushed clean off the deck outside the coaming.

  Poor seasick Dottie! Tom realized that he had not guided her back to her safe place; that had been thoughtless of him. Was she going to be totally helpless from now on?

  Tend your wheel. Mind your sailing. Don’t think about these people. You’re alone in the world, and you had better accommodate yourself to loneliness. No better time than during this endless aeon before the eye comes.