by John Hersey
A frantic question suddenly beat at his mind. What time had it been—what day had it been—when they had passed that squarish white building on the way out to look for Esmé’s eye?
Tom went below in a great hurry to find the answer in his log book. The item would be dated; the item would be timed. He was coming back to “this world”; he needed to know about time in all its proportions; he wanted to put the hours in order.
Order! The chaos in the cabin must have been the product of some cosmic humor, a practical-joking bent of Esmé’s. The jack of hearts was on one burner of the stove. All the drawers, latched though they had been, were open, as though a prowler had been looking in nervous haste for jewelry. Knives and forks and spoons glinted in the shallows of the bilge; one walked on cutlery. A pair of dark glasses was lodged, lenses out, to view the world, astride the ship’s clock, which had stopped at three minutes past noon, as if in dismay at the effort of pushing into a new twelve hours of that sort. Time! Yes, he must find his log book.
The bookshelf was empty. The tide tables lay outspread on the ice chest, open at a page giving distances in nautical miles. Tom leaned forward, gripped by the pervasive irrelevances of this setting, and learned from the top of the column that it was two hundred fifty-nine nautical miles from Bar Harbor to Halifax. This struck him as nonsense and annoyed him, and he shut the soaked book and threw it toward the bookshelf; it fluttered to the wooden slats of the settee on the port side.
Dottie, leaning in at the opening of the companionway, called down, “Audrey wants to know where you want to anchor.”
“Tell her I want to know where she stowed the books.”
Dottie wore a kindly look of astonishment; it was as if she had been slapped and forgave. At last she turned away and seemed to be talking in a friendly way to the woman she had tried, a few hours before, to—to do what to? Soon her face came back toward Tom showing a bland look that may simply have reflected the total disinterestedness of total exhaustion, and she said, “She wants me to tell you we’re right at the anchorage. She wants to know if you want her to anchor where we were before.” Then, her expression modulating just enough toward puzzlement to indicate that what followed was her own contribution: “Would that be bad luck?”
“God damn it, tell her I want to know where she hid my log book.”
Dottie turned away again, and just then a blush, so hot as to make Tom perspire, burst on his face, for he remembered that he had come down and made entries in the log book in the channel on the way out, and that had been after Audrey had secured things in the cabin. The books had been on the shelf behind their restraining lee-bar; where were they all now?
Dottie’s face again. The same vacant expression. “I think you’d better come up here.”
Tom took one step up the ladder and saw that Audrey had slumped sidewise to the left away from the wheel. Flick had gone to her and was fumblingly hauling at her and turning the wheel without looking where Harmony was headed.
Tom ran up the ladder, jumped into the cockpit, cut the throttle, and pushed Flick aside from the wheel. Let him take care of the women; they’d been nursing him all day.
In the relative quiet of the idling motor Tom heard Audrey murmuring in Flick’s arms, “I’m all right. I just…I’m O.K. now.” But she still lay cradled, and Tom heard her say, “Darling, that black paper for your eye patch, couldn’t you have understood what his log book meant to him?”
“Don’t talk about me as though I were dead,” Tom grimly said.
“We’re all tired,” Dottie said, as if that extenuation of insults and rages made acceptance of “this world” any easier.
Tom put the engine in neutral, let Harmony shoot till she had no more forward life, and went up on the foredeck and let go the anchor, with a clanking plash of metal on pond surface. Then he returned to the cockpit and shut off the engine. Out of the dregs and lees of his former self came the words, “Good old engine.”
Silence. The universe drained of rushing sounds. The rigging quiet; tiny ripples on the water.
Harmony was alone in the port of refuge. Silent along the marina pier were the wrecks of the morning; silent on the shore were the torn and splintered and canted remains of yachts and trawlers and work boats and stink pots and cut-away dinghies and all that could float—treacherous sheds, too.
“If the bottles aren’t all broken,” Tom said to Dottie, “I could use a great big drink.”
“Oooh, yummy,” Dottie said; the soft childishness came out of her as if on tape, unbacked by feeling of tone or expression. She climbed below. Tom heard the ice chest top thump, and a clinking of sound bottles. He pumped while he waited.
Dottie handed up plastic thermal cups, dead to the touch, brimming with Bourbon and ice. Tom reached the first cup to Audrey, saying, “You look as if you could use this.”
She was still leaning against Flick’s chest, but she said to Tom, “Thanks, darling. Cheers to the skipper!” She drank without waiting.
When Dottie came up she said in a flat voice, “Only two eggs broken in the ice box.”
Tom was feeling the burning liquor going down. “Imagine that,” he said.
But eggs didn’t matter. The jack of hearts on the stove didn’t matter. This was all so normal: quiet evening in harbor, serene landscape, drinks in the stately cockpit with its coaming like a starched wing collar from old times of white ties and tails. Normalcy? With Audrey leaning against the big sea-chantey shouter and waver of arms?
After one drink Tom pumped a thousand strokes and got all the rest of the water out of the bilges, and after the second drink they dragged down the damp mattresses and toppled, each in his own way, into the deep zones of greenish midnight at the floor of the troubled sea.
* * *
—
They all rose early the next morning into an azure day across whose pale arch a dry easterly breeze drifted like a rumor of good news. Tom, who had been up once in the night to pump in a half-awake daze, was stiff in every fiber of every muscle; his skin seemed to sheath an inutterably tangled complication of copper wires, like those myriad bundles of sinews on the backs of telephone switchboards. Yes, to give Flick his due, Tom had a moment’s picture, standing by his bunk when he first stood up, of this first layer of himself as an electronic envelope entrapping his inner meat and psyche in a humming, rigid system of aches—and the sum of the aches was drawn around the circumferences of his head. He groped in the medicine cabinet over the toilet washbasin for two aspirin tablets. The cool water that washed them down tasted like Liebfraumilch on his salted tongue.
Audrey could not get up; the bad trouble was in her right shoulder, and her face was ghastly with a half-moon scab blurring into a swollen purple ripeness of a whole cheek in pain. She stared up at the ribbed underside of the cabin trunk as if she had been awake day and night for weeks on end.
Dottie took over with a willful, mothering sweetness, and the object of her brimming love, at first, was Audrey. Dottie had evidently heard the clink of the aspirin in its bottle in Tom’s hand, and she went for it and gave Audrey some; with velvet palms and digits she raised Audrey’s head and held it up while Audrey swallowed the pills and the following water. Murmuring and clucking, with a tenderness unblemished by a single instant of roughness, Dottie bathed the wound on Audrey’s face. At the galley sink she rinsed the salt water out of some soaked gauze she found in a first-aid kit in the head, and she laid out the wet bandage across the gash. Tom, remembering what he thought he had seen in the flooded cabin under the eye of the storm, stood by, paralyzed by puzzlement. He had a thousand “things” on his mind, to list and fix and do, but he stood immobilized and enchanted by Dottie’s display of either irony or total lapse; but, whichever, of pure kindness.
And Audrey kept muttering shockingly unexpected words: “Thank you, dear…You’ve been a darling…How good you are to me!” And once she said, “Does Flick k
now how sweet you are?”
“Sure, sure, sure,” Flick blustered, whether to tease or in outrage it would have been hard to say, “she’s an all-day cherry lollipop.” And at that he climbed above and began to pump with vigor, the rank goat back at his chore of humping.
Tom understood, and even felt for, Flick’s outburst—after the storm a man did not know where he stood. One would have to review how he, and how others, had behaved, and see where everyone came out; and wait and see, too, what others seemed to think. Already Dottie’s and Audrey’s mutual warmth had bloomed to disturb Tom’s view of the way things had been and ought to be.
Dottie went to the icebox, and as she lifted the lid Tom realized the source of much of his unease and weakness: none of them had had a bite to eat since the breakfast Audrey had fixed early the previous morning. Tom was ravenous. He fought an impulse to shove Dottie roughly aside and snatch a raw egg out of the box and puncture it at each end with the ice pick and suck it out raw.
“We need ice,” Dottie said, head down at the lid of the box, as if it were any morning.
And gas, probably, Tom thought—not a prayer of getting it from that marina today. Another lack that made him feel wan and helpless: he could find neither pencil nor paper wet or dry. He wanted to assess, to make a checklist. Hello, Dr. Meticulous, he said to himself, glad to have you back aboard! Sort of glad. The outlines are familiar. But no, no, don’t speak of livers yet! Hold back that glimpse of the operating room; the whiteness, gowns and masks and tight cloth hats, Dr. Simon donning such a hat and, as always, reaching out a hand to his nurse and saying, “My phylacteries and shawl, please”—his everlasting joke about the antiseptic yarmulke of a hat making one go off at a tangent and see the cutting of human flesh as a ritual after all. Enough for now to want to make a list. See: the ice pick is not in its little safety-holder; that should be written down.
Dottie’s head went into the breadbox and she gave out twice cries of revulsion that sounded like the Latin expletive of woe: “Eheu! Eheu!”
Tom leaned forward to see what the matter was. The matter was this: Someone at some time—no doubt Audrey when she had gone down, after the eye had arrived, to get Flick some covering—had salvaged all the books, which must have knocked out their retaining batten early and jumped from their shelf and floated around in the deep cabin water; and had put them in with the bread. And now the breadbox contained a mealy mass of dissolved bread and bent cardboard and disintegrating printed paper. Tom reached in past Dottie’s shoulder and pulled out a dough-smeared shape: his log book.
He was furious, but when he turned to Audrey to say, “Look what you’ve done,” he was deterred by the sight of the gauze bandage just lying there on the wound and of her eyes glittering in steady gaze at the rounded ribs above.
He took the book to the sink and washed off the leatherette cover. The pages were of good rag paper and were firm; he saw that the printed lines had faded and that his entries were still mostly legible. He looked and saw: Passed CG station, 9:52 a.m., on way out. It had been six-twenty-three on the way back in; he could remember details!
He was thinking about taking the book above to turn the pages, air them, drip out moisture, so they would not dry all stuck together, when Flick came piling down the ladder, saying, “My wallet. I’ve lost my wallet.”
Flick charged up into the forward cabin and could be heard banging out a hurried search.
“Dottie,” he bellowed, “where’s my wallet?”
“In a minute, sweetheart,” Dottie singingly answered in full knowledge of her value. “I’m fixing breakfast.” Then, in a quieter voice: “Tommy, be an angel and light the stove. It scares me to death…Oh Gawd, no dry matches.”
“Allow me,” Tom said, suddenly pleased with himself, for he had quickly stooped down and found unbroken a tight-sealed mayonnaise jar full of wooden kitchen matches in the somehow still-shut locker under the stove, along with the polishes and bug bombs and special lubricants.
As Tom began to pump up the air-pressure tank of the stove Flick came, in his crashing, snorting style, out of the forward cabin, saying loudly, “It’s not the cash I mind. It’s the credit cards.”
* * *
—
When the steaming breakfast was spread on the table, Audrey sat up, and the bandage fell from her face. Dottie fetched the cloth arm-sling from the first-aid kit and arranged it so as to hold Audrey’s right arm still.
“Yow, Dotkin,” Flick, not waiting, said with his mouth full, “ ’ose eggs a greatest.”
Audrey forced out a whimpering laugh at herself when she missed her mouth with a forkful of scrambled egg held in her left hand. Dottie said to Flick, “Move, you big lummox. Get out of the way.” And she slid in beside Audrey and began to feed her with a spoon. “Is that coffee too hot, dear? Blow on it, I’ll hold it…Do you want another pillow? Tom, hand over that pillow. I know it’s soggy, can’t be helped…” At one point, interposing a leaf-like hand between her own mouth and Audrey’s eyes, she shaped toward Tom with exaggerated lip movements the silent word, “Doctor,” and pointed behind the shelter of that screening hand at Audrey. They should get Audrey to a doctor. But for God’s sake, Tom thought but did not say, I am a doctor. What if I am a specialist, a hater and cutter of livers? I know what to do for a common sprain…Yet he had not even looked at Audrey’s shoulder. What was the matter with him? Was he too exhausted to have any judgment left? No, he stubbornly told himself, that wasn’t it. Harmony had to come first; for all their safeties, he had to get Harmony to a boatyard and haul her out on dry land. Then a doctor. You weren’t going to find either a boatyard in commission or a doctor who could take X-rays on Block Island on this day; the best bet would be New London; wonder about the currents…
Dottie went on placidly spoon-feeding Audrey. Wasn’t Dottie overdoing her usefulness and serenity? He remembered the rigidity of her shoulders when he had tried to move her from the pump at the height of the storm; and what had she been doing in that knee-deep water in the cabin? Was the reproach of that lurid cheek driving her to this solicitude?
Yet Audrey was so grateful; she ate like a baby, hungrily, her pain-reddened eyes blinking adoringly at the provident hand as it lifted the spoon.
“That was super bailing you did yesterday afternoon, old pumphead,” Dottie said to Flick. The first word of congratulations of the day. To the lump himself.
“Damn good thing I’ve kept up on those isometric exercises of mine, all I can say. Damn good for all of you.” The bounce was coming back; the big jaw was working now on an empty mouth. “Do you realize,” he said, “that some of those waves were higher than the masts?” He went on to offer up further descriptive material; and Tom reflected that Flick was now going to prove himself to have been the big audio-visual recording apparatus of the good ship Harmony. Ah, yes, he’d been right there all day, watching, remembering. Who was to say that he’d seen everything out of focus?
They’re going to rearrange the entire experience, Tom said to himself. I’d better get that log book dried out in a hurry.
But he blurted out to Audrey, as if nothing had happened to her, “Where’s my Eldridge’s?” Then, abashed by his own peremptory tone, he explained that he wanted to figure the currents through the Race and Fisher’s Island Sound. For a horrifying moment he saw himself in Flick’s shoes, shouting at his wife to find his wallet for him: the male assertion of supremacy-through-helplessness.
Audrey said, speaking thickly through the pain of her cheek, “How should I know?”
“That yellow book?” Dottie said. “I saw it somewhere.”
“It was on that bunk of yours,” Tom said to Audrey, holding her responsible, “on the bare slats. Before we brought the mattresses down.”
“It’s on the bookshelf, skipper,” Dottie said. “Where it belongs. I just remembered I put it there.”
And indeed it was. Lying flat so i
t could not be seen from the opposite settee. My God, Tom thought as he reached over the girls’ heads for it, Dottie certainly is feeling sure of herself.
While Tom checked the currents, Flick, full of food, perking up sharply, went on reminiscing about the storm and seemed to be working up enthusiasm for the experience he had had. He talked of things that he had been able to do; it suddenly began to seem that a Hamden wind had blown down from a Hamden sky onto a Hamden seaway. I, I, I…
Reacting to this, Tom felt pouring into himself what had been so notably absent all morning: an access of sympathy for Audrey. “Darling,” he said, testing that word on the day after the storm, “the currents don’t look too good until the afternoon. I think we ought to be able to get to New London by, say, six o’clock. Then we’ll go straight to a hospital and check you over. Best we can do. That O.K.?”
But Audrey may still have been rankling over his pushing her about the Eldridge’s, and she answered, again with a clear show of pain, “What can I say?”
Tom felt rueful and cheated. Where were the ennobling and purifying effects of the hardship they had all suffered together? Only Dottie seemed to have been brushed by them; and what if her gentleness and confidence this morning came not from that source but rather from her knowledge that she was capable of doing what she had done to Audrey under the eye of the storm? Why had no one congratulated him, the skipper, for anything he had done? Was he going to have to descend to Hamden’s level and sell himself to the public?
He went above, sore and confused, and pulled at the pump.
In a few minutes Flick came up and he dropped with a sigh into the seat where he had sat so silent on the way out to the eye. “That sun feels good,” he said.