Under the Eye of the Storm

by John Hersey

  “What are the girls doing?”

  “They’re looking for my wallet.”

  “ ‘They’ are? Audrey, too?”

  “Aud says she feels tops now that she’s had some breakfast.”

  “And she’s down on her hands and knees looking for your wallet?”

  “I don’t know, they had some plan of dividing up the boat, fore and aft. They’re picking up some other junk, too, that got tossed around.”

  “And you came up for a short rest?”

  “No, Tom, for Chrissakes don’t be such a sourpuss. I came up to tell you some of what I got to thinking during the storm. About how to improve this old thing of yours. You know, I kind of got to love her during the storm, she really was good to us, she’s really some tub; so I began thinking, I should pay her back some of what I owe her, and I began thinking how we could fix her up. You know, Tom, we could automate this old girl from tip to toe. Now, look,” he said, and he moved over and straddled the gear box behind the wheel, “we put the console right here, a slanting top for easy viewing and manipulation—and all you need is buttons, switches and dials. I think after what I had to do yesterday my candidate for Switch Number One would be a bilge pump. Ye Gods, an ordinary submersible pump—well, you’d have to brine-proof it—it’d accomplish in thirty seconds what it takes a thousand strokes of that idiot backbreaker to do. Steering, you’d just have port and starboard buttons, get rid of this incredible antique of a wheel; then you’d have a trim-tab dingus on the rudder, like the ones on a plane’s ailerons, to take out the windward helm when you were on a beat. There’d be power winches—pull up the sails, pull up the God damn anchor, trim the sheets, do any lousy thing it takes muscle to do now. Of course you’d have all the standard navigational and piloting stuff they have in planes, like Omnirange and Distance Measuring and ADF. Of course surface radar. You could tie in your auto-pilot with the radar: in a fog you clamp the auto-pilot on some target the radar picks up, and it zeroes you right in. Then you’d have a fathometer and an accurate speed indicator—boy, that’s a horse-and-buggy job you have now. And oh, one of the best things I thought of is an automatic helmsman, you’d call it maybe the Apparent-Wind-Angle Steering Device. The apparent wind is a vector of the real wind and the speed of the boat; you probably know that.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Tom said. He had stopped pumping; he was aghast.

  Flick charged ahead. “You have a wind-vane that registers the apparent wind, see, and you simply set the angle away from that direction that you want to sail, and you tie in the steering gear with it, and the device takes over. It responds to every slight wind shift—more alert than a man sailing, especially if you’re out all day—or like yesterday, where you know it wasn’t easy.”

  “Yes, I know that, too.”

  “In other words, the device sails us, we don’t need a helmsman…You want frills, you can have any you want. Like a hi-fi system, an eight-track music tape thing with those cartridges, and you sail along with ‘The Eroica’ going or in light airs you’d want Mozart or like yesterday you’d have Götterdämmerung or Night on Bald Mountain, something ghastly. We could have used eight-track for the dancing in the cockpit when we anchored the other day in Quicks Hole.”

  That brought it all back. Tom was beyond rage; he felt the humming of those wires of the aching under the skin. “Listen to me, Flick,” he said. “Number One, my boat Harmony is the last place in this world you’ll invade with all that claptrap of yours. I’m a sailor. I just don’t want any part of that shit. A sailor doesn’t need it; he needs his wits. Going up those waves yesterday, one had to do a quick swing”—why couldn’t he say, “I had to do”?—“up into the combers. It was a very tricky maneuver, each time was different. Only a man—”

  “All right, a man is at the console. You could do it. I mean, it would take practice: you can’t just sit down at any mechanical device—take a piano—and start in cold. Sure, you’d have to have some experience with your buttons, you’d—”

  “And Number Two, when are you going to account for yourself?”

  Flick’s face had that dissolving look that it had had each time Tom had given him an order on the boat. “Account? What do you mean?”

  “I mean Audrey.”

  “Oh, Audrey.” At that Flick stood up and stepped to the companionway, and he called down, “Find it?”

  Audrey’s head appeared in the opening, and she spoke in pain. “We can’t seem to find it anywhere.” Then she held up with her left hand a T-shirt of Flick’s, and she said, “I rinsed the salt out of this. You want to hang it out to dry? Warm today, you’ll need it.”

  * * *

  —

  They were taking the storm away from him. He felt that they were stealing the experience of Esmé right out from under his nose.

  Harmony had reached out of the Great Salt Pond under full sail at a few minutes before noon—as a sort of superstitious rite he had entered in his drying-out log book the time of passing the Coast Guard station once again—and she was now well out on Block Island Sound smoothly plying the meeting-plane of the two conditions of blue, pale and pure firmament above, pure and deep fundament beneath. In all this blue she carried white sails and made a white path. Getting off the rags of the trysail and suiting her up with her three dazzling triangles had been a trial: he had worked and Flick had talked. Flick was feeling more and more magnanimous; he had even begun to give Audrey some credit for the pumping she had done during the storm; it was astonishing to Tom that the lump had even noticed that. As to Tom himself, Flick had not been openly critical but, like Dottie, with that funny pursed mouth of hers, hanging clothes out on the lifelines to dry, he had simply hung out in the sunlight some undecided points, questions of judgment flapping in the gentle morning breeze. Flick’s methods were oblique, crafty, and subtle. Before setting out for New London they had all done a smart job of cleaning Harmony. Audrey, her arm in the sling, worked intermittently; Flick’s praise of her came intermittently, too, and it was so effective in stirring her to new efforts that it soon seemed meant as a goad rather than as a reward. Dottie divided her time between maid-work and nurse-work; she gave Audrey unwavering tenderness. Tom worked muscle-stiff and more and more bewildered.

  What Tom simply could not get his mind around was Flick’s emerging heroism. It was coming out, little by little by little, that Flicker Hamden had somehow brought Harmony and her crew through the storm to the evening haven. The largest element in this emergence, of course, was the pumping Flick had done. How this pumping had happened to start at all was already blurred; the entire second half of the storm was in fact a hideous blur in Tom’s mind. Tom’s foggy memory was that Dottie had pumped, Audrey had pumped even though hurt, then both had screamed and screamed at the then waterproofed lump, sitting on either side of him and howling into both his ears simultaneously, and finally he had moved in his thorough-going daze to the pump and, once fastened to it, had been gradually transformed into a kind of sex-mimicking reciprocal engine. He had done a lot of work, there was no question about that; there may have been a question whether he knew what he was doing. At the time. Now he more than knew.

  But here as they slanted along Flick was eking out a new claim. This seemed to be to the effect—never blurted explicitly but tossed out in deceptive little jigsaw-puzzle pieces—that he had taken the wheel under the eye of the storm and had turned Harmony onto a course that made sense and saved them all, back toward Block Island. One got whiffs of a bad smell: Harmony had somehow been on a wrong bearing, negligently and possibly criminally wrong. Flick had set her right. Homeward bound.

  Tom felt gagged; he wondered if he was going to be seasick. Lumps of protest stuck in his throat. All this structure had been built so airily, so imperceptibly, that he could not begin to strike it down until it was solidly there. He could not begin to say that Flick’s idea, if it had been that and not simply an infantile running
for the womb-harbor or some such idiot behavior, had indeed had a certain danger in it. No, the structure was built on beams of hinting and girders of innuendo, and so unshakable was it becoming that Tom finally lied to himself—told himself that he couldn’t care less.

  “The reason I took over,” Flick finally said, full-cheeked, like a man eating potatoes au gratin hot from the casserole, “was that—Godamighty, this was a shocker, I tell you—I suddenly found myself all alone. I thought for a minute there that you’d all gone off your chumps and done the lemming routine. But I guess you were all below.” Then, as Tom felt his stiff muscles grow even tighter along his weary bones, Flick asked the most obvious question on earth. “What the hell were you doing down there, all of you, anyway?”

  Tom was promptly in a fright such as he could not remember having experienced during the whole of the storm, asking himself with a suddenly running heart: How am I going to say what I was doing below? I don’t want anyone ever to know what I was doing down there. I won’t tell. That’s a secret place down there. I won’t tell. I can’t.

  It was Dottie who took the pressure off—Dottie who answered with innocent eyes like dew-cleaned petals. “We had a time. Didn’t we, Audrey dear? We sure had a time.”

  “Amen,” Audrey said. There was pain advertised on her face by the cut and the bruise, but her eyes were brimming with benign feelings. “I haven’t had the good grace to thank you properly, dear Dottie.”

  “Pooh,” Dottie said. “Don’t thank me.” Her manner was sincere and glossed her disclaimer into: Don’t thank little me.

  Tom thought of what he had seen Dottie doing in that knee-deep water. How grotesque this winsomeness of hers was! Was she acting? Tom wondered: Is that feminine little piece of poontang of a dark avenger just about the shrewdest little actress you’ve ever seen? Look at her hanging her head in modesty! Was Audrey thanking Dottie because Dottie had not been able, for some reason, for some mysterious and irrecoverable reason, to finish whatever she had been doing? Either there was something inexpressibly creepy in this behavior on both sides, or—what had he seen down there in the cabin?

  “So what happened?” Flick asked.

  “There was an accident,” Dottie said. “Right, Aud?”

  “Hey, don’t put me off that way,” Flicker said, working into the tones of a prosecuting attorney. “What were you all doing down there?”

  Tom, torn, had a painful wish to hear what Dottie Hamden would say she had been doing but was himself barren of the first approach to a defense. Waves of curiosity and alarm beat at him from opposite sides as the water had at Harmony’s flanks in the confused cross-forces under the lee of the island the previous morning.

  “Let me tell my part,” Audrey said.

  Dottie asked, “Doesn’t your cheek hurt when you talk?” How cool she was!

  “It’s not that bad. Talking about something will help me to forget it.”

  “I mean, I’d be glad to tell the part I know, what I saw of the whole business.”

  “I’d rather,” Audrey said with some firmness.

  “O.K.,” Dottie said. “You tell the beginning.”

  “Let’s see—where to start? All right, when we got to the eye out there, you looked so miserable, Flick, you were chattering and shivering so, that I shifted over to your side of the cockpit—do you remember this?—and I asked you if you’d let me get the waterproofs for you; there was going to be more storm, I knew that. But you wouldn’t answer. I knew you, you were too proud, the way Tom had made us go ashore to buy you the slickers, you were determined to get triple pneumonia before you’d lift a finger to put them on. But I decided to get them anyhow. You really were going to need them. I hope you’ll forgive me. So, anyway, I went below, and do you know, it was the most incredible sight I’d ever seen? In the first place, the water—up to the tops of the bunks. I thought for sure we were going to sink, and yet I realize now that I went right ahead on the assumption that we’d pull through—someone would pump us out. I was right; you did.”

  She was looking at Flick, who was being transformed, right in front of Tom’s eyes, it seemed, into the dragon-slayer of all time.

  “But the mess and confusion sort of gripped me,” Audrey went on, “so I forgot what I’d gone down to do in the first place. I don’t know, it was as though I could somehow defeat the storm by tidying up the cabin—triumph of housework over the unruliness of the elements. You know: a woman’s broom to clean all the cobwebs out of heaven. That was me. All sorts of gear was floating around in the wash, and when the boat plunged, the water and everything in it would slosh in the spookiest way, and there I was flopping around snatching at playing cards, my fingers and thumbs going wack wack wack like a couple of ducks’ bills snapping at the cards, and latching onto a pair of my best panties that drifted around just below the surface looking like a jellyfish, and I remember there was a pencil that I jammed into the iron stove, and—”

  “And the books,” Tom heard himself bark out.

  “The books, yes. I put them in the breadbox.” Then Audrey, obviously sensing accusation in Tom’s strange cry, added, “My association, you see, was that the breadbox was supposed to be sort of moisture-proof, at least enough to keep the bread fresh; maybe it would help keep the books from being completely ruined—although I must admit they’d been floating around in that knee-deep bilgewater, so I guess I was pretty kooked up.” Then suddenly she stopped and looked piercingly at Tom and said, “What’s the matter? Did I gum up your log book or something?”

  “No, it’s all right,” Tom said, embarrassed by Audrey’s true aim.

  “I must have been down there quite a while; I got a lot done, anyway, most of it pretty crazy. All the time I was stumbling and lurching around, because the boat, you know, was being thrown ear over teakettle by the waves outside, and I’d become really drenched, I’d fallen into the water more than once. Then, it’s funny, if I close my eyes I can see the last picture with the most amazing clarity. I was at the end of the table. I’d just fished up that cylindrical bottle of oregano that you like on things, Tommy”—why, at this moment, the double-dealing diminutive?—“and I had the stupid idea of putting it back on the condiment shelf, even though I’d taken it down from there in the first place and had put it in one of the latched drawers that had unlatched itself, and I began to move toward that corner when I could feel Harmony beginning to buck and I began to rise and fly, it seemed as if, and on the way up I saw Dottie’s face just floating into the hatchway up there, and I arched up over the sink and my face came down on that sharp curved edge of the handle of the sink pump—I can see that chrome bar coming at me, with all sorts of reflections of the interior of the cabin sparkling on it—the sun was out, you remember. And then there was a Fourth of July in my head and I went black. And that’s where you come in, dear Dottie—thank God for you!”

  “You mean,” Tom blurted out, “it was the pump handle that put that gash in your face?”

  “That’s what I assume,” Audrey said. “That’s what I landed on.”

  “This happened before Dottie came down?”

  “I saw it happen,” Dottie said. “From the top of the hatchway.”

  “Let Dottie go ahead,” Flick said.

  Tom’s hands and feet felt frozen, and his guts were heavy. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This is important to me. Audrey, you’re saying your face landed on the handle and you were knocked out cold before Dottie went down there in the cabin with you?”

  “I know I did that swooping act, and I saw Dottie up in the opening, and I saw the chrome and reflections—exactly as I told you—and the flash when I hit, and that’s all I remember till—I don’t know. Later.”

  “Come on, Dottie,” Flick said. “Your part.”

  “O.K.,” Dottie said in good cheer, “I’d just stood up, up here, and that same wave sort of upchucked me to the hatchway, and I looked down just
in time to see Audrey crash into that horrible handle thing. And then she fell backward into the water. I thought she was dead. The blood was simply cascading out of her cheek and she was floating on her back in the water, and the blood was pinkening the water, and if she wasn’t already dead she was going to drown in two shakes of a lamb’s tail—yeee, that expression—my Daddy used that all the time, I used to loathe it—and so I turned around and tried to shout to Tom at the wheel to do something, but I was too terrified, I couldn’t get a sound out of my throat. I hadn’t been terrified this way by the storm, it’s funny, I trusted the men, it just seemed to me that they knew what to do and we’d get home all right, I never did think we were going to sink out there. Anyway, as I say, I couldn’t make a sound, so I had to go down myself, though it scares me out of my wits even to go within a city block of the sight of blood. I made myself somehow. But then I had the most dreadful time. That water heaving so, and Audrey was limp. I kept getting some kind of grip on her and then falling right across her—and at some point there you were, Tom, and I thought: Thank God, one of the men is here, I don’t have to be responsible for poor Audrey any more, he’ll take over. But, criminy, you went bucketing past, and actually I have a bone to pick with you, Tom Medlar. You banged me and threw me down onto Audrey all over again, just when I thought I was getting a good hold. I think she was coming to, and she was trying to help herself and had grabbed at me from underneath, but there I went when you charged through like a fullback, clumsy! So I worked and worked—I could see you doing something on the floor, Tom, up in the front part—and finally I got Audrey up on the seat thing. And you went scooting back above without even looking at us, Tom, much less offering to help. And after a bit Audrey came around better and better, and we got up in the fresh air together. That was it.”

  Flick’s big courtroom eyes came swiveling around to Tom.

  “And you? What were you doing—on the floor up in the front?”