by John Hersey
* * *
—
Tom’s sense of confusion had grown so strong that he had to escape from that question, had to play for time to sift and settle. A horror of being found out had come over him; there was a piece of evidence as to the answer to Flick’s question—what had he been doing down there?—that he must dispose of: the great Stillson wrench jammed against the floor beam with its jaws on the nut of the keel bolt over the yawl’s flaw. He made his voice as steady as he could: “Do you feel up to steering awhile, darling?”
Audrey’s eyes came around to his in some surprise; she had clearly been wanting to hear the answer to Flick’s question.
“Something I forgot to do below,” Tom hurried on to say. “Won’t take a minute.”
“Hey! I asked you a question,” Flicker said.
Audrey moved to the wheel.
“You really O.K.?” Tom asked her, shortcutting away from Flick’s insistence.
“Like I said,” she indifferently answered, “it’s a relief to have something on my mind.”
“Steer as we go.”
“As we go,” Audrey said, checking the compass.
Tom fled below. When he lifted out the floorboards over the head of the keel bolt, he kept his back between the hatch opening and that which he did not want seen. In spite of the earlier pumpings the water in the bilge reached nearly to the floorboards again. The wrench, still firmly lodged, seemed already to be covered with a thin film of rust. Tom knelt and looked down—and inward.
His confusion, to begin with, was rooted in anger and vanity. It was he who had brought them all through the storm—his forethought, his comprehension of details that mattered, his helmsmanship, his bodily endurance, his finding a way to cleave the breakers, his thinking out of suitable courses, his being a sailor, his judgment and fortitude and manliness and—yet here in the pit of the bilge was evidence of his having lost his head all the way. He would hide the evidence and salvage his captaincy. He would have to steel himself to hold Flick off. Some people aggrandize on others, using and distorting every experience to their advantage—go in losers and come out winners every time. It is a habit of moral cheating that by subtle turns of phrase in reminiscence, and even by mere archings and hintings of tone, readjusts the shares of honor. Tom wondered, since Flick had carried the process so astoundingly far in this case, whether it was his own nature to submit to such brigandage of good name. Did he, Tom, invite it—this touching up by someone else, this subtle, patient, continual dabbing at the colors and outlines which changed, in the end, not simply the spirit of the picture but its very substance?
Yet who was right and who was wrong? Had Flick really been a lump, or had Tom’s own eyes seen an image that had been far from the true one? It now came out that Dottie, far from having tried to kill Audrey, had been trying instead to save her life.
A diametric opposite, and a horrifying one—so monstrous, indeed, that Tom realized he had, just now, been burying his response to it beneath questions of vanity, of credit, of manly competition. Had he really seen murder in rescue’s clothing? If he had been so blind, had he any right to accuse Flick of changing the facts of the storm? Who, after all, distorted things? Surely Audrey and Dottie had not colluded in making up this version of the “killing.” Could they possibly have agreed, for some weird, neurotic reasons connected with Audrey’s entrapment by Flick and Dottie’s need for endless repetitions of defeat and recovery, to change their story from one end of the scale of truth to the other? Or had Tom had reasons of his own to see things totally and fundamentally askew? Or—perhaps to grasp at straws—could there be a no-man’s land somewhere between what he thought he had seen and others’ “truths”? How mistaken had he really been in his image of the powerful, earthy garbage woman—who turned out to have such a mousey, defeated voice? How far from the mark, after all, had been his reading of Dottie’s look of appeal as she lay in her bikini on the cushion in the sun? Had there perhaps been a strong flavor of killing in her saving of Audrey?
Was one doomed to see all of life in one’s own way, only to have to adjust his vision after each livelong day according to the likewise distorted visions of others? Did one see everything with a vivid inaccuracy while it was happening and then bargain out with others an ex post facto “accuracy” that compromised the self-serving distortions of all? If one became convinced that this was so, then how could one balance out the profound humility, on the one hand, that this conviction would force on oneself, with, on the other, the need for vigilance against born liars who had not yet realized the nature of these revisions? How could Tom be humble toward Flick?
He reached down for the handle of the wrench and found that it was immovably wedged in place—so tightly, indeed, with its metal handle-tip denting the hard oak, that Tom had a moment’s renewed belief that some force had in fact been loosening the nut as the keel had given out those fluttering vibrations. Then how far had he lost his head? God, what he would have given at that moment for just one miserable small item of certitude! He began to try to free the worm nut of the wrench, and as he was leaning forward, straining with his fingers at the burred cylinder, he gasped at a thought that had struck him like a hearty clap on the back, of congratulations.
Could there have been, at the core of all his inaccuracies of vision, a misreading of what Audrey felt about Flick? Had he been wrong about that pair? Had he got even that wrong?
He grasped the worm nut and pressed and turned with all his strength, and at the peak of his effort he was flooded by a recollected feeling—that this was going to be a happy cruise. That, he remembered having thought, was all set. And now as a kind of overlay on this memory came another, a visual image: this same wrench seen through the choppy bilgewater under the eye of the storm, wobbling and bent and contorted by refraction and changes of depth and light—an image of wavering untruthfulness seen at a moment when the wrench, the water in the boat, the boat itself, and the calm at the center of the storm were all of the essence of truth.
How he wanted this storm, this cruise, these days aboard Harmony to have been a marvelous experience, the joys of which one would never forget!
The worm-set gave with a sudden jolt, the steel jaws surrendered their bite on the nut at the yawl’s flaw, and he lifted the tool out and replaced the floorboard and went forward to put the wrench in the locker in the vee of the forecastle where it belonged. No one would ever know what he had done down there.
* * *
—
When he stepped out into the sunlight in the cockpit he felt himself to be, once again, the master of his vessel. He was determined not to lie outright, especially, if possible, not to himself. He looked around. The day seemed to be larger now, its sky supremely elevated in hazeless clarity, its horizons ringed with distant shoulders of known land: Fisher’s Island in view ahead, Watch Hill Point on the starboard bow, Point Judith up to the northeast, Plum Island off to port, Block Island astern; greenish purple promises in all quarters, save the easterly, of sure anchorages. Closer at hand the faces were not hostile. It seemed to him in this bright light that Audrey and Flick, she at the wheel, he close by her side, the two leaning ever so slightly toward each other in that yearning which can never be completely hidden, were, yes, in love, but he felt keenly open to correction on that point. Dottie, arms up, brushing her hair out to the dry breeze, was a giver; she could never have meant to kill. Tom felt that he should rub his eyes and clear away the last of the film of manifold distortions that the storm seemed to have sprayed over his vision. The wound on Audrey’s cheek began to hurt him now; he was a medical man and a husband still. “How’s your shoulder, darling?” he asked in all sincerity as he took the wheel.
“Not too great,” Audrey said, “if you want a frank answer.”
“Better have a couple more aspirin by now,” he said, and on that roundabout hint Dottie stirred up to go and fetch; but she waited to hear the rest o
f what Tom might say.
“We’re doing pretty well,” he went on, looking up at the trembling fullnesses of the sails. “We could make maybe a knot more under both sail and power, but we’re kind of low on gas, I’d like to keep a reserve, if you think, Audrey—”
“I’ll live,” Audrey said.
Now Tom faced Flick. “We’re taking in a fair amount of water. You have any pumping left in you, Flick? I’ll be glad to do it if you don’t feel up to it.”
“I’ll pump,” Flick said. Could it be that his eyes had lost that dissolving look?—or, Tom wondered, had most of the disconcerting film scaled off his own eyes? “But first,” Flick said, “you were going to tell us—”
“What I was doing down below while we were under the eye. Yeah, sorry about the interruptions. Well, it doesn’t take much telling. I’d looked down the hatch and I’d seen Dottie struggling over Audrey in the water, and the amount of the water threw me. I was afraid we were going to fill and sink, so I thought I’d better look and see if there was a single bad leak and whether there was anything I could do about it if there was.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing I could do much about.”
“Nothing to do but pump?”
“Nothing to do but pump. For ever and ever, amen.”
Dottie went below. Flick was more than satisfied; he was justified. He began to sway once again on the pump, and soon he was singing, off key. Tom felt relief spreading like the warmth of a shot of Bourbon in his chest.
A feminine squeak came from below. Then: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”
A stab of alarm bled ice water into the place where the relief had been. Had he really put the wrench away? Had she found—evidence?
But Dottie was standing on the ladder with her shining face exposed, displaying a gift of pleasure for her man; she was holding up his wallet, which was dripping water.
“Where was it?” Flick asked in a rather mournful and reproachful tone, as if Dottie, having found it, must have been the one who had originally mislaid it.
“In the craziest place,” she said, and she began to giggle as Flick darkened with annoyance. “I went in to get the aspirin for Audrey, and there it was, in the—right in the—oooh, it was so peculiar—right down in the johnny.”
“Wash it off? Did you wash it off? God almighty!”
“Here,” Dottie crossly said, reaching it out to Flick and looking suddenly as if she would burst into tears.
And so, although, as to visibility, breeze, and smoothness of the going under Harmony’s forefoot, the day itself was almost perfect, there began nevertheless to be moments of distress, and the easing of one sort of anxiety in Tom’s heart gave way to another bad feeling: of discontent. He wanted much that he did not have, he wanted to be a decent doctor, he wanted not to hate his noble work, he wanted not to have seen a rescue as a murder, he wanted Audrey back. Perhaps…—but in his concerns at the helm of his stubborn vessel which had ridden out the hurricane, everything seemed to trail off into an indefinite series of perhapses. The current turned, and they flew past the hazards of the Sound, and fishermen in dories lying near the reefs looked up sullenly as the old-fashioned craft sailed by, and all the while Tom was oppressed by a heavy sense of the discrepancies between his reading of the experiences of the storm and the versions his crew had brought away. But gradually these differences, too, faded into common issues of busyness, as the future became a matter for agitation. The Hamdens were going to clear out. Questions of transportation arose; Dottie was dispatched below by Flick to pack. Audrey’s pain was harsh. Was there a train schedule somewhere?
They rounded the old stone lighthouse and made their way upriver, and at Burr’s anchorage Tom had to tie up at the pier for the time being, because he had no dinghy. Not too much damage here; boatyard services were available and functioning; yes, it could be arranged to haul the boat out in the morning. Flick jumped on the dock in a business suit, and Dottie, wearing a dress, exposed a lot of leg as she climbed ashore.
As the Hamdens stood on the pier Tom called out, “Hey, anybody have a dime?” He was going to have to call a taxi to carry Audrey to the hospital.
Flick tossed a dime down. Tom cupped his hands but missed it, and the thin metal wafer tinkled on the deck. The sun flashed on its little circle, and as Tom bent over to pick it up it became the one precise image in all that scene. The storm and all its exigencies, majesties, and contending inaccuracies had already begun to slip away into vagueness, like a dream fading at the dawn of a new day, for ordinariness was showing its lights again, and, indeed, at that very instant, “this world” was claiming them all, Tom, Audrey, Flick, Dottie…
In time, in the months and years that followed, Esmé made splendid conversations, and Tom used his memories of the storm to good purpose while dining out many an evening, his vivid tales coming out always as celebrations of how good it was to be alive and how lucky he was to have a wife like Audrey. People were impressed.
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