by John Hersey
Then out across the open Sound Tom saw what seemed to be magic shadows on the water fallen down from a cloudless sky—the first streaks of the sea breeze, breaking the quicksilver glaze of the dead calm that had come with the turn of the tides. These streaks widened into pools of dark on the wide, steaming mirror. Tom went to work, to be ready when the afternoon breeze had gathered enough body to reach along the island surfaces and come down into the bay of the Hole. First the little spanker went up; then the main. He waited a bit. The metal wind vane at the main truck wavered, then turned with some purpose toward the southwest; the sail trembled up at the head. Yes, air was moving in—air that had come like instinct-driven migrating wildlife from far shores, from Hatteras, Dry Tortugas, Yucatan. Tom thought in a flash of Esmé, out there somewhere to the southwest, and for a moment he was furious with himself for his laxity in not having listened to a forecast all day. But then he busied himself—got the anchor up and shipped it and coiled the line and lashed the Danforth’s triangular blades and long cross bar into its cradle abaft the mast, and quickly hauled up the jib and ran aft to the wheel. An eddy was throwing the bow of Harmony the wrong way. No matter; a puff came and filled the sails and Tom gibed her comfortably around to glide out toward the Sound. The crew slept.
* * *
—
How serene to be alone on a well-loved boat on an easy beam reach in smooth water! Tom felt alone, and now, busy at the helm, he accepted solitude and began to think it a blessing. He headed for the lowest point in the great dip of the skyline of Martha’s Vineyard between Chilmark and Gay Head, holding half a point to windward of what he took to be Menemsha itself, to allow for the current which was now just beginning to run up the Sound. This was the perfect angle of sailing for Harmony, a hair higher than wind abeam, heeling at a lazy slant, rushing along with a swishing sound through the ripples as myriad maps of foam floated past a daydreaming geographer at the wheel, islets and reefs and atolls and shoals of spindrift thrown out by the creative bow waves. With her sails trimmed right, she was in balance; she would hold her course without his hands on the spokes of the wheel.
By the time Harmony was half way across the Sound—the wind holding so light as scarcely to ruffle the water, which was now moving more surely in the same direction as the air—Tom had thoroughly lost himself in the wide afternoon.
His gaze was making a casual sweep of all those things that bear watching—the luff of the tall sail, the telltales, the cleating of lines, the carelessly dropped fall of the main sheet, a winch handle not stowed—when he became distantly aware of a glittering pair of eyes aimed at him. He came back with an inner crash to his company: Dot, across from him, sleep-puffed, lazy, stretching her drowsy nakedness, and looking at him. Tom met her eyes, and he saw the most blatant and pathetic invitation deep, deep in the blue irises. It was so urgent as to be a cry for help. It said: Now, don’t wait, now’s the time, we’re alone, they’re asleep down there. Help me! Change me!
Tom’s heart began to run. How easy it would be to untie the little bow at the hip! The oiled legs were already spread. Harmony would sail herself. Enter, possess, serve, and never regret. Either to break the spell of those pleading eyes, or simply to figure the risks, Tom stood up and stepped to the companionway and looked down into the cabin. Two enchanted sleepers lay on the berths, in thrall to the narcotic gurgling of the boat’s motion, dead to the betrayals of this world.
Harmony held her course like a good friend.
Tom stood over Dot, looking down at her. Her gaze, still pouring into his face, seemed to Tom to say so very much about Flicker Hamden. Tom’s own warmth, withdrawn in the role of mere witness in the hour at anchor, now began to bank up fiercely, yet at least part of what he felt was pity, cold against his pulsing.
He was on the verge of bending down and reaching out a hand to Dot’s cheek when she began to shiver. His eye slid to her skin, so desirable and so available a few moments ago, and he saw there countless tiny gathers. Goose pimples. She was chilled by the ocean breeze. That begging look! Her eyes must have been pleading for cover not by a man, not by him of all men, but simply by cloth, warm cloth. He was horrified by his misreading of her messages. His face began to burn. He turned rapidly and descended the companionway ladder and went forward between the sleepers— Hamden was snoring in a sleep of filthy righteousness—to the forward cabin, where he tore a blanket off one of the bunks, and he carried it back up on deck and spread it over Dottie.
She turned her eyes up to his with a look of luxuriating gratitude, as if he had indeed served her and unknotted her, and the lids of her eyes drooped as the pupils seemed to roll up into her head—and she was fast asleep again, eased away by his gift of warmth.
* * *
—
Tom sat down at the wheel, all alone again. He felt a slow anger rising, but it was not strong. The genny needed trimming; he slipped the handle into the leeward jib sheet winch, not far from Dot’s form, and casting off the cleated fall took a few fast cranks. The rachets clicked their peremptory sounds into the hull.
“What’s happening?” It was Audrey, from below. Tom was surprised by his sharp elation, relief, at hearing that steady, good-natured voice.
“You’re missing a hell of a sail. That’s what,” he called.
Dot did not move.
Tom went forward to the companionway once more and looked below and saw his wife lying on her back, a sweater spread on her, staring straight upward, her eyes unusually wide and dark. “Come on up and join me,” he said softly. “I’m lonely up here.”
“All right, darling,” Aud said. She made mouth motions, indicating a drink-dry tongue. “Twenty more winks, O.K.?”
But she did not come. She may have fallen asleep again, Tom supposed, and he sailed on in a breeze that was now folding little tucks in the water. He had to point higher, as the current was running more swiftly, and he hardened up all three sails, coiling the main sheet when he had trimmed it down. The sun was on the shoulder of the afternoon, and a haze hung on the air like a vague report; a mildewy dampness that rumored of immense depths of the sea far away off soundings. He realized that he himself felt chilled, but for some reason he did not want to go below to fetch himself a windbreaker.
Half a mile from the Menemsha bell Tom began to rouse the crew. “You’ve got to see this entrance,” he shouted down into the cabin.
“Be right up. Be right up,” came quickly and briskly from Flicker.
Audrey was awake, too, uncovered in her bikini. Tom had the impression he had interrupted a lazy conversation, perhaps about himself, between those two; they were lying on their sides facing each other across the cabin.
He turned and shook Dot’s blanket-covered shoulder until she awoke in the act of stretching, mouth pulled, one bare arm reaching out. He pointed to the bluffs of Chilmark, where the scrub oaks were lighted yellow-green by the lowering sun, and she sat up making sleepy sounds of delight; she pulled the blanket he had brought her close around herself and hugged herself in it.
Flicker climbed up with a rowing shirt over his trunks, and in a few minutes Aud appeared in blue cotton slacks and a pale yellow sweater.
Near the bell, which clanged seldom in the calm sea, they handed the sails; Flick helped Audrey furl the main. Dot sat huddled and passive in the blanket. All three were amazingly fresh-eyed and observant, pointing out sights for others to enjoy.
Tom turned the ignition key and said to Flick, “Now hear this.”
He pressed a button, the starter gave out a gong-like cry, and the engine did indeed respond at once.
“Music,” Flicker said, but with less admiration in his voice than Tom would have liked to hear.
Tom headed for the mouth of the jetties. The tidal current was running out so fast from the broad reserves of Menemsha Pond that between the jetties waves of the water’s swiftness were veed together as if this were a river descending
from hills, and Harmony, swaying and straining, barely moved against all that force alongside the great angular chunks of stone. Bathers from the beach to the left, two women in floppy hats, and some boys with a barking golden Labrador stood on the breakwater watching their entrance. At the end of the left-hand jetty Tom swung his boat sharply to port into the basin, where, in still water, Harmony seemed to shoot forward. Quickly picking an anchorage between two fiberglas cutters, Tom swung in a big half circle, killed his speed, drifted ahead, and finally called to Flick to heave the anchor.
A man on one of the glass boats made a circle of a thumb and forefinger and called across, “Very pretty!”
Did he mean anchoring on a single pass like that, with plenty of room all around, or did he mean Harmony herself?
Tom, walking forward on the deck, glowed with sunburn and windburn and pleasure. Flick and Audrey were on the foredeck, looking at a whirlwind of gulls over the dunes beyond the Creek. Tom spent some time checking the hold of the hook because he had dragged once here on thick kelp on the bottom; the other two moved aft.
Straightening up, looking around at the whited Coast Guard boathouse with its launching rails slanting down into the smooth basin, at Dutcher’s Dock with two raunchy commercial swordfishermen tied up alongside, at the sportsmen’s playland of flying bridges two and three deep at the outer end of the town quay—at this quaint place so sophisticated that the tourist touches had themselves been absorbed into the general air of silver-shingled authenticity—Tom felt a current of release; he was pleasantly tired, full to the brim with a day of sailing delights, ready now to unbend with the others.
He wanted a drink with the others, wanted to redress his stiffness of the noon hour and to commune with them in that spirit of mindlessness they had achieved, that indiscriminately shared reveling in the dumb works of fingertips, tongues, lips, eyes, limbs, hot skins—but it seemed that during his securing of Harmony a vote had been taken by those three beyond his earshot to go ashore first, before cocktails, to take possession of the place by planting feet on it; they were not really sailors, any of them, not even Aud. He felt he owed Dot a debt—not an explanation, because she surely had no inkling of what had gone through his mind, and she may not even have been fully awake. He wanted to be agreeable; he wanted to laugh with Dot’s husband Flick. So now he took the lead, jumping down first into the dinghy, holding it steady while the girls and Flick got in, and he rowed them ashore.
* * *
—
The lights of evening bathed Menemsha, and Tom took them into the simple shack of the fishmarket on the dock, where in a glass-sided tank great lobsters, like knights in the jousting ready-tent, faced death with stupid calm, and bluefish and mackerel and striped bass, already staring with the knowledge of what death brings, lay on cracked ice—still lifes with glints of iridescent silver, blue, aqua, and pale, pale gray of shadows under rocks in shallows. Tom ordered up some clams, and a college boy, working there to get away from his family’s middle-class ethos, in boots and dirty sweatshirt and jeans, hair too long, upper lip surly and spoiled, pried open a dozen and a half, wincing each time he squeezed the steel wedge, and having cut the white muscles laid the clams in their dripping halfshells on a round metal tray. They ate them right there by the market scales, sucking the sea fruit off the rims of the shells; Flicker made slurping noises. The damp cement floor, the deep bump-clack of the ice room door thrown shut, the sunset light, the edged saline taste of the clams—Tom savored, if more inwardly than those three at noon, a rush of unthinking sensations.
But now it seemed the others did not want to let themselves go. Tom was out of phase again. Audrey spilled a dribble of clam juice down her chin and onto her yellow sweater, and her embarrassment and annoyance were too large for the case; fire spread on her cheeks. Dot ate one clam and made a face. Flick began talking about the city in homesick gloom: how he had walked across Fifty-seventh Street at eight o’clock one Sunday morning, with not a living soul in sight—a science-fiction feeling of being the only survivor. He was, Tom suddenly thought, trying to think them away from this room with a redolence of the substitute for the odor of sex—the smell, among others, of mackerel, the cuckold-fish.
It was Audrey who asked with burning eyes, “And what were you doing walking the streets at that hour on a Sunday?”
Flick patted her on the shoulder and said as if to a small child, “Hrrumph. Your Uncle Fillmore don’t let no grass grow under his footsies.”
Tom couldn’t believe the charge for the clams. He had had them in other summers from that same battered circular tray for what?—three cents a clam? He thought the college boy, a product of the new math, had perhaps never learned simple addition; he pressed his questions; the boy barked the name of his boss, who came from the chilly caverns beyond the thick door in a fishing cap with a long black plastic visor and confirmed the robbery, to the penny, in very sour New England tones that seemed to say, “Dear Lord, spare us from these summer people.” Tom wound up bilked and humiliated. There was too much money around…
But then rescue came—the arrival at the dock of one of the crusty swordfishermen, a high-pulpited vessel painted a strange brown of deserts, of dust, of utter dryness, named Thalia IV, with the pennant of a catch on the ratlines of her crow’s nest. All hurried out on the dock. A huge, muscular, steel-blue torso was heaved out on a crane and was weighed and was dumped on the dock, and the man in the black-visored cap settled a price with the fishermen. A seagull with an eye brimming with defiance perched on the torso by the rip where the sword-nosed head had been severed and began pecking at the pinkness. No one drove it away. Tom took his lackluster crew, their three set against his one, back out to Harmony for drinks.
They were soon settled, glasses in hand, in the cockpit in a quiet frame of mind as the circle of the sun seemed drawn down by an attraction of brilliance to brightness toward the piercing flashes of the Buzzards Bay light, already lit, on the Texas tower over the open sea out to the left of Cuttyhunk. Tom, puzzled by his isolation, was slipping farther into it.
* * *
—
Flick said, “Hey, case the haunted pirate ship.”
There had appeared between the jetties a big lumbering trimeran being pushed slowly by an inadequate, whining outboard. It blundered into the basin, its high freeboard and three massive floats clearly making it difficult to maneuver in a crowded, windy anchorage. A corpulent young man with a purple face under a Bahama straw was at the tiller, and he looked furious that his craft, with which he had evidently determined to impress yachtsmen from Maine to Florida, had proved so awkward, and in its clumsiness so very unnautical. A pretty, soft woman—Flicker let out a low wolf whistle at the sight of her—wearing pajama-like slacks and dark glasses with mirroring lenses, was drooped over the anchor line forward in what appeared to be the last stages of exhaustion and vexation; she looked around with eyes that seemed, in their reflecting, to be ovals of just what she saw.
“All right! Let go!” the man called to her, though his ugly, gigantic duck was still moving.
She slipped the anchor line, holding her hands up in a feminine gesture of distaste away from the snaking coils of Nylon. When the line went limp she made it fast.
Flick said, “Listen to the way that snotty son of a bitch talks to her.”
“That marriage won’t last long,” Dottie said in a dry voice.
Flick’s face snapped around toward his wife’s; he gulped at his drink as if to wash down the reaction that had started up his gorge.
The wind carried the trimeran, settling on its anchor line, hard down on one of the glass boats, and it was clear that the fellow was going to have to try again. He had overconfidently cut his engine; he scrambled out on the after-frame to start it up once more. Flick snorted. The trimeran man’s purple face lifted up and he roared to his wife to get the God-damn hook up; he made the error seem hers. The little mirrors looked at
heaven and became heavens. The soft arms tugged.
“The bastard,” Flick said.
The outboard was racing in neutral, throwing out smelly fumes.
“Is it up? Is it up?” The anchor was obviously off the bottom, for the bulky triple pontoons had begun to drift. “God damn it! Get it up!”
The woman nodded. Was she weeping behind her mirrors? The man took the nod for a signal that all was clear, though the anchor line still hung down straight. He threw the motor into forward gear. The big craft began to creep into the wind.
“Incompetent meathead,” Flick said, and then he emptied his drink, holding the glass back with the ice against his teeth while the last drops trickled down his throat.
Tom looked at Audrey; he felt he had to see her face. Was she disturbed by the display of trouble, over there, between a man and his woman? Where had Audrey drifted off to during the day? Why did he feel so alone? Her eyes were on Flicker—and no wonder, Tom thought. Flick’s response to the red-faced skipper of the trimeran was absurdly exaggerated; the brilliant social engineer seemed looped on a single drink. But Audrey had a cat-like look, watching him— inscrutable, alert, waiting in too-perfect poise. Then Tom saw the moment arrive when, with an acuity of peripheral vision that she had, she became aware of his own eyes on her face. The cat stare was instantly wiped away; she arose, moved to Flick, took the empty glass from his hand where he still held it high as if thinking of hurling it across the water at the head of the red-faced man. She went below to refill it.
