by John Hersey
But when he emerged, feeling greatly refreshed, and saw Audrey at the stove, staring at the frying pan as if unable to decide what to do next, he was suddenly let down. He cruelly searched his mind for ways in which he had neglected her. There was that crying child again. Audrey snapped out of her reverie and looked upward. Then she reached in the icebox and took out a package of bacon.
Those two came out from the forward cabin. No sign of a quarrel. No sign of a hurricane, either. Sunny skies! They were holding hands! Tom thought that this was Flicker Hamden’s most appalling effrontery yet. How could he inflict such a mockery on Audrey—to say nothing of Dot? Was he being big-Daddy-when-the-wind-blows?
Dottie looked frightened, but Tom felt that he should bear in mind, no matter what might happen later in the day, that she had been able to work up the spirit for quite an ugly spat with Flick, fear or no fear.
“What’s the check-out hour in this motel?” Flick said. “Just got a call from my secretary, says I’m needed back at the firm.”
“It’ll take a while to pack,” Dottie said, bravely going along with Flick’s joke, which fell flat with Audrey, who evidently could not take in anything but that teenage hand-holding; and as for Tom, half of him was checking off mental lists and half of him was chilled to the bone with regrets and apprehensions. Both the Hamdens sat down, waiting for service.
Tom watched Audrey getting breakfast, and with all of him he admired her so much, there came a moment of feelings so strong, that he actually had to remind himself of the dangerous storm, and of precautions. And when, as Harmony heeled to a whistling blast, he did concentrate on the storm and realized that its power was far from its peak, his feelings about her grew all the more intense; there was only a short time, he told himself, in which to repair, take back, forgive, shape up, make amends, atone—to put back together again the one important relationship of his life. But then two fried eggs were in front of him, and bacon, and hashed brown potatoes, and buttered toast, and steaming coffee—his requested hearty breakfast for which he had no heart. He tried to eat; Audrey’s handiwork was all paste between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. It occurred to him that Flick, seeing him push the food around on the paper plate, would think he was afraid of the storm, and with a Protestant anger he forced the food down. The mass of it lodged itself, to his senses, just under his Adam’s apple. Of course Flick didn’t eat much; the son of a bitch was in love.
If there could be Protestant anger there could also be Protestant self-reproach. Tom sucked probingly at his own smugness, as if at meat lodged between his teeth. He felt superior to Flicker. Even hating livers he led a more useful life than this tinker. He was interested in inner man, Flick only in electronic extensions of man, devices that dangle from him like prosthetic limbs and mechanical graspers. He, Tom, wasn’t afraid of the storm, not deeply, because he knew as a man what to do, whereas this big unshaven slob…
But then Tom had an insight that made him almost want to cast off and lose Harmony and all aboard: The cuckold always feels superior to the one who has wronged him. With this understanding all the succulence went out of his smugness, and he just felt mean. He felt driven to do something. He stood up and went to the closet opposite the head and took out his waterproofs and thin non-skid boots.
“Please tell me where you think you are going?” It was Audrey, speaking out of what?—old habit?
You can worry about me still, can’t you? He almost said it out loud. Instead he said, “I’ve got to check things.”
“Things! You and your things! Why can’t you just sit it out the way you said we were all going to?”
“The chafing gear—,” he lamely began.
“You’ll let the storm into the cabin,” Audrey said.
“For God’s sake, darling, we can’t just pretend it isn’t there.”
“Oh, go ahead, go ahead. You’re going to take us out for a little sail, aren’t you? I know you.”
Tom dived into his waterproofs to avoid thinking about that thrust. She knew him. Yes, she knew him. He lifted the hood over his head and pulled the drawstrings tight around his cheeks. A little sail?
He threw back the hatch and climbed the ladder and rose outward into a medium of violence for which no phase of his life had prepared him.
A brutal push from behind, foul and delinquent, like that of muggers on a night street, drove him down, and flinging out an arm as he fell he grasped the upright pipe stanchion of the boom gallows, and there he clung, astonished, sobbing for breath with lungs which were not elastic enough, it seemed, to deal with this air that stole air. That’s hail coming at me, he thought. The downpour had looked like rain from below but must be hail, for it crashed against the hood of his waterproofs and stung his skin like a solid scattershot. But no; there were no pellets of ice on the deck. It was just driven rain. His wet knuckles were going white gripping the pipe of the whatsit—the gallows! Aware that the main boom rested overhead on that frame called gallows, he conjured up a detail: He must take down harder than ever on the main sheet to hold the boom from jumping the frame and smashing all sorts of gear. But wait, he told himself. Gather strength. Count to twenty. Count your blessings…four, five, six…Jesus, how quiet it had been in Harmony’s cabin, how he yearned to be below! And this was only the start; it would get worse later. All at once he began to worry in earnest about the chafing gear he had set up on the anchor line during the night, that bandage of canvas strips he had wound around the Nylon rope to protect it from fraying, and he felt sure that this straining and bucking would cause even the rounded edges of the bow chock to saw right through the line in no time, and he commanded himself to go forward and see to it. But wait! That wind would take him right overboard: he couldn’t just stand up and walk forward and check the chafing gear…A little sail? A little sail?…He reasoned that he would have to crawl, he would have to slither over the coaming onto the outer deck and crawl along it, gripping the handrail on the turtleback of the cabin trunk—so this was what that prissy, varnished handrail had been for, all this time! Tom started his move over the coaming. With a heart-thump of self-congratulation he thanked God and his own foresight that he had taken the mainsail off and bagged it and strapped it down. He heaved himself along, lying almost flat. That screeching in the rigging—he had never heard anything like that. Heave. His face was close to the lovely tight grain of the wet teak deck. Heave. We’re going good now, he told himself. Was everything better, or was he just getting used to this gang-war wind? Had he thought it had sounded like a crying baby?
Gradually, very slowly, he began to make each move in a rational way. Once he had dealt in his mind with the first shock of the greatness of the wind he could begin to act, to make sense of each action. He got to his knees. Scrabbled along. Came to the end of the handrail by the mainmast. Got a good grip on the bulwarks. He was on the port side, and rainwater was coursing down the scuppers as along a city curbstone after a cloudburst. Still hard to breathe; mouth away from the gale, gulp deep, hold it, move forward. The lashed-down club of the jib—he could climb up it, so to speak, toward the bow; the small boom was made fast to the deck by its own jib leads. Shinny up it lying down.
Now he hugged the mooring bitts and could see the anchor line running out through its chock, and he saw that the wide strips of canvas (they really were canvas) that he had wrapped round and round the anchor line were doing their work very well. This gave him an enormous lift. He had set up the chafing gear in the dark, and he had set it up right. He had allowed plenty for the stretch in the Nylon line and plenty for Harmony’s surges forward that came between gusts, letting up the strain. He had made a double thickness, two bandages, in effect, and he could see that the outer one was so far scarcely worn at all. His lashings were firm. He knew his business! He could take care of…A little sail? How bitter she had sounded!
To look at the chafing gear he had to face the wind and beating rain, but he gulped air
and looked again; it helped his morale. The anchor line was safe for many hours. He had ensured that. This was something he had done right.
Easing back down along the deck he kept a sharp eye out for “things.” Everything except the cotter pins of his own life seemed secure. The main in its bag on the dinghy chocks was perfectly snug; he was exceedingly grateful—that edge of self-satisfaction again, even under the pummeling of this wind—that he had stripped the sail in the night; difficult then, impossible now.
Soon he was sitting in Harmony’s beautiful cockpit, somewhat sheltered by the cabin trunk, back turned to the gale, used to it now. Absent-mindedly, automatically, he picked up the cockpit sponge and passed it back and forth over the brass of the binnacle hood, counting the strokes. Four, five, six. His blessings.
He looked up for the first time from the immediacy of the boat and surveyed the world blowing around. At once he saw that several power boats, their windage too much for their hooks, had dragged down in the earlier northeast wind and had smashed against the marina pier—a scene of havoc all along—and that the lee shore beyond the pier was also strewn with small craft, and some not so small.
Tom felt a rush of anger at all driving-license skippers, as he called them; men with some money in pocket who, because they have passed road tests in automobiles, think they can steer anything with a wheel, and buy stinkpots and go to sea and hail sailors in open waters, calling through a bullhorn, “Which way is New London? Don’t gimme those compass numbers. Just point.” Idiots. Wasters. Spoilers. Pier-wreckers. He became quite angry; inappropriately angry.
Then a new gust of the gale came, and the crashing of raindrops against his hood was almost overpowering, and the anger was blown away, leaving a painful vacuum, into which, in a moment, grief poured. How could he ever ask Audrey the questions he wanted to ask her? How could so much of life be a waste?
Somewhere there was a muffled new knocking. Had some rigging parted? It was near at hand. A solid thing, not just a beating rope end. He looked around. Knock knock knock.
Then he saw Audrey’s face in the round porthole, low in the forward bulkhead of the cockpit, put there to provide ventilation above the engine. It was sheltered from the rain by the overhanging ledge of the stepway across the front of the cockpit, so Tom could see clearly through it. Audrey was rapping on the glass with the knuckle of her middle finger—marvelous that he had heard her in all this shrieking. Would he have heard any noise other than one that Audrey made?
When she saw that she had his attention, she began to signal with her forefinger, first pointing at herself, then pointing out through the glass. Incredible! She wanted to come out and join him.
He felt suddenly playful. The grief was gone on the violent air like the anger before it. He laughed. He fell to his knees and bending far forward put his face close to the glass and made cross eyes. Then, flapping his hands close to his rib cage like a seal waving its flippers, he invited her out.
But she drew back her face at the closeness of his, and he saw then that both Audrey and Dottie were in their waterproofs. Flick was not. The girls wanted to taste the storm together. Let them.
Tom raised up and pushed back the hatch. Dottie started up the ladder first; her eyes were big, excited.
When her head and shoulders were in the wind, she stopped; she cringed down. Audrey was pressing up the ladder beside her, and Tom saw some sort of eagerness in her face, too. What had Flick been saying to work them up this way? Or did their excitement come from his, Tom’s, having been outside in the wind? Why wasn’t Flick coming up to sample the weather?
Audrey raised her head above the hatchway just as a heavy gust came across the Pond, and it was as if she had been struck a solid blow from behind. She ducked.
Both girls backed down the companionway. They had already had enough storm. Their faces, tilted up, were pale and appalled.
Tom himself was ready for shelter, and taking help again from the firm boom gallows, he got his legs up over the hatchway doorboards and dropped down the ladder. He slid the hatch shut and felt the stillness of the air as if it were a palpable heaviness all around him; he might have been under water. He took his dripping rain gear off and hung it from one of the catch hooks of the ladder. He felt himself trembling inside.
He turned to face the others. “Pretty good breeze,” he said. “We ought to make Hamburg Cove in about four hours in this.”
A little sail. He saw from Audrey’s eyes that she understood he was joking, answering her jibe with a light heart; but Dottie blurted out, “Tom! You’re not going to take us out in this!”
“God, Miss Dorothy,” Flick said, “he’s putting you on.” All the same, Tom caught Flick looking into his face for confirmation.
He gave it for Dot’s sake. “Sure, Dot, I was kidding. We’re going to hunker down right here till it’s over.”
Suddenly, with that announcement, there seemed to appear a frightful problem. What were they going to do while they waited? How were they going to deal with each other in this confinement? The wind whined in the rigging, and they had nothing to say to each other.
Tom knew he had an advantage over the others: He had “things” to see to. It was almost eight o’clock. He turned on the radio. On the hour came bulletins, and they were all commonplace—an auto wreck on the Connecticut Turnpike, three teenage girls returning from a state beauty contest, all killed by a car that had run out of control across the center strip the wrong way; an eighty-six-year-old woman burned to death in a tenement fire, origin thought to be a kerosene cookstove; police in Norwich called by neighbors, having heard screams, to a home where a milk deliveryman, said to be intoxicated, had put a woman customer of his dairy, who had left a note in an empty bottle that she didn’t need any milk that day, across his knees and had spanked her with a ping pong paddle. But not a word from the broadcasting studio in its solid building in a solid town about the closest trouble and fear of all, not a breath—until the weather report; and then it came in the most matter-of-fact tones. High winds, currently, in New London, from the east, gusting to sixty miles an hour, with a forecast of heavy rain and winds verging on hurricane strength through the day, clearing at night, tomorrow fair and mild.
“Fair and mild,” Dottie wistfully said.
“Be quiet!” Tom wanted to hear each word.
But that was every bit of it. A musical commercial had come on—a total moral jolt in the context. Tom fought off a feeling that he was going to get into a labyrinthine argument with Flick about communications, in which he would have to say that all the sophisticated electronic equipment in the world wouldn’t cure this kind of inanity; it was beginning to look as if we needed tracking devices for storms of social idiocy…But he didn’t want to quarrel with Flicker today—not on that level, he told himself, and he turned his back on the man and checked the barometer again. God, it was plunging. It now stood at twenty-nine point five and had fallen to this immoderate low point in less than two hours.
Tom took the log book from its shelf and squared it before him on the table, and he thought: Now here, just inside the upper cover, is the substance of a quarrel!
To still his revived anger, Tom listened to the voice of the storm. He had come to think of the gusts as great words which an ear, a trained ear in a wise head, but never a device, never a machine, might be able to make rhyme and reason of; and now one came, a howling long monosyllable, under which Harmony strained as if its every wooden part were being stretched to new lengths, and Tom tried, himself straining, to get the word, and he felt that he almost had it, but the word ended with a crack of something loose above, a hard consonantal ending, and the gist eluded him.
Then with deliberation Tom lifted the cover of the log book and turned it back flat, so the cut endpaper lay exposed to view. Tom looked around at the eyes. Audrey saw the cut page and looked up at once into Flick’s face. Dottie saw it and looked up just as promp
tly into Tom’s eyes. Flick saw not only the cut but also that everyone else had seen it.
Flick looked as if he might yawn. Now, when Tom wanted his anger, he lost it in astonishment at Flick’s brazening. The man looked bored. It was going to be a long day, this; his telltale jaw muscles were relaxed, his eyelids rather heavy.
In order not to be routed altogether Tom flipped the book open and began briskly to write in it. Every item he logged was factual yet somehow muted, understated; data could not express Tom’s views of this ferocity.
He felt drawn to it. Closing the log book and putting it back on the shelf he had an impulse—he began at once to think of it as a duty—to go above again. He told himself he wanted to make extra sure that the mainsail in its bag was secure.
But he paused. Those other three were talking about Joan Plasson, an acquaintance, a fiercely ambitious woman they all knew. Under the moaning of the masts and lines, amid the heeling and shuddering of the hull, they were gossiping. They were not interested in whatever he might have written in the mutilated log book, but only in how—Flick was saying it—Joan periodically got a bad back, and it always seemed to be just after she carried on a public flirtation at some party, right up to the brink of scandal, with some older man who was crucially important to the future of Perry, her husband, and then undoubtedly had to march home that very evening and have intercourse with old Perry—and zing, muscle spasm.
Tom stood up and reached for his waterproofs, and nobody asked where he was going.
When he slid back the hatch, Flick said in an outraged tone, “Hey, can that! It’s drafty in here. I’ll start to sneeze.”
The girls both laughed at this threat; Flick’s eyes came up to Tom’s for a moment, and Tom saw a blur in them, something frozen just behind the twinkling lenses. Let them gossip for their health’s sake. He pulled the hood drawstrings tight, and though he saw Audrey saying something good-humored—she could afford it—to Dottie, he could not hear the words. He climbed out.
