They were barreling into the blue west with a good capful of breeze. What a morning! The dome of winds sparkled like a child’s eye. Gay Head was already far astern, pale against paleness, and Harmony was coming up now on the Texas tower, Buzzards Bay light, which stood up stark and angular out of the swells on its tall, hollow, red steel shanks, a mechanical monster, alien to the sea. Flick thought it beautiful.
From here, from this known point, Tom would set his bearings for the long run in the open ocean.
They passed close to the tower’s hissing feet, where barnacles clung to the steel, and they all looked up at the underside of the dizzying platform, so high, to where a derrick peeped over one edge dangling a swaying cable with an ominous bare steel hook on the end of it. Just then a Coast Guard sailor condemned to duty up there slammed a metal door in its metal frame in the metal housing, and the crash rushed down the metal legs, and it seemed as though the very waters of eternity clanged.
The course Tom set, with that everywhere-sound still ringing in his mind, was two hundred sixty-six degrees, for Block Island, twenty-six miles away across the open sea.
There had been a change in plans. As they had sat at the cabin table, at anchor in Menemsha, looking at, but not eating, the canned peaches and glazed coffee cake that Audrey had set out for the early breakfast Tom had insisted upon, they had all heard together the morning weather report from Providence. For once the forecast had been precise, because the Weather Bureau was now issuing detailed advisories:
At six a.m., Eastern Daylight Saving Time—in the hesitant, semi-literate voice of a meteorological technician, a man used to reading drift meters and pressure gauges but not pages with words on them—the tropical disturbance designated Esmé was centered two hundred and eighty miles south-southwest of Cape Fear, North Carolina. It is presently moving northwest-by-west at approximately five miles per hour. Wind speed now seventy miles per hour, an increase from last evening. This intensification may continue. The erratic path of the storm makes it impossible to predict its future course. Seaside property owners from Cape Hatteras, Virginia, to Cumberland Island, Georgia, are advised to prepare for exceptionally high tides, heavy seas, and damaging winds.
Tom, ballpoint pen poised over his open log book, had talked about this bulletin in the reassuring tones of a calculating fellow. These cyclonic storms, he said, had a tendency to loop around in a clockwise curve and go out to sea, as this one had seemed to be planning to do the day before but seemed not to be doing at this moment. Esmé was a good four hundred and fifty miles away from Martha’s Vineyard, as of that broadcast, he said, and if she did decide to swing up and out, and supposing that she might graze these offshore islands, as these babies had often done in the past, and guessing that her forward motion might be a bit faster than at present, then you could expect that conditions in these parts would become a mite unpleasant after two or three days….
There was silence from the others. Flick’s cheeks were flushed. The girls both seemed to be staring at the red patches on Flick’s face and not listening to Tom at all.
As though sitting in chilly cross drafts, Tom felt two sorts of danger, and neither was the danger of the storm. That absent-minded fixedness of both Audrey’s and Dottie’s eyes! And Flick: Tom imagined that Flick wanted to talk again about storm-tracking; that it was not reality, but rather the beautiful linking up of circuits that might whisper to each other about fragments of reality, a process rather than an essence, something very far from this real boat and that real storm, that interested the man. Doubly frightened, Tom sat and listened to his own tongue running away.
There would eventually be heavy rains around here for a day or two, the tongue was saying, even if Esmé carried straight along her present path and pasted the Carolinas. The tongue therefore suggested that instead of puttering around the Elizabeth Islands and Buzzards Bay for half a week, as they had thought they might do, and then gradually piling up the westing toward home, they should rather take advantage of the fine weather that was likely for the present and hit right out for Long Island Sound. If there had to be a storm, the chances were good that doing this would put them out on its harmless fringes. If there had to be a real snootful, it would be best if Harmony could be snug on her own three-hundred-pound mushroom anchor at home. The tongue suggested either Block Island or Newport for the first night—either one a superb sail on a day like this—then Hamburg Cove the second; then home. They could sit out the rains ashore, if rains came, and then sail around the Sound for the rest of the time. How did that strike them?
How could it strike them? They had accepted it; Tom himself in his cold sweat had accepted it. And ever since then the girls had been in skittish moods—Dottie talking a lot, laughing often, on the razor’s edge of being wild, and Audrey irritable yet inexplicably glowing.
Flick’s response had been to turn on the full flood of his charm. As they heeled along he kept exclaiming and flinging his arms in praise of the adventure they were having, and somehow these acrobatics seemed to result in his constantly being waited on by both women. Subtly he required their services but not what they served. They brought him sun cream, coffee, Kleenex, binoculars, a pillow, a hat, dark glasses, sourball candies, his camera, a chart, a book of crossword puzzles. He spread all these commodities in a casual display around him, using and consuming nothing, keeping the things, in some mysterious expectation, for “later.” The coffee grew cold, and Audrey threw it overboard, prudently to leeward, and replaced it with hot, which in turn grew cold. The collection of the loot of the girls’ pampering constantly increased.
For the third successive morning Flick had not shaved, and a seedy crop of blond bristles covered his chin and cheeks; he apparently felt that he was roughing it in the hardy way of a seaman, but Tom could not help thinking him lazy and vain in the worst sense—convinced, that is, that women would think sloppiness an irresistible corrective on a man who would otherwise perhaps have been too handsome.
Now Flick stepped below, alone—going to the head, Tom assumed. Apparently it crossed Audrey’s mind that Flick might have repented his stubble and might be intending to shave after all, and she called down after him, “Let me know if you want some hot water—won’t take a minute.”
“No, thanks, doll,” he called up from the cabin. “Don’t anybody come down here for a while.”
Perhaps, Tom thought, Flick was changing into bathing trunks—but why in the main cabin, why not forward?
In Flicker’s absence the cockpit grew silent. Audrey gazed off to the southward, scanning the horizon, it seemed, for a black cloud the size of a man’s hand, a harbinger of Esmé. Dottie took the binoculars out of the case, and without looking through them she began to flex them at the central joint that controlled the distance between the eye pieces, open, closed, open, closed, over and over, until Tom felt like yapping at her for God’s sake to knock it off.
Then noises of a catastrophe suddenly began to come up from below—a garbled roar, falsetto shrieks, a clatter of pots and pans. The girls both sat up straight, and they looked at each other in a reflexive and intimate sharing of a preparation to laugh. And now indeed the racket below was capped by a long run of bass laughter of operatic villainy. One last pathetic falsetto outcry. The bass ho-ho-ha of a desperado once again.
One hairy hand, then another, gripped the sill of the companionway, and slowly up over the edge came Flick’s head wrapped in a bandanna he had made from a Hermes scarf of Dottie’s; there was a black cardboard patch over one eye, tied on with marlin cord. The big nose, reddened with lipstick, perched on the sill in a stealthy pause. The uncovered eye darted here and there.
Rills of pretended fright and laughter poured from the girls. Tom felt a warmth at the center of the puzzling glumness that had settled in him even during this glorious sail, and he smiled.
Up came the rest of the face. Between the teeth, its line transecting the unshaven jowls, was Audrey’s breadknife dripping ketchup.
Both girls shrieked, and Dottie flew across the cockpit, and the two wives hugged each other, giggling and squealing.
Very funny and attractive, Tom thought, already analyzing, tidying; what made it so attractive was Flick’s having gone to such trouble for one moment’s naive gag. But the prank was spoiled for Tom by the globes of tomato sauce falling on the pallid, scrubbed teak, marking circlets of crimson, and he tried without success to be casual as he dived into the lazuret for his sponge to wipe the spillage away.
As he sat back down at the wheel he looked at the girls, both still gasping at the end of the flurries of their laughter, and he thought of their coolness with each other when they had been aboard with him before Flick’s arrival. Then he began to wonder where that black patch had come from.At that moment it occurred to him, as for some reason it never had before, that Harmony had a bad liver. Her flaw was a rotten liver down there in her belly next to her spine. She was a sick boat. Then Tom saw that that small cold core of glumness he had been feeling all morning had to do with his sincere hatred of livers, the hatred that was forever invading his mind, his hatred of every element of the huge, viscous, muddy, reddish-brown gland that took up so much housing in the human gut, hatred of any and all Spigelian lobes, Glisson’s capsules, omental tuberosities, fissures of ducti venosi—detailed and closely focused hatreds which he had begun to suspect were simply encodings for other kinds of deep, deep hatreds lying there against his wishes in the right side of his own abdomen, manufacturing gallons of spiritual gall. To his mind the liver was surely where the worst sins had their bed: anger, pride, envy, and laziness. In this century the other sins, having other seats, had become almost virtues: lust was a sign of vigor and civil liberty; covetousness was the hot key to success; gluttony was excusable because merely compensatory. But those other four, the ones he now thought of as the liverish sins, they were the miseries that caused most misery. He didn’t want them in himself; he wanted to be a decent man. He had used to believe in surgery, but you could not isolate anger and carve it out from all that slippery tissue, pride was not divisible, and envy grew on being cut. Laziness—the biggest trouble-maker of all, the enemy of the word “exact”—was wildly self-regenerative.
He suddenly wanted to go below and be by himself. The girls were still intermittently chuckling. Flick in his pirate get-up seated himself again in his nest of spoilage, and he began giving the girls foxy looks with his uncovered eye. That patch?
“Listen, big bad boy,” Tom said. “Will you take the helm a few minutes?”
Tom stood up, realizing that this was the first time since the Hamdens had come aboard that he had yielded the wheel to anyone else. “The course is two six six. Try to keep right on the button, O.K.?”
Flick stepped to the wheel and, with one hand on a spoke, remaining standing, he bent his knees and shaded his eyes, buccaneer-style, and scanned the horizon and sniffed at the air for a scent of hostility. He started to growl and then as Tom plunged down the companionway he gave out several deep barks and finally began to bay like a moon-broken bloodhound. The girls flew into new giggles.Tom wanted to confide in his log book. He had checked the very minute of Harmony’s passing the Texas tower but had not written it down; and he had other messages of precision to enter: course, wind direction, wind velocity, barometric pressure, tide and current data. And inner measurements? Vectors of mental drift? He dropped onto the settee on the port side and slid in under the cabin table, and for a moment he covered his face with his hands. And he saw vividly against the darkened screen of his eyelids: Audrey. She seemed to be waving him back, pushing air with her hands, warning him against something unseen; there was an urgency about her gestures, yet it seemed to him, without his seeing it at all clearly, that her face was serene, radiant, and sensuous. Tom tore his hands away and opened his eyes, and he turned on the seat, reached up to the bookshelf, lifted out the little maplewood lee-bar, and took down his precious log book.
The book fell open at the front cover, and Tom knew at once why he had wanted to come below.
Into the black, cardboardish end paper of the book ran a ragged gash which, deep into the page, began to circle and scoop, and it ended in a hole about the size of a hen’s egg. Tom searched then for other clues and soon found on the settee beside him, crudely and tactlessly left in the open, a pair of nail scissors, his ball of marlin twine, and numerous scraps and trimmings of the black stuff. He picked up the ball of twine and put it to his nose and drew in the smell of boats, caulking smell, rope-locker smell—the smell which, savored in deepest gloom of wintertime, had the power of evoking faraway sunlit wavetops, a canted mast, splashing bow waves, a warm summer breeze on a helmsman’s cheek. But the smell did not help him this time; the breeze was right there, above, and he was on the heeling boat right then.
He flipped the pages of the log book and carefully entered the figures that were in his mind.
Then he went above again and walked the length of the cockpit and said, “Thanks, Flick, I’ll take it.”
“Kee-rist!” Hamden said, harking back to the old joke about the parrot whose cage was covered in daytime by its female owner just long enough for her to couple with a lover. “That was a short night!” Didn’t Tom trust him? He shrugged, winked his one eye at the girls, and gave way to the skipper.
Tom sat down astraddle the wheel box and looked at the compass. Flick, having kept the girls in stitches, had obviously not been paying the slightest attention to the course and had worn off by nearly twenty degrees.
Tom said nothing. Bringing Harmony up to her course he hated himself for saying nothing.
“Oooh, Tommy! Look! Over there!”
Audrey, on the high side of the slanting cockpit, was leaning forward and pointing to leeward with a bare arm flung straight out to its fingertip, and her face was wearing a mask of pure childishness—eyes huge, mouth hanging open, cheeks reddened with circus delight.
Tom, turning his eyes to see whatever she had seen, warmed to her reflex of calling out to him. Had she realized how angry he was? She had called him Tommy, and he knew that she used the diminutive only at the extreme ends of the range of her feelings: when she was full of love and when she was furious. This time the sound had been good, and he was taken aback by the strength of his gratitude.
“Whee! There!”
He saw three porpoises leaping. In the sunlight the wet gray backs gleamed like stainless steel. There came two more! A calf! All on Harmony cried out with envious pleasure at the sight of such carefree play; each strong jump built a shining arch of exuberance. Silver games on a clean blue day! There must have been a school of a dozen, and all of them, with bursts of aspiring to a higher element and splash-less falls to the home one, were driving in at a shallow angle toward Harmony’s fish-like hull.
“They’re coming in. They’ll be at the bow,” Tom said. “You’d better get up there to see them.”
The other three ran forward, and soon they were perched at the windward side of the bow, Audrey gripping the jib-stay, the pirate next, and Dottie outside with a hand on the lifeline, all three bent at the waists, Flick with his arms around the two girls; and Tom was alone—at his own suggestion, alas. Often he had seen these friendly creatures playing at the forefoot of Harmony, shimmering blue-gray under the surface, seeming to speed through the water with no effort at all, nuzzling at the breast of the boat, rolling, listening perhaps to the bow waves’ rush or to the wind’s singing poured down to them through the thrumming stays and chain plates and hull, looking upward with little pig eyes, their undershot mouths seeming to smile and smile; and now, as the school came close aboard, some leaping alongside with wet blowing sounds and others taking turns at the bow under the eyes of those three, and as Tom could see the human backs jerking in response to exhilarating glimpses of the sheer fun of those swimmers, and as the three heads turned to shout and share and almost rub cheeks and kiss, Tom felt a flood of melancholy self-pity. He had told his crew to go forward; he wished he had not; he wished he could see the bow-play himself. Was the little calf there, learning a new sport? Could the porpoises, rolling to turn up their eyes, see the human faces looking down? Did they with their good minds think the people were having a gloriously happy time up there on the boat?
Audrey, leaning forward with that florid arm across her back, drew his attention and held it. What was the hint of grief in her straining now at such pleasure? He remembered; seeing her bending over in this way reminded him. One morning at breakfast time, about a month before, he had gone into the kitchen of the apartment and had come on Audrey, bent forward over the counter with almost this very curve of the back, with her forehead down on a wooden cutting board, her hands flat on the Formica on either side of her head, in an attitude of sudden illness or profound worship—an attitude, at a level of myth that seeped into his shocked mind, of preparation for human sacrifice; light blue smoke poured out of the toaster, whose timing mechanism was flawed and which she had apparently been watching. He put a hand gently on her back, feeling the two rounds of the pushed-together shoulderblades. Her face came up, streaked with runnels of tears, and she looked at him as if from beyond an unbridgeable gulf. She turned away and would not speak. He tried to connect her pain with a minor quarrel they had had a couple of nights before, when each had downed an extra martini before dinner and both had, as the evening unfolded, made less and less sense about their lives.
But only now, at Harmony’s wheel, seeing her back bent again, being hugged, did he make the true connection. He saw that small bedroom in their first apartment, with the faded cornflower-patterned wallpaper and the brass bedstead Audrey had found, which he loved to polish, and the fragrant Bouvardia, for which she had such a specific green thumb, in the small sunny window; a Sunday afternoon, a series of unsatisfactory games of backgammon, restlessness, a dark turn away from the benign mood of the second third of her term, off to the flicks to try The Hustler, a worried murmur, taxi home, lying on her back with legs up, brow wet and sheet-white, the gynecologist away for the weekend, the g.p. off for the day and the answering service for his cover vaguer with each call, the unmistakable pulsing of the pain, its rhythm speeding up with the inexorability of a bolero, the look dawning on Audrey’s face that all the euphoric plans, the dollhouse anticipations, the before-handed purchases—the bassinette, the tiny nightgowns soft as chick down, the insanely premature Winnie the Pooh, bought to appease recollections—all those things were looming as folly, as embarrassment. Then from this tone of genteel loss the occasion suddenly went to the outer limits of grimness: the mythic flood loosed on the bedspread, a writhing struggle on the bathroom floor to hold, to keep, or else to bear, and at last the empty, cauterized, never-to-be-the-same look…Tom could not remember much about the second time, which had been much less violent, perhaps because far less a surprise, but all the myriad pictures of the first were arranged and stored in his mind like the frames of a stop-action film…
The show was over. The three up forward straightened up, and looking off to starboard Tom saw the porpoises wheeling away toward shallows again.
As the crew came aft Tom half expected to see tears streaming down Audrey’s face again; not at all, she was in a rapture.
Flick began shouting to Tom. “They want to talk with us! They’re trying to get in touch!”
Dottie’s face was oddly twisted, and as she jumped over the high coaming down onto the cockpit seat and then to the deck, she said with an edge of impatience, “Oh, Flick, let it rest.”
But Flick couldn’t, and he began to rattle on about the Lilly experiments with dolphins in the Virgin Islands, and about the patterns of dolphin speech, which, squeaking, he began to try to sound out, and about their responses to synthetic stimuli, and about the possibility that they might be trained one day to help with fishery as sheep dogs help with flocks—and then he was saying that some day computers might help us find the keys to open talk with all the creatures around us. There was a rapidity and a flatness to Flicker’s utterances now that seemed tuned by some rheostat of obsession—his talent, his joy, his limitation.
Dottie, hearing that mechanical rigidity in his voice, began to kick up her heels—talked loudly about the porpoises’ dear little eyes, cutting into, and breaking off, Flick’s steady hum.
Tom searched Audrey’s face. He could not find the portentous shadows, bending-over shadows, he had fully expected to see. He only saw that she was welded by some kind of solid-state connection to that monotone of inner passion in Flick’s voice. Communication, indeed! Who could ever begin to know what another being was really trying to say?
In the next hour the breeze slowly dropped away. Long before the chop began to flatten out Tom felt the softening of the air on his cheek, and he saw the needle of the Kenyon slip from six through five and four until Harmony was easing through the sea at just better than three knots, and he felt her big genny go weak each time the mast fell away from the wind on the rise of a swell; he knew he would have to start the engine sooner or later.
A subtle change was coming over the sky. The air was still clear; they were out of sight of land, and the horizon was sharp as the edge of a table all the way around. It was far ahead, to the west and south, and very high above the earth, that a huge transparency of vaporous change was becoming visible. A thin gray hood was being pulled up the sky.
Tom doubted whether the others had noticed any of this. He had heard the brass clock strike eight times—the strokes of noon according to ship’s-clock code; and he suggested beer and sandwiches, and the girls went below.
Flick was still going on about understanding wild animals. “Like the mix of voices on the overseas phone—you know how the bits of sound are all scrambled up on the transmitting end and then reconstituted into words by the receiving end? Some day we’ll be able to do that—more than that—with say a cat’s meow: unscramble the tonality and inflection of the meow and reconstitute it into human words that the cat meant. We already have translating devices for human languages.”
“Cats might be a good place to start,” Tom said. “They see right through people.”
Tom observed for a moment the literalness of Flick’s mind causing him trouble with this line. He would have to reject the idea of cats’ having X-ray eyes before he could understand that Tom had meant that it might not be altogether comfortable to get into conversation with them.
“No,” Flick said, “I was thinking of the vibrations of their voices—so easy to chop up and analyze.”
By the time lunch was over the sails were slatting. Tom knew he should turn on power, but he wanted Flick to demand it. He went below and dead-reckoned Harmony’s noon position and noted the tenuous weather change in his log book, which first fell open again, as if of its own sense of outrage, to its violated endpaper. As he was sitting at the cabin table, hearing the boom sway and the loose cable of the topping lift drum along the big sail, the expected call came from the cockpit.
“Hey, Medlar, fella, whatever you do, don’t shoot that albatross.”
That was all Tom wanted. He went above at once, his expectancy eased, and started the engine. Audrey moved forward to lower the sails, and Flick, suddenly happy, followed her.
Within an hour the sea was flat and shiny and immense, and the afternoon lights were eerie, for Harmony seemed to be moving into a huge open mother-of-pearl-lined shell of weather, one wing sky, one wing sea. A tip of a bluff of Block Island was visible now at the inner hinge of the shell, twenty-five miles away, and so pellucid was the air that Tom thought that with a powerful glass he would have been able to see men on that cliff-tip, perhaps bending and rising in a steady persistence of some kind of stone-lifting work; in his imagination the sight of them was sharp. The afternoon looked silent, but all the evident stillness was held at a distance by the sounds of Harmony’s exhaust, now popping in the open, now steamily muffled, as the gentle glazed swells rhythmically lifted the boat’s little metal anus out of the water awhile, then put it under awhile. The dinghy, under tow from the stern on its taut painter, whispered on its path of foam.
Audrey, peering into the vast distances of the afternoon, saw a mast ahead, a bit to the right, so far away that the hull under the swaying spar was not yet to be seen. She pointed it out to Tom, and he, thinking to please her, and with the landfall already made, changed his course slightly to pass close to the oncoming stranger.
This vessel, approaching near at hand many minutes later, turned out to be a jewel of a cutter with a brightwork hull, its mahogany planks deep red under the glistening varnish. Everyone on both boats waved, and Tom, looking at Audrey as he spoke and holding her eyes, told a story of a hailing at sea—how old Joshua Slocum, at the turn of the century, having taken three years to sail around the world single-handed on his sloop Spray and having floated through raptures and nightmares of seamanship, standing one day under full sail homeward along the north coast of Brazil, met a steam vessel which proved to be the battleship Oregon. She came alongside him, flying signal flags that meant, “Are there any men-of-war about?” Slocum in his tiny craft, not knowing that the Spanish-American war had recently started, knowing little more than that he had done a great thing in sailing around the world alone, hoisted an answering signal: “Let us keep together for mutual protection.”
Let us keep together. Audrey’s eyes turned casually enough to the passing yacht. She asked for the binoculars, and Dottie handed them to her.
“It’s called Vesta,” Audrey said behind the glasses.
Tom went below and took Lloyd’s Register of Yachts from the bookshelf and carried the fat book above and laid it like an offering in Audrey’s lap. She loved to look up passing boats, and she read aloud the description of Vesta, and while Flick sat silent she and Tom and Dottie made up scandalous stories about the owner, who was from Houston, Texas, and had shamelessly rendered his sea-going adventures tax-deductible by registering the boat in the name of his firm.
But: “You didn’t tell me…” It was true that he never uttered a word to her about certain things—some that seemed not worth telling, some that would have burned his tongue to tell, some that he thought, rightly or wrongly, she should be spared out of kindness. Not a word had he ever said about that afternoon in the boatyard.
He had decided to do Harmony’s fitting-out himself that spring—the second year the fat boat was his. Boatyards dislike having owners playing at working on their own boats: dilettantes of labor having “fun” sandpapering, arrogantly mislaying tools, leaving scars of incompletion, making idiotic mistakes that fall back on the yard crews to rectify in a hurry just when the worst rush is on; but Tom, willing to pay for hours safe from a phone that might be connected to a liver, had bribed old Burkett to break his rules. Tom sat in the cockpit awhile, that afternoon, getting in a boat mood. It was a day at the end of April when the soft air bore sun-drenched promises. Harmony was cradled near the top of the launching track not far from a great-headed weeping willow down whose undulating tresses the gold of a new season’s life seemed to trickle and drip as if the sun’s rays were condensing and accumulating on the sap-sticky tendrils. The whole tree was a celebration. Tom, putting off going down into the winter-musty cabin, dreamily watched the tree’s big slow hula dance. But then he thought of the puzzle down in Harmony’s guts, and he made himself go below.
He had seen the strange clue the previous weekend, on his first day of work that spring. He had been cleaning out the bilges and, lifting the forward floorboards out, had come on it: the huge bronze ring-nut at the head of the forward of two great bolts that ran all the way down to the lead keel. The nut stood free of the wood of the keelson by a full eighth of an inch. In winter storage the boat sat on her keel instead of dangling it, and the weight of the hull had driven the flaw up into full view.
Thinking about it during the week he had remembered two happenings from the previous season that he had not previously connected in his mind: in midsummer the jib had sagged and he had taken up firmly on the forestay turnbuckle, and in late summer there had been a pesky seepage into the bilges. Had he pulled her up too hard and somehow hogged her bow?
Now, armed with an enormous wrench and a tiny can of penetrating oil, he went below to tighten the nut. He lifted up the floorboard. He could not see too well, and he climbed above-decks to take the canvas hood off the cabin skylight. Below again, drenched with a shimmering light reflected from the willow, he took a close look. What he saw sent him hurrying to the ice chest to fetch his ice pick.
There was a washer-shaped depression in the wood of the keelson around the throat of the bolt. Tom probed with the ice pick at the edges of this circle, and then his heart really sank. The wood was spongy.
He drenched the little wound with red lead and fitted a steel plate under the nut to distribute the pressure, and he took up hard on the bolt.
Boats, like men, all have flaws. Perhaps it was knowing this that had led Tom to be charitable and to forgive Harmony hers. Since the earliest pushing off from a sea beach of a dugout log, sailors have searched for the perfect craft and never found her. Every vessel seems to have her weak point—an overhang aft that will take a spanking from steep following seas; a prow giving way too generously to cheeks which pound a heading chop; an obscure leak, elusive, dormant in fair weather, always there again whenever the boat begins to work her seams in a seaway. The sea’s seeming denial of the very possibility of perfection is one of its lures. It took Tom a year, until after he saw how the plate he had installed had bitten into the diseased wood, and after he had begun a thorough study of dry rot, to realize that his red-leading and the plate itself had not halted the infection but had in fact sealed it in and undoubtedly made things worse. There was only one thing to do: remove the sick wood from the boat. Take it out and burn it. But how? Every frame and floor beam was tied to the keelson. It was a surgeon’s nightmare—not liver at all, come to think of it, but a non-regenerative vital organ that simply could not be excised either in part or as a whole, a very spine. Nothing to do but trust the thickness of the timber and tighten the nut again and again, a thread at a time, winter and summer, year after year. Only this summer he had not done it.
Last winter with the help of old Burkett’s disenchanted eye Tom had found out the cause of the rot: In a moment of laziness, or carelessness, or making-do in the old Yankee way to save a few pennies, the boatbuilder had made an unforgivable choice of wood for the keelson. Harmony and her gear were exquisitely assembled, like a masterwork of parquets and inlays, from great woods from the corners of the earth: Honduran mahogany for wheel and coaming trim, seats and decks of teak from Burma, Norway-pine planking, a dinghy of Port Orford cedar, spars of spruce from Nova Scotia, hackmatack knees, white-ash battens, honey-locust cabin bulkhead, cherry-faced drawers against butternut cabinetwork—and timbers and frames of white oak, as hard as the screws that bound them. But when it came to the biggest piece of wood of all, the keelson, running like an inoperable backbone all along the hull, the builder had settled for a timber of cheap wood from roundabout his shipyard—a piece of local red oak. Burkett, on his hands and knees, reaching with the oilstone-narrowed blade of his clasp knife down into the bilges to chip at the big timber, had shaken his grizzled head and said, “Knew bettuh. He knew bettuh.” There just wasn’t any doubt. It was a lousy piece of red oak, Quercus borealis—notorious for checking and cracking and harboring insidious spores.
You could be sure the builder had not told the man for whom he had built the boat. It was a secret place in Harmony. Tom, sitting now at the wheel, staring off into calm air that was pure and limpid as elemental truth, reflected that he had not told his crew, his companions in pleasure and danger, about that secret place. He had never told his wife Audrey about that secret place. Her accusations were absolutely justified. There were things which—assuring himself that “honesty” was too often used in human intercourse as an outlet for vicious cruelty—he was satisfied to keep to himself. But Flicker, damn him, harping on transmission of data, with even his porpoises who wanted to tell us something. What was it they had wanted to say just now at Harmony’s forefoot? What was it? What was it?
“Would you take a crack at the pump, Flick?” And then, in response to the blank look that came from the one visible eye: “It’s right under you. Take off the seat cushion and lift up the seat flap.”
“Here, I’ll show you,” Audrey said.
Soon Audrey and Flick were shoulder-to-shoulder, leaning over, their backs to the cockpit, and they were evidently lifting all the items of Flick’s treasure off the seat cushions in order to get at the pump.
Tom dropped his eyes away from the hips and buttocks of those two, which, angled out toward him into the open area of the cockpit, were expressively responding to activities that their bodies screened from view, and to give his eyes something to do, he checked the compass; for some time he fastened his gaze on the little black lubber line and on the degree mark of his bearing on the floating card, and he tried to rivet the two together, steering Harmony down a railroad-track course.
He began thinking of Hamden’s reflex whenever he, Tom, gave a command; no matter how courteously he framed the order, Flick seemed at once to dissolve into a bearing of vagueness, evasiveness. He seemed not to be able to comprehend what Tom was saying. Even making allowances for Flick’s not being the experienced sailor he had made himself out to be at wintertime cocktail parties, this response of fogginess was obviously not based on his failure to understand words Tom spoke. Rather he seemed not to be able to believe that Tom, “idle” at the helm, could possibly mean to command him to jump about doing physical labor, and in a big hurry, too. Communication was not just a matter of what Flick kept calling “input,” it was not just a question of clear and faultless utterance—especially when it came to command; giving commands and acceding to commands required a thorough-going interdependence. Tom thought about skippers of boats who scream at their crews, men who suffer a metamorphosis on sitting down at their tillers or wheels—mild and courteous ashore; imperious, tyrannical, unreasonable, hysterical in command on the water. Tom flattered himself that he was not like that, for he saw himself as more gentle and patient, if anything, at Harmony’s wheel than anywhere else, but now he realized that one specific goad—this response of indefiniteness of Flick’s—might make an unpleasant commanding officer of him. Flick’s elusiveness was surely a veiled form of insolence. The pirate get-up, which he apparently had no intention of shedding, intensified the effect.
Now Tom, with eyes still glued to the compass, heard the gagging sounds of the pump’s beginning to draw, and after a half dozen strokes the first splashes of salty foam, then hard water, into the forward part of the cockpit, from where the bilgewater would drain away through the self-bailing cockpit’s scuppers. He was both soothed by the sound—for the command was after all being obeyed—and disturbed by it: There was a solid flow from the pump, in due course, which spoke of the extent of the seepage around the keel bolt.
Tom looked up and saw to his astonishment that Audrey, not Flick, was at the pump.
Flick was sitting across the cockpit, leaning back in grand piratical style, arranging his loot all around him.
Tom had not heard any words spoken while he had been gazing at the compass, but now he had the feeling that Flick had somehow conned Audrey into doing the work for him. Command, indeed!
“Hey,” Tom said in a sharp tone, “I asked you to bail.”
Flick’s uncovered eye turned slowly toward Tom. The pupil appeared to be in the process of melting; its look was going vague again. “She wanted to,” he said, and he pointed a long forefinger at Audrey as if she were an object.
Without breaking her rhythm, pulling up and pushing down, Audrey said, “I enjoy it.”
“That’s very damn funny,” Tom said. “You’ve never once told me in all the time we’ve had this boat that you got a charge out of pumping.”
“Well, I just started enjoying it.”
Was she making fun of him?
Dottie, sitting on the port side of the cockpit half way between Flick and Tom, suddenly broke in like a tattletale at a playground quarrel. “She wouldn’t let him.”
Tom began to tremble. “Listen, you lazy prick,” he said, “when you’re on a boat you have to do your share of the work.”
Flick, in his woman’s scarf and eye patch from Tom’s log book, bathed Tom with a one-eyed look that seemed to come from a thousand miles away, and he said, “Why?”
“It’s true,” Audrey said, still rocking up and down. “I wouldn’t let him.”
“The reason why,” Tom said to Flick, “is that sometimes things have to be done in a hurry, or the whole crew gets in danger. Much as we might all enjoy it, you can’t have anarchy on a boat. There isn’t even time for democracy.” Tom realized that his anger was making him pompous.
“Surely no one’s in danger now,” Flick said from his great distance, waving a hand out over the level silver sea.
Tom felt very much in danger; his anger flamed into rage. “God damn it, Audrey,” he said. “I don’t like this. I ask this guy to do his first lick of work and—pumping’s man’s work!”
“A woman can do it. As I am demonstrating. Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty.” She broke off to rest awhile.
Flick began shouting. “What do you mean, ‘first lick? I’ve been hoisting and dousing and furling and pitching the frigging anchor overboard and hauling it up again. I’ve been extremely co-operative. In my opinion. Anyway, the girls are right, as usual: Audrey wouldn’t let me bail.”
They were having fun with him. Tom could see that they were enjoying themselves no end. He wanted to cry out to Audrey that they weren’t being fair.
But it was Dottie who spoke next, and she was in a state. “He’s a parasite! Watch out, Audrey. He’ll suck your blood. He’ll drain you till there’s nothing left of you but dust, dust, dust.” Dottie leaned over toward Flick’s circle of pirate treasure and snatched a Kleenex from his box, and Tom saw that she was weeping.
At that moment Tom intercepted a look between Audrey and Flick that carried him over the brink into knowledge he would have given anything not to have had. He took in both faces, her two eyes and his one locked in an unguarded moment of conspiracy, false security and—what Flick preached for machines and humans alike—totally open communication. They gave themselves away. Was it a surging feeling of triumph over Dottie that had led them to be so incredibly reckless?
Tom had a momentary impulse to throw Harmony’s big bronze gear-shift lever (it sparkled! he polished it every evening!) into reverse. Couldn’t he move the boat, its now lost crew, his understanding, the terrible incaution of those two, backwards in space and time into the scene they had just been through, then push the lever forward again, so they could take a slightly different course out of it?
But he did nothing. He sat limp at the wheel. Harmony moved forward through the flat sea. It was all being printed in his mind with a dry-aired clarity: the huge sky with its reptilian eye-scale of gray mist winking up from below, the loom of Block Island now a dark heap along the horizon ahead, the molten-metal sea sliding past at an irretrievable rate—a scene, in all its parts, of immutability, the sharpness of sight itself seeming to say to the inner eye, “This is the way things are, there are no other possibilities”; Dottie snuffling into fluttering paper tissues, having lost far more by giving herself away than those two, being two, could ever lose; Flick projecting his enormous feelings right through that childish birthday-party disguise, immensely sincere in his absurdity, the one eye throwing an open shaft to Audrey, the other covered by the cutting from Tom’s beloved book, the lipstick-rouged nose a drunkard’s nose, the bristling skin about the mouth touched with the most enviable pain; and Audrey, leaning slightly forward, everything about her so utterly familiar, and most familiar of all the softened cheeklines, the eyes expressive of an almost pitying sympathy, the lips on the edge of a pout, and colors here and there of lightness, of humor, of whole-heartedness, and of that same unbelievable pain of desire—the expression Tom had so long ago come to think he owned as his.
Something had to be done; the moment had to be ruptured. “Darling,”—the word leaped to his tongue—“would you take the wheel a minute?”
Audrey was on her feet, her face arranged almost too quickly; there was a crudeness not properly hers in her alacrity. “Sure, darling,” she said. That word flew again—to his ear, this time. It was firmly spoken, without a trace of awareness of irony, it seemed.
“Keep her as she goes.”
“How far do we have yet?” Was she holding him? Did she mean that she was…she was at least sorry?
“That’s what I want to check, among other things.”
He went below. He stayed a long time. He was sitting staring at the raped endpaper of his log book when Dottie came stumbling down the companionway. She stood for a moment at the end of the cabin table with a look on her face much like the one she had given him on waking up in her bikini the afternoon before: Help me! Change me! He wondered now exactly what she had meant then. Her warning to Audrey a few minutes ago had told Tom that she had intuited the whole truth long before he had understood a particle of it. How long had she known? And what did it matter how long she had known? And what if he had used her body under the sun in the cockpit while those two slept below? Would that have changed anything? Almost as if she understood his unspoken questions, Dottie vaguely shook her head and went forward; soon he heard her sobbing.
He turned on the radio to drown her out.
He was thinking—scarcely hearing whatever was being transacted on the radio; one endless marathon of commercials—thinking of his old theme, so often carelessly uttered over cocktails on Harmony, of escape and confrontation. That, he had said again and again, was the point of sailing. You got away from the world and faced the universe—your naked self in its relation to chaos. A cruising boat was where, disconnected from society, you could get down to rock bottom about your place in it, and in nature. Big chatter over drinks. Had he ever imagined that the talk would come home? Those two were alone up there now, free to exchange their telltale looks. What bothered Tom most of all was that he had been so opaque—so unwilling, or so unable, to perceive the loss he had obviously suffered some time since. How long had this been going on? Now confrontation had been rammed down his throat by a remark of Dottie’s and a vibrant glance traded by those two, and the paradox was that there was no escape. He was on a boat and could not run.
Slowly there began to trickle through to his mind something compelling about a sound on the radio. He focused his attention. A man was slowly reading. It was the hesitant meteorologist with the dry voice of the morning advisory. He was saying that just after dawn Esmé had suddenly begun gathering speed, and that she was veering again. She was rushing up the sea at nearly thirty miles an hour, northward. Tom turned off the radio without even hearing the man out, and he went above. Audrey’s face was pink and oblivious. Tom sat to one side, letting her go on steering. There was no escape.
It seemed to take forever to skirt the northern point and get around to the entrance to the Great Salt Pond. The sky and the sea and the bluffs were gray. Tom was back at the wheel again, and the concerns of the approach—watching the bearings on the creeping islandscape, light thoughts of navigation, checking the chart, ticking off the buoys, keeping the log—all those familiar mechanical rituals of boat life began to absorb him and save him. Flick had at last taken off the scarf and the eye patch, but the lipstick was still on his nose. He and Audrey appeared not even to have noticed that every aspect of existence was now changed; they were on guard, they were being discreet—and they seemed to have no idea that they had given themselves totally away and that their prudence now had an almost comical transparency. Dottie had made a disconcerting recovery; she was right back where she had been beforehand, cheerful, agreeable, trying to please everyone. Flick had casually dropped the oval of black cardboard with its laces of marlin on the seat cushion, not two feet from Tom, and Dottie had picked it up and kept twirling it around her index finger, as if in this way she could assert Flick’s being entwined, still, with her.
They bore down on the heavy jetty jutting out to the northwestward and swung in through the throat of the Pond; with a vague thought of Esmé, Tom noted the Coast Guard station to the right of the entrance. It was a fairly long pull across the wide sheet of Great Salt Pond. The place was crowded with sportsmen’s boats. Tom took Harmony to the end of Champlin’s pier to fill up with gas; standing on the dock after they had tied up, he quietly asked the attendant, a leather-faced man in khakis, whether any moorings were available.
“Are you serious?” the man said; he was loud and cheerful. “With this harrycane supposed to be coming, we was all filled up ten minutes after they switched the weather report around on us—what was that, the two o’clock?”
“What’s he saying?” Audrey, apparently having heard some interesting word, stirred in the cockpit. Dottie, sitting beside her, looked pale.
“About a mooring,” Tom called back over the ticking of the gas pump.
“Are you going to take a mooring?”
“They have none.”
“Oh.”
Had he and Audrey come to this kind of inconsequence? He was not interested any more in forecasts, portents; nor did he wish to discuss them. He and Audrey talked about a mooring without a word about the meaning of taking a mooring. The concept of precaution was no longer a serious one for them to discuss; he had a moment of wondering, for he could not clearly remember, what his insurance policies on Harmony actually covered. He took on water and a thirty-pound chunk of ice, and he tipped the man with a weathered face a dollar on a total charge of less than four dollars. Was he, he wondered, paying off a kind of debt to the Edgartown garbage woman? The indifference of the marina attendant as he stuffed the bill into his trouser pocket was sufficient rebuke to his folly. There was no one for Tom to impress—least of all himself.
He cut up the ice into chunks, which Flick handed down to him as he fitted them into the ice chest. After handling each piece, Flick loosely tossed his fingers this way and that to shake off the chill. Flick was acting somewhat put-upon; perhaps, Tom bitterly thought, he felt that Audrey should do this ice work.
They cast off. For an anchorage Tom eased over toward the old steamer pier. There seemed to be hundreds of power boats of all sizes moored and anchored in the Pond. Tom looked for an open place, for he remembered that the water was deep here and he wanted plenty of scope on which to swing in backing winds. But everywhere he went there were stinkpots, and as the other three, a team again, picked out names on transoms—Ma’s Mink, Edannboblu, Magic Carpet with dinghy Throw-Rug—he went in widening circles, as if searching for something dropped overboard. There was no good place. Finally he anchored, shaking his head, in twenty-odd feet of water not far from the nun buoy nearest the steamer pier. He noticed that a light breeze had come in from the southeast.
They went ashore to Deadeye Dick’s for dinner; it seemed to be understood that the cabin of Harmony was too cramped to contain them that evening. They rowed to the New Harbor pier and climbed ashore and soon entered a room steamy with seafood smells.
After three drinks and a half-eaten swordfish steak with beer Flick got the idea that he wanted to rewrite his will. He borrowed a stub of a pencil from the waitress and he began to scribble on a grease-spotted doily with lobsters and jellyfish printed in red on it.
“Don’t worry, Dottie,” he said. “I’m going to take care of you. I just want to give old Skipper here my inventions, you know, my thought on fixing up sailboats, all the rights and royalties and perquisites attaining thereto.” He wrote in a scrawl, apparently setting down “perquisites attaining thereto.” “My idees. I don’t know how much they’re going to bring in if anything. Might be nothing, might be a potful. Can’t tell yet. How many witnesses you need?”
Tom said, “Never mind all that. We can do without your boat gimmicks.”
“How many witnesses for a last will and testamen’? Audrey? Dear Audrey, how many?”
Tom said, “I don’t want any part of your thinking-and-talking God-damn machines. Leave me out.”
Audrey said, “I think it’s three.”
“Got just the right number.”
“Christ,” Tom said, shifting ground, “you can’t use the people you’re giving it to for witnesses.”
“Miss. Miss!” Flick snapped his fingers at the waitress.
The girl, a frowsy-haired fat fisherman’s daughter in a dress of synthetic fabric through which the pattern of the lace of her slip showed, and through that the white outlines of her bra, came to the table giggling at the sight of Flick, as she had giggled earlier: the streaks of lipstick still ran down his big nose.
“Sign on the dotted line. It’s jus’ a legal statement, do us a favor, honey.”
The girl shook her head and backed away. “Uh-uh. None of that,” she said, turning as if to run.
“What’s the matter, baby, don’t you want to get involved?” Then Flick turned limpid eyes on Audrey. “ ’Mericans don’t care any more. They’ll hear a woman scream on a street, she’s right under the street lamp; they can see these guys frisking her—nobody liffs a finger.” Flick stood up and, bumping one table, went into the kitchen. There were shrieks of laughter from two women out of sight. Soon he came out again, waving the doily. “O.K., honey,” he said to the waitress, “your Momma signed, and the other lady. Come on, just your John Q. Hancock. You can read it. Here. Look. It’s harmless.”
But in the dark in the dinghy on the way out to the boat—the wind had almost died—he said, “Audrey? You got that paper of mine—did’n’ you put it in your bag? Gimme back. I’m gonna cancel. Stuffy ungrateful bastard.”
“Tear it up. Tear it up,” Tom said.
Audrey wouldn’t give Flick the doily. Flick said, “I know you, Audrey Medlar. You want your cut. Right? Fiffy per cent. Right?”
“Isn’t that a drop of rain?” Dottie asked. “Didn’t I feel a drop of rain?”
It was in fact beginning to rain.
“That’s good, then, isn’t it, Tom? If the rain comes without any wind, doesn’t that mean the storm isn’t going to be too bad?”
She must have taken everything in—the broadcast below decks, the exchange on the pier about the mooring. Poor, silent Dottie! She had it backwards. He did not tell her that but, rather, to encourage her, he said without lying, “The wind certainly has dropped out.” But to himself, slowly, rowing to the scanning of the lines, he recited the adage:
Wind before rain, soon to your ale;
Rain before wind, ’ware a fierce gale.
Tom stood on the foredeck in a furious wind which drove raindrops hard against his waterproofs, making a sound of dried peas in a gourd. It was seabottom dark. He did not know what time it was; a halyard rapping against a spreader had wakened him. The tiny battery-powered anchor light hanging from the forestay, swaying in the wind, cast a dim glow about it, making a shimmering globe of luminescence out of the raindrops flying past. Water ran in sheets down across his bare feet. His waterproof hood was drawn tight around his cheeks and chin; wet pellets struck his face. As wind-puffs rose in intensity they set up haunted-house whistlings at the tops of the tubular wooden chafing guards on the shrouds. The halyard was still slapping at the spreader with an importunate doggedness, like someone steadily knocking at an unanswered door, desperate to come in from the discomfort and fear of the vast, windy darkness. He listened to the whistling and beating and thought of the various things he should do. He had been roused from his berth and impelled to go above by a habit of thinking: Details matter. They really do matter. Put them together and they do matter.
He had been stupid not to bring any light above. He went aft and stood for some moments at the companionway hatch, wondering how he could get below to switch on the spreader lights without dripping all over everything; he knew he could not, it was hopeless, he would just have to grope and drip. He pushed back the hatch and went below as quickly as he could, and he fumbled over his bunk for a flashlight, found it, blipped it at the clock—three forty-seven—went aft to the power panel box behind the companionway ladder, poured brilliance into the box, found the switches he wanted, and flipped them: spreader lights and binnacle light. He tossed the flashlight on his berth and climbed above.
Now the whole boat was bathed by the floodlights that shone down from the spreaders: big raindrops driving slantwise the length of the boat, everything white and everything varnished and everything brass glistening with varied tonalities; and, all around, the black water pocked with a hissing gooseflesh. Tom lifted the binnacle hood and looked at the compass, its whited points and degrees pinkly glowing under the tiny infra-red bulb. The wind had indeed backed. It was north of east now. To be exact: East northeast a quarter east, seventy degrees. He supposed it would settle in at northeast for a few hours, perhaps many. He wished now he had listened with a less muddled ear to the afternoon forecast, and that he had picked up a late evening one. Details accumulate; they count. He would have to remember to check and log the barometer reading and time when he went below later.
He started swiftly to work. He set up canvas chafing gear on the anchor line at the bow chock. He took up hard with a winch crank on the halyards and reset the halyard stops to hold them away from the spars; the rapping ceased…
He paused then, as if trying to decipher the real message of this wind. A ferocious puff came running, and hard bits of water pelted his cheeks, and be became convinced—almost said out loud to the wind, “I believe you. I do.” And he set about two heavy and fateful chores to manifest his conviction that Esmé, deceitful and unpredictable, had simply outrun all her beautiful data that Flicker loved so much.
First he undressed the yawl—for he had heard of vessels ripped from their anchorages in gales by flapping sails that had come unfurled from their booms; he mistrusted the shock-cord he had installed to hold the sails in place. He took the mizzen off and stowed it for the time being in the cockpit. Then—far more trying task—he opened the gate-latch of the track on the mainmast and pulled down the slides of the luff of the mainsail, and wormed its foot forward along the boom track and got the whole heavy sail off at last. He damped the bulk of it down temporarily atop the cabin trunk by crisscrossing over it the free end of the working jib sheet.
He went below to the forward cabin and turned a light on there. Dottie and Flick both stirred, both turned their faces to the opposite outer skins of the yawl, and both lay oblivious. Dottie wore pajamas; Tom could spare a corner of his mind to notice that.
He burrowed for the two empty sail bags and put them out in the main cabin. Then, with grunts and thumps and clankings, none of which seemed to penetrate to the awareness of either Hamden, he lifted the heavy fluke anchor out of its seating in the forepeak, and he lay it on the deck directly under the hatch. Next he opened the hatch part way on its forward hinge, so that not much rain could drive in, and he fed out the inboard end of his heavy anchor line—beautiful creamy new Nylon stuff.
Within a difficult hour he readied his ship. First he crammed the sails into their bags, dropped the mizzen into the main cabin, and lashed the mainsail, inside its bag, into the dinghy cradle on top of the cabin trunk, using two strong spinnaker guys and webbing them tightly back and forth many times. Then he lifted the fluke anchor and its chain and Nylon line up on deck through the forward hatch; and he weighted the line, sixty feet from the chain, with a heavy spare flywheel that had been stored for this very purpose in a cockpit seat locker. He started the engine and swung out to the right on the light-anchor line and got the fluke anchor down and the flywheel overboard; then swung left with the motor’s help and managed to raise the Danforth anchor—for he did not believe in having two anchors down in winds that were sure to shift.
He was committed at last to the storm, whatever it might bring, with his vessel stripped and his heavy fluke anchor down on a weighted line.
He was burning inside his waterproofs, but a push of elation worked at his throat. He had known what the significant details were, had known their relative importance; and now he wanted to let loose into the baby-teeth of the storm a shout of invitation and defiance. But he stifled the cry before it had built to actual sound, because he saw a ghost beside him.
It was Audrey. Her hair and nightgown were sopping. How long had she been there watching him? Her face turned toward him as he looked at her; it glistened in the rain as though smeared with cold cream; her hair was plastered on her forehead; her lips were pulled back—a smile?—a chill?—and her teeth flashed in light reflected from the deck. Did she want to speak? Did she want to say, “Can I help you, darling?”
Could she help? Could she make amends? Could she do anything now?
What could he answer? Go below. Leave me alone. You’re getting soaked!
Not getting. Already. Everything was already as it was. He stood on the foredeck beside his unfaithful wife in the wind and rain, looking out, as she looked, too, into the darkness upwind.