There stood the gate of heaven, gleaming in evening sunlight: the marker bell outside tolling with that true-bronze tone of good cheer that sea bells have when the sky is blue; the long jetty of blasted rocks with veins of quartz and flecks of mica giving off diamond glints; the black cans and the red nuns and the two spindles steadfastly marking the sweet channel; and there, off to the left, on Indian Head—yes, that primitive dream of dry land—rocks and sand and bayberry bushes bathed in the light of the sun. The breeze, fresh but dry, was out of the north; the sea, so soon, was growing calm. They were coming back, all alive and afloat.
Harmony looked like one of those old junkmen’s wagons that used to clop around city streets picking up scrap metal and rags and broken furniture and mildewy-dusty magazines and papers, the driver chanting or perhaps pounding with a hammer on a clanging gong of a rusty wheel rim. Everything portable was coming up from below to dry; Dottie was scurrying with a pursed mouth, bringing things up, wringing them out, and spreading them here and there. The mattresses were slung over the main boom, clothing and towels flapped along the lifelines, and with Tom’s help she had even rigged bedsheets on the fly from the main and jib halyards, enormous flags of truce.
Audrey was at the wheel, her face like an ancient cliff; the rocks of her endurance had been rounded off not by weather but by pain. The gash over her left cheekbone, no longer bleeding but blood-caked, was putting out all around it a bloom of greenish bruise. Her right shoulder slumped; she steered with her left hand.
Flick rocked on the pump like a satyr at his endless labor of intrusion and withdrawal, up and down, in and out. He had pumped now with a mechanical insatiability for two hours, and he had won: there were only four inches of slop above the cabin floorboards now. Mute and dull, he was gaining on the flaw.
No one spoke. They were automatons, Tom thought, performing what had to be gotten through, not with energies of blood sugar and flash-flaming oxygen and sparking nerves, for those had been spent long since, early in the morning, but rather with some deep, sluggish reserve of aching and yearning tenacity which seemed to be drawn from the very marrow of the bones; or maybe (though he knew better) it somehow came from the gruesome liver. In any case, they moved; the crew did work as they had not in fair sailing. Tom’s own exhaustion was so profound that he felt as if he were hip-deep in some viscous quagmire, were being sucked down not by a quicksand but by a slowsand, if there could be such a thing; yet his legs and arms functioned as if some damp gray power akin to the invisible force of storms were pushing at them, some terrible wind of life and motion that he did not want to try just yet to understand.
He went forward to rig the Danforth anchor. There it lay in its seating near the mainmast, firmly lashed down and ready—could that be a tiny glimmer of smugness he felt on this side of the storm over something he had done?—and when he had untied its stock and shank and flat, angular palms and had lifted it to carry it forward, it seemed as light in his arms as papier-maché. How could it hold a yawl in a wind? With dead-looking fingers, wrinkled by hours of wetness, he unlashed the linen anchor line from its rack on the port side and made fast the shackle and cleated the line and hung the anchor out over the sheave on the bowsprit, all set to be let go once again to that deep mud bottom where its big brother, the fluke anchor, lay derelict, lost forever.
He looked up and saw that they were already inside the Great Salt Pond, and that they were in fact just passing the Coast Guard station, where, he noticed, the flags, both of warning and of patriotism, had been taken in from the huge cross-treed flagstaff; the huge doors at the top of the boat track yawned open. A jerking reflex made him look at his watch; it was running, and it said: six-twenty-three.
A frantic question suddenly beat at his mind. What time had it been—what day had it been—when they had passed that squarish white building on the way out to look for Esmé’s eye?
Tom went below in a great hurry to find the answer in his log book. The item would be dated; the item would be timed. He was coming back to “this world”; he needed to know about time in all its proportions; he wanted to put the hours in order.
Order! The chaos in the cabin must have been the product of some cosmic humor, a practical-joking bent of Esmé’s. The jack of hearts was on one burner of the stove. All the drawers, latched though they had been, were open, as though a prowler had been looking in nervous haste for jewelry. Knives and forks and spoons glinted in the shallows of the bilge; one walked on cutlery. A pair of dark glasses was lodged, lenses out, to view the world, astride the ship’s clock, which had stopped at three minutes past noon, as if in dismay at the effort of pushing into a new twelve hours of that sort. Time! Yes, he must find his log book.
The bookshelf was empty. The tide tables lay outspread on the ice chest, open at a page giving distances in nautical miles. Tom leaned forward, gripped by the pervasive irrelevances of this setting, and learned from the top of the column that it was two hundred fifty-nine nautical miles from Bar Harbor to Halifax. This struck him as nonsense and annoyed him, and he shut the soaked book and threw it toward the bookshelf; it fluttered to the wooden slats of the settee on the port side.
Dottie, leaning in at the opening of the companionway, called down, “Audrey wants to know where you want to anchor.”
“Tell her I want to know where she stowed the books.”
Dottie wore a kindly look of astonishment; it was as if she had been slapped and forgave. At last she turned away and seemed to be talking in a friendly way to the woman she had tried, a few hours before, to—to do what to? Soon her face came back toward Tom showing a bland look that may simply have reflected the total disinterestedness of total exhaustion, and she said, “She wants me to tell you we’re right at the anchorage. She wants to know if you want her to anchor where we were before.” Then, her expression modulating just enough toward puzzlement to indicate that what followed was her own contribution: “Would that be bad luck?”
“God damn it, tell her I want to know where she hid my log book.”
Dottie turned away again, and just then a blush, so hot as to make Tom perspire, burst on his face, for he remembered that he had come down and made entries in the log book in the channel on the way out, and that had been after Audrey had secured things in the cabin. The books had been on the shelf behind their restraining lee-bar; where were they all now?
Dottie’s face again. The same vacant expression. “I think you’d better come up here.”
Tom took one step up the ladder and saw that Audrey had slumped sidewise to the left away from the wheel. Flick had gone to her and was fumblingly hauling at her and turning the wheel without looking where Harmony was headed.
Tom ran up the ladder, jumped into the cockpit, cut the throttle, and pushed Flick aside from the wheel. Let him take care of the women; they’d been nursing him all day.
In the relative quiet of the idling motor Tom heard Audrey murmuring in Flick’s arms, “I’m all right. I just…I’m O.K. now.” But she still lay cradled, and Tom heard her say, “Darling, that black paper for your eye patch, couldn’t you have understood what his log book meant to him?”
“Don’t talk about me as though I were dead,” Tom grimly said.
“We’re all tired,” Dottie said, as if that extenuation of insults and rages made acceptance of “this world” any easier.
Tom put the engine in neutral, let Harmony shoot till she had no more forward life, and went up on the foredeck and let go the anchor, with a clanking plash of metal on pond surface. Then he returned to the cockpit and shut off the engine. Out of the dregs and lees of his former self came the words, “Good old engine.”
Silence. The universe drained of rushing sounds. The rigging quiet; tiny ripples on the water.
Harmony was alone in the port of refuge. Silent along the marina pier were the wrecks of the morning; silent on the shore were the torn and splintered and canted remains of yachts and trawlers and work boats and stink pots and cut-away dinghies and all that could float—treacherous sheds, too.
“If the bottles aren’t all broken,” Tom said to Dottie, “I could use a great big drink.”
“Oooh, yummy,” Dottie said; the soft childishness came out of her as if on tape, unbacked by feeling of tone or expression. She climbed below. Tom heard the ice chest top thump, and a clinking of sound bottles. He pumped while he waited.
Dottie handed up plastic thermal cups, dead to the touch, brimming with Bourbon and ice. Tom reached the first cup to Audrey, saying, “You look as if you could use this.”
She was still leaning against Flick’s chest, but she said to Tom, “Thanks, darling. Cheers to the skipper!” She drank without waiting.
When Dottie came up she said in a flat voice, “Only two eggs broken in the ice box.”
Tom was feeling the burning liquor going down. “Imagine that,” he said.
But eggs didn’t matter. The jack of hearts on the stove didn’t matter. This was all so normal: quiet evening in harbor, serene landscape, drinks in the stately cockpit with its coaming like a starched wing collar from old times of white ties and tails. Normalcy? With Audrey leaning against the big sea-chantey shouter and waver of arms?
After one drink Tom pumped a thousand strokes and got all the rest of the water out of the bilges, and after the second drink they dragged down the damp mattresses and toppled, each in his own way, into the deep zones of greenish midnight at the floor of the troubled sea.
They all rose early the next morning into an azure day across whose pale arch a dry easterly breeze drifted like a rumor of good news. Tom, who had been up once in the night to pump in a half-awake daze, was stiff in every fiber of every muscle; his skin seemed to sheath an inutterably tangled complication of copper wires, like those myriad bundles of sinews on the backs of telephone switchboards. Yes, to give Flick his due, Tom had a moment’s picture, standing by his bunk when he first stood up, of this first layer of himself as an electronic envelope entrapping his inner meat and psyche in a humming, rigid system of aches—and the sum of the aches was drawn around the circumferences of his head. He groped in the medicine cabinet over the toilet washbasin for two aspirin tablets. The cool water that washed them down tasted like Liebfraumilch on his salted tongue.
Audrey could not get up; the bad trouble was in her right shoulder, and her face was ghastly with a half-moon scab blurring into a swollen purple ripeness of a whole cheek in pain. She stared up at the ribbed underside of the cabin trunk as if she had been awake day and night for weeks on end.
Dottie took over with a willful, mothering sweetness, and the object of her brimming love, at first, was Audrey. Dottie had evidently heard the clink of the aspirin in its bottle in Tom’s hand, and she went for it and gave Audrey some; with velvet palms and digits she raised Audrey’s head and held it up while Audrey swallowed the pills and the following water. Murmuring and clucking, with a tenderness unblemished by a single instant of roughness, Dottie bathed the wound on Audrey’s face. At the galley sink she rinsed the salt water out of some soaked gauze she found in a first-aid kit in the head, and she laid out the wet bandage across the gash. Tom, remembering what he thought he had seen in the flooded cabin under the eye of the storm, stood by, paralyzed by puzzlement. He had a thousand “things” on his mind, to list and fix and do, but he stood immobilized and enchanted by Dottie’s display of either irony or total lapse; but, whichever, of pure kindness.
And Audrey kept muttering shockingly unexpected words: “Thank you, dear…You’ve been a darling…How good you are to me!” And once she said, “Does Flick know how sweet you are?”
“Sure, sure, sure,” Flick blustered, whether to tease or in outrage it would have been hard to say, “she’s an all-day cherry lollipop.” And at that he climbed above and began to pump with vigor, the rank goat back at his chore of humping.
Tom understood, and even felt for, Flick’s outburst—after the storm a man did not know where he stood. One would have to review how he, and how others, had behaved, and see where everyone came out; and wait and see, too, what others seemed to think. Already Dottie’s and Audrey’s mutual warmth had bloomed to disturb Tom’s view of the way things had been and ought to be.
Dottie went to the icebox, and as she lifted the lid Tom realized the source of much of his unease and weakness: none of them had had a bite to eat since the breakfast Audrey had fixed early the previous morning. Tom was ravenous. He fought an impulse to shove Dottie roughly aside and snatch a raw egg out of the box and puncture it at each end with the ice pick and suck it out raw.
“We need ice,” Dottie said, head down at the lid of the box, as if it were any morning.
And gas, probably, Tom thought—not a prayer of getting it from that marina today. Another lack that made him feel wan and helpless: he could find neither pencil nor paper wet or dry. He wanted to assess, to make a checklist. Hello, Dr. Meticulous, he said to himself, glad to have you back aboard! Sort of glad. The outlines are familiar. But no, no, don’t speak of livers yet! Hold back that glimpse of the operating room; the whiteness, gowns and masks and tight cloth hats, Dr. Simon donning such a hat and, as always, reaching out a hand to his nurse and saying, “My phylacteries and shawl, please”—his everlasting joke about the antiseptic yarmulke of a hat making one go off at a tangent and see the cutting of human flesh as a ritual after all. Enough for now to want to make a list. See: the ice pick is not in its little safety-holder; that should be written down.
Dottie’s head went into the breadbox and she gave out twice cries of revulsion that sounded like the Latin expletive of woe: “Eheu! Eheu!”
Tom leaned forward to see what the matter was. The matter was this: Someone at some time—no doubt Audrey when she had gone down, after the eye had arrived, to get Flick some covering—had salvaged all the books, which must have knocked out their retaining batten early and jumped from their shelf and floated around in the deep cabin water; and had put them in with the bread. And now the breadbox contained a mealy mass of dissolved bread and bent cardboard and disintegrating printed paper. Tom reached in past Dottie’s shoulder and pulled out a dough-smeared shape: his log book.
He was furious, but when he turned to Audrey to say, “Look what you’ve done,” he was deterred by the sight of the gauze bandage just lying there on the wound and of her eyes glittering in steady gaze at the rounded ribs above.
He took the book to the sink and washed off the leatherette cover. The pages were of good rag paper and were firm; he saw that the printed lines had faded and that his entries were still mostly legible. He looked and saw: Passed CG station, 9:52 a.m., on way out. It had been six-twenty-three on the way back in; he could remember details!
He was thinking about taking the book above to turn the pages, air them, drip out moisture, so they would not dry all stuck together, when Flick came piling down the ladder, saying, “My wallet. I’ve lost my wallet.”
Flick charged up into the forward cabin and could be heard banging out a hurried search.
“Dottie,” he bellowed, “where’s my wallet?”
“In a minute, sweetheart,” Dottie singingly answered in full knowledge of her value. “I’m fixing breakfast.” Then, in a quieter voice: “Tommy, be an angel and light the stove. It scares me to death…Oh Gawd, no dry matches.”
“Allow me,” Tom said, suddenly pleased with himself, for he had quickly stooped down and found unbroken a tight-sealed mayonnaise jar full of wooden kitchen matches in the somehow still-shut locker under the stove, along with the polishes and bug bombs and special lubricants.
As Tom began to pump up the air-pressure tank of the stove Flick came, in his crashing, snorting style, out of the forward cabin, saying loudly, “It’s not the cash I mind. It’s the credit cards.”
When the steaming breakfast was spread on the table, Audrey sat up, and the bandage fell from her face. Dottie fetched the cloth arm-sling from the first-aid kit and arranged it so as to hold Audrey’s right arm still.
“Yow, Dotkin,” Flick, not waiting, said with his mouth full, “ ’ose eggs a greatest.”
Audrey forced out a whimpering laugh at herself when she missed her mouth with a forkful of scrambled egg held in her left hand. Dottie said to Flick, “Move, you big lummox. Get out of the way.” And she slid in beside Audrey and began to feed her with a spoon. “Is that coffee too hot, dear? Blow on it, I’ll hold it…Do you want another pillow? Tom, hand over that pillow. I know it’s soggy, can’t be helped…” At one point, interposing a leaf-like hand between her own mouth and Audrey’s eyes, she shaped toward Tom with exaggerated lip movements the silent word, “Doctor,” and pointed behind the shelter of that screening hand at Audrey. They should get Audrey to a doctor. But for God’s sake, Tom thought but did not say, I am a doctor. What if I am a specialist, a hater and cutter of livers? I know what to do for a common sprain…Yet he had not even looked at Audrey’s shoulder. What was the matter with him? Was he too exhausted to have any judgment left? No, he stubbornly told himself, that wasn’t it. Harmony had to come first; for all their safeties, he had to get Harmony to a boatyard and haul her out on dry land. Then a doctor. You weren’t going to find either a boatyard in commission or a doctor who could take X-rays on Block Island on this day; the best bet would be New London; wonder about the currents…
Dottie went on placidly spoon-feeding Audrey. Wasn’t Dottie overdoing her usefulness and serenity? He remembered the rigidity of her shoulders when he had tried to move her from the pump at the height of the storm; and what had she been doing in that knee-deep water in the cabin? Was the reproach of that lurid cheek driving her to this solicitude?
Yet Audrey was so grateful; she ate like a baby, hungrily, her pain-reddened eyes blinking adoringly at the provident hand as it lifted the spoon.
“That was super bailing you did yesterday afternoon, old pumphead,” Dottie said to Flick. The first word of congratulations of the day. To the lump himself.
“Damn good thing I’ve kept up on those isometric exercises of mine, all I can say. Damn good for all of you.” The bounce was coming back; the big jaw was working now on an empty mouth. “Do you realize,” he said, “that some of those waves were higher than the masts?” He went on to offer up further descriptive material; and Tom reflected that Flick was now going to prove himself to have been the big audio-visual recording apparatus of the good ship Harmony. Ah, yes, he’d been right there all day, watching, remembering. Who was to say that he’d seen everything out of focus?
They’re going to rearrange the entire experience, Tom said to himself. I’d better get that log book dried out in a hurry.
But he blurted out to Audrey, as if nothing had happened to her, “Where’s my Eldridge’s?” Then, abashed by his own peremptory tone, he explained that he wanted to figure the currents through the Race and Fisher’s Island Sound. For a horrifying moment he saw himself in Flick’s shoes, shouting at his wife to find his wallet for him: the male assertion of supremacy-through-helplessness.
Audrey said, speaking thickly through the pain of her cheek, “How should I know?”
“That yellow book?” Dottie said. “I saw it somewhere.”
“It was on that bunk of yours,” Tom said to Audrey, holding her responsible, “on the bare slats. Before we brought the mattresses down.”
“It’s on the bookshelf, skipper,” Dottie said. “Where it belongs. I just remembered I put it there.”
And indeed it was. Lying flat so it could not be seen from the opposite settee. My God, Tom thought as he reached over the girls’ heads for it, Dottie certainly is feeling sure of herself.
While Tom checked the currents, Flick, full of food, perking up sharply, went on reminiscing about the storm and seemed to be working up enthusiasm for the experience he had had. He talked of things that he had been able to do; it suddenly began to seem that a Hamden wind had blown down from a Hamden sky onto a Hamden seaway. I, I, I…
Reacting to this, Tom felt pouring into himself what had been so notably absent all morning: an access of sympathy for Audrey. “Darling,” he said, testing that word on the day after the storm, “the currents don’t look too good until the afternoon. I think we ought to be able to get to New London by, say, six o’clock. Then we’ll go straight to a hospital and check you over. Best we can do. That O.K.?”
But Audrey may still have been rankling over his pushing her about the Eldridge’s, and she answered, again with a clear show of pain, “What can I say?”
Tom felt rueful and cheated. Where were the ennobling and purifying effects of the hardship they had all suffered together? Only Dottie seemed to have been brushed by them; and what if her gentleness and confidence this morning came not from that source but rather from her knowledge that she was capable of doing what she had done to Audrey under the eye of the storm? Why had no one congratulated him, the skipper, for anything he had done? Was he going to have to descend to Hamden’s level and sell himself to the public?
He went above, sore and confused, and pulled at the pump.
In a few minutes Flick came up and he dropped with a sigh into the seat where he had sat so silent on the way out to the eye. “That sun feels good,” he said.
“What are the girls doing?”
“They’re looking for my wallet.”
“ ‘They’ are? Audrey, too?”
“Aud says she feels tops now that she’s had some breakfast.”
“And she’s down on her hands and knees looking for your wallet?”
“I don’t know, they had some plan of dividing up the boat, fore and aft. They’re picking up some other junk, too, that got tossed around.”
“And you came up for a short rest?”
“No, Tom, for Chrissakes don’t be such a sourpuss. I came up to tell you some of what I got to thinking during the storm. About how to improve this old thing of yours. You know, I kind of got to love her during the storm, she really was good to us, she’s really some tub; so I began thinking, I should pay her back some of what I owe her, and I began thinking how we could fix her up. You know, Tom, we could automate this old girl from tip to toe. Now, look,” he said, and he moved over and straddled the gear box behind the wheel, “we put the console right here, a slanting top for easy viewing and manipulation—and all you need is buttons, switches and dials. I think after what I had to do yesterday my candidate for Switch Number One would be a bilge pump. Ye Gods, an ordinary submersible pump—well, you’d have to brine-proof it—it’d accomplish in thirty seconds what it takes a thousand strokes of that idiot backbreaker to do. Steering, you’d just have port and starboard buttons, get rid of this incredible antique of a wheel; then you’d have a trim-tab dingus on the rudder, like the ones on a plane’s ailerons, to take out the windward helm when you were on a beat. There’d be power winches—pull up the sails, pull up the God damn anchor, trim the sheets, do any lousy thing it takes muscle to do now. Of course you’d have all the standard navigational and piloting stuff they have in planes, like Omnirange and Distance Measuring and ADF. Of course surface radar. You could tie in your auto-pilot with the radar: in a fog you clamp the auto-pilot on some target the radar picks up, and it zeroes you right in. Then you’d have a fathometer and an accurate speed indicator—boy, that’s a horse-and-buggy job you have now. And oh, one of the best things I thought of is an automatic helmsman, you’d call it maybe the Apparent-Wind-Angle Steering Device. The apparent wind is a vector of the real wind and the speed of the boat; you probably know that.”
“Yes, I do know that,” Tom said. He had stopped pumping; he was aghast.
Flick charged ahead. “You have a wind-vane that registers the apparent wind, see, and you simply set the angle away from that direction that you want to sail, and you tie in the steering gear with it, and the device takes over. It responds to every slight wind shift—more alert than a man sailing, especially if you’re out all day—or like yesterday, where you know it wasn’t easy.”
“Yes, I know that, too.”
“In other words, the device sails us, we don’t need a helmsman…You want frills, you can have any you want. Like a hi-fi system, an eight-track music tape thing with those cartridges, and you sail along with ‘The Eroica’ going or in light airs you’d want Mozart or like yesterday you’d have Götterdämmerung or Night on Bald Mountain, something ghastly. We could have used eight-track for the dancing in the cockpit when we anchored the other day in Quicks Hole.”
That brought it all back. Tom was beyond rage; he felt the humming of those wires of the aching under the skin. “Listen to me, Flick,” he said. “Number One, my boat Harmony is the last place in this world you’ll invade with all that claptrap of yours. I’m a sailor. I just don’t want any part of that shit. A sailor doesn’t need it; he needs his wits. Going up those waves yesterday, one had to do a quick swing”—why couldn’t he say, “I had to do”?—“up into the combers. It was a very tricky maneuver, each time was different. Only a man—”
“All right, a man is at the console. You could do it. I mean, it would take practice: you can’t just sit down at any mechanical device—take a piano—and start in cold. Sure, you’d have to have some experience with your buttons, you’d—”
“And Number Two, when are you going to account for yourself?”
Flick’s face had that dissolving look that it had had each time Tom had given him an order on the boat. “Account? What do you mean?”
“I mean Audrey.”
“Oh, Audrey.” At that Flick stood up and stepped to the companionway, and he called down, “Find it?”
Audrey’s head appeared in the opening, and she spoke in pain. “We can’t seem to find it anywhere.” Then she held up with her left hand a T-shirt of Flick’s, and she said, “I rinsed the salt out of this. You want to hang it out to dry? Warm today, you’ll need it.”
They were taking the storm away from him. He felt that they were stealing the experience of Esmé right out from under his nose.
Harmony had reached out of the Great Salt Pond under full sail at a few minutes before noon—as a sort of superstitious rite he had entered in his drying-out log book the time of passing the Coast Guard station once again—and she was now well out on Block Island Sound smoothly plying the meeting-plane of the two conditions of blue, pale and pure firmament above, pure and deep fundament beneath. In all this blue she carried white sails and made a white path. Getting off the rags of the trysail and suiting her up with her three dazzling triangles had been a trial: he had worked and Flick had talked. Flick was feeling more and more magnanimous; he had even begun to give Audrey some credit for the pumping she had done during the storm; it was astonishing to Tom that the lump had even noticed that. As to Tom himself, Flick had not been openly critical but, like Dottie, with that funny pursed mouth of hers, hanging clothes out on the lifelines to dry, he had simply hung out in the sunlight some undecided points, questions of judgment flapping in the gentle morning breeze. Flick’s methods were oblique, crafty, and subtle. Before setting out for New London they had all done a smart job of cleaning Harmony. Audrey, her arm in the sling, worked intermittently; Flick’s praise of her came intermittently, too, and it was so effective in stirring her to new efforts that it soon seemed meant as a goad rather than as a reward. Dottie divided her time between maid-work and nurse-work; she gave Audrey unwavering tenderness. Tom worked muscle-stiff and more and more bewildered.
What Tom simply could not get his mind around was Flick’s emerging heroism. It was coming out, little by little by little, that Flicker Hamden had somehow brought Harmony and her crew through the storm to the evening haven. The largest element in this emergence, of course, was the pumping Flick had done. How this pumping had happened to start at all was already blurred; the entire second half of the storm was in fact a hideous blur in Tom’s mind. Tom’s foggy memory was that Dottie had pumped, Audrey had pumped even though hurt, then both had screamed and screamed at the then waterproofed lump, sitting on either side of him and howling into both his ears simultaneously, and finally he had moved in his thorough-going daze to the pump and, once fastened to it, had been gradually transformed into a kind of sex-mimicking reciprocal engine. He had done a lot of work, there was no question about that; there may have been a question whether he knew what he was doing. At the time. Now he more than knew.
But here as they slanted along Flick was eking out a new claim. This seemed to be to the effect—never blurted explicitly but tossed out in deceptive little jigsaw-puzzle pieces—that he had taken the wheel under the eye of the storm and had turned Harmony onto a course that made sense and saved them all, back toward Block Island. One got whiffs of a bad smell: Harmony had somehow been on a wrong bearing, negligently and possibly criminally wrong. Flick had set her right. Homeward bound.
Tom felt gagged; he wondered if he was going to be seasick. Lumps of protest stuck in his throat. All this structure had been built so airily, so imperceptibly, that he could not begin to strike it down until it was solidly there. He could not begin to say that Flick’s idea, if it had been that and not simply an infantile running for the womb-harbor or some such idiot behavior, had indeed had a certain danger in it. No, the structure was built on beams of hinting and girders of innuendo, and so unshakable was it becoming that Tom finally lied to himself—told himself that he couldn’t care less.
“The reason I took over,” Flick finally said, full-cheeked, like a man eating potatoes au gratin hot from the casserole, “was that—Godamighty, this was a shocker, I tell you—I suddenly found myself all alone. I thought for a minute there that you’d all gone off your chumps and done the lemming routine. But I guess you were all below.” Then, as Tom felt his stiff muscles grow even tighter along his weary bones, Flick asked the most obvious question on earth. “What the hell were you doing down there, all of you, anyway?”
Tom was promptly in a fright such as he could not remember having experienced during the whole of the storm, asking himself with a suddenly running heart: How am I going to say what I was doing below? I don’t want anyone ever to know what I was doing down there. I won’t tell. That’s a secret place down there. I won’t tell. I can’t.
It was Dottie who took the pressure off—Dottie who answered with innocent eyes like dew-cleaned petals. “We had a time. Didn’t we, Audrey dear? We sure had a time.”
“Amen,” Audrey said. There was pain advertised on her face by the cut and the bruise, but her eyes were brimming with benign feelings. “I haven’t had the good grace to thank you properly, dear Dottie.”
“Pooh,” Dottie said. “Don’t thank me.” Her manner was sincere and glossed her disclaimer into: Don’t thank little me.
Tom thought of what he had seen Dottie doing in that knee-deep water. How grotesque this winsomeness of hers was! Was she acting? Tom wondered: Is that feminine little piece of poontang of a dark avenger just about the shrewdest little actress you’ve ever seen? Look at her hanging her head in modesty! Was Audrey thanking Dottie because Dottie had not been able, for some reason, for some mysterious and irrecoverable reason, to finish whatever she had been doing? Either there was something inexpressibly creepy in this behavior on both sides, or—what had he seen down there in the cabin?
“So what happened?” Flick asked.
“There was an accident,” Dottie said. “Right, Aud?”
“Hey, don’t put me off that way,” Flicker said, working into the tones of a prosecuting attorney. “What were you all doing down there?”
Tom, torn, had a painful wish to hear what Dottie Hamden would say she had been doing but was himself barren of the first approach to a defense. Waves of curiosity and alarm beat at him from opposite sides as the water had at Harmony’s flanks in the confused cross-forces under the lee of the island the previous morning.
“Let me tell my part,” Audrey said.
Dottie asked, “Doesn’t your cheek hurt when you talk?” How cool she was!
“It’s not that bad. Talking about something will help me to forget it.”
“I mean, I’d be glad to tell the part I know, what I saw of the whole business.”
“I’d rather,” Audrey said with some firmness.
“O.K.,” Dottie said. “You tell the beginning.”
“Let’s see—where to start? All right, when we got to the eye out there, you looked so miserable, Flick, you were chattering and shivering so, that I shifted over to your side of the cockpit—do you remember this?—and I asked you if you’d let me get the waterproofs for you; there was going to be more storm, I knew that. But you wouldn’t answer. I knew you, you were too proud, the way Tom had made us go ashore to buy you the slickers, you were determined to get triple pneumonia before you’d lift a finger to put them on. But I decided to get them anyhow. You really were going to need them. I hope you’ll forgive me. So, anyway, I went below, and do you know, it was the most incredible sight I’d ever seen? In the first place, the water—up to the tops of the bunks. I thought for sure we were going to sink, and yet I realize now that I went right ahead on the assumption that we’d pull through—someone would pump us out. I was right; you did.”
She was looking at Flick, who was being transformed, right in front of Tom’s eyes, it seemed, into the dragon-slayer of all time.
“But the mess and confusion sort of gripped me,” Audrey went on, “so I forgot what I’d gone down to do in the first place. I don’t know, it was as though I could somehow defeat the storm by tidying up the cabin—triumph of housework over the unruliness of the elements. You know: a woman’s broom to clean all the cobwebs out of heaven. That was me. All sorts of gear was floating around in the wash, and when the boat plunged, the water and everything in it would slosh in the spookiest way, and there I was flopping around snatching at playing cards, my fingers and thumbs going wack wack wack like a couple of ducks’ bills snapping at the cards, and latching onto a pair of my best panties that drifted around just below the surface looking like a jellyfish, and I remember there was a pencil that I jammed into the iron stove, and—”
“And the books,” Tom heard himself bark out.
“The books, yes. I put them in the breadbox.” Then Audrey, obviously sensing accusation in Tom’s strange cry, added, “My association, you see, was that the breadbox was supposed to be sort of moisture-proof, at least enough to keep the bread fresh; maybe it would help keep the books from being completely ruined—although I must admit they’d been floating around in that knee-deep bilgewater, so I guess I was pretty kooked up.” Then suddenly she stopped and looked piercingly at Tom and said, “What’s the matter? Did I gum up your log book or something?”
“No, it’s all right,” Tom said, embarrassed by Audrey’s true aim.
“I must have been down there quite a while; I got a lot done, anyway, most of it pretty crazy. All the time I was stumbling and lurching around, because the boat, you know, was being thrown ear over teakettle by the waves outside, and I’d become really drenched, I’d fallen into the water more than once. Then, it’s funny, if I close my eyes I can see the last picture with the most amazing clarity. I was at the end of the table. I’d just fished up that cylindrical bottle of oregano that you like on things, Tommy”—why, at this moment, the double-dealing diminutive?—“and I had the stupid idea of putting it back on the condiment shelf, even though I’d taken it down from there in the first place and had put it in one of the latched drawers that had unlatched itself, and I began to move toward that corner when I could feel Harmony beginning to buck and I began to rise and fly, it seemed as if, and on the way up I saw Dottie’s face just floating into the hatchway up there, and I arched up over the sink and my face came down on that sharp curved edge of the handle of the sink pump—I can see that chrome bar coming at me, with all sorts of reflections of the interior of the cabin sparkling on it—the sun was out, you remember. And then there was a Fourth of July in my head and I went black. And that’s where you come in, dear Dottie—thank God for you!”
“You mean,” Tom blurted out, “it was the pump handle that put that gash in your face?”
“That’s what I assume,” Audrey said. “That’s what I landed on.”
“This happened before Dottie came down?”
“I saw it happen,” Dottie said. “From the top of the hatchway.”
“Let Dottie go ahead,” Flick said.
Tom’s hands and feet felt frozen, and his guts were heavy. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This is important to me. Audrey, you’re saying your face landed on the handle and you were knocked out cold before Dottie went down there in the cabin with you?”
“I know I did that swooping act, and I saw Dottie up in the opening, and I saw the chrome and reflections—exactly as I told you—and the flash when I hit, and that’s all I remember till—I don’t know. Later.”
“Come on, Dottie,” Flick said. “Your part.”
“O.K.,” Dottie said in good cheer, “I’d just stood up, up here, and that same wave sort of upchucked me to the hatchway, and I looked down just in time to see Audrey crash into that horrible handle thing. And then she fell backward into the water. I thought she was dead. The blood was simply cascading out of her cheek and she was floating on her back in the water, and the blood was pinkening the water, and if she wasn’t already dead she was going to drown in two shakes of a lamb’s tail—yeee, that expression—my Daddy used that all the time, I used to loathe it—and so I turned around and tried to shout to Tom at the wheel to do something, but I was too terrified, I couldn’t get a sound out of my throat. I hadn’t been terrified this way by the storm, it’s funny, I trusted the men, it just seemed to me that they knew what to do and we’d get home all right, I never did think we were going to sink out there. Anyway, as I say, I couldn’t make a sound, so I had to go down myself, though it scares me out of my wits even to go within a city block of the sight of blood. I made myself somehow. But then I had the most dreadful time. That water heaving so, and Audrey was limp. I kept getting some kind of grip on her and then falling right across her—and at some point there you were, Tom, and I thought: Thank God, one of the men is here, I don’t have to be responsible for poor Audrey any more, he’ll take over. But, criminy, you went bucketing past, and actually I have a bone to pick with you, Tom Medlar. You banged me and threw me down onto Audrey all over again, just when I thought I was getting a good hold. I think she was coming to, and she was trying to help herself and had grabbed at me from underneath, but there I went when you charged through like a fullback, clumsy! So I worked and worked—I could see you doing something on the floor, Tom, up in the front part—and finally I got Audrey up on the seat thing. And you went scooting back above without even looking at us, Tom, much less offering to help. And after a bit Audrey came around better and better, and we got up in the fresh air together. That was it.”
Flick’s big courtroom eyes came swiveling around to Tom.
“And you? What were you doing—on the floor up in the front?”
Tom’s sense of confusion had grown so strong that he had to escape from that question, had to play for time to sift and settle. A horror of being found out had come over him; there was a piece of evidence as to the answer to Flick’s question—what had he been doing down there?—that he must dispose of: the great Stillson wrench jammed against the floor beam with its jaws on the nut of the keel bolt over the yawl’s flaw. He made his voice as steady as he could: “Do you feel up to steering awhile, darling?”
Audrey’s eyes came around to his in some surprise; she had clearly been wanting to hear the answer to Flick’s question.
“Something I forgot to do below,” Tom hurried on to say. “Won’t take a minute.”
“Hey! I asked you a question,” Flicker said.
Audrey moved to the wheel.
“You really O.K.?” Tom asked her, shortcutting away from Flick’s insistence.
“Like I said,” she indifferently answered, “it’s a relief to have something on my mind.”
“Steer as we go.”
“As we go,” Audrey said, checking the compass.
Tom fled below. When he lifted out the floorboards over the head of the keel bolt, he kept his back between the hatch opening and that which he did not want seen. In spite of the earlier pumpings the water in the bilge reached nearly to the floorboards again. The wrench, still firmly lodged, seemed already to be covered with a thin film of rust. Tom knelt and looked down—and inward.
His confusion, to begin with, was rooted in anger and vanity. It was he who had brought them all through the storm—his forethought, his comprehension of details that mattered, his helmsmanship, his bodily endurance, his finding a way to cleave the breakers, his thinking out of suitable courses, his being a sailor, his judgment and fortitude and manliness and—yet here in the pit of the bilge was evidence of his having lost his head all the way. He would hide the evidence and salvage his captaincy. He would have to steel himself to hold Flick off. Some people aggrandize on others, using and distorting every experience to their advantage—go in losers and come out winners every time. It is a habit of moral cheating that by subtle turns of phrase in reminiscence, and even by mere archings and hintings of tone, readjusts the shares of honor. Tom wondered, since Flick had carried the process so astoundingly far in this case, whether it was his own nature to submit to such brigandage of good name. Did he, Tom, invite it—this touching up by someone else, this subtle, patient, continual dabbing at the colors and outlines which changed, in the end, not simply the spirit of the picture but its very substance?
Yet who was right and who was wrong? Had Flick really been a lump, or had Tom’s own eyes seen an image that had been far from the true one? It now came out that Dottie, far from having tried to kill Audrey, had been trying instead to save her life.
A diametric opposite, and a horrifying one—so monstrous, indeed, that Tom realized he had, just now, been burying his response to it beneath questions of vanity, of credit, of manly competition. Had he really seen murder in rescue’s clothing? If he had been so blind, had he any right to accuse Flick of changing the facts of the storm? Who, after all, distorted things? Surely Audrey and Dottie had not colluded in making up this version of the “killing.” Could they possibly have agreed, for some weird, neurotic reasons connected with Audrey’s entrapment by Flick and Dottie’s need for endless repetitions of defeat and recovery, to change their story from one end of the scale of truth to the other? Or had Tom had reasons of his own to see things totally and fundamentally askew? Or—perhaps to grasp at straws—could there be a no-man’s land somewhere between what he thought he had seen and others’ “truths”? How mistaken had he really been in his image of the powerful, earthy garbage woman—who turned out to have such a mousey, defeated voice? How far from the mark, after all, had been his reading of Dottie’s look of appeal as she lay in her bikini on the cushion in the sun? Had there perhaps been a strong flavor of killing in her saving of Audrey?
Was one doomed to see all of life in one’s own way, only to have to adjust his vision after each livelong day according to the likewise distorted visions of others? Did one see everything with a vivid inaccuracy while it was happening and then bargain out with others an ex post facto “accuracy” that compromised the self-serving distortions of all? If one became convinced that this was so, then how could one balance out the profound humility, on the one hand, that this conviction would force on oneself, with, on the other, the need for vigilance against born liars who had not yet realized the nature of these revisions? How could Tom be humble toward Flick?
He reached down for the handle of the wrench and found that it was immovably wedged in place—so tightly, indeed, with its metal handle-tip denting the hard oak, that Tom had a moment’s renewed belief that some force had in fact been loosening the nut as the keel had given out those fluttering vibrations. Then how far had he lost his head? God, what he would have given at that moment for just one miserable small item of certitude! He began to try to free the worm nut of the wrench, and as he was leaning forward, straining with his fingers at the burred cylinder, he gasped at a thought that had struck him like a hearty clap on the back, of congratulations.
Could there have been, at the core of all his inaccuracies of vision, a misreading of what Audrey felt about Flick? Had he been wrong about that pair? Had he got even that wrong?
He grasped the worm nut and pressed and turned with all his strength, and at the peak of his effort he was flooded by a recollected feeling—that this was going to be a happy cruise. That, he remembered having thought, was all set. And now as a kind of overlay on this memory came another, a visual image: this same wrench seen through the choppy bilgewater under the eye of the storm, wobbling and bent and contorted by refraction and changes of depth and light—an image of wavering untruthfulness seen at a moment when the wrench, the water in the boat, the boat itself, and the calm at the center of the storm were all of the essence of truth.
How he wanted this storm, this cruise, these days aboard Harmony to have been a marvelous experience, the joys of which one would never forget!
The worm-set gave with a sudden jolt, the steel jaws surrendered their bite on the nut at the yawl’s flaw, and he lifted the tool out and replaced the floorboard and went forward to put the wrench in the locker in the vee of the forecastle where it belonged. No one would ever know what he had done down there.
When he stepped out into the sunlight in the cockpit he felt himself to be, once again, the master of his vessel. He was determined not to lie outright, especially, if possible, not to himself. He looked around. The day seemed to be larger now, its sky supremely elevated in hazeless clarity, its horizons ringed with distant shoulders of known land: Fisher’s Island in view ahead, Watch Hill Point on the starboard bow, Point Judith up to the northeast, Plum Island off to port, Block Island astern; greenish purple promises in all quarters, save the easterly, of sure anchorages. Closer at hand the faces were not hostile. It seemed to him in this bright light that Audrey and Flick, she at the wheel, he close by her side, the two leaning ever so slightly toward each other in that yearning which can never be completely hidden, were, yes, in love, but he felt keenly open to correction on that point. Dottie, arms up, brushing her hair out to the dry breeze, was a giver; she could never have meant to kill. Tom felt that he should rub his eyes and clear away the last of the film of manifold distortions that the storm seemed to have sprayed over his vision. The wound on Audrey’s cheek began to hurt him now; he was a medical man and a husband still. “How’s your shoulder, darling?” he asked in all sincerity as he took the wheel.
“Not too great,” Audrey said, “if you want a frank answer.”
“Better have a couple more aspirin by now,” he said, and on that roundabout hint Dottie stirred up to go and fetch; but she waited to hear the rest of what Tom might say.
“We’re doing pretty well,” he went on, looking up at the trembling fullnesses of the sails. “We could make maybe a knot more under both sail and power, but we’re kind of low on gas, I’d like to keep a reserve, if you think, Audrey—”
“I’ll live,” Audrey said.
Now Tom faced Flick. “We’re taking in a fair amount of water. You have any pumping left in you, Flick? I’ll be glad to do it if you don’t feel up to it.”
“I’ll pump,” Flick said. Could it be that his eyes had lost that dissolving look?—or, Tom wondered, had most of the disconcerting film scaled off his own eyes? “But first,” Flick said, “you were going to tell us—”
“What I was doing down below while we were under the eye. Yeah, sorry about the interruptions. Well, it doesn’t take much telling. I’d looked down the hatch and I’d seen Dottie struggling over Audrey in the water, and the amount of the water threw me. I was afraid we were going to fill and sink, so I thought I’d better look and see if there was a single bad leak and whether there was anything I could do about it if there was.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing I could do much about.”
“Nothing to do but pump?”
“Nothing to do but pump. For ever and ever, amen.”
Dottie went below. Flick was more than satisfied; he was justified. He began to sway once again on the pump, and soon he was singing, off key. Tom felt relief spreading like the warmth of a shot of Bourbon in his chest.
A feminine squeak came from below. Then: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”
A stab of alarm bled ice water into the place where the relief had been. Had he really put the wrench away? Had she found—evidence?
But Dottie was standing on the ladder with her shining face exposed, displaying a gift of pleasure for her man; she was holding up his wallet, which was dripping water.
“Where was it?” Flick asked in a rather mournful and reproachful tone, as if Dottie, having found it, must have been the one who had originally mislaid it.
“In the craziest place,” she said, and she began to giggle as Flick darkened with annoyance. “I went in to get the aspirin for Audrey, and there it was, in the—right in the—oooh, it was so peculiar—right down in the johnny.”
“Wash it off? Did you wash it off? God almighty!”
“Here,” Dottie crossly said, reaching it out to Flick and looking suddenly as if she would burst into tears.
And so, although, as to visibility, breeze, and smoothness of the going under Harmony’s forefoot, the day itself was almost perfect, there began nevertheless to be moments of distress, and the easing of one sort of anxiety in Tom’s heart gave way to another bad feeling: of discontent. He wanted much that he did not have, he wanted to be a decent doctor, he wanted not to hate his noble work, he wanted not to have seen a rescue as a murder, he wanted Audrey back. Perhaps…—but in his concerns at the helm of his stubborn vessel which had ridden out the hurricane, everything seemed to trail off into an indefinite series of perhapses. The current turned, and they flew past the hazards of the Sound, and fishermen in dories lying near the reefs looked up sullenly as the old-fashioned craft sailed by, and all the while Tom was oppressed by a heavy sense of the discrepancies between his reading of the experiences of the storm and the versions his crew had brought away. But gradually these differences, too, faded into common issues of busyness, as the future became a matter for agitation. The Hamdens were going to clear out. Questions of transportation arose; Dottie was dispatched below by Flick to pack. Audrey’s pain was harsh. Was there a train schedule somewhere?
They rounded the old stone lighthouse and made their way upriver, and at Burr’s anchorage Tom had to tie up at the pier for the time being, because he had no dinghy. Not too much damage here; boatyard services were available and functioning; yes, it could be arranged to haul the boat out in the morning. Flick jumped on the dock in a business suit, and Dottie, wearing a dress, exposed a lot of leg as she climbed ashore.
As the Hamdens stood on the pier Tom called out, “Hey, anybody have a dime?” He was going to have to call a taxi to carry Audrey to the hospital.
Flick tossed a dime down. Tom cupped his hands but missed it, and the thin metal wafer tinkled on the deck. The sun flashed on its little circle, and as Tom bent over to pick it up it became the one precise image in all that scene. The storm and all its exigencies, majesties, and contending inaccuracies had already begun to slip away into vagueness, like a dream fading at the dawn of a new day, for ordinariness was showing its lights again, and, indeed, at that very instant, “this world” was claiming them all, Tom, Audrey, Flick, Dottie…
In time, in the months and years that followed, Esmé made splendid conversations, and Tom used his memories of the storm to good purpose while dining out many an evening, his vivid tales coming out always as celebrations of how good it was to be alive and how lucky he was to have a wife like Audrey. People were impressed.