Under the Eye of the Storm Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

  BOOKS BY JOHN HERSEY

  BLUES

  BLUES

  THE CALL

  THE WALNUT DOOR

  THE PRESIDENT

  MY PETITION FOR MORE SPACE

  THE WRITER’S CRAFT

  THE CONSPIRACY

  LETTER TO THE ALUMNI

  THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT

  UNDER THE EYE OF THE STORM

  TOO FAR TO WALK

  WHITE LOTUS

  HERE TO STAY

  THE CHILD BUYER

  THE WAR LOVER

  A SINGLE PEBBLE

  THE MARMOT DRIVE

  THE WALL

  A BELL FOR ADANO

  INTO THE VALLEY

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION,

  Copyright © 1967 by John Hersey

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1967, and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ebook ISBN 9780593081075

  www.vintagebooks.com

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  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by John Hersey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1 “SEE HOW THE CURRENT TAKES US”

  2 THE SWIMMERS BENEATH THE BOW

  3 THE CONE OF UNCERTAINTY

  4 THE SECRET PLACE

  1

  “See How the Current Takes Us”

  A high lozenge of light told Medlar’s one cracked and sleep-blurred eye that dawn had come. That dim gray oval was the porthole in the cabin trunk, opposite. He lay listening. There were not many sounds: the rudder post uttering soft bovine grunts at intervals, the tidal currents from the Katama cut purling along the flanks of the yawl, his wife’s even breathing in the berth across the way, and the ticking of the round brass ship’s clock on the bulkhead over his bunk. Those were all. Harmony, he knew, was secure on her mooring; the morning was calm. He sat up…

  Look at him! The right side of his face is creased with the impress of the cloth folds of the pillow case against which it has lain in a hard morning sleep following two waking hours in the middle of the night. The expression is pinched, chary, and cautious—of a man trying to keep track of small points at a time when the large drift of events is unthinkable. The source of his income and dismay: the slippery mass of the human liver. Though but thirty-four, Dr. Thomas Medlar knows as much about the ravages of contemporary life on that organ as any man on the eastern seaboard of North America. This already famous hepatologist is here on his boat precisely to put distance between himself and diseased livers. The best way to escape thoughts of livers is to pay undeviating attention to the myriad details of his awkward vessel, Harmony. His wife Audrey calls him, sometimes, Dr. Meticulous. What an impeccable tool chest he keeps aboard his yawl! How tidy his log book is!…

  He glanced at the clock and then at the file card he had taped to the edge of the shelf where the radio stood, a schedule of maritime weather reports in his own hand’s ordered italic script. Six twenty-nine. He felt the fitness of his having started up like a timed contrivance on the very minute for a forecast from Boston. The elements of existence afloat were measurable and manageable—even by an unconscious mind, schooled by outward habits of exactitude, which could set a head-alarm to wake one just in time for a dimly remembered morning weather broadcast.

  He turned the radio on. The weatherman, who called himself Sunny McCloud, was complacent; his voice, though tuned low, had a resonance that must have been fueled by Bourbon and blood-rare steak—an impertinent heartiness so early in the morning. He spoke of continuing flows of warm air and gentle days as if he were their commercial proprietor.

  Then, boozily off-hand, this Sunny McCloud told of the making up of a tropical storm, by name Esmé, which might have the mainland in mind though just now she was, he said, a remote sort of shrew—five hundred miles from nowhere off the Georgia coast and meandering.

  Dr. Medlar did not want to think about faraway gales. He snapped off the radio, lay down on his back, and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  —

  The rest of this cruise was going to be fun, and that was that. It was all set. Nothing could be changed. During his sleeplessness he had made a list of things to do on this day. A fixed list; an iron list. Morning wipedown, dispose of garbage, inventory check, meet Hamden; other such matters. Thomas Medlar was, in his own view, a fair-minded, warm-hearted man who had dedicated his life to saving lives by saving livers. Alas, he was already, before his thirty-fifth birthday, earnestly sick of the organ of his choice. At that moment in medical school when a specialty had had to be entered on a printed form, he had opted the liver for unashamedly careerist reasons: Among his contemporaries the liver was unpopular, for the heavy rushes in that year were to lungs (carcinoma) and hearts (plastic valves), and the liver was at the bottom of the visceral heap; he had seen his chance. The liver would have its day, and he would be its lonely champion. And indeed his was already a respectfully whispered name in liver circles, yet he had a conviction of failure—not as to professional accomplishment but rather on a score of character. On this point, however, he was rather calm, for he had concluded that all men are in due time failures. They gain power or fame, he had perceived, and it sickens them for want of more; they earn money and it makes them cheaters, pseudo-experts, impostors; they garner praise for a while and it makes them love mirrors; then they eat shit and pretend they are gourmets. If they have done nothing they assassinate the characters of others who have done something. So Tom Medlar had observed. At last they all know that they have betrayed in folly and greed their best possibilities; they are moral failures. In most cases it takes them many years to find this out. Having detected his own inner bankruptcy while still young and vigorous, Tom Medlar had now worked out a way to get through the rest of his days busily, painlessly, and even, much of the time, in high good cheer. His way was to be exact in little things. There was a dynamic force in the word “exact” that had great appeal for him. Exactism came to this: marking off the hours this side of death by being precise about humdrum details of existence which in themselves had no meaning whatsoever. No meaning, that is, beyond their capacity to wipe out the human liver from all consideration—blessed utility!

  * * *

  —

  He stirred, opened his eyes, raised his arms, and stretched to the full length of his delight at being aboard Harmony.

  The day was coming on, but the cabin was still dark: the door-boards were in at the companionway, and the hatch cover was closed, and the blue-bellied dinghy loomed upside dow
n on its chocks over the cabin skylight, hooding it like a miniature night. Only the two oval portholes admitted a bit of light.

  He looked once more at the porthole across the way. Fog. He could tell it from the sweating on the glass.A Vineyard fog. He wondered whether the plane bringing Flicker Hamden would be able to land before noon on the island. His friend the computer nut. He always looked forward to seeing Hamden, yet he knew that he was always eventually depressed by exposure to Hamden’s obsessions. He and Hamden could never agree. Tom Medlar regarded himself as a humanist, a vitalist; he believed in an inner flame, a secret of life, intuition, love, whispers in the night, and crushing fallibility. Flicker Hamden, to the contrary, characterized anything Medlar said as “rickety antiquated Bergsonian idiocy” and extolled electrical intellectuality and wanted every mortal to be plugged in to a vast cybernetic system of data-sifting, problem-solving, and decision-making. Hamden had an optimism which kept him so far off the ground that the conception of moral failure had never even entered the printed circuit of his mind. All this notwithstanding, it would, as always, at least at first, be good to see him—when the fog broke.

  Thinking of Flick he remembered that Flick’s wife Dottie was sleeping now up forward in the broad-breasted bows of Harmony. He listened for Dot’s breathing and could not hear it: she was beyond the thin forward-cabin door, and the clacking of the brass clock overhead chopped into bits such soft sounds as her lungs must have made up there. He thought of the dark life-bruises under her eyes.

  Dot had been visiting alone on Chappaquiddick and had come aboard the night before, in a fuzzy cardigan and a very short denim skirt, and pearls, chattering about weathered wood and fantastic real estate prices and Bill Furness, who, when he got drunk at big parties, she said, “had a thing” of guarding doorways and only allowing those to go through who “deserved to pass.”

  Over scotches at the cabin table in the dim light of a gimbeled kerosene chimney lamp, the two women, his wife Audrey and Flick’s wife Dot, had all at once torn into a shrill hen fight about the man Furness, whom Audrey, in any case, scarcely knew; it was the inappropriateness of the girls’ fury rather than the wildness of their eyes and the trembling of their voices that had hit Tom hard. He had felt the approach of something dangerous.

  Recalling now the heat of their faces, and aware again of a vague feeling of peril, Tom suddenly hardened and daydreamed with his eyes closed; a crevasse had opened before him, and he took a wild bottomless plunge into desire for anarchic pleasures connected with the memory of both those girls possessed by fury. This chaotic sensuality was upsetting. He—with whom every move called for a plan, a little list, the reassurance of forethought—had an urgent need to check this swiftly rising inner weather. He opened his eyes.

  Yes, he said to himself, his heart’s pace stirred by those fantasies of astonishing irregularities; yes, fog outside. They’d be late getting away.

  In his agitation he arose and dressed and silently made up his bunk. Every move was spruce and controlled; “shipshape” was a high-value word at this point in his racing mind. He raised the bunk on its hinges and looped the retaining strap over its peg, so the starboard cabin settee was ready for whatever the day might bring—shipshape indeed.

  Slowly, slowly, watching Audrey’s form for signs of waking, he pulled back the sliding cover of the companionway, and he stealthily climbed the ladder and lifted one leg and then the other over the door-boards, and he stepped down into the ample cockpit and stood to one side to avoid the dripping from the boom.

  * * *

  —

  Tom sighed. How ghostly and soothing it was up here! The mist-softened boats in ranks, tugging at their mooring lines in the fast-ebbing current, seemed to be moving through the water on lonely tethered voyages. Big yachts, among them a breathtaking black-hulled old ten-meter, lay between Harmony and the channel, and a flock of day sailers and cocky open racing craft anchor-sailed every which way in the eddies by the curve of the Chappy shore. Edgartown at the far end was blotted out; the private piers and boathouse docks beyond the channel reached back, like memories of childhood, into a silvery emptiness. Directly across the way stood a topheavy dockhouse, a weatherbeaten cube of pure nineteenth century raised up on out-curving supports for the purpose of enabling elderly ladies to sit out on good afternoons to watch the sailboats leaning at their work—a setting rendered completely other-day and unreal by this thick, moist air.

  In the veiled distance Tom heard a deep motor thumping, a one-lunger; some kind of work boat making short trips.There were calming things to do. He lifted the teak seat-board over the lazuret locker and took from a canvas bucket hanging there among spare lines a round head of true sponge (for he despised, at least on boats, the multicolored, square-edged, synthetic saucepan cleaners to which the big chemical companies gave that name), and he held the lovely once-living form, still nearly alive to the touch, in his two hands, kneading it, and he thought of the slowness with which it had shaped its myriad cavities and vacuoles just for him, of its years of growth in a warm sea so that now, on this foggy morning in Edgartown harbor, he, Tom Medlar, could perform a ritual, could sweep it over the glistening brightwork and brass in and around the cockpit of his beloved boat, squeezing the moisture overboard now and then, performing the sacred morning wipedown of the semi-circular expanse of the old Friendship cockpit that was his special pride—his outdoor throne room, he called it, though Audrey had another name for it: his playpen. The hooded binnacle, the deeply varnished wheel with a white cord Turk’s-head on the midships spoke, the wide teak seats and narrow teak deckboards, especially the high coaming, as upright as a church pew, reaching aft in a noble and generous curve from side to side of the cabin trunk—every detail contributed to a sense of an old-fashioned quality, a homely elegance. Harmony had a broad-beamed grace; a crew of eight could daysail and picnic in comfort in her cockpit. It was fashionable—“sea-going”—in the big boats these days to let brass and bronze darken with verdigris, and to paint out coamings and handrails, but Tom called that sort of fashion mere laziness; he still polished and varnished all summer—and the cockpit sparkled under the sponge even in fog.

  He heard the throbbing coming nearer, and now he saw a dark form gliding between two big sloops at the edge of the murk. It was the garbage boat. Tom remembered the sturdy, stone-faced Portuguese woman pulling alongside early in the morning of a previous stop here; she took garbage ashore. He was intensely happy at her approach. He wondered why. Had it to do with the two who were sleeping below—with the threat he had felt in their sharp, crazy clash the night before? With the unsettling daydreams, of play with them, that had driven him from bed? Was there something about the broad-shouldered garbage woman, as he remembered her, so stoical and taciturn, nodding as she took the garbage bags and sadly accepting a quarter with no acknowledgment at all, that could bring him heavily back to earth?

  With a housebreaker’s furtive movements Tom descended into the cabin and carried up a carton and two green plastic bags of refuse. Audrey was still solidly out. Above again, he pulled shut the companion hatch cover, so Audrey and Dottie would not be wakened—he wanted to speak with the woman—and then stood waiting at the port quarter. The thudding of the motor was deep and eerily near at hand in the close air, and Tom could hear the rippling at the lap-straked cutwater as the heavy black boat pushed its way to a schooner astern of Harmony down the line of moorings.

  The imminent coming of this hard-faced woman, a reminder in her hopeless, dark-skinned, poverty-ravaged person of all those aspects of shore life that made escape onto the sea seem desirable, brought Tom hard up against a matter that had often set him wondering: the real meaning of Harmony in his life. For one thing, as a young teaching doctor he had not really been able to afford her, homely and cheap as she had been. He owed the bank eight thousand at six per cent; a mortgage on this fat female chattel. As the skipper of an inexpensive craft with distinctly unyachty lin
es—a big old Maine sloop, or a Boston copy of one, anyway, converted for easier handling to a yawl—he thought of himself as a nonconformist, an oddball doctor, an escapist, one whose protest against ordinariness took the form of being, or playing at being, a now-and-then sea bum who might take off any day for distant islands, hospital appointments two-months-deep be damned. Nevertheless, he had to recognize this other strain in himself: a deep pride in brush-and-polish ownership. He secretly thought of himself, particularly when Audrey came into focus in his mind, as a yacht owner, a person who was getting ahead in the most vulgar terms of ordinariness. This did not fit with his comprehension of failure. What did fit was the burden of meaningless small tasks Harmony imposed on him. The ambiguity of his boat life may, he guessed, have had something to do with the intensity of his expectation of the garbage woman’s call, for he had two thoughts about her. He wanted to make friends with her; he wanted to tip her, too.

  As her chunky boat now came sipping at its bow waves, the garbage woman stood at the crude wooden steering lever on the starboard side, in a massive black rubber raincoat, heavy boots, and an ancient yellow oilskin rain hat under the rim of which stray wisps of her curly black hair were silvered like cobwebs with moisture. Though she must have been surprised to find a yachtsman eagerly waiting for her, with his bundles of garbage already at hand, her face showed nothing but its habitual dark lines of gloom and defiance. Her squat boat had an incongruous row of treadless tires from Vespas and Lambrettas hung alongside for fenders. To Tom, she and her rig stood for the world ashore—social injustice, trash in streets, teenage hoodlum unruliness, stupid violence on television; but she also gave a romantic image of stolid self-sufficiency, of honest labor out of doors. Gripping the gunwale of Harmony with her right hand, she took the bundles from Tom at the rail in her left as if they were valuable goods and put them with mother-hen fussing and patting into her filthy wooden bin.