Under the Eye of the Storm Read online

  “Think this’ll burn off?” Tom asked in haste, for she was almost ready to shove away so soon.

  Up from under the stiff brim of yellow oilcloth she gave the sky—which had come down to rest, it seemed from the tilt of her face, on the spreaders of the masts in the harbor—a long, intimate stare. Then she looked down not at Tom but at her cargo of garbage and said in a tiny, evasive, piping treble, “Might be a little some’at out the sou’west when the sun gets up.”

  Her voice was a shock. Had it been throaty and brutal, he would have been wildly exhilarated by the flavor of New England chowder on her Portaguee tongue, but it was a feeble voice, timid, squeaky, with no trace of resentment of an unfair world, no warmth that should have come from living close to the edge of hell. Tom was horrified by the inaccuracy of the expectations he had had. Nevertheless, he pressed her further. “When do you think it might clear?”

  “Can’t hardly say ’t will.”

  Tom had wanted this big coastal woman to see and praise his old-fashioned, sea-kindly fisherman’s craft (or copy of one), but she kept her stare for the most part on the precious bin. She did not seem to want contact; garbage alone could purify, humanity was tainted. Tom felt a push of anger; he wanted to scare the little mouse that apparently lived in her big, worn body. “Hear about the storm?”

  Now her eyes—set too close together in that broad, dark face, seeming slightly crossed in the effort of focusing beyond the creased nose—did flicker briefly toward the topsides of the yawl as she asked in barely audible tones, “What storm was ‘at again?”

  “The one they call Esmé. Off the Carolinas, way out. On the radio.”

  The garbage woman lifted what seemed an acre of rubber raincoat in a powerful shrug, but her real answer came in a thin, indifferent peep. “Di’n’ hear ‘bout that’n.”

  She dropped her rugged hand from the varnished gunwale and placed it on her steering lever.

  “Wait a second…I wondered…” But Tom, disconcerted by her spiritless voice, had no idea what further he wanted to ask her, and he paused.

  She gave him a little time and then she said, “I got all them boats.” She peered into the fog higher up the harbor. She looked furtively and wistfully for a moment at Tom’s eyes, as if wishing her tongue were equal to the task of rebuking him for something—for delaying her those few seconds? Already she had engaged the forward gear and now she touched the throttle with her huge booted foot.

  She was gone. Tom saw the half dollar still in his hand; he had meant to give her twice the “usual.” She would think that the cheap skate in that old beamy tub had fast-talked her to avoid giving her money. That feebly reproachful glance she had thrown him!

  He thought of shouting after her, but it was too late, for the black hull was already melting into the gray vapors and soon there was nothing left of the visitor but the popping of her motor out in nowhere up the harbor.

  * * *

  —

  His shoulders shook with a sudden chill, and he turned around and for a few moments moodily stared at the compass, as if he had to know where he was bound in all this fog. He put a hand on the shapely wheel. Underfoot he felt the delicate trembling of his yawl in the current, like that of a high-strung horse; she was alive and impatient with land-locked life, it seemed. Before long Tom had shaken the feeling of disorientation his encounter with the garbage woman had given him, and he had yielded once again to the strong joy of being on his boat. This was a kind of intoxication by quiet. The solitude in the fog-curtained cockpit, with the door shut on the two sleepers below, narcotized all his unrests, and even fleeting twinges of pain in his back from a muscle there that had a way of tuning up like a harp string when he slept on the canvas berth on Harmony—even those telegraphic thrusts soon eased, and stopped. He stood in something like peace.

  * * *

  —

  As of its own will the cover of the companionway slid back, and Audrey’s hands, squarish to see but soft to the touch as Tom knew well, appeared over the lip of the door-boards, and then her face above them—and Tom’s tranquillity was disturbed only to be deepened. Even with a sleep-swollen face and hair undone, she had a definiteness, a personality which overmatched easily that of the odd boat. She had a beautiful homely countenance—a face which was a playground of unsymmetrical bumps, puffy places, pads, planes, widenings, sharp curves over errant bones, all of which fused together into a vision of a cheerful, courageous, and loving nature. So it seemed at this moment.

  “Ugh,” she said. A comment on the fog. Then she ducked down and slammed the cover shut.

  Tom pushed the hatch lid back a few inches and said softly into the crack, “Some greeting!” He closed it quickly again.

  Audrey usually woke up in a good humor, and he could count on her energetic grin a great deal of the time. Occasionally, when Tom was most unsure of himself, he wondered whether her dependability was grounded on some kind of thickness, insensitivity. She had been, they said, a fat child, and some of her old friends still called her Pudge; her figure was tolerable now, feminine, slightly coarse, giving an impression, yes, of insulated nerves. Yet she was not callous; she was quick in understanding. There was a periodicity, itself dependable, in her crying out against unchangeable things: that life with a doctor was gruesome, his hours were godawful, he was called out of bed in the middle of the night, he came home bushed, he didn’t talk to her enough, he was secretive about women patients, he forgot news, they had no real friends, she was getting wrinkles in her neck, between them they were barren. There it was, they were childless. She had miscarried twice; then no luck at all. Whose fault was anything? Her most telling reproach was withholding reproach, giving gracious space and light and air in which his unspecific guilt could flower of itself. Her anguish came at intervals, riding the cycles of disappointment. Between times she was a good wife. There was a kind of fright in that thought. She might be the breath of his life.

  Soon the cover slid all the way back again, and Tom, looking down into the cabin, saw that Aud was dressed in jeans and her turtle-neck Irish sweater with the fancy stitch-work, and she had made her bunk and sponged down the cabin deck and now was pumping the alcohol stove.

  Without looking up at him she asked, “What did your friend from Boston have to say?”

  So she had not been all that asleep. “Mr. McCloud sounded squiffed,” he said. “At six-thirty a.m.”

  “Isn’t there an earlier forecast you could pick up? I mean, don’t you think it would be a good idea to get all the poop on the isobars and occlusions and whatever-they-are at about let’s say four o’clock in the morning?”

  “Hooo. It’s sarcastic out today.”

  “What did the man say?”

  “Fine. Fine for the next two days.”

  “Looks just fine up there.”

  “This’ll burn off. Sorry I waked you. If I waked you.”

  “If. What about the storm? What’s her name again?”

  “Esmé the pretty one? Hovering. They think she’ll go out to sea like a good girl.”

  “Oh, Lord, what do those people ever know? I don’t wonder they drink.”

  * * *

  —

  Audrey slammed the pots and wrenched the sink pump and dropped the ice chest lid with a bang—her firm way, Tom surmised, of announcing to Dot Hamden that a day starts early on a boat.

  Thinking of those electric clashes between the two women the night before, Tom wanted to float some vague sniffing questions, some oblique trial inquiries, to try to discover, if nothing more, the source of his own outsized reactions to their outsized anger, the source perhaps of those gamey fantasies that had bolted him out of bed; but of course he could not, because the cabin was a kind of echo chamber and whatever he and Aud said at one end would surely be heard up forward by Dot, who must have been wakened by Audrey’s clatter.

  So Tom stood back and resum
ed his reading of the fog, which seemed to be floating past now in the same direction as the current, intensifying a sense of a self-willed motion of the yawl through both space and time. This feeling became too strong, and Tom found himself walking forward to check, as if for confirmation of his belief in reality, the pennant of the mooring lashed by its pick-up line to the mooring bitts; then he leaned out over the bowsprit and watched the water flowing past the mooring line, which trembled at its own eddies like a string of some great bass instrument. Only when, seeing a floating fan of seaweed catch itself on the hemp just under the surface, he was again really satisfied that water and weather were on the move, rather than his craft or his illusions, did he realize that the squeaky footsteps of his skidproof sneakers on the foredeck were right over, and close over, Dot’s prostrate form down in the forecastle. He wondered if he, too, had been trying to stir her. Did she sleep in the buff? Self-consciously avoiding the clear plexiglas cover of the forward hatch, he went aft.

  He stepped down again into the cockpit, and there he found draped around his head, like festoons of glorious pale-colored gauzes hung out for his pleasure by his wife, the fragrances of bacon cooking and coffee brewing—so superior, he thought, taking a deep draught of them into his lungs, to their tastes, in the end, on the tongue. He heard, quite loud, the splattering of fat under the slabs of meat and the repeated chuck of the percolator and the push of the burners beneath. He was aware that his senses were extra alert, out hunting this morning like huge-eyed ospreys on silent wings.

  “What do we do about this fog?” Audrey’s voice came up through the opening to announce that she was aware of his movements on the boat, and Tom thought for a moment, and then in a blur of laziness dropped the thought, that her question carried a burden. Guardedness?

  “Wait it out, what else? Why? You worrying about Flick?”

  Audrey’s back was turned to him. She was struggling with something—to open a new can of coffee, presumably for another day, with a key, as he understood when he heard the inrush of air at the breaking of the vacuum. Finally she said, “Flick can take care of himself.”

  Flick could. Independence of action was his shibboleth. Independence and exuberance—which together conspired in a habit of using people, because he could not have both without exploiting anyone who wanted to be close to him. Tom suddenly wondered why he and Audrey had asked the Hamdens to come aboard into the skintight intimacy of life on a boat. They had been seeing this “fun couple,” as everyone called them, quite often this last year. Dot, with her sweater-and-pearls mentality; and Flicker—people always spoke of his zest for life. How unspoiled he was. Inner fire. Spontaneity. He was some kind of whiz in a skyrocketing firm of men who called themselves “social-engineering consultants,” and though he himself had never touched a finger to a computer knob, his company prepared the way for its every move by “running a program,” as Flick put it. “We ran a program the other day,” he had said recently, “on the retroactive contraceptive pill. Fascinating! We may be able to edit remorse right out of the range of social feelings.” His exuberance stemmed from, and also fed, his optimism about the future. “Tomorrow” would be a time, according to him, when the analysis of electrocardiograms and yes, by God, the diagnosis of cirrhosis and hepatitis and Weil’s disease and haemochromatosis—all the ills in Tom’s field—would be done much better by computers than by mere doctors. Decision-making everywhere, even in the home, would be taped, push-buttoned, and housed in “damned good-looking” imitation-walnut consoles. The earth would be a single farm, the moon would be colonized, the sea would be potable, the sun would be our power plant, intelligent life in the galaxies would be reachable by radio phone, and man in this world would be totally free, provided merely that he would check in from time to time with his infinitude of servant-boxes. Flick’s sincere joy in these prospects made a kind of poetry of them. There was nothing science-fictional about them, to him; they were imminent, emergent. His conviction was charming. He was almost, but not quite, irresistible. The not-quite was the letdown part. The not-quite made his handsomeness, his health, his big deep laugh, his hairy hands, the sapphires in his eyes, his hoarse undauntability—it made all his tireless exuberance hard to take for a long stretch, at least for Tom, who was just a plain old liver doc. But on the short haul Flick certainly gave one a lift—and short or long he could, as Aud had said, take good care of the self.

  Audrey turned her face up toward Tom and asked, “How will we get word about his plane?”

  “We’ll just have to wait. Go ashore. Take a cab to the airport. Wait some more. These fogs usually burn off about noon.”

  She moved to the stove. “ ‘There’s never any hurry when you’re living on a boat.’ ” She was quoting him; now the tone seemed casual, her usual self’s steady voice. “Come and get it,” she said. She cracked an egg on the side of the pan and parted the shell with care to drop the yolk at the center of the white.

  * * *

  —

  He climbed down the ladder, hearing and smelling the new frying, and seated himself at the cabin table. Audrey had raised the wings of the table and had set out plastic coastal charts as place mats, and paper plates and cups; nothing to wash later but silver.

  No sooner had Tom settled than Dottie came breathlessly out from the forward cabin, all dressed, powdered, brushed-out, red-lipped; it seemed as if she had been ready for a long time and had been waiting for him to come back down into the cabin. The girls’ good-mornings were quiet and maybe a trifle too easy. Dot asked if she could help and sat down across from Tom without regard for an answer—which never came.

  The impression was of passivity charged with unrest. A narrow face in parenthetic waves of hair, delicate gold earrings in pierced lobes; a warm face with two little chills under the eyes, dark places where all that might be subtended under the vague name of unhappiness—doubts, hurts, unrealized hopes for delightful gifts from loved ones, angers, wrong-reasoned urges to good causes, letters dictated to the self in the night—where everything harrowing had been driven for refuge from the downright healthfulness and cheerfulness of the rest of her glowing face. Whenever Dottie met new people, Tom had noticed, she greeted their opening statements with bursts of too-loud laughter and then, having emitted a few of these claps of agreeableness and of wanting to be noticed and of needing to be liked, she subsided into a melancholy and toneless quiet, speaking when she spoke on a pitch that was two or three notes lower than natural for her, as if forcing her voice down her throat into her soft bosom where she may have thought her real mother-wit lived. She had brought a big canvas bag of knitting aboard. She scratched her scalp from time to time. When she said something she really meant, she gave an emphatic toss of her head, so that her sincere eyes were veiled momentarily by clouds of flying hair.

  “What’s this about meeting Flick?”

  Flicker’s plane was due, according to the schedule, Tom said, at ten; he said it would be silly to leave until, at the very least, floes of glare had begun to drift on top of the fog. He paused, and then said drily that he had work to do on the boat while they waited. They ate, after that, in silence.

  And after breakfast he busied himself, ostentatiously, in the face of the speechless restlessness of the girls, with an inventory check. Was everything in its place? Forepeak: reefing lines; ditty box; six bagged sails; spare sail stops; heavy anchor, chain, and rode…He moved about mumbling. Dot did try to help Audrey, and when she was brusquely sent forward to clean her own cabin, Tom, moving aft with his clipboard of lists, saw the fanned-up embers in Dot’s eyes. But he refused to focus on the girls’ tightness with each other; he was taken up with busy work, the purpose of which, he realized once with a sinking throb, was to keep himself from thoughts of the flaw in his boat. His beautiful boat—there was her picture, in a frame of rope above the Shipmate stove, taken long ago when she was still a gaff-rigged sloop and had a main boom as long as her overall length, ca
rrying a simply incredible press of canvas, main and topsail and two headsails and bonnets and spinnaker and cheater, huge thunderheads of gray duck cloth above the small white hull. What men they must have been in the old days to use and subdue such power aloft! Ticking off now the checklist of things—portable lights, flares, sail-mending kit, anchor light (oil)—kept him from wondering why he had not hauled her out for the midsummer taking up on her bolts. He surely was, as Audrey called him, Dr. Meticulous, infallible as to niceties—brass fittings threw bright darts of their shininess in one’s eyeballs; the batteries in the flashlights were always fresh and would not fail when needed—but he had not done the one fundamental semiannual job that Harmony’s flaw required. He was drawn to lift up the floorboards along the bilges and peek; he suppressed the temptation. Why punish himself? He went above and pulled at the pump. Thirty strokes and she was sucking air; not bad after all. He felt relieved and went below again. Then he wondered whether all his uneasiness hadn’t to do, not with Harmony at all, but rather with the seething impatience that swirled around him.

  “O.K.,” he said, as if capitulating at the end of a long argument, “just let me shave and then we’ll go.”

  Audrey already had the kettle boiling for his shave; he took it into the head. When the mirror fogged over with steam, he splashed water on the glass to open up a jagged reflection, and he looked himself in the eye and tried to face the eagerness of both these women to go and fetch Flicker Hamden.

  * * *

  —

  As soon as he called out that he was ready, Audrey blasted off three times with the pressure fog horn, and Tom repeated the call when he climbed above, and in a while the launch came alongside. They jumped down into it. The launchman looked up at Harmony’s stately coaming and sucked at his cheek and then asked for two dollars for the mooring, and Tom paid, and the man took them ashore. There were brighter spots in the fog, now, and they rode a cab to the airport, and there, as Tom had predicted, they waited. And waited. The plane was said to be on its way. A man sent up a balloon and timed its vanishing and doubtfully shook his head. The girls both seemed pale. Some Edgartown types stood around in crazy straw hats from Eleuthra. No one said much. It got to be noon. The expectation of Flicker Hamden grew out of proportion to his person; he would have to justify himself, on stepping down, by turning out to be some sort of magician, or singer, or gambler with handlebar mustaches. The three sat on a baggage cart.