In Sunlight and in Shadow (47 page)

After tossing a rucksack into his sixteen-foot Winabout, he loosed the painter, dropped the centerboard, and when the wind in bare rigging had pushed him halfway across the inlet, raised mainsail and jib, tacking out to open wind-lined waters already running with a two-foot swell. Despite the weather and size of the boat, his plan was to sail to New London and up the Thames, leave the boat for the winter with a friend, and pick it up on the way home from a trip to Boston in late spring. The winds ahead of the storm went northeast. It would be a quick but dangerous run, and he would take the train back on Sunday, having been through enough difficulty and privation, he guessed, to keep him for a few months, and having touched upon the state of life in which nothing was assumed, all was at risk, and even things thought dead can come alive.

The track of the storm, however, had moved unfavorably and confused the winds, which now clashed in the Sound in unexpected violence, deepening the swell almost unbearably for the little boat and subjecting it to life-threatening concussions. This was before the rain and the dark, and just the work of the wind, when land was close by and easy to reach, though far enough away for drowning. Vanderlyn could have come about and made for home. To go east he had to tack now anyway. He could have sought shelter on any of the beaches to the south, the mansions behind them unperturbed by the winds through which, like his own, they had long held.

But he didn’t, guiding his boat instead between the two pillars of Greenwich and Oyster Bay and out to the middle where small boats were in great danger. The wind screamed through the few short stays. The boat ceased to be propelled solely by the air, and was made by gravity to slide down the slopes of swells, sometimes fast enough to luff the sails, sometimes fast enough to give rise within Vanderlyn to a giddy feeling of disconnection, as if physics were abridged and this boat were soon to be lifted into the thin of the atmosphere.

Perhaps it was adrenaline or something greater, but in the storm the world seemed full, and he slowly cut his way east, tacking now broadly, now tight, according to what was happening far out at sea and its repercussions in the Sound. Somehow the eastern-driving winds were a narrative of his life, and opened the truth of it to him in their pattern and their beat, and thus the truth of the lives of others, which in essence were the same.

For eight hours until dark he struggled every second, always alert, ignoring everything but what was instantly required. The first thing to go was the jib, nipped at the base until it broke half free and flew hysterically from the top of the mast like linens on a clothesline. He let it go—daring to leave the tiller and dash to the mast for the seconds it took to uncleat the halyard—and watched as it climbed on the wind. Rather than flopping upon the waves and sinking like a handkerchief, it rose violently, lines snapping, compressing upon itself in folds, falling back and unfolding as if in regret, and then, when open, rocketing up again. It would take two steps down but twelve up, and in this way it ascended until he could no longer distinguish it from the streaks of gray and white that scored the charcoal-colored clouds.

He had never seen anything like that. Sails were heavy. No matter what the force of the wind, when detached from the rigging they hit the water within a boat’s length or two at most. The departure was welcome. Like watching for the largest wave or listening for the loudest crack of thunder, it served more than curiosity or entertainment but something related to a greater expectation. Things lifting on the wind, seas violent such as no one had ever seen, the world shaken by majestic events: this was the way out. In this seemed to be answers, although they were not clear and perhaps never would be. But on the edge—rain now lashing, the rucksack overboard with his possessions, the shore no longer visible, the ribs and stays threatening to explode with strain—nature seemed just, its elemental assertions against which he now struggled the theme and answer he had sought all his life. It was good to get such a strong answer from such a strong hand. He imagined that unexpectedly and contrary to all the fixed laws by which the world lived, he might possibly follow the ascending sail, and that this would be his death. Though in general he could barely see, he did see when the friction and collision of two great waves sent up columns of oxygenated white water, bursting the darkness like fireworks that bloom, upwell, and disappear with a sigh.

At almost three, when, had he been sensible, he should have been camped in a harvested field close to the water, with the boat pulled up safely on the sand, he checked his watch. It glowed back at him, and he tapped it, thinking it had stopped in the afternoon, though he didn’t bother trying to listen for ticking that could not possibly be heard. Had he guessed, he might have said it was not the middle of the night but no later than eight in the evening. Perhaps he had been taken so fast that he had sped past Montauk and Block Island and was now in the open sea. The water seemed very wide, the waves were of a class that lifted great liners, and there were no lights, horns, ships, or ports. And then, in a blast of wind like a hammer blow, the mast cracked and knifed into the water, pulling the tiny bit of mainsail with it and the boom as well. Like a sea anchor, drawing after it wire stays far too strong to unfasten at a stroke, it swamped the boat and sent Vanderlyn into water that, though cold, seemed to him to be a pleasing temperature and, rather than a shock, a relief.

Though by now beyond the realm of deliberation, he still had to decide whether to stay with the boat or let himself be carried by the sea. Like his life, were it not to sink completely, the wreckage would keep his head above water if he could but hold on to it, for in daylight the swamped sailboat would be far more visible than a man alone. From the rails of many an ocean liner on the North Atlantic he had seen clumps of flotsam stuck in place as he steamed by. In comparison to the empty expanses they were an irresistible target for the eye. Even on a destroyer pressing thirty knots one scanned these things for clues of life. The crews of fishing boats, freighters, or warships would look closely, the watch-standers lifting their binoculars. So he clung to the gunwales, now at water level, and stayed with the broken vessel.

This was not easy. The water had retained enough of the summer heat not to be that cold in early fall, but it eventually numbed his hands and fingers. Waves struck with great force, threatening to break his hold. The mast twisted, clubbed at him, and sometimes wrapped its guy wires around him like the tentacles of a squid. Salt water was shot into his mouth by high-pressure winds and attacking waves. And at four or five, after what seemed like a week, the lightning began, bringing intermittent floods of illumination that froze the swells as if in a slide show.

But the lightning enabled Vanderlyn to make out a coastline so low it might have been an illusion were not the land of eastern Long Island shallow after epochs of grading by the sea. It was unlike a hallucination in that it was homely and indistinct. And then, still offshore, the remains of his boat caught on a shoal. The waves broke over him, but the varnished timbers dug into the sand and held fast, and he knew they would stay.

At dawn he found that his grip had closed like rigor mortis around the half-broken gunwale that had saved his life. The sky was the color of long-tarnished silver, and the waves now were only a foot high and running as evenly as if they were apologizing. He looked about. The shore was a mile or two away, a concave necklace of beach and low dunes, in the center of which was an inlet. He recognized this. Sitting on the sand, the little waves crossing over him never more than chest high, he turned his head as if he were rowing, hands still on the gunwales, and saw behind him, at the same distance as the shore, the southern tip of Gardiners Island. As a child, passing by on sailboats, he had seen workers there harvesting grain by hand, like medieval peasants. No one was allowed to land, but his father had beached their boat and gone in to speak to them. “Either they’re all Shakespearean actors hired to amaze trespassers, or we’ve stumbled upon a remnant of the Elizabethan age,” he had said. In college, Vanderlyn had sailed there at night with a girl from Vassar, and, in for a penny, in for a pound, they had swum naked in a warm freshwater pond, as disconnected from the world as if they had been shot back a million years.

Breathing hard, worrying about his heart and whether it might stop, not confident that in his state and in the wind and current of even the denatured storm he could reach shore, he thought back to 1910, before the great wars, when he had swum at the height of summer under a full moon in the Gardiners’ bath-warm pond. In the moonlight the Vassar girl was flawless. He had thought at the time that he would marry her, and eventually he did.

At eight o’clock by his still-running watch despite the paradox of the description, he abandoned what was left of the Winabout and, at first half walking, half swimming over the bar that had saved him, found deep water and began a slow, two-hour crawl toward Napeague Inlet.

Were he to make it, he would burrow into the side of a dune and sleep, and when he awoke go to the highway and then East Hampton, where among the many people he knew, someone would be at home despite the season and the storm. He had nothing but his clothes, neither shoes nor socks, which had been stripped off by the sea as easily as a two-year-old’s shoes and socks are shucked from his feet by a mother’s well practiced and affectionate hands. In the cold, dry sides of a dune, he dreamt of the island pond, moonlit, warm, and ruffled by the wind.

C
ATHERINE NOW DISPLAYED
a delicacy that made her parents unusually tentative in her presence. They refrained from speaking when ordinarily they would have spoken, they shot glances at one another, and were as careful about what they said as if they were disarming unexploded ordnance. The more fastidious they were in her regard, the more fragile she seemed to become, until, faced with this realization, they pretended unsuccessfully that nothing had changed. But it had. Silences in conversation were now much longer, the resumption of speech more abrupt, the endings unnatural, the atmosphere brittle. Her insoluble problem, that of injustice working upon a single human heart, threatened to transform her. Forced to change, she longed not to, and in sorrow and in anger could only observe what was happening. An unknowing onlooker might have thought that she was angry at the people she loved, but it was just that when she struck out at enemies she could not reach, her frustration found its target among those who were closest to her.

At first that Saturday, she hadn’t wanted to ride out to the docks at Montauk to buy dinner from the incoming boats. “Why don’t you send
him?
” meaning Harry, she had asked her father, who, instead of upbraiding her for her startling rudeness, stated patiently that he and Evelyn would be going, and it would be good to get out of the house on a rainy day. In East Hampton, storm days wore out playing cards and electric lights, and by late afternoon the roads were filled with restless people who, as if it would be their salvation, wanted to look at storefronts.

Harry loved Catherine too much to be hurt that she had referred to him as if he were a disliked servant or an untrusted stranger. “Why don’t you come?” he asked. “We can look at the storm waves from the Montauk Road.”

“We can just walk out here and look at the waves,” she answered, her tone half combative and half a cry for him to take her in his arms.

He remained practical. “It’s far more interesting and dramatic from a height.” He should not have said
dramatic.
Billy and Evelyn winced.

“The storm is over,” Catherine stated.

“But on the ocean side,” Harry responded, trying not to be argumentative (which was somewhat like walking over a bridge of eggshells), “the highest waves are born at sea and they come after the storm. They’ll be at their maximum, and you can face them knowing that they can only back down.”

“Yes,” said Billy, “and from inside the Rolls, where you’ll be quite comfortable.”

She had seen too many wonderful things while looking out through the windows of that car not to go, and, announcing that she would, she seemed closer to her old self. “I don’t want lobster,” she said. “I want something that’s comforting.”

“Lobster’s not comforting?” Billy asked. “I guess not if you use it to clock someone in the face.”

“Lobster is for triumph, for people who don’t care. I’d like something like chowder, and rolls.”

“Oh,” Billy said. “I see.” He didn’t.

“Of course,” Evelyn added, knowing how simple it would be to make what her daughter wanted.

At Hither Hills the waves were once again cavalry charging against the dry world as line after line of galloping white attacked beaches that somehow remained intact. The water on the bay side was comparatively still, and there fishermen driven by habit and necessity had gone out before the storm was over, baiting smaller hooks, dragging lesser nets.

At the docks, Catherine seemed connected to the fishermen in a way that Harry, having come from the war, well understood. He was neither jealous of her love for them nor disturbed by their love for her, for it was the kind of thing, glancing and pure, that he had seen make hardened soldiers worshipful of feminine beauty they had mistreated and misapprehended all their lives, and would again, perhaps, when their privations came to an end. Catherine had always understood the difficulties of the fishermen, and she had always been kind, but now it was deeper, as if she had been riding with them in their boats or waiting at home with their children.

Billy bought fish, and they started back. She was placid and silent. It was raining lightly. Either dusk had fallen or dense clouds had replicated evening light. Billy flipped the switch for the headlamps, and as he did so Evelyn leaned forward and turned on the radio. At the tip of Long Island they were more or less halfway out to sea, with neither hills nor mountains to obstruct radio signals as the storm-driven atmosphere did to these what wind did to escaped birthday balloons. A station in Chicago faded in and out, its ghostly dance behind the warm yellow light of the dial finally disappearing. French then filled the car as if a miracle. “Montreal,” Billy said after listening a moment to the transmission, disappointed that the broadcast had not leapt the ocean. And then Evelyn turned the dial and stopped its lighted bar on a strong New York station from which Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D issued amid lonely cracks of static from lightning over distant seas.