Dead calm

needed a mother or somebody to protect him from the Pacific Ocean and from Bellew’s abrasive contempt.

“Why did he want to make the trip?” Ingram asked. “Bellew, I mean.”

“I don’t even know who first suggested it,” she replied. “It was just one of those ideas that can burst on the scene fully grown when four people are sitting in a bar with their second or third round of drinks. It was about ten days after we’d met them, and we’d just come in from a day’s fishing as his guests on the boat he’d chartered. He already had all the material for the story he was doing on the fishing at La Paz and was sure he could get a story, or perhaps two, out of the trip. I told him we would be glad to pay their air transportation back from Papeete. And, after all, it would only take a month.” She smiled bitterly. “We sailed from La Paz twenty-six days ago.”

Before they were more than a week out, everything began to go wrong. They blew out a sail in a squall and lost another overboard. Leaks began to show up from opened deck seams so that when they were shipping any water aboard everything below was soaked. They missed Clipperton Island because something had apparently slipped up in Hughie’s navigation. They used up most of their fuel trying to beat their way back to it, which was ridiculous, since it was uninhabited anyway, but by now they were no longer acting rationally but only motivated by their endless quarrels. They gave up trying to find the island after it failed a second and a third time to appear where Hughie said it was. Orpheus began to leak alarmingly, so it took more pumping every day to keep the water out of the cabins.

But beyond all that, it was the old story of clashing personalities jammed into too small a space with nowhere to go to avoid each other. Bellew became caustic, loud-mouthed, and finally insufferable, openly contemptuous of Hughie’s mistakes in navigation and seamanship, while Hughie, instead of fighting back, retreated into sullenness and pouting. Estelle Bellew was sympathetic and tried to shield him from her husband. Lillian herself lashed out at Bellew in defense of Hughie—or she did at first, until she decided that wasn’t the answer—but at the same time it was lacerating to have to admit to herself that he even needed defending against another man. Some of her hurt and resentment must have showed, for Hughie began turning increasingly to Estelle rather than to her for comfort when he backed down from Bellew. And Estelle tried increasingly to help him, as though he were a boy, and alone.

“That in itself was infuriating,” she went on. “The implication was that I was some species of heartless monster who had no sympathy, no feeling for him at all. She had the best intentions in the world, but she simply couldn’t seem to understand that that was the trouble in the first place, that he’d never in his life had to accept the responsibility for his own actions or fight for his rights, because there was always some woman panting to shield him from the one and buy him the other. And she was simply doing it again. I was trying to help him in the only way he could be helped—or that I hoped he could be helped—by letting him work it out for himself, no matter how I cringed and wanted to go somewhere and cry when he simply retreated into petulance in the face of Bellew’s contempt, or no matter how much easier it would have been to set him behind me and then remove Bellew’s skin in strips. So I began to treat her—Estelle—with the same insufferable nastiness that Bellew treated Hughie.

“In the end I couldn’t stand it any longer—the helplessness of it, I mean—watching Hughie being browbeaten without the spirit to fight back, and not being able to do anything in the world about it except drive him more and more to some other woman for sympathy. I hated both of them, and I hated myself. I blew up. I did the one thing that was guaranteed to hurt everybody. I made an open, deliberate pass at Bellew.”

“Well, it’s been done before,” Ingram said.

“But seldom by people who are assumed to be adult. And seldom with consequences as tragic. It happened one night just at the end of the second week.”

It was shortly after dinner and they were all on deck. She was at the wheel, having relieved Hughie just at dusk so he could take a series of star sights while he could still see the horizon. Bellew was sprawled in the cockpit beyond her, while Estelle was sitting alone on the forward end of the deckhouse, looking at the fading afterglow of sunset. Hughie’s star sights didn’t work out. He’d got three of them, with three lines of position several hundred miles apart, none of which crossed, or were anywhere near the dead-reckoning position based on the equally dubious fix he’d got at noon. Either his figures were wrong or he’d mistaken his stars. A long time went by while he checked and rechecked his work. Then he came out on deck with a star chart, but in the meantime the moon had risen and the stars were fading and hard to distinguish. And Bellew started on him again. Her flesh crawled.

“How’s it look, Magellan? We still seem to be in the same ocean?”

Hughie made no reply. He went on futilely trying to match up at least one of the stars with his chart. Her heart ached for him. She wished she could help him. And why, oh why, in the name of God, didn’t he turn on the badgering and idiotic salaud and tell him to shut up?

“I’ll tell you what, Commodore,” Bellew went on, “if it turns out we’re anywhere near Greeley, Colorado, I got a friend runs a bar there…”

She closed her eyes. Do something, Hughie!

He did. Like a sullen child, he threw the star chart on the deck. “Hughie,” she called out quickly, trying to save him from utter shame, “let me try. Maybe I could help—” But without even a glance at her he’d already turned and gone forward to Estelle. She could see the two of them sitting close together in the light of the rising moon. She’d bitten her lip to keep from crying, and she could taste blood in her mouth. Then out of some dark and insensate desire to wound them all, herself included, she said to Bellew, “We don’t seem to be entirely necessary, do we? But it is a beautiful night, and if you’d like help with some of your problems, why don’t you bring up a couple of drinks?”

The others had seen, all right—at least the merged silhouette against the moon—and heard the laughter and the singing. One of them was dead now, and the other was mad, at least partly as the result of it, so she was the only one left—besides Bellew, of course—with any true and rational appreciation of the scene as something to be treasured forever. It had taken perhaps fifteen minutes to sicken herself to the point where she had to go below or jump overboard. She removed the repulsive hand from inside her bra, got up, leaving the wheel untended, and went down to the cabin and locked the door. Hughie never came down at all. Apparently he’d slept on deck.

She went on in a minute. “So there you have the situation. We had everything we needed now for disaster, or for something very messy, but when it came, two days later, it was only an accident.

“I’ll try to give it to you in chronological sequence, as we reconstructed it afterward, though it concerned four people in different places, I was asleep through a good part of it, and at the end only two of us were still alive and able to give a coherent account of what had happened. It was two p.m., and we’d been lying becalmed for over an hour, with all sail still set, but the booms sheeted in to keep them from banging. It was Bellew’s wheel watch, and he was sitting in the cockpit, keeping an eye out for signs of a breeze. Estelle Bellew was lying in her bunk in the forward cabin, reading, I think, and Hughie and I were in our cabin aft. I was pretending to be asleep; that way we had at least the semblance of an excuse for the fact we weren’t speaking to each other. Hughie went out.

“He came on deck. Bellew, of course, was in the cockpit.

Neither of them spoke. Hughie went over to the rail and was looking down into the water when he saw the school of dolphin which had been following the boat and playing around under it for the past two days. These are dolphin, the fish, you understand, and not porpoises.”

Ingram nodded. “Very beautiful fish, like flame under water. The Mexicans call them dorado—golden, or gilded. They like to lie under anything floating on the surface.”

“They’re the ones. Anyway, while he was looking at them he remembered that Estelle had said she’d like to see if she could photograph them from below the surface if the school was ever around when we were becalmed. So, still without speaking to Bellew, he went back below. Only, when he passed through the deckhouse, he went forward first into the main cabin—that is, the saloon—and called out to Estelle through the curtained passage at the forward end of it, telling her about the fish. She was eager to try to photograph them, so she said she’d put on a swim suit and meet him on deck. Bellew, still aft in the cockpit, heard none of this, of course. Hughie then went back up into the deckhouse and on down into our cabin to put on his swim trunks and get a diving mask and snorkel. But I didn’t know it, because by this time I was asleep.

“Hughie was below probably only a few minutes, but when he came back up through the deckhouse and stepped on deck Bellew was no longer there. He’d gone below, into the main cabin, to make a sandwich. This, of course, is forward, toward the Bellews’ cabin, so—since the two of them hadn’t met in the deckhouse—Bellew had no idea Hughie had returned to the deck. Fortunately, you know the layout below, and you can understand why we had to reconstruct this whole thing afterward to try to understand how it could have happened.”

Ingram nodded. He could see the tragedy already beginning to take form, like the choreography of some death scene in a ballet, where every movement had to fit.