Hostages to Fortune Read online

  At the end there were promises to keep in touch, expressions of lasting mutual interest in what became of each other. In their longing to feel that the bond between them was durable, not perishable, both were trying, as much as to keep alive the memory of Anthony, to put a stop to time and its inexorable erosions, to deny the transitoriness of all human life, a glimpse into which she too had now been given. On his side he intended to keep none of these promises, for he knew that reminders of him would soon begin to be burdensome to her, and he knew that she would renege on them too after a time. She was young, and while he was not one of those older people who thought the feelings of the young were shortlived because they were shallow, he knew that they were rapidly replaced, that the wonderful recuperative powers of youth and its unquenchable appetite for life and above all its irrepressible self-delight, all the saving instincts his Anthony had somehow lacked, would soon take Alice’s thoughts away from this unfortunate experience. In his memories she would always occupy a place all her own as the one girl his poor doomed boy had loved, and as the daughter who had almost been his, the mother of the grandchildren he might have had.

  Why? Why did he do it? she asked again for the last time, and then for the first time he felt a moment’s irritation with her. She asked it as everybody did, as if there could be no answer. Yet it was not so bizarre, not so unaccountable as that tone of wonderment implied. His son was no one-of-a-kind freak. He was not alone in judging the world unfit to live in. Every day many young people did what he had done and each one found a different reason for it. And still people wondered at them, thought their behavior mysterious. How did that old joke go? If you. can keep your head while all about you men are losing theirs—then maybe there’s something wrong with you.

  But he swallowed his bitterness and to this young person with her life before her said that she was seeking a reason for an act that was unreasonable, an explanation of the inexplicable, and he wished that he himself could believe what he was saying and not that he was seeking an escape from self-interrogation and blame. “We’ll never know,” he said.

  It was what she needed to hear and the sigh with which he said it was what she needed to have it turned off with. By putting it beyond hope of ever being understood one put oneself beyond the obligation to try to understand.

  “We’ll never know,” she echoed him. And Anthony’s ghost receded a step deeper into the shadows, faded a shade less substantial.

  His last long look at her was his good-bye to all that she embodied for him: a fulfilled and contented old age—an old age that seemed to have arrived ahead of schedule and to have brought him little contentment, no fulfillment.

  Et in Arcadia ego.

  The setting was pastoral, the mood idyllic. Beside the silvery stream they sat like characters out of Walton. And their dialogue was about death, for even in Arcadia it was there. Ah, if only there were a spray against people! One that like the insect repellent promised on the label hours of protection.

  “I have a confession to make,” Ken Howard was saying. “My feelings right from the start were mixed. I pitied my poor father. Of course I did. That was my overriding feeling. But at the same time I was angry. Hurt and angry. I felt sorry for myself.

  “In those days I believed that parents the age of mine—they seemed awfully old to me then—had all long since lost any romantic attachment to each other and lived only for their children. Their private lives were over. That was foolish, of course, and also very selfish, as only children can be. I paid the price for thinking it. Believing as I did that my father lived only for me, I was bound to believe that only I could have been the cause of his death. What had I done to disappoint him so? We had been great pals, or so I thought; now our good times seemed like a sham. He had only pretended to love me. It cast an ugly light on all our lives together. I know now that my father did think of me, up to the end, and that if his love for me and mine for him was not enough to go on living for, it wasn’t personal, if you know what I mean. But I was many years coming to understand that. His doing what he had done made me different and at a time when every kid longs for one thing above all and that is to be like the others. I tell you, awful as it is to admit, for a long time I secretly hated the memory of my poor father. And of course I suffered tortures for that.”

  It was not against people that he needed protection. What he needed was a spray for protection against himself, against the stings of remorse. He had had many, and he did not shed the venom. In him it accumulated.

  Each morning when he selected clothes for the day from his closet and again each night when he hung them back up he saw on the shelf the carton containing Anthony’s ashes. He might have put it somewhere else and spared himself the sight but he felt he ought not to be spared. Meanwhile, the time had not yet come to discuss with Cathy what was to be done with it. She was still not ready for that. She had never asked what disposition he had made of the body. In this he saw not indifference but dread of the subject. She still shrank from any mention of Anthony. Only yesterday he had found the family photographs all gone from the piano lid and from the shelves and the walls of the living room. Not just the ones of Anthony or including him but also those of just the two of them. Reminders of her former life were all painful to Cathy and she was hoping by putting them out of sight to put them out of mind. Bare patches in the dust where they had stood and unfaded squares of wallpaper where they had hung, the ghosts of photographs, were reminders more haunting to him than the photographs themselves.

  Indeed, the whole world was already erasing the traces of Anthony Curtis’s short, unhappy stay and getting on with its many affairs. It seemed determined to flaunt its goods and attractions to prove his wrongheadedness. Spring came almost impudently early. One balmy day succeeded another and trees budded as though winter had been called off that year. All the more imperative then that he not forget for a moment. Alas for good intentions! Though the spirit be willing, the flesh is fleshy. He felt a stirring in him and recognized it as a renewal of interest in his work. He felt other stirrings as well and was loath to look closer for fear of recognizing them. He noticed things around the house neglected and in need of his attention. He read the newspaper, wondered what was for supper. In short, time passed and, willy-nilly, did its work of healing. Seen so often, Anthony’s carton became a familiar sight, ceased to be a continual reminder, sometimes even went unnoticed as he chose a pair of pants for the day or undressed for bed. One morning he was appalled to catch himself humming a tune as he shaved. Was he growing indifferent, callous? Perhaps it was just a part of general deterioration. You couldn’t go on forever feeling things as intensely as you might once have done. The nerve ends numbed, you turned in upon yourself, your range of vision shortened, you cared less for causes, more for creature comforts: that was what it was to last—dying young you died good. He need not have worried; his too-quick recovery was merely a remission. He was in for a relapse. Anthony’s ghost had not been laid; it was just biding its time.

  A constant preoccupation with Anthony: that was his due and to endure it patiently his duty. An eternal flame must burn to that wronged and reproachful memory and he must be its vestal. To have assumed the awesome responsibility of bringing a person into the world and then to have contributed in whatever way and to whatever extent to that person’s early rejection of life deserved a life sentence of repentance and atonement.

  But that was reckoning without the old Adam in him. For a man just going on fifty, in robust health and with better than normal appetites, to foresee an end after a while to a regime of self-denial and castigation of the flesh was only human, all too human. There was no more poignant admission of our distance from the state of grace than that contained in the words “Life goes on.” One survived calamities that ought to have killed one out of sheer shame of surviving them. One ought to have perished of bereavement and grief but one indecently didn’t, one grossly didn’t. Broken hearts beat on, and they longed like none others for company and comfo
rt. What ought to have been a tribute to human resilience and recuperativeness became a reproach for our animality, our insensitivity and our impudence. One not only survived but, shameless creature that one was, looked again with quickening interest at the world around him, only recently so desolate. Even over land seared black the little shoots of fresh green grass reappeared in time, grew, and grew rank. Penitential abstinence defeated its aim by arousing a ravenous appetite. Flesh of his flesh had destroyed itself, but his own too too solid flesh shuffled on, and where there was life there was lust.

  But if he thought that time enough for this had elapsed then he and his wife were living by different calendars, almost, it would seem, on different planets. She repelled his overtures, timorous and exploratory as they were, as though she were repelling them for all time to come, for all time past, both as though the two of them were now strangers to each other and also as though they were too close akin, as though he had proposed something not only illicit, indecent, but incestuous, though the full realization of this was to be delayed for several minutes, came when he heard the faintest of noises, heard it for the first time ever yet knew instantly what it was and what it signified. Infinitesimal in duration, barely audible the actual sound, yet to him it was explosive, reverberant. He knew what it was the way, in battle, a soldier knows the sound of the shot destined for him, the one he cannot dodge. It was the click of the lock on her bedroom door.

  She had put him off before, but then she had said, “Ask for me tomorrow, Romeo.”

  And he: I’ve been Shakespeared!

  And she (switching to the drawl of her native Ozarks): Tonight, ole hoss, I’ve got a sore between my two big toes.

  And he: The hurt cannot be much.

  And she: ’Tis not so deep as a well, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve: ask for me tomorrow.

  She was past all that, past childbearing now.

  To his own bed he slunk that night like the cat he had just put outdoors.

  After this he waited for her to make the next move toward a resumption of their conjugal relations. He waited and waited.

  They flee from me, that sometime did me seek

  With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

  Wyatt’s bitter lines and Job’s lament. My breath is strange to my wife ran in his mind like a refrain. And its being strange to her made his breath strange also to him.

  His wife had given him a slap in the face and his cheek burned red from the blow. She had fouled him with a far more grievous blow below the belt. But shame a man for something, however innocuous, and he will feel ashamed, and anger soon succumbs to shame.

  Although his immediate reaction to Cathy’s repulsion of him had been indignant, resentful, and defensive, it left in his mind, already envenomed by doubts and regrets, the toxin of self-contempt to swell and fester long after the sting had worn off. To have his advances repelled in so brusque and final a manner was to make him feel beholden for all those she had ever submitted to. That was how he must think of it now: submitted to. Those had been many and so he had much to feel beholden for. Made to feel dirty, disrespectful of both the living and the dead, crudely ill-timed, both stung and shamed he shriveled into himself and the distance and the silence between them lengthened and deepened. He was afraid to look at her lest his look be misinterpreted—or rather, interpreted rightly.

  Rejected by the woman who had been all womankind to him, he felt rejected by the entire sex. Having vowed to forsake all others for her, he had seen himself as a man through that one woman’s eyes. He had done so ever since she accepted him; that was what had made a man of him—until then he had been a boy fumbling under skirts; he could not stop when she spurned him. No other woman now lent him her eyes to see himself with anew. Because of Cathy’s love he had thought the better of himself; without it he thought the worse. He had not known that his amour propre was so dependent upon her, but so it was, and when she left his bed she took with her his self-respect and his manhood. The possession of them having been the undisguised source of pride that it was, their loss must be just as evident. He had felt that people pointed him out behind his back as the father whose son had killed himself; now he felt that to this they added, and the husband whose wife does not sleep with him. To men his despicable condition must show in his face. Women must scent his rancid musk.

  He felt both detached from and yoked to his big unwanted body. Without the partner whom he had shared it with for most of his adult life it was useless, gross, and ugly to him. He neglected it. He stopped shaving, brushing his teeth, washing his face so as not to have to look at himself in the mirror in the morning. Thus he made himself still less attractive—or would have if she had noticed. Whenever he did catch sight of his reflection it seemed to be that of another person bearing a close resemblance to him, and its hangdog look made it seem that to that other person the resemblance was an unwanted one. At such times he felt rather as though he had living in the house with him a twin brother, identical and inimical, one who detested him and detested his likeness to him. Not wanting to see anybody was now joined to not wanting to be seen, and his isolation was complete.

  He was learning that the humiliated and despised have nobody to protest their mistreatment to but themselves. Nobody wanted to hear about it, and besides, you would have died of shame to tell anybody. You yourself wanted not to hear about it: Nothing was more shameful than the consciousness of having endured mistreatment. Not to have protested it was to admit having deserved it. Being despised made you despise yourself. Indeed, such a person’s sole defense was to reject himself before the other person could do it. One was riven in hostile halves.

  The estrangement between his wife and him was aggravated by their physical nearness and the constancy of their association. The freedom from an outside job and the independence to work at home for which he had thanked providence daily these twenty years was now a curse. A little absence might have made hearts grow fonder. As it was, she was always within sight or sound: a longing, a loss, a heartache; while for her, there he was: a reminder, a revulsion, and a self-reproach. Just as when—this after several drinks—he was driven to look into the mirror and there saw double, so did Cathy when she looked at him, only for her the second person was Anthony. He could tell from her irrepressible shudder. She might almost have been seeing the sight he was shown in that undertaker’s basement in Princeton. He came almost to believe he was that sight. The resemblance between father and son had been a strong one and with the boy no longer present to make the comparison it had grown all the stronger in memory; he thought so himself. It was as though Anthony were now his shadow. He was glad then that he had never told her how her son had died; her shudder when she looked at him was sufficient without that. His desire and her distaste, his guilt over his desire and hers over her distaste, made for an intolerable situation. The measure of that was that the break, when it came, would be a relief even to him.

  Meanwhile his torment of the flesh grew upon him daily. It might be inappropriate, ill-timed, unseemly, but it was not to be denied. He took refuge from shame in the knowledge that this longing was a common way of compensating for the loneliness and grief caused by the death of a loved one, even of a spouse. In that and in the conviction that his longing was not entirely of the flesh. An affirmation of her love was what he longed for, an assurance that with the death of their child that love had not died too. Who but his partner in the union that had produced the boy could share and assuage the grief and the guilt that tormented him?

  Yet the once-living proof of his manhood was dead by its own hand. The life he had engendered had wanted no more of that life. Was his manhood threatened or had it been extinguished? For all his longing, he was not at all sure that given the opportunity he could perform as a husband again.

  He found himself blushing now like a pubescent boy at any mention of sex—and how often it got mentioned! It was still another reason for avoiding contact with the world. His condition gave him a sense of—surely prematu
re?—agedness, decrepitude, of being finished, burnt out. The callow youth he had been, the old man he was to become: he felt like either or both of those, not like the man in his prime that he was used to feeling. The sexual craving of a dirty old man (was there any other kind?) accompanied by the shame of an adolescent—the shame that every man looks to marriage to relieve him of. Cathy was teaching him by example to loathe himself, particularly that ungovernable appendage of his, or rather, that part of him to which he now felt the rest was an appendage.

  How could she not see that their situation was intolerable? That man and woman could not live around the clock under the same roof in married celibacy? Of all sexual perversions that was the most unnatural. It was indecent. It was grotesque. And she had always been so sensitive to his wants. Whenever he desired her she knew it telepathically. She knew it often before he did. Had she no sense of his humiliation now? Could she not feel in wavelengths throbbing on the intervening air his constant longing, his smoldering resentment?

  It was not a question of her “duty” to him. He had never thought of it as a duty. He never took her for granted. Twenty years of it had not diminished his wonder and gratitude at having a woman of his own. He never fully believed in his good fortune. Each time she responded to him was a surprise and a joy. “She’s going to do it! She is! She really is! She’s going to!” he said to himself. The sight of her body made him feel he was about to die of heart congestion and constriction of breath and not care if he did—what better way? Now to taste the ashes was to recall the fire.