Hostages to Fortune (22 page)

“My parents asked me to tell you how terribly sorry they are for you both,” she said.

“Thank them for us both. And say that we deeply regret the unhappiness which your association with our family has brought into theirs. We hope you will be able to put it all behind you as quickly as possible.”

“Was it something I did? If I said something to hurt him why did he never tell me so? Give me a chance to explain. Apologize.”

“You must not sift your memories for things you might have said or done. There was no way of your knowing that you were dealing with a person incapable of weighing things properly. Don't let your conscience torment you. Put Anthony away in your memory and keep no reminders of him. If you have letters from him, destroy them. Live. When the right man comes into your life, marry him. Have children. Be happy.”

“I thought I loved him. I thought he loved me. We were too young for it now, of course, but I really thought we might get married someday. Now it's as if I never really knew him, never knew what was going on in his mind, and I'm left not knowing how I ought to feel.”

“You should pity him but that doesn't rule out a good dose of anger, a sense of being unfairly rejected. A person's life is not all his own to be reckless with, not when he has involved others in it. Whatever was troubling him he owed it to you, to all of us, to give us a chance to help, to account for ourselves. But then pity him, because whatever it was he felt it was too much for even us to be of help.”

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 comfort. 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.