Hostages to Fortune (24 page)

Just sitting there he was exhibit A in evidence of a state manifestly preferable to yours. He would leave it to you to say whether yours was so enviable. Suicide: nothing like it, Dad, for getting your way with the women in your life, and let's face it, old man, you've struck out with yours. His own had been Mom and Alice, right? Well, look at them now! Contrite? Remorseful? Devoted? Let them live to a hundred, nothing would ever exorcise him from their minds. They could no longer give him what he wanted, even ask him what it was, so they gave him their all. Climb a mountain, win a trophy, get your name in lights: mere competitions—put yourself beyond competition and they were yours for as long as they lived. You became their unappeasable god. Mom was his, all his. Of course, if Dad were to do it too, why then he would have to move over and make a place for him on the bench. Having another? That was a slow but sure way of putting an end to your pain but if that was your aim was there not something to be said for stealing the march on time? It could be done in a minute. And on that note, good night, Dad, and pleasant dreams.

And so he was left alone to wonder where all this was leading and where it would end. How much longer could man and wife go on living in this cage of a house like specimens in a zoo daily disappointing their attendants' expectations that they might mate? Upon that question the light of false dawn shed no illumination. What it did show him was that for the memory of the dead son with every claim upon his pity and his penitence what he had come to feel was jealousy, suspicion, and hatred. To justify himself he had created for Anthony a ghost that was vengeful and vindictive, one who relished the misery he had inflicted upon his survivors, one whose motive had been just that. How cowardly of him to attribute unnatural, unspeakable desires to the dead boy who could not defend himself, and to take refuge from blame in the type-castings of what he himself called abominable psychology.

When a man married for twenty years awoke one morning to find himself alone nothing looked the same to him, not even himself. He had lost the eyes through which he had seen himself. In his own case the change affected his every moment. His and Cathy's had been a very different married life from that of most couples one or both of whom went out to a job by day and who saw each other only in the evenings and on days off from work. For twenty years they had spent their every hour together under this same roof. He wrote in his study within her call. Whenever he was stuck for a word or when he needed to straighten his back or stretch his legs, he strolled around the house or out to the garden, where he found her. It was a life of routine and rituals. They drank their preluncheon sherry, their predinner martinis, ate their every meal together. His first few days alone in it, he wandered around the house like a man lost. He was only half the man he had been and he was looking for the lost half.

Yet when the time came he was half relieved to see her go. The loss of her was fully as painful as losing the boy; but the humiliation, the unnaturalness, the perversion of living celibate under the same roof with his own wife—at least that was ended. He was relieved for another, related yet contradictory, reason, as well: her repulsion of his perhaps poorly timed but certainly licit longings had seemed to make them illicit, the most criminal he had ever felt, as though she were Anthony's now, or felt herself to be, and his own longings for her were taboo.

Now whenever the phone rang he let it go unanswered. For now that he no longer wanted it to ring, it did. Its sound to him was like the shrilling of some noxious insect reemerging from its period of dormancy. His mourning duties had been paid, he had served out the term of decorous withdrawal from the world, and people felt the time had come to extend a hand and welcome him back to their society. That unfortunate incident could be put behind them all and the misguided not to say misbegotten boy who had chosen not to live could be treated as though he never had and life be resumed where it had been so rudely interrupted. He imagined the party on the other end of the line saying to his wife or she to her husband, “I'm calling the Curtises. We've let time enough go by. Their wounds will have begun to heal and they'll be ready for company now. Life must go on.” He let the phone ring until it stopped and the house was steeped in silence once more. If he never saw anybody again it would be too soon.

To Tony, when he called with the news of Christy's death, he himself had said, “I'll come at once.”

“No, Ben,” Tony had said. “Thank you all the same and, please, don't be hurt, for it isn't personal, but I don't feel like seeing anybody. I want to be alone.”

He had been hurt, deeply hurt, at the time. He had never taken anything so personally as Tony's telling him it was not personal. For while he understood Tony's not wanting to see anybody, he was not anybody, he was he, Ben. Experience had taught him better now. It was not Tony on the line when the phone rang now. Tony knew that he was the last person he would want to hear from. Tony knew that when you longed for a certain person whom you would never see again the sight of anybody else, even a dear friend, was painful, almost distasteful. Yet Tony knew only of his loss of just one of his old familiar faces.

On the very morning of his first day alone the long-married man was faced with a domestic problem which underlined his new state and would be a reminder of it three times every day. He who had not eaten a meal alone for twenty years was now to savor the tastelessness of food consumed in solitude and silence. To be sure, his and Cathy's meals of late had hardly been festive affairs. But recalling them now brought to mind the old saying, the man without shoes complained until he met the man without feet.

He joined the ranks of a class he had once been privileged to pity, a class that Cathy had found particularly pathetic. Those men along in years seen shopping alone in supermarkets and looking as lost and helpless there as in a jungle. Men for whom that most familial of occasions, mealtime, had become a mere bodily function and a chore. Men who might have been builders of bridges, bosses of gangs, managers of millions, but who had gone home every night to a waiting supper served them by a wife who knew their tastes and whose first waking thoughts were on planning, buying, and preparing that supper, men as incapable of taking care themselves of their most basic need as a suckling babe.

“How awful to be all alone like that when you are old,” Cathy was moved by them to say. “To have nobody to turn to, share your feelings with. Nobody to whom to say such little things as ‘Come to the window, don't miss this sunset' or ‘Look! A hummingbird.' Worst of all, to get and eat your meals alone. A solitary old age must be even more painful for men than for women. They are so unable to take care of themselves, most of them.” He had thought it was feelingly, now he realized it was self-complacently, that he concurred, that he added, “As for me, I'd be hopeless.”

That was now being tested and proved. He had been thoroughly spoiled. Cathy had accustomed him to eating very well. The dishes he attempted to make for himself now were overseasoned, either burnt or overdone, and no two of them were ever ready in time to be eaten together. The results were not worth the effort. And how much of his time it took just to keep himself fed, and badly fed at that! He soon came to understand why those old men whom before he had pitied picked items from the supermarket shelves with just one thing in mind, not how tasty but how easy to prepare. Thus when they checked out it was with a dreary sameness of diet, no fresh produce but rather preprepared, heat-and-eat, one-man meals in boxes. In a word, TV dinners. The TV dinner represented a whole way of life—if you could call it living. The very sight of one of them with the deceptively mouthwatering photo on the lid brought to mind pictures of loneliness, alienation. Food of America's unloved, her widowed, her divorced, her unwanted, her elderly, her pensioners, her kitchenless millions in bed-sitting-rooms with one-burner hotplates, whom rejection, age, the loss of teeth had—mercifully—robbed of appetite. Something to be thawed and chawed without paying any attention to it while watching television alone, for even if you did pay attention, close attention, there was no telling one dish from another; they all tasted, if that was the word, like chicken pie without any chicken, so no wonder one saw old men at the checkout counter buying stacks of a week's worth of the same frozen beef stew.

He had become one of those, and it added years to his sense of agedness. To avoid being seen by anyone of his acquaintance at this unmanly and humiliating chore he drove to a town thirty miles from home to do his solitary shopping. His clumsiness in the kitchen would have been comical to watch. To see a man near fifty, trying to mop up an egg dropped on the floor, suddenly seeing in it the wreckage of his life and, on his knees, with tears in his eyes, begging, “Cathy, come back to me,” would have been amusing to someone else perhaps but not to the poor fool himself. He masticated his joyless fodder as mechanically as a cow in its stanchion munching hay. He passed up meals. Although mostly owing to what came later, his loss of weight had its beginnings then.

Cathy's room was open to him again now and one day he found himself in it.

There had been no settlement of property between them, no communication of any kind. He was not expecting her to ask him for a divorce. He hoped he was wrong, hoped she would, for it might be taken as a sign that, unlike him, she reserved for herself the possibility of remarrying one day. But even though she was past the threat of childbearing, he doubted that she would. Once burned, twice shy, and she had been badly burned. To him she meant married life, always had, still did, always would, and, he feared, he meant the same to her. When he felt up to it, he would find himself another house, in another town, clear out of here and inform the lawyer that he was gone and that she might now return. He suspected that Cathy would sell this house along with the reminders of their life together and find herself another one somewhere else too. Meanwhile, but for what she had packed to take with her, all here was as she had left it.

On her mantelpiece stood the pair of Meissen candlesticks they had bought at a country auction in upstate New York, the seashells they had brought back from the Bahamas, above it the Callot etching she had spotted in an antique shop in Edinburgh and that had been his tenth wedding anniversary present to her.

He was afraid of being overcome by memories and regrets through even so much as a glance at the bed.

By the window that gave onto the garden sat her chaise longue. He had often brought her tea on a tray there in the afternoon and read aloud for her criticism and comment his day's production of pages.

There on her sewing table sat the carved red lacquer box—the traditional wedding present to Chinese brides those were—in which she kept buttons.
Pray you undo this one. Thank you, sir
.

There stood the Jacobean marquetry stand-on-stand—another of their finds—in whose many small drawers she kept her stockings, her scarves, her handkerchiefs, her gloves.

There was an African violet, dead from lack of watering.

On her desk a revolving calendar showed the date on which she had left. He reset it not to the day's date but to that of Anthony's death. It was like the inscription on the burial vault of a family that had perished all together, for this room in which he had been conceived was now the tomb of the love that had died on the day Anthony killed himself.

The moving van set off for Stone Ridge at quarter past nine in the morning. A crew of two had sufficed to do the packing, and it had taken them less than an hour: aside from his personal possessions he was taking with him only his desk and his bed. Now he had only to leave and Cathy would find a house from which, except for the articles they had owned jointly, every last trace of him had been removed.

Those traces had been many, and removing them was a job that had occupied him for weeks. All day long for days he had emptied closets and drawers, sorting out his things from hers. He had toiled endlessly up from the cellar and down from the attic carrying cartons full of stuff. Twenty years he had lived in this house, and he was one of those people who never threw anything away—just the opposite of Anthony, who took after his mother in this. From a trip to the town dump he would return with half the load he had carted there, appalled to see the perfectly serviceable things that Cathy was discarding, and to her exasperation, back in place it all went. You might not have need of a certain thing right now but you never knew when you would, or if not you then somebody else. Old? Yes, but for certain jobs that was what you wanted, not a new pair. That was not working now but one day he would see whether he could fix it. He had saved everything, and he had a let to save, for he operated on the principle that if you found something you liked you had better lay in a lifetime supply because they were going to stop making it. Not until now had he asked himself what was a lifetime.

He must have supposed he was going to go on living forever. Had he had no sense at all of the passage of time, of the narrowing of prospects, the waning of enthusiasms, of the inevitable decline of his strength and the weakening of his faculties, of the fickleness of fortune and the folly of presuming upon the future? How thoughtless, how selfish of him! What a rat's nest for other people to have to dispose of when he was dead and gone! This accumulation of goods, the naïve trust and the blighted hopes it represented, now mocked him, sickened him with the evidence of his fatuity. If only Cathy could see him now! Daily the Salvation Army truck came to haul it all away—the rag-and-bone shop of his heart.

Cathy had been impatient not only with his saving of things, she was impatient with things. Something lying around unused, taking up space, angered her as a lazy person might. She endowed it with a being, with a personality—shiftless, sly, good-for-nothing—and treated it, when she spied and pounced upon it, as though it had been lying low and living off her without earning its keep. Seeing for the first time now that for him this accumulation of things had been a promise, an illusory promise of life always to come, he wondered whether Cathy's hostility to them might not have been because for her they were just the opposite: a memento mori—that this was behind the rage that came over her whenever another spring rolled around to clear them all out, get them out of her sight. He was sentimental about old creels and picnic baskets because he associated them with good times and foolishly expected the good times to last forever; in her contrary way Cathy was sentimental too, resenting such things because they could not go on indefinitely repeating the pleasure they had given her and because being old and worn they made her feel old too. Since changes in women's clothes were so much more radical than those in men's, an old dress of hers with its hem too low or too high or a pair of shoes with tall spike heels angered her because they dated her, far more than an old suit of his with lapels half an inch different in width from those of today did him.