Hostages to Fortune (10 page)

Yesterday morning Tony had appeared on deck bearing drinks at an hour that caused Pris an even more pointed than usual look at her wristwatch. He was at the wheel, she knitting. He took a sip of his drink and choked, then choked again trying not to let her see that he was choking. It was almost straight Barbancourt rum. He pretended to drink it but when Pris balled up her knitting and went forward to stretch herself on deck he poured it over the side. There had to be one sober man on board, especially with those clouds piling up on the western rim.

He was at the wheel, Pris sunning and napping, Tony below listening to the radio.

“Skipper,” he called, “I'm on one hundred and twenty degrees. Right?”

“Steady as you go,” Tony called back.

With the coffeegrinder winch he took up on the sheet and trimmed the mainsail and caught the wind, and the boat responded with a shiver and a lunge like a racehorse feeling the crop. She lifted her bow and rose high, laving her sides with foam. She could be as frolicsome as a porpoise, give her a good breeze and someone at the helm to stroke her. She was in her forties but racy still. Keeping her was as costly as keeping a woman and she required just as much pampering. When she was hauled out and dry-docked yearly her decks were holystoned, her mahogany scraped down, varnished, her brightwork polished to gleam like gold. In an age of plastic hulls and aluminum masts she was a curiosity and in dock she drew crowds like a classic car. She was womanly in her lines, svelte in her prow, broadening appropriately down toward the bottom where her works were. Now the shrouds hummed, the windstreamers snapped. Below, Tony was assisting the mezzo-soprano with
Ma che cos'è quest'amore che fa tutti delirar'
? You would have thought he was four sheets to the wind unless you knew him, then you knew that off-key was the only way Tony could sing. He could not help but feel a puritanical judgment that this was a bit too much jollity in a man burdened by Tony's memories and regrets. Yet he felt he had no right to judge him. If Tony could forget for a moment any of all that he had to forget who was to begrudge him that?

When he next called out his course they were skimming along at a good eight knots. Tony's rendition of
Per la scala dal balcone prest' andiamo via di qua
was interrupted for “Aye, aye, Mr. Starbuck. Steady as you go.” Hardly was this said when the boat was rammed by something at least as solid as a whale. Her bow reared high, she rolled to starboard and from stem to stern a spasm shook her. Joints and sockets cracked like bones breaking. From below came the crash and clatter of gear, galley wares. He spun the wheel hard alee and she came about and the sails emptied and hung slack while the boat continued to wallow and to shudder as though convulsing from the blow she had been dealt. Too shaken to move, he sat gripping the spokes of the wheel. The dinghy had been thrown from its davits and now, held to the boat by its painter, bobbed on the water astern. Through his half-dazed mind, not ready yet to deal with his predicament, wandered the odd, idle thought that it looked as though it were just born and still attached by the cord to its mother.

Pris handhauled herself back by the rail and arrived at the cockpit as Tony came staggering up from below. He seemed unaware of the gash across his forehead or of the flow from it filming his eyes and causing him to weep tears of blood. He looked like the enlightened Oedipus returning on stage. He was reeling and appeared to be suffering from concussion of the brain. He touched his brow, then stared with incomprehension at his bloody hand.

Leaving Pris to attend to Tony, he dashed below.

The galley floor was littered with pots and pans, canned goods, the bunks with things from the shelves above them: books, binoculars, the radio, still emitting Rossini—it must have been the latter that had struck Tony in its fall. But in the cabin, in the head, in the forward quarters there was no water. She had not sprung a leak—not yet. From their locker beneath the bunk he took life jackets and returned on deck.

A wreck, he said to himself as he drew the dinghy alongside and dropped in its oars. That's what we've hit, he said to himself as he took off his sneakers. Lots of them in these waters and we've struck one. Either a new one or an old one that has shifted its lie too recently to be on the chart in the right place. That's what it's got to be.

He lowered the ladder over the side and, not knowing what was under the surface, lowered himself cautiously into the water, thinking that should they have to take to it they would be frozen dead within five minutes. He took a deep breath and submerged to assess the damage, the danger.

He never told the Thayers when he got back on board what he had found below nor did he consult the chart to see whether the reef they had struck was on it. He never had to tell them, he never had to consult the chart. Nor did he have to tell them that had the boat been a modern one its plastic hull would have split at the seam like a nut and gone down with all hands aboard before there was time even to don life jackets. One chartered by a neophyte sailor and his wife and children had done just that this very season in these very waters and—while horrified, helpless spectators watched from shore—sank in seconds.

What Tony had done was shocking, inexcusable—hardly believable. On even the smallest pleasure craft the captain was the captain, the same as on an ocean liner. At sea his word was law. Laxness in carrying out his orders might not be punishable by being put in irons or hanged from the yard-arm, but it was the crew's duty, even when they were his close friends, to obey them. A boat was potentially a dangerous place and somebody had to be in command of it. In turn, it was the crew's right to expect their captain to be alert at all times. To his seamanship they entrusted their safety.

A sailor since he could walk, descendant of a long line of sea captains, nobody knew better than Tony that of all derelictions of the captain's duty inattention to the chart was the most egregious. That he could have committed it, thereby putting in jeopardy the lives of his wife and his closest friend, disclosed the depth of his continuing distraction of mind. It also, by its very enormity, silenced any criticism of him. He must have been drinking down below long before bringing up drinks for all.
People smile, but the agony endures
.…

He had toweled a tingle of warmth back into his body numbed by the icy water when Pris came from the forward quarters and joined him in the cabin.

“Anything I can do?” he asked.

She had done it all. Had washed Tony's bloody face and bandaged his cut and put him to bed to sleep it off. She shook her head. He was chilled by the look in her eyes of dull, detached, uncaring apathy. She was weary of Tony's suffering. It reminded her of her own.

But life went on and one dutifully reenacted its rituals, reminders though these were of a lost innocence that was now almost an accusation. And so, once inside the harbor, he cut the engine and dropped anchor at their old spot. At the time that inaugurated the custom about to be observed Christy could have been no more than two years old, his own Anthony not yet born.

While the charcoal in the grill grayed with ash they sat in the cockpit having a drink, all acting as though nothing untoward had happened yesterday, their thoughts on what awaited them at home. Surely the Thayers were thinking already of that; he was, and he had a lot less to think about than they. In fact, he was impatient to get home now, for he had resolved on this cruise to have things out with Cathy, settle their trifling dispute, and get them on a better understanding. The troubles of their friends had made him realize how lucky they were, how petty their squabbles. Trout season was over for the year, but he was considering suggesting a second honeymoon at the club. These were to be his last moments of such self-complacency, for meanwhile, at the marina, the superintendent had spotted them at anchor inside the harbor and his helper was even then on his way out in the skiff with orders to go as fast as he could go.

The superintendent had worked at the marina for many years. He had been there when the Thayers and the Curtises first cruised together. That was how he knew they would drop anchor at that spot in the harbor before coming on in to dock. They had stopped there at the end of their cruise ever since the first one, for, because of what happened then, it had become a rite. The superintendent knew the story. How for their last meal on board Tony had saved a steak and had stopped there to cook and eat it. Tony's way of cooking a steak on board the boat was to soak newspapers and lay them in a pad on the deck of the cockpit and build his charcoal fire in a grill set on the pad of paper. Seeing this for the first time, his passenger was dubious, not to say apprehensive.

They had had a drink and were having just one more before having another when Tony became dissatisfied with his fire. He went below to the galley and returned with a paper cup full of alcohol. When he poured the alcohol on the charcoal it flared and the stream became a fuse leading to the cup. It was not the first time this had ever happened. Tony was used to it. But he was not and when Tony set the cup on the deck to burn itself out he stamped on it. Tony did a back somersault over the rail, hit the water feet first and sank from sight. All this had happened in a second.

Tony surfaced with his drowned pipe clenched between his teeth. He was wearing shorts and when the cup was stamped his bare legs had been spattered with drops of burning alcohol. Tony's leap into the water had been as instinctive as was his stamping out the fire. Now patches of hair were gone from Tony's legs as though moths had been at him. They dried him off and rubbed him with an unguent. He was not much hurt. He, Ben, burned more with shame than Tony did with pain. Over their next drink it turned into comedy.

Now it was one of the many memories that bound them to each other and, he supplying the steak, it had become a tradition to round out their cruise with a last meal in this same spot. It was this spot that the superintendent of the marina had kept an eye on since the first phone call the day before yesterday, not much expecting to see the boat until about now, but watching nevertheless because of the urgency in the woman's voice at the other end of the wire and because of his promise not just to have the call returned as soon as they docked but to do better than that by sending his helper out in the skiff as soon as they came in sight.

It was Tony's alarm that alarmed him. Not for himself, or if so, only as a reflex and only for a moment, but for his friend. Tony's inner battering was blazoned by that bandage on his forehead and the livid bruise surrounding it and by the bleariness of his eyes, alcohol-induced but that was not to dismiss it, for alcohol was only the symptom of a far deeper distress. Poor Tony, how changed he was! Always so cool, so steady, prepared to cope with whatever came—now this timorousness, this dread of life.

Tony offered to come ashore with him. In the way the offer was made there was something hesitant, apprehensive, insincere, a look in the eyes or an undertone to the words that saddened him for his friend as nothing before had done. Once the bravest and most generous of friends, his suffering had turned Tony cowardly and self-protective. He had troubles enough of his own, he could take on no part of anybody else's. He was able no longer to get outside himself, which was the first requirement for friendship as it was for love, and share in another life. He was glad he had declined that offer and insisted that Tony stay aboard the boat. He was glad of that, at least.

“We'll put everything on the back burner until we know what's the matter,” said Tony to him as he boarded the skiff.

“Nothing's ‘the matter,'” he said as though to a fearful child. “Whatever it is it'll keep until we've eaten and brought the boat in. I'll be right back.” Last words of a life then ending. When, ten minutes later, they returned to haunt him, to taste like ashes on his tongue, they would seem to have come from before the Fall.

The number he was given to dial had the same New Jersey area code as the phone in Anthony's dormitory but it was not Anthony's number and that caused him a moment's perplexity, for he knew nobody else in that area. It could not be a call from Cathy, for she had headed west from home; that was all he knew—all she herself had known—about her destination, but that much he knew. So it was not a call from Anthony and yet it must concern him. Those words of Tony's to which he had just condescended so loftily now nagged him: he hoped nothing was the matter.

This while the unknown phone rang once, twice. Later, hunter that he was, he would liken those final moments of his former life while the phone rang to the interval between the firing of the gun and the meeting in air of the shot and the bird on the wing. Later; at the time he could liken what then happened to nothing that had ever happened to him before. This time he was not the hunter, he was the bird on the wing, and the shot that brought him down, that placed a pellet in his every vital part, was the president of Princeton University's informing him, with a heavy heart and with a father's sympathy, that his son Anthony had committed suicide.

He could just imagine what a father must feel on being told that his child had died in an accident or been killed in combat or died of a disease. After the shock of it would come the heartbreak, the anguish, the realization of the awful finality, the sense of loss and the loneliness, the unfillable gap left in your life, your unspent pity for the poor child and your regret at not having been there at the end to soothe him, to say good-bye, your own self-pity and your dread of telling his mother, the special sadness of burying a young person and the inadequacy of your friends' condolences: he could imagine all this with a vividness born of longing, for these sufferings, forbidden to him, were what his heart cried out for. He envied the man to whom they were permitted as a dying soldier might envy his neighbor in the next bed merely maimed by the same projectile. His dead son had unfathered him.