Hostages to Fortune (11 page)

He must do his grieving alone and out of sight and with the consciousness that the object of it had repudiated him and all his works, especially one of his works, his own begetting. Within the space of a minute after hanging up the telephone that knowledge descended upon him. For some while after the conclusion of the conversation he sat with the receiver still to his ear. Finally becoming conscious of the humming in his head he lowered the mechanism. He did not at once replace it in its cradle. He stared at it as though he had never seen one before and knew only dimly what it was. Then there was a moment when he could not recall what he had just been told. It was something bad, very bad, but for a moment he was too stunned to recall what it was.

The manner of his son's death had made him a pariah, had put him in quarantine—or rather, it had drafted him into that army which until now, except for thoughts of the Thayers, had existed for him in articles on teenage suicide in newsmagazines in doctors' and dentists' waiting rooms and which he had read only because of his friends: their survivors, their parents, people whom, now that he was one of them, he knew to be the loneliest alive, like the multitude of souls in any one circle of Dante's hell, all condemned to the same torment for the same transgression, each in too much pain to comfort a fellow sufferer, indeed, seeing in fellow sufferers a mirror image of his own pain, his guilt, his shame.

On the wall in the office of the Gloucester marina hung a clock. At 1:21 he was a man who had not known how happy he had been at 1:20. Within that minute he had been cut off from both the living and the dead. To the living, as he knew before he had yet faced a single one of them, he would embody the ultimate affront to life, and to none more so than his fellow survivors. The unknowing look of strangers would be hard enough to bear but the commiseration of friends straining across the unbridgeable gulf that had opened all around him would be intolerable.

As yet his son's death was not real to him but already his responsibility for it was. For something which he was not conscious of having done but to which he confessed his guilt, he had been judged, convicted, and condemned to a life sentence all in a minute. Just one little minute out of the eternity of time—if only the clock could be turned back that one minute! Yet in his heart he knew that that minute was only the last in a long sequence and that he was the one who, without knowing when the alarm was timed to go off, had wound the clock and set it going.

He had just one person to turn to now, his partner in guilt. When he dialed home and was answered not by her but by the tape recording he had left saying that he had gone sailing out of Gloucester and by a message urging him to call the number he had just called, it seemed the final rejection of him. He felt the world had turned from him as from a criminal in olden times when they were branded on the forehead or had a nostril slit or an ear notched so that people knew on sight that you were a criminal and what your crime had been. The last persons on earth who would want to see him now were the dear friends who would understand only too well what he was going through. Nor did he want to see them. Only now did he realize how little he had really felt, how shallow his sympathy had been, how trite and beside the point his efforts to console them when they were enduring what he was enduring now. This bond had not brought them closer, it had sundered them. The sight of a leper was frightening and disgusting to everybody but surely none did it frighten and disgust more than the poor leper whose company was restricted to those like himself.

The clock on the wall, now one minute deeper into the day, told him it was time he began serving his sentence. He went outside and told the boy who had brought him ashore to return to the boat and tell his friends that he had been called away and would be in touch with them sometime later. Looking at his reflection in the eyes of the superintendent of the marina he saw that he was a marked man. For the father of a child who had killed itself the parts mutilated as punishment were private and did not show but the damage was emblazoned on his face and evident in his every gesture. His son had unmanned him.

He kept waiting for his mind to break down at any moment. What a breakdown of the mind entailed he had no clear idea but he was amazed that his kept on functioning—amazed and somewhat chagrined. To be able to carry on after such knowledge was callous, even gross. His hardiness seemed to him hardness, his elasticity coarseness of fiber. Actually he was more impaired than he realized at the time.

What happened was that for the remainder of that devastating day a sort of automatic pilot took over and steered his course for him. Only the operation of some such auxiliary mechanism of the mind could have gotten him from Gloucester to Princeton. A kind of emotional second wind, quickly expended, dangerous to draw upon, but there when desperately needed to complete the course. With this emergency second self behind the wheel of the rented car, he blanked out, as Anthony, when he was very young and subject to carsickness, stretched out in the back seat and slept through long trips. Indeed, there were moments while driving down to Boston when it was strangely as though it was Anthony at the wheel.

He had once suffered a blow on the head that caused concussion of the brain. Afterwards he carried on as usual but for days he felt queer all the time and he experienced periodical blankness of mind. The queerness was caused by the feeling that none of his senses was attuned just right: his vision was slightly blurred, his hearing somewhat muffled—the world seemed to be in retreat from him. Then, like a failure in the house of the electric current when the lights all go out and you are left in the dark, his train of thought would be disrupted in the middle of a task. He would find himself in some place and not know how he had arrived or what he was there to do, like a sleepwalker on waking. The drain upon his damaged brain had been too great and it was protecting itself, blowing its overloaded fuse. So it was responding now. It was not the stretches of confusion and disorientation that were painful, it was the intermittent return of clarity, when he knew where he was and what he was there to do, when through his involuntary, his self-administered anesthesia, his pain asserted itself.

Such a moment came when it was his turn at the ticket window in Logan Airport.

“Yes, sir,” said the clerk. “Help you?”

He opened his mouth to speak but to his surprise he could not utter a word. When he tried, his jaw began to tremble and his eyes brimmed with tears. The clerk, used to people who drank themselves senseless to drown their fear of flying, evidently thought he was one of those. He was not drunk but the sensations he was experiencing were those of drunkenness. Not a gradual mellowing but that moment of sudden, sickening poleaxed stupefaction from having drunk much too much far too fast. He excused himself with a wave of the hand, fell out of line, and found himself a seat.

On any day of the week Logan Airport was busy, a crossroads with thousands of people arriving and departing, greeting and taking leave of one another. Boston was a college town, none bigger, and many of these people were students—none of them his, each and every one of them a reminder of his. He saw several families happily reunited as his would never be again.

The stewardesses' smiles were the same for each and every passenger. Bright, commercial smiles that one must accept as part of the fiction that every trip was a pleasure trip. Everybody on this one was bound for the same place: Newark. The flight was a direct one, with no intermediate stops. Some no doubt were going as he was from Newark on to Princeton. They were going home, going back to school, back to work, going on business to one or another of the industrial research centers with which present-day Princeton was ringed. For them this was an unexceptional day, not one to be circled forevermore on their calendars, another day in lives punctuated by change but not brought to a full stop, fundamentally the same as they had been yesterday and as they would be tomorrow (except that none of them could foresee what lay in wait tomorrow, or even yet today; only this morning he had thought he was sailing back to all that he had left on land). There was always, on any flight, not just one laden with compatriots returning home from abroad but any flight, an atmosphere faintly familial, clubby. To him now the one thing that he and the others had in common, their all being bound for the same place, only emphasized their dissimilarity. A person boarding the plane with the intention of hijacking it and diverting all aboard from their expected destination to his private one could not have felt himself more different, more completely alienated from his fellow passengers than he felt. Nor have disguised his inner turmoil with more of a bearing of studied ordinariness.

He had gotten away from nothing while in the air, yet when the plane touched down and he felt the earth with all its attendant duties underfoot again it was as though he had returned from the weightlessness of outer space and resumed the full burden of his bulk. Exhausted now, down to the last gasp of that second wind, having been sailing a boat off the New England coast early that same day, longing to be alone instead of on a bus, mistrustful of himself behind a wheel and with no need of a car for the day ahead of him tomorrow, instead of renting another one he hired a taxi to take him from Newark Airport to Princeton.

“Wake me when we get there,” he said to the driver, thereby averting conversation, and then stared open-eyed into the night throughout the forty-mile drive.

If he had escaped detection by his fellow plane passengers it was probably only by pretending to doze through the flight and avoiding conversation with either of his neighbors, and protected by that universal assumption that all trips were pleasure trips. The desk clerk at Princeton's Nassau Inn spotted him instantly as a suspicious character and said all rooms were booked for the night.

“I had to drop everything and leave on the spur of the moment,” he said in explanation of his having no luggage.

But there was more to it than that. To the clerk's trained and experienced eye his appearance, his manner betrayed him as being up to no good. That there was something self-condemning and haggard about his look he could feel.

“Sorry, sir,” said the clerk.

He was tired, dead tired, he knew of no other, less particular hotel, and he was going to have to expose himself to the world sooner or later. The news would have been in the local papers and Princeton was a small town, dominated by the university.

“My name,” he said, looking away as he said it, “is Curtis.” It was the first time in his life that he had ever been embarrassed by it.

He allowed several seconds to pass.

“I'm the father—”

“Ooh,” he heard the clerk say. The sound escaped him like air from a puncture.

He faced the man.

Now it was the clerk whose face bore an expression of guilt and contrition. The two of them stood facing each other, both trying but both unable to utter another syllable.

His last time in Princeton had been when he drove Anthony there for registration. That that was still not two months ago was as contrary to common sense as that the earth was round. There had not been time even for a change of seasons. The leaves on the trees were only beginning to yellow. It was tantalizingly as if the clock had been turned back to that earlier time and what had happened since had not happened. But of course it had happened and this illusion only made it more achingly real.

That last time was all too green in his memory as, on his way to call on the president of the university the following morning, he crossed the campus.

Actually they had arrived the day before registration to give Anthony time to get settled. By prearrangement over the long-distance telephone they had met Anthony's new roommate, Jeremy, that day. Lunch together was all the time needed for them to learn to like Jeremy. How important it was to like your first college roommate nobody knew better than he. He had been reminded often that day of his.

The boys had been assigned ground floor quarters, a bedroom with bunks provided by the university and an unfurnished sitting room with a fireplace, with stone-mullioned windows looking out on a quadrangle. They had agreed beforehand that each would contribute two hundred and fifty dollars—on Anthony's side a lot of trout flies—to buy their furnishings. How times had changed! And inflation did not account entirely for the difference. He himself had lost no time in letting his new roommate, who looked rather well-to-do, know that fifty dollars was his limit; with a sigh of relief Tony had said that that was the very sum he had to spend. He drove Anthony and Jeremy to secondhand shops in and around the town that day, and he had been both amused and impressed by their taste, their mutual tact, their thrift. His last sight of his son had been of him setting off with his roommate for supper at their eating club.

It had entertained him all the way home that evening to contrast himself during his first days at Princeton with Anthony. Then as now it was assumed that the grub you were on graduation from high school had had the summer in which to have spun its cocoon and that on or about Labor Day you had emerged with a full set of wings. You were now ready for and worthy of Princeton, of the society of your classmates and the efforts on your behalf of your professors and your preceptors.

Each of your first walks across campus to class made your heart both soar and sink. All this for you—but were you for it? There was nothing forbidding in themselves about the buildings; what was forbidding was your sense of being out of place among them. Temples of learning into which you entered like an infidel in disguise, faked the responses to the ritual by taking your cue from the true believers and sometimes failing to take your cue, nodding knowingly at the professor's allusions and laughing a bar late at his jokes and being stared at by your classmates who had laughed on time. His references to books you had not read sent you scurrying after class to the library, there to be overwhelmed by an ocean of unread books awaiting you. You and you alone seemed to have missed some session in school that would have made college algebra comprehensible. You turned in disgust against yourself and in anger against the school that had sent you there so unprepared.