Hostages to Fortune (13 page)

While Jeremy brought a bottle from a cabinet and water from the bathroom tap he took in the surroundings in which his son had lived his final weeks and which had been the last his eyes had closed upon—except that they had not closed but had bulged from their sockets. His own eyes strayed upwards against his will and searched for something to attach a noose to. An overhead water pipe was the only possible thing he could discover.

“We kept a bottle, Mr. Curtis,” said Jeremy as he poured, “but, please, don't get the idea that we did a lot of drinking. We didn't. We—” He stopped, sensing how superfluous it was now to defend Anthony against his father's suspicions, how any testimony to his good behavior only added to the pain. And how the past tense evoked the present, the future.

“Were you the one who found him?” The drink helped him ask that.

Jeremy nodded and, once started, kept nodding, unable to stop himself, confirming what he still could not accept. Through the boy's eyes, wide with shock, he saw as clearly as through panes the image imprinted on his mind. The stage itself surrounded him; the only property missing was the body. Cut down and removed from the scene, it still hung in place in Jeremy's memory, and would for as long as he lived. As if by a process of mental photography, in the look that passed between them it was copied permanently onto his mind. Unable to sustain their look, Jeremy averted his gaze. His involuntary upward glance lingered momentarily on the water pipe, and the picture was replete.

“I was away,” Jeremy said. “My father had an operation and I went to New Haven to be with him. I was away for three days. When I returned …”

He let the boy lapse into silence. Actually, to his perplexity, he was curious, even avid for details, but the boy was suffering. No doubt he had already had to recount it to the campus guard, the town police, the coroner, and they were simply people doing their jobs. He let the boy think he was sparing him.

“There was no note?”

“No, sir.”

There seemed to be nothing more to say, no reason to prolong this further. He drained his drink preparatory to leaving. He looked at his watch. What then passed through his mind chained him to his chair. As surely as if he were present to see it, he knew that this was the moment when Anthony's body was being consigned to the flames. He had never been inside a crematorium but imagination supplied him with particulars. He saw the body conveyed on rollers, as in a foundry, to a furnace too fiery to be looked into. He saw the hair burst aflame, the eyes whiten and turn opaque like those of a fish in a frying pan. He saw the assaulted skin cleave to the skull and the lips draw back exposing the teeth in a last grisly grin. He saw the flesh shrivel and sear like a roast in an oven and saw the body jerk and writhe as nerves and muscles and sinews contracted spasmodically in the infernal heat, then saw it charred black. In seconds the flesh was consumed away, oxidized; held together at joints momentarily annealed, only the skeleton remained. The bones glowed red then white, a tissue of incandescent ash like the mantle of a lamp. Then all burned out, grayed, decomposed and crumbled into a layer of dust.

“I know what you must be thinking, Mr. Curtis,” Jeremy was saying. “Here I was, living with him in these two rooms: in all that time there must have been something, some hint that something was going on in his mind. A person doesn't … doesn't do that to himself without giving it some thought, without dropping some clues. Maybe half wanting to give himself away and be stopped from what he's planning. If so, I never saw it. I have sifted my memories—”

Sifted my memories
. Arresting phrase! That was going to be hard to forget. With so many more of them, he would be sifting his memories for a long time to come.

“Maybe there were things I should have noticed. Maybe he was trying to reach me. Maybe I was just too wrapped up in my own concerns. I'll never stop asking myself—”

He wanted to beg him, please, to stop. In trying to exonerate himself from blame or to assume his rightful share of it Jeremy had no notion what pain he was causing to the one who had lived all the boy's life with him, the one who ought to have noticed any warning signs, who had been too wrapped up in his own concerns, who would never stop asking himself …

He rented a car. In the parking lot below Palmer Square he saw a Salvation Army collection bin. His decision was made on the spot and the duffel bag and carton disposed of. At five o'clock he made his second appearance of the day at the undertaker's.

This time he was shown into the office of the establishment. He took the chair offered him beside the owner's desk. He was presented with his bill and lent a pen to write his check. The undertaker supplied him with the date. He recorded the check on its stub and returned the borrowed pen. The undertaker signified that their business had been transacted by standing up. He stood too. The undertaker picked up and held out to him the package which until then he had not noticed sitting on the desk.

It was a small, square, plain package wrapped as though for sending through the mails. One expected to see a label on it, and in fact, one did. It seemed to read, “Curtis, Anthony.” He stared at it and then at the undertaker, uncomprehending. Just what he had expected to be given he could not have said, but this was so far from it that when he took the package in his hands it was still without realizing what it was. He was still further from that realization when he felt its weight, or rather, its lack of weight. Then into his mind flashed an image. The image was that of a newborn baby, its passage-racked, red and wrinkled little body lying steaming with its mother's body heat in the snow, then, as in a sequence of time-lapse photography when a flower is shown to bud, blossom, blow, and wither all within the taking of a breath, he saw that baby shoot up to be a man and that man transmuted into this little box of nothing in his hands. He looked from it to the undertaker as though to ask “Can this be all?” The rapidity of events culminating in this one rushed in upon him and he stood for some seconds bemused. The day he had spent in arriving at this moment passed in review through his mind. It presented itself to him as a series of narrowing circles as, in being passed by the university authorities to the town officials, by them to the undertaker and from there to the crematorium, his son had been progressively detached from the world and processed into this product, packaged in this container. His hopes had gone up in smoke and he held in his hands the ashes.

He thanked the undertaker, who held the door for him, and, carrying his acquisition before him, walked down the street to his parked car. With the package on the seat beside him he drove away from Princeton for what he knew would be the last time.

His involuntary first reaction in Gloucester had been to phone Cathy. It had been instinctive, like gasping for breath, and getting no answer had been suffocating. But on reflection he had been grateful that he had failed to reach her and this kept him from trying again in Princeton. News this harrowing was not to be broken over the telephone. It was unbearable to think of her alone in the house with it until he came. Even as he listened to the ring he began half to hope that it would go unanswered. Afterwards he felt that had she answered he might have hung up without speaking.

But somehow he never doubted that she would be there waiting for him when he got home, for it did not seem to him only a short time ago that he had tried and failed to find her there—it seemed a lifetime—and now he could hardly believe that she was not. The house—meaning her—had been the oasis for a man parched and perishing of thirst and he had reached it only to find that the well was dry. That everything in the living room was just as he had left it, just as it had always been, enforced its strangeness now that nothing would ever again be the same. A wave of hatred for the house, for its many reminders of a happiness now lost, passed over him. It was the same as ever, but so changed was he that he felt himself a stranger in it, alone and lost.

From a wry, ironical source came a glimmer of hope. He remembered to his shame that when they were last together Cathy and he had been quarreling. The triviality of it under the harsh light of the present made him groan for their childishness even as it cheered him. Impossible as it was to believe, Cathy still did not know what had befallen them and might, poor fool, still be nursing her grudge against him, might be in the house, in her room sulking, aware that he was here and refusing to come down and greet him.

She was not. He returned to the living room, sat his weary body down, found himself staring at the carton containing Anthony's ashes and broke into sobs.

Days dragged by and still Cathy did not come home. Either she was innocently enjoying herself or else she was still sulking at him. Whichever it was, he pitied her with all his heart, for either way she was storing up regrets and self-recriminations with every passing moment.

Reason told him it was better for them both that she was not there just now. The wound would have been reopened with their every word, every look. They would have reminded each other constantly of Anthony. Meanwhile, though the pain remained as sharp as ever, surely he was forming scar tissue. He worked always at home and being together in the house all the time they had always contracted the same illnesses but somehow they usually contrived to do so by turns, thus the one was able to nurse the other; this would be something like that: he would have lived through the first devastation of it and be better able to look after her. For the time being he busied himself in the garden daylong and drank away the evenings.

On one of those evenings he was struck by the realization that he had put Tony altogether out of mind. This pained him. It also puzzled him. Of all people Tony was the one of whom he should have been reminded most often. How could he have forgotten the dear friend who had suffered the same loss as he? Was it out of consideration? Was that why he was sparing Tony his news? No, he had forgotten his friend. A numbness of spirit had settled upon him, listlessness, self-absorption, apathy, grief, and a shutting out of the world—but Tony? How could he have been unmindful of him? He reckoned it was like Freud's explanation for your forgetting a certain person's name when it should have been the easiest of all names for you to remember: it was your name and you resented sharing it with anybody. What contrary creatures we were! Selfish with our sorrows!

To Tony and to the other people who had to be informed personally he broke his news by letter. It brought home to him how few friends he had. There were times when a man was glad that they were no more numerous than they were. That many fewer to hurt. If this was hard to do what was breaking the news to Cathy going to be like?

The writing of the letters was another milestone making Tony, along with everybody else, seem far away and the time of their association long ago. Between him and his past a gap had opened. His entire life, every event, every scene of it had receded a distance from him. It was like the occasion of first sensing the need for eyeglasses, when the physical world had shrunk and grown hazy. Now, however, it was not space, it was time that had lengthened for him, time which is measured differently for each person on earth, not in calendar units but in losses, life's steady contraction. The sensation was unfamiliar to him but he recognized it at once, it had been delivered to the right address: he felt suddenly old. Old, tired, and lonely. It was a loneliness that nobody, not even Cathy, was going to be able entirely to fill.

The thought of Tony brought with it the memory of what he had observed on board
Pandora
—the widening rift between Tony and Pris—and this was attended by a pang of personal misgiving. He had been counting on nothing less than total oneness between Cathy and him in facing up to their loss, but suppose that in her shock and horror and self-defensiveness she disowned that side of Anthony that had turned against his other half and laid the blame for it at his father's door? Even just speculating upon such a possibility filled him with guilt toward her, yet such things had been known to happen. If only she would come, put an end to the solitude that bred such disloyal and unworthy suppositions! She would hardly need to speak. The sight of her face would be reassurance enough.

On another of those days he borrowed from somewhere the courage to enter Anthony's room. This room had been awaiting him when he was born. It was a plain enough room, yet had he been overcome with homesickness for it? He himself could have no idea how powerful an emotion homesickness might be. He had thought that Anthony was immune but he knew those first weeks away at college were a difficult, even a dangerous time. You were suddenly on your own, expected overnight to be an adult, an expectation that all the other students seemed up to. What was the matter with you? You had done well enough in high school but now you seemed to be the only one in your class who did not understand the professor. Had Anthony phoned home in his loneliness and fright and, getting no answer but that recording, in a moment of despair done what he had done?

Within the four walls of this room he was formed. On one of them the stages of his growth were recorded. Beginning with the twelfth, they had measured his height on each of his birthdays. On the last one he had stood exactly six feet tall. Meanwhile within that strong, straight frame, now reduced to a handful of cinders, some crookedness was growing. Between which two marks on the wall had it begun, and how had his father not detected it in time?

He once had a friend who, though twice Anthony's age, died all too young of brain cancer. Toward the end his entire brain was involved but originally the section affected was the one in which the names of things are stored. His memory had been getting worse for some time but he got medical attention only after setting out across town one evening to visit his sister and being found hours later wandering lost in the streets, having forgotten his sister's address, her name, his own name, and his address. Surgeons opened his cranium and then just sewed it back up. He was past help. Within weeks he was an anatomy student's cadaver at the medical school to which his body was willed.