Hostages to Fortune (18 page)

Personal to you, unshareable, singular as your calamity was, you found that there was nothing singular about it; on the contrary, you were, in fact, a part of one of today's most widespread problems. There had been epidemics of youthful suicide at various times in history, fads for it, but as with so many of mankind's miseries, our age outdid them all. Of today's youth it was the number two killer, second only to highway accidents. Such a scourge had it become that there were international conferences on it. There was a library of books, there were television programs, dial-a-phone emergency counseling services. You could hardly pick up a magazine or a newspaper supplement without finding in it an article on the subject. It was like that other scourge, cancer: when it touched close to you was when you became really conscious of its incidence.

Was it then some malaise of the times, a worldwide wave of
taedium vitae
, an attrition of the life urge of the race, something quite impersonal, without individual motive or explanation, simply an all too common fatal germ that your child had caught?

God knew, these were hard times in which to be young and hopeful. Faiths were bankrupt and causes corrupted. The word
progress
had become an obscenity. Life was longer now that there was hardly anything worth living for. You could go anywhere you wanted to go now that there was nowhere left to want to go to. A dollar bought you twenty-five cents' worth and whatever you spent it on didn't work, fell apart, looked like hell. There was no such thing as craftsmanship anymore. We had polluted ourselves to the brink of extinction. We were up to our asses in our own filth, and the moral, political, and cultural climate we had created would make a buzzard puke. There was little game left to hunt, few fish to catch. Every species was endangered except the cockroach and the rat. Nothing you ate had any taste. Nothing was any fun anymore. The movies were meant to be entertaining, now they were either depressing or dirty, or both. Music used to have the power to soothe the savage breast, now it was meant to turn you into a howling savage. The idiot box had put an end to the magazines worth reading. Painting and sculpture—well, if you were not insulted then you had missed the point. Instead of trying to look their best, the young people made themselves as ugly as they could so as to outrage their elders. Your life was not worth a nickel on the streets of any city in the country. The third-rate ruled the world. In every country on earth, whichever party was in power, it was the mediocrities who were on top of the dungheap. Technology had turned against its masters. Erect skyscrapers to alleviate crowding, build bridges to span rivers, and people threw themselves off them. Invent drugs to ease pain and cure the curse of insomnia, and people took overdoses of them. We thought these blessings were being misused—were we mistaken? Was killing yourself with them one of their uses? The generation gap, the credibility gap, wars nobody could win or end, drab surroundings, shoddy products, dreary lives—was it any wonder so many people stayed stoned out of their minds on drink and drugs? How else could you get through a day of it?

He had heard Anthony himself in that very vein, but of course one never took to heart anything a young person said. Everybody griped about those things and then, like Miniver Cheevy, born too late, called it fate, and kept on drinking. Nobody killed himself for the sake of them. Or did some?

He did not want to be a part of a problem. He did not want to be a statistic. He did not want to be another case. To be truthful with himself, he was resentful that he must share his plight, resentful that his case, if it must be, was not the only one of its kind, or at least resentful of continual reminders that it was not. To know that he was one of many did not dilute his pain; it did not enter into solution, it was not soluble, especially not in other people's tears. Folk wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, misery did not seek company, it shunned it. In nothing were we more selfish than in our suffering. “You don't know what I am enduring!” How often we said that to the world, and how it dismayed and irritated us to have somebody reply that he knew very well, he had suffered the same thing himself before us. We could not allow that our lonely, steep, and stony path was actually a well-worn one. We wanted all the world's pity to ourselves, not just our share as one of a multitude. Suffering, like everything else, was devaluated by being mass-multiplied. In a fellow sufferer one saw oneself not just mirrored but mocked. Had God chosen to silence Job's complaints by showing him a horde of others like himself, that would have broken his spirit once and for all and have destroyed his faith. That would have belittled and cheapened his sufferings, and the one thing that sustained the poor wretch was the sense of his distinction in being the particular object of God's displeasure.

Through reflection and self-examination he grew philosophical and forbearing toward the world's avoidance of him. But with the passing of each day of unrelieved silence Cathy grew more embittered and resentful. To her their friends' unfeeling consideration was unforgivable. For she interpreted it to mean that she was being left to hide her shame and disgrace in seclusion. He gave up trying to explain or excuse them. She wanted to hear none of that.

“Well, love,” he said, “we've still got each other.”

He got that said only by choosing a tone that totally misrepresented his true feeling. Thus it came out sounding rather rueful, perhaps even rather wry, when actually his whole heart and soul were in it. What he had meant to convey was that they were now all the world to each other. But without some trace of self-irony, some slight, modest disclaimer, how did one offer oneself as all the world to another person? What he had succeeded in intimating was that they had nothing now except each other and must make do as best they could with that cold comfort. The time for actions, not words, had come. He held out his arms for her to come home to. His warmth went cold as she flinched, shook her head, then turned from him with a shudder she could not suppress.

Ken Howard said, after swallowing—as offhand as that—“How did he do it?”

To speak of this for the first time, too, was both a shock and a relief. “He hanged himself,” he said.

“That'll do it,” said Ken. “Every time.”

Ken's breeziness was not offensive to him; on the contrary, he found it tonic. “He meant business,” he said. It sounded like tough-guy talk. It sounded almost as though he were boasting of his son's deed. He was not. He was simply saying something he had needed for a long time to say and saying it somewhat assertively because his listener was not the person meant to hear it. Hardly more than a stranger to him, this man had asked the question he had waited for the boy's mother to ask. He had waited, first in dread that she would ask it, then in relief, and finally in resentment that she did not.

Cathy decided that Anthony's death was unintentional, an accident, and nothing, she said, could make her change her mind. This was almost the first thing she said, although it was several days after she had emerged from the seclusion into which she had withdrawn on being told the news. It was hardly what he had been expecting to hear her say. But then neither was he expecting her to look or to act or to bear herself as she did.

It was late at night on the fifth day after he got home from Princeton that Cathy finally returned. Finding the lights of the house off and thinking him to be asleep, perhaps not wanting to see him anyway, she let herself in and went quietly to bed. He allowed her this last night's untroubled sleep. He would tell her in the morning. It was impossible for him to believe that she had returned still loyal to the mood in which she had left, but as he had continually to remind himself, she did not know what he knew, and in case she was ready to resume hostilities where they had left off, he resolved to break his news to her the first thing, before she had time to say something she would regret, for it was unthinkable now that there ever be another cross word between them. Besides, clean wounds healed quickest. So Cathy slept that night while he did not.

As he waited the next morning for her to come downstairs he warned himself what to expect, or rather, what not to expect. He must not expect her to throw herself into his arms for comfort and consolation. From such news, and from the bearer of it, no matter who, her first reaction would be to recoil in horror. That was what he must expect and not be hurt by it. He must not take it personally.

It was just what happened, and as he was expecting her to throw herself into his arms to be comforted and consoled, he took it personally and was hurt by it.

Cathy fled to her room and there she stayed. From behind her closed door there came no sound. The day passed and the night, a second day came and passed and a second night. She was taking it even harder than he had feared. He could occupy himself, distract himself, with nothing. Those were agonizing days for him as he pictured Cathy wrestling alone with her anguish, longing to comfort her, fearing for her health of mind tormented as she was by a grief so great she wanted no one, not even him, to see her. People differed in their reactions. His had been to long for her, but some must lick their wounds alone. He must be patient now, wait it out, hold himself in readiness for the time when she would want him. He respected her wish for privacy, but the longer it lasted the more his anxiety mounted. Solitary grieving, like solitary drinking, led to immoderation. He reminded himself that he had had his time alone with the knowledge—in his case not by choice but perforce, yet maybe it was better that way, better that she had not been in the house. The sight of her would have melted him. Yet with terrible irony he likened those days when he paced the floors to those of an expectant father during his wife's protracted labor. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children—in what greater sorrow give them up before their time! His anxiety over Cathy while she remained shut in her room bred a thousand contingencies. He was prepared for everything but for what eventuated.

He had said to himself, “Three whole days she has been in there!” When on the morning of the fourth day she reappeared downstairs he had to ask himself, “Was it only three?”

There was no trace of redness in her eyes, no tremor in her lips, no pucker in her chin. Although it had seemed an eternity while he waited it out, now it seemed miraculous that she could have attained this self-composure in so short a time. Disheveled, distraught, haggard, hysterical—no, she was none of the things he had been dreading. Her tears had all been shed, and shed some time ago. How deeply stricken she was showed in her lusterless eyes, in the labor of her breathing, in the frequent involuntary shake of her head as her mind spasmed with memories and regrets; but the set of her shoulders, the thrust of her jaw proclaimed her refusal to feel the shame and the disgrace she was expected to feel. It was an astonishing feat of courage, of strength of will. She seemed to have passed her days in seclusion allotting one to the question, must it be? another to the answer, yes, it must, and the third to the resolution, then so be it. What was more, she seemed to suppose that he, who had lived longer than she had with their new situation, had faced up to it and arrived at the same mood of resignation.

He had now had an opportunity to observe the reaction of four people to the suicide of their child. Pris had been numbed by it. Tony had been crushed. Cathy refused to accept it. The one whose reaction he could not label was his own. From which he deduced the obvious: that he knew himself better than he did the other three, and that he was fatuous in thinking their reactions any more definable than his. Surely from the little we were able in a lifetime to learn about ourselves one lesson to be drawn was that about others we knew nothing at all.

Cathy's days in the fiery furnace had not melted her, they had tempered her. Whatever may have been the stages she had passed through, the woman who emerged was, as far as the world was ever to be allowed to see, one unbroken, one who would not look back. He was glad of it, he was overjoyed, but prepared as he was for the worst, he hardly knew what to make of the best. She had no need of him, or if she did she would not admit it. The strong arm he had readied to steady her with, the shoulder for her to cry upon, would not be wanted. The answers to her questions that he had painfully prepared would not be wanted. The grisly details of an event she was determined to put behind her she did not want to hear. The world could keep its pity, and pity, like charity, began at home. His was the first pity she could do without.

He admired, he envied her bravery, and all the more as she mistakenly credited him with the same, supposed that she was only catching up with him. True, he had lived with it longer than she had. But her strength and resilience shamed him for his weakness and dependency. He could have used some support from her. So much the smaller of the two of them, she was that much the stronger. A stubborn, defiant refusal to accept it, or to accept responsibility and shame for it: that was Cathy's reaction, and he was sure it was the right, the reasonable, the healthy-minded reaction. And yet, how different from his own! No dread, no premonition of such a possibility had ever darkened his mind, yet what did it say about his sense of responsibility that he had so readily, so unquestioningly accepted the event? His easy acquiescence seemed to accuse him of a kind of complicity.

She was averse to talking about the matter and as he could talk about nothing else they soon talked about nothing at all. They saw nobody, yet they were never alone; with them at all times was Anthony. By absenting himself from them forever he had made himself their constant companion. He had his place at the table and in front of the fire in the evenings. Let either of them speak, his shadow fell between them and they sat in heavy, apathetic silence. Each reminded the other of him and of nothing else of all that was between them. They were like a pair of animals yoked together and with blinders to prevent their seeing outside the row they trod, and holding the reins and the whip was Anthony.