Hostages to Fortune (19 page)

But oppressive as it was, the silence between them was preferable to the dread that came whenever she cleared her throat to speak: she was now about to ask him how Anthony had done it. She had worked up the courage to ask. Each evening that passed sparing him that was a reprieve. There was no nice way of killing yourself but there were degrees of ugliness, of violence to the body, the duration of the agony, the disfigurement.
Shot? so quick, so clean an ending
? Let her think it had been that. Or, since sleeping pills had made it all so easy and tidy they had just about replaced other methods, she probably assumed it was that, perhaps even felt she had a parent's right to assume it. That was the thoughtful, the considerate, the civilized way. It did not pain or inconvenience the survivors any more than was unavoidable. You were found already stretched out in bed looking as though you were just asleep. No gore. Whoever found you had the minimum fright and bother. Just to name the way Anthony had chosen to die would produce an image to sear his mother's soul.

And he? Would he have been any happier now if what he had been shown in that basement in Princeton was a body outwardly unmarked? Had the boy chosen a different way to die would he be any the less dead? The answer to that last question was obvious, the one to the other more complicated.

Unlike Cathy, he had wanted to know the details. Maybe that was morbid curiosity, but he had wanted to know. No doubt about it, it was morbid, because his reason for wanting to know was so that he might, as nearly as he could in imagination, experience the death of his child. Flesh of his flesh that was, and it was imperative that he know what throes it had undergone in destroying itself. That might be morbid, but was there not something unnatural in the boy's mother's incuriosity about the details?

“It was an accident,” she said. Out of their strained silence on the subject it came like a shot, and it was so wide of the mark it left him speechless. “That's what I believe and always will. I mean it was—how shall I say?—a stunt that went wrong. He meant to be found in time and saved. He wanted to throw a scare into somebody. And I know who.”

He would consider that last remark later; for now, he was too distressed by her first statement. It placed before him more vividly than ever, as evidence to the contrary, that twisted neck, the swollen, livid face, the bulging eyes, the protruding tongue. He set down the drink in his hand before he should spill it and turned away to hide from her his agitation. He felt himself choking, strangling. He could not swallow his mouthful. He pictured the boy in those last lonely hours, his world now reduced to that dormitory room and peopled solely by a self he was determined to rid the world of. It seemed a bitter belittlement of that terrible desperation to suppose it was some sort of bad joke, a stunt that had gone wrong, a mere accident. Deplorable, misguided, rash, juvenile though it might be, his taking his life had been the supreme act of his life, and it seemed his right to have his seriousness acknowledged. Surely his aim had not been just to hurt his mother, but just as surely she was denying herself something in rejecting the full measure of her hurt, of the deprivation she had coming to her, in denying him his agony, his dignity. It was hard to grieve properly for a poor joker who had not meant to kill himself but had bumbled into it.

It was not the evasion of her responsibility—if any—that he objected to. He could have understood and forgiven that. But to insist upon its having been unintentional without asking how it had been done was to deprive the boy of the death he had so determinedly desired and so painstakingly planned and executed. Until those whom he had left behind granted him that death he would be an unquiet ghost, forever strangling in that noose with which he had tried to end his pain. Surely for those left the hope of curing their pain began with the full admission of it.

Thus he began to resent her incuriosity, her comfortable assumption that it had been done somehow painlessly, quickly, cleanly, decorously, perhaps with an overdose of sleeping pills from which there was a chance of being wakened as though from a nightmare, maybe scolded a bit for having given everybody a scare, but then soothed and made to realize that it was all a bad dream. Did he resent also the fact that now he could never tell her otherwise? Was he resentful that by her indifference she forced him to live alone with that vision? No, for sharing the picture imprinted on his mind with anybody would not attenuate or diminish its frightfulness. Like a painting, it could be reproduced, distributed in large editions, and the original would remain the original in all its vividness. Yet being the one witness to the body gave him something of a sense of having been his son's co-conspirator in his death.

He wanted not to think about this, he wanted to think about anything other than this, and he could think of nothing else. He wanted not to generalize, not to categorize, not lose his son in abstractions, not let him become a case, a statistic, another in that vast army of teenage suicides. Yet the image of that body suspended in his thoughts (how long had it hung from that ceiling before being found and cut down?) forced him to wonder whether in all cases the method contained a message. Anthony might have been as dead one way as another, but he had chosen a certain way and not an easy one. His way certainly spoke of premeditation. So elaborate a means suggested that he had plotted long, or if not long then intently, against his life. There had been nothing impulsive about it. That side of him that had turned against himself had stalked its prey and it was the deadliest of enemies, for it knew its victim's ways, could foresee and forestall its shifts and dodges. Had there been some sort of perverse thrill in forcing that intended victim to witness all those extensive preparations for his execution? In making him an accomplice in the purchase of the rope, in checking the clock to see that everything was proceeding on schedule? (How did he know that to make it slip a hangman's noose was always lubricated with soap? How did Anthony know it? How did he know that Anthony knew it?) Was such a grisly death chosen so that the victim's unanswered cry for help would reverberate all the louder, all the longer in the memory of those who might have come to his rescue? When poor Tony was summoned to the New York City morgue to identify and claim as his what was left of Christy was there an old incident from out of her childhood which came to his mind and made him say, “When you climbed to the top of that tall building, my dear, dead daughter, were you repeating the time you climbed to the top of the apple tree to sulk over your hurt feelings? I coaxed you down from the tree, I lifted you down from the limb, but you went beyond Daddy's reach and his reasoning when you climbed to the top of the building, didn't you?” What was Anthony demonstrating to the world by the way he had chosen to leave it? And wasn't it pity added to pity that the message had reached so very few in the world? What was it meant to convey to the only one of his parents whom it had reached?

One slit his throat, another put the muzzle of a gun in his mouth: different temperaments, different approaches to the same end. Yes, the how of it was important. To misapply a philosopher of popular culture, the medium was the message. A suicide, he was coming to see, was a work of art. It was a corruption of his mind that he could think so, for it was the very opposite of a work of art; it was destructive, not creative, and yet it was art, inverse, devilish art, and there were different media at your disposal. Or perhaps there was a hierarchy of genres as there was once in painting, with the historical at the top, the sacred, the allegorical and so on down to still life—
nature morte
—at the bottom. Or it was like music. Why was one person drawn to the viola and another to the violin? What made one person choose to hang himself and another to jump off a building? Was the spurning of easy outs and the choice instead of an elaborate and gruesome mode of self-destruction a test of the sincerity of your intentions, the genuineness of your resolve, of your nerve? Was it meant to leave no comforting doubts in your survivors' minds that you had known what you were doing, that you meant business? Or, by making death a weary lot of trouble to go to, gory and nasty and as painful as possible, were you trying to face it at its worst and face it down, or giving it full rein to terrify you from it? Was each additional floor that lonely little Christy climbed that afternoon meant to give her another chance to reprieve herself as well as another dare to mount still higher and plunge still farther? Such stark methods must appeal to those who had turned against themselves with pitiless savagery, not just to those weary of the diuturnity of life but to passionate haters of it, disappointed beyond reconciliation. Or else to those determined to horrify the world that had rejected or disillusioned them and show its self-contented citizens a different estimation of the unexamined existence they clung to.

They had not gone gentle into that good night, those two, but had it been, until too late, a game, a kind of game played with—against—yourself, like a game of chicken in which you were the driver of both the cars? An adolescent flirting with death and with the assurance only an adolescent could have of his ability to win?

Had his Anthony said to himself, “Really, I'm just exploring this. Just curious. I'm not really going through with it. I'm just testing the water”? In going to the hardware store, buying the rope and paying for it and getting his change from the salesclerk (who doubtless concluded the transaction with “Have a nice day”) did he say to his reflection in the show windows, “See? The fact that I can do all this so coolly shows I'm not crazy, that I'm not really going to do it. I'm testing myself, seeing what my powers of resistance are. A time will come in all this when I will have gone as far as I need to go in order to prove myself. At that point it will become real—until then it's just a game, just make believe. When I say to myself, now all I have to do is kick the chair out from under me, then I won't do it because I will have proved to myself that I could go all the way. Then I will have called death's bluff, and my own”?

Then suppose that at the last moment the suspense and tension built up so that you did it just to escape from that. You didn't want to do it. Even then, at the very last of last moments, you still wished to be saved from yourself. But nobody came. Your father did not come—in itself a reason to do it. You did it because you could not stand not to do it. You had worked yourself up to this pitch and had left yourself only one out.

Had there been a sense of excitement and challenge in it? Forbidden games played behind parents' and teachers' backs, played for the highest of stakes? Did it make you seem more mature? If maturity was age and age was proximity to death, what better way to steal the march, overtake and outstrip your elders, get there before they did and repay them for what the poet called the ignominy of childhood? The secrecy, the danger, even a sense of complicity, of conspiracy between your two selves, the plotter and his prey, in league against an unsuspecting world. Did it make you seem more interesting to yourself and give you a feeling of superiority over those who assumed on face evidence that you were content with the same safe existence as theirs, or, in the case of a youngster with his way still to make in the world, that you would go through the mill and make the same compromises they had made in order to achieve their dreary, dull security? The sense that
you
were destroying
them? Good creatures, do you love your lives?

He drew up short, having already traveled further down this path than he ever expected to get, suddenly fearful of proceeding, daunted not by its difficulty—that was what he had anticipated—not by its strangeness, but by its menacing ease, its frightening familiarity. He had begun in dismay at the utter hopelessness of finding a motive for his son's doing what he had done; he was dismayed now to discover the fertility of his mind in finding them. It hardly seemed to be his mind, so unexplored a side to it this was. Searching for the one, he had found a multiplicity of motives, all plausible, all sufficient; a bit further on and he might find what he was looking for, what he was suddenly not at all sure he wanted to find: the right one. Could it be that not to know, painful and tormenting as that was, was better than to know? Doubts were dreadful but was certainty worse? And was the answer not only not complex but hideously, horribly simple, mockingly apparent? He had thought he was entering a maze, an issueless maze; now he felt himself being lured on with the promise that there was an issue. It was obvious—that was the reason so many failed to see it. To find it he had only to open his eyes, only to look into himself. He was searching for the motive? Suppose he found there was none? Suppose he found that none was needed. There came to him, too quick for him to escape it altogether, an intimation that the answer to his question, “Why?” might prove to be a question:
Why not
?

That was not to be dwelt upon; besides, if it was for anybody it was not for the young, it was for those who had run out of reasons for why life must go on. For example, parents of a child who had committed suicide. As for Anthony, in his case questions found no answers, they only raised more questions, and he wondered whether that had been a part of the boy's motive. He heard him say—actually heard him—his ghost—say, “I'm realer to you now than I ever was alive, aren't I? I've gotten your attention, your full attention, at last. You realize now that I was somebody you never knew and you will speculate endlessly on what he was really like, that stranger whom you brought into the world and, because of that, presumed that you understood.
Why? you
will ask yourself with your every breath, with every beat of your heart:
why? why
? And for all your conjecturing I shall remain a puzzle. You cannot put your questions to the one person who might resolve them, for I have taken all the answers with me. By one action I have overturned all your perceptions, all your presumptions about me, and wrapped myself in impenetrable mystery.”