Hostages to Fortune (21 page)

But that was later—a lifetime later. That evening while the women made camp and prepared the food that was to accompany the trout they were confident of catching, the men went fishing. They were rigging their rods when Anthony, lining up the guides on his and pushing together the two sections, said in a tone as offhand as he could summon, “Dad, it's none of my business, of course, but if you don't mind telling me, when did you propose to Mom?”

“I reckon it is your business,” he said. And he told of that evening on the terrace of the clubhouse with the Thayers—Anthony's godparents—present, and something of the feelings that had prompted him then. He could see that as he listened Anthony was making some personal comparisons. Some contrasts, too, he trusted. Not wanting to discountenance the boy, he made no mention of his age at that time, but he hoped it went without saying. Yet he would not have been greatly surprised had Anthony, feeling, as they sat around the campfire, as though this moment, here in this place, with these people, was one
he
wanted to prolong for life, said in imitation of his father, “Alice, marry me, will you?”

Anthony boyishly thought it was boyish to let your feelings show, especially your pleasure, but his that evening were too great for him to dissemble. Watching Alice and his mother working together on the meal and then cleaning up afterwards, washing the utensils at the streamside in the dying light, he was enchanted. His father could study him because he had eyes only for Alice. He glowed with pride in her as though she were already his own, pride in her camping competence, her ease with his parents, her grace and prettiness, her little sallies of wit. Above all he was enjoying the sense that the four of them were two couples on this outing together—especially when they all bedded down together in their sleeping bags. For the first time that evening Anthony's father pictured himself as a grandfather—without, of course, picturing himself a day older than he was.

In the night he had awakened, had slipped out of his sleeping bag and gone down to the water to listen to it and to stargaze. There he found Anthony.

“Oh? You awake, son?”

With uncharacteristic openness Anthony said, “I'm too happy to sleep.”

From too much happiness could come deep disappointment and Anthony was awfully young to make his happiness dependent upon another person herself equally young. But this worry that tinged his father's satisfaction that starry night was no more than that: a tinge.

One day early that August, looking up from the letter in his hand, Anthony asked, “Dad, supposing I was to get admitted to one of the Ivy League colleges, could you lend me the money to go?”

“Lend you the money? I'd give—”

“It's an awful lot. And there's more to come. After I got out of college could you lend me the money to go through Cornell University School of Veterinary Medicine?”

“What's this about lending? You get yourself admitted to college and—”

“I've done that. Read for yourself. Here's my letter of acceptance.”

Thus was explained the true purpose of his recent hitchhiking trip to Princeton. No word about changing his mind, about having applied for admission to the university. Never a word until he knew the result. Nor would there ever have been a word if he had been turned down. That was our Anthony.

“Congratulations, son! But I thought—”

“I changed my mind. You know, Dad, life is a serious business and time is short. You aren't given enough of it to go goofing off any.”

“True. All too true. Have you told your mother about this?”

“Not yet. First I had to speak to you about finances.”

“She will be very pleased. So now what about this year? Are you still planning to spend it out west?”

“No. I'm going to Princeton.”

“This year? Does it say you've been accepted for
this
year? It's unheard of!”

“Well, my school record is pretty good” (in fact, it was outstanding) “and I came away thinking I had made a pretty good impression on the admissions officer. Now, I have checked this thing out, and here is what I'm up against. Veterinary schools are hard to get into, as hard as medical schools, maybe even harder. Veterinary medicine is a closed shop. Vets don't want any more vets. Before you can get into veterinary school you first have to work for a vet for six months, and many of them won't take on a student helper.”

“How do you propose to get around all that?”

“One step at a time. And here,” he said, brandishing the letter, “is the first. Not many applicants come to them with a degree from Princeton. The schools have to stay in business. They turn down many applicants, especially Cornell, but they accept the best. I mean to be one of those. The only problem is money. It's going to cost a bundle. So here is what I propose: you stake me and I'll repay you out of my earnings.”

“No more of that.”

“Dad—now don't take offense—in a few years I'll be making more money than you ever dreamed of. If I was going into something impractical it would be a different matter, but I'm not. You're probably thinking: animal clinic, distemper shots, boarding pets while people go on vacation. Forget it. Dad, practically our whole economy depends on vets. The meat we eat. Our water supply. Commercial fishing. Champion bulls. Thoroughbred horse breeding. Laboratory research for the big drug manufacturers. You've done enough for me. No more freeloading. Past a certain point in life a man ought not to have to work anymore for his kids. I'm asking you for a loan. The arrangement is the same one I'm going to make with my son when he's college age.”

There was a final note.

“Suppose I had said no, I couldn't afford it? What then?”

“Matter of fact, that was what I was expecting you to say.”

He overlooked on grounds of youth this second slight to his ability as a provider. “And?”

“Oh, then I was going to get a bank loan. And I mean to pay you the interest I would have had to pay on that.”

That was still just months, one might even say just weeks, ago. What went wrong with all those far-reaching plans? From an aimless kid tired of school to professional man, even the father of a son: there could be no doubt that all this was founded on hopes centering on Alice Clayton. Theirs was the kind of youthful romance that might well have resulted in marriage, in time. That the affair had had its little ups and downs they had seen, for although Anthony had disciplined himself never to display his feelings, he had only half succeeded: he could conceal his satisfactions but not his disappointments, though, with evident annoyance that it could be asked, his reply to the question, what was bothering him, was always “Nothing.” Now his father wondered whether perhaps the boy's mother was right, after all. Right not in thinking it was a stunt that went wrong, for it was no stunt, it was in determined and deadly earnest, but right in thinking it was meant to throw a scare into somebody, and she knew who. If that were so, or even if the poor child only imagined it might be so, then of all Anthony's victims Alice was the most mistreated. Linked hand in hand with that thought was this one: was it possible to come to hate a suicide? Not pity the poor lost soul but hate him for the pain he had brought upon you and his blighting of the lives of all who had known him, loved him? If that were so, if he were to make you end by hating him, and suffering the self-hatred that would entail, it would be a revenge too cruel to bear. Was suicide the one death that ensured your never being laid quietly to rest in the memory of your survivors? It was horrible to impute to such vindictiveness even a fraction of the motive, but was that one of its attractions?

Because she had said over the phone that she was expecting to hear from him in a tone that caused him to interpret “expecting” to mean “dreading,” and because there had been a long wait and the dead silence of a hand being held over the mouthpiece while the sister who answered told Alice who was calling (not by his own name but as “Anthony's father” was how he had identified himself), then another long silence, long enough for quite a lengthy family council, even an argument, even a scene, he was totally unprepared for what happened when they met. He had reckoned that her parents would be unhappy over this meeting but would not oppose it, rather would insist that it was her duty, however painful. So he could not have said just what sort of reception he went expecting, only that it was not what he got, and he was moved by it, chastened, humbled, more than ever sorry for his own part in her unhappiness and angry at his wife for her underestimation of it—and maybe also for not having done herself what this child did on sight: throw herself into his arms sobbing brokenheartedly.

Child? If until now she had been a child, she was one no longer, she was a woman, like it or not, one put to a test reserved for few and deeply shaken by it. The word that leaped to his mind at the sight of her was
widow
, and though no child, she was pitifully young to look like that. Far-reaching and rough were the waves Anthony had sent outward in scuttling his own boat. He thought he had counted up the losses to himself; now to the list was added Alice and all that she might have been.

He was not so simple as to think her outpouring was pure unmixed grief for his dead son, neither was he so selfish as to resent its admixture. What did it matter which among the welter of her feelings was uppermost: sorrow, shock, bereavement, bewilderment, mistrust of the life that lay ahead of her after this discovery of its deceptiveness, its treachery? Or stark terror? For as he stood holding her close and feeling her throes, the thought crossed his mind that had she been anywhere nearby at the time Anthony lost his balance there might have been not one violent death but two, not one family in mourning now for a child but two. How hard it was at moments like this to keep in mind that the boy had acted irrationally and excuse him, not add to the bill of indictment against him what he had done to this poor girl. Despite all he could do, a growing resentment toward his dead son was building up in him.

Much passed through his mind as he stood holding Alice for what was to be the first and the last time. Among his thoughts was this one: out of an instinct only too human, Anthony's mother sought someone to put the blame on; was it the instinct of only a mother that she blamed the one girl in her son's short life? And himself? Had he requested this meeting half in hopes of trapping her into some revelation that would put the blame on her and relieve him of his share? Whatever Alice had done, if anything at all, she could not have foreseen this outcome. For his part, knowing all that he knew now—and not knowing all that he would never know—he supposed Anthony was capable of twisting and magnifying some little tiff they had had into a motive for what he had done; if so, he only hoped it had been something so trivial, so insignificant that she would be unable even to remember it, much less imagine that it might have been the cause and have it come back to haunt her. What if she had very sensibly said no to a proposal of Anthony's that they get engaged? That she vow while he was away at school to go out on dates with no other boy? Was she to make a nun of herself at her age? Was she to blame if Anthony were mad enough to kill himself over the thought of her going to a movie with some other boy? The calamity would be compounded if she were to allow some such thing to cloud her life. She had been shown a glimpse into the human mind, its unknowability, its penchant for self-torture and destruction; young as she was, she would never outlive that. Misfortune enough, her mere encounter with such disaster. Enough that she felt, as he felt, rejected. The help and comfort she might have given had been judged useless. Now to the list of his self-reproaches must be added this meeting. He had subjected her to it and his profit on it was further anger toward Anthony on behalf of this victim of his rashness. Perhaps the worst thing of all about unnatural death was the total confusion of feelings it caused.

It was this young woman's children he was vaguely thinking of when, not long ago, he had pictured himself for the first time as a grandfather—without then picturing himself as any older than he was. There was nothing vague about his realization now that he would never be a grandfather. Anthony had killed his grandchildren. He had never longed for any before. He had assumed that he would have them, and that had been a pleasing if somewhat indistinct prospect, but he had never longed for any. He did now. Now that he could only mourn for them he did. So much so that, holding in his arms his might-have-been, his almost daughter-in-law and looking over her shoulder, he could see, hand in hand, the grandchildren, a girl and a boy, whom he would never have—could even see their resemblance to himself. He felt old enough to be a grandfather now, many times over.

There passed through him as if a switch had been thrown a shock that was electrical, and like the polar charges of which an electric current is compounded, it produced in him feelings diametrically opposed but which in their combination flooded his mind with illumination. It flowed from her to him like an electric charge. He tensed with the sense that he held in his arms not one person but two and a part of a third, blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh. She was pregnant. That explained everything. Even now, ripening in her, was his fatherless grandchild. She was a widow without ever being a wife. She was pregnant with Anthony's child; guilt for that was his motive for what he had done, and the calamity was extended into the next generation. Yet though half of the charge that coursed through him was a sickening dread, half of it was hope. A fantasy born of fear and longing, it left when it passed feelings half of relief, half of regret.

Her first words when she was able to speak were to inquire after Mrs. Curtis. How was she bearing up? Her consideration was an added accusation against Cathy.

As well as could be expected, was his reply. Better than that. Courageously. She was setting an example for them all.