Hostages to Fortune (23 page)

He felt both detached from and yoked to his big unwanted body. Without the partner whom he had shared it with for most of his adult life it was useless, gross, and ugly to him. He neglected it. He stopped shaving, brushing his teeth, washing his face so as not to have to look at himself in the mirror in the morning. Thus he made himself still less attractive—or would have if she had noticed. Whenever he did catch sight of his reflection it seemed to be that of another person bearing a close resemblance to him, and its hangdog look made it seem that to that other person the resemblance was an unwanted one. At such times he felt rather as though he had living in the house with him a twin brother, identical and inimical, one who detested him and detested his likeness to him. Not wanting to see anybody was now joined to not wanting to be seen, and his isolation was complete.

He was learning that the humiliated and despised have nobody to protest their mistreatment to but themselves. Nobody wanted to hear about it, and besides, you would have died of shame to tell anybody. You yourself wanted not to hear about it: Nothing was more shameful than the consciousness of having endured mistreatment. Not to have protested it was to admit having deserved it. Being despised made you despise yourself. Indeed, such a person's sole defense was to reject himself before the other person could do it. One was riven in hostile halves.

The estrangement between his wife and him was aggravated by their physical nearness and the constancy of their association. The freedom from an outside job and the independence to work at home for which he had thanked providence daily these twenty years was now a curse. A little absence might have made hearts grow fonder. As it was, she was always within sight or sound: a longing, a loss, a heartache; while for her, there he was: a reminder, a revulsion, and a self-reproach. Just as when—this after several drinks—he was driven to look into the mirror and there saw double, so did Cathy when she looked at him, only for her the second person was Anthony. He could tell from her irrepressible shudder. She might almost have been seeing the sight he was shown in that undertaker's basement in Princeton. He came almost to believe he was that sight. The resemblance between father and son had been a strong one and with the boy no longer present to make the comparison it had grown all the stronger in memory; he thought so himself. It was as though Anthony were now his shadow. He was glad then that he had never told her how her son had died; her shudder when she looked at him was sufficient without that. His desire and her distaste, his guilt over his desire and hers over her distaste, made for an intolerable situation. The measure of that was that the break, when it came, would be a relief even to him.

Meanwhile his torment of the flesh grew upon him daily. It might be inappropriate, ill-timed, unseemly, but it was not to be denied. He took refuge from shame in the knowledge that this longing was a common way of compensating for the loneliness and grief caused by the death of a loved one, even of a spouse. In that and in the conviction that his longing was not entirely of the flesh. An affirmation of her love was what he longed for, an assurance that with the death of their child that love had not died too. Who but his partner in the union that had produced the boy could share and assuage the grief and the guilt that tormented him?

Yet the once-living proof of his manhood was dead by its own hand. The life he had engendered had wanted no more of that life. Was his manhood threatened or had it been extinguished? For all his longing, he was not at all sure that given the opportunity he could perform as a husband again.

He found himself blushing now like a pubescent boy at any mention of sex—and how often it got mentioned! It was still another reason for avoiding contact with the world. His condition gave him a sense of—surely premature?—agedness, decrepitude, of being finished, burnt out. The callow youth he had been, the old man he was to become: he felt like either or both of those, not like the man in his prime that he was used to feeling. The sexual craving of a dirty old man (was there any other kind?) accompanied by the shame of an adolescent—the shame that every man looks to marriage to relieve him of. Cathy was teaching him by example to loathe himself, particularly that ungovernable appendage of his, or rather, that part of him to which he now felt the rest was an appendage.

How could she not see that their situation was intolerable? That man and woman could not live around the clock under the same roof in married celibacy? Of all sexual perversions that was the most unnatural. It was indecent. It was grotesque. And she had always been so sensitive to his wants. Whenever he desired her she knew it telepathically. She knew it often before he did. Had she no sense of his humiliation now? Could she not feel in wavelengths throbbing on the intervening air his constant longing, his smoldering resentment?

It was not a question of her “duty” to him. He had never thought of it as a duty. He never took her for granted. Twenty years of it had not diminished his wonder and gratitude at having a woman of his own. He never fully believed in his good fortune. Each time she responded to him was a surprise and a joy. “She's going to do it! She is! She really is! She's going to!” he said to himself. The sight of her body made him feel he was about to die of heart congestion and constriction of breath and not care if he did—what better way? Now to taste the ashes was to recall the fire.

“
Must
you have
another
drink?”

It was another of their evenings, another of those now routine conversationless evenings heavy with silence, until now.

To what he had already poured he defiantly added a dollop. “Just one more before I have another,” he said.

“How many is that now?”

“I haven't been keeping count.”

“You mean you've lost count. I haven't. It's four.”

“Well, as they say 'way down yonder in New Orleans on their way to the graveyard to bury a man, ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; if the women don't get you the liquor must.' In my case, God knows, it won't be the women.”

She aimed at him a look of disgust and disdain, rose from her chair, and went upstairs. He watched as Anthony rose from his chair and followed his mother up to that bedroom the door of which was locked to him.

He was seeing slightly double but this he saw clearly, and just as clearly saw himself and was appalled at the depravity of his mind. Yet why should he be? It was a modern-day commonplace that sons lusted after their mothers and resented their fathers' possession of them, subconsciously wished to destroy their rivals, feared castration by them as punishment for their incestuous cravings and to prevent their consummating them. Another commonplace: afraid to destroy their fathers and tormented by guilt for their wish to do so, some destroyed themselves instead, perversely triumphing over their rivals from beyond the grave. “Long before you, many a man has lain with his mother in his dreams,” Jocasta tells her son and husband, Oedipus. “Who does not desire his father's death?” cries Ivan Karamazov. Once considered criminal psychopaths, both characters were now accepted as spokespersons of normality. Like books that started out as literature for adults and within a generation were children's classics, these once unmentionable conjectures were nursery school knowledge now. Often it was the child who brought them home from sex education class for the enlightenment of a parent born to a more naïve and inhibited generation.

But did he really think that something like this had been a factor in Anthony's case? Was he jealous of his wife and the ghost of his poor misbegotten son? Never mind what he thought. Whether or not an unnatural love for his mother and an attendant guilt toward his father had been, consciously or unconsciously, a part of Anthony's motive, the fact was that he had come between his parents. He had alienated his mother's affections. It was he whom she now took to bed with her.

While overhead his wife of twenty years slept, he sat long into the night staring into the flames of the fire and then into its embers and then into its ashes, reviewing the feelings that had been accumulating in him. Despite what he had drunk, he was sobered by the realization that he had been weighing his grief against Cathy's and, with his finger on the scale, had tipped the balance in his own favor. She had recovered much sooner than he, therefore it had gone less deep with her. She had not viewed the body; he had. The truth was, though she showed it less, she felt it more. He himself was the measure of that. For her Anthony had become the sole reason for their union and with his untimely death that had ended. The combination of their genes, the home they had made, the example they had set, one or more or all of these had gone wrong, calamitously wrong, and in him she saw embodied their failure; she shrank from his touch, from his very look.

For this he blamed the dead, defenseless boy. He blamed him for the sorrow, the self-accusations, the isolation that had been brought upon him, and now for the estrangement from his wife. He blamed Anthony for inconveniencing him, for disturbing the routine of his life, for interfering with his pleasures, his peace of mind. He begrudged him his unassailability. Only another drink prevented him now from following this out to its inescapable conclusion.

Had his son died of a disease or in an accident or in combat, in a word, blamelessly, then his memory might have been properly interred and grass allowed to grow over it. It might have been visited on appropriate occasions and otherwise left unvisited without any self-reproaches. But Anthony had died by his own hand, through his willful decision, not deterred by any consideration for those who had loved him, and shameful as it was, his father's pity was giving way to a sullen resentment. Anthony had “placed his psychological skeleton in his survivor's closet.” In the one book on suicide that he had since looked into he had gotten no further than that preliminary statement. The author of it seemed to have peered inside him like a surgeon probing to verify the presence of an inoperable malignancy.

Meanwhile, diseased though he might be, he was still alive. Life did go on, and he had had a lot of it in him. All his appetites had been big ones, some might say gross ones, and though this blow had suppressed them for a time, it was only for a time. Like Hardy's observation, pertaining to his Tess, that, moralists notwithstanding, fallen women do not usually die of their humiliation, they live through it, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye; so might a failed father look again at his child's mother. He might shame himself with the inappropriateness of his passion while their child's ashes still sat on the shelf in his clothescloset, but that did not put down the passion.

To be resentful at being made to feel there was something dirty in his desire for his lawfully wedded wife—surely that was only human? Was it heartless of him to feel that while Anthony had of course been the main thing between them he was not the only thing? His coming had interrupted their romance; now his going had ended it. All she could see now whenever she looked at him was their failure, and shudder with remorse and revulsion. His mind kept returning to that shudder of hers. And she had not seen the sight he had been shown in the undertaker's parlor.

And suddenly there it was before him. Seated in the armchair where nobody had been just the moment before, given an appearance of embarrassment and self-apology by that twisted neck which forced him to look askance at his father, was Anthony. He had come to ask his father what kind of brute he was. Pity, pity was what his son deserved—not resentment, pity; all he could summon would still fall short of enough. Pity and penance, and if a lifetime of married celibacy was his sentence, it was still insufficient atonement. In killing himself Anthony had not acted alone; his father had been an accomplice. Never mind that his mother had, too; be that on her conscience, let his father attend to his, it was burdened with more than it could ever be purged of and he added to the load with his every thought. Anthony came to ask if he really wanted more of what had engendered him. Could he ever again take pleasure in the act? Was he resentful at being denied that?

When he reopened his eyes it was still there and he realized then that this visitation was not altogether unexpected. The sense of something unwanted in the house, as though they had a lodger, one uncertain of his welcome and thus shy of declaring his presence: he had felt that already.

He had felt it first one night just recently. Alone downstairs, he had switched on the television set and found himself viewing a drama about anorexia nervosa, another of the many novel scourges afflicting today's youth, another expression of their widespread wish not to live. When the heroine had starved herself into a state of such emaciation that she looked like an adolescent inmate of an extermination camp she was committed by her desperate parents to an institution. There she was spotted by and taken under the wing of a sister inmate, a veteran of perhaps seventeen, an accomplished hunger artist, one wise to the ways of the grownup world of food junkies and pushers. A vampire who sucked air, a self-destructive narcissist enamored of her own ethereality, she enlisted her all-too-willing pupil into her cult of
la belle dame sans merci pour elle-même
. She was foiled in her design of leading her disciple to her death by dying first herself. Something in the atmosphere of the darkened room that evening had made him feel he was not alone in watching this, had made him wonder were suicides, especially youthful suicides, who in forswearing so much set you to questioning whether they had forsworn anything worthwhile, like that: sirens luring the living to their shoals? Did their unquiet spirits return with the design of enticing those whom they had left behind down the path they themselves had trodden? Loners in life, did they afterwards long for company in their limbo, especially for the company of their kin?

On that night nothing had materialized, but now here it was. Speechless on account of that scarred and twisted neck, that protruding tongue, Anthony conveyed his message by his aspect. He was eloquent, he was sly, he was insinuating. Patient, patronizing, scoring points without uttering a syllable. Dad's drinking oiled
his
tongue while tonguetying Dad, so, unlike his mother, he was uncensorious about the booze. Didn't bother Anthony one little bit how much old Dad drank, despite the fact that his was a generation that disapproved of the favorite drug of their decadent elders. Tolerant of smoking pot, popping pills, sniffing coke, but down on drink. Not Anthony. Go ahead, Dad, have one more before you have another.