Hostages to Fortune (25 page)

With shoes, clothes, hairbrushes, tennis rackets the division was easy enough, but separating some of his possessions from Cathy's had been like unraveling warp from woof, like separating the yolk from the white of an egg. What, for instance, to do with one document from the carton in the attic labeled Vital Statistics: Anthony's birth certificate? Cut it in two, half for him and half for her, like the disputed child of Solomon's judgment? His decision was to tear it in pieces: nothing for either of them.

Every house was a gamble; this one had been a long shot and on it they had staked their all, for it represented the decision to give up both their jobs, leave the city, and trust in his by no means certain ability to support them by his writing. Not just a house, it was a career as well. Or rather, two careers: his and the one she was giving up for the sake of his.

They had liked this area, which was still totally rural then although it was only an hour by train from the city, but if it had been up to him they would not have bought this house. They would not even have gone inside to inspect it. Having inspected it, they would certainly not have bought it. Crumbling garden walls, rank weeds, untended flowerbeds gave evidence of a once well-to-do family gone to seed. Inside the neglected grounds sat the neglected house. Even to him there was dimly discernible the showplace it once had been, as the pretty girl is discernible beneath the wrinkles and the stoop of old age, but to restore it to its youth seemed as hopeless an undertaking as restoring the old lady to hers. Cathy's was the eye that had seen beneath the hideous wallpaper, the bilious paint, the fussy fretwork with which the Victorian grandchildren of its builders had gussied up the stately old structure, and hers the dauntlessness to tackle all that dilapidation.

Laughable now, the price they had paid for it, the wages of workmen then, but for them it had been a burdensome commitment and for the first several years a steady struggle, a nest of inconveniences. The carpentry, the masonry, the plumbing, all the jobs requiring skill, they had hired done, getting around to them as the money became available, living with things as they were until such time. His first book had put new cabinets in the kitchen, dampers in the fireplaces. The second bath had had to wait for the second book. Meanwhile, years of their own toil had gone into refurbishing the place inside and out. They planted shrubs, seeded a lawn (no three words ever stood for more work), laid out a rose garden and beds for cut-flowers. Five feet tall when they set them out, the hemlocks topped twenty now, the willows fifty. They stripped, scraped, sanded down through as many as a dozen coats of paint, spackled walls, grouted tiles. There was no rest; as soon as one project was completed they undertook the next one awaiting them. The baby had had to wait for the third book. When it was born a room was ready for it. He decorated the room in blue while waiting for the two of them to come home from the hospital.

Meanwhile they were furnishing the house, starting out with nothing, for until then they had lived in a furnished apartment, and God knew, neither of them had inherited anything from anybody. In this task they were lucky in their time and place. In shops in nearby towns and at household auctions could still be found fine antiques at affordable prices, especially of the period they developed a taste for, early Empire, then overlooked not to say despised, for this was before Mrs. Kennedy renewed interest in the style through her televised redecoration of the White House. For ninety dollars a dealer had parted gratefully with a rosewood washstand stenciled in gold with a running Greek key that had belonged to Joseph Bonaparte, deposed king of Spain, during his years of exile in Bordentown, New Jersey. A carved mahogany window seat by McIntyre of Salem, with cornucopia arms and kneed, winged, and clawed feet, had cost thirty-five. Another dealer, in whose shop it had sat gathering dust for a decade, let them name their price for a Launnier pier table. They were proud of their cleverness, their sharpness of eye, their uncommon taste. As part of the pretense of being landed gentry they dressed for dinner—except on those warm summer evenings when she came downstairs dressed in nothing at all and transformed the place into a bordello out of the Belle Époque.

At the auctions and in the shops they were attracted by things other than furniture: oriental rugs, jewellike in their tints and in their intricacy of design but displaced by the fad for wall-to-wall carpeting, cut crystal, also old-fashioned and worthless, and above all by pottery and porcelain. The hieroglyphic makers' marks on these became another language to them. In one unlikely shop he spotted a pair of Chelsea
putti
. She found a charger monogrammed by Lambertus Cleffius, one of the earliest makers of delftware, in a stack of dime store dinner plates. He found a T'ang bowl at a flea market.

It had been an education and for two people brought up poor, children of the post-depression, and in her case only a generation removed from southern sharecropping, living surrounded by their instant heirlooms had made them feel like the lord and lady of the manor. At the same time it remained always something of a joke. Out of the people in the primitive portraits they brought home they made themselves a family tree—hollow for generations—and gave their ancestors biographies which accounted for not one penny of the once vast family fortune's having come down to them. A youthful disappointment in love was what had so soured the features of Great-aunt Hortensia and caused her to leave her millions from the China ginseng trade to a home for unwanted kittens. Cathy's great-great-grandparents, Jubal and Matilda, shown on the pillared portico of Taradiddle, had sold the silver and the jewels and had mortgaged the old plantation to put everything into Confederate war bonds. Already at the age of four pinheaded Great-granduncle Leonidas gave promise of his fecklessness. Sole heir to Cincinnati Guttapercha, manufacturers of condoms and babybottle nipples, he allowed the holes to get put in the wrong one of the plant's two products and after lawsuits and receivership and a life of vagrancy had ended up dead of anemia when, as ringmaster of a traveling troupe of trained fleas, he was reduced to nothing but himself to pasture his performers on.

Just as his books were built into the house, so the house was written into his books. It and its furnishings had been his storehouse of metaphors. Whenever he felt the need of one to convey his meaning, a stroll outside or a session in the kitchen usually suggested one. To recall all these now would have been like recalling several models of defective cars back to Detroit, but otherwise he had done a thorough job of effacing himself, and the place was Cathy's now, all hers. If their joint possessions were painful reminders to her of him then she was free to do as she liked with them, for he had consigned his share in them, along with the house, to her. The small carton he picked up now in leaving was the one thing he was taking that had belonged to the two of them and it was a thing in which she had shown no interest. It was the carton containing Anthony's ashes. “A light kind of cinders,” in Sir Thomas Browne's phrase, his son's remains weighed less than the newborn child had weighed.

With the carton under his arm he pulled the front door shut behind him, locked it, and slipped the key under the doormat. In his letter to the lawyer he had said he would be out of the house by noon. Cathy probably planned to allow some little time beyond that to ensure their not encountering. He was getting away at an hour that would spare them meeting even on the road.

Cathy had left without their ever discussing what was to be done with the ashes. Anthony might have left no mortal remains to be disposed of, so completely had he taken himself out of her life. If she even knew they were in the house all that while she never said so and for fear of having her show any repugnance he never told her they were. Her indifference made him all the more conscious of their presence.

It devolved upon him to choose a burial site. He felt no attachment to his ancestral cemetery plot back in Kansas. Orphaned at ten when both of his parents, along with his little sister, died in a fire, he had hardly known his family. The grandparents who had taken in the orphan boy had been dutiful but were too old to be much more than that. Anthony and those people had never laid eyes on one another. Cathy was disinclined to return to her native Arkansas dead or alive. Blairstown had been home to him for longer than any other place, but he was severing all ties with it now, leaving no forwarding address. He predicted that Cathy would sell the house and everything in it and quit the area too. Anyhow, Anthony had disassociated himself from his family.

What would have been his wishes in the matter? None, probably. Blank indifference. Scatter them to the wind. Disperse them and let it be as though they had never been. But an instinct of his own, so primitive it amounted to superstition, kept him from this course. Free as the wind to wander, Anthony's spirit would roam; laid to rest in some spot where he had been happy, it might lie quiet.

His prep school: he had been happy there—at least he had seemed to be; what he had done made you wonder whether Anthony had ever been what he seemed to be, how long he had been secretly unhappy. But there he had seemed to be happy, and the school had its own cemetery. It was on the edge of the campus, on a hilltop overlooking a river. In it were buried long-tenured faculty members and a few old grads. It was a quiet spot where, in good weather, students came to study, stretched on the ground in the shade of the old oak trees. There Anthony would be spared ever having either of his parents alongside him.

Over the phone the school's headmaster had told him there would be no objection, which was coolness enough to make him think there really was and to say there would be no ceremonies, the space he required was small, and attention would not be drawn to it afterwards as no marker was contemplated. The headmaster repeated that there would be no objection. And so, on this painfully pretty day, with the sun shining so bright it hurt your eyes and with people everywhere eager to get out of doors and enjoy themselves, he drove northeastward to bury in Massachusetts the last relic of his former life before assuming the one awaiting him.

Possibly the headmaster had wanted to guarantee him his privacy, spare him the embarrassment of having any of Anthony's former schoolmates or teachers present out of a sense of duty or morbid curiosity; more probably his way of assuring that there would be no objection was to keep the matter to himself. Whatever his motive, that he did, and the outcome was that the funeral, that one-man ceremony in which he himself was the entire cortege, the gravedigger, the preacher, and the congregation, ended in his being apprehended by the campus cop on charges of suspicious behavior. There could not have been a more telling commentary on the furtive, hole-and-corner, outcast and excommunicated character of the proceeding.

Arriving on campus in early afternoon, he used the service entrance, driving past Dormitory Row and the tennis courts, up the hill past the headmaster's house and the library, through Faculty Circle to the cemetery gate. There he left his car and with what must have been unconvincing nonchalance took a stroll along the paths to make certain he had the place to himself.

Uneasy he must indeed have appeared, for no criminal with evidence to rid himself of could have been more anxious to encounter nobody, to do his job and get away unseen, but in searching out a spot in the remotest part of the cemetery, away from the bustle of the campus and as far removed as possible from the nearest occupied plot, he was following what he judged would be Anthony's wishes as well as trying to meet any objections to the nearness of a suicide by the survivors of those interred there. To the faculty wife watching him from her window or to the unseen student whose curiosity he had piqued he might well have looked like somebody searching for a spot to cache his loot or to bury the body of his victim.

Since what he planned to do was of the starkest simplicity he had thought he would be done with it before he had time to feel much. He had not foreseen that in the starkness lay the pity of it and in the brevity the pain. Funerals were for the living, to let them assuage their grief by giving expression to it, take leave of their dead and receive the condolences of relatives and friends, but in this one at which he officiated there were none of these customary consolations. This had been a death desperately desired; to mourn it would be a mockery, to embellish it hypocrisy.

He knelt on the ground and with his pocketknife cut a square of turf. He lifted it out and placed it on a newspaper. The dirt he dug with his knife he piled on another newspaper. He had his reason for wanting to disturb the appearance of things as little as possible, to leave no traces, but his doing so could only have quickened suspicions already aroused, as would what must have been his evident agitation as he returned from the car bearing the carton. If he looked guilty, remorseful, distraught, was it any wonder? Indecisive, too. For until now his one thought had been to get it over with quickly; now he felt the contrary urge to slow it down, do something more, dignify it, not let the boy go so unregretted, put forever out of sight with this indecent haste, this lack of ceremony. Until now he had been fortified by the sense that he was dutifully doing Anthony's bidding. If a part of that bidding was to deprive his father of the consolations of company, offerings of flowers, music, remembrances by those who had known his son, then it was his duty to bear that too. And so he had, until now. It was as he came back along the path carrying the carton that the sight of his shadow on the ground struck him with the full force of his loneliness. Perhaps that had been a part of Anthony's intention too. Pitiless toward himself, Anthony could not be expected to spare those whom he had left behind. He was overwhelmed by the bitter appropriateness of this bare, bleak ceremony to that lonely death. He longed for his wife, the boy's mother, and her absence mortified him.

He set the carton on the ground beside the hole, rose, looked around him with feelings of desolation and anguish, lowered his head, cleared his throat, and said what he felt Anthony would have chosen for him to say.