Hostages to Fortune (26 page)

Let the day perish wherein I was born
.

All the more ironical to think now that he had been impatient for his birthday, could not wait for it, came before he was due. His father had been in the kitchen that morning preparing breakfast as usual when his mother came down to say she thought maybe they ought to go to the hospital. Her face had been like one of those days described as mostly sunny, only fleetingly clouded by fear. They were glad to have their expectancy shortened by her being three weeks premature.

Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived
.

Let that day be darkness; let God not regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it
.

As for that night
…

As for that night, that enchanted night, it had been one of a thousand and one when, himself a literary King Sharyar, done with his day's storytelling, his Scheherazade spun him her wordless tale of love as if her life depended upon it, that night different only in being one of those on which they had hopefully left off using precautions. That spasm in the groin had begotten this boxful of ashes.

As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be counted unto the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months
.…

Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes
.

Why died I not from the womb
?

Just possibly because his father had been there to prevent it. There had been fresh-fallen snow on the ground that morning and he had bundled Cathy into her old raccoon coat and over slow roads had driven the fifteen miles to town, learning only when he parked and helped her out of the back seat that her labor had commenced. Halfway down the walk she stopped, said, “I'm afraid I'm not going to make it,” turned the color of the landscape, gave a gasp and a groan, and sank to the ground. There in the snow, with his bloody hands, he had delivered the child, himself delivered toward the end by hospital personnel summoned to the scene by someone's having spied it from an upstairs window. Always in a hurry, that boy, both in coming into the world and in leaving it.

He had knelt there pinching shut what their cleaning woman (in recounting how an infant of her acquaintance had been strangled by his) called the biblical cord so that blood would not drain from the baby back into the afterbirth, waiting for help. It came at last and he was relieved.

“Nothing much for me to do but tidy up after you,” the doctor had told him afterwards.

Had this unexpected role of his in the birth made him bask with even more pride in his first sight of mother and child together? Of course it had and he was grateful that he had had the good sense, the immodesty, the shamelessness to admit it and enjoy himself. She thanked him, kind sir, and he said, shucks, ma'am, it was no more than any fellow who happened along would do for a lady in distress.

Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? For now I should have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept; then had I been at rest with kings and counselors of the earth
.

He knelt and lowered the carton into the hole. With those hands of his that had been the first and the last to hold his child he crumbled a clod of dirt on the lid of the carton, saying, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He filled the hole and replaced the square of turf. It had been the work of five minutes.

This season's growth of grass would heal the cuts made in it. Even now it was hard to tell that the ground had been disturbed. Within days it would be impossible. Indeed, he himself, just minutes later, had some trouble finding the spot when ordered to do so by the campus cop, who marched him back from the car and made him dig the box up again.

By being cut back to one, martinis had regained their potency. He felt the old anesthesia dull the edges of his mind. Ken Howard capped his flask. Ken had disposed his lunch among the pockets of his vest; now he assembled it and spread it before him. From out of nowhere the picnic wasps appeared. Ken casually waved them away.

He took his lunch from his creel and opened the box to see what Pauline had packed for him. Breakfast at the club was served at fisherman's hours and Pauline came to work early enough to find him there this morning in her kitchen putting together a sandwich for his lunch.

“Ah, there, Mr. Curtis, I will do that for you,” she said.

He had to turn from her to hide the tears that sprang to his eyes. That happened to him often now. The least little thing could cause it. A snatch of old song, words that carried an import for him of which the speaker was unaware, photographs—to them he was so susceptible he had to keep them out of sight—small courtesies like Pauline's that touched him to the quick. Or often for no cause at all, out of nowhere, like a sudden shower on a sunny day. His new skin was thin, his self-command shaky. Nerves, his doctor said; he would get a grip on them in time.

What Pauline had packed for him now brought tears to his eyes again and he had to turn away to hide them from Ken Howard. In the box was the kind of lunch he used to consume before: two hard-boiled eggs, two thick sandwiches, a slab of cheese, pickles, potato chips, an apple, and a slice of cake. It was a long time since any woman had tried to tempt his appetite, feed him back to his old self. He was touched—why was he also saddened, shamed by such consideration? He felt it was wasted on him. For he too had insulted life, and having attempted to sever his bond with humankind he felt himself undeserving of its care and concern.

PART TWO

So, while he was purposely avoiding paying a visit to the Thayers, somewhere in the ice-jammed waters below him, maybe directly underneath, as he drove over Hudson's Rip Van Winkle Bridge that afternoon en route from Massachusetts to Stone Ridge, lay Tony's body, tossed by the tides to and fro for months already then. Upstream the river was still breaking up, the glittering shards of ice a broken mirror big enough for seven times seven years' bad luck. From that day it was three weeks yet before Pris would write him her two letters, three weeks before the body would surface and be found and laid to rest along with the other Thayers, Christy among them, in the hilltop churchyard looking across the blue water to the chain of blue mountains brooding above it. New troubles would be beginning for him then. Not those brought by the news of Tony's death. Not until some three months later, with another year's herring come and gone from the river by then, would he receive the first of those letters and learn about that. But within just three weeks, in that troll- and elf-land where old Rip before him had gone to get away from the world and a loveless wife and had fallen out of time, a mind once scornful of all spiritualism, one firmly rooted in the realm of the real and the accountable—his own mind—already wavering, would have darkened superstitiously and be convinced that for all he had buried and all he had left behind that day, he had brought with him to this lonely house and this out of the way place a passenger, an uninvited, permanent, and most pernicious guest.

It was a place from which visitors could be seen coming a mile off but with nowhere to hide if you did. The holding of which it was now a part was a dairy farm of four hundred acres spread across a valley. The flat fields surrounding it were sown to hay and the long dirt road leading to it had neither dip nor bend to conceal anything taller than a turtle. The road ended at a creek and there, that evening for the first time, he left his car. The car was not the only evidence of modernity he felt he was leaving behind, for it was as though time itself came to a stop there. For more than a century the big fieldstone shed that stood at the edge of the creek had served to house farm implements, for two centuries before that it had been a gristmill. The waterwheel was long gone but the millrace, the work not of man but of nature, a flume of seamless rock, remained, creating a waterfall with a ceaseless crash. A narrow footbridge of some twenty feet spanned the creek to an island of one solid rock about a quarter of an acre in extent. Scoured by the periodical flooding of the creek and cleared of silt, the island was naked of growth; there was not so much as a blade of grass anywhere on it. Resting on the rock like the Ark on Ararat was what had once been the miller's house, his now on lease for the next three years, surrounded on all sides by the waters of the creek like a moat. A fastness, a keep, was what he had found for himself here.

A house so old it had seen everything, he would be no novelty, it could shelter him, too, might, if walls had tongues as they have ears, even have told of some former tenant out of all the generations that had dwelt within them in a situation more similar than not to his own. Gray though they had been from the beginning, its stones looked grayed with age. The thick slates of its gambrel roof were ragged and flaky at the edges like the worn scales of an old, old fish. Even from outside one knew that its doors, its shutters, its floorboards would creak arthritically. The house was severe, even dour, of countenance, unadorned, ostentatiously unostentatious, the architectural projection of the plain people its builders, the Palatine Huguenots who had settled this valley of the Esopus stretching southwesterly from the old state capital of Kingston down to New Paltz. This was not a house to welcome home a prodigal son. Its doorway one could imagine a fallen daughter once upon a time being ordered never to darken again. Its windows, deeply set in its thick walls, were few and small, as befitted long harsh winters and fireplaces fueled by wood—felled and split with hand tools and hauled by oxcart and sledge—and the threat of Indian attacks. Their little panes, mullioned with lead, were diamond-shaped, and now in the light of late afternoon/early evening those of the facade, permanently tinted purplish by the rays of many a rising sun, glimmered opaquely like the facets of gem-cut steel. Windows not for letting in the world but for keeping it out. To avoid flooding of the ground floor the foundation rose high and the steps of half-round stones, once millstones, leading to the low Dutch door were stacked like pancakes. So worn hollow were the stones by generations of feet they might have furnished half a dozen churches with holy-water fonts, a mischievous thought pleasing to him because it would have been such anathema to the rigid Calvinists who laid them up and because as he climbed them that first evening it seemed to him that he was entering something like a one-man monastery. For he was forgetting that it is in solitude that we are least alone. It would have been humanly impossible to have shut the door before admitting his uninvited guest, for it followed as closely upon his heels as his shadow. However, it would be a while in making known its presence. That night, with Anthony twice buried and with the death of Tony not known to him, he was allowed to go to bed thinking he had left everything behind him and was as isolated on his island as he seemed to be.

He knew that in work lay his one hope of salvation, hard, absorbing, daily dawn-to-dusk work, but he knew too that he must now make a complete break with the past. He had brought with him copies of none of his books. The Cathy to whom one of them was dedicated, the Tony another, were no more (the terrible irony of his rightness about Tony he had yet to learn); for that matter, the person who wrote them was no more. Always one to move on, never one to reread his books once the proofs had been corrected, he wanted now never even to see their spines on a shelf again. Another life, one lost, irretrievable, was reflected in their every phrase. He could not return to the half-finished story he had been working on before his troubles; the point of it had been lost. Lost too was the eagerness he had felt then to get started on several other projects. Reexamined in turn, each of them now seemed unpromising, illusory. Yet no new ideas fired him. He forced himself to his desk daily but the writing he did was just that: forced. It was not that it came hard; what was wrong with it was that it came easy, and, as one of his favorite bon mots went, a writer was somebody for whom writing was harder than it was for other people. At day's end, without Cathy to discuss it with, he threw away his production.

The fault was his and he knew it; therefore he blamed the house.

Yet the setting was nothing if not peaceful. The house itself, in its own way, had charm; indeed many if not most people would have found it altogether charming. No amount of puritanical asceticism could quite stifle the native good taste of the age of its builders, nor uglify the virgin materials they had found to work with: chestnut paneling for the walls, wavy-grained, wide pine floorboards, massive oak beams with the mark of the adze on them, all now honeyed with age. The very determination with which they had sought to exclude beauty from their lives had created a style of stark simplicity sure to appeal to a later generation whose aesthetic credo was that form followed function.

But that rich patina had been acquired from the touch of human hands, and “happy the people without a history” went for houses, too. History groaned in every board of this one. The worn treads told of how many had climbed those stairs another night with a heavy heart, had wearily watched another day break through those windowpanes. Over such a long span of years how many had waved for the last time to a loved one as he crossed that footbridge to die alone in some distant place? Whose they were and exactly why they had been shed he could not know, but he could be sure that tears had flowed within these walls enough to fill that brook from bank to bank. The rafters must have shivered time and time again to words that could never be unspoken. It was not depressing just to think of how many had died here, though that was depressing enough; rather it was to think of how many had lived here and of what they had had to endure only to die at last.

And so when he first began to imagine—fantasize—hallucinate—a presence in the house he thought he was endowing it with some composite spirit of the place, one afflicted with all the accumulated sorrows and disappointments ever felt beneath its roof. And that was bad enough. That was silly, simpleminded, childish enough. It was not like him. At least, it was not like the him he knew, the one he had always been before. Now he hardly knew himself, so greatly and in so many ways, all for the worse, had his life changed. Yet surely his mind had not so far deteriorated that he was ready now to believe in ghosts. “Ghosts” was merely a name for the dead one accumulated in life and carried inside oneself—including one's own dead selves. He did not believe in haunted houses. Or rather, he believed that all old houses were haunted, which came to the same thing. You could not live for long in one without peopling it with its former tenants and weaving tales around them, and for this isolated and ancient house one's imagination had full license to make the tales gothic and gruesome. But he heard no footsteps in the night nor saw nebulous shapes lurking in the shadowy corners of the rooms. Bats fluttered around the eaves in the evenings and deathwatch beetles ticked away in the walls, but there came no midnight tappings on windowpanes. Above the everlasting rush of the waterfall he heard nothing, he saw nobody, living or dead. No one came near the place. The hayfields surrounding his island sanctuary required no attention from the farmer at this time of year, would require none until the one week, in July, when they were mowed. He had dropped out of the world in coming here. His mailbox at the end of the lane was over half a mile away and he stopped to empty it of the junk addressed to “Boxholder” only when he passed it on his way in from shopping. This he did in nearby Kingston so as to avoid becoming known to the merchants of the village and preserve his anonymity. His occupancy of the house, his very existence, were unsuspected. Why then this irrational sense of there being somebody skulking about the place? Why, sometimes, was the very air of the room he entered still palpitant with the presence of someone who had fled from it on his approach? Why, when he knew it was not so, was the conviction overwhelming that that doorlatch had just been lifted and then softly put back in place? His scalp tingled at times when he felt himself being watched; the mind inside the scalp could only wonder at itself, at its inability to prevail with its unassailable reason.