Hostages to Fortune (4 page)

Between the two schools of fly-fishing, as in everything else, there was a generation gap. He never knew it until Anthony told him, but he was a presentationist. To him the important thing was not the pattern of the fly so much as it was the accuracy and the delicacy with which it was presented to the fish. Oh, even his sort recognized that there were times when your artificial had to be realer than the thing itself if it was to fool the fish into taking it instead of one of the swarms of naturals coming off the water. But most of the time he relied not upon the exactness of his imitation but upon his skill in stalking the fish and casting the fly. When Anthony called him a presentationist he was calling him an old fogy.

Anthony was an imitationist. He was one of the new breed of scientific anglers. With the same intensity he applied to everything, he had plunged into the vast field of trout stream entomology. Not that he was any the less skillful in presenting his fly for all that, but when he did so it was as near a copy as could be made from fur, feathers, and tinsel of the one he had caught on the wing and identified out of the hundreds known to him. The demon of encyclopedic knowledge had always beset that boy. He would, if you insisted, tie and sell you a gaudy Royal Coachman imitative of nothing in nature like the one his entomologically innocent father had just selected, but he would both pity and scorn you.

Well! If presentation was what he must rely upon, then Lord help him! His first cast of the day looked like his first ever. The line fell upon the water like a serving of spaghetti. It was not that the line was kinky. It had been but he had attended to that. Wound on the spool of the reel, long unused, it had been coiled like a spring when he removed it last night. Looking for something to occupy himself with at the witching time when churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes forth contagion to this world, he had dressed the line and looped it loosely on pegs on the clubhouse porch to relax and straighten. The kinks were in him. It was years since he had made so sloppy a cast. Instead of annoying him it tickled him. It tickled him so he laughed aloud. His inexpertness had carried him back momentarily to an earlier, more carefree time in his life. Then he stood listening to the silence as though for the call of some uncommon bird to be repeated and identified. It took a while for him to realize that the once familiar, now forgotten sound had been that of his own laughter.

By one o'clock in the morning it had been evident that this was turning into another of his nights. As drugs to induce sleep were forbidden to him, the passing of the eye of the storm was his signal to get up and in his pajamas creep downstairs so as not to disturb the slumbers of his fellow club members whose tranquil snores penetrated their bedroom doors. He knew what he would find downstairs, but the reality was no more to be dreaded than his lone pillow thoughts about it. The reality, being real, and thus suggestive at least of other, alternative realities, would even be preferable.

Not memories but moisture and mosquitoes kept him from the terrace now. Light from a single lamp illuminated the barroom. The door stood open and through the screen door fog had drifted in from outside and deepened the murkiness. He drew himself a mug of beer from the tap and marked it down on his long-inactive charge account. He sipped it slowly, for he had a long wait for the dawn.

The peepers had multiplied and now the night belonged to them. Their drone was pierced at fixed intervals by a screech owl uttering its long-drawn, broken, all-too-human-sounding sob. It was a nocturne he knew. He too was one acquainted with the night.

He sipped his beer and listened to the patter of the raindrops from the leaves of the trees and the distant rush of the water over the spillway of the pond, the steady trill of the frogs, the ululation of the owl like a banshee prophesying doom, and when his mug was either half empty or half full he wondered which was better, to have had sound sleep at night, appetite and good digestion, love, friendship, fatherhood, if only for a while, or was the pain of losing them such that it would have been better never to have known them? According to the poet, it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and he supposed that went for all of life's blessings, to none of which had we any claim or assurance of, but it was like asking a man deafened and blinded in midlife whether he would not rather have been born that way. Having heard Mozart, having seen a sunrise and Chartres cathedral and the paintings of Picasso, one could cherish the memory, but not without pangs of regret if one must do so in silence and darkness that would never again admit them.

Oft in the stilly night

Ere Slumber's chain has bound me,

Fond Memory brings the light

Of other days around me.

No other spot had for him more fond memories of other days than this one, but to complete that very verse:

The words of love then spoken;

The eyes that shone

Now dimmed and gone,

The cheerful hearts now broken!

This unlikely hour was the one at which he knew the barroom best, though not as now, alone in it. After everyone else had said good-night and gone upstairs, after Eddie had rinsed and dried the last glass and mopped the countertop and left them, Tony and he had sat here talking oft and late in the stilly night. Tony had begrudged time lost in sleep, and when with Tony so had he. In those days, before their troubles began, the two of them had always met bubbling over with news for each other, questions to ask, books to recommend, jaunts to plan, amusing encounters to relate, nuggets of nonsense to share. The one would learn the latest sayings, interests, and accomplishments of his godson, the other those of his goddaughter. So as not to disturb the sleepers overhead they spoke low, and that quiet and intent intimacy was a part of his recollection of those nights. Tony was not only a good talker himself, he made a better one of you. When, often at an hour later than this, they switched off the last light and climbed the stairs to their sleeping wives, he went always with the afterglow of a stimulating conversational workout. If only he could recall now some of the many sparkling sayings he had been sure he would never forget! Good things in abundance cheapened themselves; where so many came from there would always be more. Now for company in the night he had the peepers and the owl.

His thoughts turned—no stopping them—to a night that he had not spent here with Tony. A night under this roof but not in the bar. Another June night but one with no threat of a storm, another sleepless, long night but one not nearly long enough. His wedding night. The words of love then spoken, the eyes that shone, the cheerful hearts, now broken …

The days of their banns had brought the week to Thursday. The Friday would bring an influx of other members and their guests for the weekend, but for the wedding ceremony and the supper afterwards their little party still had the clubhouse to themselves. There in the sitting room he, his best man, and the minister had waited for the bride and her bridesmaid to come downstairs. She wore the cameo brooch that had been Eddie's grandmother's and the wristwatch they together had bought her just that morning, a pearl necklace borrowed from Pris, and a blouse the blue of her shining eyes. She carried a bouquet of lilies of the valley gathered in the locust grove beyond the pond, and whenever in later years he looked at Tony's wedding picture of them hanging on the wall here he smelled again their heady, hypnotic perfume. Pris played the wedding march on the old upright piano and then joined them on the terrace for the service and the exchange of vows and of rings—to avoid embarrassing observations he was wearing his now, although now, following his loss of weight and the thinning of his fingers, he could, for the first time in years, slip it off. The cook had produced a wedding cake. After supper a conspiracy of thoughtfulness and delicacy had emptied the place. The kitchen staff had hurried through their cleaning up and betaken themselves home, Eddie had given himself the night off, the Thayers had chosen a distant section of the stream to fish the evening rise, and now at nightfall the newlyweds had it all to themselves. So determinedly out of this world, care banished, pleasure decreed, it was the perfect hideaway for a honeymoon. Cathy declared she would not have exchanged it for any other.

The sun had shed over everything its last alchemical glow and then withdrawn, the dusk drew around them its sheltering curtain. By moving her things into his room, their first domestic arrangement, they transformed it into their room. The early nightcap he mixed for them was not entered on the charge account; at Eddie's insistence, everything was on the house tonight. He put a record on the phonograph and counted his blessings while, to the sobbing of saxophones and the keening of clarinets, Frank Sinatra lamented his lucklessness in love. For him there
were
friends waiting to throw shoes and rice.
He
wouldn't have to dream the rest. The fullness of each moment made it seem that time had stopped to attend upon them. A moon the color of honey beamed down on the flagstones of the terrace. Their hymeneal, the multimyriad murmur of the peepers, with no discordant owl to screech that night, was like some sustained celestial hum, like the voices of the stars, of which the sky was so brim full that the fireflies flickering in the shadows seemed to be a shower of them fallen from the superfluity.

“Alone at last, Mrs. Curtis,” he said.

“Mrs. Curtis. Mrs. Curtis. Mrs. Curtis.” She seemed to turn the name one way and another so that its facets might all sparkle like a gem. “That's me. Mrs. Curtis. That's my name. I've been trying it on myself all afternoon but you're the first person to call me by it. Oh, dear, I hope I'm not about to spoil things by crying.”

“It will take a little getting used to,” he said.

“Mmh, but already I like the sound of it,” she said.

“Maybe it will seem more like your own when it's something more than just a name,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed, then, comprehending his meaning, colored so deeply it was visible by moonlight.

He took her drink from her, set it beside his on the parapet, and there they left them, unfinished.

Upstairs he swept her off her feet and carried her over the threshold, marveling to himself at her tininess, and then feeling some apprehension over it. She closed the door behind them and he set her down. As he undid her buttons, unzipped her zipper, she said, “I feel like a present being unwrapped. I hope I'm what you were wanting.”

“You are a present,” he said. “And just what I've always wanted.”

She closed the distance he had put between them so as to admire her, took him in her bare arms, and with her lips just touching his, said, “I shouldn't tell you, but you needn't have waited for this until now, you know. I could never have resisted you. Does that make me sound like a wanton woman?”

“I'm counting on your being wanton, woman,” he said. Then, “Thank you for saying that, my love. It was knowing I didn't have to wait that made me want to.”

“Thank you, my love, for saying that,” she said.

Two boys it was who met in the clubhouse kitchen late that night. Two boys on the same errand, appetites aroused by their exertions in satisfying another one, there to raid the icebox for a midnight snack, both in their pajamas, each barefoot so as not to disturb the other. Two men it was who, minutes later, returned upstairs together, each bearing his offering on a tray.

Like boys caught in some midnight mischief they had grinned guiltily and leered at each other and then simultaneously both had sobered, sensing something unworthy of them as husbands, something disloyal and degrading to the wives waiting for them overhead, in that suggestion of male clubhouse smuttiness. So much could pass in a look, so much more in a look reconsidered and revised on the spot, within the blinking of an eye. In just that fraction of time he felt he had been admitted into another of his friend's clubs, with all the privileges and all the duties of membership.

Oft in the stilly night now time came to a stop. Clocks, like the one on the wall here—where every effort was made to put a stop to time—ticked on, their hands advanced, but for him the night stood still. It passed for those asleep and unconscious of its passage. He got up now to limber his stiffened joints and he shook his head like shaking a watch to make it run. In the sitting room another lamp burned low. By its soft radiance he could see the big mounted fish hanging over the mantelpiece. He had been present to witness that one caught. There was a fond memory of other days when cheerful hearts were still unbroken.

As an angler Tony Thayer had been complete. He knew intimately the ways of his wily prey, was versed in stream entomology, could cast like a tournament champion, and he was blessed with that without which all these talents and attainments would have been for nought: he was lucky. It was not to detract from his skill to say that in fishing, as in everything else, Tony was lucky. Take the affair of that big trout in the clubhouse pool—or formerly of that address, now in everlasting repose here on its plaque above the sitting room mantelpiece. No peer of the dusty leviathans hanging over the barroom doors, to be sure. Those harked back to the days of yore. Their like would not be seen again, no more than would the men of mighty mold who had hung them there. But for these mean modern times Tony's was a big fish.

Big when first reported, he had for years been getting bigger, as though he throve on all the threats against him and the vain attempts upon his life, until now he was the length of a fire log and had a maw like an alligator. It had been resolved in solemn session that the health and future of their pond depended upon the fish's being removed forthwith, before he cannibalized every other fish in it including those of his own get, but so much water had flowed over the dam since then that sons of club members were becoming members themselves and still the fish declined all inducements to self-destruct and by now his brain was a computer programmed with every pattern of artificial fly ever to come from the tier's vise plus projections of the permutations still possible using the world's available materials. They tried for him without expectation of outwitting him but just so as to keep any fellow member from chancing to do so, and each was content not to catch him as long as none of the others did. For although they cursed him and denounced his wickedness, the truth was he was their pet, their mascot; they admired the old reprobate and didn't really care how many of their smaller fish he ate, were glad to have him to talk about, were thrilled whenever he allowed them a glimpse of himself, and would miss him when he was gone. The place would not be the same without Old Jumbo.