Hostages to Fortune (8 page)

For men only because of its inaccessibility before, the club was now turned by paved roads into a place for all the family. Children began to appear in the pictures and before long they and their mothers were sporting fishing togs. Black-and-white gave way to Kodachrome, flashbulbs followed the festivities indoors. The club's decor remained unchanged—he was surrounded now by the very objects he saw in the pictures, even by pictures pictured—while young men came home on leave in the uniforms of four wars. The catches of fish dwindled from days of yore but there were still fish to be caught and people kept coming back, finding fun and fellowship here, needing no photographer's injunction to smile, posing with thumbs up. Happy families are all alike, and when they are shown all at the same sport in the same spot the effect might have been monotonous, even wearisome, but in someone who had once been and was no longer one of a happy family himself it was longing they awoke. For him those had been welcome days away from work that made getting back to work all the more welcome. He loved the sport but he had never been a fanatical fisherman. Odd that a man of his outlook should have fathered a son whose intensity in everything he took up was almost manic, but to him it had been important that none of his pastimes become more than that, a pastime. Absorbing, yes, demanding, yes, otherwise no point in pursuing it, but not all-absorbing. The cream on top that enriched the milk of life would have been cloying as a steady diet.

Even so, he had managed to spend a good amount of his time here, as Tony, the shutterbug, who loved every minute of life and wanted mementoes of them all, had recorded. Much of a wall was covered with his snapshots of them in those days. It was like Tony to want to share his good times with everybody and to assume that everybody wanted to share theirs with him. Envying no man his pleasures, he could not imagine any man's envying him his. Just when the two of them had caught the fine catch of fish in the picture he was looking at now he could not remember. It was not all that uncommon, and when good times followed one another with no end to them in sight they were not prized enough to be labeled. Happy days are all alike; every unhappy day is unhappy in its own way.

It was ungrateful of him, but he found it hard now to realize that he had had so many happy days, and it was contrary of him to expect now to see the man in the pictures when he looked into the mirror and to see the man in the mirror when he looked at the pictures. Why was it that the joys we had had were not only no comfort to us later but brought us the sharpest of pains? A matter of tenses. Had had. Past perfect. Present mirth hath present laughter.

He was trying not to dwell upon individual pictures. Too many of them brought back too vividly the time of its taking. It was test enough of his strength to expose himself to their collective effect. Nevertheless, he found himself lingering over each one because he was afraid to let his eye stray toward the section of the wall that he dreaded most of all. Reliving it in these pictures, he could feel his life coming up to the recent past.

One spring they had driven up, as always, on the eve of opening day, went to bed that night as the barometer was falling, and in the morning woke to find a foot of snow on the ground with more still falling fast. It was wet, heavy snow and the club members were wakened as one by the loud crash of a nearby limb breaking and falling from its weight. The clubhouse was cold and dark. Powerlines were down, unreachable by repair crews. Kerosene lamps for this contingency were brought out and in all the fireplaces fires were started.

To listen to, it was as though they were under siege all that day, with tree limbs crackling like rifle fire and mounds of snow falling into the snow with a sound like the impact of artillery. When finally the snow stopped falling during the second night it had deposited over two feet. Then the barometer rose, the temperature plummeted and everything froze solid.

They were snowbound for ten days. They sawed and split firewood, hauled water in buckets from the stream and used the old, disused outhouse, and the men, as shown in this picture of them posing in the snow, all grew beards, his then as black as now it was white. By the fourth day Pauline's fare—she was Eddie's wife, in charge of the clubhouse kitchen—was growing stale, by the sixth it was giving out. Armed from Eddie's private arsenal and bolstered by Tony's “To hell with the game laws. This is a matter of survival,” the men took to the woods. The photograph showed them with their bounty, he with his four-point buck, Tony with his spikehorn, another club member with a mess of squirrels, still another with a heap of rabbits, and Eddie with half a dozen grouse. They ate so well none of them cared if it never thawed.

In contrast to this were summer afternoons when heat waves struck, when the water was low and warm and the fish wary and off their feed, and then it was more fun to swim in the pond, play croquet or badminton on the lawn, drowse in a hammock hung in the shade. Often they were kept indoors by wind and rain. Then they passed the time reading, fussing with tackle, playing games, solving puzzles, and drinking too much, and Tony with his camera had snapped them at all these activities. Such a lot of activity! You could almost hear these pictures, the laughter on the lips, the raillery, the songs, and it deepened the silence of the night, the stillness now of this the scene of all that play, lengthened the distance from those days and from all hope of reunion with those people. These moments caught and mounted along with the memorable fish on the walls brought to mind a multitude of similar ones. They littered his memory like dead leaves from a tree.

He was nearing the end of the wall and in these pictures they were all a little older but still as carefree as always—if anything, more contented than ever. And why not? Their luck had held for so long they had been lulled into a sense of its permanence. With a daughter like Tony's what father would not look self-satisfied? Happy man, how could he know that before another year was out she would leap forty-seven stories to her death? And himself? The big, hearty fellow without a worry in the world or a thought for tomorrow, with the pretty little woman, his loving wife, always at his side?

On reflex he turned aside and in so doing saw another picture. It was not the hot tears in his eyes that distorted it—or maybe it was. He saw the picture of a dead boy of eighteen with a face made livid by trapped blood, with bulging eyes, a swollen, blackened tongue protruding from swollen lips, a twisted and swollen neck stretched and scarified by a rope. What the picture actually showed was a much younger boy holding up a fish and smiling at the camera, but in his father's eyes that final image of him now intruded upon all others from the rest of his son's short life.

They had been at sea for a week, sailing out of Gloucester up the coast past Portsmouth, Portland, past Monhegan, and into Penobscot Bay. They had moored at Boothbay Harbor, anchored off Vinalhaven, gone ashore at Castine and Blue Hill. Then back down the coast again. Now landfall. Home port and then home again. For the Thayers it was back to their big haunted house, their incurable pain and their incessant self-questioning, for him it was back to his wife and the troubles between them. Just one last time-honored ceremony before coming in to dock and then it was back to all they had sailed away from.

Now all three were busy pretending that nothing had happened yesterday. Up from the galley came the smell of onions frying. Sails were furled, bags packed, and already dressed for shore, he sat at the wheel, the chart at his feet on the cockpit deck. After yesterday, no more of that navigating from below.

He came chugging in under power, keeping the rocks, the Dry Salvages, to portside, listening to the scream of the gulls and the funereal tolling of the buoy bell. The bell set the cadence for Eliot's lines inspired by this place. At the time he could not recall them exactly, and shortly he was to forget all about them and everything else. It would be several days after finally getting home when he would think of them again and look them up and then find in them an added applicability.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

For the Thayers this cruise was to have been their coming out. There was a time to mourn, as both the Bible and the book of etiquette counseled, and while the time to dance had not come, the period of mourning prescribed as mentally healthy and socially acceptable was over. Life must go on, although sometimes, along with the poet, one forgot just why. Pris packed her black dresses away with her veil, and Tony thumbed through the latest issue of
Yachting
.

A cruise without Ben aboard was not a cruise. This one absolutely depended upon his saying yes to their invitation. Or rather, upon his and Cathy's saying yes, of course. The Thayers were perhaps not quite as sorry as they tried earnestly to sound over the phone when he declined for Cathy, explaining that she was away from home and would not be back by then. They were coming out but they were still tender and tentative, and while they always got along with Cathy, with him they never had to get along. They would sail the old familiar waters and do the things they used to do before. That “before” was unfortunate. It pulsated in the earpiece, waiting to be finished off with a phrase.

The invitation to go on that cruise had come as a godsend to him. Cathy and he were squabbling again and she had gone away. She had not left him; things were not that bad; but she had gone away. He had been batching for several days, and he was not meant to be a bachelor. Remorseful, regretting things he had said in heat, yearning to have her back while at the same time still loyal to his angry mood—in the midst of all this had come Tony's call. It signaled something that gave him even more pleasure than the relief from his situation at home. It meant that Tony, dear Tony, his poor broken friend, had begun to recover at last from his terrible blow.

He brought with him the champagne and his ritual, his penitential offering of a steak for their last meal on board and from the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal the customary quart of fresh bay scallops, for, while they were a reminder that it was from atop the Pan Am Building overlooking the terminal that Christy had leaped, the scallops were a shipboard tradition of theirs of long standing and not to have brought them would have made it seem that all reminders of her were henceforth to be avoided. When they had stowed the gear and the provisions and filled the gas and water tanks they spent their first evening charting their course and planning their anchorages and their moorings and then, full of Veuve Cliquot, went to their bunks and were cradled and rocked by the rhythmical lapping of the harbor swell, lullabied to by the buoy bell. Perhaps in the very volume of their talk—his talk, mainly, for the Thayers seemed content to leave it to him—there had been an uneasy evasion of the topic, but they had gotten through the evening with no allusion to Christy.

Even to his best friend Tony talked of this trouble of his no more than he ever talked of any of his troubles. His was the patrician avoidance of display. To those like Tony it was bad form to spill your insides—the code of the club carried over outside the club. To some of Tony's class it was bad form to have any insides. Tony was not like that. Tony was deep. But his depths were not for public view.

Alone in the cabin that night, lying in his bunk, he assessed the damage to his friends still in evidence a year and more after their calamity. Or rather, the damage to one of them: Tony. It was presumptuous enough of him to try to imagine the father's grief and guilt; the mother's, she in whose body had ripened that one smashed by itself out of all human semblance—at least he had the humility not even to try to imagine that. The outward evidence of damage to Tony was all too ample, and it of course could be no more than a token of the inner ravage. It was to be seen not only in the added and deepened lines of his face; in the stoop of his shoulders and the inclination of his head, slight but, in him who had always carried himself so erect, marked; in the blanching of his complexion caused by his long confinement indoors, he who before was always browned by the sun the year round, and the spread of white strands in his hair—it was even more noticeable in his manner. Always ebullient, Tony was now subdued; always decisive, he was now vague; always self-assured, he was now timorous. He peered at the world with eyes troubled by some nagging, unanswered question; it gave him the look of a man whose vision was beginning to fail. Even with his dearest friend he seemed unsure whether his company was welcome. There was an air of self-mistrust, of uneasiness about him—about Tony Thayer, of all people! Whenever he caught himself smiling, and that was all too seldom, he corrected himself and put on a sober look; whenever he caught himself looking sober he corrected himself and smiled. He seemed to feel it would be thought unseemly for someone who had suffered what he had to evince interest in life, and again he seemed to fear it would be thought unseemly to let it be seen that he had lost interest, to let his suffering show and inflict the burden of it upon others. He must surely ask himself whether even his friend was not wondering how much he was to blame for what had happened, in what way he had so wretchedly failed as a father. It was as if Tony's conception of himself had been shattered and a new one, strange to him, substituted for it. An analogy suggested itself. Just days earlier he had heard on the radio an interview with a famous surgeon. From it he learned of a new departure in heart transplants. Instead of replacing the patient's own diseased heart with the donor's they now left it in place alongside the new one. In tandem, the pair shared the work. For whatever the period of reprieve from death given him by the operation, the patient had two hearts, neither very reliable, the one defective, the other susceptible to rejection by its host. Tony's emotional infirmity was now comparable to that two-hearted person. His old shattered self coexisted with a new one alien to him. And all this was evident in a single evening, an evening, moreover, devoted to the planning of a pleasure cruise. How much more must lie concealed from sight!