“Alone this evening?” Ruth asked.
“Every evening,” he replied, though to himself, not aloud. Aloud he said, “Yes. I’m not very good company, I’m afraid, but won’t you join me?”
“Cathy’s not with you?”
She asked it disbelievingly. So she did not know. In this there was some relief, more painful irony. Ruth was one of those—like himself—who supposed that after what they had been through together Cathy and he could never again bear to be apart for a moment.
“No,” he said. “Not this trip.”
He helped seat her. He had forgotten the scent close up of a woman’s fragrance and it dizzied him like a lungful of smoke after long abstinence. He seated himself. The waitress came and set another place.
“Don’t wait for me,” said Ruth, indicating his dinner. But he did wait, and she said, “It’s good to see you here again, Ben. We’ve missed you.” She was letting him know that she for one did not think it improper for a man who had been through what he had to want to enjoy life once again.
He thanked her. Said it was good to be back.
She said, “Actually I may not be coming back anymore myself after this.”
“Oh?”
When she had been served she explained. “An old friend has recently proposed to me, and he’s no fisherman—hates the thought. Besides, he lives out in Oregon. That all makes it sound like I’ve said yes to him, doesn’t it? I haven’t. But neither have I said no. If he asks me again—well, I’m not sure what I’ll say.”
“You’re here to find out.”
“Yes. Yes, I am,” she said, wondering at his perception.
“Do you love him?”
“Love,” she mused. “I’m not sure I know what it’s supposed to feel like the second time around. Different from the first, I guess. I like him a lot. He’s a good man. He says he loves me.”
He looked around the room, then back at her and said, “This place meant a lot to your Jack.”
“Yes,” she said, and with her eyes expressed her gratitude for his understanding.
He understood that she wanted not to cheat this suitor of hers, not shortchange him. Her whole heart he could not expect, it was not hers anymore to give, but she wanted to make sure she was giving all she had left, not holding back any part of it. In this place that had meant much to her Jack she was hoping to commune with his spirit and either lay it to rest or else live in its thrall.
Which outcome she foresaw, her next words revealed. “When I lost him I vowed I would never marry again. But as I needn’t tell you, Ben, life goes on.”
She wanted confirmation of that. Wanted it particularly from him.
“Yes,” he said. “Life goes on.”
“And as I also needn’t tell you, it helps to have someone to face it with.”
In that, too, she wanted him to second her.
He managed somehow to say it helped to have someone to face it with.
With a sigh that had in it some regret but rather more complacency, she said, “I’ll miss this old place. I was never all that keen on fishing but it was always fun to be here.” She was fairly confident that her Jack’s ghost, when she encountered it somewhere along the stream tomorrow, would let her off the hook, give her the old club sign, “Thumbs Up!” He hoped it did. A woman, he thought, could change her name—more than once. There was a boost toward getting a fresh start in life.
“It was a wonderful place for the boys when they were growing—Oh, Ben! How thoughtless of me! How could I? I’m so sorry. Oh, I could bite my tongue off!”
“Save it to say ‘I do’ another time. And of the first may you remember what you want to remember and forget what you want to forget.”
To himself he said, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
After supper, in the game room, the bridge and backgammon regulars were at it. From the poolroom came the click and clatter of the balls. In the sitting room women knitted, plied their petitpoint needles while sipping coffee and chatting together. Seated at the vise on the table in the corner a flytier had drawn a circle of onlookers. He remembered a fellow club member’s once asking whether Tony and he tied their own flies out of season. That was before their son and godson began supplying them with his flies, but even then their answer had been no. For them there had been no out of season. Their year was a succession of sporting seasons, with closing day for one soon followed by opening day for another: salmon, grouse, ducks, deer.
He felt obliged to put in an appearance in the bar. Life went on; one paid one’s dues by demonstrating that it did. Here was a good place to do it. Thumbs Up! Here he was safe from sympathy.
The looks the patrons turned on him showed him his mistake. The atmosphere of the bar had undergone a change; the falling barometer on the wall seemed to be its gauge. He had ventured into the very vale of tears just waiting for someone to shed them over. The weekend bachelors enjoying an evening free from their wives’ supervision had arrived at a state of emotional unsteadiness, their sang-froid had thawed, and emanations reaching him from several of them made him feel they would be willing to exempt him from the strict application of the club’s code, his being such a special case, and that they felt he was wishing they would. When one of them detached himself from the bar and tacked toward him he took refuge on the terrace. To be shunned by sober men was painful, to be sought out by maudlin ones was worse. It seemed it was to be his lot now to endure both.
A breeze had risen and set the trees sighing. Above the everlasting murmur of the stream the first of the evening’s chorus of peepers was tentatively tuning up. The light from the barroom mixed milkily with the mist rising off the water as it cooled in the chill of the night. Overhead a half moon shone and the sky to the north was sprinkled with stars but to the south it was black and the blackness was spreading rapidly northward. The quickening breeze now carried the smell, or rather the absence of smells, of approaching rain. A first, far-distant rumble of thunder was like the yawn of some awakening beast of prey about to begin its nightly prowl. The barometer of his disposition was beginning its nightly fall, only tonight it was falling faster as his quickening memories marshaled like a gathering storm.
He felt on his forehead the first, premonitory raindrop and he went inside. As he passed through the barroom, Eddie, from behind the counter, said, “Good night, Mr. Curtis. And”—holding out a fist, thumb up—“welcome back.”
He faltered only for an instant. “Thanks,” he said, and to all he nodded good-night.
Passing the door of the room in which his wedding night had been spent, he considered this latest evidence of the changes in himself and of the wariness with which he must expect now to be treated. Eddie and he had called each other by their first names for years.
In his room, the duplicate in every detail of the one he had just passed, as flashes of lightning drew nearer and more frequent, he studied his reflection in the mirror. He recited to himself these verses:
I look into my glass
And view my wasted skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”
For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
The mist was lifting from the mountains now. From their wooded slopes it rose in plumes like smoke from scattered breakfast campfires. The moment had come for him to make a decision. Whether to overhaul his long-neglected vest, thereby delaying the fishing, or to start fishing, thereby delaying, or at least taking on one at a time, the memories which the contents of the vest were sure to stir. A fly-fisherman’s vest contained more things than a boy’s pants pockets. Even from the outside of it there dangled on strings a tackle shop in miniature: nail clippers, folding scisso
rs (a gift from Tony, those), a surgeon’s hemostat used to disgorge hooks from fishes’ mouths, the bottle of dope for making dry flies float. His vest had been put away with no expectation of its ever being used again and never looked at in all the time since. That in its many pockets he carried on him an album of images in the form of flies and gadgets, he knew, and in the course of the day—if he stuck it out—he would, willy-nilly, turn the pages of that album one by one. Better that, though, than to turn them now all at once. Do that, and he might get no further, as he had almost gotten no further than cleaning out his locker earlier this morning at the club. The contemplative man’s recreation, fishing’s patron saint Izaak had called it; well, contemplation was what he was here to get away from. He must try to make this just a day’s fishing, forgetting the other days, especially the last one, telling himself that since then much water had flowed over the dam, under the bridge, and other such threadbare phrases with which people tried to cloak themselves against the sharpness of fresh sensations and the chronic, incurable ache of memory.
Yet no matter how he tried, there would be no getting away from the knowledge that, as a pregnant woman was said to be eating for two, he would be fishing today for three. The consciousness of that had been with him since the inception of this outing. If it struck him now with the force of a fresh realization it was because he was here, actually here. Against his own belief—maybe against his better judgment—certainly against his doctor’s, whose opposition was not because of his allergy to insect bites—he was here. That was not to say he was bound to stick it out. His room at the clubhouse might be reserved for the entire weekend but he could quit and leave at any time and be breaking no promises. He had made none, neither to himself nor to either of the ghosts he bore within him. Enough for now that he had made it this far. He was here—what was left of him. Now he must just trust to the current to bear him along. By going with it this morning maybe he would be able to go against it this afternoon. Get through one day and maybe it would be succeeded by another.
He donned his hair shirt, his many-pocketed vest heavy with reminders, and then, as in a dream, his felt-soled wading shoes making footfalls so silent he seemed to himself weightless, he crossed the meadow to the woods and the water, following his disappearing, reappearing feet through the fog blanketing the ground. The anthology of verse he carried in his mind supplied him with Spenser’s lines:
A foggy mist had covered all the land;
And underneath their feet, all scattered lay
Dead souls and bones of men,
Whose lives had gone astray.
The club’s ten miles of water was apportioned into twenty sections. A member’s section, or his guest’s, was his for the day. Customarily it was over breakfast, with much Alphonsing and Gastoning, that sections were assigned. Today, however, he had left the clubhouse before anybody else was up. As he pondered the assignment sheet his eyes disregarded his warning and he saw the newly hung frame on the wall above the desk. It contained, mounted on a card, a coiled leader to which a fly was attached and with the inscription “Tony Thayer/His Last Cast.” The angler in him noted that when his friend hung up his rod at the end of that day the fly he had been using was the Gray Fox Variant. He put his name down for Section Seven. Not because he had overheard at the bar the evening before that it had been productive lately but because it was there that he had been fishing the last time. If today was to be a test then let it be one.
In its course the club’s water changed its character several times. It was half a day’s steep climb—he had done it once—to its source in a spring high on the mountainside above the clubhouse. At the start a mere trickle, fed by other springs and runoffs the stream soon swelled in size. Growing swift and burly, it carved gorges through solid rock. About halfway down the mountain it became a brook trout brook, and maybe it was the deeply evergreen-shaded water and the dark depths of it in which they lived and had adapted themselves to, or maybe it was the invigorating rigor of existence in those icy rapids, whatever the cause, the fish from there were uniquely pronounced in the brilliance and depth of their coloration, looking at all times of the year like other brook trout looked only in their spawning colors in the fall. Lapidary they were. To hold one fresh out of water and still glistening in your hand made you think of gemstones and goldsmithing, of cloisonné, of glazed polychrome porcelain.
The clubhouse pool with its concrete spillway placed upon the stream its first restraint and the leveling of the land below the pool further slowed and smoothed it. Over the next mile the water was stepped down over a series of log dams. A parklike stand of copper beeches bordered this stretch, and there, early in the morning, a fisherman sometimes caught his breath and froze at the sight of a deer at the water’s edge, a shape only slightly darker gray than the enveloping atmosphere, so immaterial it seemed the ghost of a deer come to haunt the grove where it had died.
Once out of the shadow of the woods and in the sunlight the stream turned leisurely, meandering through meadow-land, pausing in pools. Still cold, the water here was a few degrees warmer than it was higher up and the colder-blooded brook trout mostly left it to the more tolerant browns. The grassy banks were dotted with hawthorn, alders, osiers. Blue irises and yellow irises bloomed at the water’s edge here early in the season; later on, cardinal flowers attracted hummingbirds to their scarlet stars. Nesting pairs of mallards burst off this water or the hen threshed the surface in her takeoff feigning a broken wing to lure the fisherman away from her hidden brood.
He had his favorites among the sections of the stream but he had made it a rule to fish all the other sections too. This had kept those favorites from becoming overly familiar to him, had made him study and master different types of water, to calculate where trout would choose to be in them and how best to approach their lie. Thus over the years he had gotten to know the entire stream. During his year away from it, on nights when he lay awake in bed, he had retraced it, sometimes from the top down, sometimes from the bottom up, recalling as closely as he could individual trees, boulders, shallows and pools, bends where the bank was undercut, fish he had caught and fish he had hooked and lost.
Section Seven was approached through a hemlock-covered hillside on its east. The shadowiness of the woods and the silence of his footfalls on the dead hemlock needles, the lingering reflection of himself in the eyes of the Kelly brothers and those of his fellow club members, the contradictory combination of familiarity and strangeness in finding himself here again, made it seem as though all this was from a former life, as indeed it was, and brought a sensation now grown frequent with him: a momentary disbelief in his own reality. He often caught such glimpses of himself, as though he had stepped outside his body and saw himself with eyes other than his own. Often it brought on this dizziness requiring that he steady himself against something solid. At such times the yearlong hiatus in his life seemed like a trance, a walking sleep.
He reached the water’s edge and stood looking upstream and down. Just before stilling into a long, deep, and dark pool, the water bubbled, effervescent, like champagne. Beneath the sweeping boughs of the hemlocks, their roots in the current, tall rhododendrons grew in a tangle as thick as mangroves in the tropics. They were coming into bloom now. Vivid against its dark green, almost black leaves, each pink-white cluster was a bouquet in itself.
Afraid to explore his pockets, he found what he needed now by feeling the outside of his vest. It was a fly box. With trembling hands he raised the lid and it was like opening Pandora’s box. Man-made imitations of insects though these were, for him they were as menacing as a nest of hornets, the sting of association in each and every one of them.
Even after a year’s absence from it the stream bred memories in him as it did the mayflies that hatched as nymphs from its bed and swam to the surface, metamorphosed and took flight in swarms. One now reached the surface of his mind. It came as he was choosing a fly. With that one, the Gold-ribbed Hare’s Ear, he had hooked and fought the big
gest brown trout of his life. His Anthony, his and Cathy’s, Tony’s godson, had tied that fly, had been the witness to his fight with the fish.
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Maybe his doctor was right: he ought not to take up fishing again. For him it was a dangerous recreation, fraught with too many memories of a life now lost. Already he had been stung repeatedly on this outing and not by insects, as his doctor, who was not an allergist but rather an analyst, had warned him he would be. But he had not really been talking about insects either when he replied that the world was full of them and that to live in it a man had to take his chances—better to go out that way than to go on neither dead nor alive.
As for that fish, he had known from the instant of their contact that it was no ordinary one. In the shake of its head transmitted to him through the line there had been magisterial disbelief in this effrontery. He struck and set the hook and it was his turn to disbelieve when he felt the fish’s weight. What that was he could only approximate, for of course, like all the big ones, the fish had gotten away, but not before a fight lasting twenty minutes while Anthony, in his waders, chased it toward him upstream and down. With a last paroxysm of power it broke free at the landing net, leaving him limp with excitement and disappointment. He did not choose the Gold-ribbed Hare’s Ear today. He was unlikely ever to hook another such fish but if he should he had no Anthony to help him now.
He had been left with a slight impairment of his vision, which, when the operation was one as delicate as threading a 4X monofilament leader through the eye of a number 14 trout fly, not even his new half-moon spectacles could entirely correct. Even with one eye shut it was still two gossamer strands he was trying to put through two pinholes, and the effort was not made easier by that other lingering legacy of his troubles, the incessant, ungovernable trembling of his hands.
Hostages to Fortune Page 2
