Hostages to Fortune

by William Humphrey

  Meanwhile, notwithstanding these disquieting thoughts, he was getting drowsy. The rhythmical rocking of the boat, the good food and wine and the regular tolling of the buoy bell, the heady salt air were working their spell on him. Was there not a distortion of the heart in nonsuffering too? Luxuriating in his satiated senses, secure in the blessings of life: that was incompatible with his sorrowing for his friends, but of just such incompatibilities was life composed. He was not unmindful that at home, or rather, gone from home in a pet, he had a wife with whom he was spatting, but in comparison with his friends’ his troubles were trifling. For him life was good, and perhaps to excuse himself for the difference between his luck and theirs he felt a moment of resentment—no, he felt a moment of sheer exasperation for the poor, desperate girl, his own goddaughter, who had done this to her parents. How could a young person with everything to look forward to, pretty, privileged, pampered, have done this to them, have been so ungrateful for the life they had given her? In a moment of obliquity both moral and mental he said to himself that her life was not hers to squander so frivolously.

  For “frivolously” was how he thought of it. The inviolable sanctity of each human life and the right of no one to take another’s in which he believed carried with it for him the inviolable right of a person to end his life when it became unbearable. The choice not to live was as precious as the right to life, and were he yet to suffer unendurable anguish of mind or an incurable, long, excruciatingly painful illness, he believed he had the right to end his life, even a duty to do it and spare his family and friends the sight of his pain, his helplessness and dependency. Those who were ill, alone, who had lived the best years of their allotted span and were nearing the natural end, to them we, at least some of us, were willing to extend the right to choose their own deaths. But like so much else done for their own good, this freedom was one forbidden to the young. Their despairs were no more to be taken seriously than their loves. The suicide of a young person called in doubt the worth of life itself. Was it for this reason that we felt it not to be their right but a childish senselessness and took it as a personal affront? Whatever our reason, we felt there was always hope for the young. With them things were never as bad as they seemed. If only they gave us the chance we could reason with the young, coax them back from the brink, reconcile them. Wasteful: that was how we thought of them. Every moment precious to us as life rushed to its ordained end, we recoiled from their waste of it.

  In the early morning light the gray windblown water had looked like hammered lead but by the hour appropriate for the moose juice to appear abovedeck the skies had cleared and in the afternoon they anchored off a rocky pine-peaked shore and rowed the dinghy in and went musselgathering and at the happy hour the Jolly Roger flew from the mast and it was just like old times. Except for the bloody, mangled ghost who now haunted the boat, who foreran its course, its every veer and tack, as though on the prow it had a lifesize figurehead of her. But that went without saying. Her they had with them now always and everywhere, and always would; meanwhile life went on.

  It was October and after this last cruise of the year the boat would be hauled out of water and put for the winter in dry-dock. For the past two seasons while the Thayers themselves had not sailed she had been chartered for a week or two weeks at a time to strangers. Indifferently treated, she was now in need of her owners’ care. For the first couple of days under sail all hands were busy, when not taking their turns at the wheel, putting things shipshape. While Pris tidied the head and folded and arranged the charts and scrubbed and polished and put things back where they belonged in the galley he tinkered with the engine trying to find the cause of a knock he had not liked the sound of as they left port under power. The captain meanwhile familiarized himself anew with his boat. He had been away from her for a long time; he acted as though he had been away even longer than he had. It was as though he were chartering her. Even after Pris had restored all to its wonted place things still eluded him. Where was the such-and-such kept? he was obliged to ask, until Pris grew impatient with this absentmindedness, impatient or else embarrassed for him, embarrassed by this revelation of the width of the gap in his life. His seamanship had grown rather dull from disuse. He was no longer nearly as sharp as he used to be in trimming his sails to catch the least breath of a breeze.

  Pandora was spacious as sailboats go; still they lived closely confined aboard her and soon there were moments when he sensed that Tony now found being constantly companionable wearisome and chafed for privacy, for silence. One of the most engaging of his traits had been his attentiveness. It made you feel that he had cleared his mind of everything else in order to concentrate upon the important matter you had to impart. This stimulated you in your choice of words and made you either thoughtful or else inspired in your silliness. He brought out the best in you, made you more inventive, more entertaining, and raised you in your own esteem. Now a diffuseness in his gaze sometimes revealed that he was only half attending, or attending with effort. Tony had something on his mind now that would not be cleared. His thoughts were elsewhere. It was not drink that caused his distractedness; on the contrary, it was the distractedness that was causing him to drink.

  Such observations as this he made of his friend while striving not to seem to be observing him. The last thing he wanted was to make Tony feel that he was being studied, that he was the object of morbid curiosity. Under surveillance must be how the Thayers felt themselves to be now whether they were or not. He could imagine—he was continually beginning observations to himself about Tony with that: he could imagine, only to break off and rebuke himself with, No, he could not imagine. It was presumptuous of him to think he could imagine the feelings of someone who had undergone Tony’s soul-shattering experience.

  But there was hardly a waking moment when they were not thrown together like dice in a dice cup and he could not avoid seeing what was to be seen. As on that day off Monhegan when foul weather forced them to ride it out at anchor and kept them battened down and cooped below. Then he had—it was forced upon him—the opportunity to study his friends like creatures in a cage. They bobbed, they yawed; the boat ran the length of the anchor chain one way and then the wind shifted and back it went the other way. The portholes streamed with rain and in the cabin silence thickened like the fog. Such close confinement tried the patience, not to say the tempers, of even the best of friends.

  Trying that day to dispel the deepening gloom, to earn his passage by enlivening things a bit, he learned to his chagrin not only that his efforts were unavailing, but that they were unwelcome, wearisome. He longed to say something that would distract his friends’ minds. Console them, cheer them. He believed in the power of words to do anything but he could not find the right ones. And he doubted his own sincerity—perhaps that was why he could not find the right words. What masqueraded as a selfless longing to comfort his friends was equally as much a longing to still horrors of his own which the suicide of any young person aroused. However pure or impure his intentions, he failed, and though not a word was said in rebuke he felt nonetheless rebuked for his frivolousness. Without the boat to keep him busy Tony’s thoughts drifted to his troubles, and once in those waters, like the boat itself wallowing in a calm, he could not get moving again.

  A part of Tony had died with Christy and it was precisely the part of himself that before he had shared with others. Now, try as he might, regret his failure as he evidently did, he could not be the friend he had been. You could almost read in his face a plea to be forgiven this contraction of himself. Two hearts were not more, they were less than one. The company Tony longed for now with both his flawed hearts was that of his dead daughter. It was she whom he sought with those unfocused eyes, she and the answer to the question as endlessly repetitive as the waves: why?

  It was on that day at anchor that something else surfaced too, a thing so unexpected, so unpredictable, so disturbing, and the evidence of it so carefully concealed—from themselves even more than from
their friend—that even someone who knew the Thayers as well as he did had difficulty in detecting it, believed it unwillingly, sorrowfully. Rather than drawing more closely together in their time of trouble, as, surely, another couple would have done, the Thayers had drifted apart. The rift between them was not wide, but it was there, and in just one week at sea, in their close confinement, he watched it widen.

  He noticed first how little the two of them had to say to each other now. Both let him do the talking. They looked interested but the interest was feigned. They smiled at his little jokes, lame as they were, thin, hesitant, perishable little smiles, and each tried to urge the other into any discussion, but when he fell silent the conversation languished and soon lapsed into silence. It was as though they had just one topic to talk about and they wanted never to hear it spoken of again.

  They were far too mannerly with each other for a married couple. The least show of genuine feeling would release a flood of it, they seemed to fear. They seemed weary, if not wary, of each other’s company, as though what they reminded each other of was their mutual pain and sorrow. The careful consideration each showed the other had in it a suggestion of self-apology. Both were often absentminded and abstracted and were confused and embarrassed when caught lost in a study.

  And another thing from before was missing; what it was he realized on the fourth day out. On this cruise no snapshots were taken. There was nothing now of which Tony wanted a memento, it seemed.

  Far more soothing to the spirit than any words of his was the sun and the serenity and the smooth motion once they weighed anchor and got going with the wind in the sails again. The hiss of the water against the sides of the hull was the very sound of silence. In the vastness all around and overhead there was solace. If you felt belittled by the immensity of it all and your chatter was hushed by humility and you were reminded once again of the impermanence of everything but sea and sky, there was, oddly enough, solace of sorts in that too: in the sense of how much suffering had anteceded yours and now was over, all passion spent, long forgotten—human lives as numerous as the waves and now as anonymous.

  Along with this infinity encompassing him, his friends’ troubles trivialized his own. He felt ashamed to look them in the face. And—petty, perverse, mean, miserable involuntary muscle that the human heart was!—there were moments when he actually resented them for that. We do not thank those who have put us to shame. Yet to them and to the silence and the spaciousness he owed this—and surely his friends would be glad to know that anything worthwhile could be derived from their misfortune: a sense of his foolishness and a determination to reform. Here in the close presence of inconsolable loss, here vividly reminded of his own paltriness and the brevity at best of life, he knew how blessed he was and how ungrateful he had been. He was ashamed of his own childishness and he felt it was his fault to have allowed Cathy to be as childish as she had been—or rather, as he had been. What an unaffordable luxury it was to quarrel with loved ones! The unforgivable sin was to squander your blessings in bickering with the person dearest to you. It was as if he had already made it up with Cathy, and in his happiness and gratitude, from the heights of his fatuity, so soon to be taken from under him, he could have wept tears of pity for his less fortunate friends.

  Already the days were shortening. Having anchored early, they began drinking early. The evenings came down chilly and soon they were driven below and battened down the hatch for the night. In an effort to make Tony’s drinking seem less immoderate and to disarm Pris’s disapproval, he kept up with him drink for drink, dram for dram. This did not deflect Pris’s censorious looks nor soften the set of her pursed lips. That cold, silent, tightlipped female disapproval which was the worst of all reproaches, which made a man feel as though he had been shut in a cell, in an isolation ward. Pris kept count of their consumption like a bartender required by law to serve no more to a patron who had had his fill, but unlike the bartender she was not doing the serving. As for herself, never much of a drinker, she was drinking less than ever, and now as Tony drank more and more she drank less and less.

  What surprised and saddened him was to see how little sympathy Pris felt for Tony. Her husband’s deterioration: who better than she knew what had caused it, and if he sought solace in the bottle who better than she knew the severity of his suffering?

  Taking her book to bed with her, Pris retired early to their sleeping quarters forward of the head, leaving the cabin to Tony and him. Always on the side of the underdogs, baseball masochists, they listened on the radio to the last bitter out of the World Series games. Tony replenished their drinks every other inning, anesthesia for their pain, accompanying each with his “Just one more before we have another.” Late on one of those nights, as he lay in his bunk pretending to be asleep, Pris made her way through the cabin to go on deck for a breath of air, intending to be overheard as she muttered to herself, “Damned boat smells like a distillery.”

  Drinking hours on this cruise had been pushed forward as though they sailed into an earlier time zone each day and reset their clocks. The moose juice came up the companion-way at midmorning, the Jolly Roger that flew from the mast at the happy hour was run up in midafternoon. Happy hour! With Pris sipping her lone Dubonnet and looking on with the conviviality of a Carry Nation! She was no less annoyed with him now than with Tony, for it was his presence of which Tony was availing himself to drink all the more out of his duty as host.

  Yesterday morning Tony had appeared on deck bearing drinks at an hour that caused Pris an even more pointed than usual look at her wristwatch. He was at the wheel, she knitting. He took a sip of his drink and choked, then choked again trying not to let her see that he was choking. It was almost straight Barbancourt rum. He pretended to drink it but when Pris balled up her knitting and went forward to stretch herself on deck he poured it over the side. There had to be one sober man on board, especially with those clouds piling up on the western rim.

  He was at the wheel, Pris sunning and napping, Tony below listening to the radio.

  “Skipper,” he called, “I’m on one hundred and twenty degrees. Right?”

  “Steady as you go,” Tony called back.

  With the coffeegrinder winch he took up on the sheet and trimmed the mainsail and caught the wind, and the boat responded with a shiver and a lunge like a racehorse feeling the crop. She lifted her bow and rose high, laving her sides with foam. She could be as frolicsome as a porpoise, give her a good breeze and someone at the helm to stroke her. She was in her forties but racy still. Keeping her was as costly as keeping a woman and she required just as much pampering. When she was hauled out and dry-docked yearly her decks were holystoned, her mahogany scraped down, varnished, her brightwork polished to gleam like gold. In an age of plastic hulls and aluminum masts she was a curiosity and in dock she drew crowds like a classic car. She was womanly in her lines, svelte in her prow, broadening appropriately down toward the bottom where her works were. Now the shrouds hummed, the windstreamers snapped. Below, Tony was assisting the mezzo-soprano with Ma che cos’è quest’amore che fa tutti delirar’? You would have thought he was four sheets to the wind unless you knew him, then you knew that off-key was the only way Tony could sing. He could not help but feel a puritanical judgment that this was a bit too much jollity in a man burdened by Tony’s memories and regrets. Yet he felt he had no right to judge him. If Tony could forget for a moment any of all that he had to forget who was to begrudge him that?

  When he next called out his course they were skimming along at a good eight knots. Tony’s rendition of Per la scala dal balcone prest’ andiamo via di qua was interrupted for “Aye, aye, Mr. Starbuck. Steady as you go.” Hardly was this said when the boat was rammed by something at least as solid as a whale. Her bow reared high, she rolled to starboard and from stem to stern a spasm shook her. Joints and sockets cracked like bones breaking. From below came the crash and clatter of gear, galley wares. He spun the wheel hard alee and she came about and the sails emptied and h
ung slack while the boat continued to wallow and to shudder as though convulsing from the blow she had been dealt. Too shaken to move, he sat gripping the spokes of the wheel. The dinghy had been thrown from its davits and now, held to the boat by its painter, bobbed on the water astern. Through his half-dazed mind, not ready yet to deal with his predicament, wandered the odd, idle thought that it looked as though it were just born and still attached by the cord to its mother.

  Pris handhauled herself back by the rail and arrived at the cockpit as Tony came staggering up from below. He seemed unaware of the gash across his forehead or of the flow from it filming his eyes and causing him to weep tears of blood. He looked like the enlightened Oedipus returning on stage. He was reeling and appeared to be suffering from concussion of the brain. He touched his brow, then stared with incomprehension at his bloody hand.

  Leaving Pris to attend to Tony, he dashed below.

  The galley floor was littered with pots and pans, canned goods, the bunks with things from the shelves above them: books, binoculars, the radio, still emitting Rossini—it must have been the latter that had struck Tony in its fall. But in the cabin, in the head, in the forward quarters there was no water. She had not sprung a leak—not yet. From their locker beneath the bunk he took life jackets and returned on deck.

  A wreck, he said to himself as he drew the dinghy alongside and dropped in its oars. That’s what we’ve hit, he said to himself as he took off his sneakers. Lots of them in these waters and we’ve struck one. Either a new one or an old one that has shifted its lie too recently to be on the chart in the right place. That’s what it’s got to be.