He lowered the ladder over the side and, not knowing what was under the surface, lowered himself cautiously into the water, thinking that should they have to take to it they would be frozen dead within five minutes. He took a deep breath and submerged to assess the damage, the danger.
He never told the Thayers when he got back on board what he had found below nor did he consult the chart to see whether the reef they had struck was on it. He never had to tell them, he never had to consult the chart. Nor did he have to tell them that had the boat been a modern one its plastic hull would have split at the seam like a nut and gone down with all hands aboard before there was time even to don life jackets. One chartered by a neophyte sailor and his wife and children had done just that this very season in these very waters and—while horrified, helpless spectators watched from shore—sank in seconds.
What Tony had done was shocking, inexcusable—hardly believable. On even the smallest pleasure craft the captain was the captain, the same as on an ocean liner. At sea his word was law. Laxness in carrying out his orders might not be punishable by being put in irons or hanged from the yard-arm, but it was the crew’s duty, even when they were his close friends, to obey them. A boat was potentially a dangerous place and somebody had to be in command of it. In turn, it was the crew’s right to expect their captain to be alert at all times. To his seamanship they entrusted their safety.
A sailor since he could walk, descendant of a long line of sea captains, nobody knew better than Tony that of all derelictions of the captain’s duty inattention to the chart was the most egregious. That he could have committed it, thereby putting in jeopardy the lives of his wife and his closest friend, disclosed the depth of his continuing distraction of mind. It also, by its very enormity, silenced any criticism of him. He must have been drinking down below long before bringing up drinks for all. People smile, but the agony endures.…
He had toweled a tingle of warmth back into his body numbed by the icy water when Pris came from the forward quarters and joined him in the cabin.
“Anything I can do?” he asked.
She had done it all. Had washed Tony’s bloody face and bandaged his cut and put him to bed to sleep it off. She shook her head. He was chilled by the look in her eyes of dull, detached, uncaring apathy. She was weary of Tony’s suffering. It reminded her of her own.
But life went on and one dutifully reenacted its rituals, reminders though these were of a lost innocence that was now almost an accusation. And so, once inside the harbor, he cut the engine and dropped anchor at their old spot. At the time that inaugurated the custom about to be observed Christy could have been no more than two years old, his own Anthony not yet born.
While the charcoal in the grill grayed with ash they sat in the cockpit having a drink, all acting as though nothing untoward had happened yesterday, their thoughts on what awaited them at home. Surely the Thayers were thinking already of that; he was, and he had a lot less to think about than they. In fact, he was impatient to get home now, for he had resolved on this cruise to have things out with Cathy, settle their trifling dispute, and get them on a better understanding. The troubles of their friends had made him realize how lucky they were, how petty their squabbles. Trout season was over for the year, but he was considering suggesting a second honeymoon at the club. These were to be his last moments of such self-complacency, for meanwhile, at the marina, the superintendent had spotted them at anchor inside the harbor and his helper was even then on his way out in the skiff with orders to go as fast as he could go.
The superintendent had worked at the marina for many years. He had been there when the Thayers and the Curtises first cruised together. That was how he knew they would drop anchor at that spot in the harbor before coming on in to dock. They had stopped there at the end of their cruise ever since the first one, for, because of what happened then, it had become a rite. The superintendent knew the story. How for their last meal on board Tony had saved a steak and had stopped there to cook and eat it. Tony’s way of cooking a steak on board the boat was to soak newspapers and lay them in a pad on the deck of the cockpit and build his charcoal fire in a grill set on the pad of paper. Seeing this for the first time, his passenger was dubious, not to say apprehensive.
They had had a drink and were having just one more before having another when Tony became dissatisfied with his fire. He went below to the galley and returned with a paper cup full of alcohol. When he poured the alcohol on the charcoal it flared and the stream became a fuse leading to the cup. It was not the first time this had ever happened. Tony was used to it. But he was not and when Tony set the cup on the deck to burn itself out he stamped on it. Tony did a back somersault over the rail, hit the water feet first and sank from sight. All this had happened in a second.
Tony surfaced with his drowned pipe clenched between his teeth. He was wearing shorts and when the cup was stamped his bare legs had been spattered with drops of burning alcohol. Tony’s leap into the water had been as instinctive as was his stamping out the fire. Now patches of hair were gone from Tony’s legs as though moths had been at him. They dried him off and rubbed him with an unguent. He was not much hurt. He, Ben, burned more with shame than Tony did with pain. Over their next drink it turned into comedy.
Now it was one of the many memories that bound them to each other and, he supplying the steak, it had become a tradition to round out their cruise with a last meal in this same spot. It was this spot that the superintendent of the marina had kept an eye on since the first phone call the day before yesterday, not much expecting to see the boat until about now, but watching nevertheless because of the urgency in the woman’s voice at the other end of the wire and because of his promise not just to have the call returned as soon as they docked but to do better than that by sending his helper out in the skiff as soon as they came in sight.
It was Tony’s alarm that alarmed him. Not for himself, or if so, only as a reflex and only for a moment, but for his friend. Tony’s inner battering was blazoned by that bandage on his forehead and the livid bruise surrounding it and by the bleariness of his eyes, alcohol-induced but that was not to dismiss it, for alcohol was only the symptom of a far deeper distress. Poor Tony, how changed he was! Always so cool, so steady, prepared to cope with whatever came—now this timorousness, this dread of life.
Tony offered to come ashore with him. In the way the offer was made there was something hesitant, apprehensive, insincere, a look in the eyes or an undertone to the words that saddened him for his friend as nothing before had done. Once the bravest and most generous of friends, his suffering had turned Tony cowardly and self-protective. He had troubles enough of his own, he could take on no part of anybody else’s. He was able no longer to get outside himself, which was the first requirement for friendship as it was for love, and share in another life. He was glad he had declined that offer and insisted that Tony stay aboard the boat. He was glad of that, at least.
“We’ll put everything on the back burner until we know what’s the matter,” said Tony to him as he boarded the skiff.
“Nothing’s ‘the matter,’” he said as though to a fearful child. “Whatever it is it’ll keep until we’ve eaten and brought the boat in. I’ll be right back.” Last words of a life then ending. When, ten minutes later, they returned to haunt him, to taste like ashes on his tongue, they would seem to have come from before the Fall.
The number he was given to dial had the same New Jersey area code as the phone in Anthony’s dormitory but it was not Anthony’s number and that caused him a moment’s perplexity, for he knew nobody else in that area. It could not be a call from Cathy, for she had headed west from home; that was all he knew—all she herself had known—about her destination, but that much he knew. So it was not a call from Anthony and yet it must concern him. Those words of Tony’s to which he had just condescended so loftily now nagged him: he hoped nothing was the matter.
This while the unknown phone rang once, twice. Later, hunter that he was, he wo
uld liken those final moments of his former life while the phone rang to the interval between the firing of the gun and the meeting in air of the shot and the bird on the wing. Later; at the time he could liken what then happened to nothing that had ever happened to him before. This time he was not the hunter, he was the bird on the wing, and the shot that brought him down, that placed a pellet in his every vital part, was the president of Princeton University’s informing him, with a heavy heart and with a father’s sympathy, that his son Anthony had committed suicide.
He could just imagine what a father must feel on being told that his child had died in an accident or been killed in combat or died of a disease. After the shock of it would come the heartbreak, the anguish, the realization of the awful finality, the sense of loss and the loneliness, the unfillable gap left in your life, your unspent pity for the poor child and your regret at not having been there at the end to soothe him, to say good-bye, your own self-pity and your dread of telling his mother, the special sadness of burying a young person and the inadequacy of your friends’ condolences: he could imagine all this with a vividness born of longing, for these sufferings, forbidden to him, were what his heart cried out for. He envied the man to whom they were permitted as a dying soldier might envy his neighbor in the next bed merely maimed by the same projectile. His dead son had unfathered him.
He must do his grieving alone and out of sight and with the consciousness that the object of it had repudiated him and all his works, especially one of his works, his own begetting. Within the space of a minute after hanging up the telephone that knowledge descended upon him. For some while after the conclusion of the conversation he sat with the receiver still to his ear. Finally becoming conscious of the humming in his head he lowered the mechanism. He did not at once replace it in its cradle. He stared at it as though he had never seen one before and knew only dimly what it was. Then there was a moment when he could not recall what he had just been told. It was something bad, very bad, but for a moment he was too stunned to recall what it was.
The manner of his son’s death had made him a pariah, had put him in quarantine—or rather, it had drafted him into that army which until now, except for thoughts of the Thayers, had existed for him in articles on teenage suicide in newsmagazines in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms and which he had read only because of his friends: their survivors, their parents, people whom, now that he was one of them, he knew to be the loneliest alive, like the multitude of souls in any one circle of Dante’s hell, all condemned to the same torment for the same transgression, each in too much pain to comfort a fellow sufferer, indeed, seeing in fellow sufferers a mirror image of his own pain, his guilt, his shame.
On the wall in the office of the Gloucester marina hung a clock. At 1:21 he was a man who had not known how happy he had been at 1:20. Within that minute he had been cut off from both the living and the dead. To the living, as he knew before he had yet faced a single one of them, he would embody the ultimate affront to life, and to none more so than his fellow survivors. The unknowing look of strangers would be hard enough to bear but the commiseration of friends straining across the unbridgeable gulf that had opened all around him would be intolerable.
As yet his son’s death was not real to him but already his responsibility for it was. For something which he was not conscious of having done but to which he confessed his guilt, he had been judged, convicted, and condemned to a life sentence all in a minute. Just one little minute out of the eternity of time—if only the clock could be turned back that one minute! Yet in his heart he knew that that minute was only the last in a long sequence and that he was the one who, without knowing when the alarm was timed to go off, had wound the clock and set it going.
He had just one person to turn to now, his partner in guilt. When he dialed home and was answered not by her but by the tape recording he had left saying that he had gone sailing out of Gloucester and by a message urging him to call the number he had just called, it seemed the final rejection of him. He felt the world had turned from him as from a criminal in olden times when they were branded on the forehead or had a nostril slit or an ear notched so that people knew on sight that you were a criminal and what your crime had been. The last persons on earth who would want to see him now were the dear friends who would understand only too well what he was going through. Nor did he want to see them. Only now did he realize how little he had really felt, how shallow his sympathy had been, how trite and beside the point his efforts to console them when they were enduring what he was enduring now. This bond had not brought them closer, it had sundered them. The sight of a leper was frightening and disgusting to everybody but surely none did it frighten and disgust more than the poor leper whose company was restricted to those like himself.
The clock on the wall, now one minute deeper into the day, told him it was time he began serving his sentence. He went outside and told the boy who had brought him ashore to return to the boat and tell his friends that he had been called away and would be in touch with them sometime later. Looking at his reflection in the eyes of the superintendent of the marina he saw that he was a marked man. For the father of a child who had killed itself the parts mutilated as punishment were private and did not show but the damage was emblazoned on his face and evident in his every gesture. His son had unmanned him.
He kept waiting for his mind to break down at any moment. What a breakdown of the mind entailed he had no clear idea but he was amazed that his kept on functioning—amazed and somewhat chagrined. To be able to carry on after such knowledge was callous, even gross. His hardiness seemed to him hardness, his elasticity coarseness of fiber. Actually he was more impaired than he realized at the time.
What happened was that for the remainder of that devastating day a sort of automatic pilot took over and steered his course for him. Only the operation of some such auxiliary mechanism of the mind could have gotten him from Gloucester to Princeton. A kind of emotional second wind, quickly expended, dangerous to draw upon, but there when desperately needed to complete the course. With this emergency second self behind the wheel of the rented car, he blanked out, as Anthony, when he was very young and subject to carsickness, stretched out in the back seat and slept through long trips. Indeed, there were moments while driving down to Boston when it was strangely as though it was Anthony at the wheel.
He had once suffered a blow on the head that caused concussion of the brain. Afterwards he carried on as usual but for days he felt queer all the time and he experienced periodical blankness of mind. The queerness was caused by the feeling that none of his senses was attuned just right: his vision was slightly blurred, his hearing somewhat muffled—the world seemed to be in retreat from him. Then, like a failure in the house of the electric current when the lights all go out and you are left in the dark, his train of thought would be disrupted in the middle of a task. He would find himself in some place and not know how he had arrived or what he was there to do, like a sleepwalker on waking. The drain upon his damaged brain had been too great and it was protecting itself, blowing its overloaded fuse. So it was responding now. It was not the stretches of confusion and disorientation that were painful, it was the intermittent return of clarity, when he knew where he was and what he was there to do, when through his involuntary, his self-administered anesthesia, his pain asserted itself.
Such a moment came when it was his turn at the ticket window in Logan Airport.
“Yes, sir,” said the clerk. “Help you?”
He opened his mouth to speak but to his surprise he could not utter a word. When he tried, his jaw began to tremble and his eyes brimmed with tears. The clerk, used to people who drank themselves senseless to drown their fear of flying, evidently thought he was one of those. He was not drunk but the sensations he was experiencing were those of drunkenness. Not a gradual mellowing but that moment of sudden, sickening poleaxed stupefaction from having drunk much too much far too fast. He excused himself with a wave of the hand, fell out of line, and fou
nd himself a seat.
On any day of the week Logan Airport was busy, a crossroads with thousands of people arriving and departing, greeting and taking leave of one another. Boston was a college town, none bigger, and many of these people were students—none of them his, each and every one of them a reminder of his. He saw several families happily reunited as his would never be again.
The stewardesses’ smiles were the same for each and every passenger. Bright, commercial smiles that one must accept as part of the fiction that every trip was a pleasure trip. Everybody on this one was bound for the same place: Newark. The flight was a direct one, with no intermediate stops. Some no doubt were going as he was from Newark on to Princeton. They were going home, going back to school, back to work, going on business to one or another of the industrial research centers with which present-day Princeton was ringed. For them this was an unexceptional day, not one to be circled forevermore on their calendars, another day in lives punctuated by change but not brought to a full stop, fundamentally the same as they had been yesterday and as they would be tomorrow (except that none of them could foresee what lay in wait tomorrow, or even yet today; only this morning he had thought he was sailing back to all that he had left on land). There was always, on any flight, not just one laden with compatriots returning home from abroad but any flight, an atmosphere faintly familial, clubby. To him now the one thing that he and the others had in common, their all being bound for the same place, only emphasized their dissimilarity. A person boarding the plane with the intention of hijacking it and diverting all aboard from their expected destination to his private one could not have felt himself more different, more completely alienated from his fellow passengers than he felt. Nor have disguised his inner turmoil with more of a bearing of studied ordinariness.
He had gotten away from nothing while in the air, yet when the plane touched down and he felt the earth with all its attendant duties underfoot again it was as though he had returned from the weightlessness of outer space and resumed the full burden of his bulk. Exhausted now, down to the last gasp of that second wind, having been sailing a boat off the New England coast early that same day, longing to be alone instead of on a bus, mistrustful of himself behind a wheel and with no need of a car for the day ahead of him tomorrow, instead of renting another one he hired a taxi to take him from Newark Airport to Princeton.
Hostages to Fortune Page 8
