And so, running for his life, running from his haunted house in Stone Ridge to escape the deadly urgings of its resident spirit, he had run into another, realer, far more deadly one at their old New York rendezvous, the Princeton Club. This one with a motive for what he had done and the motive the same as his own. This one his alter ego, the model for much of what he was.
He tore the letter in pieces and sprinkled them on the water. Like petals from an expiring rose they fell. Just downstream a fingerling trout nosed one of the scraps and then swirled away. Some soon sank, others were soon lost in the wavelets and the froth. He watched the last one float out of sight. Then in the distance he spied a fisherman working his way toward him through the section that would once have been Tony’s. It seemed to be his still, by rights. Unreasonable as it was, and perhaps all the more because it was so unreasonable, he felt a moment’s enmity toward the man, whoever he might be, for not being his dead friend. However, he would have to be cordial. The man waved to him and waded on upstream.
“Saw on the sheet that you had put yourself in Section Seven for today,” said Ken Howard as he clambered up the bank.
Ken loosened his bootstraps and turned his boot tops down to his knees. He slipped out of his vest and detached his creel from its harness. He knelt, unlatched the lid of his creel, and turned it upside down. Out of it slid a brown trout fully a foot and a half long. It was only a short time out of its element. Beneath its lacquerlike coat of clear mucus its undimmed colors still shimmered, iridescent.
He gave a whistle of appreciation.
With a clasp knife Ken slit the fish from vent to gills. He stripped out the innards and ran his thumbnail along the exposed spine. At the stream’s edge he sloshed the fish in the water to rinse out its cavity. He then cut open the fish’s stomach and studied its contents.
“Cress bugs and caddis nymphs,” he observed. “He fell for a grannom fly.”
Ken produced a pocket flask. He uncapped it and raised it in a toast. “To a fine fish,” he said.
With his martini he responded, “To a fine fisherman.”
“To the memory of the fine boy who tied the fly that fooled the fish,” said Ken.
It was like lancing a long-festering sore or pulling a rotten tooth: a shock, a moment’s sharp pain, and then relief. He was touched to tears. He said—when he was again able to speak—“Thank you for that. Most people think they’re doing you a favor not to mention him. It gets to seem as though you never had a son.”
He remembered how, when they went into seclusion afterwards, silence settled upon the house and with the passage of time spread like an insidious growth. Their living area contracted and outlying rooms died as do the extremities of the body from lack of circulation. The stormwindows were lowered, shutting out the sounds of the world, sealing in the silence, and the shades were drawn in the disused rooms. Routine preparations for the change of seasons, the onset of hibernation, but this year fraught with more than usual melancholy. It was reminiscent of an experience he once had of staying on in a summer place after the season was over, with the pipes drained, the utilities disconnected, the windows boarded up and the games all stored away, the parties, the outings, the laughter all gone like the leaves from the trees.
The lawns browned and the flowers in their beds faded, drooped, and withered. The last of the songbirds left and their feeder went unfrequented, unreplenished. The days passed unmarked, uncounted. But they passed, and wintry winds now wailed over the stricken landscape, the expiring year. The house stood out from the barren scene as stark as a letter edged in black. The days shortened, darkened. Caravans of geese departed, uttering their plaintive good-byes. In the darkness and stillness of a November night the first snow of the season fell and over the world blackened by frost a winding sheet was drawn.
The postman drove by without stopping or stopped to leave bills, mail-order catalogues. The sound of the television set, the time or two it was switched on, was incongruous, obtrusive. Daily he listened to the phone to test whether it was working. The hum, like the uninterrupted drone of an indifferent universe, told him it was, but it never rang: a lifeline gone dead. He had demanded much of people, setting standards that few could measure up to, and thus his circle of friends had always been small. There were not many who might have condoled with him now. Of those few, few did. The world receded further and further, as though they were alone in a boat drifting out to sea, or in a submarine sinking deeper daily as its support systems ran down.
However, the delivery man kept the tank of the furnace filled, the electric-meter reader stopped on his rounds. The services were being supplied; it was the moral support system that was failing him. There, too, lifesavers were tossed to him, but they were not his fit. To the door one bleak day came a brace of painfully couth young Mormon missionaries, plainly not the fruits of the old-time religion but of modern-day monogamy, and on another day equally dismal a trio of Seventh-Day Adventists who, when he said he was too busy just then for a talk with them, tried to make an appointment. The message they had for him was an urgent one, direct from On High, and concerned the imminent end of the world and his eternal salvation. The Bible Belt had extended northward of the Mason-Dixon line just as had the range of the buzzard following farm mechanization and the consequent dearth of dead workhorses down there.
He had believed that by bringing up his child in a household free of religion he was giving him an advantage. He still believed that. But maybe he had denied his child the thing that might have saved him. Maybe what had once restrained people from laying violent hands upon themselves might have restrained Anthony: the belief that in so doing they were destroying the image of God, in which they were created. People killed themselves in greater numbers nowadays than ever before; was that because they had ceased by and large to believe in God or was it simply because there were so many more of them? Could it be that the two things were one and the same: the greater the number of people the greater the number of opportunities to doubt that God looked like that?
The time had been like the time he lost his address book. He had had the book for years but not until he lost it did he realize how dependent he was upon it. Without it he was cut off from all but the very few people whom he was so closely in touch with that he knew by heart their addresses and telephone numbers. Not hearing from him, some people decided he had dropped them and took offense. Some he had not heard from for years afterwards, some he never did hear from again. He had considered placing an ad in the paper explaining his predicament. It was like that now only in reverse: his friends had lost his address and telephone number. No, rather it was as if his telephone had been disconnected and his mail all returned to the senders marked “Address Unknown,” for not even those who knew them by heart called now or wrote.
He knew how they explained to themselves their silence, their avoidance of him. They called their evasion tactfulness, their self-protection they called consideration of his feelings, respect for his wish to be left alone, allowed to forget. They were sparing him embarrassment, explanation, apology. And he acquiesced. He called none of them to ask, “Where are you now that I need you?” He acquiesced in that universal human conspiracy which consigned the suicide to a double death by denying him the one he had chosen, which put beyond the pale the poor lost soul who had already put himself there, and forbade his survivors to grieve openly for him as was the right of others more acceptably bereft.
What friends he did have were tried and loyal friends. Had any other misfortune but this one befallen him they would have rallied unsummoned to his side. They were enlightened, broad-minded, kindhearted people. None of them was so backward as to believe in sin and damnation, none so Pharisaical as to deny the suicide any resemblance to themselves. The barbarity of past ages in forbidding him burial among the righteous, in driving a stake through his heart and burying him at a public crossroads or leaving him unburied for carrion would have horrified them. They were humane people, civilized people; they burie
d the suicide double deep in silence. In short, they were people like himself, that was why he had chosen them as friends. Yes, people like himself, and hadn’t he, when forced to utter it, always whispered that word suicide so as not to mortify further the survivors of it? Hadn’t he suppressed all mention of the dead one’s name? Hadn’t he felt the suicide of any young person to be an insult to life, something which rendered absurd our own lifelong efforts not to die? Had he not taken it as a personal insult, a personal threat? Now he was the embodiment of that insult, that threat, one felt, to judge by the way they avoided him, by every parent—all but him. He, to whom it had happened, had never considered the possibility. Upon the unwary falls the blow.
Not even a case as close to him as Christy’s had alerted him. In the very way he put that to himself was to be found the source of his unwariness, his self-complacency: Christy’s case. A person who was a case was not like you and yours. Cases were curiosities, anomalies, aberrations. Those without names but only initials, classified by types like the inferior phyla, were buried in medical textbooks; notorious ones gave a synthetic shudder to tourists in waxworks museums. Only now, now that parents looked at him as though he might be contagious, did he understand Tony’s avoidance of him after Christy’s death. And maybe exposure to Christy had shown Anthony the way. Maybe one reason for Tony’s silence now was his sense of responsibility. Maybe the parent was the carrier. Maybe there was no maybe about it.
Blood of his blood and flesh of his flesh had asked itself the inadmissible question, was life worth living, and had arrived at the inadmissible answer. Did the frail fiction of life depend upon never asking that? People now seemed to see in him a reproach for the frivolity of their ways and their vanity in carrying on. If he tried with a forced smile to allay their fears of him they recoiled. They wondered how, after what he had gone through, he had the insensitivity, the effrontery, the bad taste to go on drawing breath. If, with our aging bodies, our dulling perceptions, our diminished appetites and our unsatisfactory performances, we were ashamed of outliving any young person, how much more shameful it was to have survived the one who was to have been your continuity, the nearest thing you would ever have to a reincarnation!
He was conscious of having become a public figure, one to be pointed out, whispered about, moralized upon. A dread distinction had been conferred upon him. He had endured what all men feared and thus had spared them having to endure it. He had paid the price that all obscurely felt they owed. They did not necessarily thank him for this and certainly they did not seek the pleasure of his company. When at the end the old blind Oedipus showed up at the sacred grove he himself had become sacred; what all men feared doing he had done; but though he was pitied he was unwanted; he was a sacred monster. So it was with him now. No one liked to be reminded of the dark disasters of life.
Oh, if he was shunned wherever he was known, he was considerately shunned. The silence in which he was wrapped was nothing if not kindly. In the village, whenever he went there on an errand, shopkeepers and service attendants handled him with kid gloves—if not with tongs. Acquaintances spied him from afar and veered aside or passed by deep in conversation so as to avoid an encounter that would prove awkward and painful to him. Forcibly contained, his grief would sometimes rise in his throat as sour as gorge, as bitter as bile, and as hard to hold down. In fantasy he saw himself crying out in the street, “Have pity on me, people! My son is dead! Comfort me! Comfort me if you can.” Reason, restraint, decorum would regain control and he would swallow his grief, and it was as hard to get down again as gorge.
The world could not decide what it wanted of him. It was permissible to survive certain calamities but there were some that ought to have killed you. If you were too grossly insensitive to perish politely then you might at least seclude yourself. These things were managed better back in the days when convents to retreat to were there for women with the decency to realize that nobody wanted to see them anymore and when men, having said all the wrong things, might tie their tongues by becoming Trappist monks as their apology to the world.
But underlying all these was a far simpler and more comprehensive explanation for his friends’ silence and avoidance of him. He had only to look into himself to discover it. He could put himself in their place. He could picture someone even now, bothered by his conscience, the neglect of his duty, poised to dial the digits of the Curtises’ telephone number or, with pen in hand, to write a long overdue letter. Had he himself not done that, stiff with dread, irritated in advance by his conventional phrases, his vanity stung by the realization of his unoriginality? Then the very fact that he was long overdue made it seem that he was now too late. Inexcusable behavior provided the excuse for more of the same. And he could see that person put down the phone, cap his pen. Discouraged from trying by his foredoomed failure, able all too easily to put himself in the Curtises’ place and feel the incommensurateness of words to wounds, he chose continued silence, comforting himself with the thought, what could anyone say? Our inability to reach and succor one another we could live with so long as we could turn it off with an old saw, so long as we did not put it to the test. Else it brought home to us the irremediable isolation in which we were each born to live and to die.
What did he expect? For that matter, what did he want? Would he not have found any words of comfort not only lame but a mockery of his misery? Could he be cheered? Did he wish to be? He believed in the power of words to do anything, though he knew how hard it was even for him, or rather, especially for him, the tools of whose trade they were, ever to find the right ones. Did he want now to expose to his friends their inability to do so, to watch them squirm with discomfort, to reveal to them their inadequacy to feel for him as deeply as he deserved? Did he expect his misfortune to make poets of everybody, or if not, to shame them for not being eloquent with commiseration? Had suffering made him selfish? Cruel? Could he not realize that the cowardice that kept people from him now was mankind’s common condition, that it was not aversion to him or self-protectiveness but simply the recognition that their tongue-tied sympathy would be no more consolation than that of mutes hired to mourn at a funeral? Their avoidance of him must have pained them too. Did he long for further evidence of human helplessness, of life’s ineluctable loneliness?
Not for him the therapy groups he read about now of parents of youthful suicides seeking and, so they said, finding relief through talking about their dead children and listening to others talk about theirs. He hoped they did find relief, but that was not for him. He shuddered to imagine searching for clues in his boy’s upbringing in discussions with strangers or spying on the unwanted lives of their poor offspring. It seemed a desecration of the dead, as ghoulish as grave robbing, and an invasion of the privacy of souls whose consuming desire had been for oblivion. Not for Cathy either, though hers was a different reason. She wanted no more than knew it already to know that she had mothered a suicide; she wanted nothing to do with others like herself. Hers was a common enough reaction, he supposed; still it saddened him. He expected something different from his wife than a common reaction.
Personal to you, unshareable, singular as your calamity was, you found that there was nothing singular about it; on the contrary, you were, in fact, a part of one of today’s most widespread problems. There had been epidemics of youthful suicide at various times in history, fads for it, but as with so many of mankind’s miseries, our age outdid them all. Of today’s youth it was the number two killer, second only to highway accidents. Such a scourge had it become that there were international conferences on it. There was a library of books, there were television programs, dial-a-phone emergency counseling services. You could hardly pick up a magazine or a newspaper supplement without finding in it an article on the subject. It was like that other scourge, cancer: when it touched close to you was when you became really conscious of its incidence.
Was it then some malaise of the times, a worldwide wave of taedium vitae, an attrition of the life urge of
the race, something quite impersonal, without individual motive or explanation, simply an all too common fatal germ that your child had caught?
God knew, these were hard times in which to be young and hopeful. Faiths were bankrupt and causes corrupted. The word progress had become an obscenity. Life was longer now that there was hardly anything worth living for. You could go anywhere you wanted to go now that there was nowhere left to want to go to. A dollar bought you twenty-five cents’ worth and whatever you spent it on didn’t work, fell apart, looked like hell. There was no such thing as craftsmanship anymore. We had polluted ourselves to the brink of extinction. We were up to our asses in our own filth, and the moral, political, and cultural climate we had created would make a buzzard puke. There was little game left to hunt, few fish to catch. Every species was endangered except the cockroach and the rat. Nothing you ate had any taste. Nothing was any fun anymore. The movies were meant to be entertaining, now they were either depressing or dirty, or both. Music used to have the power to soothe the savage breast, now it was meant to turn you into a howling savage. The idiot box had put an end to the magazines worth reading. Painting and sculpture—well, if you were not insulted then you had missed the point. Instead of trying to look their best, the young people made themselves as ugly as they could so as to outrage their elders. Your life was not worth a nickel on the streets of any city in the country. The third-rate ruled the world. In every country on earth, whichever party was in power, it was the mediocrities who were on top of the dungheap. Technology had turned against its masters. Erect skyscrapers to alleviate crowding, build bridges to span rivers, and people threw themselves off them. Invent drugs to ease pain and cure the curse of insomnia, and people took overdoses of them. We thought these blessings were being misused—were we mistaken? Was killing yourself with them one of their uses? The generation gap, the credibility gap, wars nobody could win or end, drab surroundings, shoddy products, dreary lives—was it any wonder so many people stayed stoned out of their minds on drink and drugs? How else could you get through a day of it?
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