He had heard Anthony himself in that very vein, but of course one never took to heart anything a young person said. Everybody griped about those things and then, like Miniver Cheevy, born too late, called it fate, and kept on drinking. Nobody killed himself for the sake of them. Or did some?
He did not want to be a part of a problem. He did not want to be a statistic. He did not want to be another case. To be truthful with himself, he was resentful that he must share his plight, resentful that his case, if it must be, was not the only one of its kind, or at least resentful of continual reminders that it was not. To know that he was one of many did not dilute his pain; it did not enter into solution, it was not soluble, especially not in other people’s tears. Folk wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding, misery did not seek company, it shunned it. In nothing were we more selfish than in our suffering. “You don’t know what I am enduring!” How often we said that to the world, and how it dismayed and irritated us to have somebody reply that he knew very well, he had suffered the same thing himself before us. We could not allow that our lonely, steep, and stony path was actually a well-worn one. We wanted all the world’s pity to ourselves, not just our share as one of a multitude. Suffering, like everything else, was devaluated by being mass-multiplied. In a fellow sufferer one saw oneself not just mirrored but mocked. Had God chosen to silence Job’s complaints by showing him a horde of others like himself, that would have broken his spirit once and for all and have destroyed his faith. That would have belittled and cheapened his sufferings, and the one thing that sustained the poor wretch was the sense of his distinction in being the particular object of God’s displeasure.
Through reflection and self-examination he grew philosophical and forbearing toward the world’s avoidance of him. But with the passing of each day of unrelieved silence Cathy grew more embittered and resentful. To her their friends’ unfeeling consideration was unforgivable. For she interpreted it to mean that she was being left to hide her shame and disgrace in seclusion. He gave up trying to explain or excuse them. She wanted to hear none of that.
“Well, love,” he said, “we’ve still got each other.”
He got that said only by choosing a tone that totally misrepresented his true feeling. Thus it came out sounding rather rueful, perhaps even rather wry, when actually his whole heart and soul were in it. What he had meant to convey was that they were now all the world to each other. But without some trace of self-irony, some slight, modest disclaimer, how did one offer oneself as all the world to another person? What he had succeeded in intimating was that they had nothing now except each other and must make do as best they could with that cold comfort. The time for actions, not words, had come. He held out his arms for her to come home to. His warmth went cold as she flinched, shook her head, then turned from him with a shudder she could not suppress.
Ken Howard said, after swallowing—as offhand as that—“How did he do it?”
To speak of this for the first time, too, was both a shock and a relief. “He hanged himself,” he said.
“That’ll do it,” said Ken. “Every time.”
Ken’s breeziness was not offensive to him; on the contrary, he found it tonic. “He meant business,” he said. It sounded like tough-guy talk. It sounded almost as though he were boasting of his son’s deed. He was not. He was simply saying something he had needed for a long time to say and saying it somewhat assertively because his listener was not the person meant to hear it. Hardly more than a stranger to him, this man had asked the question he had waited for the boy’s mother to ask. He had waited, first in dread that she would ask it, then in relief, and finally in resentment that she did not.
Cathy decided that Anthony’s death was unintentional, an accident, and nothing, she said, could make her change her mind. This was almost the first thing she said, although it was several days after she had emerged from the seclusion into which she had withdrawn on being told the news. It was hardly what he had been expecting to hear her say. But then neither was he expecting her to look or to act or to bear herself as she did.
It was late at night on the fifth day after he got home from Princeton that Cathy finally returned. Finding the lights of the house off and thinking him to be asleep, perhaps not wanting to see him anyway, she let herself in and went quietly to bed. He allowed her this last night’s untroubled sleep. He would tell her in the morning. It was impossible for him to believe that she had returned still loyal to the mood in which she had left, but as he had continually to remind himself, she did not know what he knew, and in case she was ready to resume hostilities where they had left off, he resolved to break his news to her the first thing, before she had time to say something she would regret, for it was unthinkable now that there ever be another cross word between them. Besides, clean wounds healed quickest. So Cathy slept that night while he did not.
As he waited the next morning for her to come downstairs he warned himself what to expect, or rather, what not to expect. He must not expect her to throw herself into his arms for comfort and consolation. From such news, and from the bearer of it, no matter who, her first reaction would be to recoil in horror. That was what he must expect and not be hurt by it. He must not take it personally.
It was just what happened, and as he was expecting her to throw herself into his arms to be comforted and consoled, he took it personally and was hurt by it.
Cathy fled to her room and there she stayed. From behind her closed door there came no sound. The day passed and the night, a second day came and passed and a second night. She was taking it even harder than he had feared. He could occupy himself, distract himself, with nothing. Those were agonizing days for him as he pictured Cathy wrestling alone with her anguish, longing to comfort her, fearing for her health of mind tormented as she was by a grief so great she wanted no one, not even him, to see her. People differed in their reactions. His had been to long for her, but some must lick their wounds alone. He must be patient now, wait it out, hold himself in readiness for the time when she would want him. He respected her wish for privacy, but the longer it lasted the more his anxiety mounted. Solitary grieving, like solitary drinking, led to immoderation. He reminded himself that he had had his time alone with the knowledge—in his case not by choice but perforce, yet maybe it was better that way, better that she had not been in the house. The sight of her would have melted him. Yet with terrible irony he likened those days when he paced the floors to those of an expectant father during his wife’s protracted labor. In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children—in what greater sorrow give them up before their time! His anxiety over Cathy while she remained shut in her room bred a thousand contingencies. He was prepared for everything but for what eventuated.
He had said to himself, “Three whole days she has been in there!” When on the morning of the fourth day she reappeared downstairs he had to ask himself, “Was it only three?”
There was no trace of redness in her eyes, no tremor in her lips, no pucker in her chin. Although it had seemed an eternity while he waited it out, now it seemed miraculous that she could have attained this self-composure in so short a time. Disheveled, distraught, haggard, hysterical—no, she was none of the things he had been dreading. Her tears had all been shed, and shed some time ago. How deeply stricken she was showed in her lusterless eyes, in the labor of her breathing, in the frequent involuntary shake of her head as her mind spasmed with memories and regrets; but the set of her shoulders, the thrust of her jaw proclaimed her refusal to feel the shame and the disgrace she was expected to feel. It was an astonishing feat of courage, of strength of will. She seemed to have passed her days in seclusion allotting one to the question, must it be? another to the answer, yes, it must, and the third to the resolution, then so be it. What was more, she seemed to suppose that he, who had lived longer than she had with their new situation, had faced up to it and arrived at the same mood of resignation.
He had now had an opportunity to observe the reaction of four people to the suicide of their
child. Pris had been numbed by it. Tony had been crushed. Cathy refused to accept it. The one whose reaction he could not label was his own. From which he deduced the obvious: that he knew himself better than he did the other three, and that he was fatuous in thinking their reactions any more definable than his. Surely from the little we were able in a lifetime to learn about ourselves one lesson to be drawn was that about others we knew nothing at all.
Cathy’s days in the fiery furnace had not melted her, they had tempered her. Whatever may have been the stages she had passed through, the woman who emerged was, as far as the world was ever to be allowed to see, one unbroken, one who would not look back. He was glad of it, he was overjoyed, but prepared as he was for the worst, he hardly knew what to make of the best. She had no need of him, or if she did she would not admit it. The strong arm he had readied to steady her with, the shoulder for her to cry upon, would not be wanted. The answers to her questions that he had painfully prepared would not be wanted. The grisly details of an event she was determined to put behind her she did not want to hear. The world could keep its pity, and pity, like charity, began at home. His was the first pity she could do without.
He admired, he envied her bravery, and all the more as she mistakenly credited him with the same, supposed that she was only catching up with him. True, he had lived with it longer than she had. But her strength and resilience shamed him for his weakness and dependency. He could have used some support from her. So much the smaller of the two of them, she was that much the stronger. A stubborn, defiant refusal to accept it, or to accept responsibility and shame for it: that was Cathy’s reaction, and he was sure it was the right, the reasonable, the healthy-minded reaction. And yet, how different from his own! No dread, no premonition of such a possibility had ever darkened his mind, yet what did it say about his sense of responsibility that he had so readily, so unquestioningly accepted the event? His easy acquiescence seemed to accuse him of a kind of complicity.
She was averse to talking about the matter and as he could talk about nothing else they soon talked about nothing at all. They saw nobody, yet they were never alone; with them at all times was Anthony. By absenting himself from them forever he had made himself their constant companion. He had his place at the table and in front of the fire in the evenings. Let either of them speak, his shadow fell between them and they sat in heavy, apathetic silence. Each reminded the other of him and of nothing else of all that was between them. They were like a pair of animals yoked together and with blinders to prevent their seeing outside the row they trod, and holding the reins and the whip was Anthony.
But oppressive as it was, the silence between them was preferable to the dread that came whenever she cleared her throat to speak: she was now about to ask him how Anthony had done it. She had worked up the courage to ask. Each evening that passed sparing him that was a reprieve. There was no nice way of killing yourself but there were degrees of ugliness, of violence to the body, the duration of the agony, the disfigurement. Shot? so quick, so clean an ending? Let her think it had been that. Or, since sleeping pills had made it all so easy and tidy they had just about replaced other methods, she probably assumed it was that, perhaps even felt she had a parent’s right to assume it. That was the thoughtful, the considerate, the civilized way. It did not pain or inconvenience the survivors any more than was unavoidable. You were found already stretched out in bed looking as though you were just asleep. No gore. Whoever found you had the minimum fright and bother. Just to name the way Anthony had chosen to die would produce an image to sear his mother’s soul.
And he? Would he have been any happier now if what he had been shown in that basement in Princeton was a body outwardly unmarked? Had the boy chosen a different way to die would he be any the less dead? The answer to that last question was obvious, the one to the other more complicated.
Unlike Cathy, he had wanted to know the details. Maybe that was morbid curiosity, but he had wanted to know. No doubt about it, it was morbid, because his reason for wanting to know was so that he might, as nearly as he could in imagination, experience the death of his child. Flesh of his flesh that was, and it was imperative that he know what throes it had undergone in destroying itself. That might be morbid, but was there not something unnatural in the boy’s mother’s incuriosity about the details?
“It was an accident,” she said. Out of their strained silence on the subject it came like a shot, and it was so wide of the mark it left him speechless. “That’s what I believe and always will. I mean it was—how shall I say?—a stunt that went wrong. He meant to be found in time and saved. He wanted to throw a scare into somebody. And I know who.”
He would consider that last remark later; for now, he was too distressed by her first statement. It placed before him more vividly than ever, as evidence to the contrary, that twisted neck, the swollen, livid face, the bulging eyes, the protruding tongue. He set down the drink in his hand before he should spill it and turned away to hide from her his agitation. He felt himself choking, strangling. He could not swallow his mouthful. He pictured the boy in those last lonely hours, his world now reduced to that dormitory room and peopled solely by a self he was determined to rid the world of. It seemed a bitter belittlement of that terrible desperation to suppose it was some sort of bad joke, a stunt that had gone wrong, a mere accident. Deplorable, misguided, rash, juvenile though it might be, his taking his life had been the supreme act of his life, and it seemed his right to have his seriousness acknowledged. Surely his aim had not been just to hurt his mother, but just as surely she was denying herself something in rejecting the full measure of her hurt, of the deprivation she had coming to her, in denying him his agony, his dignity. It was hard to grieve properly for a poor joker who had not meant to kill himself but had bumbled into it.
It was not the evasion of her responsibility—if any—that he objected to. He could have understood and forgiven that. But to insist upon its having been unintentional without asking how it had been done was to deprive the boy of the death he had so determinedly desired and so painstakingly planned and executed. Until those whom he had left behind granted him that death he would be an unquiet ghost, forever strangling in that noose with which he had tried to end his pain. Surely for those left the hope of curing their pain began with the full admission of it.
Thus he began to resent her incuriosity, her comfortable assumption that it had been done somehow painlessly, quickly, cleanly, decorously, perhaps with an overdose of sleeping pills from which there was a chance of being wakened as though from a nightmare, maybe scolded a bit for having given everybody a scare, but then soothed and made to realize that it was all a bad dream. Did he resent also the fact that now he could never tell her otherwise? Was he resentful that by her indifference she forced him to live alone with that vision? No, for sharing the picture imprinted on his mind with anybody would not attenuate or diminish its frightfulness. Like a painting, it could be reproduced, distributed in large editions, and the original would remain the original in all its vividness. Yet being the one witness to the body gave him something of a sense of having been his son’s co-conspirator in his death.
He wanted not to think about this, he wanted to think about anything other than this, and he could think of nothing else. He wanted not to generalize, not to categorize, not lose his son in abstractions, not let him become a case, a statistic, another in that vast army of teenage suicides. Yet the image of that body suspended in his thoughts (how long had it hung from that ceiling before being found and cut down?) forced him to wonder whether in all cases the method contained a message. Anthony might have been as dead one way as another, but he had chosen a certain way and not an easy one. His way certainly spoke of premeditation. So elaborate a means suggested that he had plotted long, or if not long then intently, against his life. There had been nothing impulsive about it. That side of him that had turned against himself had stalked its prey and it was the deadliest of enemies, for it knew its victim’s ways, could foresee
and forestall its shifts and dodges. Had there been some sort of perverse thrill in forcing that intended victim to witness all those extensive preparations for his execution? In making him an accomplice in the purchase of the rope, in checking the clock to see that everything was proceeding on schedule? (How did he know that to make it slip a hangman’s noose was always lubricated with soap? How did Anthony know it? How did he know that Anthony knew it?) Was such a grisly death chosen so that the victim’s unanswered cry for help would reverberate all the louder, all the longer in the memory of those who might have come to his rescue? When poor Tony was summoned to the New York City morgue to identify and claim as his what was left of Christy was there an old incident from out of her childhood which came to his mind and made him say, “When you climbed to the top of that tall building, my dear, dead daughter, were you repeating the time you climbed to the top of the apple tree to sulk over your hurt feelings? I coaxed you down from the tree, I lifted you down from the limb, but you went beyond Daddy’s reach and his reasoning when you climbed to the top of the building, didn’t you?” What was Anthony demonstrating to the world by the way he had chosen to leave it? And wasn’t it pity added to pity that the message had reached so very few in the world? What was it meant to convey to the only one of his parents whom it had reached?
Hostages to Fortune Page 14
