Hostages to Fortune

by William Humphrey

“Must you have another drink?”

  It was another of their evenings, another of those now routine conversationless evenings heavy with silence, until now.

  To what he had already poured he defiantly added a dollop. “Just one more before I have another,” he said.

  “How many is that now?”

  “I haven’t been keeping count.”

  “You mean you’ve lost count. I haven’t. It’s four.”

  “Well, as they say ’way down yonder in New Orleans on their way to the graveyard to bury a man, ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; if the women don’t get you the liquor must.’ In my case, God knows, it won’t be the women.”

  She aimed at him a look of disgust and disdain, rose from her chair, and went upstairs. He watched as Anthony rose from his chair and followed his mother up to that bedroom the door of which was locked to him.

  He was seeing slightly double but this he saw clearly, and just as clearly saw himself and was appalled at the depravity of his mind. Yet why should he be? It was a modern-day commonplace that sons lusted after their mothers and resented their fathers’ possession of them, subconsciously wished to destroy their rivals, feared castration by them as punishment for their incestuous cravings and to prevent their consummating them. Another commonplace: afraid to destroy their fathers and tormented by guilt for their wish to do so, some destroyed themselves instead, perversely triumphing over their rivals from beyond the grave. “Long before you, many a man has lain with his mother in his dreams,” Jocasta tells her son and husband, Oedipus. “Who does not desire his father’s death?” cries Ivan Karamazov. Once considered criminal psychopaths, both characters were now accepted as spokespersons of normality. Like books that started out as literature for adults and within a generation were children’s classics, these once unmentionable conjectures were nursery school knowledge now. Often it was the child who brought them home from sex education class for the enlightenment of a parent born to a more naïve and inhibited generation.

  But did he really think that something like this had been a factor in Anthony’s case? Was he jealous of his wife and the ghost of his poor misbegotten son? Never mind what he thought. Whether or not an unnatural love for his mother and an attendant guilt toward his father had been, consciously or unconsciously, a part of Anthony’s motive, the fact was that he had come between his parents. He had alienated his mother’s affections. It was he whom she now took to bed with her.

  While overhead his wife of twenty years slept, he sat long into the night staring into the flames of the fire and then into its embers and then into its ashes, reviewing the feelings that had been accumulating in him. Despite what he had drunk, he was sobered by the realization that he had been weighing his grief against Cathy’s and, with his finger on the scale, had tipped the balance in his own favor. She had recovered much sooner than he, therefore it had gone less deep with her. She had not viewed the body; he had. The truth was, though she showed it less, she felt it more. He himself was the measure of that. For her Anthony had become the sole reason for their union and with his untimely death that had ended. The combination of their genes, the home they had made, the example they had set, one or more or all of these had gone wrong, calamitously wrong, and in him she saw embodied their failure; she shrank from his touch, from his very look.

  For this he blamed the dead, defenseless boy. He blamed him for the sorrow, the self-accusations, the isolation that had been brought upon him, and now for the estrangement from his wife. He blamed Anthony for inconveniencing him, for disturbing the routine of his life, for interfering with his pleasures, his peace of mind. He begrudged him his unassailability. Only another drink prevented him now from following this out to its inescapable conclusion.

  Had his son died of a disease or in an accident or in combat, in a word, blamelessly, then his memory might have been properly interred and grass allowed to grow over it. It might have been visited on appropriate occasions and otherwise left unvisited without any self-reproaches. But Anthony had died by his own hand, through his willful decision, not deterred by any consideration for those who had loved him, and shameful as it was, his father’s pity was giving way to a sullen resentment. Anthony had “placed his psychological skeleton in his survivor’s closet.” In the one book on suicide that he had since looked into he had gotten no further than that preliminary statement. The author of it seemed to have peered inside him like a surgeon probing to verify the presence of an inoperable malignancy.

  Meanwhile, diseased though he might be, he was still alive. Life did go on, and he had had a lot of it in him. All his appetites had been big ones, some might say gross ones, and though this blow had suppressed them for a time, it was only for a time. Like Hardy’s observation, pertaining to his Tess, that, moralists notwithstanding, fallen women do not usually die of their humiliation, they live through it, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye; so might a failed father look again at his child’s mother. He might shame himself with the inappropriateness of his passion while their child’s ashes still sat on the shelf in his clothescloset, but that did not put down the passion.

  To be resentful at being made to feel there was something dirty in his desire for his lawfully wedded wife—surely that was only human? Was it heartless of him to feel that while Anthony had of course been the main thing between them he was not the only thing? His coming had interrupted their romance; now his going had ended it. All she could see now whenever she looked at him was their failure, and shudder with remorse and revulsion. His mind kept returning to that shudder of hers. And she had not seen the sight he had been shown in the undertaker’s parlor.

  And suddenly there it was before him. Seated in the armchair where nobody had been just the moment before, given an appearance of embarrassment and self-apology by that twisted neck which forced him to look askance at his father, was Anthony. He had come to ask his father what kind of brute he was. Pity, pity was what his son deserved—not resentment, pity; all he could summon would still fall short of enough. Pity and penance, and if a lifetime of married celibacy was his sentence, it was still insufficient atonement. In killing himself Anthony had not acted alone; his father had been an accomplice. Never mind that his mother had, too; be that on her conscience, let his father attend to his, it was burdened with more than it could ever be purged of and he added to the load with his every thought. Anthony came to ask if he really wanted more of what had engendered him. Could he ever again take pleasure in the act? Was he resentful at being denied that?

  When he reopened his eyes it was still there and he realized then that this visitation was not altogether unexpected. The sense of something unwanted in the house, as though they had a lodger, one uncertain of his welcome and thus shy of declaring his presence: he had felt that already.

  He had felt it first one night just recently. Alone downstairs, he had switched on the television set and found himself viewing a drama about anorexia nervosa, another of the many novel scourges afflicting today’s youth, another expression of their widespread wish not to live. When the heroine had starved herself into a state of such emaciation that she looked like an adolescent inmate of an extermination camp she was committed by her desperate parents to an institution. There she was spotted by and taken under the wing of a sister inmate, a veteran of perhaps seventeen, an accomplished hunger artist, one wise to the ways of the grownup world of food junkies and pushers. A vampire who sucked air, a self-destructive narcissist enamored of her own ethereality, she enlisted her all-too-willing pupil into her cult of la belle dame sans merci pour elle-même. She was foiled in her design of leading her disciple to her death by dying first herself. Something in the atmosphere of the darkened room that evening had made him feel he was not alone in watching this, had made him wonder were suicides, especially youthful suicides, who in forswearing so much set you to questioning whether they had forsworn anything worthwhile, like that: sirens luring the living to their shoals? Did their unquiet spirits re
turn with the design of enticing those whom they had left behind down the path they themselves had trodden? Loners in life, did they afterwards long for company in their limbo, especially for the company of their kin?

  On that night nothing had materialized, but now here it was. Speechless on account of that scarred and twisted neck, that protruding tongue, Anthony conveyed his message by his aspect. He was eloquent, he was sly, he was insinuating. Patient, patronizing, scoring points without uttering a syllable. Dad’s drinking oiled his tongue while tonguetying Dad, so, unlike his mother, he was uncensorious about the booze. Didn’t bother Anthony one little bit how much old Dad drank, despite the fact that his was a generation that disapproved of the favorite drug of their decadent elders. Tolerant of smoking pot, popping pills, sniffing coke, but down on drink. Not Anthony. Go ahead, Dad, have one more before you have another.

  Just sitting there he was exhibit A in evidence of a state manifestly preferable to yours. He would leave it to you to say whether yours was so enviable. Suicide: nothing like it, Dad, for getting your way with the women in your life, and let’s face it, old man, you’ve struck out with yours. His own had been Mom and Alice, right? Well, look at them now! Contrite? Remorseful? Devoted? Let them live to a hundred, nothing would ever exorcise him from their minds. They could no longer give him what he wanted, even ask him what it was, so they gave him their all. Climb a mountain, win a trophy, get your name in lights: mere competitions—put yourself beyond competition and they were yours for as long as they lived. You became their unappeasable god. Mom was his, all his. Of course, if Dad were to do it too, why then he would have to move over and make a place for him on the bench. Having another? That was a slow but sure way of putting an end to your pain but if that was your aim was there not something to be said for stealing the march on time? It could be done in a minute. And on that note, good night, Dad, and pleasant dreams.

  And so he was left alone to wonder where all this was leading and where it would end. How much longer could man and wife go on living in this cage of a house like specimens in a zoo daily disappointing their attendants’ expectations that they might mate? Upon that question the light of false dawn shed no illumination. What it did show him was that for the memory of the dead son with every claim upon his pity and his penitence what he had come to feel was jealousy, suspicion, and hatred. To justify himself he had created for Anthony a ghost that was vengeful and vindictive, one who relished the misery he had inflicted upon his survivors, one whose motive had been just that. How cowardly of him to attribute unnatural, unspeakable desires to the dead boy who could not defend himself, and to take refuge from blame in the type-castings of what he himself called abominable psychology.

  When a man married for twenty years awoke one morning to find himself alone nothing looked the same to him, not even himself. He had lost the eyes through which he had seen himself. In his own case the change affected his every moment. His and Cathy’s had been a very different married life from that of most couples one or both of whom went out to a job by day and who saw each other only in the evenings and on days off from work. For twenty years they had spent their every hour together under this same roof. He wrote in his study within her call. Whenever he was stuck for a word or when he needed to straighten his back or stretch his legs, he strolled around the house or out to the garden, where he found her. It was a life of routine and rituals. They drank their preluncheon sherry, their predinner martinis, ate their every meal together. His first few days alone in it, he wandered around the house like a man lost. He was only half the man he had been and he was looking for the lost half.

  Yet when the time came he was half relieved to see her go. The loss of her was fully as painful as losing the boy; but the humiliation, the unnaturalness, the perversion of living celibate under the same roof with his own wife—at least that was ended. He was relieved for another, related yet contradictory, reason, as well: her repulsion of his perhaps poorly timed but certainly licit longings had seemed to make them illicit, the most criminal he had ever felt, as though she were Anthony’s now, or felt herself to be, and his own longings for her were taboo.

  Now whenever the phone rang he let it go unanswered. For now that he no longer wanted it to ring, it did. Its sound to him was like the shrilling of some noxious insect reemerging from its period of dormancy. His mourning duties had been paid, he had served out the term of decorous withdrawal from the world, and people felt the time had come to extend a hand and welcome him back to their society. That unfortunate incident could be put behind them all and the misguided not to say misbegotten boy who had chosen not to live could be treated as though he never had and life be resumed where it had been so rudely interrupted. He imagined the party on the other end of the line saying to his wife or she to her husband, “I’m calling the Curtises. We’ve let time enough go by. Their wounds will have begun to heal and they’ll be ready for company now. Life must go on.” He let the phone ring until it stopped and the house was steeped in silence once more. If he never saw anybody again it would be too soon.

  To Tony, when he called with the news of Christy’s death, he himself had said, “I’ll come at once.”

  “No, Ben,” Tony had said. “Thank you all the same and, please, don’t be hurt, for it isn’t personal, but I don’t feel like seeing anybody. I want to be alone.”

  He had been hurt, deeply hurt, at the time. He had never taken anything so personally as Tony’s telling him it was not personal. For while he understood Tony’s not wanting to see anybody, he was not anybody, he was he, Ben. Experience had taught him better now. It was not Tony on the line when the phone rang now. Tony knew that he was the last person he would want to hear from. Tony knew that when you longed for a certain person whom you would never see again the sight of anybody else, even a dear friend, was painful, almost distasteful. Yet Tony knew only of his loss of just one of his old familiar faces.

  On the very morning of his first day alone the long-married man was faced with a domestic problem which underlined his new state and would be a reminder of it three times every day. He who had not eaten a meal alone for twenty years was now to savor the tastelessness of food consumed in solitude and silence. To be sure, his and Cathy’s meals of late had hardly been festive affairs. But recalling them now brought to mind the old saying, the man without shoes complained until he met the man without feet.

  He joined the ranks of a class he had once been privileged to pity, a class that Cathy had found particularly pathetic. Those men along in years seen shopping alone in supermarkets and looking as lost and helpless there as in a jungle. Men for whom that most familial of occasions, mealtime, had become a mere bodily function and a chore. Men who might have been builders of bridges, bosses of gangs, managers of millions, but who had gone home every night to a waiting supper served them by a wife who knew their tastes and whose first waking thoughts were on planning, buying, and preparing that supper, men as incapable of taking care themselves of their most basic need as a suckling babe.

  “How awful to be all alone like that when you are old,” Cathy was moved by them to say. “To have nobody to turn to, share your feelings with. Nobody to whom to say such little things as ‘Come to the window, don’t miss this sunset’ or ‘Look! A hummingbird.’ Worst of all, to get and eat your meals alone. A solitary old age must be even more painful for men than for women. They are so unable to take care of themselves, most of them.” He had thought it was feelingly, now he realized it was self-complacently, that he concurred, that he added, “As for me, I’d be hopeless.”

  That was now being tested and proved. He had been thoroughly spoiled. Cathy had accustomed him to eating very well. The dishes he attempted to make for himself now were overseasoned, either burnt or overdone, and no two of them were ever ready in time to be eaten together. The results were not worth the effort. And how much of his time it took just to keep himself fed, and badly fed at that! He soon came to understand why those old men whom before he had pitied picked
items from the supermarket shelves with just one thing in mind, not how tasty but how easy to prepare. Thus when they checked out it was with a dreary sameness of diet, no fresh produce but rather preprepared, heat-and-eat, one-man meals in boxes. In a word, TV dinners. The TV dinner represented a whole way of life—if you could call it living. The very sight of one of them with the deceptively mouthwatering photo on the lid brought to mind pictures of loneliness, alienation. Food of America’s unloved, her widowed, her divorced, her unwanted, her elderly, her pensioners, her kitchenless millions in bed-sitting-rooms with one-burner hotplates, whom rejection, age, the loss of teeth had—mercifully—robbed of appetite. Something to be thawed and chawed without paying any attention to it while watching television alone, for even if you did pay attention, close attention, there was no telling one dish from another; they all tasted, if that was the word, like chicken pie without any chicken, so no wonder one saw old men at the checkout counter buying stacks of a week’s worth of the same frozen beef stew.

  He had become one of those, and it added years to his sense of agedness. To avoid being seen by anyone of his acquaintance at this unmanly and humiliating chore he drove to a town thirty miles from home to do his solitary shopping. His clumsiness in the kitchen would have been comical to watch. To see a man near fifty, trying to mop up an egg dropped on the floor, suddenly seeing in it the wreckage of his life and, on his knees, with tears in his eyes, begging, “Cathy, come back to me,” would have been amusing to someone else perhaps but not to the poor fool himself. He masticated his joyless fodder as mechanically as a cow in its stanchion munching hay. He passed up meals. Although mostly owing to what came later, his loss of weight had its beginnings then.

  Cathy’s room was open to him again now and one day he found himself in it.

  There had been no settlement of property between them, no communication of any kind. He was not expecting her to ask him for a divorce. He hoped he was wrong, hoped she would, for it might be taken as a sign that, unlike him, she reserved for herself the possibility of remarrying one day. But even though she was past the threat of childbearing, he doubted that she would. Once burned, twice shy, and she had been badly burned. To him she meant married life, always had, still did, always would, and, he feared, he meant the same to her. When he felt up to it, he would find himself another house, in another town, clear out of here and inform the lawyer that he was gone and that she might now return. He suspected that Cathy would sell this house along with the reminders of their life together and find herself another one somewhere else too. Meanwhile, but for what she had packed to take with her, all here was as she had left it.