Hostages to Fortune

by William Humphrey

  One slit his throat, another put the muzzle of a gun in his mouth: different temperaments, different approaches to the same end. Yes, the how of it was important. To misapply a philosopher of popular culture, the medium was the message. A suicide, he was coming to see, was a work of art. It was a corruption of his mind that he could think so, for it was the very opposite of a work of art; it was destructive, not creative, and yet it was art, inverse, devilish art, and there were different media at your disposal. Or perhaps there was a hierarchy of genres as there was once in painting, with the historical at the top, the sacred, the allegorical and so on down to still life—nature morte—at the bottom. Or it was like music. Why was one person drawn to the viola and another to the violin? What made one person choose to hang himself and another to jump off a building? Was the spurning of easy outs and the choice instead of an elaborate and gruesome mode of self-destruction a test of the sincerity of your intentions, the genuineness of your resolve, of your nerve? Was it meant to leave no comforting doubts in your survivors’ minds that you had known what you were doing, that you meant business? Or, by making death a weary lot of trouble to go to, gory and nasty and as painful as possible, were you trying to face it at its worst and face it down, or giving it full rein to terrify you from it? Was each additional floor that lonely little Christy climbed that afternoon meant to give her another chance to reprieve herself as well as another dare to mount still higher and plunge still farther? Such stark methods must appeal to those who had turned against themselves with pitiless savagery, not just to those weary of the diuturnity of life but to passionate haters of it, disappointed beyond reconciliation. Or else to those determined to horrify the world that had rejected or disillusioned them and show its self-contented citizens a different estimation of the unexamined existence they clung to.

  They had not gone gentle into that good night, those two, but had it been, until too late, a game, a kind of game played with—against—yourself, like a game of chicken in which you were the driver of both the cars? An adolescent flirting with death and with the assurance only an adolescent could have of his ability to win?

  Had his Anthony said to himself, “Really, I’m just exploring this. Just curious. I’m not really going through with it. I’m just testing the water”? In going to the hardware store, buying the rope and paying for it and getting his change from the salesclerk (who doubtless concluded the transaction with “Have a nice day”) did he say to his reflection in the show windows, “See? The fact that I can do all this so coolly shows I’m not crazy, that I’m not really going to do it. I’m testing myself, seeing what my powers of resistance are. A time will come in all this when I will have gone as far as I need to go in order to prove myself. At that point it will become real—until then it’s just a game, just make believe. When I say to myself, now all I have to do is kick the chair out from under me, then I won’t do it because I will have proved to myself that I could go all the way. Then I will have called death’s bluff, and my own”?

  Then suppose that at the last moment the suspense and tension built up so that you did it just to escape from that. You didn’t want to do it. Even then, at the very last of last moments, you still wished to be saved from yourself. But nobody came. Your father did not come—in itself a reason to do it. You did it because you could not stand not to do it. You had worked yourself up to this pitch and had left yourself only one out.

  Had there been a sense of excitement and challenge in it? Forbidden games played behind parents’ and teachers’ backs, played for the highest of stakes? Did it make you seem more mature? If maturity was age and age was proximity to death, what better way to steal the march, overtake and outstrip your elders, get there before they did and repay them for what the poet called the ignominy of childhood? The secrecy, the danger, even a sense of complicity, of conspiracy between your two selves, the plotter and his prey, in league against an unsuspecting world. Did it make you seem more interesting to yourself and give you a feeling of superiority over those who assumed on face evidence that you were content with the same safe existence as theirs, or, in the case of a youngster with his way still to make in the world, that you would go through the mill and make the same compromises they had made in order to achieve their dreary, dull security? The sense that you were destroying them? Good creatures, do you love your lives?

  He drew up short, having already traveled further down this path than he ever expected to get, suddenly fearful of proceeding, daunted not by its difficulty—that was what he had anticipated—not by its strangeness, but by its menacing ease, its frightening familiarity. He had begun in dismay at the utter hopelessness of finding a motive for his son’s doing what he had done; he was dismayed now to discover the fertility of his mind in finding them. It hardly seemed to be his mind, so unexplored a side to it this was. Searching for the one, he had found a multiplicity of motives, all plausible, all sufficient; a bit further on and he might find what he was looking for, what he was suddenly not at all sure he wanted to find: the right one. Could it be that not to know, painful and tormenting as that was, was better than to know? Doubts were dreadful but was certainty worse? And was the answer not only not complex but hideously, horribly simple, mockingly apparent? He had thought he was entering a maze, an issueless maze; now he felt himself being lured on with the promise that there was an issue. It was obvious—that was the reason so many failed to see it. To find it he had only to open his eyes, only to look into himself. He was searching for the motive? Suppose he found there was none? Suppose he found that none was needed. There came to him, too quick for him to escape it altogether, an intimation that the answer to his question, “Why?” might prove to be a question: Why not?

  That was not to be dwelt upon; besides, if it was for anybody it was not for the young, it was for those who had run out of reasons for why life must go on. For example, parents of a child who had committed suicide. As for Anthony, in his case questions found no answers, they only raised more questions, and he wondered whether that had been a part of the boy’s motive. He heard him say—actually heard him—his ghost—say, “I’m realer to you now than I ever was alive, aren’t I? I’ve gotten your attention, your full attention, at last. You realize now that I was somebody you never knew and you will speculate endlessly on what he was really like, that stranger whom you brought into the world and, because of that, presumed that you understood. Why? you will ask yourself with your every breath, with every beat of your heart: why? why? And for all your conjecturing I shall remain a puzzle. You cannot put your questions to the one person who might resolve them, for I have taken all the answers with me. By one action I have overturned all your perceptions, all your presumptions about me, and wrapped myself in impenetrable mystery.”

  The ghost faded. He would have called it back and begged it to torment him further rather than leave the void it left: this thought: was it the height of fatuity to suppose that he had figured at all in his son’s last thoughts on earth? Better to live with the certainty that Anthony’s sole motive was retaliation for his father’s lifelong neglect and misunderstanding of him than to know that he had come in the end to such an extremity: a solitude so desolate that his father no longer existed for him.

  “With me it’s not idle curiosity,” said Ken Howard, “because when I was fourteen years old my father killed himself.” Even now, all these years later, and even confessing it to a kindred soul, it still brought a flush of embarrassment to the man’s face. “I was the one who found the body. My father had gone to some pains to get himself ready for what he was about to do. Knowing that his dead body would soon be handled by strangers he had followed my mother’s advice to me whenever I was going anywhere, to be well dressed and wear clean underclothes in case I had an accident and was taken to the hospital or was killed: then I would not disgrace us by being unpresentable. My father had bathed and shaved and had put on his best suit. He had tied on a necktie. Then he had swallowed lye. The tumbler he had drunk from and the can with th
e red skull and crossbones and the spoon he had stirred it with sat on the bedstand. He had drunk it and had stretched himself out on the bed to wait.

  “He had nicked his chin in shaving, and he had treated the cut with a styptic pencil. A thin red line of dried blood showed through the white coat of alum. He was about to kill himself and yet he had treated his little cut. I wondered whether he had said ‘Ouch’ and whether he had winced at the sting of the styptic pencil. All his little efforts to be neat, to make as little trouble as possible, made me feel he had been ashamed and apologetic for what he was doing, and that made me feel ashamed for him, and people’s silence about him afterwards made me feel they were trying to spare me my shame. When they do it to themselves you not only lose them, it is as you say, as though you never had them.”

  The last person who wanted to hear this, he was the one chosen to listen. So it always was. Wakes were the time when conversation turned inevitably to and lingered upon the subject which all were there to forget. Speak not of rope in the hanged man’s house, went an old proverb, yet always in the hanged man’s house rope got mentioned sooner or later. It had in his house. He himself, that last time on board Pandora, had spoken of once being so desperate over something he was ready to jump off a bridge—and then wished there had been one handy. Now he knew as though he had already heard it said what was coming next. He had already heard it. He had said it to himself times out of number.

  “To all outward appearances my father was a contented man, one with everything to live for. He was just forty years old. He was a successful lawyer and was being mentioned for a judgeship. He was a loving husband to my mother and a devoted father to me. He was in good health and his finances were in order. He was a man with no secrets in his life. What made him do it no one ever knew. To this day I have never stopped wondering.”

  Why? Why?

  In every sound he heard that question asked.

  Clocks ticked it. Winds moaned it. Sirens wailed it. Crows cawed it. Wheels clicked it. Dogs in the night howled it. The blood in his veins pulsed it. Why?

  Waves on the beach pounded it. Gulls screamed it. Leaves on the trees whispered it. Rain on the roof drummed it. Why? Why?

  Bells tolled it. Trains shrieked it. Flames hissed it. Silence thundered it. Why?

  Not only did he hear it all the time, he saw it everywhere. Each block of pavement underfoot, each square of patterned wallpaper repeated it. It was woven into the carpet, it was every word on every page. Why? Why? Why?

  Asked that question by every sight and sound, at every turn, his existence narrowed to a single purpose as the rays of the sun are gathered by a lens and focused upon one burning spot. To answer it he must try to get to know the son he had thought he knew.

  There came over him a sense that the life he was leading was not his. That his body had lived on after he himself had died and had been occupied by someone else as the shells of snails survived to house the next generation. A spirit had dispossessed him and its name was Anthony. Some people when they died left debts to be discharged by their survivors; it was life itself that Anthony had defaulted on. His father was left to live out the balance of that unfinished life. That was his son’s legacy to him. Life: we could not get enough of it, yet to be burdened with an unwanted life made one’s own a burden.

  He longed to talk about him with the boy’s mother but she found the subject too painful, too distasteful. She appeared to have concluded that the person who had done this thing to her was not her child; he had disowned her. His act had been a declaration to the world that his mother had failed him. How had she failed him? He was not required to show proof. It was an unjust punishment and it was impossible for her to defend herself. She saw what Anthony had done as an act of childish impulsiveness. Her belief that a girl was the direct cause of it made it all the more juvenile. She said bitterly, “He might have thought of us.”

  Maybe hers was the right, the healthy-minded reaction: to reject whoever had rejected you. It was not for him to fault her. But for his part he saw it not as a childish act of Anthony’s but rather as a pitifully premature agedness and disillusionment with life, however it had come about, and he chose to credit the boy with some understanding of how deeply he was about to hurt his parents and thus with an unhappiness too deep for that to deter him.

  As for Cathy’s dismissal of what she called calf love, he could only wonder at the shortness of her memory or else suspect the hardness of her heart when young. At sixteen he would have died for Louise Avery, at seventeen for Mary Ellen Edmonds, at eighteen for Elizabeth Gibbons, and the wonder was that he hadn’t because for all they cared he might have. To some it might seem to trivialize his present suffering to say that nothing until now had so broken his heart as the indifference of those shallow, flighty girls of long ago, but not to him. There were greater pains in life than unrequited young love, but not at that age, and if that had contributed to Anthony’s unhappiness, to a feeling of being unwanted by all the world, then he could feel for him, especially as the love of his own life seemed to be dying now before his eyes.

  With Anthony’s first girl, during his last summer, it had been as with all his interests. Until then he had had no time for girls; now he had no time for anything but Alice Clayton.

  Jogging—another solitary, grueling self-test of endurance—was Anthony’s consuming craze that summer. Finished with school, tired of textbooks and the tyranny of teachers, of the indignity of never having been anything but a schoolboy, he had decided against college, was thinking of a year out west as a ranch hand or as a lumberjack or as a firefighter with the forestry service, and he was getting himself in shape. It looked instead as though he was destroying himself when he came in from a five-mile sprint drenched with sweat and heaving for wind. It was while jogging on a country road in training for one of those all-male work gang, footloose and unfettered bachelor jobs that he met Alice, she riding her horse.

  With any interest of Anthony’s it was always as though he were its discoverer, the first ever upon the scene, the holder of the patent. So it was now with Alice. She was the Eve to his Adam and all the world was suddenly Eden, fresh from its creator’s hand. He was like his father, a one-woman man, unlike him in seeming to have found his on his first try. He soon brought her home to be presented to his parents. Their reactions to one another he studied as closely as though judging how they were going to get along as in-laws. It took him aback that to his parents Alice was something the likes of which, at least, they had seen before. A nice specimen, very nice, but not a new species. Anthony was an illustration of the truth that there is something in us which resents the discovery, made always just when the first full flush of our novelty is upon us, that others before us have felt, or claim to have felt, our own self-same inimitable emotions, that the world was here ere our coming and there is nothing new under the sun. We are deflated and diminished by any discovery of our conformity to pattern, and perhaps for some, all aflame with youth and expectation, learning that the world was so old and shopworn and they themselves so unoriginal was too disillusioning, too dispiriting for them to want to carry on. In Anthony this craving for singularity, this irritation with and disavowal of resemblances between himself and the rest of the world, was pronounced. It made him consistently contrary, determinedly different, odd and crotchety in small ways. He worked on holidays, he took his walks in the rain, he went without a winter overcoat, he lived on a diet all his own. Small idiosyncrasies, merely amusing before, but now, indicative of what major maladjustment? Had the end come when he discovered his likeness to humankind in one particular above all, and had he declared his difference in the only way possible, by not awaiting the common fate but by anticipating and thus forestalling it, taking matters into his own hands and making himself master of his? Or was it the other way around? Had his refusal to have his like been all along because of the inadmissibility of that most basic of bonds? No young man believes that he shall ever die. True, but he had better learn better if he
wants to become an old man. The mark of maturity was the acceptance of that one ineluctable fact of life. That was the one touch of nature that made the whole world kin. But suppose you could not accept it? Could not? That touch of nature was the one you refused to acknowledge in yourself. A world of kin swamped your precious individuality. Then your only out might be like that of people who threw themselves from a height to put a stop to their terror of doing so.

  Never suspecting that it would be the last, he had followed with pleasure the course of his son’s first love. Not because through it he was reliving his own. Very different, sweetly different from his own it was, and his gratitude to Alice for that difference grew by the day. At Anthony’s age his father had been luckless in love but he had been incorrigible, burned again and again and still as susceptible as a moth to flame. A heart that had been broken almost beyond repair was barely beating again when he offered it all eager and palpitant and guileless and humble to yet another little flirt for her to play with like a yo-yo and then toss indifferently aside. To him, people who laughed at young love were unfeeling. Life brought no emotion more pure, more intense, more selfless, nor, when it was unrequited, spurned, more painful. It was a blow not just to your pride but to your whole personality and made you not just distrustful but self-doubtful. It left wounds into adult life. His had been healed by Cathy but he still carried old scars. Daily: that was the frequency of his opportunity for observation of them, for not a day was allowed to pass that summer without those two seeing each other and it was at the Curtis home that they spent their time. Anthony preferred always to wage his campaigns on his own terrain. And it had been sweet to see him offer his parents as one of his attractions.