Hostages to Fortune (12 page)

An orphan from the age of ten, brought up by grandparents in an atmosphere guaranteed to stifle the mind and to scare it witless on first being exposed to matters intellectual, far from home—in fact, without any home to long for—he had been countrified and callow, shy and self-conscious when he arrived at Princeton, not strongly silent as was the impression everybody had of Anthony. Had it not been his good luck to be assigned Tony Thayer as a roommate he might have fallen into a desperate mood of loneliness and a paralyzing sense of inferiority. Anthony was so much more mature than he had been at that age. More worldly, more resourceful, more independent and self-assured. He was better educated. He had grown up in a bookish home. He was
his
son. It was pleasing to recall that Princeton had soon set to rest his fears of it, even more pleasant the conviction that in Anthony it would arouse none.

Even now—acutely, piercingly now—the beauty of the campus struck him as it always had. It was hard to understand how anybody could be anything but happy here. Yet it was easy to understand how, if you were unhappy, being surrounded by beauty to which you were privileged but unable to respond to would deepen your unhappiness, and the sight of others at home in it would make you feel even more alienated and unworthy of all that was being wasted on you. The very sight of the groundskeepers at their work would make you feel out of place; then, if you were a dutiful child, there would follow a feeling of guilt over the money your being here was costing your parents. There was no end to the number of bypaths leading off the trail of sorrow, and when you were young it was so easy to get lost.

A look of uneasiness crossed the president's face when they were introduced; that was predictable, but it lingered on long enough to be seen as something more than just uneasiness. The man seemed to have been so certain in his expectation of something different that he found the reality disconcerting. This caused him to take quick stock of himself and then he saw what was lacking, what it was that the president had been expecting. A couple, man and wife, father and mother—even if estranged, brought together now. The realization stunned him. In his shock, in the press of duties all requiring urgent attention, in his personal pain and consequent numbness to all else, he had put Cathy out of mind, had set her aside as another of his duties, to be attended to when her turn came. Abashed at his unmindfulness, appalled at the task awaiting him of telling her all that she did not know, unable to believe that she did not know it all, he hardly heard what the president said, hardly knew what he himself replied.

Not that there was much to say. The president expressed his own and the community's shock and sorrow. Still, apparently, not fully recovered from his surprise at there being no Mrs. Curtis present, he said their sympathy went out to him and to—all of his. If there was anything he or his staff could do to facilitate arrangements, please call on them. He offered the use of the university chapel for a memorial service. The cadence of their speech soon signified that the interview had run its obligatory course.

He felt awkward about asking for help or advice. He and his had caused embarrassment and trouble enough. However, “Can you tell me,” he asked, his face flushing hotly, “what is expected of me now?” At once he wished he had expressed himself somehow differently. He had not meant to imply that student suicides at Princeton were commonplace enough for there to be a set of rules for their survivors. “I mean, to claim the body must I go to the police?”

The president said he understood there were certain legal formalities. He himself was not familiar with them; however, the head of the university security department, who had been in touch with the local authorities from the start, understood the rules. He was on his way over now. That—the phone rang—would be to announce him.

Everything was being done to smooth his passage. The president turned him over to the security chief. He in turn, in order to spare them a visit to the police department and possibly a wait there, had arranged for an officer to meet them at the undertaker's. This was on one of the streets leading off Nassau and there he drove them, refraining from conversation. It was a lovely day that Anthony was missing.

At the undertaker's the security man and the plainclothes policeman remained upstairs while he was conducted to the basement. A door was opened for him and then the undertaker discreetly withdrew.

The body, illuminated by an overhead light, lay on a table in the center of the room. It was dressed in the familiar jeans and flannel shirt, missing the loafers. It lay face up, or rather, it lay on its back but from the doorway it was the back of the head that was to be seen. It was as though, hearing his father coming, Anthony had turned his face to hide his shame. He approached, went around to the other side, and the curiosity he had not dared acknowledge to himself was amply satisfied. The boy had hanged himself.

His eyes shut of themselves but that did not shut out the sight; on the contrary, in the darkness of his mind the afterimage glowed phosphorescent.

At just what moment, or rather during what full five minutes—for it must have taken all of that—during what five carefree minutes of his had it been happening, what idle thing had he been doing even as his son hung threshing in air? The answer to his question came all too promptly. His mind, his horrified but irrepressibly curious mind, like a dog nosing in ordure, brought it to him and laid it at his feet. Out sailing on the smooth and soothing waters of Penobscot Bay, he had been silently dispensing pity to his friends for the suicide of their child.

Back upstairs he signed the papers presented to him by the police officer. Seeing that he was incapable of reading, it was explained to him that with these documents he identified the body as that of Anthony Curtis, age eighteen, son of Benjamin and Catherine Curtis of Blairstown, New Jersey, and as next of kin claimed it and, the death having been violent, neither natural nor accidental, affirmed it to have been a suicide and absolved the Princeton police from the duty of investigating it. The security officer volunteered to drive him wherever he might want to go. He thanked him but said he was familiar with the town and that he would prefer now to be alone.

It was then shortly past ten. He was to come back to the undertaker's at five. He returned to his room at the inn. He hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the doorknob and stretched himself out on the bed. There he stayed until checkout time at two, when he paid his bill and left. Meanwhile, after several tries, he had reached Jeremy on the phone and made a date with him for three. Classes would keep him until then. The world kept turning although your son had dropped out. He walked over to the campus, passing on Nassau Street a troupe of Hare Krishnas in their sandals and saffron robes banging their tambourines and chanting their mindless incantation—people who had found the answers but not the questions.

It came back to him as he strolled along the campus walks, through quads and cloisters, as he rested on benches and watched the odd, skull-faced, black Princeton squirrels at play, a couple of students his son's age flinging a Frisbee, how pleased he had been at Anthony's choice of his father's old school, and this though he had never urged it, never even proposed it. He had not opposed Anthony's decision not to go to college. He had deplored it, for college had meant so much to him, but he had not opposed it. He believed that going to college was the easiest way to begin to acquire an education, the only way for people like himself, but the easiest way was not the best way for everybody. Intellectual though he was, he was by no means bent on his son's becoming one. When Anthony changed his mind and decided to go to college after all, he was glad; when he chose Princeton, it had seemed to his father a mark of approval of him. It was another bond between them. It would give them memories to share.

Motivated: that was today's word. It even appeared on college admissions evaluations. He himself had arrived at Princeton with no motivation beyond wanting to play on the baseball team and to earn the degree needed for getting on in the world. Once Anthony had changed his mind and decided to go to college after all he must surely have been the most highly motivated member of his entering class. He was already looking beyond Princeton, had chosen his professional school, picked a wife, planned a family. How had all that drive and determination and sense of purpose been lost in so short a time?

The same differences between father and son that were matters for pride one moment became matters for reproach the next one, and he was tempted to commit the common parental sin of contrasting his own disadvantages to the advantages he had given his son and to charge his early discouragement to his being spoiled. It was a charge he could never make stick. Anthony had not been spoiled; he had resisted all his parents' efforts to spoil him.

It was unfair of him to expect that to Anthony Princeton would mean as much as it had meant to him. As unfair as it would have been to expect his roommate Jeremy to be to Anthony what Tony Thayer had been to him. The two dormitory rooms that Tony and he had shared were the first home he had ever had to call his own, and he would have loved them even if he had had to share them with someone less agreeable than Tony. Pleased as he was with them, that fact was one he kept from his roommate.

He was obscurely ashamed of being an orphan, as though he were somehow to blame, and, just because he was loath to talk about it, did not yet know that all orphans were more or less ashamed; as we all think when we are young about our shortcomings, he thought his were unique. Tony's affectionate references to his parents, his reading aloud from their letters, made him all the more self-conscious, and by silence and evasion he managed for a while to keep his secret. Then came Thanksgiving.

Tony was going home for the holidays. That he was not doing the same came out one day. This year for the first time he did not have even the elderly grandparents who had taken him in on the death of his parents. He was not sorry for himself. He did not think himself unfortunate. He was looking forward to spending his holidays here alone, having the campus all to himself.

When finally it came out that he had no home to go to, Tony was appalled. You would have thought he had just found his roommate in his swaddling clothes abandoned on the orphanage steps. He did not invite him home with him, he decreed it. They took the spur line train, the time-honored “Dinky,” from Princeton to the main line, from there the train to New York, then upriver to Hudson. That visit was his first to Riverside. His experience, that of an orphan of eighteen fresh out of Kansas, attending an Ivy League college on a baseball scholarship, provided him with only one comparison: it had been a movie set come to life. And he had been sharing digs with the heir to all this! Was it owing to Tony's graciousness or to his own backwardness that he had never suspected? Recalling in the midst of all this splendor the shabbiness of their furnishings at school, for which he felt himself responsible, he began an apology. He was silenced By Tony's saying he had thought he liked their rooms. His ingrained class prejudice got a shaking-up on that visit. No one was less nice for not being poor.

It was observing Tony as they studied together in the evenings that first piqued his intellectual curiosity—or more accurately, that opened in that previously unbroken ground the first furrow. He had unquestioningly assumed that after graduation he would go into business, and his evenings were spent grinding away at mathematics and economics texts. Seeing Tony shake with laughter or lay down his book enraptured and gaze off into some scene conjured up by words on a printed page was something he had never before seen anybody do, could not comprehend, could only marvel at. There was something to be envied in such enjoyment, and in Tony's case it was genuine, not affected. Timidly, furtively, afraid of being laughed at, even taunted for his presumption, as Caliban might have stolen a peek into Prospero's book he looked into one of Tony's. His horoscope for that day must have been in all the right conjunctions: his first book was
Don Quixote
. Like Prospero's, it was magical; unlike Caliban, he actually appreciated something of what he read.

Good books were
good:
it was the most eye-opening lesson of his life. Though unable to ask why nobody had told him, he felt nonetheless that he had been deprived. Somebody should have said that “good” meant just that, not good for you.

He began to wonder whether, to dare hope that, inside his hulk of a body there might be an unsuspected brain. He had learned that not everybody well-to-do was a ne'er-do-well; maybe not every jock was a jerk.

To none of his professors did he owe more of his early education than he did to Tony. The sharing of his enthusiasms was Tony's greatest pleasure. He never put down your enthusiasm for a book you had just discovered for yourself and which he had outgrown, but he always had one to recommend that replaced yours. And in those days, when they had time for everything, Tony was always ready to lay down his book and go outside for play. In their senior year he was batting .299 as the varsity first baseman and, along with Tony, was on the staff of
The Nasssau Lit
.

The tower clock struck three. As he rose from his bench to go and keep his appointment for this hour it was as if the double images of vision which all his life had been fused into a single image by the receptors of his brain had split and separated. With one he saw the two young men that Tony and he had been and with the other saw this very moment, germinating in them even in those early days—another bond between them.

With a thoughtfulness and tact that touched him almost to tears, Jeremy had packed all of Anthony's personal possessions, thus sparing him having to handle them. A duffel bag and a cardboard carton sufficed to contain them. Anthony had been one to pare life to its essentials. But lest it seem that he was hurrying his guest's departure by having everything ready to be removed, that he was trying with unseemly haste to exorcise the ghost that now haunted the premises, Jeremy offered him a drink, and lest it seem that he was anxious to get away, he accepted. Over them hung a pall that both were trying to disregard. The boy was on edge despite his efforts, afraid of him, afraid for him, in dread of his questions and painfully ill-at-ease here in the very setting of his sorrow.