Hostages to Fortune (14 page)

To this day he reproached himself with thinking how for years his friend had said what's-his-name and thingumabob, unable to remember their names, and how, out of what he thought was consideration, he had said nothing about it. The tumor was even then pressing on that lobe of the brain, and if only he had said something his friend might still be alive. But he was not a doctor, and even if he had been he could hardly have said “Donald, that habit of yours worries me. You ought to have exploratory brain surgery to see whether you haven't got a tumor. Maybe it's not too late to have it out before it turns malignant.” The impossibility of that showed how senseless his self-reproaches were, but he made them nonetheless. Ought he to have seen in Anthony's intensity a threat of suicide and taken him to a psychiatrist? That was just as senseless, and just as insistent, a self-reproach. Death was deaf to all extenuations. That which one had not done was that which one ought to have done.

Had he been less self-concerned, more attentive, had he been sensitive to them, surely there must have been signals, warning signs, distress calls, indirect pleas for help, symptoms, something like his early-dead friend's forgetfulness. What ought he to have noticed that he had been obtuse to? That was not a question that occurred to him now at intervals; it was constant, unrelenting, as involuntary as drawing breath.

The suicide wanted to obliterate himself and what he did was to make himself unforgettable. His last act shed a lurid light upon every memory of him. It drew suspicions upon his most innocent, ordinary, everyday behavior. His every trait must be reexamined for signs of morbidity. Harmless, even endearing little quirks of character were now seen as having been potentially pathological, and one was remiss in not having detected their sinister import in time.

Anthony could not have been more than twelve when his father knocked on his door one afternoon and was told in a weary tone to come in. He found Anthony lying on his bed with his hands clasped behind his head.

“Busy thinking?” he asked. “Hope I'm not interrupting.”

“No. I'm not thinking. I'm just lying here.”

“It's too nice a day to stay indoors. Up! Let's do something. How about clay pigeon shooting? Perfect day for it.”

Anthony did not stir.

“A swim?” he suggested. “Or a walk in the woods?”

“I can't.” This was said in a tone of misery.

“Aren't you feeling well?”

“I'm feeling fine, thank you, and I would like very much to shoot clay pigeons or take a swim or go for a walk in the woods with you, but I can't. I've got to stay in. It's my punishment for something I did.”

“Oh? Your mother is making you stay in?”

“Mother doesn't know anything about it,” said Anthony scornfully. “I'm making myself stay in. All day long.”

“What have you done to deserve that?”

Anthony turned his head and gave his father a look of exasperation. “Do
you
want people to know about it when
you've
done something dumb?” he asked.

Anthony's self-punishments spared his father having to recall many times when he had inflicted punishment upon him. There were some and they returned now to repay him tenfold for every lash, but they were blessedly few.

He learned to expect—and to respect—Anthony's days of self-castigation. Now he had to ask himself, was it for some unatonable error that he was punishing himself at the end? Before it had seemed, if a little unusual, perhaps even a little excessive, not alarming, indeed rather amusing and even admirable, probably indicative of a life of high achievement, that impatience with his own imperfection. Did some people hasten their mortality because they could not accept that it was the common lot?

To someone who lived at such a pitch of expectation, someone young and tender, not toughened to disappointment, like Anthony, not much would have been needed to topple him from his high, and when he fell he would fall low. Completely uncompetitive against others, the boy had always been fiercely in competition with himself. Like a lone polevaulter, no sooner had he cleared a height than he raised the bar. There had seemed nothing ominous in that at the time, but the way he tested himself against no standards but his own: what was one to make of that in light of what came later? Was it a morbid fear of being bested or was it a Luciferian pride—the feeling that no one was good enough to be worth his contending against? Organized sports he had shunned, yet as did every adolescent American boy he had his basketball hoop over the garage door and spent hours shooting at it. But always alone. Whenever one of his few friends suggested a skirmish he said no. To his father this had been a trifle worrisome; too late, he wondered whether he ought not to have worried more. Yet surely he was not to blame for not having seen in it a clue to what was to come?

Intensity did not cover it—the boy had been compulsive. Whatever he took up it was with passionate involvement and the determination to master it. And once he had, he seemed to hold his own attainment in contempt, as though to say “I've licked that one, what other tests have you got for me?” Should a father have seen in that a tendency to run through life's challenges and exhaust them all too early? He had excelled at whatever he attempted and he envied no boy his abilities. Anthony had his faults but envy was not one of them. He was saved from that by one of his faults. He was too proud ever to envy anybody anything.

For as long as something interested him nothing else did. His absorption in it was single-minded. Such devotion could not really be requited, not by any boyish pursuits. To expect trout fishing or any other pastime to reward in kind devotion that intense was sure to lead to disappointment for anybody but a fanatic. But having run through one interest, Anthony was quick to replace it with another just as absorbing. Who could have read a tendency toward self-destruction in what had seemed instead intense self-exploration? Could the world pall and go flat for a youngster interested, one thing at a time, in so much of it? Apathy, indifference, boredom, lack of curiosity, premature cynicism, those would seem to be attitudes more to be suspected, mistrusted. He spent much of his time alone but that seemed then to suggest a liking for his own company, not a predisposition toward a murderous rejection of it.

People who killed themselves on the doorsill of life were ones to whom life's challenges seemed too great for the effort, weren't they? That certainly did not fit Anthony. He thrived on challenge, sought it out, added to it on his own. Had there been no other, his falconry alone was evidence of that. What did it tell you about a person, himself a
rara avis
, who took up that uncommon sport?

Wild animals had been Anthony's first and most enduring fascination—indeed, it was to study biology preparatory to going into veterinary medicine that had made him suddenly change his mind about going to college. (Did unnatural death turn everything to bitter irony?
Biology:
from the Greek for “the study of life.”) Every sort of animal interested him.
(Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?
) He trusted all, feared none. He liked insects, unlike his allergic father, was attracted to reptiles, was rather contemptuous of people who feared or were repelled by them. Was rather contemptuous of people anyway when compared with animals. Wild animals. He was fairly indifferent to domestic ones, kept no pets, but kept at one time or another a menagerie of the kinds the least responsive to human attentions. That certainly included hawks, and now when Anthony came to mind it was most often with his hawk on his wrist. A hawk required undivided attention, repaid it with nothing. Owning one was like being a partner in a bad marriage.

Anthony's first hawk was one he found wounded—and his comment on that was revelatory of his attitude. He said, and he seemed to mean every word of it, “I'd like to shoot whoever shot this bird.”

He kept it in his bathtub, nursed it, and callously fed it the pigeons that had been one of his former fancies. When it was plain to see that the bird would never fly again but would be a dependent cripple he broke its neck with one quick snap. As he had broken his own rather than live on in whatever way it was that he felt himself impaired.

He had been violating the law just by bringing the bird home. Everything possible was done to discourage the would-be falconer. Captive hawks were solitary creatures. They would not mate, would not even consort with one another. They seemed to despise one another for having capitulated to their subjection. So even if it had been legal you could not go to a hawk breeder and buy yourself one. But all traffic in them was against the law. You had to capture your own, an eyas from the nest or a passager, an adult bird. For this you had to have the state's permission and to obtain that you had to have a raptor's license. To qualify for a license you had to pass a lengthy written examination, a field test, and an inspection of your premises for a bird. Pass all these and you might still be rejected unless your examiners were convinced of the sincerity of your interest, because hard as they made it for you to acquire a bird, once you had one you were not only not allowed to sell it, you couldn't even give it away, couldn't even release it back to the wild, without their permission. The bond between the bird and you was more than a marriage, it was a Siamese twinship. Nobody who ever questioned him had doubts about the sincerity of an interest of Anthony's.

The apprentice falconer had to capture his bird under the supervision of a master, and apprenticeship was for two years. And just as in olden times when the keeping of birds of prey was the prerogative of nobility and the species were allotted by patent of birth, with the eagle the sole right of the emperor, the peregrine that of the prince, and so on down to the lowly merlin for the landless villein, so today's apprentice was restricted to the red-tailed hawk or the sparrow hawk.

Considering all these deterrents it was not surprising that in the entire state there were no more than a couple of dozen falconers. For Anthony this very exclusiveness of the club to which he aspired to belong was one of its attractions, and all the obstacles in his path only made him the more determined to reach its end. What was more, once out of his apprenticeship and licensed to own the goshawk which it was his ambition to own, to add a difficulty himself. He was intent on capturing not a nestling but a mature hawk, one already hunting on its own, or rather, on her own, for it was the bigger and more predatory female that every falconer wanted, thus one with a will of her own and all the harder to man and to train.

Of hawks, as distinct from falcons, the goshawk was the fiercest and most fearless. It was the only one that would attack a man, and it did so with little provocation. To venture within a mile of one's nest was dangerous, to look up into its tree was almost an invitation to attack. One could knock a man down, lacerate, even blind him. An eyas was taken from a goshawk's nest only by a man clad in leather from top to toe. The enthusiasm with which he told all this was enough to make one think that the goshawk's misanthropy was something Anthony admired, even shared. Indeed, his disgust with what had been done by man to spoil the environment had embittered him toward his own kind and blackened his view of the future. He was always on the side of the wild.

He was now in correspondence with members around the country of the zealous, beleaguered little band who called themselves falconers. Despised by landowners, disowned by their fellow sportsmen, hampered by bureaucrats in well-meaning but benighted conservation agencies, they were like a band of coreligionists, proscribed, dispersed, but still stubbornly devout, keeping their ancient rites and rituals in a secret brotherhood with its own antiquated and arcane vocabulary. His father informed Anthony that to the ancient Egyptians the hawk was a god and they worshiped stone and painted wooden statues of him. Indeed, he and his pen pals might have been the last remnant of that cult. He was telling Anthony nothing not already known to him. In the rather quizzical look he got for his pains he detected a feeling that being uninitiated he profaned that knowledge.

In the fall of the year, excused from classes, even given field credit for the venture in his biology course, Anthony and one of the master falconers with whom he corresponded backpacked into the Ramapo Mountains, on the eastern flyway for migrating hawks, and, provisioned for a week's stay, pitched a tent and set a trap for the bird he sought. The trap, a net sprung by pulling a string, was baited with a live pigeon, one of several they took with them in a cage, tethered to a stake.

They built a blind of boughs, dressed themselves in camouflage and daubed their faces with mud, and took turns watching the trap, spelling each other every three hours. On the morning of the fifth day, with Anthony on watch, a hawk from out of nowhere plummeted and struck, instantly killing the pigeon. Anthony pulled the string, the net closed, and he had his goshawk. It was a female, his haggard.

Jesses for her legs and a hood for her head, even a name, were waiting for her, and all of them fit. He called her Jezebel for her inbred and incorrigible faithlessness.

Other hawks were paintings, but the goshawk was a pencil drawing in shades of gray. It gave the impression of being as starkly functional as a bullet, too busy at its one deadly task for ornamentation. Its underside was pale with dark speckles, its back black, its tail gray barred black. Its only touches of color were its red eyes, which gleamed like twin warning lights, its yellow legs, and its gunmetal-blue talons. For swiftness in flight its feathers were shingled as closely as the scales of a fish.

He had observed the manning of the bird. Manning: accustoming it to man, his ways, the sounds and the motions he made. The old falconry manuals taught that the initial step in manning a bird was to exhaust it into submission by depriving it of sleep for three days and nights. Which meant the falconer's depriving himself of the same amount of sleep. One wondered how either the bird or the man survived the ordeal, much less cooperated thereafter in the hunt. But this torture was totally unnecessary; nowadays the bird was starved into submission—or rather, it starved itself.