Hostages to Fortune (16 page)

Cathy's were not so easily disposed of. Her rod was a reminder of her that he would have to keep. A powerful reminder it was, for it was to please him, to be with him, that she had taken up fishing. A gift from him to her, the rod was the work of a man whose name was to fishing rods what Stradivarius was to violins. He had retired from business some years earlier and at first he refused to make a rod for Cathy. It was the mention of Tony Thayer's name that made him reconsider. Even then he set another condition. There being no more of them, his rods had become collector's items. This annoyed the man. He considered himself a practical craftsman, not a maker of whatnots.

To Cathy he said, “So you want one of my poles. Why?”

“Because my dear, devoted husband wants me to have the best.”

“Mmh. But what are you going to do with it?”

“Fish with it,” she said. “What else?”

“Catch fish with it,” her husband corrected her.

“Catch fish with it,” she said.

“Good,” said the old man. “That's what it's for.”

The man never signed his rods, a mark not of modesty but of pride. Like the best London tailors, who never sewed a label into their jackets, he expected the quality of his work to identify it as his and nobody else's. On the butt of this rod, near the cork handle, was written in tiny, perfect copperplate script, “Made for Catherine Curtis.” Coat upon coat of hand-rubbed varnish gave the golden cane a gleam like amber. Like its owner, the rod was short, delicate, but with plenty of backbone.

He returned the rod to its case and put it with her vest and the double-billed Scottish cap she had bought at Kelly's on their last trip. The trout fly in the band of the cap—a Queen of the Waters it was—he had stuck there. He doubted that Cathy would ever fish again. He had introduced her to it and she associated it with him. With him and with Anthony, with Tony—with everything that she longed now to forget. But he would have to keep her tackle just in case she should ever want it, in case he ever heard from her again.

A pair of smallish, chest-high, khaki-colored fishing waders would not seem an article of clothing to arouse a man's desires. What woman could be attractive in those clumsy things? His could. In theirs, most of the club women waddled like pachyderms, and in a ready-made pair little Cathy would have looked comical, but these of hers he had had custom-tailored, and in them she had been a mermaid, as alluring as in her frilliest frock. Out of them she had been that much more alluring and he remembered a summer afternoon when, impelled by an urge more elemental, he quit fishing early and found her in her section of the stream and she read his thoughts in his face and waded ashore to him and he helped her out of her waders and hung them from a limb and they combined the rest of their clothing to make themselves a bed on the bank. That day they fished no further.

He wished he had not made that play on Dante's
Quel' giorno più non vi leggemmo avante
. It brought to mind the lines preceding it:

Nessun' maggior' dolore

Che ricordarsi del tempo felice

Nella miseria
.

No grief surpasses this:

In the midst of misery to remember bliss.

The sun was high overhead as he rounded the bend in the stream from which he could see to the end of his section of it. So often had it happened in the past that, against all reason, he half expected to see Tony working his way toward the boundary line and the rendezvous with him.

They had always chosen adjoining sections of the stream and, one of them fishing up from the bottom of his section and the other one fishing down from the top of his, met midway for lunch together. When they came in sight of each other both went on fishing out their sections but he always did so idly for it was more enjoyable as well as more instructive to watch Tony. The head start he had gotten by being born of a long line of ardent outdoorsmen could not alone account for Tony's mastery of a fly rod or his prowess with a gun. With either he was a pattern of grace and a study in total concentration of mind and body. Even in dying Tony had shown dispatch, originality, style.

If he was fishing downstream, with the wet fly, fishing blind, that is, fishing the water and not to rising fish, continually casting the same length of line and covering the water by his progress through it, Tony's wading was as negligent as a stroll down his garden path. He never seemed to feel his way with his feet, never faltered or stumbled or slipped and lost his balance even though the stream bed was strewn with rocks and they were moss-grown and so slippery the club's hoariest joke was that Eddie spent his day off coating them with axle grease.

But it was when Tony was fishing upstream, fishing the dry fly, that he liked best to watch him. Dry-fly fishing demanded greater delicacy of presentation, more accurate casting, closer attention to the currents if the lure was to float with naturalness and not with a telltale drag. When no fish was visibly on the feed Tony fished the water, but what he liked best was the challenge of fishing to a fish rising to a hatch of flies; he liked to match the natural insect with his artificial one, stalk his quarry with the stealth of a hunter, lengthening his line with false casts that hovered above the water just to the side of the fish's lie, then when it was exactly the right length drop it upon the water as softly as if it had just that instant hatched and surfaced there, await the fish's cautious rise, then strike. No obstacle could ever keep him from making a cast because he knew a trick cast to get around it with. He was as dextrous with his left hand as with his right and his casting range was whatever it took. In his hands a fly rod had been a conductor's baton, a magician's wand: trout sang his tune in chorus, he could conjure them out of nowhere. Whenever, between him and the position he considered best to cast to a fish from, there was water too deep to wade, he swam it. No waders for Tony, except in the iciest early-season water.

They would have left bottles of beer to chill in the stream and their lunch in a hamper in a tree out of the reach of animals. In the hamper would be a thermos of martinis to drink while drying out. They always had just one more before having another, ever since Tony had first proposed that they do.

Today he would have just his one. That was more than he was used to having in midday now. He was looking forward to it. He was wet and cold from the waist down, hot and wet with sweat from there up, tired from lack of sleep, and muscles long unused ached from inching his way among the rocks on the bottom. He hauled himself up the bank, leaned his rod against a tree, and got out of his vest and his creel harness. He knew this spot of old: it was here that Tony and he had met for lunch the last time they fished together, yet as he stood to let the water drain from him he took his bearings. Do I stand here, he asked himself, not only with the sense of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life and food for future years? He listened to the woods and the water for an answer. None was forthcoming. He had learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.

He was not succeeding in what he was here now to try to do. The reason for that was that he was not here and the time was not now. A new beginning, a fresh start, an object in living was what he sought and his dead life kept reasserting itself. For all the outward change in him he was the same self still. He was like that old oak there. Last of trees to leaf out, soon now it would, and this year's would be like those of all the others. He was like it in this too: his roots went deep and fixed him in one spot.

He had sweated off the insect repellent yet again. After spraying himself afresh he sat in the shade of the tree with his legs stretched out in the sun to dry. His martini cooled him where he was hot and then warmed him where he was chilled.

He felt hungry. He had all but forgotten what it was like to feel hungry but he was hungry now and it felt good. He sipped his drink slowly for he wanted to savor his hunger. It was better that he do everything slowly. He was still in training and must guard against rushing his sensations. They got out of hand when he tried to deal with too many at a time. Having to relearn everything took concentration. Lunch would be leisurely. His stretch of water required resting before he waded back through it, and so did he. And anyhow, the middle of the day was an unproductive time for fishing.

In the old days Tony and he would have reported to each other their observations of the morning now. They would have told of fish hooked and fish lost, of changes in the course of the stream, perhaps of spying an otter or a beaver—it was a pileated woodpecker that Tony had been excited by their last time here together. Tony was keenly observant, boyishly inquisitive, and had no patience with anybody who was not. If one could inherit traits from a godparent then it was from Tony that Anthony had gotten his passionate love of nature, and that impatience with—in his case contempt for—clods who lacked it. To live in this world without wondering what the things in it were and how they lived was not to live. Tony knew wildflowers and weeds, trees, birds and birds' eggs, minerals, the constellations of the stars.

They would be exchanging sections for the afternoon, so at lunch they always told each other what to expect to encounter. Both knew the stream so well that all they had to do was to name a bend or a rock or a tree. Each would have told which flies had been successful for him and which had not, and if one or the other had risen a really big fish he told just where to find it and how best to approach its lie. Of one thing there would have been no mention. Possibly one or the other of them would have published something lately, and though he could be sure the other had read it, yet their talk was never about that. They knew each other too well to talk shop. That they went on being friends testified to their mutual respect, for neither of them could have been friends with a writer whose writing he did not respect, yet praise to the face from the other would have embarrassed either of them.

He leaned his back against the tree and took from his wallet the unopened letter given to him by Eddie last evening at the club. It could not hurt him now. Not again. He had not opened the letter earlier because he had already read it a year ago—or rather, a copy of it. He was sure it was the same, for this one too was postmarked Hudson and dated the same day as the one he had received. No doubt Pris had been more confident of his receiving this one than the other one, for he came here more often than he went to New York. It had fallen out the other way. To make sure it was the same and contained no information not known to him, he opened the letter. He had been right: this was the original of which he had read the copy. Yet he had been wrong: even now it hurt. This one was a reminder of all that the first one had led to:

Dear Ben,

I have tried calling and writing but I got a recording saying that your phone had been disconnected and my letter was returned to me so I am writing you there. Forgive me for adding to your sorrows, my poor Ben, but I must tell you that funeral services for Tony were held today. Actually he died three months ago, in an iceboating accident, but the body could not be recovered until the river thawed. I could not bring myself to tell you at the time, knowing so well what you were going through.

Here in this spot, with its memories, holding in hand this letter and recalling its duplicate, which had also reached him late and which had also been addressed not to his home but to his and Tony's other club, reliving what reading that one had done to him, his identification with Tony Thayer throughout all their adult years made them seem to him like twins. How their lives had paralleled and mirrored each other! The same pastimes and pleasures, interests and outlooks, the same devastating misfortune, and very nearly the same end. For he had not been misled for a moment by Pris's word “accident.” The three-time iceboating champion of the United States the sport's first fatality? He needed nobody to tell him what had happened. As plainly as if he had been there lying prone beside him on the passenger's tray, separated from him by nothing but the beam which was the boat's body, he saw Tony catch the wind in his sail and set his tiller and point his prow toward where he knew the ice was thin. He could feel in his face the sting of the icy spray, feel the rib-jolting bumps, the frigid air that seared the lungs. It would have been exhilarating. A last lusty lover's embrace with the ice and then the plunge into instant insensibility. He longed to have been there.

And so, running for his life, running from his haunted house in Stone Ridge to escape the deadly urgings of its resident spirit, he had run into another, realer, far more deadly one at their old New York rendezvous, the Princeton Club. This one with a motive for what he had done and the motive the same as his own. This one his alter ego, the model for much of what he was.

He tore the letter in pieces and sprinkled them on the water. Like petals from an expiring rose they fell. Just downstream a fingerling trout nosed one of the scraps and then swirled away. Some soon sank, others were soon lost in the wavelets and the froth. He watched the last one float out of sight. Then in the distance he spied a fisherman working his way toward him through the section that would once have been Tony's. It seemed to be his still, by rights. Unreasonable as it was, and perhaps all the more because it was so unreasonable, he felt a moment's enmity toward the man, whoever he might be, for not being his dead friend. However, he would have to be cordial. The man waved to him and waded on upstream.

“Saw on the sheet that you had put yourself in Section Seven for today,” said Ken Howard as he clambered up the bank.

Ken loosened his bootstraps and turned his boot tops down to his knees. He slipped out of his vest and detached his creel from its harness. He knelt, unlatched the lid of his creel, and turned it upside down. Out of it slid a brown trout fully a foot and a half long. It was only a short time out of its element. Beneath its lacquerlike coat of clear mucus its undimmed colors still shimmered, iridescent.