Free Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey

from the bank. Quaint and amusing and all so long ago and out of date you found the people in these pictures, never for a moment reflecting that the time would come when the ones of you would amuse somebody in the same way.
    From before the era of legal daily limits were pictures of bearded, portly men in plus-fours, tweed jackets and caps, posing alongside miraculous draughts of fishes. Because of the long rough train ride through the mountains to Chalfont, then by wagon and team the fourteen miles from there, no women were to be seen in these early pictures. Filterless, they lacked clouds in their skies also. Too long a trip for weekends then, it was for upwards of two weeks at a time that the men came. Their creels were the size of packhorse panniers and their rods the length of lances.
    Family likenesses were traceable between the founders and the square-jawed young men with their hair parted down the middle, wearing yoke-collared sweaters and long knotted scarves. Having recently fought the war to end war and make the world safe for democracy, they now defiantly displayed bottles of bootleg bathtub gin. Detroit made its contribution to the look of all our yesterdays with open touring cars, phaetons, roadsters with rumbleseats, and the inclusion in the party now of women with bobbed and marcelled hair beneath cloche hats, short skirts with belts below the waistline.
    For men only because of its inaccessibility before, the club was now turned by paved roads into a place for all the family. Children began to appear in the pictures and before long they and their mothers were sporting fishing togs. Black-and-white gave way to Kodachrome, flashbulbs followed the festivities indoors. The club’s decor remained unchanged—he was surrounded now by the very objects he saw in the pictures, even by pictures pictured—while young men came home on leave in the uniforms of four wars. The catches of fish dwindled from days of yore but there were still fish to be caught and people kept coming back, finding fun and fellowship here, needing no photographer’s injunction to smile, posing with thumbs up. Happy families are all alike, and when they are shown all at the same sport in the same spot the effect might have been monotonous, even wearisome, but in someone who had once been and was no longer one of a happy family himself it was longing they awoke. For him those had been welcome days away from work that made getting back to work all the more welcome. He loved the sport but he had never been a fanatical fisherman. Odd that a man of his outlook should have fathered a son whose intensity in everything he took up was almost manic, but to him it had been important that none of his pastimes become more than that, a pastime. Absorbing, yes, demanding, yes, otherwise no point in pursuing it, but not all-absorbing. The cream on top that enriched the milk of life would have been cloying as a steady diet.
    Even so, he had managed to spend a good amount of his time here, as Tony, the shutterbug, who loved every minute of life and wanted mementoes of them all, had recorded. Much of a wall was covered with his snapshots of them in those days. It was like Tony to want to share his good times with everybody and to assume that everybody wanted to share theirs with him. Envying no man his pleasures, he could not imagine any man’s envying him his. Just when the two of them had caught the fine catch of fish in the picture he was looking at now he could not remember. It was not all that uncommon, and when good times followed one another with no end to them in sight they were not prized enough to be labeled. Happy days are all alike; every unhappy day is unhappy in its own way.
    It was ungrateful of him, but he found it hard now to realize that he had had so many happy days, and it was contrary of him to expect now to see the man in the pictures when he looked into the mirror and to see the man in the mirror when he looked at the