Free Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey Page A

pictures. Why was it that the joys we had had were not only no comfort to us later but brought us the sharpest of pains? A matter of tenses. Had had. Past perfect. Present mirth hath present laughter.
    He was trying not to dwell upon individual pictures. Too many of them brought back too vividly the time of its taking. It was test enough of his strength to expose himself to their collective effect. Nevertheless, he found himself lingering over each one because he was afraid to let his eye stray toward the section of the wall that he dreaded most of all. Reliving it in these pictures, he could feel his life coming up to the recent past.
    One spring they had driven up, as always, on the eve of opening day, went to bed that night as the barometer was falling, and in the morning woke to find a foot of snow on the ground with more still falling fast. It was wet, heavy snow and the club members were wakened as one by the loud crash of a nearby limb breaking and falling from its weight. The clubhouse was cold and dark. Powerlines were down, unreachable by repair crews. Kerosene lamps for this contingency were brought out and in all the fireplaces fires were started.
    To listen to, it was as though they were under siege all that day, with tree limbs crackling like rifle fire and mounds of snow falling into the snow with a sound like the impact of artillery. When finally the snow stopped falling during the second night it had deposited over two feet. Then the barometer rose, the temperature plummeted and everything froze solid.
    They were snowbound for ten days. They sawed and split firewood, hauled water in buckets from the stream and used the old, disused outhouse, and the men, as shown in this picture of them posing in the snow, all grew beards, his then as black as now it was white. By the fourth day Pauline’s fare—she was Eddie’s wife, in charge of the clubhouse kitchen—was growing stale, by the sixth it was giving out. Armed from Eddie’s private arsenal and bolstered by Tony’s “To hell with the game laws. This is a matter of survival,” the men took to the woods. The photograph showed them with their bounty, he with his four-point buck, Tony with his spikehorn, another club member with a mess of squirrels, still another with a heap of rabbits, and Eddie with half a dozen grouse. They ate so well none of them cared if it never thawed.
    In contrast to this were summer afternoons when heat waves struck, when the water was low and warm and the fish wary and off their feed, and then it was more fun to swim in the pond, play croquet or badminton on the lawn, drowse in a hammock hung in the shade. Often they were kept indoors by wind and rain. Then they passed the time reading, fussing with tackle, playing games, solving puzzles, and drinking too much, and Tony with his camera had snapped them at all these activities. Such a lot of activity! You could almost hear these pictures, the laughter on the lips, the raillery, the songs, and it deepened the silence of the night, the stillness now of this the scene of all that play, lengthened the distance from those days and from all hope of reunion with those people. These moments caught and mounted along with the memorable fish on the walls brought to mind a multitude of similar ones. They littered his memory like dead leaves from a tree.
    He was nearing the end of the wall and in these pictures they were all a little older but still as carefree as always—if anything, more contented than ever. And why not? Their luck had held for so long they had been lulled into a sense of its permanence. With a daughter like Tony’s what father would not look self-satisfied? Happy man, how could he know that before another year was out she would leap forty-seven stories to her death? And himself? The big, hearty fellow without a worry in the world or a thought for tomorrow, with the pretty little woman, his loving wife, always at his side?
    On reflex he turned