Free Hostages to Fortune by William Humphrey Page B

aside and in so doing saw another picture. It was not the hot tears in his eyes that distorted it—or maybe it was. He saw the picture of a dead boy of eighteen with a face made livid by trapped blood, with bulging eyes, a swollen, blackened tongue protruding from swollen lips, a twisted and swollen neck stretched and scarified by a rope. What the picture actually showed was a much younger boy holding up a fish and smiling at the camera, but in his father’s eyes that final image of him now intruded upon all others from the rest of his son’s short life.
    They had been at sea for a week, sailing out of Gloucester up the coast past Portsmouth, Portland, past Monhegan, and into Penobscot Bay. They had moored at Boothbay Harbor, anchored off Vinalhaven, gone ashore at Castine and Blue Hill. Then back down the coast again. Now landfall. Home port and then home again. For the Thayers it was back to their big haunted house, their incurable pain and their incessant self-questioning, for him it was back to his wife and the troubles between them. Just one last time-honored ceremony before coming in to dock and then it was back to all they had sailed away from.
    Now all three were busy pretending that nothing had happened yesterday. Up from the galley came the smell of onions frying. Sails were furled, bags packed, and already dressed for shore, he sat at the wheel, the chart at his feet on the cockpit deck. After yesterday, no more of that navigating from below.
    He came chugging in under power, keeping the rocks, the Dry Salvages, to portside, listening to the scream of the gulls and the funereal tolling of the buoy bell. The bell set the cadence for Eliot’s lines inspired by this place. At the time he could not recall them exactly, and shortly he was to forget all about them and everything else. It would be several days after finally getting home when he would think of them again and look them up and then find in them an added applicability. People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
    For the Thayers this cruise was to have been their coming out. There was a time to mourn, as both the Bible and the book of etiquette counseled, and while the time to dance had not come, the period of mourning prescribed as mentally healthy and socially acceptable was over. Life must go on, although sometimes, along with the poet, one forgot just why. Pris packed her black dresses away with her veil, and Tony thumbed through the latest issue of Yachting .
    A cruise without Ben aboard was not a cruise. This one absolutely depended upon his saying yes to their invitation. Or rather, upon his and Cathy’s saying yes, of course. The Thayers were perhaps not quite as sorry as they tried earnestly to sound over the phone when he declined for Cathy, explaining that she was away from home and would not be back by then. They were coming out but they were still tender and tentative, and while they always got along with Cathy, with him they never had to get along. They would sail the old familiar waters and do the things they used to do before. That “before” was unfortunate. It pulsated in the earpiece, waiting to be finished off with a phrase.
    The invitation to go on that cruise had come as a godsend to him. Cathy and he were squabbling again and she had gone away. She had not left him; things were not that bad; but she had gone away. He had been batching for several days, and he was not meant to be a bachelor. Remorseful, regretting things he had said in heat, yearning to have her back while at the same time still loyal to his angry mood—in the midst of all this had come Tony’s call. It signaled something that gave him even more pleasure than the relief from his situation at home. It meant that Tony, dear Tony, his poor broken friend, had begun to recover at last from his terrible blow.
    He brought with him the champagne and his ritual, his penitential offering of a steak for their last meal on board and from the