Hostages to Fortune Read Free

“Lord, bless this union of thy servants Benjamin and Catherine, and send them, we pray thee, an evening rise.”
    In just a week and a day their silver wedding anniversary was coming up.
    Where was she now? he wondered as the bell summoned him to supper.
    â€œLazarus, come forth!” the bell cried to him with a loud voice.
    â€œLazarus stinketh, for he hath been dead four days,” he said to himself.
    He tarried on the terrace to give his fellow club members time to drain their drinks and go to the dining room and seat themselves without having to feel that they must invite him to join them at their tables.
    Not all, but enough about him and his affairs was known here to force a role upon him. Before making his entrance he composed his face into a suitable expression. A delicate balance must be struck. He must look undaunted but not unfeeling. He must show that he had buried his dead but that he had not forgotten them. He must respond to smiles with a smile but not with a broad one; he must respond to looks of commiseration with a grateful look but not with one that pleaded for more. Even to people familiar with only a part of his story, like these here, he would be viewed with a combination of curiosity and caution of which he would be conscious every moment but of which he must appear to be unconscious. He believed he was up to this now. He believed he could show a brave face to the world. Unfortunately he could do nothing about the ravage to that face which aroused suspicions of there being even more to his story than was common knowledge.
    The bar, its countertop covered with empty and half-empty glasses, was deserted. He passed through it and went down the hall to the dining room. It was not the pain of entering it for the first time alone or with nobody awaiting him there that arrested him on the doorsill—the pain would come later; at first it was the novelty of it. Forgotten were the attitude and the expression to suit it that he had so carefully rehearsed. Not since his troubles all began had he been among people, and to his long disused and still oversensitive organs the talk and the laughter, the lights, the glitter were a shock. He stood at the door dazed and irresolute. The pain of remembering Cathy made him yearn toward a happiness in which he had once shared. Old associations momentarily obliterated present realities: he forgot who he was now and remembered who he had been for so long—one like these, here on a holiday, surrounded by his family and his friends. It was lucky for him that he went unnoticed. Anyone seeing him there with that smile on his face would have thought him a monster of forgetfulness, morally and emotionally deficient.
    He had already been served when Ruth Rogers appeared at his table. For a moment he thought that one of his secrets was out and that he was now to experience the mockery of being considered “eligible.” The possibility of his patient’s being exposed to a widow or two his own age had been the one aspect of this outing that his doctor approved of.
    â€œAlone this evening?” Ruth asked.
    â€œEvery evening,” he replied, though to himself, not aloud. Aloud he said, “Yes. I’m not very good company, I’m afraid, but won’t you join me?”
    â€œCathy’s not with you?”
    She asked it disbelievingly. So she did not know. In this there was some relief, more painful irony. Ruth was one of those—like himself—who supposed that after what they had been through together Cathy and he could never again bear to be apart for a moment.
    â€œNo,” he said. “Not this trip.”
    He helped seat her. He had forgotten the scent close up of a woman’s fragrance and it dizzied him like a lungful of smoke after long abstinence. He seated himself. The waitress came and set another place.
    â€œDon’t wait for me,” said Ruth, indicating his dinner. But he did wait, and she said,