Read Online Crossers by Philip Caputo - Free Book Online

brought on the same cold grating in his lungs, like breathing ground glass, that he’d felt so often before. “Oh, Christ, Mandy, Mandy,” he cried aloud, his eyes flooding. He turned away from his task, unable to go on with it, and did not shed tears so much as heave them in violent spasms. By the time he recovered, the quail were charred to a crisp. He fed them to his dog.
    Quam in omni vita servasti morum prohibitatem ver cundiam … Quam in omni vita servasti morum prohibitatem ver cundiam, in hac quoque at praestabis; est enim in quaedam at dolandi modestia . Trying to unravel that sentence practically tore the ligaments in his brain. He reached into the magazine rack for his Latin textbook, an artifact from his prep school days, but it was of no help. In defeat, he turned to the English translation on the opposite page. That correctness of character which you have maintained all your life, you will exhibit in this matter also; for there is such a thing as moderation even in grieving .
    Marcia, the recipient of Seneca’s essay, had lost a beloved son in his youth, and Castle wondered how she’d reacted to such bleak consolation. There is such a thing as moderation even in grieving? (Much as he admired Seneca, he often argued with him across the gulf of two thousand years.) I don’t think so, except when the loss isn’t much—your old aunt Tillie, say. But when the loss is grave, and the pain scalds your nerves until they’re numb, leaving only an emptiness as if all your organs have been sucked out and your skin and bones become a vessel for a vacuum, well, how do you moderate that, Lucius Annaeus Seneca?
    He read on, following the translation. So many funerals pass our doors, yet we never think of death … Who of us ever ventured to think upon exile, upon want, upon grief? He underlined those phrases, and then these: That man lost his children; you also may lose yours … Such is the delusion that deceives and weakens us while we suffer misfortunes which we never foresaw that we ourselves could possibly suffer. He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand . Starting another argument, Castle scribbled in the margin, “True, but so many things can’t be foreseen.” Like fanatics hijacking airliners and turning them into guided missiles, he thought. But with Seneca’s larger point he agreed, at least insofar as it applied to himself. He hadn’t foreseen any evil befalling him for the simple reason that none ever had.
    A fortunate son all right, raised in Tokeneke, where shaded private roads wound past the mansions of board chairmen and Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers. It was the toniest neighborhood in Darien, tony enough in its own right, a Wasp preserve when he was growing up, not a synagogue within the town limits, just one Catholic church—a mere chapel compared with St. Luke’s Episcopalian—and the only blacks to be seen were those who cleaned the houses or bused tables at the Tokeneke Club. His father was a cardiologist whose patients included many of those same chairmen, lawyers, and investment bankers, along with a few prominent New York and Connecticut politicians. The doctor had also inherited a respectable portfolio from Castle’s grandfather, a social-climbing contractor who’d Americanized his surname (his father, one Giuliano Castelli, had emigrated from Italy in the 1880s), married a New England Brahmin, and had the moxie to say yes when a friend named Thomas Watson asked if he would invest in Watson’s new company, International Business Machines.
    Castle’s mother, Grace, who liked to joke that she was “an Arizona cowgirl what done right good for herself” in marrying a doctor from a moneyed eastern family, finished her education after the war, and began teaching English at a private school in Stamford. She was active in the kinds of charities that drew women of her status, but she always made time for Gil and his sister, helping them