Hamilton Stark (23 page)

Rochelle: “The auditorium’s right through those doors, straight ahead and to the right. Think you can find it all right?”

Hamilton: “Sound simple enough.”

Me: “No problem. Right, Hamilton?”

Hamilton: “No problem. Right, Rochelle?”

Rochelle: “No problem. Right?”

Me (laughing again): “Are you making fun of me?”

Rochelle: “I don’t know. See you after the speeches.”

I realize that I’m not explaining many things that the reader doubtless would like explained. Please believe me, I’m not leaving these questions unanswered merely because I
have a perverse love of mystery. Quite the opposite; in fact, I despise mystery. Mystery is the last resort of the hysteric. It’s a frantic, final attempt to organize chaos, or rather, to give the
appearance
of having organized chaos. None of that for me. It’s too easy and too cheap a way out for a man who feels, as I do, morally compelled to abide with chaos all the way to the end, until either he has succeeded in answering all the questions at hand, unraveling all the tangles, explaining all the puzzles, solving all the riddles, or else he has succumbed to the snarl of chaos altogether. For such a man, for me, the mid-die, where “mystery” lies, is definitely excluded. I am an
emotional
man, yes, but I am
not
a romantic man. And though I may never ascend quite to those airy levels of pure reason where, for example, my friend C. strolls about so comfortably, at least I am clear about the nature of my goal and can measure with accuracy the distance I remain from it. This particular clarity and the measuring that results therefrom comprise, for me, the only possibilities for a moral life. All else is either fantasy or determinism.

For this reason, that day at Ausable Chasm I persisted in trying to find out why Rochelle was graduating from college here in the North. Ordinarily, if Hamilton indicated that he didn’t wish to discuss a subject, I deferred to him and changed the subject, never bringing it up again unless and until he indicated readiness. But my fascination with Rochelle, then, at the actual sight of her, drove me to push in ways I would have otherwise found rude, if not downright boorish, in myself as well as in anyone else.

“What’s the story?” I asked him. “What’s the explanation? How come?”

All of which he answered with a shrug, a downturned mouth with pouting lower lip, like a carp’s, a helpless flop of open hands at his sides. And after a while it occurred to me
that he didn’t know the answer either, that it was likely, when he had learned that his daughter was graduating from Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, that he had been as surprised and puzzled as I.

I therefore ceased asking the man about it and promised myself to ask Rochelle instead. Unfortunately, whenever I was with her, I became so addled by her physical and spiritual presence that I forgot my promise altogether, and now, six years after making that promise, I still have not kept it, and thus I do not know why Rochelle graduated from an obscure college in upstate New York rather than one in central Florida. This distresses me. For now it is too late to keep that promise. Rochelle is gone from me except in memory and imagination. I will never know the answer to my question, and the reader will never know either.

To return: I handed Rochelle her drink and joined her in the bed. (This happens to be the imaginary point from which I can most easily recall the events of the day I spent in Ausable Chasm.) We were talking about the day we first met each other and how we had perceived each other then. She said that she had thought of me as a small man, short and slight, but later, after having seen me numerous times alone, realized that it was because I had been in the company of her father that first time and thus, when compared to his great height and overall bulk, had appeared much smaller than, in fact, I actually was. She was pleased, she told me, when she discovered that I was the same height as she and that, while my musculature was not exactly overdeveloped, I was nevertheless wiry and in quite good shape for a man my age.

Waving her compliments away, I gently asked her if she had seen her father and me from the speakers’ platform while she had been giving her speech. I wanted to know if she had
seen my attentiveness. I confess it. Hurt somewhat by the comparison between her father’s and my physical size, I wished to have her compare my rapt attention with her father’s cruel inattention. So I risked causing pain. I risked the chance that, by invoking the image of her father sitting in the audience and apparently sleeping through her speech, with me perched on my chair, rapt and admiring next to him, she would feel again the pain that moment must have caused her.

“You were an angel,” she said, smiling into my face. She had cut through my ruse in one stroke, had comforted me without mocking me and at the same time had spared herself the pain of the memory. What a woman! Then, with laughter, she began to talk about Ezra Taft Benson’s speech. “Remember it?” she asked me. “That funny little old man with all that crazy fervor?”

Actually, I recalled nothing of Benson’s speech, except for the one line that Hamilton had continually quoted to me all the way back home in the car. I promptly related it to her: “The best defense is the one you never have to use,” I said.

She giggled, then reminded me that when Benson had uttered those words Hamilton had broken into applause, mortifying me, perhaps astonishing Benson, and inducing a few scattered, sheeplike souls in the audience to join him. I had completely forgotten that awful moment and for a few seconds relived my embarrassment, which had been quite painful. I wasn’t so much embarrassed because I was sitting next to a person who seemed to be reacting to a banality with inappropriate enthusiasm, as I was embarrassed because that man happened to be my hero. I did not point this out to Rochelle. I didn’t have to. After all, he was her hero too.

I may not have listed it among my earlier encomiums, but Rochelle’s memory is prodigious, photographic. Mine, of
course, is ordinary. But she could recall details, entire conversations, books, films, any text at all, things and events in their entirety that I could but barely invent. Catalogues of things passed by on an afternoon’s drive in the country, newspaper articles and editorials verbatim, entire chapters from the Bible, the first paragraphs from novels she had read years ago, news accounts from radio and television that she’d listened to but moments before—it was unnerving, slightly otherworldly, and at all times not quite believable. I could never rid myself of my initial response to one of her recitations, which was that there must be a trick to it, a crib, a way of faking it somehow. At any rate, on this morning, when she noticed that I had preferred being amused by the Benson speech itself to being embarrassed by the associated image of Hamilton’s suddenly applauding a remark of, well, questionable morality, she quickly and kindly proceeded to recall for me the introduction given Benson by the president of the college, a Mr. Carlisle Bargeron.

“Remember,” she said, “in President Bargeron’s introduction, this bit of deathless prose:
‘Ezra Taft Benson was conditioned early in life for the political buffeting that was to come. In fact, he experienced mob abuse early in his life.’”
Rochelle giggled and put on a pompous expression that mocked President Bargeron and continued. “‘
Secretary Benson is not a ministerial man in appearance.’”
She was recalling his words effortlessly; they came back to me as she spoke them. Surely she was making them up; but if she were, how could I recognize them as she spoke?
“‘He could be taken for a well-groomed businessman, over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds. He greets you with a pleasant smile and has an easy laugh.’”
She smiled at me. “He must have written that speech from old publicity handouts from the Eisenhower administration. Because there was old Benson, sitting right next to Mr. Bargeron in a folding
chair, tiny, shriveled, scowling like a Puritan minister!” She laughed. “Do you remember the crescendo of the introduction?”

I shook my head no. Good God, until she had started quoting it, I had forgotten that there had even been an introduction in the first place.

“‘Secretary Benson stands at the crossroads, seeking in turn the tide!’”
Then, wrapping her long arms across the front of her body, she broke into goodhearted laughter. Utterly without malice, her laughter seemed to enfold the very object of her mockery, President Bargeron, and even Benson himself in a hug of compassionate understanding. For a second I felt that her laughter included as its object Hamilton too, and even me. Swinging her long, tanned legs over the edge of the bed, she got up and, naked, unself-consciously crossed the room to the dresser and made herself another drink.

I must tell you that I was happier at that moment than I could remember ever having been before.

When she returned to the bed, she went on quoting, this time in a wheezy, high-pitched voice designed to affect the quality and tone of Ezra Taft Benson’s aged voice.
“‘We need,’”
she said sternly,
“‘as we need no other thing, a nationwide repentance of our sins! In our rush for the material things, we have, indeed, forgotten to serve the God of this land. We must look beyond the dollar sign! Our greatness has been built on spiritual values, and if we are to survive we must find again what we once had and now have lost. I am speaking of the inner strength that comes from obedience to divine low!’”

Taking a sip from her drink. Offering me a sip. Then, amazingly, going on.
“‘At least twenty great civilizations have disappeared! The pattern is shockingly similar. All, before their collapse, showed a decline in spiritual values, in moral stamina, and in the freedom and responsibility of their citizens. They showed
such symptoms as excessive taxation, as bloated bureaucracy, as governmental paternalism, and in general a rather elaborate set of controls and regulations affecting prices, wages, production, and consumption.’”

She paused again, and then she began a recitation that to me was indeed beyond belief (I could not believe that she had merely heard the speech once; she had to have read a copy at some point), for she was now quoting Benson as he quoted yet another speaker, and she was quoting both exactly (as far as I knew):
“‘After reviewing the decline and fall of these great empires and appraising the lessons taught, the historian Glover of Oxford University makes this cryptic comment: “It is better for the development of character and contentment to do certain things badly yourself than to have them done better for you by someone else.’”

Her voice, ordinarily low for a woman and tender, had tightened in her mimicry and had risen and, to be sure, had harshened somewhat, I was struck dumb by her ability not only to remember the man’s exact words but also to mimic his voice and mannerisms. What a woman! I said to myself.

“And remember how he ended his speech?” she reminded me.

I had not remembered at all, of course, until she began to quote it, and then as she spoke there returned to me in a rush a second embarrassing image, the image of Hamilton’s second outburst, which, fortunately, had not been perceived by Rochelle. It came as Benson was reaching the rhetorical peak of his message. The little man, visibly trembling with the emotion of his message to these young graduates, had cried out to them,
“I love this nation! It is my firm belief that the God of Heaven raised up the founding fathers and inspired them to establish the Constitution of this land! This was ingrained in me as a youngster by my father and mother and by my church! It is part
of my religious faith! To me, this is not just another nation! It is a great and glorious society with a divine mission to perform for liberty-loving people everywhere!”
Here he hesitated a moment to wipe the spittle from his lips with his handkerchief. Then, continuing with fervor, he shouted,
“Freedom is a God-given, eternal principle vouchsafed to us under the Constitution! It must be continually guarded as something as precious as life itself! It is doubtful if any man can be politically free who depends upon the state for sustenance! A completely planned and subsidized economy weakens initiative, discourages industry, destroys character and demoralizes the people!”
At precisely this moment as Benson stepped away from the microphone, Hamilton had leaped to his feet and, brandishing one huge fist like a club, had bellowed, “Live free or die!” It was the New Hampshire state motto!

The rest of the audience had begun to applaud and a few individuals had risen to their feet, to prove their patriotism, perhaps, but possibly because of their genuine enthusiasm for the secretary’s words, and thus, luckily, Hamilton’s cry was lost on most of the people in the auditorium. Not on me, however, nor on the dozen or so people seated near us. And not on Ezra Taft Benson, either. The old man, by a quirk, happened to have been looking straight at Hamilton as he finished his speech, so when Hamilton leaped to his feet and bellowed the New Hampshire motto, Benson must have thought an enormous fanatic, an outsized Puerto Rican or some kind of Balkan anarchist madman, was about to attempt a suicidal assassination. The old fellow went white and staggered backward, clutching at his chest, clawed at it, and fell to the floor, where he began kicking his feet like a child having a tantrum.

In a second Mr. Bargeron, Rochelle and the minister who had offered the prayer at the beginning of the ceremonies had
reached Benson and had pulled him back to his feet. Apparently they had not seen the cause of his fall and assumed he had tripped over a microphone wire because they were, all three, apologetic and concerned mostly that he might have hurt himself. The secretary, who by this time had realized he was not to be assassinated, smiled painfully and limped from the stage, disappearing quickly behind the curtain, ashen-faced, shaken, mumbling to himself.