Hamilton Stark (3 page)

It was Rochelle, A.’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, his only child and at that the child of his own late childhood. A lovely red-haired girl with long thin arms and legs, dressed in a forest green wool parka, hatless, with the hood laid back beneath her dark, tumbling, red river of hair—she was a startling figure to behold, especially when she was the last person in the world one expected to see out here, and even more especially when one realized that she was carrying a rifle, which, because of the telescopic sight attached to it, I instantly recognized as A.’s own Winchester 30.06. She had the rifle cradled under her right arm and across the front of her flat belly, with her left hand gripping the bolt as if she had just fired off a round, or was about to. She seemed distraught, shaking, green eyes darting wildly, roughly, and in the direction of the woods on the left side of the road. She did not seem to notice my car as I slowed, crossed over, and stopped beside her.

Leaning out the open window so she could recognize me, I cried, “
Rochelle!
What’s the matter? What are you doing out here?”

“I’ll
kill
him!” she screamed into the woods, as if I were located in that darkness rather than behind her in my car. “I’ll kill the bastard! I’ll
kill
him!”

“Where is he?”

“In there someplace,” she said in a hoarse voice, as if she had been screaming for hours and had exhausted all her vocal resources but the roar. All she had left was her maximum effort; anything less collapsed of its own weight. “I know he’s in there,” she croaked, motioning toward the woods with the tip of the barrel. “I think I hit him once, maybe twice, at the
house when he drove up. When I chased him down here, I could see he was bleeding, his face was bleeding, all over his lousy face, the bastard!”

Her own face was gathered up like a fist, her green eyes agate-hard. Her fine, even teeth were clenched, and the muscles of her long jaw worked ferociously in and out. Her delicately freckled hands had turned chalk white from the force of her grip on the rifle.

Though she had acknowledged my question by shouting her answer into the woods, she had not acknowledged my presence yet and continued to stare searchingly into the tangled darkness. With extreme care, moving slowly yet smoothly and, I hoped, gently, I got out of my car. She seemed not to notice so I took a single step toward her; then she wheeled about on her heels and swung the gun up, slapped the butt against her right shoulder, and pointed the tip at my heart. She sighted down the barrel with care, focusing the telescope with her left hand as if she were tuning in a distant radio station.

“Don’t!”
she ordered.

I froze, one foot held delicately off the ground, both hands palm down and off to my sides, as if quieting an orchestra. “Rochelle,” I said in a calm voice, “give me the gun. C’mon, honey, let me have the gun now, you don’t want to kill your dad. I know you’re mad at him, I know he’s upset you, but you don’t want to
kill
him for it, now do you, honey? C’mon, honey, let your ol’ buddy have the gun, then we can sit down and talk about it.” I had slowly let my foot descend to the ground and had taken a second step.

I was terrified—the sight of one of the most stable creatures I had ever known, one of the most admirably predictable and rational women I had ever met, standing wild-eyed before me with a high-powered rifle zeroed in on my thundering
heart, so upset my notion of the real and expected world that anything could have happened, anything, and it would have seemed appropriate, Rochelle could have broken into a Cole Porter song and started tap-dancing her way down the road, using the rifle as a cane, waving over her shoulder at me as she pranced out of sight, the end of a musical comedy based on the exciting life of a girl revolutionary. Or she could have suddenly opened her mouth wide, as if to eat a pear, and shoving the tip of the barrel in, jammed her thumb against the trigger and blown the top of her lovely head away. Or she could have simply squeezed one finger, nothing more than that, just wrinkled her trigger finger one-sixteenth of an inch, and I would have heard the explosion, possibly would have smelled the fire and smoke, seen a shred of the narrow belt of the blue sky fall into my face as I was blown back against the side of my car, my chest an erupting volcano for no more than a split second, and then Nothing, unimaginable Nothing.

With a shudder, I decided it didn’t matter what happened so long as anything could happen. I took another step, then yet another, and gradually, as I neared her, she lowered the barrel of the gun until, by the time I could reach out and touch her shoulder, it was pointing at the ground. With my left hand I took the gun from her, and with my right I reached around her shoulders and drew her to me.

Suddenly she was sobbing, her bony, fragile shoulders hunched and twitching with the sobs. And then it all came out, what he had said in his answer to her letter, what her letter had said about her mother, A.’s first wife, until finally she was blubbering wetly against my chest. “Oh, I don’t understand, I just don’t
understand!
Why does he have to be that way, why is he so
awful? Why?
”

I sighed. It was not going to be easy for me to explain. After all, she was his daughter, his only child. And she loved him.

Event #3:
(From The New York
Times
, Wednesday, May 1, 19——.)

I read the article with slight, barely conscious interest, prodded by my daily habit of reading every article in the newspaper from beginning to end diligently, regardless of the content, but perhaps also prodded by the vaguely familiar tone of the somewhat cryptic remarks attributed to the old man, an assertiveness tempered by a strangely familiar form of personal humility, a kind of matter-of-fact pride and wisdom that I had not heard in many years. There was a small wirephoto of the graybeard above the article, and when I
studied the blurred face, I recognized, in spite of the long beard, the hair, the stooped posture and the obvious aging that had taken place, my friend of long, long ago. It was A.

And thus, once again, after a lapse of what seemed an entire lifetime, I began thinking obsessively about the man.
“Where did he come from? What kind of life did he lead that brought him to this end?”
I chuckled to myself at the poor, befuddled reporter’s questions and imagined A. frustrating the fellow with half-truths and outright lies, flattery and aggression. The reporter should not have been talking to A., I snorted, but
me!
He’d never learn the truth from A., not in a million years.

Believing as I did that each of the above three events, taken separately, could explain A.’s peculiar (to me) absence that Sunday afternoon in February 1975, I had reached a point in my relation to him where almost anything could happen and where whatever did happen would be believable. It would seem “natural,” “right,” consistent with all I had known of him before. In other words, the man had become sufficiently real to me that I could, and therefore should, write a novel about him.

It was almost four o’clock by the time I arrived at my home in Northwood. The sun was setting coldly behind the low hills, dragging a darkening gray blanket across the snowy fields and woods while the temperature tumbled fast toward zero and below. Then, as the sun dropped wholly behind the farthest hill, leaving only a sky fading from red to peach to sooty gray to deep, starry blue, a low cold wind cruised across the snow, from the colder, eastern horizon to the slightly less cold western, as if following the waning light. Then the wind was gone, like a pack of silent dogs, and the night settled
motionlessly down to its business of making the icy lakes creak and boom, of making the trees snap, the streams whimper, the hibernating animals underground turn worriedly in their sleep, of making the rocks beneath the snow concentrate their mass.

Inside my house, as soon as I had built the fire to blazing in the library, I sat down at my desk, plucked my pen from the holder, and, opening a blank notebook before me, wrote in large letters on the first page,
HAMILTON STARK, A NOVEL
. I turned the page, and continued to write.