Hamilton Stark (31 page)

It was several minutes later, when, as I was committing to memory the call of the brown creeper
(Certhia familiaris)
, whispering to myself “see-ti-wee-tu-wee,” that Hamilton interrupted and informed me that he and Jenny were going for a walk to the top of Blue Job, where it would be cooler, and if I wanted a lift back to his house, where I had parked my own car, he would provide it. I smiled hello politely to Jenny, who was sweating profusely, and said no, that I’d stay here awhile and would catch a ride out for my car later in the evening.

Hamilton seemed relieved, or at least he did not scowl as he usually did when I abridged or altered one of his suggestions with a plan of my own, and the two of them left together, as silently and intently as they had been dancing.

The next time I saw Hamilton, not three weeks later, he had married her. “Well, I married her,” he said.

“Who?”

“Jenny, the school nurse,” he said, as if I should have expected it. I did not, of course. Quite the opposite.

C., however, was not surprised.

“Well, let me tell you, it surprised
me!
” I fairly shouted, startling him back into his chair.

“Goodness!”

Certainly it surprised me. Hamilton had but barely shed his second wife Annie, and he had only just met this new one. Also, because of her profession, as I have mentioned, and because of her rather ordinary life so far, which, I assumed, gave her a rather ordinary mind, and because of her appearance, this new one did not, to me, seem to be Hamilton’s “type.” She was a handsome woman, in an athletic way, but her overall appearance was Prussian, almost manly. Both of Hamilton’s previous wives had been physically delicate by comparison, even Annie, who did not start to gain weight until after she had married him. This woman seemed invulnerable, which surely only reinforced what I assumed (from her profession) was a custodial temperament. How could Hamilton have thought he would be happy with such a
woman, especially so soon after the dissolution of his second marriage and that final encounter with his mother and the insights into what he called “smotherhood” gained there?

It wasn’t difficult to understand or to predict, my large friend assured me. According to him, though my even larger friend, Hamilton, might well be conscious of a particular image dominating his relationship with his mother, he might even be conscious that the same image had dominated his relationships with his other wives, and possibly his relationships with all women (an awareness, C. pointed out, that so far I had not granted Hamilton); in spite of this awareness, this self-consciousness, the man might still be compelled to go on living in its dominion.

At first I didn’t understand, but then C. explained that it depended on the image, its qualities. A uroboros, for example, is an image of closure, a frightening image of compulsive, ritualistic repetition. To have one’s life organized under the dictates of a uroboros would be painful, indeed, and if one were unfortunate enough to be conscious of that image, one might
find it even more painful, for all one could do would be to raise the repetition to a higher level, hoping to avoid it there, only to find oneself once again repeating oneself. What one would have in that case would be a spiraling uroboros, as it were. In Hamilton’s case, by becoming conscious of his compulsive attraction to women who wanted to “smother” him and his resultant revulsion at the indebtedness incurred, that is, his “guilt,” his only recourse seems to have been to introduce “wrath,” so as to speed up the process, to spin the wheel a little faster, hoping thereby (one must assume) that the pain for the woman and confusion for himself would be lessened.

Rochelle’s demon Asmodeus was not a wholly imprecise way of perceiving her father’s behavior, C. reminded me. It explained a great deal—his fervent seductions, his cold withdrawals, and, finally, his wrathful rejections. If you concede sincerity to such a man, then his behavior does indeed seem possessed. The difficulty with the image of Asmodeus, however, is that it holds out the possibility of exorcism. Magic. The right combination of aspects of the moon, chants, artifacts
and fetishes, and
voilà!
he’s free. A daughter’s love, a
spurned
daughter’s love, explains her attraction to it.

But, I, as C. quite rightly pointed out, I was no man’s daughter, spurned or otherwise. Which was doubtless why I had chosen to describe the same man with the image of the holy man, the man outside all social prescriptions for meaningful behavior, the man who uses his life as allegory, who, to demonstrate human ordinariness, heaps ashes on himself, who, to demonstrate the vanity of human wishes, forgoes all normal access to praise and achievement, the man who, to demonstrate the possibility of self-transcendence, denies the claims the rest of us honor.

We are the only creature that does not know what it is to be itself, C. went on. We are the only creature that must perceive itself through the use of images. The limits and the possibilities implied by those images, then, are the limits and possibilities for our perceptions of ourselves. And because we can hardly be expected to exceed the morphology of our perceptions, then it’s clear that our images of ourselves
determine the morphology of our very lives. Rochelle saw her father through the image of a particular kind of demon-possession, one that combined and thus explained his peculiar juxtaposition of drunkenness, lust and rage. I had tried to convert her to my point of view, which depended on her coming to see him as a holy man. C., in his turn, was recommending that I see Hamilton as a spiraling uroboros. We were all three trying to perceive him, to imagine him into a reality in our own lives, by means of a coherent image. Yet he persisted in resisting our imaginations. The demon had fallen away in the face of Hamilton’s obvious intentionality. No man possessed could be that willful. And the holy man was rapidly being secularized by what appeared to be compulsive behavior rather than self-conscious, exemplary behavior designed to be taken as allegorical. And now this somewhat pathetic and depressing image of the self-devouring serpent had come to control my perceptions of the man. The time had come to try to discover
how Hamilton perceived himself, if at all. And if this could not be determined, to ask oneself if, indeed, one had invented him altogether.

Thank heaven for C.! If it hadn’t been for his presence in my life, his very presence that evening in my library, I would at that moment have felt wholly alone.

T
HIS IS A PAINFUL CHAPTER
for me to write. Before I’m through with it, I will have lost my best friend, will have sent him from my house into the snowy cold, leaving me behind, remorseful and, to counter remorse, desperate for justification. A dangerous state for a rationalist: it’s when he is most tempted to depart from reality and fly off into the soothing heavens of reason.

It began with the death of Alma Stark—not the actual fact of her dying, but later, in my describing it. It’s possible that it began earlier, of course, in Chapter Nine, where I told of Hamilton’s meeting and consequent marriage to Jenny, but I was not aware then of any irreconcilable differences between my and C.’s points of view. At that time, despite the differences between us, I was still able to use C.’s point of
view to inform my own, as I had been doing all along. So that at the end of Chapter Nine, while I may have seemed disconsolate at having to lose Rochelle, I could still console myself with the continued presence of C. But all that was before I had told of the death of Alma Stark.

The death itself was not especially poignant or wrenching. It was expected. She had been ill for most of the previous winter and had fended off an attack of flu and then pneumonia, but clearly she was weakening and, in fact, had not been expected to survive the winter at all. She was eighty, still mentally alert, but no longer able to resist ordinary onslaughts against her body. The following November, she came down with a strep throat, and despite massive doses of antibiotics, she developed double pneumonia and had to be hospitalized in Concord, where, after struggling on for two more weeks, she died, quite peacefully in her sleep, of heart disease.

Though her last years obviously had been scarred by the wound Hamilton had inflicted on her when he had evicted her—a wound she could close only by refusing after that night ever to see her son again, refusing and regularly renewing that refusal, for the cut was deep and could be staunched only with difficulty—those last years, nevertheless, had been relatively comforting to her. She was able to convert her dependence on her daughters, Jody and Sarah, into something which caused
her
to suffer, and thus the integrity of her personality was sustained. Her daily round of activities included helping Jody with housework, cooking and cleaning up after the children (twin boys entering adolescence, people who, to her tongue-clucking satisfaction, seemed to regard her presence as they would a maid’s—or at least that’s how, sighing, wringing her hands and tweaking her throat, she would put it to her friends at the Ladies’ Aid Society, always adding, of course, “It must be hard for them, having an old
lady suddenly come to live in a crowded little house with them”). After the first year, Chub had added a small bedroom to the trailer, off the back at the middle, like an awkwardly placed appendage, and she spent most of her evenings there, and while her daughter, son-in-law and their two children watched TV in the living room, she crocheted, wrote letters to the Barnstead boys in Vietnam, and read the Bible. It was a nice room, pine-paneled, with a single window that faced Chub’s gravel pit (a supplementary source of income for the family). She had her own bed, a dresser, a small desk under the window, and even a closet of her own, which she had filled with the rest of her possessions—her clothes, photograph albums, Christmas tree decorations, and the quilted spread that she had made the spring she married Hamilton’s father and that she had used on their bed for over forty years. But now she slept alone on a narrow, cotlike bed. It would look foolish, she remarked, if she used the quilt to cover this little bed. But she couldn’t bring herself to give it over to Chub and Jody, to lay it across their wide Hollywood bed in the master bedroom. She thought maybe she’d just leave it to them in her will. She’d leave the photograph albums to Sarah, who seemed more interested in them anyhow, perhaps because she was childless. At least that’s what she told the ladies at the Ladies’ Aid Society while they knitted, sewed, crocheted, and wove handy, warm articles for the Barnstead boys in Vietnam. As it turned out, however, she wrote no will; Sarah ended up with the quilt and Jody took the photographs and Christmas tree ornaments.

During these years, between Alma’s loss of her home and her death, no one in the family spoke to Hamilton or saw him socially. If one or several of them accidentally came up against the fact of his presence, at a bean supper or the Fourth of July Band Concert or in McAllister’s General Store, for
instance, they ignored that fact and would not acknowledge its existence even to one another. One time Chub had backed his cruiser—his own station wagon, actually, outfitted at the town’s expense with a siren, blue glass bubble on top and two-way radio—into one of Hamilton’s cars, a year-old Cadillac, the car he’d driven to Rochelle’s graduation in Ausable Chasm, New York. Chub had driven up to Danis’s Superette without noticing Hamilton’s car and had parked next to it, both cars facing the store, and then, recognizing the dark brown Cadillac, he had realized that the owner doubtless was inside the grocery store and that they would unavoidably pass in the aisle, so he had immediately dropped his cruiser into reverse and had backed out quickly, clipping with his right front fender Hamilton’s finny taillight. While the glass was still tinkling to the ground, Hamilton had emerged from the store and had stared, expressionless, as Chub spun the wheel of the cruiser, tromped on the accelerator, and roared away.

No one spoke to Hamilton of the event that for all intents and purposes had severed him from his family, and naturally, he never brought up the subject himself—not necessarily because he was ashamed, however. It just was not his way to discuss his personal life, not even with people who happened to participate in his personal life, his wives, for instance. In fact, none of his wives learned of the split in the family from Hamilton himself, and there were three of them (wives) who came to live with him in the very house that had been as much the symbol of that split as cause. They found out from their friends and other associates in town, usually when someone, eager to obtain and circulate Hamilton’s point of view, would ask Jenny, the school nurse, or, later, Maureen or, still later, Dora, why on earth her new husband had kicked his mother out of her own house. Jenny, or Maureen or Dora, would demand to know what on earth the person was talking
about, whereupon she would hear the generally accepted version of the story, so that the interviewee became interviewer, first of the friend or associate who happened to have made the query in the first place, then of Hamilton himself.

“Why on earth did you kick your mother out of her own house?” she would ask him finally.

His answer always went something like this: “A, it wasn’t her house. B, it was my house. And C, I didn’t kick her out against her will.” And that’s all he would offer as explanation or description of what had happened that night. If his wife of the moment persisted with questions, he would simply announce that his mother was the only person to whom he would explain or describe what had happened, but only if she first indicated to him that she neither understood nor remembered what had happened. “And so far,” he would say, “she’s given no such indication of stupidity or lapse of memory.” At which point it was clear that the interview had ended. Hamilton would go back to reading the paper or weeding the garden or repairing the toaster, and his wife would promise herself that she would inquire further into the matter, to be sure, but she would ask other people than her husband.