Hamilton Stark (35 page)

“Well, if you asked me, and I’m beginning to think that you wouldn’t, but if you asked me, I’d tell you that I think she’s damned fortunate to be able to think of it as a bad dream. She’s lucky to be able to think at all!”

“Wha…?”

“The man’s dangerous. And surely you see that,”
he said, his voice suddenly lowered.

“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” I laughed. “Dangerous? Perplexing, yes. Frustrating, certainly. But dangerous? No, my dear friend, I think not.”

“You sound irrational, man,”
he informed me quietly. Was there a tainting touch of condescension in his voice? I couldn’t tell. Perhaps he actually believed what he was saying, perhaps to him I did sound irrational. But to me, his assertion that Hamilton was dangerous, and was dangerous specifically to Dora, his ex-wife, was, well, hysterical. No, if anyone sounded irrational this gray predawn, it was my old
friend C., the man I was accustomed to regard as an almost pure thinker.

“C.,” I said calmly, “what’s got you off on this ‘dangerous’ tangent? If you’re afraid for Dora’s welfare, for heaven’s sake, or her physical safety, you might as well be afraid for mine as well,” I said.

“
Indeed
.” His voice was still low, and then very carefully he began to try to “reason” with me, as he put it, though I must say right here and now that what he had to say did not sound particularly reasonable at all. I will concede that he was sincere, however, and that he was not condescending to me. And I do believe that the man was genuinely afraid that Dora, and possibly I myself, were in danger of being killed by Hamilton Stark. Yes, that’s right,
killed
. By Hamilton,
my
Hamilton, good old Ham Stark. My
hero
, for God’s sake!

The way C. saw it, he told me, the very inability of practically every intelligent or sensitive person who came into close contact with Hamilton to determine with confidence whether the man’s behavior was deliberate and intentional or out of control and compulsive—that very inability made the question of whether Hamilton was dangerous or not a very real question, one that any responsible person, as well as any other kind of person who chose to associate with Hamilton, had to try to answer. Then C. went down a quick list of people who, close to Hamilton in various ways, had been unable to determine whether his behavior was intentional or compulsive—Rochelle, who tried so hard for so long, and for all I know may still be trying as she reads this, and Rochelle’s mother, and Annie, Hamilton’s second wife, and probably Alma, his mother, although, from the evidence, one couldn’t be sure, and Dora, and then, of course, me. On the other hand, people like Jody and Chub Blount, probably Sarah and her husband, Sam Mooney, too, and Hamilton’s third and fourth wives,
Jenny the nurse and Maureen the waif, and most of the townspeople who knew Hamilton considerably less than intimately—these people all were convinced that the man was stark raving mad, out of control, dangerous. They had no doubts. Whether they could come up with a sure diagnosis or not didn’t matter; they believed he was ill and that the nature of his illness put them in various kinds of danger.

The rest of us, according to C., couldn’t decide whether the man was ill or transcendently healthy. We were attracted to him quite as much as we were repelled. And that, according to C., made the question of his potential danger a real one. He went on briefly to cite a few famous cases that he thought were historical parallels—Juan Perón, Howard Hughes, Mary Baker Eddy, and several others I’ve forgotten. In all these cases, C. insisted, the very thing one person used as evidence of the hero’s madness, his illness, another person cited as evidence of his genius, his transcendent good health. Usually, this produces a stand-off, a static situation, which no responsible person should abide. (I thought C. did sound a bit self-righteous there, but basically I agreed with him.) At which point, according to C., the person recognizes that he or she is faced with the choice of either becoming one who follows the hero or one who flees from him, and because of the nature of genius on the one hand and this particular type of illness on the other, one is forced to forgo one’s reason, one’s reliance on objectively considered evidence, and rely instead soley on one’s intuition, which, C. said, was precisely what all of us—Rochelle, her mother, Annie, Dora, and I—had attempted to do.

Apparently it was easier for people like Rochelle’s mother and Annie and, eventually, Dora to trust their intuition. Though they never actually were able to conclude, in a syllogistically sound way, that the man they had married was
insane, they nevertheless had ended up acting as if they had so concluded. Though they had all three decided, after the fact, to regard certain bits of his behavior and certain physiological manifestations as evidence of his madness, it was wholly on an intuitive basis that they had reached their conclusion. After all, C. pointed out, the very same bits of behavior and physiological manifestations these three people used to prove their ex-husband’s madness, Rochelle and I had cited as evidence of his genius—the cryptic, self-denying, aphoristic utterances (which, C. reminded me, I had once regarded as “double positives” and a higher form of wisdom); the absurd ritualization of petty tasks and minor events (to me, the absurdity was admirable and was in fact the whole point); his inability to demonstrate “normal” feelings toward others (a willed characteristic, which, I had claimed, functioned mainly to make us more conscious of our “normal” feelings); his growling out loud, the “dead eyes” cited by Dora (to me, evidence of a yogic state of meditation employed by Hamilton to help him cope with deep frustration without having to resort to simple repression); and numerous other minor acts and behavior patterns. The point C. wanted to make, apparently, was that none of this was evidence that could justify our feeling one way or the other about the man. For on that level Hamilton resisted penetration or analysis. One could not confidently project oneself onto him, which, said C., is indeed as much characteristic of genius as it is of madness, for we are, none of us, one or the other. Rochelle and I, C. believed, had taken longer than the others to decide one way or the other, had continued to entertain the question, letting one ambiguous, open-ended image of him fold into another just as the first image seemed about to close, because we were probably slightly more intelligent than they, or at least were more worldly-wise in the way of paradoxes.

Up to this point I had not found it especially difficult to agree with my old friend, and actually, as the conversation progressed (it was more a monologue than a conversation), I had felt grateful to him for taking the time and thought to put the matter in this particular perspective. In my quest for an understanding of Hamilton Stark, C.’s point of view was still of value to me. The bedroom had gradually filled with a milky light, and because of the peculiar stillness, I knew that it would soon be snowing. I lay back down and propped the receiver against the pillow next to my ear and continued to listen.

But, unfortunately, this was where C. started to assert a point of view that, to my mind, not only revealed an intolerable intellectual arrogance but actually undermined his carefully stated previous position as well. Essentially, what he started to do was cite what, to him, was clear-cut evidence for the madness of Hamilton Stark, what he, C., called
“a particularly virulent form of madness.”
I listened with dismay as he described Hamilton’s absurd overritualization of petty tasks and acts as a compensatory device for his failure to participate any longer in his society’s “normal” social rites. Then C. went on to recall for me Hamilton’s youthful belief,
“on rather suspiciously flimsy evidence,”
that he had killed his own father in a quarrel. That, plus his unseemly rush to supplant his father later, after the old man’s first stroke, by taking over legal title to the property, indicated to C. the presence of a
“deep and unresolved oedipal conflict.”
As further evidence of this unresolved oedipal conflict, he also pointed to what he described as Hamilton’s strong need to keep his mother at a safe distance, even going so far as to
“toss the old woman out into the cold”
and to withhold all expressions of feeling for her, even at her death.

By now, quite frankly, I was too appalled to stop him. And thus C. went on uninterruptedly, dragging out one bit of
so-called evidence after another, each time reasserting his diagnosis of “
unresolved oedipal conflict,”
sounding more and more like a college psych major. I could barely believe what I was hearing! There was the pattern of Hamilton’s passively aggressive stance toward the women who became his wives—why there were so many of them, C. insisted. There was his inability to declare his love for any one of them, which, conjoined with his inability to say that he did
not
love any one of them and his apparent belief that the only alternative to loving someone, in particular a woman, was to hate him, or, in particular, her. And then there was
“that gravestone business,”
as C. called it, which indicated to him that the man was by now dealing with only barely repressed desires to remove the object of his obsession, the object of his
“unresolved oedipal conflict,”
by wishing her dead. And so
“naturally,”
C. had felt a rush of concern for Dora’s welfare, for with Hamilton’s mother finally dead and buried, his dark obsession would turn to the next closest substitute, his wife, and even if she were his most recent ex-wife, she would still be the next closest substitute for his dead mother.
“Murder, my friend, is always the madman’s way out of an overpowering love-hate relationship.”
Hamilton was giving evidence, to C., at least, of an increasing inability to sustain any relationship at all with a woman, as shown by the increased pace of his marriages and divorces.
“How can I not be deeply concerned with the welfare, even for the very life, of any woman who falls prey to the charm of his enigmatic ways and his manipulative passivity, especially now, when he seems so close to losing what little ability he has had in the past of repressing his murderous impulses?”

How, indeed? I thought sarcastically. Yes, how? Oh bitter disappointment! Oh solitude! Oh inevitable betrayal! Oh silence, exile and cunning!

“You there?”

Oh lost and by the wind grieved point of view!

“Are you still there?”

Oh deep-wounding reason! Oh overreaching Apollonian perspective!

“Hello? Operator? Anyone there? I think I’ve been cut off. Operator? I think I’ve been cut off. I think the connections broken. Operator? Is anyone there?”

“‘A fine setting for a fit of despair,’ it occurred to him, “‘if I were only standing here by accident instead of design.’”

—
Kafka
, The Castle

“Let me lie here in the snowfield and die warm.”

—
Stone-People-Long-Song, Stave 12 (Abenooki Creation Epic, LaFamme and Brôlet, trans.)

T
HERE WAS NOTHING LEFT
for me to do but return to A.’s home in the town of B., locate the man, seek him out and
face him there, and gather from that confrontation the evidence and information, the data, that would let me rest easily with my having at last rejected C.’s point of view. I was extremely distressed, perhaps even desperate. Everything was either falling apart or else was about to come together. I felt that if I stayed at home this bleak morning and continued to write my novel, for instance, or cooked a ham or read a bit of Livy, by nightfall everything indeed would have fallen apart. If, on the other hand, I drove myself across the center of the state to the town of B. and scrupulously searched A.’s house and adjacent grounds, I just might be able to discover a clue to where he was, and then I could follow the clue to where he was and meet with him there, my mind racked by dread and paradox, and the meeting would somehow set me at ease again.

Surely, I thought as I lay there in my bed and slowly put the receiver back on the telephone base next to me, surely, this is the final test of my faith. Never again will I ask myself to question the very sanity of my hero, and thus my own sanity as well. Never again, I swore, would I permit myself to be so torn, so divided, so alone. By the end of this day, I would have committed myself to following and, to the best of my abilities, emulating the man, or else I would have purged myself of him forever, would have freed myself at last from the glittering beauty of his image.

Thus my desperation and dread and fatigue were mixed with a certain gladness, for I knew that after today, one way or the other, my agony of self-division would be ended. For a second I wondered if the whole thing had been engineered by A. himself, as a final test of my loyalty and spiritual insight. But I quickly shoved that thought away. After today I would no longer be asked to plague myself with such fearful speculation, and knowing that, I also knew that any speculation
today was pointless, was but the idle habit of my deeply troubled mind. Once a divided mind foresees resolution as inevitable, it no longer has sufficient cause to be divided.

I bounded from my bed and got dressed quickly in a woolen shirt and heavy flannel trousers—after having first glanced out the window at the cold, overcast day. It hadn’t yet started to snow, but clearly it was about to. Neglecting to shave or even to brush my teeth, I hurried downstairs to the kitchen, where I sat down and laced on my boots, pulled on my overcoat, cap, and driving gloves, and walked quickly, briskly, to the garage.

By eight-fifteen I was in Concord, headed west toward the town of B. As I skirted the downtown area and began the gradual climb away from the Merrimack Valley to the Suncook just beyond, the snow started falling, scattered flakes, hard and wind-blown. They came like bits of ash at first, tiny, dry flakes, isolate, drifting slowly to the ground as if settling to the bottom of a motionless sea. Soon, though, the snow was falling in swirls and waves that blew from the roadside in powdery sprays and fantails as the car, winding downhill from the ridge west of Concord, reached the Suncook River and brushed along the road that followed the river north and west toward the narrow uplifted head of the valley, where, near the horizon, I could make out the dark gray hump of Blue Job Mountain. Here the river, where it meandered, broadened, and then slowed, was frozen from bank to bank. The ice was invisible beneath the thick blanket of old snow. Sledges, sleds, snowmobiles and people afoot had left trails, paths and tracks across the smooth white skin of the river, scribbles and doodles that, from the road, looked random and pointless. Doubtless, when they were first laid down, the tracks and trails had followed a deliberate pattern, had logically sought a goal—just as had the black, curling ribbon on the road itself, which, seen from a map, would
also look random, pointless, dropped from the sky to lie however it fell, as if only accidentally tying together two distant, named points on that grid. But, in fact the road had not been randomly drawn. It had been laid down atop the still narrower, unpaved, wagon route that nineteenth-century Yankee traders had built to carry granite and lumber from the mountains to the sea, and that road in turn had been laid down atop the old market road built by eighteenth-century farmers in the valley, who, in their turn, had been following the still older footpaths that the earliest settlers had worn smooth, their paths laid atop the Indian paths, which had followed the migratory movements of the animals, the deer and moose, the bear, and even, before these, the bison. And the animals had been following the river, this very river before me now, its smooth white surface crisscrossed and scribbled over, like a used sheet of paper, with the tracks, trails and footpaths following the invisible rivers, valleys and ridges of the makers’ whims and impulses.