Outer Banks (17 page)

 

Y
OUR FATHER HAD
piles, which was unusual for a man as young as he was then.

 

Y
OUR FATHER WAS
too big.

 

Y
OUR FATHER WAS
afraid of going to the dentist. Also, he refused to see a doctor when he was sick or for his piles, and he refused to take medicines of any kind. Even aspirin. He was convinced that it would only make things worse. He always said, “If things can get worse, they will, but there's no reason to make it easy for them.”

 

Y
OUR FATHER WAS
afraid that his penis was too small, and in a way he was right, because, while his body was unusually large, his penis was normal-sized. Unfortunately, because he asked me, I told him that one night. He never made love to me afterward, but that came fairly late in the pregnancy anyhow.

 

Y
OUR FATHER SAID
he loved his mother, but once when he was drunk he started to cry and roll around on the floor, yelling about how much he hated her.

 

Y
OUR FATHER WAS
not a happy man. But he said it was on principle, and that it was for him a moral principle, what he called a “moral imperative,” and that was why he tried so hard to make other people unhappy too. I could never tell for sure when he was joking, but I think he was joking then. But he may not have been. He certainly acted as though he thought everyone should be unhappy, that it was for him a moral thing and, therefore, by making people unhappy he was somehow making them better.

 

Y
OUR FATHER WAS
the worst thing that ever happened to me.

 

Y
OUR FATHER REFUSED
to admit that he was lonely, even though he had no friends he could confide in. But he said that was on principle, too, I mean the part about being lonely. I think he would've liked to have had a few friends, so long as he could've kept on being lonely at the same time. But he had too many principles.

 

Y
OUR FATHER HATED
me.

 

O
H
, G
OD, HOW
he hated me.

T
HROUGHOUT THE PRECEDING
monologue, Rochelle listened attentively to her mother, motionless and almost completely silent. Or at least that is how she would later describe herself. She smoked cigarettes one after the other. When she had smoked one down to the filter, she would crush it out in the seashell ashtray on her mother's Danish coffee table. Crossing and uncrossing her long legs with that unself-conscious, almost inevitable grace of hers, she never once took her alert eyes off her mother's expressive, changing face. The only sounds in the room were the continual drone of the air conditioner and the soft, southern voice of Rochelle's mother and now and then the noise of a car in the midday Florida heat slipping past the apartment building.

It's difficult to know how the content of her mother's jeremiad affected Rochelle. We have only her self-description, offered much later, when her attitude toward her father had been altered considerably by the things she had heard from her father's four other wives, from the testimony of numerous people, including myself, who had known him over the years in one capacity or another, from a lengthy interview with his dying mother and
another with his sisters and a brother-in-law, and when she herself had, as they say, “gotten in touch with her anger.”

One could easily speculate about Rochelle's reaction to the news (and at that time it
was
news) that her father was in many ways a self-centered, immature, violent, cruel, eccentric, and possibly insane man. But I'm afraid that in my own case any speculation would be influenced by my personal relationship with her, and thus, however innocently, I would tend to work toward evoking in the reader deep feelings of pity and admiration for this amazing young woman. Also, I'm not at all familiar with the nature of Rochelle's relationship with her mother and therefore cannot confidently say that she did not have some secret use for refusing to believe her mother, i.e., that she did not, perhaps, need to think of her mother as a liar, as a bitter, middle-aged woman filled with self-pity, a mother in need of a villain to justify the absence of her husband throughout her daughter's childhood and adolescence.

Suffice it to say, then, that I'm not the best person to be in the position of presenting, with anything that approximates objectivity, Rochelle's emotional reaction to her mother's testimony concerning the character of her father. Frankly, I am too much in love with Rochelle to be of much good to anyone in this particular matter, except possibly to Rochelle herself, and probably not even that. I admire the woman, and I say it with practically no qualification whatsoever, and because I am aware of how deeply and sharply she has suffered and how she has endured with intelligence, dignity and selflessness throughout, I am filled almost to overflowing with compassion for her. Also, I confess that for several years I have desired her love in return, have sought her favor in every way I could imagine, taking advantage of every slight opportunity to court her that has come my way—and as a result, I have had to watch myself lie for her, to know that I was, on certain occasions, violating all principles,
even those few principles I had once thought inviolable. I say this without apology. I offer it merely as a warning.

My vulnerability to a woman like Rochelle is well known. Or at least it's well known to me. Many men have a weakness (I should say, a “weakness”) for women with long, wildly flowing, deep red hair. And many men have a similar “weakness” for women who are tall, as tall or even taller than they themselves are, and who are thin without being gaunt, large without being big or heavy in any way. And, too, many men have a “weakness” for women who are well shaped, neatly and symmetrically proportioned. I am surely one of each of these types of men, and if that were all there was to my beloved Rochelle, I would be safe, as it were, and could report to you anything I might believe to be true of her without having to feel that I might be deceiving you to further my own rather special interests. But Rochelle is so much more than merely a tall, well-shaped woman with long red hair, that I am consequently that much less a reliable witness to her words and feelings.

I realize that so far I've not said a thing about Rochelle's character or her spiritual nature or intellect. Nevertheless, I would like to linger a little longer on what might be called her “body.” She has skin on her body that is as smooth and white as a fine young onion, or as the flesh of an apple, or as an abalone shell worn smooth by a century's tides. Dark green (blue-spruce green, actually), her eyes are tear-shaped, slightly downturned, with long, dark lashes. Her nose is long, straight, slender, the vertical arc that insists on the perfect symmetry of her face. Her mouth is neither large nor small, but full and expressive nonetheless, with a sharp, slightly protruding upper lip, a pouting lower lip, and large, white, even teeth that seem as ready to nibble as quick to bite. Her forehead, cheeks and chin are smooth, symmetrical, but at the same time sharply defined by angles which are clearly visible in all but the severest light.
Ears—small, a happy maze of tender and delicate whorls, full-lobed. Throat—slender, long, white, and at the base, a mauve birthmark the size and approximate shape of a candle flame. And I have kissed that flame.

 

(P
LEASE NOTE THAT
I do not believe it would be appropriate for me to speculate on, or even to report what I know to be the case with regard to, Rochelle Stark's character, her spiritual nature, or her intellect. It seems to me that these attributes would be better portrayed, more interestingly and realistically portrayed, in action,
in medias res
, as it were, and therefore I will put off such portrayal until later in the narrative, when my beloved Rochelle's developed inner life can be made manifest more naturally and convincingly.)

I
N
C
HAPTER
F
OUR
proper, Rochelle's mother—whose name, by the way, is Trudy Brewer Stark (she retained her married name after the divorce)—mentioned in passing that her daughter Rochelle was at present “hitchhiking all over the country, sleeping by the side of the road and all, not afraid of anything or anyone…” From the text, it's also apparent, or should be, that at the time of the mother's speaking the daughter is approximately twenty-two years old. As it happens, this interview was made four years ago, which would make Rochelle twenty-six now, a figure that is consistent with the information she has personally made available to me on different occasions.

It is true, as her mother claimed, that when she was twenty-two Rochelle was traveling about the country in a somewhat casual manner. Or so it seemed. She carried all her worldly goods on her back in a large Kelty expedition pack, slept in a sleeping bag at the side of the road or wherever she happened to find herself at nightfall, and after a fashion “lived off the land” by shoplifting at supermarkets and fruit stands, stealing from gar
dens and orchards, and, whenever possible, picking wild berries, fruit and nuts.

She lived this way for about a year, most of which she spent retracing the footsteps of her father's fearful flight from New Hampshire, his wanderings that followed the desertion of his wife and infant daughter in Lakeland, Florida, and, when he discovered that in fact he had not killed his father and that his long hegira had been essentially in vain, his swift return home to New Hampshire.

Rochelle's journey, a fact-finding tour more than a hegira or pilgrimage, was not in vain. She returned home to her mother's apartment in Lakeland with the information she had gone out for. Essentially, the information was geographic and social, material that would help her realize her ambition to write a realistic novel about a man who was very much like her father, Hamilton Stark. She was young, and she had not traveled much, and naturally she had felt somewhat intimidated by the task she had set herself, especially when it came to writing about a character who had traveled rather widely in his youth and had spent most of his life locked inside the social confines of the working class. But her year-long note-taking journey reassured her that she would have little difficulty handling the geographic and social realism that her novel, as she had conceived it, would require. This was the point at which she began her series of interviews with her father's five ex-wives, several of his friends, and his mother, sisters and brother-in-law. As I have mentioned, the interview with her own mother was the first in this series.

I
N
C
HAPTER
F
OUR
, which was narrated by Rochelle's mother, Trudy Brewer Stark, there were numerous references to Hamilton Stark's belief that he had murdered his father. Naturally, this belief was of considerable moment and consequence to Hamilton, a fact not lost on his daughter, Rochelle, when, some twenty-two or more years later, she began to write a novel about a man based closely on her father.

Therefore, since this episode has considerable bearing on the meaning of this, my own novel, and since Rochelle has evidenced herself to be an author far more naturally gifted than myself in portraying the circumstances, characters, emotions and actions that comprise the episode, I am including here her Chapter Eight, entitled “Return and Depart,” which concerns itself most particularly with the events and circumstances that led up to Hamilton's “murder” of his father.

Note: There have been obvious name changes, as mentioned briefly in my Chapter Three, “Three Tales from His Childhood”—her Alvin Stock is actually my Hamilton Stark, who is, of course, my friend A. Rochelle's Feeney in “Return and
Depart” is Hamilton's friend, a man who in my novel remains nameless; he is not, as might be thought, the character C., nor is he myself; simply, I do not have a character in my novel who corresponds to Feeney, nor do I have such a person in my life. Nor does A. have one in his. In fact, Feeney may be a pure invention. The girl named Betsy Cooper is my Nancy Steele; in A.'s life, her name is B. Crawford is Rochelle's name for the place I have called Barnstead, which in A.'s life is the town of B. All three places happen to be located in New Hampshire. Rochelle's Loudon is the state capital, Concord, called that both in my novel and in A.'s life. As the chapter begins, Alvin (Hamilton, A.) has been discharged from the Air Force (the Army Engineers Corps, both for Hamilton and for A.), is twenty-one years old in 1963 (1948 for Hamilton and A.), and is returning home from Vietnam (Fort Devens, Massachusetts) to Crawford (Barnstead, B.).

A further note: The reader may wonder why I did not include with my earlier selections from Rochelle's novel (specifically in Chapter Three, with the three tales from his childhood) a schematic breakdown of the name and place correspondences between the two novels and “reality,” such as I have included here in the note above. My decision was essentially founded on stylistic premises, but also I did not want to introduce too many characters into the novel too early for even the most organized and devoted reader to keep separate from one another. But the reader might well ask why, then, didn't I choose simply to continue here with my earlier practice of using the same names, the same as in my novel, for the excerpts from Rochelle's novel? Yes, I would answer, but then the reader might tend to believe that both Rochelle and I were writing about the same character, Hamilton Stark, when, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Therefore, I reasoned, at some point I would be obliged to make the distinctions explicit, and this seemed to me the appropriate point for it.

Chapter 8

R
ETURN AND
D
EPART

 

Alvin came home to Crawford, a veteran, not a hero, for there was no war just then. He had spent all his discharge money traveling east and slowly north across the country, seeing his friends home, visiting a few days with each, eating large meals with the family, meeting the girlfriend, taking her friend to a movie or on a blind date, drinking afterward with his buddy until the local bars closed, and then catching the morning train, bus or plane as far as his next friend's home town, where he would repeat the ritual. It was a casual yet methodical itinerary, one the group of young veterans had worked out together with affectionate care during their last few weeks in Vietnam. Its logical and necessary conclusion, that Alvin would arrive home in Crawford, New Hampshire, last, alone, with no one left to pass through his home town on his way to someplace farther east or north, was a geographical accident. Consequently, when finally Alvin had been greeted at the Loudon bus station by his own family and in Crawford by his local friends, had put away his blue uniform, and had unpacked his duffel, his entire experience as an American soldier abroad as one of the military “advisers” in Southeast Asia was placed neatly into his past, as if into a trunk, and was stored away with his uniform in the attic.

This act, however, was not solely the result of an accident of geography (his having been discharged on the West Coast and returning home to a place farther north and east than that of any of his friends), though that was of course of some importance. But rather, it was also something he himself desired—to compartmentalize his past. He did not want any of his old Air Force buddies dropping by to spend several days drinking and talking about the past. He did not want any of his previous life overlapping his present and smearing onto his future. In a way, it was how he made himself available to himself: he now consciously thought of his
past as a batch of differently shaped and variously colored boxes or blocks, all strung together in simple chronological order, like a chain of islands that happened to fall along a single meridian or degree of latitude. Among these blocks, Alvin numbered: Early Childhood; Early Adolescent Period of Self-Recrimination; The Religious Conversion Period; The Two Years He Wanted To Become a Minister; The Year He Wanted To Go to College; Giving Up; and In the Air Force.
^*
To Alvin, no coherent relationship existed among these blocks of time except, of course, that of simple sequence. And by the time he was twenty-two, he was beginning to feel comfortable with that absence of relation. In fact, he was learning how to utilize and even to depend upon it—just to keep moving.

“Well, what d'you plan on doing now?” his father asked him across the table.

It was at breakfast, Alvin's first morning home. Having served him bacon, fried eggs, orange juice and coffee, his mother was now bustling silently, smilingly around the kitchen. “I don't know,” Alvin said. “I just thought I'd call up a few people, maybe go see some old friends. You know…”

“I don't mean this morning.”

“Oh.”

“I mean,
do.
For a living. Or are you just up early because it's a nice fall day?”

Alvin wasn't sure he understood. “Where are the girls?” he asked his mother.

“Oh, they're still sleeping, Alvin. You forget, they're teenagers, and this is Saturday. No school.” She smiled apologetically.

His father snorted.

“Yeah, well, I guess I'm just excited about being home and all.”

“What're you planning to
do
now?” his father asked again.

Alvin put down his coffee cup and lit a cigarette. Inhaling deeply, he stared down at his half-emptied cup. “Pa,” he said, “I don't think I know for sure what you're asking.”

The older man looked straight ahead, across the table and out the window. “For
work.
A man has to
do
something. You're a
man
now, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then. What're you going to
do?
”

Alvin's mother had stopped her busy movement and now, looking down at her hands, stood motionless by the stove. None of the three people in the room was looking at any of the others. A gust of wind cracked against the house and whistled along its sides from north to south. Outside, the sky was stone dry and blue, a cool, windy, October morning. The ground was gone all to browns and yellows, and the trees had turned violently red, orange, yellow, purple. The dry leaves, about to fall from the branches to the parchmentlike ground, were clattering noisily in the wind and could be heard even from inside the house.

“Well,” Alvin began, “I've thought about it. A lot. And I thought I'd drive over to Loudon on Monday and see if I could get a job working for the state. Department of Public Works, maybe. Then I'd take it from there—I mean, about where I'd be living and all, and when.” Alvin spoke slowly, with care, obviously tense, as if he were lying.

“Okay. But before you do that,” his father said, “I want you to consider this.” The older man was still staring out the window. “Say you come to work for me again. But not part-time, not as a helper. As a pipefitter this time. Gradually, working together, we can take on a few bigger jobs. Schools. Maybe a hospital or something. Apartment houses. You know a few things about engineering now, and I know a lot about installation.” He paused, as if waiting for Alvin to answer.

When his son remained silent, he went on. “We can get capital from the bank or the government. In a few years we can turn
this one-man plumbing business into a regular contracting outfit. Fifteen, twenty, thirty men laying pipe. Maybe doing some good-sized jobs all over the state.”

Again, the older man paused, as if to gauge his son's response, and getting none, continued speaking, but more rapidly. “Here's the deal. You go to work for me on Monday, day after tomorrow, as an apprentice pipefitter. I can get you into the union. Easy. The Loudon local. I've already talked to the business agent over there. I'll pay you apprentice wages, what anybody else'd pay you. It'll take you five years before you can get your journeyman's license. If you're still at it then, and if you've given all you've got to make this into a solid, medium-sized plumbing and heating company, I'll make you an equal partner in the business. Where it goes from there depends on what we both decide. Together. In fifteen years or so I'll retire. Then the whole thing'll be yours. Assuming you're still at it and want it.” He finally looked over at Alvin's face. “How does that sound to you?” he asked somberly.

Alvin sighed and rubbed his cigarette out in his saucer. He looked up and saw that both his parents were looking down at him, waiting for an answer. “Starting Monday, eh?”

“I already spoke to the union brass over in Loudon. They've got a couple of openings for new apprentices coming up this month. They'll hold one of them for you, if you want it.”

“Five years?”

“Five years. On the job as a pipefitter early every morning. But doing a hell of a lot of estimating, too. And paperwork, engineering at nights and on weekends, too—making this operation into a regular contracting business. You can go on living here if you want to. Or you can get your own place. Up to you.”

“Can I have till tomorrow, before I give an answer?”

“Sure. Take all the time you need. Between now and Monday morning.” That was a joke, and Alvin's father smiled to indicate it.

Alvin laughed. “Ha!”

Then his father got up from the table, put on his old green cap and coat, and went out the door. After a few seconds, Alvin heard the pickup truck start and rattle past the house, down the dirt road toward town.

“Has he been planning this a long time?” Alvin asked his mother, who had gone back to work, this time at the sink, washing dishes.

“A
long
time,” she answered over her shoulder.

 

H
E ACCEPTED HIS
father's offer. It didn't appear to him that he had much of a choice, so he accepted the offer with a certain reluctance and with the type of resentment that gets felt by everyone concerned but never expressed by anyone at all. He worked for his father—dutifully, methodically, punctually—but never more than was specifically required of him. His father told him, “Far as I'm concerned, you're just another apprentice pipefitter. A helper. And I'll treat you the same's I treat anyone else I hire out of the local. And if you don't do your job, pal, you can pick up your pay and head on down the road. Either you cut it, or you're down the road. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Alvin thought that was fair enough as long as he, for his part, was free to treat his father the same way he'd treat any boss he happened to be working for, any foreman whose crew he ended up on. He thought that, he decided it, but he never mentioned it to his father, his employer, his foreman.

The offer, then, almost as soon as it had been made and accepted, was corrupted. The bargain, sealed, was instantly broken open again—with the father treating his son like an employee but demanding in return filial loyalty and commitment, the son treating his father like an employer but resenting any demands placed on him which were not covered specifically in the union contract. Neither party, naturally, was satisfied. Each felt he was being cheated by the other.

Throughout the fall they worked together this way—father and son, boss and helper. Most of the work they did was small
repair jobs, the kind of work Alvin's father had always done, jobs which Alvin hated because the work was often difficult, usually dirty, and frequently unacceptable to the customer. They replaced burst water pipes, cleaned out the drainage system in a supermarket, and installed several new oil burners in old furnaces. They repaired half a dozen water pumps, countless leaking faucets, clogged traps and toilets; installed washing machine drains, garbage disposals, drainage vents, lavatories, laundry tubs and bathtubs. They built furnace fireboxes, set toilets, installed radiators, piped up hot water heaters, and repaired sump pump systems. And in practically every case they were working on the plumbing or heating system of an old house, renovating or, worse, often merely repairing facilities, fixtures, equipment and pipes that had been used for several generations. Consequently, the work was filthy—in cobwebs, dust, soot, mucky water, shit and garbage. And it was always difficult, exacting work, trying to make an old piece of equipment work like a new one, trying to install pipes and fixtures where an architect had planned a closet or a stairwell, trying to run sharp-edged metal heating ducts where there was no basement, no light, and barely enough room between the floor joists and the cold ground for a man to crawl in. And because it was repair or renovation work, it inevitably took more time than the customer expected it to take, the equipment never functioned quite as well as it did when it was brand-new, and more parts and material were used than the customer had thought necessary. “Why can't you guys use more of the pipe that was already
there?
” was the typical complaint. And of course the bill always came to more than the customer thought the job was worth. Exhausted, filthy, Alvin would write out the bill and hand it to the customer, who would look at it, cluck his tongue, and say, “Jee-
suz!
I used to want my kid to grow up to be a doctor, but now I think I'll tell him to become a
plumber!
” In a way that Alvin couldn't quite name, conversations like that always left him feeling slightly humiliated.