The Sunlight Dialogues (24 page)

“Dad,” Tag said.

Then Hodge’s mother was standing in the doorway, a little behind Millie, wringing her hands, saying: “Politics!”

Hodge said, though he would have gone on with it if the women weren’t there, “Well, the world will make out.”

“Will, I want to talk to you,” Millie said, pushing at the screen.

He ignored her.

The Old Man studied him for a long time, or so it seemed: scrutinized his memory of him. Then he turned his head slowly and looked at Tag. Suddenly, as if discovering something—some terrible and holy secret that had slipped his mind—he smiled. He said, “Yes, no doubt you will. The world will learn. Sure as day.”

Hodge could not explain, afterward, the peculiar power of that moment for him. The words were trifling, absurd if one looked them over too closely. The expression on the Old Man’s face was not uplifting, not glorious, though it is true that his slightly shaking chin jutted upward and out as though he were about to fly. An image for a poster. Nevertheless, Hodge was powerfully moved, jolted as if by electric shock of love: the head ten inches from his own was suddenly gigantic, and looking into the hairy ear Hodge seemed to see past all galaxies into the void where, behold, there was light. All the rest of his life he would not be able to speak of that moment without a sharp upsurge of mysterious, perhaps childish elation, and also fear, and all the rest of his life he would be troubled, occasionally, by a new attack of that extraordinary feeling: a sense of the world transfigured, himself transformed to the pure idea of older brother in a fated house, a family destined for glory or terrible sorrow, he couldn’t say which. He did not go out in pursuit of such moments. He fled them, if anything. They thrilled every fiber of his body, shifted his mind to a higher gear than it normally used (as if some door opened, as doors occasionally opened in his dreams, revealing, beyond some mundane room, vast recesses obscurely lighted and charged with warm wind and a deep red color, beautiful and alarming): he thought them dangerous, possibly mortal, like the shocking pleasure (he imagined) of falling from a roof. Or rather, to speak precisely, he for the most part thought about them nothing whatever, merely dreaded them in the back of his mind, and went on with the work at hand.

The Congressman would have done the same. Two hours before that conversation on the porch—it was this that Millie had been eager to tell him, this that had shattered his younger brother—his father had suffered a heart attack. Hodge’s mother was badly shaken, Millie excited, but the Old Man, even before the doctor could make it from Alexander, was coolly talking politics. And not to evade reality. To Hodge’s father, politics was more interesting than dying. Dying (if he was dying, which as it turned out he was not, yet) was merely an annoying—a disgusting—interruption.

Neither could Hodge explain even now, over thirty years later, what it was that the nations—and he himself, perhaps—were going to learn. He’d long ago quit worrying about it. The troubles had come, his father had been right enough about that—both international troubles and private—and were coming still. But they managed, Hodge and the world. If his father had discovered the formula that would quiet their unrest (and perhaps he had: he’d given a bewildering emphasis to those final words, “Sure as day”), he’d taken the secret with him to the grave. They would muddle through without it.

And so, renouncing cynicism, in the back of his mind he had taken the road Will Jr would take: emulation. Had allowed himself to be tyrannized by the Old Man’s achievements. It was no one’s fault—the fault of a ghost: the casual effect of time, of inevitable change, generations of Presbyterian ministers, gentleman farmers, public servants, lawyers, judges, all rising together in the apparition of one man who in his prime had a quick, deep brain and the eyes of a Moses and a voice like ricocheting thunder calling down God’s wrath on Federalization. The brain was gone from the light of the sun, had shattered into its specialties in the Old Man’s sons and daughter, but the eyes were still living, and the voice. Will Jr had the voice; Hodge had it himself, and Ben and Tag—in fact every one of his four brothers and almost all their sons; but you seldom heard it fully opened now, except when they laughed or, meeting at a wedding or a funeral, argued politics. It was the image, ghost, archaic (as even Will Jr knew) but still compelling, that had once made Hodge seem to himself a fool and now made him a disappointment to his elder son. He accepted it, now that the partnership was so much water gone under the bridge. For Hodge was a singularly reasonable man, as his father, despite stubbornness, had been before him. (The stiffness of the Old Man’s back—exaggerated in the faded photograph which hung, thoroughly inconspicuous, centered above faded, obsolete world maps and a 1937 chart of the kings and chief ministers of the sundry nations, behind Hodge’s desk—was an effect merely of time and place: a matter of style. Hodge, too, and even Will, had flaring nostrils, coarse hair in the nose and ears and curling on the backs of the fingers, but no stranger would have mistaken them for avenging angels, trumpets of Justice in days of rank corruption. The times were wrong, not incorrupt and not out of joint but subtly mellowed, decayed to ambiguity: If right and wrong were as clear as ever, they were clear chiefly on a private scale, and though God was in his Heaven yet, He had somewhat altered, had become archetypal of a new, less awesome generation of fathers: Wisdom watching the world with half-averted eyes, chewing His ancient lip thoughtfully, mildly, venturing an occasional rueful smile.)

He had nibbled the apple, pulpy as it was, to the bright black seeds. He wondered where it had come from and why he had not eaten it before. “Client,” he thought. “Some farmer.” And then: “Odd.” If he were not Hodge—invincible Hodge!—he would have thought of Snow White, poison; or of Adam and Eve; or of love grown older. He thought: “Snow-apple,” and was distinctly pleased that he still remembered the name.

Beyond the closed Venetian blinds, in the parking lot between the office and the back wall of the Methodist church, small children were playing a singing game he remembered from a long, long time ago:

McGregor got up and he gave her a thump,
Gave her a thump, gave her a thump. .
.

Again the rueful smile came. Italian kids. He’d seen them there often, glancing over his spectacles briefly, absent-mindedly, as he passed the window with a sheaf of papers for Betty in the outer office to sort and file. But he couldn’t remember having noticed before what sort of game they played. He wondered, briefly, whether Will would remember it too, and whether he would associate the game with the long green hills of Stony Hill Farm or with some other place, Albany, say, in Hodge’s belated law-school days, or Buffalo, or Leroy, or Ben’s place. The question entered and left his mind in a single instant, no more than a trifling impulse of the blood, a question he would no more have asked if Will were there than he would pause now to consider it. The world it came from was not his world. That was his immunity to the Old Man’s power, and also it was his weakness. His mind glanced from the children playing in the parking lot to the sooty church window, one small pane of which was broken, to the sill he’d forgotten to fix at home. He felt himself at the edge of some unpleasant recollection, but the instant he knew it was there it was gone, and he was waiting again, reading the scrawled note on the corner of his desk:
Obtain the release of Nick S.
On a smaller sheet there was another note, in Betty’s hand:
Check ins. pol. on converted School Bus for Ben.

Ben his brother.

Mortgaged to his ears for rolling stock already—big farm equipment, four tractors, a pick-up truck, a station wagon, two motorcycles, and now a school bus. His legacy from their father was one of the unluckiest; or so it seemed, from time to time, to Will Hodge Sr. (Ben would stand in his yard at the Other Place—as they all still called it, even now that Stony Hill was gone—a man still handsome though grown red-faced and heavy at fifty, his head tipped back, looking through the lower halves of his thick, dark-tinted steel-rimmed glasses at the newly delivered corn chopper, or the twenty-year-old wired-together baler, and the look on his face and in his stance was like a child’s, solemn, deeply satisfied, detached as a sunlit mystical vision from the dying tamaracks, tumble-down barns, and the high, orange-yellow old brick house that labored in vain to establish for Ben Hodge his spiritual limits. There were honeybees in the walls of the house, and in the bedroom where Ben and Vanessa slept in the Congressman’s grand old walnut bed there were coffee cans to collect the honey that dripped down the walls from the windowsills; set squarely in the center of the once-large kitchen was a bathroom (vented to the kitchen) that Ben had put in for the comfort of his (and Will Hodge’s) mother in her last year; and in the kitchen and pantry and livingroom walls there were plaster patches to recall the time when Ben Hodge would sit up late with his twenty-two, killing the rats his traps missed before they could nibble the sleeping old woman’s fingers. Destructions unnerving, in some metaphysical way unlawful, to Hodge. For if Hodge was by temperament a mender, a servant of substance, Ben was a dreamer, a poet, an occasional visiting preacher at country churches from here to good news where. He was blind to the accelerating demolition all around him, or saw it in his own queer terms, inscrutable to all but his good wife and, perhaps, children, both his own and the numerous children he and Vanessa took in. Among them Will and Luke. (So that it had been as Hodge had expected it would be—had even, strange to say, hoped it would be: the image had been reinforced for them both, the magnificent ghost of a lost time and place revitalized, made to seem fit for a world it could never survive in except by a calculated destruction of body for soul: a world well lost for poetry, for the beauty of sleek or angular machines, big motors roaring for as long as they lasted, profligate generosity, family talk. Well lost—the barns Hodge’s father had built, the trees he’d planted, the dew-white vineyard—but lost, past recovery. Lost.)

“Hah,” he said.

There was someone at the door.

Quickly, slyly, he dropped the apple core in the basket by his desk.

3

He knew the moment he opened the door that something serious had happened and that he was, himself, in some way, accused. The two policemen he’d known for years—stooped, bald Clumly and Dominic Sangirgonio—stood on the steps suspiciously casual, solemn-faced as Chinamen, not talking, looking at him as though they did not know him. Clumly looked drained, like a man just told he will be dead before morning. His eyes were full of rage. Clumly nodded, an act of will, and gave a smile-like twitch of the colorless lips on the face as white as a grub’s. The ice-blue eyes glittered. “Morning, Will,” he said loudly, as though Hodge were deaf. He bristled with impatience, and Hodge had a feeling the man’s mind was miles away, sorrowing, or burning after vengeance.

“Good morning,” Hodge said. He slid his lower lip over his upper, instinctively cautious, like a man in a room with a lion. He had a brief, peculiarly clear sense of the motionless, deserted street, the curb where a little while ago Will Jr’s Chevy had been, the sidewalk dappled with the shadows of leaves, the two men’s shoes on the rubber-matted steps. At last, grimly, Hodge smiled, annoyed at that infernal sense of himself as a small boy forever ready to be guilty of forgotten crimes. But Clumly, too, was like a boy—a man of over sixty, close to retirement. He stood angrily tapping the side of his pantleg with his hat—his white, perfectly hairless head still cocked. He wore his uniform, as always. Miller, too, wore his uniform, the wide belt, the gun. He folded his arms.

“Catching up on some work?” Clumly asked ferociously, looking past Hodge into the office. He looked like a bear, bending to peer in past Hodge.

“No, not really,” Hodge said, considering again. “Come in.”

Clumly glanced at him, then nodded, a jerk of the head. “We won’t be a minute,” he said.

Hodge held the door for them, then closed it behind them.

Hodge said nothing. Miller stood by the door, studiously examining the police cap; Clumly stood in the middle of the room, hands in coatpockets, scowling and looking around not as a friend but as a police professional. He asked, “What
are
you doing here on a Sunday, Will?”

“Will Jr came down,” Hodge said. “He needed some maps he’d left here.” He hooked his thumbs around his suspenders and stood, jaw protruding, waiting.

Clumly cocked his head, bending toward the desk to read the note on the tablet. A flush of irritation ran through Hodge, but he said nothing. Clumly read aloud, eyes glittering: “Obtain the release of Nick S.” He scowled, blushing at the same time, and glanced at Miller. “You won’t need this.” He put down the tablet. “He’s already out.”

Hodge waited, and later it would seem to him that Clumly had taken a good deal longer than necessary to come out with it: he would remember that absolute stillness of Miller, standing by the door looking fixedly into his hat, and Clumly himself, touching his nose with two fingers like a man baffled by a sudden and inexplicable change in a familiar landscape, studying Hodge’s jaw. He said, “He’s escaped. Killed a man. You’d better come down with us.”

“Poppycock!” Hodge exploded. “I don’t believe it.”

Again Clumly touched his nose, looking at Hodge as though he were not a man, an old friend, but some mysterious object brought back from the center of Africa or India, a contraption with no clear purpose or meaning, possibly dangerous. Under that stare, Will Hodge felt heavy as stone, freakish, sealed off from the usual flow of things as he’d been sealed off, in the old days, when his wife would turn briefly to look at him with revulsion. But Clumly, too, was transmogrified. He looked dead, as though there were no longer any intrinsic connection between the parts of his face—the round, yellowed ears, the red-veined nose, the white, sagging cheeks that lapped to the sides of his small, cleft chin like old drapery, or like dirty snow sinking into itself, or like bread-dough. The old man’s shirt was blue, his tie dark green. He’d been wearing that same limp uniform it must be a month.