The Sunlight Dialogues (56 page)

But the world the Old Man had created at Stony Hill was different from the world where he worked, doggedly honest but out of place, in the end. Stony Hill Farm, inside its stone walls, was as self-contained and self-perpetuating, even as serene—or so it had seemed to Will Jr’s childish eyes—as Heaven itself. It was a garden for idealism, where there was painting and poetry and card tricks, and sober worship on Sunday evenings; where neighbors got together and spoke thoughtfully of the Future of the United States, and of taxes and balanced trade and the troubles in Europe. It made you want to be a minister.

All mere illusion, he knew now. Mere entertainment. But if there was no God, there was no Devil either. So much for absolutes, then. So much for politics. He would throw it all up and go—where?

That was the point he’d come to, that night on his angry walk. He stopped. He was standing on a high hill where he could look down on all the Wyoming Valley—the lights of the village far in the distance, the nearer lights of farmhouses going out one by one, like Einstein’s furthermost stars. “A man should try to be a father,” he said aloud. “Make the best of things. Not improve the world so much as make it tolerable for his children.” Immediately, he scowled. It didn’t sound convincing. He loved his daughter: going in to her crib at night when she lay there asleep and vulnerable he felt himself almost at the point of tears. But the fact remained, she would not obey or respect him. When he played with her he often ended up hurting her. He was a big man, and clumsy, and the more inexpressible his emotions became the more he felt the need to burst through the isolating walls by sheer muscle. He’d broken Maddie’s arm once. He was bouncing her on the bed—a foolish thing to do, he knew at the time, but she liked it, and he felt joyful, dropping her to the mattress and catching her as she bounced up to his arms again with a child-laugh like bells—and suddenly Louise was there, reaching out, crying “Willie, stop it! You’ll break her neck!” He missed his rhythm and the child fell with her arm tucked under her, and when he snatched her up her eyes rolled up out of sight and her body went stiff and he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt—though he was wrong, thank God—that she was dead. He ran to the garage with her, threw open the car door, and lay her down in the seat and drove—it must have been at speeds of ninety and more—to the hospital in Batavia. “Never again, dear God,” he’d said, and if she was dead, as he thought, he swore he would kill himself. But by the time they reached the hospital she’d come to again, and when the doctor looked her over in the Emergency Room he said she’d only broken her arm. Not even a break, in fact. A minute crack. Will Jr seldom rough-housed with Maddie now. But he could no more talk with his daughter than with Louise, could only hug her until she cried out in alarm, or shake her hand so hard it made her eyes widen. It would be the same with his son (the son still unborn, almost undreamt-of, the night of his walk), and it was the same with his brother, his father, his sister—the same as it would be two years later in Buffalo, when he would accidentally push his good friend through a window at the Unitarian church. And it had been the same with Ben Jr, before he was killed, and with all Will Jr had ever known and loved. And so his speech to himself that night rang hollow:
Make the best of things.
He stood watching the farmhouse lights go out one by one, and he imagined the stars going out one by one, and he thought,
Where will I go? What will I do?
and answered,
Nowhere. Nothing.

The air had been hushed, a moment ago. Breathless. Now it was stirring, and it came to him that it was going to rain again tonight. He was miles from home. He turned back and began walking hurriedly, and then as the wind mounted and the trees began creaking above the road, he began to run. He became irrationally frightened, almost terrified. When he reached the house he was wet to the skin and the wind was howling like a banshee in the trees, and he was breathing so hard it was as if his throat was afire.

Louise said, “Willie!” bending to him, white, and he gasped, “It’s all right. I made it. Everything’s all right!” The next morning he ended the partnership.

It was that same year that his father had broken with his mother.

Will Jr removed his hands from his eyes and sat brooding, staring at the drab yellow walls of his office. There were no books here. He had no need of them in his specialty. When he had a research job to do for HOME—Housing Opportunities Made Equal-one of his numerous social causes, he could go to the firm’s research library on the sixteenth floor. Or when the State assigned him a defense. It took no great reading to deal with the usual humdrum debtor or even with professional skips—a man like Kleppmann, for instance.

But he had not come here to think about Kleppmann, and he wouldn’t.

Nevertheless, he was thinking about Kleppmann. Or rather, everything he thought had Kleppmann inside it like a cancer, the worm in whatever ripe apple-sweet thought he could summon from the cellar of his mind. Someday, chances were, R. V. Kleppmann would kill him, and Will was afraid. He reached out abruptly and turned the file over to keep himself from staring at the name.

“I should go home,” he thought. “What am I accomplishing, sitting here twiddling my fingers? Nothing.” He laughed sourly.
“Eh bien.
I submit to you then, Counsellor, you damn well ought to go home.” He did not stir.

2

“Rat race,” he thought.
“Perdu.”

But it wasn’t just himself. Something had gone wrong with all of them—his father and mother, his brother Luke, his sister, the times in general. It was no good fretting and whining about it, but just the same it was there, a fact. Somehow one had to escape it.

A specialist in collections. Who would have thought it!

They could have found no one less suited for the work—an idealist, sentimental, generous, fond of good music and books (he was a member of the Columbia Record Club and three different book clubs). He loved movies. He sang in the church choir—the Unitarian church four blocks from his house. He’d even tried cello lessons, six months ago now—had sat up late squinting heartsick at the page and clumsily laboring like an anxious dinosaur in glasses, Louise knitting in the semidarkness behind him. The cello would help him relax, he had said. In his childhood, living on Uncle Ben’s farm, he’d spent hours playing “Danny Boy” and “Old Man River,” playing and singing at the top of his voice. But it hadn’t relaxed him, of course. The opposite. He didn’t have time to practice, and going to his lesson unprepared made the sweat run down him in rivers. When he did get to practice, on the other hand, he felt guilty because he was using up time he should properly have spent with his family. Just the same, a strange man to be hunting down debtors, seizing bank accounts, property, wages, getting judgments from the courts. Three or four days a week at least he was off on the road somewhere, hunting through documents in Albany, chasing down stocks in New York or Pittsburgh or Kansas City, investigating the debtor’s associates and family. He, Will Hodge Jr, who had hated travel all his life and could get airsick merely by watching a big plane land.

There had been a kind of cruel inevitability about his becoming what he’d become. He was by nature a man who worked feverishly at whatever he did. It was that that had decided them on putting him into collection. The workload there was heavy and also vital, and the man who had done the job before him had been even less suited for the work, apparently, than Will. There were accounts six months old that hadn’t even been acted upon, and some of them were accounts with the firm’s most important clients.
Mercantile Trust
had collection accounts worth hundreds of thousands. To goof on them meant more than losing those accounts: it could mean losing their merger cases too—their tax cases, their suits, and on across the board. And so, much as he hated the work, he had thrown himself into it. He had tried at first to do everything in person—writing letters, pursuing examinations, chasing, demanding, seizing. It was all very well to throw injunctions around, seize property, put a man out of work by taking his wages and inconveniencing his employer, but one did not have to do it impersonally, brutally, so it had seemed to Will at the start. But then he’d begun to hear their stories, had begun to see what incredible lengths they’d go to, even under oath, to hide their unlawful nesteggs. He’d been fooled again and again and again, so that eventually whenever at the end of it all it appeared that he had for once been dealing with an honest man, he could not be sure at all of his opinion.
Don’t fool around,
became his motto,
slap a judgment on him!
He had begun to develop forms, convenient sheets which could be filled out by any secretary, so that judgments rolled off his assembly line like new refrigerators. It had altered his life. He’d been annoyed, in the old days, by those signs in corner grocery stores:
No Credit—
that is, No Belief. Now he understood the feeling.
No Checks Cashed. No Installment Sales. Cash Is King.
He saw how even his own family robbed him—his sister, his mother (he’d lent her the money for her car; he would never see a cent of it), even his wife, bringing out dresses she said she’d sewn herself but had really bought that morning and hadn’t even bothered to take the tags out of. Dominus! All right then. He would put up with their thievery, because they were his flesh and blood, but he need not stew about the others. Predictably, he’d become good at his work. He turned out the work so efficiently that his department expanded, in fact almost tripled its output. He made, now, very few mistakes about people. The few mistakes he did make were his errors in thinking honest debtors to be dishonest, but he did not let those errors trouble his sleep. It was only to be expected that there would be, here and there, an honest man (a fool, more like, given the harsh realities), but if you judged all men thieves you had statistics on your side. As for all his former nonsense about justice and goodness and the Legal Ground of the American Way of Life, well, this:

He’d been appointed by the State to serve as defense counsel. The boy was a hoodlum. Tall, curly-headed, with thick, sneering lips. All his life he’d been a troublemaker. The police knew him well. He was standing in a bar when two policemen arrived in answer to a call from the bartender, a complaint about some minor disturbance which was over by the time the police got there. The two cops went to the bar where the boy was standing and talked to the bartender. The boy said, reportedly, “Beat it, fuzz, you’re not wanted here.” One of the cops told him to mind his own business, and the boy, without further provocation, elbowed the cop in the stomach hard and said, reportedly, “Go fuck yourself.” He was promptly arrested, taken to the car, and shoved into the back seat. There, according to the boy’s version, one of the cops said, “You’re a wiseguy, ain’t you,” and struck him. The boy struck the cop with his handcuffed wrists. He was charged with and tried for disturbing the peace and resisting arrest.

Will Hodge Jr had spent forty-some hours researching the case—digging up witnesses, questioning the boy, the cops, the ten bystanders he could locate. What he learned, beyond any shadow of a doubt, was that the boy belonged in prison, all right, but the State had no case. The Buffalo ordinance against obscene language in a tavern did not qualify as disturbance of the peace, and beating a cop without any intention to escape did not qualify as resisting arrest. And so Will had won, ultimately. Had sweated out the ordeal of the trial, had awakened in the middle of the night with his heart pounding so badly he was afraid he was going to die, asking himself in terror
Should I have objected? Did I ask the right question?
But had won. A stupid and pointless victory of technicalities. And a victory, worse yet, that accomplished nothing but a return to the status quo—like all legal victories: a kind of high-falutin auto mechanics, a perpetual repairing of broken parts, bent fenders, leaky tubes. Poets, for instance, made poems that might—if the poet was lucky and talented and careful—endure for a thousand years. But what was it that a lawyer made, preparing a brief of, say, four hundred closely reasoned, meticulously researched, precisely stated pages? Did the poet put in any more of his heart’s blood, his brain’s electricity, torment of soul? At best the lawyer established a precedent: a man sentenced to life in prison instead of the chair because of “extenuating emotional circumstances.” At best.
Where will I go?
he had asked himself.
What will I do? Nowhere. Nothing.

And one of these days, Mr. Kleppmann would put a bullet through his head. Why did he go on with it? He could teach. He’d talked with Louise about it. He could get a credential, shuck the salary—a piddling salary anyhow, all things considered—and shuck the house in Kenmore—yes, no alternative to that—but eventually teachers could afford to buy houses too. He could drop the rat race, break free. As simple as that! And yet he was not going to drop it. He’d go on and on until he managed to destroy himself. From ego, must be. From a vague sense of his own image, not clear to him yet, but there, final, however unrealized inside his head: a shadowy higher ground toward which, instinctively, he must go on witlessly fleeing. An image of himself as—was it that?—a blind old man enthroned in his livingroom, speaking with neighbors of balanced trade and income taxes and the troubles in Asia? The Congressman through the looking-glass, then, turned inside out, gone dark.

But if it was ego that drove him, why was he not a professional skip, like Kleppmann—a man who moved from city to city setting up paper businesses, borrowing on them, vanishing as if in smoke. What could be more satisfying if it was ego, nothing more?

But that, too, he had an answer for. The Congressman’s ideas were no longer viable, his faith was as empty and dead as his estate, yet they’d left their mark on Will Hodge Jr as on all of them. The American dream turned nightmare. They were not such fools—or anyway Will Jr was no longer such a fool—as to pursue the dream, but at least, with the impossible ideal in mind, he could hate the forces that denied it. Nothing short of hate could explain his continuing pursuit of a man he knew had the power—and the indifference—to kill him. It was no fantasy. His evidence wouldn’t stand up in court, but he had evidence that R. V. Kleppmann had arranged the murder of a private detective in Madison, Wisconsin. The man had been found shot through the head, sitting on a public toilet.