The Sunlight Dialogues (80 page)

“What’s the matter with them all?” Louise Hodge asks the street. Their party friends, she means. It was better at home, in her childhood, when all people talked about was neighbors or accidents or the shortest route to Cincinnati, or they quoted long conversations that had no point, or told of their kidney stones.

But she knows well enough what the trouble is. They don’t know the same people, living, as they do, in twenty different suburbs—all identical but having nothing in common, nothing human anyway: not Mrs. Wartz, ninety-two, who just fell down the cellar stairs, or Charley Parish who married that girl from Rome, Italy, and her not half-grown. They could talk, if they talked of such things at all, only in wearisome abstractions, not of neighbors but of what neighbors in general are like—the coffee klatches, the crabgrass business, the children in the yard. Not of particular places but of the abstract idea of a shopping center, and then sometimes a spurt of excitement when you mention some huge, dull store where everybody’s been. And to complicate matters, one is—their circle is—polite. Too much comparison of neighbors or shopping centers can turn into rivalry. Undemocratic. What the women want to talk about the men find disgusting; what the men would say bores the women to tears; and for the men to leave the women would be unchivalrous. Or worse, would reveal that what all conversation turns on, sex, is fit only for the dark.

We were going to visit India, she thinks. Why India she has no idea. Neither does Will, probably. But for some reason they talked about it, and she can recall the excitement it stirred in them once—how long ago now?—eight years?

She thinks: What
would
the men talk about, if they talked? But she knows. Law.

Nevertheless, he devotes himself to it as though it were much the most interesting thing in the world. He scoffs at it at the dinner table, talks pipe-dreams of going into teaching, dropping the rat-race, yet after dessert goes into his study (on the days he comes home for supper) and opens fat books and fills one long yellow tablet after another, and won’t go to bed. We two have no more to talk about than the people at our parties, she thinks.

Abruptly, with a stubborn, determined look, she crosses to his desk and picks up the sheaf of papers on top of the pile, in the middle of the mess. She reads. After a minute she sits down, alarmed, concentrating.

MEMORANDUM TO TAX DEPARTMENT Sept. 2, 1966 RE: WILLIAM B. HODGE, JR., IRS Claim for Penalty Tax (re. Flemming)

     The following is a summary of my activities with respect to Flemming Construction, Inc. Everything is included which seemed at all relevant to the question of the capacity in which I acted with respect to the company from time to time. In connection with the preparation of this memorandum, I have read all of the files (our closed files 31471 through 31477), the minute book of the corporation and the time slips. References to the particular documents in the files are made as “[1-101]”, referring to the closed file involved and the number of the document in the file as set forth on a list I have prepared. References to information in the minute book are indicated as “[MB-date]” and to time slips as “[TS-date]”.

     For convenience, this memorandum is divided into the following parts:

I The period expiring 12/31/63

II The period January 1, 1964 through September 21, 1964

III September 30, 1964 to date

IV Summary

Par. 1   Date
5/2/61 Certificate of Incorporation filed. Standard By-Laws subsequently adopted [MB with Article IV, Section 5, specifying duty of Secretary and Assistant Secretary]:

PART I—The period expiring December 31, 1963

The Secretary shall issue notices of all members of stockholders and directors where notices of such meetings are required by law or these By-Laws. He shall attend all meetings of stock-holders and of the Board of Directors and keep the minutes thereof. He shall affix the corporate seal to and sign his signature and shall perform such other duties as usually pertain to his office or as are properly required of him by the board of directors.”

Empty language, insanity,
she thinks, but she reads on. There are twenty-one pages, typed, single-spaced, and she knows—though she doesn’t know what it’s for—he’s spent months on it. He has a keen mind she knows for sure, because sometimes Will has turned it against her; nevertheless, the idea continues to molest her thought, destroying her concentration:
It’s all empty, insane.

57 9/30/64 At about 5:00, Finsker asked me to come with him so we could talk a moment. We went to Mr. Evans’ office. Finsker advised me that he did not believe that Caulke could carry out the agreement he was making with Sand because of the severe financial position of the company and advised me then, for the first time, that the company had not paid its Federal taxes for a month. He said the balance was about $30,000. I advised him, strongly, of the consequences of this and asked him to say nothing until we could talk to Caulke later. We rejoined Caulke as the meeting at Porter’s office was breaking up and went to supper with him at the Hotel Buffalo. I advised them then of the situation as I understood it and the possible civil and criminal consequences. I said that from this point on, no money remaining in the company could be paid for any purpose other than taxes and that they would have to issue a check for the balance available payable to IRS. …

After this, pages of unpaid bills, increasingly desperate attempts to keep Flemming Construction afloat, then this:

“Flemming,”

In correspondence, I did not always carefully speak in the third person (referring to “our client”, etc.), but sometimes merely used the collective “we”—with respect to Flemming. See, e.g., letter to Milfort 5/17/65, p. 3. Worse yet is an occasional use of the first person singular in such a way as to suggest that I might have control. E.g., ltr to Milfort, 12/17/64. Fact is, however, that FCI had already decided to sign anything Louie wanted it to, so that when I said I would see that everything was done just so, I was trying to prod Louie merely to say what he wanted. I doubt that the pronouns should create any substantial problem.

Like the cluttered room, the immense mass of facts—“items”—in Will’s attempt to defend himself (that much she understands clearly) drains her of strength.

Underneath the sheaf of papers, a letter.

Dear Mr. Hart:

     My client informs me that your check #651 dated September 1, 1966 in the amount $151.13 has again been returned by your bank because of insufficient funds.

     Frankly, Mr. Hart, my client is getting rather fed-up in the way you are handling your account

     I therefore notify you in my client’s behalf that he demands the balance of $1526.42 by return mail in the enclosed envelope.

     M&T does not wish to carry your account any farther, nor have any further business dealings with you.

Sincerely yours,

[signed]: W. Hodge          
Attorney-at-Law

Carefully, she replaces the papers, then rests her forehead on her fists. She feels momentarily nauseous, involved in what she has called the insanity of it all, and terrified by pronouns. Outside the study window, she knows without looking, the afternoon is unnaturally bright, teeming with grass and leaves and the infinite webwork of bark on trees, and the air is full of noise: children, an air-hammer six blocks away, the whisper of creatures in motion, destroying and building, crawling through the grass.

2

Will Hodge Jr’s trip to Chicago was a total waste: Kleppmann’s man was just ahead of him, as usual, and had liquidated his stocks that very morning. It gave Will the feeling (standing at the file in the oppressive Chicago First National office, reviewing the figures a fourth time, as though repetition might change the result) that everyone around him was in on the deal. They looked as if they might be. The man called Fleet, with the reddish-purple face and eyes starting out of his head like eyes on a drowned man, or one with bubonic plague, his collar too tight but elegant, silk, his tie silk too, on his fat red fingers an enormous set of rings (And what kind of wife do
you
go home to, Fleet?), fat legs filling the ridiculous pinstripe funeral-parlor trousers; the other called Ottla, Attila to Will, huge, solemn man with a red moustache, slightly luminous, like a child’s hair on a summer day, his spectacles low and loose on his nose, and behind them, glazed gray eyes like a lunatic’s. “No luck?” he asked softly. He could bellow like a bull if he wanted to, but he spoke as though the deep-blue carpeted room were the public library. Will shook his head. “Ah,” said Attila, “those people!” He bent forward slightly, ominous. Turned away.

He could get a plane out at ten-forty, be back in Buffalo a little after midnight, or he could wait for the one at seven or so in the morning. He lowered his eyebrows and swung his jaw out, trying to decide, still gazing at the figures as if expecting from them some sign. His return was urgent: he must reach some decision. If they knew who their so-called Sunlight Man was, their attitude might be substantially changed. That was possible. Moreover, as long as he kept what he knew to himself, there was the danger of his father’s getting foolishly involved. Not a practical man, he was easily confused or put off by his bungling feelings. But one could phone them, of course. Why not? Not Clumly, no. But one might get hold of the other one, Officer Miller.

Will scowled. It made sense, yet something he could not put his finger on made him resist.

Buz Marchant was here in Chicago, old Wooster friend. It was a long time since Will had seen him, and for certain reasons … This wasn’t the first time he’d thought of Buz. All day the idea of calling him when he reached Chicago had been nagging at the back of his mind. What harm? But he knew what harm and toyed with it in the back of his mind and hung now undecided, closing the folder deliberately, as if with satisfaction. “I wonder,” he said, “do you mind if I use your phone?”

He could not make up his mind to phone Batavia. He would think about it. He phoned his friend Buz.

In the taxi, afterward, he sat with his fingers interlocked, dark suitcoat open, sucking at the pipe he’d for some reason bought at the airport this morning (it was bitter as alum: he’d never yet had a pipe that wasn’t, and the taste made his stomach knot tighter than usual—when he’d searched his pockets, a minute ago, he’d found he had only a half-roll of Tums remaining: have to stop at a drugstore, he’d thought, but despite the rage of his stomach he’d forgotten it already), a BBB, one of the best pipes made in England, according to the man at the counter, the band sterling silver, a steal—pure highway robbery—at fourteen dollars. Nevertheless, he felt like an attorney, sitting with that pipe in his mouth. So, long ago, thus subtly disguised, he had felt like an attorney. It came to him that his Uncle Tag had had a pipe. It was never out of his mouth. An oral fixation, possibly? Was that the secret? Deprived too early of sweet mother-love, snatched too quickly from her soft breast (it was hard to imagine: she was old when Will knew her) and hurled into the old man’s grand, unalive, uncommunicating study? But that was not his uncle’s life, he knew, it was his own, and the breast, though he couldn’t remember it, was probably not soft. Nor was anything ever snatched rudely from that tit. For her sake, too, it came to him, he must get his call through to Miller. God knew what his mother might get in her head when she learned it was dear old Tag. For a moment he closed his eyes.

He seemed to think nothing whatever now, looking out the window, experiencing an indifferent, vaguely disturbing wash of half-ideas and sensations. He could not shake his feeling that the cab was being followed. They were driving under the elevated railroad, a long tunnel of darkness with startling daylight on either side, clear as welding light by contrast, as if it were no mere Chicago day but a day in San Diego or Hawaii. Every second or so they sped through slits of light from above. A train went over, shaking the earth, pushing its roar of sound along ahead of it, machine-gunning storefronts to the right with its hurrying shadow. Through gaps in the wall of buildings he saw tall buildings beyond, gray, brown, red, black; majestic. That was where he’d live, if he had his way: the heart of the honeycomb. His windows would look out on windowed towers, and the sunlight would not touch him except at noon. He would never hear his neighbors’ names, would have friends as secret and private as himself, would have nothing to say to the garbage man but “ ‘Morning.”
That
was safety. As hidden and free as a pigeon on a crowded roof, a bee in a hive, a stinger in a sea of watchful stingers.

Baldwin,
he read. He’d been meaning for years to get a new piano for Louise. He had a fond image of her sitting stoop-shouldered at the new piano, leaning forward to read the music and stretching her hands for the hymn-tune chords, the only piano music she knew how to play. Now they were passing steak houses, and now, swinging out from the shadow of the el, scruffier stores—a pet shop where moulting parrots stood waiting for old-woman love above their dung, and squirrel monkeys cowered, eating their fingers in the shadows. On the sidewalk, a thickset Polish girl with heavy ankles and a wide, square ass. He reached up to touch his pipe and pursed his lips and thought, philosophically, of her crotch. At the corner an old man in a faded plaid shirt stood leaning on his newsstand, waiting. Beside him on the rack, bold headlines:
MOTHER BUTCHERS FIVE.
He thought of speaking to the driver. The hair on the back of the man’s head was filthy and untrimmed, hanging almost to his collar as if to cover the white scar shooting from his neck down his back. It flickered through his mind that the driver was an impostor, a murderer. He wiped sweat from his lip and studied the driver’s picture.
It was not the same man.

He calmed himself.

It
was
the same man.

Yes.

“I was sorry to hear about the divorce,” Will had said on the phone.

Buz Marchant had laughed. “Life begins at alimony.”

“Ha.” It was a thing he’d forgotten, that eternal labor at joke-making. People laughed for him, though, because the voice was right, the cock of the eye; who cared if the joke was stupid? “I take it your heart’s not broken,” Will said.