Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  I did say that he was big and strong then, didn’t I? Well, indeed he was. Never in my life had I seen a man as big and strong as your father was then. It’s where you get your height. He was wearing a T-shirt that showed all his muscles, and work pants, and he had come into the Globe to buy some underwear. He had just gotten off work at the pumping station. They were building a new pumping station that year and he had walked up to the foreman with his suitcase in his hand, and the way he told me later, he just said to the foreman, “You probably need pipefitters, and I’m the best damned pipefitter you’re ever going to get the chance to hire, so you ought to hire me whether you need pipefitters right now or not.” The foreman, who later tried to become your father’s friend, Bucky Walker, you remember him, he said, “Anybody thinks that high of himself is either so damned good I can’t afford to let him go, or so damned bad it’ll be a pleasure to fire him. So you’re hired, pal.” That’s how your father told it, and later, when Bucky told me the story, it was the same story, and Bucky had no reason to lie about it, because by that time your father had gone back up north and had left me with you as a baby here in Lakeland. Actually, Bucky was kind of interested in me then. He was hanging around the apartment a lot after work, drinking beer and talking about your father, wondering why he had gone and done what he had done. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone along with Bucky the way he obviously wanted me to and had even married him after my divorce. And after he had divorced Sally, naturally. I mean, he was kind of a sweet man, and God knows, he was in love with me. I guess I never really told you much about all that, did I? Well, it doesn’t matter, because I was still so in love with your father that I couldn’t see the good side of any other man, even a man as sweet as Bucky Walker.

  But I’m getting away from the thing I wanted to describe to you, how your father looked to me when we first met. I was modeling a pink one-piece Esther Williams bathing suit in a swimwear fashion show on the mezzanine of the Globe, and I had just started down the ramp when I caught sight of him coming up the stairs from the first floor, where he had bought some underwear. He told me later that, noticing a sign about the swimwear show upstairs, he’d decided to come and take a look. There wasn’t a beach at Lakeland, as you know, it’s so far inland, and at that time he had been in Florida for over a month and hadn’t seen a single woman in a bathing suit, and as he always said, that’s what Florida was to him, “Women in bathing suits and Coney Island with palm trees.” He’d seen the Coney-Island-with-palm-trees part, but so far he hadn’t seen anything of the women in bathing suits. So he decided to walk up the stairs to the mezzanine and take in the fashion show. Your father was always like that, very direct and not at all self-conscious. It didn’t matter to him that he was the only man in the place, or that he was dressed in a construction worker’s clothes, all dirty and sweaty and everything.

  I was walking down the platform, with mostly older women shoppers seated around the platform, my boss, Polly Prudhomme, describing the bathing suit I was wearing to the shoppers while I walked along, turning, strolling, kneeling, and then I saw your father’s head as it came over the top of the stairs. Oh, I couldn’t believe it. It was like a dream. A huge, smiling, suntanned face, a great toothy grin, tiny ears, dark eyes twinkling, a mass of black curly hair, a neck like a tree, and then his broad shoulders, thick chest, great brown arms swinging as he came up the stairs, and then that tiny waist of his, the long muscular legs, until finally he was at the top of the stairs, standing there with his legs apart, his hands in fists on his narrow hips, a big smile across his face, good-natured like a boy’s, only somehow hungrier than a boy’s could be. I was so taken by his appearance, especially the way it had gradually come to me, piece by piece like that, like a mirage floating up from the floor—first the head, then the torso, then the legs—until at last standing there before me was a grinning giant, the handsomest man I had ever seen. Anyhow, I was so taken by his appearance that I stopped midway down the ramp, stood still, and stared straight at him, and I smiled. I smiled! All the women in the audience and all the girls waiting to come behind me and even Polly Prudhomme herself followed my gaze until they too were staring straight at him, most of them with their mouths open. Polly had stopped describing the bathing suit I was wearing and was gaping like the rest of us. It was a strange moment, silent, no one moving, your father standing at the top of the stairs, grinning, while maybe fifty women stared back at him, with me motionless up there on that ramp, smiling at him, as if I was a slave girl or something being auctioned off and he had suddenly appeared from the desert to save me from a fate worse than death. It was like the movies!

  Well, like the old song says, those may have been the best of times, but they were the worst of times too. At least for me they were. Your father, when he wanted to be, was the most charming, thoughtful, witty—oh, God, could he be funny—intelligent, tender, sexy, and all-around interesting man you’d ever want to meet. And when he was, those were the best of times. I was never a happier woman than I was then. I sang all day long until I got off work and could meet him at the door of the Globe, where he’d be waiting for me, standing there in the late afternoon sun, dirty from his job at the pumping station, chatting with the janitor, old Eddie Coy, who locked the door after the store employees had left. I’d come out the door, and your father would see me, and holding his lunch pail under one arm, he’d whip the other arm around me, and he’d lift me right off the ground and spin me in a half-circle and set me down again, and then he’d stare down into my eyes, and he’d say, in that deep, throaty voice of his, “Hi.”

  It was really something. I get a little weepy just remembering those days, the best of them. When it comes to the worst of them, though, all I have to do is remember a single one of them, just one of those days, and my eyes clear up pretty fast, let me tell you. There were Friday nights back then before we were married when I’d get off work and would come out the door, expecting your father to be there, as he’d promised, to take me out to dinner, and not finding him, would ask Eddie Coy if he’d seen your father, and Eddie would shake his head, No, not yet, so I’d wait and wait and wait, a half-hour, an hour, and hour and a half, until finally I’d know that he wasn’t coming, and I’d walk on home to my apartment, fix myself some supper, take a long bath, and try to sleep—until along about one in the morning, when I’d still be awake, tossing and turning, and there’d come a loud banging on the door. Jumping out of bed, I’d rush to the door, and when I opened it, I’d see him, standing there, a vicious snarl across his face, bloodied lips and cut eyes, bruises and scrapes, torn clothing, with a half-emptied bottle of whiskey in his hand. “Ran into a little bit of trouble down at th’ Tam,” was how he’d explain all the cuts and bruises. Then, using nothing but the foulest language, he’d describe in gory detail how he’d single-handedly beaten up half a dozen sailors or brickmasons or electricians or “crackers,” though I was never sure what he meant by the word, who he was referring to, exactly. Probably just anyone he couldn’t identify any other way by uniform and such. Anyhow, he’d stagger into my apartment, brushing off my foolish attempts to clean him up and bandage his cuts, pushing me and any sympathy I might have away, physically shoving me into a corner of the room, where I waited, slowly growing frightened of him, as he talked to himself, only to himself, and drank the whiskey from the bottle, growling like a dog, literally growling and curling his lips back and showing his teeth, snapping and snarling, rambling on about his “enemies,” turning everyone into an enemy—his parents, his sisters, his friends in New Hampshire and the people he’d met here in Florida, and of course, even me. Then, after a while, especially me. I was becoming his worst enemy. Every time he came in that drunk and torn up from fighting in the taverns, he would end the night by cursing at me, spitting out horrible names, a little more horrible each time it happened, a little more personally cutting, slicing into the parts of me that were the tenderest parts, taking the cruelest advantage of whatever fears and secret
s I might have revealed to him some other night when we had been holding each other tenderly. Teasing and mocking me for my fears, threatening to expose my secrets, he’d call me “stupid” and “idiotic” and “sentimental” for a while, and then “selfish” and “insensitive” and “cruel,” and finally, “whore” and “leech” and “nag”—those last three, it always came down to them, whore and leech and nag. That’s what probably made them hurt so much, the fact that it always came down to the same three names. If he had just been lashing out at the world in general, he might’ve ended up calling me lots of awful things, sure, but all different. But because he always called me only those three, and all three, never one without the other two, he made me think that he really believed it about me, that even when he was sober and being kind to me, he still thought of me as a whore, a leech, and a nag. And of course, because I loved him and he was a man, I started seriously wondering if I was a whore or a leech or a nag, and there was just enough guilt for my own sexual interests in life, just enough dependency, and just enough nagging for me to slip slowly into believing that I was those things he was calling me, until I too thought of myself as a whore, a leech, and a nag. I even felt sorry for him for having to put up with me, for having fallen in love with me. So when he asked me to marry him I was so grateful, and so eager for the chance to prove by my loyalty that I wasn’t a whore and by my wifely support and devotion that I wasn’t a leech and by my trust and obedience that I wasn’t a nag, that I said, “Yes,” I said, “Oh, yes, yes, oh God, yes! Yes, yes,” I said, “yes.”

  Well, that’s way behind me now, and I’ve forgiven him, forgiven him for all of it. Really. I have. Part of it was my fault, I’m sure. I mean, I didn’t understand him very well, so it was hard for me to give him what he really wanted and needed—though I’m not sure any woman would have been able to give him what he wanted and needed. He was lonely, terribly lonely, I could tell that much. I could understand that. A stranger in a strange land, like they say. No friends, except the few rough pals he made at work. No family, and unable to be in touch with his family in New Hampshire because of what he was sure he had done to his father. And Florida was just not the place for him—he said he was a man of cold winds and ice and snow. I remember him telling me that, very serious, as if he was telling me he was Catholic or Methodist or Episcopalian. He hated the heat, the sun, the white light of noon, said it made him shrivel up inside, said it made him feel closed off from the world. He was always complaining about the palm trees. “They’re not trees. Why d’yer call them trees? They’re giant weeds, that’s what. Weeds,” he called them. And he disliked the people who lived here, called them “crackers,” even when they were from places like New York or Ohio. “Life in Florida,” he would grumble, “is like living in a motel full of crackers.” So actually, I wasn’t surprised when he left Florida. I expected it. What did surprise me, though, was that he did it alone, that he didn’t take the two of us along with him, his wife and his baby.

  We hadn’t been getting along for quite a few months when he left—not since I first told him I was pregnant, as a matter of fact, and you were three months old when he left, so that means we hadn’t been getting along for about a year. But I had blamed that pretty much on myself, on the pregnancy and all and the way I was right after you were born, the way I was all wrapped up with being a mother. Like I said, he was lonely, and after I got pregnant it was hard for me to help him not be lonely.

  Oh, what am I doing this for? What’s the matter with me? I sat down here to tell you the truth, and I’m not doing it, I’m lying, sliding over things, leaving important things out. I’m not telling the truth at all. It’s just that I don’t want you to be hurt by him any more than you already have been. But I can’t keep on lying to you.

  Life with your father was horrible for me right from the start. First there was that affair with Polly Prudhomme. Then there was the drinking. And after that there was all the violence, the fighting, the times he actually hit me. Then came the silence. He went silent on me. Shut everything down and just sat in his chair, reading sometimes, or looking out the window, or leaning back, his hands behind his head, and looking at the cracks in the ceiling. When you were born, he would come into the room where I was sleeping with you, and he would stand over your little bassinet and stare silently at you, no expression on his face at all. It was the strangest, scariest thing I had ever seen. It was as if he had died or something. I started going a little crazy from it. You can imagine the pressure it created, that silence, his expressionless face. I’d sob, “Do you love me?” and he’d say, “Sure,” just that, as if he was answering a question about a new hat I’d bought. “How do you like this one, hon?” “Fine,” he’d say. Except that I’d be sobbing, “What do you feel about me? What do you feel about the baby?” And he’d look up from the newspaper and say, “Fine.” No expression at all on his face, no depth in his voice. Well, I know I went a little crazy from it. I’d sometimes find myself in the middle of the night lying on the bathroom floor, my face pressed against the cold tiles of the floor, sobbing hysterically, “Why don’t you leave me! Get out! Get out!” And he’d be at the door, leaning casually against the frame of it, looking down at me with a strange curiosity in his eyes, and he’d say, “Fine.” The next morning, silence.

  It went on like that for many weeks until finally one morning I got out of the bed I slept in, looked over at his bed and saw that it was already made, thought I’d overslept, and rushed out to the kitchen to make his breakfast. He was gone. He never left before seven-thirty. I looked at the clock on the wall. Seven o’clock.

  He never came back. He didn’t love me. He didn’t love you. You were only a baby. He never even told you any night-time stories or sang you any songs. You were only a baby. He should’ve loved you for that at least. But he didn’t. I loved him. He might have loved me back a little for that. But he didn’t. So he left us. Packed a suitcase, walked out, got on a bus, disappeared. He left me with some money in the bank, and once he wired me a hundred dollars from Colorado. Six months later, I got a typed post card from him. It said:

  Better get a divorce under way. I’ll pay. My father is alive and well. Your lawyer can reach me c/o my parents, Barnstead, New Hampshire. Everything’s going to be all right for you now. The hard part is over. For you, I do feel guilty, if you’re wondering, but it won’t do you any good. It doesn’t even seem to do me any good either, so I won’t be feeling it for long. As ever,

  H. Stark

  That was all. Six months later we were legally divorced, and I never saw your father again, though, as you know, I did hear from him again, numerous times. But I was lucky enough never to have to see him again.

  There were the post cards he sent you, but you also might as well know that your father called me for years afterward, usually late at night, often on a sentimental occasion, like our anniversary or my birthday or yours. He was always drunk when he called, and because I would be less than enthusiastic, he’d turn sour and angry almost immediately and would hang up on me. I never bothered at the time to tell you of these calls because you were too young to have understood, and he eventually stopped calling, probably when he was with his second wife, whom, I’m told, he loved intensely for a while, though frankly speaking, I don’t believe it.

  Your father beat me at least fifteen times in the year that we were married and living together. By “beat me” I mean hitting me more than once on any given occasion. I’m not counting all the times your father hit me only once.

  Your father swore and cursed at me constantly. He mocked my clumsiness when I was great with child.

  Your father lay in my own bed with my best friend, Polly Prudhomme, who also happened to be my boss until I was too pregnant to model even the maternity dresses and had to quit my job at the store. He told me about it after everyone in the store and practically everyone in town already knew about it, and then when he told me about it, he gave me all the details of their times together. He praised her
especially for her skill at giving him what he called “head,” which meant sucking on his penis (you’re old enough to know all this by now) and letting him ejaculate into her mouth and, he said, she swallowed the semen, though that’s a little hard for me to believe. Yet he insisted that’s what she liked to do and that she did it so well he almost became addicted to it. He told me they even had a code worked out so that he could make an appointment with her by teasing her in front of me, and I remember, when he came to the store to get me after work, his saying to Polly, as if he was teasing her about her name, “Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?” And she’d laugh and say, “Naw, not tonight,” or, “Later, maybe, after supper for dessert.” I would scold him afterward for making fun of her name. “Besides, she doesn’t know what you mean by ‘cracker,’” I would say to him, and he’d just laugh, knowing that actually I was the one who didn’t know what “cracker” meant.

  Your father drank whiskey until he passed out on the floor, and he always did it on nights when he had promised to take me out to dinner and dancing.

  Your father had a fistfight with my only living relative, my Uncle Orlando—beating him senseless in his own front yard in front of his own wife and horrified children—all because Orlando had enough courage to stand up to your father and tell him what a selfish and cruel man he was to be treating me the way he was then (this was only a week before your father left me).

  Your father bragged about his abilities as a pipefitter. He had no humility. He was convinced that, compared to him, all the men he worked with and for were stupid, lazy, and unskilled.

  Your father was frequently impotent, sexually inadequate. I won’t go into it any further than that because there may well be reasons for it that we can never really know about, matters outside my experiences with him, childhood experiences and that sort of thing, but your father, I thought, was not quite right sexually. He talked too much about some of his friends’ (men friends, mind you) muscles. Also, he seemd to enjoy a certain kind of intercourse which, I’m told, only homosexual men do regularly. You know what I’m talking about.