Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  Your father hated cats. I won’t tell you about how one time he killed a whole litter of kittens. It was horrible.

  Your father cheated at cards. Even bridge.

  Your father stole government property.

  Your father lied about his taxes. He also told strangers that he made more money than he really did make. Sometimes he even told them he was making money on the side by playing the stock market, betting on the horses, betting on dogs, winning sports pools, bowling. He had me believing (until I had my lawyer check it out later) that he owned a lot of real estate in New Hampshire. “Half the side of a mountain,” was how he put it, but my lawyer told me that your father’s parents owned an old rundown farm, and your father owned nothing.

  Your father thought all flowers were ugly, though he once admitted he liked blue hydrangeas. “Mainly because they don’t look like they’re real,” he explained to me.

  Your father didn’t know how to swim. He said it was on principle, but of course it was because he didn’t want to be in a position of having to learn something that most people already knew about.

  Your father didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, either, and that too he said was on principle. I could never understand that.

  Your father hated people of all races, creeds, and colors. He was an extremely prejudiced man, the worst I have ever known, even after living my whole life in the South. He would make fun of a person’s background, no matter what it was. “Stupid Polacks.” “Grabby Jews.” “Dumb niggers.” “Drunken Indians.” “Thick-headed Irishers.” He hated them all—even what he himself was, which he referred to as “common white trash” or sometimes “snot-nosed Yankees” and “backwoods New Hampshire shit-kickers.” But whenever he used these terms, he somehow said them with a certain note of endearment. Somehow these slurs became affectionate nicknames. Not so for the others, though.

  Your father could play the saxophone well, but he only played it when he was alone or thought he was alone. He did not, as he claimed, play in the Guy Lombardo orchestra. He often referred to himself as “one of Guy’s Royal Canadians” when people asked him about his saxophone, which he displayed ostentatiously on the coffee table in the living room of our apartment.

  Your father had a smile that people loved, and when, because of their love for his smile, they got close to him, he stopped smiling and never allowed it to be seen again. I cannot recall his smiling at me after we were married, and actually, I can’t recall his smiling at me from the moment I told him that I was falling in love with him, which happened the fourth time I went out with him. Of course I know he must have smiled at me then, many times. It’s just that I can’t recall it.

  Your father told wonderful jokes, but only to strangers. When he told jokes to people who were not strangers, the jokes were cruel and dark and only funny in a way that made you feel guilty if you laughed.

  Your father would sneer at old people on park benches as if they disgusted him.

  Your father kicked dogs and dared them to bite him for it.

  Your father was a jaywalker.

  Your father growled. Like an animal. At night, if a car drove up, or if someone knocked on the door, your father would start to growl, low and deep from way back in his throat.

  Your father often ate the same thing for lunch that he knew I was fixing for supper.

  Your father lied about having been a champion boxer. He was, however, a very good, that is, a successful, barroom brawler.

  Your father lied about having been a champion runner, though he did have very muscular legs and seemed never to be physically tired, so he probably could have been a champion runner if he had tried. But he never even tried.

  Your father thought he had killed his father, but he never confessed to having any guilt for it. He blamed it on his father. Otherwise, he never talked about it with me. I’d ask him to tell me about it and he’d say, “It was all my old man’s fault,” and then he’d roll over and go to sleep.

  Your father talked incoherently to himself when he was drunk, and he was drunk at least one night a week, usually Friday night, after he had gotten paid.

  Your father had piles, which was unusual for a man as young as he was then.

  Your father was too big.

  Your 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.”

  Your 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.

  Your 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.

  Your 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.

  Your father was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

  Your 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.

  Your father hated me.

  Oh, God, how he hated me.

  Chapter 4

  Addendum A

  THROUGHOUT 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.

  (Please 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.)

  Chapter 4

  Addendum B

  IN CHAPTER FOUR 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 gardens 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.

  Chapter 4

  Addendum C

  IN CHAPTER FOUR, 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 Craw
ford (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

  RETURN AND DEPART

  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.