Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  His description of the process by which he validated and honored her point of view went something like this: “When a lady makes a request, a gentleman has no choice but to meet that request. Sure, he can ignore it, but he wouldn’t be much of a gentleman, would he?” He was smiling, but the smile was characterized more by resignation than good cheer.

  I had asked him pointblank why he had behaved toward his mother in a way that the rest of the community had regarded as a heinous way to behave toward one’s mother. He had first obtained the power, legal and financial, to evict his mother from the home she had lived in all her adult life, the house she had raised three children in and where she had lived in wedlock with a man, his own father, for over forty years, the house that had become the source and final resting place for a lifetime’s most personal memories and associations. He had obtained the power to evict her from this house, had obtained it under the guise of helping to care for her in her dependent old age, and, horror, he had used that power. He had gone ahead and evicted her. He had forced her to accept the extra room in her daughter Jody’s small and crowded trailer and to have the costs of her room and board paid by her other daughter, Sarah. Hamilton had forced Alma into becoming her daughters’ burdens of woe, he had forced her into deepening their sense of having been injured. He had given them, thereby, control over her. For he had forced her into the role, for the first time in her life, of victimizer, of depriver, of oppressor.

  This was not, of course, what the community saw in it, but it is what eventually I came to see in it. Gradually, as I pondered Hamilton’s cryptic, seemingly irrelevant answers to my questions, I came to believe that his eviction of his mother that night was an almost inevitable consequence of the years in which he had honored her need to be injured. Doubtless, in time she had gradually come to realize that he did not feel guilt for his role as injurer, at which point she played her last card, so to speak. She would force him to reject her altogether. She would up the ante. Which, from Hamilton’s point of view, gave him no alternative but to raise her bet and force the next round of the game into play. Did she want him to be that ungrateful a son? All right, if that’s what she wanted, it’s what she got. After all, she was his mother and he could do no less for her than try to provide for her what she really wanted.

  “I learned something about women from that experience,” he told me one evening at the Bonnie Aire, where we had gone for a few drinks. It was a hot, overcast, Friday night, the July following his eviction of his mother.

  What had he learned about women? I asked him (having at the time intimations of some future troubles with women, whom I then understood almost not at all).

  He learned, he told me, a woman’s greatest power over a man is her ability to turn her suffering into a virtue. She converts the one into the other, completely. She makes a condition of being female—and a wife and mother—into an ethical feat, which feat we as men have no choice but to reinforce. Most men don’t understand this conversion, he explained, and that’s why most men, rather than reinforce the conversion, deny that it’s even taken place. They treat their women as if they were still suffering. But what we’re supposed to do, what they want us to do, is to reinforce the conversion by acknowledging it and making it possible for the process to continue. So, naturally, what they want is for us to increase their suffering, to build their supply of it back up at least to where it was before they managed the difficult task of converting it into something that gave them power, the power of possessing virtue.

  He paused and chugged down his glass of ale as chaser to the shot of Canadian Club he had tossed down right before speaking. I remained silent. Hamilton seldom spoke at this length (not to me, not about a subject that he knew was important to my understanding of him), and I didn’t want to distract him with my presence.

  “And I’ll tell you something, something that I’ve not told anyone else,” he said, looking down at the empty glass, turning it in his huge hands. “It ain’t easy, giving them what you know they want. Especially when it’s your mother. Because the spring the whole thing, the conversion thing, works off is guilt. Male guilt.” He explained that it’s only to a man that a woman’s suffering looks like an ethical feat. Other women look at it with envy, or, if they’re a little protective of their own brand of pain, they see it as pathetic, or maybe they look at it with fear, because they know a woman who suffers more than they do cannot honor their own conversions. But a man sees it differently. Only a man can admire the pain, can acknowledge the bearer of it as virtuous. And the reason a man sees it this way is because he bears with him a quantity of guilt, nameless because he’s born with it, having been born male in this world where one-half of the species dominates the other half. Hamilton wasn’t saying it was right or wrong, that domination. He was just saying that it exists. The dominant one in any pairing off feels guilty for that fact, whether he knows it or not. And because most men don’t know they feel guilty, guilt in general, rather than in the particular case, most men don’t see what’s being asked of them by the particular cases before them.

  He was sweating across his forehead and upper lip. Two large fans, one in each of the back corners of the tavern, were not cooling the place much. The temperature outside was the same as the temperature inside, and all the fans accomplished was to create movement in the heated air, which was sufficiently close to body temperature so as to be incapable of cooling anybody. The bartender leaned morosely on his elbows and stared at the front door. There were no customers aside from Hamilton and me. The waitress, a tubby woman with frizzy orange-dyed hair, sat on one of the barstools, her tray plopped on her lap. Hamilton and I were in a booth close to the door.

  A man’s guilt, he told me then, wants him to eliminate the suffering of the particular case in front of him, so gradually he tries, and sometimes he thinks he succeeded, only to see it reappear a moment later, in her face, her hands, her voice. Some men, after a while, realize that the particular case has nothing to do with their generalized guilt, and what they do is to dismiss the particular case, to deny its hold on them. As Hamilton’s father had done. He had ended up ignoring Alma’s virtue and had treated her suffering “as a plain pain in the ass,” to use Hamilton’s words. It’s easier on the man that way, he explained. But harder on the particular case, the woman. The only honorable thing a man can do is, first, realize that this particular case’s pain has nothing to do with his guilt. That lets him deal realistically with the particular case, but it also means that he can’t kid himself about there being any easy removal of his generalized guilt. “No,” he declared, “you’ve got to learn to live with it. You’re not going to change society, so you just have to learn to live with it. Right?”

  “Right. Right.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, any of it. You’ve still got to face down that guilt every time some woman comes up to you wringing her hands in despair,” he went on. It’s hardest, he explained, when the woman is your mother, because if she practiced “smotherhood” on you while you were young and helpless and completely dependent on her for information about the world, then she’s going to have a strong hold on your guilt. She won’t be able to help it. “Smotherhood,” he said, glossing the term for me, is a self-defeating, usually unconscious way of deluding a son into thinking that all his guilt is directly related, as effect, to his mother’s pain and apparent powerlessness. And this delusion gets set into the son’s mind long before he can think for himself. So that later on, when he tries to respond rationally to the demands some woman’s pain is putting on him, if that woman happens to be his mother, he’s still got to deal with the old, deep-seated delusion that his only honorable response is the guilt-ridden one. In the particular case of Hamilton’s own mother, he felt that he had been put to the ultimate test. She had made it clear to him that the only way he could honor her conversion of generalized suffering into particularized forbearance was to kick her out of her own house. Which, after a lot of tugs in the opposite direction, he d
id. “It wasn’t easy,” he sighed. Then he waved to the waitress for another round.

  “I bet it wasn’t,” I said admiringly. Perspiration was running off our faces. I unbuttoned my cuffs and rolled up my sleeves to the elbows, then loosened my collar and took off my necktie. I had long since removed my sport coat. Hamilton was wearing a clean white T-shirt and work pants—not that it matters, except peripherally with regard to what happened next.

  The waitress, whose name was Linda, a cheerful type who seemed resigned to spending the rest of her life doing just what she was doing then, brought us another round, our third or fourth, I can’t recall, and slowly, her tray slapped her thigh, walked back to the bar and hitched herself up onto a stool and resumed staring at the front door. The bartender, whose name was Lee, a town “character” who played Rudoph the Red-nosed Reindeer every year in the Kiwanis Club’s Christmas Pageant, went on peering morosely into the hot empty space a few feet in front of him. He was obviously lost in thought, puzzling his way around a bit of supper caught behind a tooth, his mind a single, low-frequency hum of passive attention that, having fallen upon his tooth, seemed glued there. In the corners of the room, the two standing fans whirred uselessly away at the heated air as the screen door swung open and a woman walked in from the street, alone. The door banged behind her, and she looked around the room, smiled at Hamilton and me slightly, and walked directly to the bar, where she ordered a gin and tonic.

  She was around forty, a good-looking woman, more handsome than pretty, wearing a sleeveless blouse that exposed her muscular arms and drew attention to the amplitude of her bosom. Her corn-blond hair, long and healthy-looking, was wound into a Teutonic bun behind her head. Her white Bermuda shorts were tight and made of such heavy cloth that they seemed to armor her lower body rather than merely to cover it. Though she had been in town, living in an apartment over Paige Realty, for no more than two weeks, certain things about here were already known by just about everyone else in town: She was the new school nurse, she was from Concord, the capital, where she had previously worked in an old-age home, she was unmarried, probably had never been married, she had a loud, commanding voice and a hearty laugh and she liked, on these hot evenings in July, to come out of her sweltering apartment around nine for a couple of gin and tonics and a little conversation with “the boys.” Her name was Jenny, and within two weeks she was Hamilton Stark’s third wife.

  “Well,” I said to C., “that ought to make things more ‘significant.’” We were in my library on the ground floor. C. had finished his bath and dressed, and we had adjourned to the library where he could drink a little wine, an excellent California burgundy that C. had not yet tried, and warm ourselves by the fireplace. It was a chilly evening, not yet cold enough, of course, to turn the furnace on, but quite cold enough to welcome a room’s being heated by an open fire. C. was seated in his favorite armchair, resting from the exhilaration of his bath, as was his wont, and I had taken my accustomed place by the fireplace, standing with one elbow resting on the mantel.

  C. was wheezing slightly. “Ah, yes. Yes, that’s fine, fine.” He uncrossed and recrossed his feet at the ankles on the ottoman. “Tell me, if you don’t mind giving things away, tell me,” he wheezed, “do you personally agree with Hamilton’s rationalization for his … behavior toward his mother in particular … and women in general? After all, it implies an attitude toward women that’s not exactly fashionable, you know.” He almost chuckled. “You may get yourself into deep trouble with your female readers, heh-heh.”

  Letting himself sink back into the chair, he went on. “Two questions. Did you indeed have ‘trouble with women’ later on? And did the understanding of women that you gained, apparently through Hamilton Stark, help you out of your trouble? Obviously the two questions become one, and obviously, again, that single question is an attempt to determine if your novel can be used as a pragmatic guide. For we all, if we are men, have ‘trouble with women’ from time to time and wish, especially at such times, that we understood them better.” C. smiled benevolently and nipped off the end of his cigar with his front teeth. I don’t think the burgundy suited him.

  “Yes, yes, of course. But that was just a personal aside there, that business about my intimations. It really refers to nothing that should concern my readers.* Probably, because it does intrude on the narrator’s locus of attention, and therefore the reader’s locus of attention as well, I’ll revise it out of the final version of my manuscript. I will say this much, however: If you want to use this novel as a guidebook, then you’ll have to accept Hamilton Stark as your guide. That’s the only rule for reading it, the only condition I’ll attach—except of course that you know the language well enough to recognize a persona when you hear one.”

  “Ho, ho!” C. laughed.

  I refilled his glass. That should quiet him, I thought. I had expected him to respond, not to my slip of a reference to my own, later, personal difficulties (which are well outside the scope of this book), but rather to the peculiar juxtaposition of Hamilton’s confession regarding his mother in particular and women in general, and the sudden appearance in the narrative of his third wife, Jenny, the nurse. After all, if it’s specifically the custodial compulsion of some women that you find most disturbing, one would expect you to be especially wary of women who are custodial by profession—nurses, house-keepers, babysitters, prison guards, and so on, professions that have no product as issue. It certainly surprised me—Hamilton’s speedy courtship and marriage to Jenny, I mean, and, that night at the Bonnie Aire, his quick switch from the painful (to him) description of his relationship with his mother to his moves on Jenny. For, no sooner had she sat down at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic than Hamilton arose from our booth and joined her at the bar. He opened his conversation with a discussion of the weather, the evening’s dominant fact, and moved quickly to questions about her—where she was from, her job, her impressions of the town and its people, what she did with her earnings—to a suggestion that they dance (Hamilton is well known as a dancer, an excellent dancer), whereupon he played “On the Road to Mandalay” by Frank Sinatra on the juke box in the corner, and the two of them danced, slowly at first, in the oppressive heat, then in large, graceful circles around the small room, between tables, from the door in front to the bar at the back. They played “Moonlight in Vermont” by Andy Williams, and danced again, serious-faced, athletic, the two of them, a pleasure to watch, certainly, but somehow embarrassing, for, in this heat in the all-but-deserted tavern, with their somber yet intent expressions, it was a rather intimate dance they were doing. Then they played the theme from the movie Picnic, and I think we all, the bartender, the idle waitress, and I, became extremely self-conscious and turned away from the dancers, the bartender to a chore in the kitchen in back, the waitress to painting her fingernails pink, and I to a copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to North American Birds that I happened to have in the pocket of my sports jacket, which I had removed some time earlier.

  It was several minutes later, when, as I was committing to memory the call of the brown creeper (Certhia familiaris), whispering to myself “see-ti-wee-tu-wee,” that Hamilton interrupted and informed me that he and Jenny were going for a walk to the top of Blue Job, where it would be cooler, and if I wanted a lift back to his house, where I had parked my own car, he would provide it. I smiled hello politely to Jenny, who was sweating profusely, and said no, that I’d stay here awhile and would catch a ride out for my car later in the evening.

  Hamilton seemed relieved, or at least he did not scowl as he usually did when I abridged or altered one of his suggestions with a plan of my own, and the two of them left together, as silently and intently as they had been dancing.

  The next time I saw Hamilton, not three weeks later, he had married her. “Well, I married her,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Jenny, the school nurse,” he said, as if I should have expected it. I did not, of course. Quite the opposite.

  C., howev
er, was not surprised.

  “Well, let me tell you, it surprised me!” I fairly shouted, startling him back into his chair.

  “Goodness!”

  Certainly it surprised me. Hamilton had but barely shed his second wife Annie, and he had only just met this new one. Also, because of her profession, as I have mentioned, and because of her rather ordinary life so far, which, I assumed, gave her a rather ordinary mind, and because of her appearance, this new one did not, to me, seem to be Hamilton’s “type.” She was a handsome woman, in an athletic way, but her overall appearance was Prussian, almost manly. Both of Hamilton’s previous wives had been physically delicate by comparison, even Annie, who did not start to gain weight until after she had married him. This woman seemed invulnerable, which surely only reinforced what I assumed (from her profession) was a custodial temperament. How could Hamilton have thought he would be happy with such a woman, especially so soon after the dissolution of his second marriage and that final encounter with his mother and the insights into what he called “smotherhood” gained there?

  It wasn’t difficult to understand or to predict, my large friend assured me. According to him, though my even larger friend, Hamilton, might well be conscious of a particular image dominating his relationship with his mother, he might even be conscious that the same image had dominated his relationships with his other wives, and possibly his relationships with all women (an awareness, C. pointed out, that so far I had not granted Hamilton); in spite of this awareness, this self-consciousness, the man might still be compelled to go on living in its dominion.

  At first I didn’t understand, but then C. explained that it depended on the image, its qualities. A uroboros, for example, is an image of closure, a frightening image of compulsive, ritualistic repetition. To have one’s life organized under the dictates of a uroboros would be painful, indeed, and if one were unfortunate enough to be conscious of that image, one might find it even more painful, for all one could do would be to raise the repetition to a higher level, hoping to avoid it there, only to find oneself once again repeating oneself. What one would have in that case would be a spiraling uroboros, as it were. In Hamilton’s case, by becoming conscious of his compulsive attraction to women who wanted to “smother” him and his resultant revulsion at the indebtedness incurred, that is, his “guilt,” his only recourse seems to have been to introduce “wrath,” so as to speed up the process, to spin the wheel a little faster, hoping thereby (one must assume) that the pain for the woman and confusion for himself would be lessened.