Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  When I drew up to the gate and prepared to stop so that I could get out and open it, I saw, with surprise, that the gate was wide open already. Hadn’t I remembered to close it the day before? It was enough of a habit that I didn’t have to think consciously of it in order to close it after passing through, therefore I couldn’t be sure. Was this “evidence” of anything—-that the gate, normally closed, was now invitingly wide open? I looked up the long driveway to the house and garage. Everything was as I had seen it yesterday afternoon—A.’s Chrysler parked facing the closed garage door, the house darkened and apparently empty, the large expanse of smooth, freshly whitened yard encircling the house from the fence down in front to the woods in back, and beyond those woods, the rising shape of the mountain. No, except for the new pelt of snow and the open gate, everything was the same. Everything.

  Very slowly, the snow creaking under my tires, I drove up to A.’s car and parked directly behind it. Then I got out of my car and walked around to the window at the driver’s side of the Chrysler. There they were, the three bulletholes connected by a network of tiny cracks, like spider webs. I touched each of the holes with my finger. One of them unexpectedly crumbled at the edges from the pressure, and my finger poked into the cold interior space of the car, startling me. Frightened by something nameless, I quickly withdrew my finger and nervously yanked on my gloves.

  It was totally silent, windless, the snow falling straight down, as if being drawn to the ground by the ground itself in some guilty need to hide itself. I left the car and checked the garage door, which was locked. Then I crossed the yard to the front door, determined that it was locked, went up to the side porch and yanked on that door too. Leaning close to the glass to block out my reflection with my shadow, I peered into the kitchen. It was dark inside, but when my eyes had grown used to the darkness, I could see the outlines of the stove, sink, refrigerator, and the small, wooden table and single stool A. had built to replace the Formica-topped table and chairs he had once owned with Dora and that now lay beneath a foot or more of old snow in the field in front, the chromium legs rusting, padding from the seats spilling from rips torn one afternoon last April by high-powered rifle slugs. I could see the calendar on the wall near the telephone. Below the four-color photograph of an oil burner was the sheet for the month of February, for the year 1975—just as it should be. Yet somehow I was surprised. Somehow I had expected to see some other year, some other month. The house seemed to have been deserted long, long ago.

  Slowly, I stepped down from the porch and took a few steps into the yard. The only sound was the constant rattle of my own voice inside my own head. The snow was still softly falling, and I couldn’t see clearly more than a few feet in front of me. There was nothing left for me to check, I thought, except the footprints, and that was quite impossible now. Everything was buried under several inches of soft, fresh snow, so that the only footprints I could see were my own. They dribbled along behind me, tiny, crumbling craters slowly filling with new snow. I knew that in a few minutes even these, my own tracks, would disappear. And that would be the end of the “evidence.” Any further pursuit of A. would have to be based solely on abstract reasoning, speculation, empty theory. Or else I simply would have to guess at his whereabouts, randomly placing him here and there, then rushing to seek him here and there, and if he was not to be found at either place, to guess again. I did not want that. No man wants to believe that his life has finally gotten so out of his control that he either must theorize about it or else be forced to guess at its nature. He’d rather believe in magic, fetish objects, totems, dreams. This is how a real life becomes a fiction, I thought, dismayed.

  Suddenly, as if remembering a scene from a dream, I remembered driving through the cathedral-like woods on my way over this morning and how, for a few hundred yards, where the branches of the trees wove themselves together overhead, the snow had seemed almost not to be falling. If there had been old tracks on that ground, I thought, footprints laid down beside the road yesterday or the day before, anytime back to the last heavy snowfall, then they would still be visible. Like the faces of type in a printer’s matrix, they could be returned to after the type itself had been destroyed and read again. With a matrix, yesterday’s or last week’s newspaper could as well be today’s or tomorrow’s.

  Stepping quickly, almost bounding, around the side of the house to the back, where the second barn and an old chicken house and tool shed were located, I reasoned that if A. or anyone else had decided in the last few days to walk into the woods, for whatever reason, his tracks would probably still be visible near the trees and would remain so until the wind came up and blew the new snow into obliterating drifts. I knew that A.’s habits and routines seldom led him into the woods, so I knew that any trail I saw would be a sign that something out of the ordinary had occurred—and I desperately needed just such a sign at that moment to break the impasse, the painful balance that hung between all the signs of normalcy and all the signs of variance. Of course, I also knew that his habits and routines led him at least once a week to walk up the path to the top of the mountain, so any variation from the tracks that the habitual walk up and back ought to have left would be meaningful, too.

  With a hunter’s eye, I scrutinized the exposed, old, packed snow that lay in corrugated sheets beneath the tall pines, cedars and spruce growing along the cleared ground behind the barn and outbuildings. Nothing. Several times I walked back and forth along the edge of the clearing, looking into the woods. Nothing. An occasional rabbit’s trail, the scattered scratches from birds, the small spirals left by squirrels—that was all. Then, as my spirits sank, I came to the path, the narrow defile between the trees and bushes that slowly switch-backed up the gradually rising incline all the way to the top. And there they were—A.’s tracks, his easily recognizable 13 EEEs, each one a yard from the next, leading swiftly from under the smoldering blanket of new snow on the yard directly into the woods and on. This I had, of course, fully expected to see, especially after a weekend, when I knew that A. had made his weekly trek to the top of his mountain, Blue Job, two thousand feet or so above sea level, a huge lump of granite and glacial till that had been his family’s property since the days of the earliest white settlement in the valley. It comprised almost the whole of seven hundred acres for which they had been taxed these two hundred years, that mountain and the three- or four-acre apron at the base of its south face, where the house and fields were located. Except for its lower half, where every fifteen years or so timber could be harvested, the land was not arable. The upper thousand feet of its height, at this latitude, was so close to the tree line and so free of loose soil that it was almost completely clear of vegetation—a gray gnarl of rock and bony plate and crevice.

  I took a short step onto the path, and the snow suddenly seemed to cease falling. My vision cleared as if a screen had been removed from before my eyes. I straightened and peered around for the second set of tracks, A.’s return set. But there was none! How could that be? If he’d gone up, then he must have left tracks coming down. There was no other route for him, up or down, especially at this time of year. The northern slope was precipitous and notched with crevices and sheer drops of hundreds of feet onto ledges and broken shards of stone. The east and west slopes, once you got off the knob, no easy descent, and entered the trees, were practically impenetrably dense with low scrub brush and face-whipping birches left from the last timbering. Besides, they eventually flattened into fields that were owned by other people, people A. had refused to permit to trespass on his property. He was not very likely to trespass on theirs, not unless he was in the direst of circumstances, and probably not even then.

  But how to explain the presence before me of tracks leading up the mountain, and no tracks leading down?

  I could not answer my own question. Emphatically I decided again that there would be no more speculation. I would follow the tracks through the woods to the rock, and I would follow what I knew was A.’s usual path across t
he rocks the rest of the way to the top. I knew that my answer lay there, at the wind-blown top of the mountain, not here below, in the shelter of the forest.

  I pulled my cap over my ears, gave my gloves a tug, and started trudging uphill along the path, first easterly, then westerly, switchbacking through the trees. As I ascended, the trees became shorter and more twisted, and soon I could see patches of gray sky over me and fresh snow falling on the path. In a short while, the trees were not much higher than my head, briary Scotch pine and dwarfed and gnarled spruce, and when I looked down to check on A.’s tracks, I could no longer see them, for the snow was by then falling heavily on me and on the path, erasing my own tracks behind me as quickly as, a few minutes before, it had erased A.’s. But I was familiar with the path, had walked it many times before, and I knew that A. had come this far and that he must have gone on, so I continued to climb. It became more difficult, for I was out of the trees altogether, and the path was rougher and more circuitous as it wound around huge boulders and skirted short but dangerous drops. The new snow on the old, hardened snow below made my footing less sure. Several times I slipped and almost fell, and once I kept myself from tumbling back down a steep stretch of the path only by pulling myself forward with my hands on a long, jagged outcropping adjacent to the path. The wind was high now, and it whipped the snow against me in wet, adhesive sheets, plastering my hat and coat and face. I could not see more than a dozen feet in front of me and then only when the wind momentarily hitched or shifted and blew the snow from behind me. My progress was slow, I knew, but I didn’t have much farther to go. I had reached the crown, where the path abruptly steepened for a final hundred and fifty feet and then leveled off at the top. Increasing my effort, even though I was panting like a racer and, despite the cold and the wind, sweating heavily, I made the final scramble to the top, where I finally came to rest on the table-sized ring of flat stone there. I could see nothing that I could not reach out and touch. The snow had covered my entire body and had turned all but the red sun of my face as white as the whirling white space that surrounded me. If there had been another human face on that high flat table top, that altar, I would have seen it, I would have fallen to my knees before it, for I would have seen nothing else but that face. But there was no other human face there to match mine. I was alone, completely alone. I knew that if I took another step, I would walk off the altar into empty space, a swirl of white, and then nothing. Nothing. Unimaginable nothing. I turned slowly around and began the descent.

  About the Author

  RUSSELL BANKS is the author of Rule of the Bone and Continental Drift, among other titles. He has received numerous prizes and awards for his work, including the O. Henry and Best American Short Story Awards. He lives in upstate New York and Princeton, New Jersey, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark University Professor at Princeton.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Praise

  “Stunning and original… Russell Banks’s most sustained, intricate, and impressive work to date… Banks is a writer who has a mind.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “A success… Ironic, melancholy, and haunting.”

  —Newsweek

  “Banks has skillfully used his repertoire of contemporary techniques to write a novel that is classically American—a dark, but sometimes funny, romance with echoes of Poe and Melville.”

  —Washington Post

  Other Works

  Rule of the Bone

  The Sweet Hereafter

  Affliction

  Continental Drift

  The Relation of My Imprisonment

  Success Stories

  The Book of Jamaica

  The New World

  Trailerpark

  Family Life

  Searching for Survivors

  Copyright

  HAMILTON STARK. Copyright © 1978 by Russell Banks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1978 by Houghton Mifflin Co. It is reprinted here by arrangement with the author.

  Chapter One, “By Way of an Introduction to the Novel, This or Any,” was originally published in slightly different form in the anthology Statements I, Jonathan Baumbach and Peter Speilberg, eds., Fiction Collective/Braziller, New York, 1977.

  Epub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062123244

  First HarperPerennial edition published 1996.

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Banks, Russell, 1940–

  Hamilton Stark / Russell Banks. — 1st Perennial ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-06-097705-1

  1. Divorced men — New Hampshire — Psychology — Fiction. 2. Fathers and daughters — New Hampshire — Fiction. 3. Fiction — Authorship — Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A49H3 1996

  813′.54—dc20

  95-53320

  * * *

  96 97 98 99 00 /RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  *These comprise the sequence and subjects of the first seven chapters of The Plumber’s Apprentice, the novel from which “Return and Depart” is drawn. It also marks one of the few places in the book where the narrator self-consciously becomes “the author.”

  *The Latin version of Tobit adds that Tobias and Sarah defeated the demon by successfully remaining chaste for the first three nights of their marriage, which was the beginning of the later custom of “Tobias’s Nights.” In fact, right down to the nineteenth century in parts of France, Germany and the Balkans, it was customary to follow the example of Tobias and Sarah, and in medieval France, husbands were often permitted to pay a fee to the Church for a license to disregard the rule.

  *Oddly, when asked which of his many construction jobs had given him the most personal satisfaction, Hamilton replied, “The Temple of Jerusalem,” which remark, at the time, was interpreted by the interrogator as meaning that none of his many jobs had given him personal satisfaction.

  *A local, smaller, coldwater version of the well-known catfish.

  *‘It might be worth noting, however, that the intimated troubles did occur later, very recently, in fact, and naturally enough concerned the only woman in the author’s life (at the time of this writing). That woman was Rochelle Stark, and the author’s “troubles” with her arose from her gift, and his literary use, of the voluminous materials and several texts of her novel, The Plumber’s Apprentice, which, the reader will
recall, were formally presented to the author in his Chapter Seven, “Ausable Chasm.” For, when it became apparent to Rochelle that the author intended to incorporate extended pieces of her more or less completed narrative directly into the body of his own narrative, her reaction was surprising to the author. He had taken her at her word, that her research materials and other texts were his to use, however he wished to use them, in the writing of his own novel. Thus he had hoped that she would be pleased by what he regarded as his imaginative use of those texts, especially since he had credited her for them and had so elaborately praised their qualities (even when, naturally, with this fastidious an author, there were sections that displeased him some-what). And if his hopes of her gratitude and delight could not be met, then he fully expected her, at the least, to provide him with an objective appraisal of his use of those materials, as one craftsman to another. In other words, the author hoped she would be flattered by his deployment of her help, and if he couldn’t get that much from her, then he expected more help, this time in the form of critical analysis. Instead, as the reader may have guessed, Rochelle’s reactions were more complex. She would not criticize. No, indeed, quite the opposite; she lavished him with praise for his imagination and wit. And she would not let him believe that she was sincerely flattered. “Oh, my goodness! I’m so happy that you were able to take so much!” she exclaimed. “And that you had to change so little!” This was the beginning of the author’s “troubles” with Rochelle. A sensitive person, he was able immediately to break her code and perceive that her exclamations were actually whimpers of pain, a woman’s pain, the kind of pain no self-conscious man can perceive without recognizing its cause—man himself, or rather, that aspect of himself which is characterized by gender (as opposed to sex or any other personal manifestation of manhood). At first the author permitted himself the standard, expected reaction of personal guilt. After all, her suffering certainly seemed personalized enough, a particular kind and dose of pain caused by a particular person’s offense. He therefore apologized. She told him not to apologize. He sounded ridiculous. She was honored. Why should he apologize for having honored her? He apologized again. She rejected his apology again. He tried to minimize his actual use of her materials. She agreed, ashamed of their irrelevance. He came back and defended his need for them, their utter relevance. She didn’t believe him. He insisted. She believed him, and again, honored, she rejected his apology, this time in advance of its being offered. He grew suspicious of her expectation that he apologize. She must think he had something to apologize for. He denied having done anything wrong. She agreed, nothing wrong. He said lots of novelists had done it. She was happy to know there was a tradition for this sort of thing. He demanded to know what she meant by that. She said nothing. He said he knew irony when he heard it, and sarcasm too. She doubted that. He laughed sarcastically. She apologized—for misleading him, for having been unclear. She had been perfectly clear, he said ironically. She wrung her hands. He stalked about. She apologized. He told her not to be ridiculous, he felt honored by her gift. Why should she apologize for having honored him? She apologized again. He rejected her apology again. She began to deprecate the materials, pointing out his good judgment in deciding to use so little of them. He agreed, depressed by what he feared was their irrelevance. She came back and defended their relevance to his novel, especially the way he had integrated them. He didn’t believe her. She insisted. He believed her, and again, feeling honored by her gift, he rejected her apologies for the meagerness of the gift. What, she asked him, made him think she wanted to apologize for her gift? He must think her ashamed of her work, especially in relation to his work. She told him hers was just as beautifully done as his. There was nothing wrong with it. He agreed, nothing wrong. At least, she informed him, she was working in a tradition. He was happy for her, as for so many other writers, that there was a well-established tradition for them to work in. She demanded to know what he meant by that. He said nothing. She said she knew irony when she heard it, and sarcasm too. He doubted that judging from her work. She laughed sarcastically. He apologized. He said he was guilty of having been unclear. After all, he depended on a tradition as much as she did. Oh, no, he had been perfectly clear, she told him, wringing her hands. He stalked about. She wept. He apologized. And so it went, around and around again, like a uroboros. They had been transformed, and two separate people, hitherto linked solely by their love for one another and their shared obsession with a third person, had suddenly found themselves capable of connecting only viciously, auto-cannibalistically, wearing a single body, yes, but a body with its tail in its mouth. And since neither the author nor Rochelle could distinguish the head of the beast from its tail, they could not break this self-devouring connection, and rapidly their love for one another turned to fear for their own survival, then desperation, then hatred of the other. Their old shared obsession broke apart also, and they began to attack each other’s viewpoint and interpretation. Where one found meaning, the other saw projection and egoism. Where one found sublimity, the other saw wishful thinking. Each began to think the other soft-headed, sentimental and self-indulgent on the subject of Hamilton Stark. Yet they could not separate. The uroboros is a mesmerizing image. It is, in spite of the entrapment it signifies, a securing, containing, utterly stable image, and if the author had not recalled his earlier conversations with Hamilton and had not decided to enact certain of the aphorisms learned there (and set down earlier in this chapter), it’s possible that their lives, the author’s and Rochelle’s, would be locked together even today by the image of the self-swallowing serpent. For the author, as the reader doubtless knows by now, bore a typically heavy burden of typical male guilt, despite his years of study with the master of neutralizing precisely that guilt. And Rochelle, in turn, bore a typically heavy burden of typical female pain, despite her relative freedom from any oppressive relationships with particular men (heaven knows, her father had never participated in any such relationship, and her love affair with the author had been essentially the connection between two acolytes, with nothing in their role as acolytes to permit an inequality between them). Thus, by the time the author finally remembered Hamilton’s advice and example and their applicability to his own situation, he had grown feeble and confused, and it took an enormous effort of will for him to face down the forces that conspired to keep him from applying that advice and example, the forces of his own conventions, the threat of public disapprobation, his fear of loneliness, and naturally, his love of Rochelle. There was a further consequence that threatened him: he doubtless would end up unable to use the materials of her novel in his own novel, either because she would forbid it or because he would be too ashamed, purely and simply, of a cruelty that, at such a point, would be merely gratuitous. And possibly illegal. But even so, he was at last capable of meeting this coercive array of forces head-on. One afternoon following a particularly vicious turn of the wheel they were locked into, he went to his desk and drew out of a drawer all the notes, tapes, genealogical charts, maps, photos, and all the carefully typed manuscript pages of The Plumber’s Apprentice, wrapped the materials fastidiously in brown paper, and drove to the post office, where he mailed the package to Rochelle, who at that time was still living in a boarding house in Concord. To the top sheet of her manuscript, he had clipped a typewritten note, which read: I have read your manuscript and related materials with care, and, as you know, with a predisposition to enjoy them because of the person your character Alvin Stock is based on. I have found, however, that, whether taken as a work of imaginative fiction or as a roman à clef, the manuscript fails to interest or amuse, and I am therefore returning it to you with my thanks. You are obviously quite intelligent and at times show evidence of talent, and I would not wish to discourage someone who is at the very beginning of her career as a writer, but it occurs to me that you might consider trying some other aspect of writing than fiction. Have you ever thought seriously of writing articles for women’s magazines? This can be ex
tremely lucrative, and you would be free to travel. In any case, I am flattered that you cared to solicit my opinion of your work, and if you wish to have me read any of your future writings, I would be delighted to do so. Good luck to you in your career. She never knew, of course, that as he typed this letter the author wept. Nor would he have told her or even hinted at his pain if they ever happened by chance to meet again. It was the end of Rochelle’s lovely presence in his life, he knew that. He also knew how she would remember and imagine him from that day on—as a senselessly cruel man, possibly psychotic, a man unable to give love because he was unable to accept love, a dangerous man. And he knew that, in so describing him, she would bring him closer to the way most people described her own father, and that possibly her experience with him, the author, would lead her finally to view her father as others did. Her inescapable image of him, the author, as villain would, by its similarity to the other, lead her to accept an image of her father that she had resisted so bravely these many years. He knew that this conversion, or lapse, would deprive no one of any particular truth—not Rochelle, not Hamilton, and not the author. And finally, he knew now that he himself was going to have to research and write all those sections of his hero’s life that he had originally counted on being researched and written by Rochelle. That meant work. Hard work. He did not enjoy reading realistic fiction; still less did he enjoy writing it. But he had no choice. Rochelle was gone, used up and thrown out with the rubbish of his imaginative life. And her novel was gone with her. He was alone in his book now, a solitary. (Except, of course, for the company of his friend C. and Hamilton Stark himself.)