When she first met Hamilton, Dora knew nothing of the stories about him that had circulated for years in and around Barnstead, mainly because, until she married him, she had never been to Barnstead. She had been living in Concord at the time, in a small and rather drab apartment. And since her divorce six months earlier from her first husband, Harry Franklin, a man she had loved deeply and loyally for twenty-three years, she had lived there alone, extremely depressed, quietly trying to heal the deep, suddenly inflicted wounds that had precipitated the divorce. What had inflicted the wounds was her accidental discovery that her husband Harry Franklin had been a lifelong philanderer, and she alone, of all the people who had known him these many years, she alone had been unaware of this aspect of his character. In fact, to her embarrassment, she had thought of him as sexually cold, almost unresponsive, not just to her but to all women. She had even developed a kind of condescending, maternal affection for his nature, often referring to him as a cold fish, a stodgy haberdasher on whom, she felt, all sexual innuendoes and provocations were lost. And when finally his true nature came out (broadcast hysterically by one of his girl friends, who, not as trusting as Dora, had trailed him and had discovered that he was betraying her, too), she had felt as if he had yanked her legs out from under her. And when, through some perverse determination to “clear his conscience once and for all,” Harry had revealed to his poor wife the names of all the many women he had slept with over the years, continuing for weeks to remember and then to confess yet another old and all-but-forgotten liaison, when his confessions were finally over, Dora felt as if her life had been cut to pieces, the pieces cast into the sea, like so much garbage, to float there, swelling in the sun, picked at by gulls above and nibbled by passing fish below. It was in such a state, then, deeply depressed, beaten—a woman so deceived that any further deception would be meaningless, for there was now nothing left to “protect” her from—in such a state, one night after work, she had stopped for a drink alone in a cocktail lounge next to the typesetting shop where she was a compositor, and she had met Hamilton Stark.
They were seated at the leather-covered bar in the artificial gloom; he was a little drunk, and soon so was she. Perhaps she was attempting to put a little cynicism into her life, to see if it could lift her spirits a bit, even if only briefly, and when he had idly mentioned his displeasure with the place, what he called its “ad-man décor,” she had just as idly suggested that they adjourn to her apartment for the evening, where, she said, the décor was “early Woolworth’s.” He had asked her if she had a television set; she had said yes, a color set, and he had been delighted. There was a Frank Sinatra special on that night that he wanted to see. “Ol’ blue eyes,” he had called him. “You know that song he sings, ‘I Did It My Way’?” he asked her. She thought she knew the song. “Well, that’s me,” he said.
She married him within a week. The reasons were obvious to everyone who knew her. “She’s marrying the pipefitter because of what it’ll do to Harry,” they said. It was presumed that she did it so Harry Franklin would regard her new marriage as the act of a broken, possibly deranged woman, and therefore, people reasoned, he would feel guilty. “As well he should,” they clucked. It was, of course, no less possible that her marrying Hamilton after knowing him over drinks and color TV for only a week was the act of a broken, possibly deranged woman, in fact, and that how Harry the haberdasher might feel about it had never once occurred to her. But no one thought of that possibility. People tend to see ulterior motives everywhere these days, even in grief and woeful distraction.
They were married by a justice of the peace, a man who ran a large dairy farm and ice cream stand in Northwood, and a few days later, Hamilton’s mother died. Dora had barely unpacked her clothes and color TV. The kitchen set and bedroom suite they had purchased together, as a cynical nod to the forms of sentiment, had been delivered that afternoon, and she had just finished tucking in the linen, placing her combs, brushes, make-up and jewelry neatly on the dresser, moving first one article, then removing them all and starting over again, trying to make these dozen articles look as if they had been on top of that dresser for twenty-three years, when the phone rang. It was the first time it had rung in the three days since she had moved in, and she rushed out to the kitchen to answer it.
It was Sarah, Hamilton’s sister, she knew, even though they had never met, calling to inform her that her new mother-in-law, after a lengthy illness, had died in her sleep the night before. Funeral services would be held at the First Congregational Church in Barnstead at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday, December 1, two days later. Dora started to respond to this news and the, to her, peculiar way in which her new sister-in-law had conveyed it, but before she could utter a word, even a stammer of sympathy, Sarah had hung up.
That evening, when Hamilton came home from work (he was then the foreman for the plumbing, heating and air-conditioning systems on the new Tampax factory being built in the southwestern part of the state and was driving forty miles each way to work every day), she told him, word for word and in the same tone of voice, what Sarah had told her. She prefaced her bulletin, naturally, by telling him that his sister had called him that afternoon with some “shocking” news.
“Oh? Which sister?”
“Sarah.”
“What was the news?”
She told him.
“Anything else?”
“No, nothing else. Just ‘click,’” Dora said, miming the act of hanging up a telephone receiver.
“‘Click,’ eh?”
“Yes. ‘Click.’”
Hamilton sat down slowly at the kitchen table in the chair that faced the window. It was where his father had always sat. At breakfast he could see Blue Job as it caught the day’s first light, and in the late afternoon he could watch it lose light and slowly turn gray until finally it loomed darker than the sky that surrounded it.
He asked her to tell him when the funeral was to be held, and she repeated Sarah’s message. It was a message, she assumed, even though it had come in the form of an obituary notice. She wanted to ask him about Sarah, about his other sister, Jody, and about his mother, too, but she did not dare, not now. Until this moment, she had not once wondered about these people; she had been too preoccupied with how her marriage to Hamilton fit or did not fit into her own private, truncated past. And now that she wanted to know about his past, if for no other reason than to be better able to comfort him at such a bad time, she was afraid to—for he had begun to growl, low in his chest and throat, like a large and vicious animal. He sat there, looking dead-eyed out the window at the gathered darkness, his hands fisted heavily on the tabletop, and growled.
Very slowly, one silent step at a time, she backed away from him, and then left the room altogether. In seconds she had left the house and was outside in the front yard, standing next to the car, a green Chrysler airport limousine he had recently purchased, wondering if she should flee down the road in his car, which so far he had not allowed her to drive, or return to the house and try to comfort him. She had never heard anyone growl aloud like that, and she had never seen a person’s eyes go dead before, and she was terrified. Harry Franklin, when his mother had died, had cried like a baby, she remembered with sudden affection. And she had held him in her arms and crooned soothingly to him while for hours he had catalogued his childhood memories of the woman. What could this woman have done to Hamilton to have evoked such an enraged response? Clearly, it was rage—those eyes, that growl, the enormous fists on the smooth Formica-topped table—but rage at whom? Somehow it did not seem directed at his mother. No, the rage belonged elsewhere, and that was why Dora was so frightened that, rather than try to comfort him, she had fled from him, had tiptoed out to stand coatless by the car in the cold November twilight and wonder if she should flee still farther from him.
Suddenly he was there, standing at the door, his bulk filling the doorframe, his face burning darkly across the yard at her. He slowly reached one hand out and pointed a finger
at her, as if it were the barrel of a gun. “Where the hell are you going?” he demanded in a low voice.
“I … well, I don’t know. I thought… I thought you wanted to be alone.” She started to wring her hands. The ground that lay between them, freshly frozen but already as bleak as tundra, seemed to undulate in slow waves, and she knew she was weeping. From across the field a wind chipped at her back, and she began to shiver from the cold.
“Get in here,” he ordered. “One woman already left me today. Don’t make it two.” He turned slowly around and disappeared into the darkness of the living room, leaving the door wide open for her.
She hesitated a second, then, still wringing her hands and shivering from the cold, quickly walked across the dead yard and followed him into the house.
He did not speak to her again that evening, nor did she attempt to engage him in conversation of any kind. As swiftly and unobtrusively as possible, she prepared their meal, a frozen sirloin that she broiled, frozen french fries and peas (his favorite meal, he had told her one evening the week before at her apartment in Concord when, quite by accident, she had presented him with the very same fare). And after they had eaten in silence, she had quickly cleared the table, washed the dishes, and had gone into their bedroom, which had once been his parents’ bedroom, adjacent to the kitchen. Off that room was the cold, unused front parlor, empty of furniture, curtainless, with a fireplace that he had blocked up years before. A few days earlier she had looked on this house as having what she called “marvelous potential,” and she had imagined redecorating it, starting with that old, tomblike parlor, which, because of fair days it filled to brimming with morning sunlight, she had thought would make an attractive master bedroom, then converting his parents’ old bedroom into a large and luxurious bath and dressing room. The upstairs, where there were two bedrooms and a connecting bath, she planned to use for guests. Her mother could come from Chicago and visit them, and her sister in Pittsburgh could come, and her father and his second wife, and her friend Gladys from Massachusetts could drive up during her vacation next summer. She had imagined new curtains, new carpeting, fresh paint. The house was squarely built, meticulously maintained and spacious, and it coaxed out all her most hospitable fantasies and plans, even though for the last six months she had been a woman who had felt that all her life’s plans had been for another, a previous life.
But that night, as she sat on the edge of the double bed that she and her new husband had purchased a few days before, she looked around her, and all she saw was hopelessness and dark retreat. It was not the kind of hopelessness that was characterized by disorder or sloth, but the kind that makes itself known first by the ruthless paring down of the elements of a life to its essential, molecular units, then by a compulsive ordering of those units, a deliberate placement of remnants in self-referring relations that were abstract, geometric, intellectually pure, controlled. The house and its contents seemed suddenly, hopelessly, cold to her, like an arctic wind, and she began to think with fond nostalgia of her small, crowded apartment in Concord, its warm disarray and thoughtless clutter. (She did not dare to think of the house she had lived in before that, the house she had shared for twenty-three years with Harry Franklin.) She snapped off the light next to the bed, got slowly undressed in the dark, and slipped into the bed. She began to think that she had made a terrible mistake. It might not be too late. Harry was a good man, though flawed, cruelly flawed … and he had cried when she left him, cried like a baby…
Hamilton did not come to bed that night. Or at least not to their bed. Possibly he had slept in one of the upstairs rooms and had made the bed when he got up, but when she came into the kitchen at six-thirty, the ceiling light above the table was burning and his coffee cup and breakfast dishes, as usual, were soaking in the sink, and his car, as usual, was gone.
She heard the furnace kick over and start its low hum, and she checked the thermometer posted outside the kitchen window. Fourteen above zero. She hoped it wouldn’t snow for the funeral. Oh, God—the funeral. What should she do about the funeral? As the gray cold day wore on, she worried more and more fixedly about it. How was she supposed to act? What was expected of her? She could not understand how such a thing could have become problematic, but it had. She was surprised that she actually did not know what was the proper and appropriate thing to do. Funerals and weddings and birthdays—these were events in a life that were such integrated parts of its overall texture that one almost never questioned what was expected of one as a participant in those events. One simply knew. They were rituals of the culture, and she was one of the people who lived inside and sustained that culture. Why, then, was she so unsure of herself, so incapable of deciding what was expected of her by her husband, her sisters-in-law, the townspeople they lived among? She felt as if she had accidentally wandered into an alien land, where the rituals were obscure and exotic, where a wrong guess could be disastrous for her because outrageous to everyone else.
Around four in that afternoon, as it grew dark and the temperature began to fall again, she called the only florist in Barnstead, Herb Cotton, and ordered a large arrangement of white chrysanthemums to be sent to the church the next day in time for the funeral. She knew that she should have sent the flowers to the funeral home, but Sarah hadn’t said anything about which funeral home her mother’s body was lying in or whether there was to be a service there, and she didn’t dare call Sarah now and ask her.
“What should the card say?” the florist, presumably Herb Cotton, asked in a high, thin voice.
“What?”
“The card. What should we put on the card?”
“Oh… Well, I suppose … the usual, I guess.”
“The usual?”
“Yes … you know, ‘From Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Stark,’” she said with hope in her voice.
“This Mrs. Stark speaking?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” He paused. “Ham’s wife, eh?”
“Yes.”
“Yep. Wal, don’t you an’ ol’ Ham worry yourself. We’ll get these over to the Heywoods’ Funeral Home tonight. They’ll still look good at the church tomorrow.”
“Oh… Well, thank you.”
“Good woman, y’know. That Alma Stark. That’s Ham’s mother, y’know.”
“Yes, I know. I… I never knew her.”
“Yep. Bye, now,” he said sharply.
“Good-bye,” she said, and she hung up the phone.
That evening, Hamilton arrived home three hours later than usual, only slightly drunk, but dark and glowering and filled with smoldering silence. She bobbed around him, gave him food, and stayed in the bedroom for the remainder of the evening, listening to him as he tramped heavily in and out of the house from the barn. Every now and then she could hear sounds that told her he was sorting out the tools, equipment, materials—“a place for everything and a thing for every place.” One minute she imagined him doing something that was wholly intentional, deliberate, no matter how bizarre-seeming. She imagined him, for instance, building a coffin for his mother, a hearse from his car, a graveside marker. But a minute later she could only imagine him doing something that was determined wholly by forces outside his conscious will, compulsive acts, no matter how ordinary or normal-seeming—and she imagined him sorting out jars of nuts and bolts, inventorying pipe and fittings, stacking kindling endlessly.
That night she slept alone again, and again she didn’t know where her new husband slept if he had slept at all, for when at seven-thirty she went out to the kitchen, even though it was Saturday and not a workday, once again the light was burning and his breakfast dishes were in the sink and his car was gone. Around nine he returned, with the newspaper and the week’s groceries, ale, and Canadian Club. He had begun his regular weekend routine. Dora, of course, did not know this yet, but by eleven, when she had watched him several times perform some menial or trivial task in the yard or house and then pull a pen and small black notebook from his shirt pocket and make a mar
k in the book, she realized that he was indeed performing a weekly ritual. That’s when it occurred to her that the man had no intention of attending his mother’s funeral. She could not say with confidence, however, that it was his intention, actually, not to go, for she also believed that he was unable to go, that forces beyond and stronger than any of his intentions were keeping him at home on this day, notebook and pen in hand, checking off his chores, one by one, as he did them.
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