Eventually, however, he relented. One March afternoon he moved all his puzzles and games, his Erector set and tools, his model airplanes and his drawing pads and crayons and watercolors, into the front room, one thing at a time, slowly, as if he had been ordered to move out of the house altogether.
The following afternoon he returned home from school, and while he was sitting on the floor in the middle of the bare room, working on a balsa and tissue paper model of a P-47 Warhawk, he remembered the last time he had spent an afternoon there. It was when, the previous summer, almost a full year ago, his two cousins from Massachusetts had been “sent to the country” by their parents. Ham liked his cousins, especially the boy, Daniel, who was his age. But he also liked the girl, Virginia, even though she was older than the boys by four full years. Her parents had nicknamed her Ginger, and Ham had always assumed that it was because of her reddish hair, which somehow reminded him of what ginger looked like. She was a good-natured and attentive girl, and she never seemed to object to keeping company with two boys four years younger than she. She was able to lead them without necessarily dominating them, achieving a balance that pleased all three and, for Ham’s mother, making the chore of suddenly having to care for three children less strenuous than it might have been.
But the last time they had come up to visit, Ginger had changed. Sullen, withdrawn and aloof from the boys, she had preferred staying in the kitchen with Ham’s mother to playing in the front room or, on sunny days, out in the barn and yard with the boys. Ham saw immediately that she had changed. She spoke to him in a voice heavy with sarcasm and condescension, and she treated her brother Daniel with outright contempt.
“What’s with her?” Ham asked Daniel after Ginger had sneered at the boys’ request that she join them in a game of Monopoly. It was raining, and the boys were sitting by a window in the front room, slightly bored, watching the rain dribble down the glass.
“She’s big stuff now,” Daniel explained. “She thinks she’s Miss America. All she does at home is look in the mirror. At night she locks herself in her bedroom and studies her titties in the mirror. No kidding, I seen her. I looked through the keyhole once an’ saw her doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at her titties.”
“Her titties? Has she got those?” Ham didn’t remember noticing any pointy things protruding from her chest when she arrived.
“Yeah, little bitty titties!” Daniel laughed. “I seen ’em, lots of times.”
“How? Does she show them to you?”
“Naw. But I look at her through the keyhole in her bedroom door, and sometimes I walk in on her when she’s taking a bath or getting dressed or something, like it was an accident. Boy, she hates that. And sometimes I sneak up on her from behind and yank up her shirt or sweater and take a look and run away before she can even hit me. She doesn’t run as fast as she used to, so it’s real easy.”
“Yeah?” Ham was astonished by these turns in his cousins’ lives, and he was equally astonished by Daniel’s boldness.
“You want to see ’em?”
“See what?”
“Her boobs, the titties, stupid!”
“Sure,” Ham quickly answered. “How?”
“Easy. You call her in here, tell her you want her to explain something to you, something like about the Monopoly rules, and I’ll circle around through the living room and sneak up behind her and yank up her shirt. Okay? Got it?”
“Sure.”
“But when I do, you better be ready to take off, because she really gets mad,” Daniel warned.
Ham said he’d be ready, and Daniel went out of the front room into the living room. Then Ham started calling Ginger to come and explain something to him. “A Monopoly rule!” he yelled.
She sighed, got up from the kitchen table, and strolled through the downstairs bedroom to the front room. When she appeared at the door and asked, “Okay, what is it?” Ham momentarily lost his courage and was about to say “Never mind,” when he saw Daniel tiptoeing out of the bedroom behind her, his blue eyes gleaming excitedly, his fingers and hands poised to grab her shirttail, which he did, snapping it up to her armpits and exposing to Ham’s amazed eyes a tiny white brassiere strapped across her chest. Then, as she screamed, Ham started running, backward and out the door to the living room, through the living room to the kitchen and into the bedroom, where he ran into Ginger, who had remained standing in the doorway, her arms folded defiantly across her chest. Daniel, who had first fled into the kitchen and then had turned to follow Ham as he passed through, bumped into his cousin from behind and yelled, “Hurry up! Get going!” And then he saw her too.
They started to spin around and head back through the kitchen again, but she said, “Forget it, Daniel! I’m through chasing you. If you two want to be disgusting little sex fiends, go ahead. Here, take a good look,” she said, and she lifted her blouse and showed them her brassiere. “Satisfied?”
Ham felt his ears redden at the sight, and he turned around and ran from the room, all the way upstairs to his bedroom, where he sat down on the bed and waited for Daniel to come looking for him. While he waited, he promised himself, over and over, that he’d never look at Ginger’s titties again, no matter what her brother said, never.
Except when he happened to be in the front room, he hadn’t thought about it since it had happened. It was like almost forgetting it, or like having only dreamed it, parts of it—the part where Daniel sneaks up behind her, his eyes gleaming, his fingers outstretched and hooked a little, like Dracula’s, while Ginger stands in front of the door to the bedroom, talking peacefully to Ham about the Monopoly rules, when suddenly she bares her breasts to him, stands there leering, calling him a disgusting little sex fiend. That’s what he remembered whenever he had to spend more than a minute or two alone in the front room.
And inevitably, if he remained there, he remembered two other things, both of which caused him discomfort that was extreme and similar in feeling to the discomfort caused by the first memory. Like the one, the other memories were of events that had taken place in the front room. In one of them, he is with Ginger. She is about ten, and he is only six, and they are looking at each other’s genitals, touching them with fingertips, prodding, pulling tissue back, scrutinizing with excruciatingly gentle curiosity their respectively tiny organs.
They were not found out. No one burst in on them and pointed a huge finger and called them disgusting little sex fiends. Yet the memory gave Ham terrible discomfort, a deep sense of shame, and always, if at that moment he did not leave the front room, he would remember the other event that had taken place there. He would remember one spring morning, a Sunday before church, going into the front room from his parents’ bedroom, taking a short cut to the stairs, and as he runs through the room, he glimpses a tiny mouse huddled on the fireplace hearthstone, a brown mouse the size of a man’s thumb caught in a brick-walled corner. Ham stops and tiptoes over to the mouse, which cannot escape its corner and, as a final ruse, is stilled, trembling, waiting. The boy leans to his left and with his two hands removes a brick from the stack of a dozen or so that his father placed there, probably for some intended chimney repair, and the boy drops the brick onto the mouse, crushing its body but not killing it, so that it squeaks wetly, like an orange being squeezed for juice, and the boy must retrieve the brick, hold it up to his chin and drop it a second time, and then a third, and finally a fourth, when the mouse is dead.
Ham slowly got to his feet and walked from the front room to the kitchen, on his way passing through his parents’ bedroom, where the new baby slept in her white, gauze-shrouded basinette. His mother was resting. She was seated at the kitchen table looking at her fingernails. When he came into the room, she smiled and said hello to him and asked him to come stand next to her.
While she stroked his hair back with her hands, he asked her one more time if he had to play in the front room. She relented and said no, he didn’t have to.
But she wa
nted to know why he hated that room, when he used to love it so.
He was going to tell her about the mouse, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he remembered that she already knew about it. It had never been a secret. He had run proudly from the front room to the kitchen and had brought both parents back to see the dead animal. They had been pleased and amazed. His father had patted him on the head and had said, “Good boy,” and his mother had said, “I never would’ve been able to do that. I just would’ve run for the cat and let him do it!”
So he said nothing to his mother, nothing of the mouse and of course nothing about his cousins. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at his feet.
“You’re a strange one, Ham,” she told him, smiling. “But if you want to be here with me and the baby, I guess I’ll just have to give in and let you.”
After that he forgot about the mouse and did not remember it even when, now and then, because of some errand or helping his mother or father, he could not avoid going into the front room. And when he had forgotten about the mouse, he no longer remembered staring and poking at his cousin’s body, or her hands on his. And eventually he forgot the day she pulled up her own blouse and exposed her breasts to him.
If it seems strange that the daughter of a man like Hamilton Stark should treasure and retell in literary form these three tales of his childhood, the reader might remember that it’s only in the light of these stories that she is able to justify her love for the man. Otherwise, she might be forced to regard her love for him as perverse, lost, tangled in ropes of ritualized grief and reenacted trauma, possibly for the rest of her life, and certainly his.
And if it seems strange that a hero’s childhood should be described in this manner, please remember that my hero is both controversial and enormous, and therefore whoever would attempt to describe him objectively (excluding from his description the narrator’s personal sympathies and antipathies for the subject) runs the risk of being dominated by the subject. That is the reason for the mask, the format of the tales, the realism, the lack of realism.
There will be other masks, other formats, other castings of reality. You may continue to call this one Rochelle, if you wish, and of course she will continue to play a major role in the events being described. She is, after all, Hamilton Stark’s only child, and despite her having been deserted by him, she is crucial to our understanding of him. Actually, her absence from his life, because it was willed by him, is more revealing than her presence would be. I hope you like her. I do. She’s twenty-six years old, a long-boned, precisely featured, red-haired young woman with green eyes and clear white skin that’s almost translucent. She moves quickly but with grace and elegance. True elegance. If I were a younger man, I would court her. I would pursue her ceaselessly. For though she’s the kind of young woman who tends to draw organized, purposeful, self-centered men into changing their lives suddenly, radically, and, very often, disastrously, she’s also the kind of woman who’s astonished when it actually happens—though, to one not so affected by her charms, it’s never clear that she did not secretly desire the disaster.
But, to continue:
Chapter 4
Her Mother Speaks to Her of a Man She Calls “Your Father”
NO, REALLY, DEAR, I mean it. It’s time everyone stopped all this dancing around the few trivial facts of the man and got right down to where you can stick your nose up against them, so to speak. Forgive me for saying it this way, but the man, your father, is a despicable man. Always was. Despicable, pure and simple, and everyone who’s ever had the misfortune to know him knows at least that much about him, and especially everyone who’s ever been married to him, among whom I count myself the first, as you know.
But you’re his only child, dear, you’ve never been married to him, of course, so that’s probably why you keep going through all this hero-worshiping nonsense with the man. But only child or not, don’t forget the facts you have to ignore. Life’s like that, it’ll let you keep on ignoring the facts, practically forever, if you want to go that far, but eventually it’ll make you pay for it—or your children, or your wife or husband, or maybe even your grandchildren. Anyhow, somebody ends up paying, and I don’t plan on being that somebody for you. No, you’re practically grown now, old enough to know the truth about your father. You think now that he’s somebody to imitate, someone to admire and recommend to all your friends, someone who’ll defend you against your enemies, a confidant, an advisor, a teacher, a chum. When I get through, dear, you’ll know better than to imitate him. You’ll know not to expect him to defend you against anything. Hah, you’ll need someone to defend you against him! A chum. Some chum.
You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this now, why I waited so long to turn you against him. Well, blood is thicker than water, that’s how I always reasoned about the matter, and besides, I never wanted him coming back at me that I turned you against him, you his only child, the one he probably claims to love so much, but of course, only later, when you’re practically all grown up and it’s easy to love you, easy to be your father now—not that you weren’t a lovable child, no, of course not, you were a wonderful, cuddly, curly-haired little thing, everyone loved you, especially me, and I didn’t want your father claiming that I had turned you against him by only telling you the bad things about him, or only telling you things in a light that would make you think badly of the man your father. Let the child find out for herself, that’s what I always said, when people asked me if you knew what kind of a man your father was, and believe me, they asked, oh God, did they ever ask. They couldn’t believe it when you talked about him the way you did, when you bragged about his being a pipefitter, when you told people what a big shot he was, how he built the U.S. Air Force Academy all by himself, that place in Colorado, as if that weren’t one big lie. Brother, the things that man could tell a child. I remember my eyes filling with tears when I would hear you out on the back steps telling your little friends how your father had been a champion boxer. And when you told them he was a champion runner. And when you described his cars. His ability to play the saxophone. His enormous bicep. His black and thick hair. The curly mat of black hair on his chest. The broad shoulders, the hard-muscled back. The rocky thigh.
Well, you asked me for my thoughts and opinions and my memories of the man, and I’m going to give them to you, no matter what they do to your version of him. I know you’ll be asking the same of his other wives—or, I should say, ex-wives—so I won’t bother with what I know to be true of him after we got our divorce, because you’ll get plenty of that from the women who knew him later and better than I did during those particular years of his life. And who knows, maybe he’s changed. It sometimes happens. But even so, above all, I want to be fair to the man, because from what I’ve heard, he’s been fair to me. From what I’ve heard, he’s actually told people he still loves me, and that he loved me best of all, that I was his “true love.” I can understand that. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. We were so young, and you know what they say about young lovers, first lovers. Oh, I’ve gotten over him, all right, I mean, I can admit now that he was my first love, my true love, all that sort of thing, but I’m over him now. Because after all, you must remember he was the one who left. Not me. He was the one who walked out. Not me. He was the one who wanted the divorce, the one who got himself a lover while he was still married to me. Not me. I never did any of that. It makes it easier to get over someone if you’ve never done anything wrong to him. You can understand that.
But I’m sure that when he says I was his first love he’s telling the truth. I don’t think he lied to me about that, and maybe even after all these years he still does think of me that way. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing about him. You know what they say about first loves. We were young. I mean young. I was a fashion model then, for the Globe Department Store right here in Lakeland. A small-town girl, sure, but pretty. Some people said pretty enough to succeed as a fashion model in New York, even. You know all this, yo
u’ve seen pictures, snapshots, and of course, you’ve talked to people who knew me then. Anyhow, that’s not important, except that naturally it helped me land your father.
He came south to Florida that winter, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father, your grandfather. Someone’ll probably go into all that in detail, so I won’t bother here. It’s a fascinating story, though. Whenever I tell people about it now, they simply refuse to believe that I believed it then, that he had killed his own father, I mean. But I always say, “Listen, if he believed it himself, why shouldn’t I believe it too?” Not many people can come up with an answer for that one.
Anyhow, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father that I first met your father. He came south to Florida, hitchhiking, with nothing more than what he could put in a single battered suitcase. Why he chose Lakeland I’ll never know for sure, but I think it had something to do with a construction job that was going on then. A lot of plumbing was involved, connecting up a couple of lakes in the area for a town water supply, something like that. I never paid much attention to the jobs he worked on, never really understood them very well, though of course I was a good listener and always made sure to praise him highly for his work, both to his face and behind his back.
He chose to stop running in Lakeland, after running all the way south from his family home in New Hampshire in the middle of the winter, hitchhiking on trucks, sleeping alongside the highway in places like Red Bank, New Jersey, and Raleigh, North Carolina. He had just turned twenty-two years old, big and strong and not afraid of anything or anyone, except the police, of course. I often think of him, now that you are doing the same thing at almost the same age, hitchhiking all over the country, sleeping by the side of the road and all, not afraid of anything or anyone, and you aren’t even afraid of the police, naturally, because you don’t think you have killed your father. Anyhow, I often think of your father during those years, and it gives me some slight comfort, because after all, he did the same thing, and no harm came to him for it.
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