Hamilton Stark

by Russell Banks

  To return: I handed Rochelle her drink and joined her in the bed. (This happens to be the imaginary point from which I can most easily recall the events of the day I spent in Ausable Chasm.) We were talking about the day we first met each other and how we had perceived each other then. She said that she had thought of me as a small man, short and slight, but later, after having seen me numerous times alone, realized that it was because I had been in the company of her father that first time and thus, when compared to his great height and overall bulk, had appeared much smaller than, in fact, I actually was. She was pleased, she told me, when she discovered that I was the same height as she and that, while my musculature was not exactly overdeveloped, I was nevertheless wiry and in quite good shape for a man my age.

  Waving her compliments away, I gently asked her if she had seen her father and me from the speakers’ platform while she had been giving her speech. I wanted to know if she had seen my attentiveness. I confess it. Hurt somewhat by the comparison between her father’s and my physical size, I wished to have her compare my rapt attention with her father’s cruel inattention. So I risked causing pain. I risked the chance that, by invoking the image of her father sitting in the audience and apparently sleeping through her speech, with me perched on my chair, rapt and admiring next to him, she would feel again the pain that moment must have caused her.

  “You were an angel,” she said, smiling into my face. She had cut through my ruse in one stroke, had comforted me without mocking me and at the same time had spared herself the pain of the memory. What a woman! Then, with laughter, she began to talk about Ezra Taft Benson’s speech. “Remember it?” she asked me. “That funny little old man with all that crazy fervor?”

  Actually, I recalled nothing of Benson’s speech, except for the one line that Hamilton had continually quoted to me all the way back home in the car. I promptly related it to her: “The best defense is the one you never have to use,” I said.

  She giggled, then reminded me that when Benson had uttered those words Hamilton had broken into applause, mortifying me, perhaps astonishing Benson, and inducing a few scattered, sheeplike souls in the audience to join him. I had completely forgotten that awful moment and for a few seconds relived my embarrassment, which had been quite painful. I wasn’t so much embarrassed because I was sitting next to a person who seemed to be reacting to a banality with inappropriate enthusiasm, as I was embarrassed because that man happened to be my hero. I did not point this out to Rochelle. I didn’t have to. After all, he was her hero too.

  I may not have listed it among my earlier encomiums, but Rochelle’s memory is prodigious, photographic. Mine, of course, is ordinary. But she could recall details, entire conversations, books, films, any text at all, things and events in their entirety that I could but barely invent. Catalogues of things passed by on an afternoon’s drive in the country, newspaper articles and editorials verbatim, entire chapters from the Bible, the first paragraphs from novels she had read years ago, news accounts from radio and television that she’d listened to but moments before—it was unnerving, slightly otherworldly, and at all times not quite believable. I could never rid myself of my initial response to one of her recitations, which was that there must be a trick to it, a crib, a way of faking it somehow. At any rate, on this morning, when she noticed that I had preferred being amused by the Benson speech itself to being embarrassed by the associated image of Hamilton’s suddenly applauding a remark of, well, questionable morality, she quickly and kindly proceeded to recall for me the introduction given Benson by the president of the college, a Mr. Carlisle Bargeron.

  “Remember,” she said, “in President Bargeron’s introduction, this bit of deathless prose: ‘Ezra Taft Benson was conditioned early in life for the political buffeting that was to come. In fact, he experienced mob abuse early in his life.’” Rochelle giggled and put on a pompous expression that mocked President Bargeron and continued. “‘Secretary Benson is not a ministerial man in appearance.’” She was recalling his words effortlessly; they came back to me as she spoke them. Surely she was making them up; but if she were, how could I recognize them as she spoke? “‘He could be taken for a well-groomed businessman, over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds. He greets you with a pleasant smile and has an easy laugh.’” She smiled at me. “He must have written that speech from old publicity handouts from the Eisenhower administration. Because there was old Benson, sitting right next to Mr. Bargeron in a folding chair, tiny, shriveled, scowling like a Puritan minister!” She laughed. “Do you remember the crescendo of the introduction?”

  I shook my head no. Good God, until she had started quoting it, I had forgotten that there had even been an introduction in the first place.

  “‘Secretary Benson stands at the crossroads, seeking in turn the tide!’” Then, wrapping her long arms across the front of her body, she broke into goodhearted laughter. Utterly without malice, her laughter seemed to enfold the very object of her mockery, President Bargeron, and even Benson himself in a hug of compassionate understanding. For a second I felt that her laughter included as its object Hamilton too, and even me. Swinging her long, tanned legs over the edge of the bed, she got up and, naked, unself-consciously crossed the room to the dresser and made herself another drink.

  I must tell you that I was happier at that moment than I could remember ever having been before.

  When she returned to the bed, she went on quoting, this time in a wheezy, high-pitched voice designed to affect the quality and tone of Ezra Taft Benson’s aged voice. “‘We need,’” she said sternly, “‘as we need no other thing, a nationwide repentance of our sins! In our rush for the material things, we have, indeed, forgotten to serve the God of this land. We must look beyond the dollar sign! Our greatness has been built on spiritual values, and if we are to survive we must find again what we once had and now have lost. I am speaking of the inner strength that comes from obedience to divine low!’”

  Taking a sip from her drink. Offering me a sip. Then, amazingly, going on. “‘At least twenty great civilizations have disappeared! The pattern is shockingly similar. All, before their collapse, showed a decline in spiritual values, in moral stamina, and in the freedom and responsibility of their citizens. They showed such symptoms as excessive taxation, as bloated bureaucracy, as governmental paternalism, and in general a rather elaborate set of controls and regulations affecting prices, wages, production, and consumption.’”

  She paused again, and then she began a recitation that to me was indeed beyond belief (I could not believe that she had merely heard the speech once; she had to have read a copy at some point), for she was now quoting Benson as he quoted yet another speaker, and she was quoting both exactly (as far as I knew): “‘After reviewing the decline and fall of these great empires and appraising the lessons taught, the historian Glover of Oxford University makes this cryptic comment: “It is better for the development of character and contentment to do certain things badly yourself than to have them done better for you by someone else.’”

  Her voice, ordinarily low for a woman and tender, had tightened in her mimicry and had risen and, to be sure, had harshened somewhat, I was struck dumb by her ability not only to remember the man’s exact words but also to mimic his voice and mannerisms. What a woman! I said to myself.

  “And remember how he ended his speech?” she reminded me.

  I had not remembered at all, of course, until she began to quote it, and then as she spoke there returned to me in a rush a second embarrassing image, the image of Hamilton’s second outburst, which, fortunately, had not been perceived by Rochelle. It came as Benson was reaching the rhetorical peak of his message. The little man, visibly trembling with the emotion of his message to these young graduates, had cried out to them, “I love this nation! It is my firm belief that the God of Heaven raised up the founding fathers and inspired them to establish the Constitution of this land! This was ingrained in me as a youngster by my father and mother and by my church! It
is part of my religious faith! To me, this is not just another nation! It is a great and glorious society with a divine mission to perform for liberty-loving people everywhere!” Here he hesitated a moment to wipe the spittle from his lips with his handkerchief. Then, continuing with fervor, he shouted, “Freedom is a God-given, eternal principle vouchsafed to us under the Constitution! It must be continually guarded as something as precious as life itself! It is doubtful if any man can be politically free who depends upon the state for sustenance! A completely planned and subsidized economy weakens initiative, discourages industry, destroys character and demoralizes the people!” At precisely this moment as Benson stepped away from the microphone, Hamilton had leaped to his feet and, brandishing one huge fist like a club, had bellowed, “Live free or die!” It was the New Hampshire state motto!

  The rest of the audience had begun to applaud and a few individuals had risen to their feet, to prove their patriotism, perhaps, but possibly because of their genuine enthusiasm for the secretary’s words, and thus, luckily, Hamilton’s cry was lost on most of the people in the auditorium. Not on me, however, nor on the dozen or so people seated near us. And not on Ezra Taft Benson, either. The old man, by a quirk, happened to have been looking straight at Hamilton as he finished his speech, so when Hamilton leaped to his feet and bellowed the New Hampshire motto, Benson must have thought an enormous fanatic, an outsized Puerto Rican or some kind of Balkan anarchist madman, was about to attempt a suicidal assassination. The old fellow went white and staggered backward, clutching at his chest, clawed at it, and fell to the floor, where he began kicking his feet like a child having a tantrum.

  In a second Mr. Bargeron, Rochelle and the minister who had offered the prayer at the beginning of the ceremonies had reached Benson and had pulled him back to his feet. Apparently they had not seen the cause of his fall and assumed he had tripped over a microphone wire because they were, all three, apologetic and concerned mostly that he might have hurt himself. The secretary, who by this time had realized he was not to be assassinated, smiled painfully and limped from the stage, disappearing quickly behind the curtain, ashen-faced, shaken, mumbling to himself.

  Rochelle and I must have been remembering the same image—old Benson staggering backward, grabbing at his chest, falling over and kicking his feet on the floor, then being helped off the stage—for suddenly she looked at me in the gray, melancholy light and in a soft voice asked, “What really happened? What made that old man act like that … so terrified … as if someone were going to kill him? Did something happen that I, that I didn’t see? Did my father do anything?”

  I knew that she wanted me to say no, to keep it a puzzle, but I couldn’t lie to her any more than I could lie to myself. So I told her, told her how her father had stood up fiercely with his enormous fist raised and had cried out the New Hampshire state motto, which, as she could tell immediately, was indeed threatening. To a timid listener it could sound like, “Live free or I’ll kill you!”

  “Did he do that because he was carried away with enthusiasm for Benson’s speech?” Her voice was shaky, frightened, pleading.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. But he has a way,” I explained, “as you probably know all too well, of praising a thing by condemning it and of condemning a thing by praising it. He has a way of making a positive statement from a double negative, and a negative statement from a double positive. The first skill is not rare, but the second is. You aren’t a native New Englander, as I am and as your father is, so you’re probably not as aware as I of the degree to which the skill operates in the culture as a means for self-expression. Practically any old Yankee farmer will let you know how cruel and relentless his winter has been, not by condemning it, but by smiling and perversely praising the facts that his thermometer has frozen, that his cattle and pigs all froze to death in January, that there was still ice on the lakes in mid-June. It’s almost an ironic point of view, an extremely highly developed form of sarcasm that they’re not even aware they possess. The late Latin poets possessed it, consciously, of course, and certain eighteenth-century English authors owned it also, again quite consciously. But rarely, if ever, has it been characteristic of an entire people. Hamilton, your father, seems to have developed it to an extremely high degree, mainly because at some early age he must have become conscious of it and realized that, if he pushed it to a still more extreme point, he could gain a much wider range of reference for it, could use it to criticize matters more complex than last winter’s awful weather. At least that’s my theory, Rochelle. And because I love the man, I choose to believe it. So I guess it’s more than a theory, it’s also a rationalization. I wish it were more than a rationalization, though. I wish it were a description.”

  “I know,” she said softly, in almost a whisper. “If it were a description, you could believe that he despised Ezra Taft Benson, had utterly rejected him, and yet had managed at the same time to avoid subscribing to your and my liberal notions. Wouldn’t that be a profound and mature politics?” she said in a voice filled with wonder. “To be free to criticize and even to despise the old man’s reactionary position without, as a result, having to endorse any other. To offer yourself essentially as a critique, to be able to trust yourself that much! Why, you’d have to be a political genius to accomplish it!” she exclaimed. “Or some kind of Kierkegaardian ironist,” she added thoughtfully.

  “That’s precisely what keeps me from deserting your father’s side at moments like that, like the time he shouted the state motto at Benson or when he fell asleep during your valedictory speech or mocked me for voting for people like Morris Udall … or all the other things he’s done that, on the surface, seemed mindless, cruel or intolerant.” Our enthusiasm for the man was growing again. Our fear and mistrust were on the wane. With bright eyes and rapid words we cheered each other on, and before long we were both loving and admiring him without qualification again.

  It was more than merely possible that he had intended all this, had even foreseen it, and that it was his method of teaching us to see and understand the world more independently and with steadily increasing clarity. He was in many ways like a Sufi master or a wizened old peyote-chewing Indian shaman or a Zen Buddhist teacher who by indirection points direction out. But we are so naïve and ill-formed that, in our search for wisdom, we run around expecting to find it only in stereotypical figures—like desert-browned Sufis or raucous old Indian grandfathers or crisp Buddhist monks—never realizing that it is more in the nature of true wisdom that, for us, wisdom reside in the familiar form of a New Hampshire pipefitter who can’t seem to get along with people.

  Reaching over, I took her by her smooth shoulders, pulled her to me, and felt her cool breasts press against my chest. “Oh, Rochelle!” I cried. “We must be strong! And I do believe that we’re stronger together than we are alone! Your father is probably the greatest man either of us will ever have the good luck to meet in our lifetimes. Alone we weaken, we forget how difficult and tangled is the path to true wisdom. But together we are strengthened, toughened, encouraged to push through the intellectual and emotional tangles and our own most private fears and insecurities and conditionings to the end, where we, too, can offer ourselves as critiques, as double positives, and finally, in the largest sense, as human beings!”

  Needless to say, I was hovering somewhere between ecstasy and hysteria when suddenly, and thankfully, Rochelle taught me the utter ridiculousness of my feelings, showed me how far I still had to go before I could claim to possess a shred of the cloth Hamilton wore. She showed me also how much further along that path she had gone than I, showed me that while I might have glimpsed the master’s garment, she had actually touched it.

  “I don’t think you understand the nature of religious experience,” she said evenly. “I’m sorry, but when a person reaches the point where he or she can claim to know what you are now claiming to know, he or she should be free to enact it. If he or she can’t, if he or she still needs help, t
hen he or she really cannot say that he or she has the requisite knowledge. I’m sorry, but you’re much closer to the path when you’re greedily interrogating me about my father, when you’re splicing together your own personal and acquired knowledge of him, making of the man’s life a text, if you will, that will guide you straightway into the invention of your own life.” Gently, she pulled away from me and took a last sip from her glass. Then she smiled. “If you’ll fix me another drink, I’ll tell you how my father almost went to college.”

  “What?” I was stupefied by the sequence—first a collusion, then a collision, and now a collusion again.

  “Sure,” she said brightly. “I’ll tell you everything I know about him. And it’s quite a lot. I’ve done four years of research on his life so far, for that ‘novel’ of mine. You know, The Plumber’s Apprentice. I don’t feel possessive about that material anymore. I’m no more a professional novelist than you are, for heaven’s sake!” she laughed, and I had to laugh with her. “Go ahead, honey, fix me another drink and I’ll tell you all about how my daddy almost went to college.” She smiled and spoke with a southern accent that, as I rushed across the bedroom to the dresser where I had placed the cognac, soda and ice, nearly made me swoon.

  “After all, honey,” she drawled from the bed, “you told me something this mo’ning I didn’t know about before, that stuff about how Daddy stood up and shouted the state motto and all? I oughta do the same thing for you now, shouldn’t I?” And she winked at me. Winked! What a woman!

  I was certainly very confused. How, how had I lost control of the situation like this?

  Then I remembered: it was the ecstasy and the hysteria—or rather, it was my having reached the point halfway between the two. After that, everything had gone haywire for me. Rochelle had taken complete control of the conversation, and of me, until there I was fetching her a drink in exchange for a tale I hadn’t even particularly wanted to hear anymore, and to make matters worse, I was doing it in a swoon. How would I ever be able to remember the tale, let alone determine its importance to my own tale? Oh, reader, dear reader, remember this, and let it be an example to you. In the book of your life, never permit yourself to invent a woman or a man who is capable of bewildering you while he or she seduces you. You will lose the thread of your argument, you will find your story line impossibly tangled, your plot utterly overthrown, and your faith in your powers of observation and analysis sliced to limp ribbons of insecurity. Call it love, call it whatever you will, but know the risk. If you must, as I must, think of your life as a novel and of the creatures therein as “characters,” then unless you keep yourself from falling in love with one of those creatures, you will have to give up the idea of control. You will have to become not an inspired author, but one who is simply not in control of his own novel. It happens, it happens frequently.