Mal Hamilton seemed to have a way of compelling attention from people; perhaps it was that his ugly, gaunt face became almost a symbol of conscience to them, as his near-illiterate mother and grandmother were permanent reminders that all was not perfect in Burnham Falls. Perhaps the town could have forgotten about Charlie and Rose, and the arthritic old Nat ‒ but Mal didn’t let them forget. He was everywhere, mowing lawns, painting basements, serving in Crosby’s market, greasing cars at Morton’s Garage. Whenever people cleared out their cellars and attics, they gave more than they intended of the contents to Mal, and he took them, without pride and without shame ‒ clothes, bottles, scrap metal, used lumber. He was often given meals in the kitchens of Burnham Falls, and he accepted them too, with a muttered word of thanks. But, by this time he was an object of town pride rather than pity, for he began to record some of the highest marks in the state at his Regional Examinations, and it became almost a duty for the people of Burnham Falls to do what they could for him. When he graduated from high school he was class valedictorian, with his raw, bony wrists shooting beyond frayed cuffs, and George Keston looked on with approval, and thought that Charlie and Rose Hamilton had no business to be there in the gathering. Mal had the choice of three scholarships to different colleges. He drew out some money from George’s bank, bought himself a suit of clothes, a cheap suitcase, and left Burnham Falls.
The town hardly saw him for the four years he was at college, though George Keston had letters from him occasionally, and he reported that even though Mal was working to feed and clothe himself at college, he was still managing to put some money in the bank. The money came back to Burnham Falls, as if he had not yet learned to trust it in any other place. They heard that he spent one summer lumbering in Oregon, and another on a ranch in Colorado; and they also heard that he continued to top his classes in science and mathematics. Burnham Falls saw him once when he came back to attend his grandfather’s funeral; he had grown taller, and the harsh lines of his face hadn’t softened, though he now wore clothes that fitted him well enough. His body was tough and hard, and his speech as spare as ever. Everyone wondered why he had come back, for there had been no love between grandfather and grandson. Then they learned that it was not Rose, but Mal who had inherited the crumbling old house, and the twelve acres. Mal left Burnham Falls again, and Charlie and Rose stayed on at the house.
He went through college, stayed on an extra year and got his Master’s degree. Charlie began to talk, half-bragging, half-complaining that his son had no use for anything more than book-learning, and it was time he earned some money, and began to support his folks. When Rose died, Mal did not, this time, come back to Burnham Falls for her funeral.
‘I don’t blame him,’ was all George Keston said.
He went to work for a chemical firm ‒ a fairly routine job that did not pay well, but gave him time to himself. Two years later he had his Doctorate in Physics, and when George Keston got his letter, he talked of it around the town with as much satisfaction as if Mal had been his own son. Charlie Hamilton heard the news from the girl who served in the diner at the station, and he went out and got drunk. They found him lying unconscious at the back of the war memorial, and a few days later he died in the county hospital of pneumonia.
George Keston wired Mal, and he replied that he was coming back immediately. It was the summer of 1941.
Burnham Falls saw little change in Mal Hamilton, except, if anything he was harder and tougher ‒ but he was tougher with himself than anyone else. He was still sparing of speech, and his hands still bore the scars from the lumber camp. There was still not enough time for Mal Hamilton to do all that had to be done. They learned that he had thrown up his job, and had been hired at a much larger salary to run the West Coast branch of an experimental chemical company. The job didn’t start until September. He told George Keston he’d spend the rest of the summer in Burnham Falls.
If Burnham Falls believed that the aggressive, hard-bargaining boy was for ever buried in the Doctor of Physics, it was mistaken. Mal got a loan from the First National, and George Keston personally guaranteed it. With the money he borrowed he started to patch up and paint the Tyler house; he put in new kitchen fittings, built new closets and a bathroom, added a deep screen porch off the living-room; he mended broken floor-boards and stairs, and painted the rooms in soft greys and white, and the kitchen was yellow, so that it sparkled when the morning sun came in. He added shutters to soften the blind, staring windows. It had been a solid house, built to last, and it came to life under his hands. Its great beauty was a fieldstone fireplace which filled one whole wall of the living-room and which leaked badly. He called in Stan Cooper, the Burnham Falls mason, to fix it. He carted away the accumulation of cans and junk from the yard, cleared the riot of honeysuckle and blackberry, and laid a lawn ready to be seeded in the fall. The evergreens were trimmed and clipped, and a neat white post and picket fence put in place. Then he cleared a broad path through the wood to where his twelve acres touched on a small lake; here he built a diving-pontoon hard by a big, flat-topped rock that jutted into the water. As a child, Mal had swum here, solitary, on summer evenings; most people had forgotten that it existed. Now it was remembered as an asset that went with the Tyler house.
During the summer Mal came into town every few days in an old truck he had bought to pick up more lumber and paint. People knew he meant to sell the house when it was finished, and they were curious about its progress ‒ but more curious about Mal himself. Matrons who had been pleased to have young Mal Hamilton come to take away the rubbish from their cellars, now stopped him in Main Street and asked him to dinner. He always refused, and did not trouble to explain why. He was still the Mal Hamilton they remembered ‒ curt, almost rude, with no time to waste. Especially grieved over his refusal to socialise was George Keston, who felt he had a legitimate claim on Mal, and would have liked to take him about the town, to boast of his achievements. The most Mal would do was share a cup of coffee with him in the diner ‒ which was hardly the place for the President of the First National. Burnham Falls expected more from a Ph.D. than the thin, tall figure in the faded denim and spotted paint cap; it was disappointed.
George Keston shook his head, and again made excuses. ‘I guess he’s just worked too hard all his life to know how to stop. It isn’t human the way Mal Hamilton works.’
This last was a reference to the fact that Mal, with the Tyler house almost finished, had taken work as Stan Cooper’s labourer. His loan was running out, and mason’s fees were high, so he hauled stone and cement for Stan in payment for the repairs to the fireplace and chimney. His hands grew rougher, and he never learned to wear gloves. He worked off his debt to Stan, and as the last closet at the Tyler house had been painted and papered, he stayed on as a mason’s labourer, earning four dollars an hour. Burnham Falls was shocked, but it knew that for Mal Hamilton, the opinion of the town did not exist. He merely put up the for sale notice outside the house, and went on taking orders from Stan Cooper.
He was hauling stone from the edge of the lake at Downside for a new terrace and steps to replace the old wooden ones at Joe Carpenter’s cabin, when Harriet first saw him.
Harriet Carpenter and Mal Hamilton were a world apart ‒ and more. He was ten years older than Harriet, and the years had been full of the kind of struggle and discipline she could only guess at. He let a stone drop dully into place on the pile, and looked up and saw her.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Harriet.’
Without knowing quite why, she held her hand out to him formally. He wiped the whitish dust off his own before taking it. She was aware of the softness of her flesh grasped within that roughness.
‘Hello, Harriet.’
With neat, economical movements he felt in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes, and held it towards her. She had started to smoke that summer, although Joe disapproved, and she took one now, happy that Mal Hamilton, who had time to spare for no one in Burnham Falls, should want to s
pend some with her. They found seats on two of the biggest stones, and faced each other.
Mal squinted at her as he inhaled. ‘You’ve just been in New York? … Like it there?’
She nodded eagerly. ‘I enjoy it … especially this time. I’ve been staying with John McGuire’s daughters.’
But Mal, who had read only the classics required to pass his English exams, had never heard of John McGuire. He was totally ignorant of the world of best-sellers and literary fashions, and he had not read a piece of fiction since leaving college, nor even a book review. It was the first time Harriet began to comprehend the narrowness of Mal’s life ‒ in which, as far as she could judge, there had been only work. He did not seem to mind, or even to be aware of what he had missed. She learned that he had been living in New York for two years, and had never visited a gallery.
He shrugged. ‘There’s no one going to pay me right now for knowing whether or not there’s a Leonardo hanging in the Metropolitan.’
‘Don’t you want to know yourself?’
‘That’s a kind of a damn-fool question to ask, Harriet. The only thing I want right now is money, and if you think I’ve spent most of my life to this point reading books for the love of them, then you’re mistaken. They have to pay off. Later on there’ll be time for the galleries and the bestsellers … if I find I need them.’
Then he finished his cigarette and went back to work, and that was all their first meeting amounted to. But he seemed to welcome her when she appeared at the cabin the next time, and the next time after that. She wondered a little at the ease of their contact when Mal Hamilton so ruthlessly held off every other encroachment on his privacy and time. He had so often been represented to her as a person of iron discipline and control, self-sufficient and aloof, that she had no way of knowing the unspeakable loneliness of the man, the bonds of patience and restraint that had bound him for so long, and which found some relief at the sight of the girl, slim and russet-haired, with skin tinted olive above her brown sweater, standing in the dappled sunlight, holding out her hand gravely. She was almost a woman, but she had not learned the tricks of a woman, which he mistrusted and feared. There was a childish awkwardness about her still, an eagerness, a questioning that he had wanted to satisfy. The women Mal Hamilton had known had meant less than nothing to him; he had needed only the feel of their warm, female bodies, and had been bored with the necessity of feeding them, and listening to their talk beforehand. Around the universities he had seen girls like Harriet, but he had never exchanged even a word with them ‒ because they were expensive, and because they were always protected and cherished by someone like Joe Carpenter. But Harriet had looked at him confidently and undemandingly; she was a woman, and a child ‒ pulling uncertainly on her cigarette ‒ and on her, trustingly, he had suddenly unburdened some of the loneliness, the explosive ambitions and hopes that had been pent up inside him since the years when he had collected discards from Joe Carpenter’s back door. For the first time in his life he discovered that one of the luxuries of women was that they could sometimes be talked to.
There were many calls on Stan Cooper about that time, and he worked only intermittently on the Carpenter lodge, so that Mal’s work there also was sporadic. He may or may not have known that Harriet drove every day to the lodge on the chance that he might be there, and they might share a cigarette and ten minutes’ talk.
During those weeks of August, she seemed to reach out urgently for womanhood ‒ because Mal had, in some fashion, evoked it in her. He made no overtures to her, never came closer to her physically than the moment when he held out the cigarette pack. But he made no concessions to her age when he talked of the things he had done, and the things that had been done to him. She knew that she was hearing what no one had ever heard from Mal’s lips. She saw the rawness of the boy who had learned early in Burnham Falls that he had to be tough and insensitive to survive, and she saw the ways in which the town had taught him this. The world outside the town had never been harder than the town itself, and she began, guiltily, to understand the cruelty and meanness around her. Mal had no pity for himself, and no pity for anyone else, he said. He would never come back to Burnham Falls again because, when he had sold the house, he would have taken everything it could give him. She thought about this, and realised the justice of it. Mal taught her far more than the McGuire girls did.
Joe noticed their friendship with some disquiet, knowing well enough Mal’s reputation for aloofness and brusqueness. And yet there was nothing to object to in Mal’s attitude to Harriet, and Joe remembered that when news of Mal had filtered back to Burnham Falls, he had held him up as an example to Josh and Harriet of what determination could accomplish. He almost believed that Burnham Falls was responsible for Mal’s progress. Mal did not trouble to contradict him.
Harriet had hoped that Josh also could be Mal’s friend, but there was no contact between the two. If Josh attempted to join them by the lake shore, or even, hesitantly, to load a wheel-barrow with stone, Mal’s cold gaze would be on him critically, and Josh would grow clumsy and tongue-tied. After a while he left them alone, and Harriet, trying to reach back for the friendship with Josh which she had loved, was rebuffed. Josh was preoccupied and uncommunicative.
Labour Day passed, and Josh prepared to go back to Harvard, and Harriet to Troughton. Mal’s house had not been sold, and the town was saying that he had priced it too high. Harriet was already restless at the thought of Troughton, and strangely, this time she knew she would miss Mal more than Josh. Mal was preparing himself to move on to his job on the West Coast, and as yet Harriet had not dared to ask him if he would write to her. She was afraid that by mentioning it, she might jolt their relationship back to what it superficially was ‒ that of a schoolgirl and a grown man.
Then, the week-end before he was due to go to Harvard, Josh suddenly announced that he was going to New York. Joe had been counting on his company at the lodge that week-end, and he was annoyed.
‘If you’re going to see a girl,’ he shouted at Josh, ‘what’s wrong with telling me about it?’
Josh remained silent, and he took the Friday night express. On Saturday night when he came back to Burnham Falls he was wearing an Air Force uniform, and he had a twenty-four hour pass. His company was starting for Texas the next day.
Harriet and Joe were both at the lodge. They heard no sound of a car, because Josh had hitch-hiked from New York, and had been dropped on the road at the Downside turn-off. He opened the door gently, and stood blinking in the light.
‘Hello, Dad … Harriet.’
The newspaper was frozen in Joe’s hands. He sat staring at his son, and after a long interval found words.
‘Josh … what have you done?’ His tone was quiet and cold.
Josh dropped his bag noisily on the floor, and pulled off his cap. He looked away from his father, towards Harriet.
‘Get me something to eat, will you, Harriet? I’m hungry.’ Then he turned back to Joe. ‘I’m sorry to give you a shock like this, Dad. But I had to do it … whether you agreed or not. It’s my decision. I hope you’ll come to understand it.’
In reply, Joe dropped his newspaper and got to his feet. ‘I don’t understand it, Josh … I don’t think I ever will.’ He turned his back on Josh, and they watched him in silence as he walked to the open door on to the terrace, down the unfinished steps, and along the path to the lake. There was a faint moon, and for a time they could see the outline of his figure.
‘Go after him, Josh!’ Harriet urged. ‘Talk to him … explain things.’
He moved wearily towards the kitchen. ‘I’m tired of explaining to Dad, Harriet. If he doesn’t know I’m grown up, talking won’t make him see it now.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘What about some food, huh?’
She questioned him rapidly while she fixed bacon and eggs and coffee, but his replies were monosyllabic. He wrote down for her his serial number, and the post he was going to in Texas.
‘You’ll see,
Josh ‒ he’ll write. As soon as he gets over this … shock … he’ll write. It’s just that he was all so tied up in you going to Harvard … he’ll get over it …’
‘I don’t care if he writes or not. I don’t need to be forgiven like a bad child who’s run away from home.’
‘Oh, Josh … he’ll see that! Later on he’ll see it!’ Then she gave a little exclamation as he wiped his mouth in the napkin, and the chair scraped on the floor as he rose. ‘Josh! ‒ where are you going?’
‘Back to New York,’ he said.
‘You’re not going! ‒ oh, give him till the morning, at least.’
He leaned across the table. ‘Harriet, it’s time you and I stopped doing all the giving in this family. It’s time we stopped spoiling and protecting our father.’ He walked back to where his bag and cap were. She ran towards him.
Corporation Wife Page 7