Hamilton Stark (21 page)

“Now, my friend, here’s the point. Evidently certain women, and possibly a number of men as well, when encountering a man of A.’s enormous physical size and self-assurance—which to my mind borders on the psychotic—find themselves reduced back to the level of children when it comes to their ability to separate what’s real from what is not real. Your man was apparently able to induce in Annie Laurie the emotional equivalent of a child’s relation to its parent, in particular as regards the parent’s having been
thrust into the position of arbiter of reality, a kind of metaphysical supreme court of no appeal. That’s evidently what made our Annie Laurie, I mean D., think she was crazy. Unfortunately for her, she was made dependent upon him, and her dependence increased in geometrically multiplying degrees every time such an encounter as at the motel occurred. I’m curious. Did his denial of her reality in so absolute a fashion take place only after one of his episodes of drunkenness and rage?”

“The fact of her obesity doesn’t really alter your comprehension of her words?” I queried hopefully.

“No. Of course not. Don’t be silly. But tell me, did A. deny D.’s perceptions of the world only after one of his episodes of drunkenness and rage?”

Somewhat relieved, I answered him. “Apparently what he could not remember simply did not happen, as far as he himself was concerned. According to the tapes, portions you haven’t heard, he could not remember
anything
he said or did while drinking, and he could never remember what he had said when he was enraged, which was often, and he could not recall what he experienced during sex. I’m summarizing, of course, but there’s no point in your listening to seven hours of tape. Most of what’s there is self-centered trivia and small talk between two women who don’t know each other very well. The important facts about Hamilton Stark, A., though, are, one, he believed passionately that if he had no memory of a particular act, speech, or emotion, he did not commit it, speak it, or experience it. It wasn’t his. It was someone else’s. And two, he never remembered what he did when he was drunk, said when he was angry, or experienced when he was copulating. A third fact of consequence might be that he was often drunk, frequently enraged, and regularly had sexual relations with women.”

“You speak of him in the past tense,” C. said with a smile, “as if he were dead.”

“It’s a narrative convenience. Ignore it.”

“Fine. But it is odd,” C. opined, and again my heart fluttered with dread, “that the man would seem so deliberate about his offenses. Do
you
think it was deliberate on his part? Is that why you want to immortalize this cad? Do you think his awful personality was the expression of a consciously held idea, a philosophical idea, about the world and how to be in it? That is, after all, what’s fascinating about religious leaders, isn’t it?” (That’s one of the things I love about C.—he refuses to deal with personalities; he goes straight and deeply into the abstract, historical heart of the matter. It’s why I referred to him earlier as a thinker.)

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m no longer sure,” I said sadly. “I feel like Saint Peter making one of his denials.” For the first time in my celebratory examination of my hero, I was aware of the strong possibility that he was not only a churl, but a nonconscious churl. A true churl. I was suddenly afraid that my man’s life was out of his control, when my original perception of him, the very reason I had decided to celebrate him in the first place, for heaven’s sake, was that he, of all people, had gained control of his life without suppressing his life. For an instant I thought of telling C. about the cataclysmic end to Hamilton’s marriage to Annie, and also the final secret. But then, like Peter after the cock crowed and the prophecy had been fulfilled, I felt a sudden surge of belief—possibly welling from my knowledge of how C. would interpret the information and the secret, possibly for an even less defensive reason—but regardless, like Peter, I was once again rocklike in my steadfastness, and I was no longer ready to give up on my man, my Roarer, my Crank, my Colossal and Cosmic Grouch and Bully Boy, my Man Who Hated Everything so as to Love
Anything, my Man Obsessed with a Demon so as to Avoid Being Possessed by One—my one last possibility for a self-transcendent ego in a secular age!

Our conversation dawdled on into the late evening, but we, neither of us, could add anything substantial to what has already been described here, especially since I had by then decided to withhold a quantity of specifically cruel qualities demonstrated by my man, and by eleven o’clock, C. and I decided to have a nightcap and end the evening’s conversations with a…

T
HIS IS THE STORY OF HOW
Hamilton Stark almost went to college. Unavoidably, it will be the story of numerous other events as well—other people, other missions, other conflicts resolved and unresolved—but mainly, it will be the story of how Hamilton Stark almost went to college.

Not many people know it, know that he even wanted to go to college in the first place or that he actually came close to doing so in the second. Naturally, you’d never have heard it from the man himself—he carried a number of odd, perhaps even (now that we know what we know) defensive prejudices against people who had gone to college.

“You take your college-educated man,” he frequently proposed, “and I’ll show you a capitalist dupe. Not that I mind your capitalists. Shit, no. I
admire
capitalists,” he said. “It’s
your
dupes
I can’t stand. I’ll stomp a capitalist dupe before I’ll stomp a communist true believer, and you know what I think of your communist true believers,” he reminded me.

Needlessly, it turned out, for I did indeed know what he thought of people he chose to designate “communist true believers.” I knew that he despised them. Possibly despised them to the point of violently attacking them, for, though I personally have never actually
seen
him physically assault a so-called communist, nevertheless I have heard stories that, frankly, I’d rather not relate here. Let it suffice to say that Hamilton Stark, in the barrooms of central New Hampshire, was a well-known, militantly forceful anticommunist. Every morning he read the Manchester
Union-Leader
, a newspaper widely regarded as the nation’s most rabidly right wing, a newspaper with red-ink headlines such as MUSKIE WEEPS WHEN SHOWN HIS OWN WORDS and HALDEMAN AND EHRLICH-MAN QUIT UNDER LEFT-WING PRESSURE. That sort of garbage, which Hamilton, oh, my Hamilton, seemed to choose to believe.

There was a brief period when he and I were still willing to argue politics. I am a moderate Christian Socialist and at the time of this writing have cast my presidential ballot for the following individuals: Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Rogers Morton (write-in), and Morris Udall (write-in). Hamilton, though he has voted in every presidential election since 1948, has voted for only one man—Ezra Taft Benson. At least that is what he tells me. And I have no reason to doubt that if Hamilton votes in 1976, he will vote yet again for Mr. Benson, even though by then Benson may well be dead and out of the running altogether. And who knows, Hamilton may write in Benson’s name anyway. He used to quote Benson to me until, my ears burning, I begged him to stop. “You want to hear what a
wise
man said? ‘It’s just too bad, it’s really sad, but there has to be a loser.’ Now that’s
my
idea of presidential wisdom!” Hamilton would exclaim. “I
love
that … ‘it’s really sad,’ heh heh heh. You talk about your Kennedy wit. What about the
Benson
wit?”

I suppose in a certain perverse light Benson’s remarks could have been seen as witty, but to me they seemed cruel and shallow. The difficulty in arguing politics with Hamilton was that I could never tell for sure whether or not he was being serious. It was never clear that, by taking such an extreme position and then defending it with quotes from someone like Ezra Taft Benson, he wasn’t mocking me. Here are some other sentences Hamilton quoted and claimed were uttered by the man: “There’s no way a man can live a useful life without stepping on a few people’s toes.” “It’s in the nature of freedom not to know what a man will do with it.” And, “The best defense is the one you never have to use.” Actually, this last sentence I heard myself as it came from the crinkled lips of the ancient parchment-skinned Ezra Taft Benson. He gave the graduation speech at Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, Ausable Chasm, New York, in 1969. I was in the audience because Hamilton Stark was in the audience; he was there, first, because his hero Ezra Taft Benson was giving the graduation speech, and second, because his daughter Rochelle was giving the valedictory speech. Frankly, I think Benson’s speech meant more to Hamilton than his daughter’s did—Hamilton either fell asleep or pretended to fall asleep during the latter—but for me, that day was momentous. It was the day I first met Rochelle, Hamilton’s daughter. Benson could have collapsed from a heart attack during his speech and I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. And the only reason that today I can recall the merest scrap of his speech—“The best defense is
the one you never have to use”—is because Hamilton quoted it to me a dozen or more times during the drive back to Barnstead.

I had never met Rochelle, though of course I knew of her existence, had listened to Hamilton talk about her for years, and had seen pictures of her, first her grade school photographs, then junior high school, and most recently, four years ago, her high school yearbook photograph. So, in a manner of speaking, I knew what to expect. I had seen her image change, gradually, year by year: from that of a bright-faced, wide-eyed, mischievous three-year-old (taken at nursery school), in which she wore a kelly green daysuit that contrasted beautifully with her then flame red hair; to the image of a gap-toothed seven-year-old grinning proudly into the camera, her now deeper red hair in braids tied around her head, her green eyes flashing with innocent affection; to the image of a sober-faced, sexually serious adolescent, an intense face already full of intellectual grace and sensual force, with a touch of the bewilderment that such rare presences in such inordinate quantities must have caused her; and on to the most recent image, the tall, almost statuesque, even though delicate and slender, young woman, her deep red hair now tumbling roughly, densely, over her shoulders, her eyes warm, intelligent, disciplined, her mouth in a slight smile as if about to speak, full and promising, her neck long, proud, elegant. And of course, because these photographs were all inscribed to her absent, never seen nor even directly remembered daddy, I was able to trace the development of her character over the years by studying the changes in her handwriting and the language she used to inscribe her photographs. From her nursery school photograph (precociously, I thought):

And then, sadly asserting her relation to him, a six-year-old who could no longer even recall the presence of the man, who knew him only as a name and burning need:

Here she is at ten, obviously after having read a bit of Shakespeare (one wonders what her mother made of the little girl’s reading habits: a fifth-grade child poring over Lear?):