The Sunlight Dialogues (22 page)

Will said, lowering his finger and closing his hands together, “I mean, to speak without circumlocution, Nick’s in jail again.
Voil
à
.
The bail’s completely out of reach. I suppose you knew?”

Hodge pursed his lips and lifted his eyebrows, noncommittal. It was his brother Ben’s opinion that they’d done all they should for Nick.

“I could work on it, of course,” Will said soberly, his forehead wrinkled as though he were debating a matter of the greatest importance to thoughtful citizens (his voice boomed, political, a compensation for the confidence he did not feel in what he was saying), “as a matter of fact, I told Luke I’d see to it. But it would be better if you did, really. They owe you favors, after all. It’s out of my—ah—territory.”

Hodge laughed, the snort of a bull.

“Oh, I know, I know,” Will said nervously. He rolled his eyes up. “Luke should have come to you directly,
c’est vrai.
But I happened to run into him first. Louise and I stopped by the farm with the children and Luke told us about it, so—” He sighed profoundly.

“So you thought you’d make him grateful to me,” Hodge said, and again snorted.

“Now Pater,” Will began. But Hodge raised his hand (which was square), interrupting.

“What makes you think Luke wants him back?”

“Well of
course
he wants him back,” Will said. “Because he needs him on the farm, if no better reason.” Then, on second thought: “And Nick needs Luke, that’s the
whole
truth of it. Nick hasn’t been in trouble for a long time, living with Luke. And now suddenly this, a rather serious jam. He needs help, spiritual help, Father, and Luke’s good for him.” He brought down his fist on his knee.

Hodge opened the desk drawer and hunted through the mess for a pencil. There was an apple, slightly shrivelled. “All right,” he said with finality but no conviction. He found the stub of a pencil at last and scribbled a note to himself on the yellow tablet. He studied the paper unhappily, sharply remembering his younger son’s face, arrogant and sullen, handsome as his mother’s face (except for those ears, long as an elephant’s ears, and red)—quick to sneer, quick to smile, as hers was, a face as delicate as his own was blunt: his own, or Will’s, or his daughter Mary Lou’s—the face of Luke Hodge in whom all that was subtly wrong, for obscure reasons contemptible, in W. B. Hodge, Attorney at Law, came into enigmatic focus. (And he knew that what Will had come to do was not really necessary, had been unnecessary from before the beginning of Luke’s spat with humanity, because Hodge loved his upstart son, though love was not a word with which Hodge was comfortable, any more than Luke was comfortable with it. But however unnecessary the thing might be, it was also inevitable: the trifling tyranny, again, of the Congressman’s ghost.) Carefully, precisely, in order that there should be no mistake, Hodge recrossed the
t
’s and redotted the
i
’s in the scribbled note.

“I believe it was your idea that Luke take him in the first place,” Hodge said, still feeling, for some reason, petulant. He couldn’t say why he insisted on the point; certainly not to drive Will into a corner.

“Partly,” Will said with dignity. “Partly Luke’s.”

(But Will was wrong. It was during the time of their partnership that it had happened, before Will had moved from Batavia to the firm where he was now, in Buffalo. Sam White had appointed Will for the defense, the case being of no importance, and Hodge had driven over to the jail with Will. He’d gone there it must be a hundred times before and since, but that time stood out in his mind even now—the gleam of the polished bars directly in the path of the morning sun, the distinct grillwork of shadows in the cell falling away toward the canvas pallet and the metal John and the boy. Nick Slater had been fifteen then, skinny and small for an Indian, and timid. He was like a captured squirrel or rabbit, standing still at the back of his cage. His elbows jutted out like cornknives, and around his round face his thick black hair was as long as a woman’s; it hung level with his shoulders. He refused to talk to them, but it didn’t matter. The police had arrested him for petty larceny, a grocery store. The only question was the stiffness of the sentence he would get. On the way back to the office Will had said thoughtfully, “Father, we should get that young rapscallion out of there.” Hodge had said nothing. Will knew as well as he did that it wasn’t that simple. “If we could only
place
him,” Will said. He was sucking at the pipe he was trying out, in those days, to keep down his weight. As Hodge stopped at the Jackson Street light, Will exploded, “Luke! The kid could work for Luke!” “Hole on,” Hodge had said. But he’d known already that the thing was decided. And so before he knew what hit him, Luke Hodge was a legal guardian, as his Uncle Ben had been before him again and again, and as his grandfather the Congressman had been to half the countryside before that.

A stormy business, inevitably, in which, inevitably, Will Hodge had played his miserable part. He’d stood one night six months ago now with his hands on the doorknob of Luke’s back door, puffing and holding the door shut tight against his son, bracing himself with one foot on the ice-crusted wall, shouting, “Settle down, Luke! The boy will be back!” But Luke was in no mood to settle down—too furious even to realize that there were other doors he might come out, and windows. “You’re God damn fucking right he’ll be back,” he shouted through the door. “Right back in the cell. And if he’s wrecked that truck of mine he’ll pay with a kidney.” The pounding of Hodge’s heart was a white hot maelstrom in his chest, and he couldn’t push up his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, because he didn’t dare let go of the icy doorknob. He was shaking all over, and he couldn’t tell whether it was because of the howling winter wind or because of the way his son shot out words, danced through words the way his mother did. Hodge roared, outraged, “You sound like your mother.” And instantly he regretted it, knowing that was Millie’s game, forcing their son to take sides. Luke stopped pulling at the door. He said, “Get out of here. Shit on you. Beat it.” His voice was ominously calm. Hodge said, not out of fear but out of pity—by morning Luke’s rage would have brought on a headache fierce enough to blind a horse—“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.” As always, the pity made it worse. Luke whispered, “Get out.”

It had all been for the best, however. Late that night when Nick Slater came back, lurching, half-skating up the driveway on foot, singing (Hodge sitting mournfully in the snowbank under the tamarack in Luke’s front yard), Luke was indifferent, befuddled by some drug he’d taken for the headache, and took Nick back without a word.)

“Oh, well, all right, my idea then,” Will said. “I see well enough what you’re driving at.” He opened his hands and ducked his head. “I admit it freely. I meddle. But look at me! How can I help myself? I’m weak!”

“No matter,” Hodge said, staring into the tablet, sliding his lower jaw beyond his upper. The word
weak
registered in his mind and he glanced over his glasses once more and smiled. After a moment he said, “How things going up there?”

“Oh, fine,” Will said, lowering his eyebrows, as embarrassed as Hodge Sr was at having asked. “I work too hard,” he said then, sternly. “I chase all over hell, and when I’m home I stay in the office night after night till eleven or twelve, trying to wind up that Kleppmann case. Been on it almost a year now. And then, what little time I have left—” He lost the thread. “Debilitating,” he said with a sigh.

Hodge nodded, thinking all at once of the apple in his drawer.

Abruptly, his son slapped his knee and bent forward, preparing to get up. “So you’ll spring Nick Slater for us?”

The rueful smile returned. “For Nick’s sake, as you say. I’ll see what I can do.”

Will laughed, reaching up to touch the bald place, then pressing his palms into his hams. He swung his loose weight further forward and rose like a whale. “Good. Merciful father, we thank you.” Hodge, too, was standing now. They shook hands, and as always Will hung on for a moment, still talking, holding his father’s hand in both his own. “Louise sends her love. Also the kids. You’ve got to get up there and see us one of these days.”

“I’ll do that,” Hodge said, pleased.

“I apologize for dragging you over from church, making you miss the sermon. No doubt it was a six-reel thriller, as usual. But as you see, it was a matter of the greatest delicacy.” He grinned and added soberly, “The
truth
is, I’ve been so consarned busy it was the only time I could make it.”

“No trouble,” Hodge said.

“It
is
trouble, and I’m sorry.”

“Bosh,” said Hodge.

“Just the same,” Will said, “we appreciate it.” He tightened his grip on Hodge’s hand, and to save his knuckles Hodge returned the grip. Will said,
“Bon jour, Pater.
Take care.” He twisted the hand, forcing his father to Indian wrestle. Hodge Sr grinned with his teeth clenched and stood like an iron-wheeled tractor. “Take care yourself,” he said.

Will Hodge Jr released his hand suddenly and laughed. Then, puffing, he went over to the door, bent for the albums of maps, and turned to say again, “Take care.” He took his hat from the rack, smiled at it, and put it on.

“Take care,” Hodge said. He hooked his tingling fingers around inside his suspenders, elbows going out like ducks’ wings, and, smiling as if his enormous son were some magnificent achievement of subtle wit, which he was, he walked behind Will through the outer office to the frosted-glass door which bore the neatly lettered sign, in reverse:

TAGGERT FAELEY HODGE

ATTORNEY

NO.
11
BANK ST.

BATAVIA, N. Y.

(Taggert Faeley Hodge was no longer here. He had fled in the night sixteen years ago, leaving ruins to his brother Will, and was now, the last anyone had heard, a salesman of used cars in Phoenix, Arizona.) Hodge watched his son go cautiously sideways down the steps, Will’s dimpled left hand on the iron railing, the flesh white as snow beneath the curly black hair, his right arm clamped over the albums of maps like a picture-framer’s vise. When Will was safely down on the sidewalk, puffing, starting out to where his Chevy wagon sat waiting with its right front wheel cocked up on the curb, Hodge closed the door and nodded thoughtfully, muttering to himself gruffly, “Monkeybusiness.” He sighed, thinking once more of Luke the irascible, then returned to his desk and sat down to rest a minute. He remembered the apple, frowned, and opened the drawer.

2

It was pulpy. But Hodge had expected that. He took a second bite. He had nothing to do, nowhere to go except out to lunch and, eventually, home to the apartment. However, his horizons did not seem to him noticeably drab. He enjoyed going out, never knowing whom he might run into, and back at the apartment he was making kitchen cabinets. He did not especially enjoy looking forward to springing Nick Slater. It wasn’t true—and Will knew it—that people owed him favors. The only people who owed Hodge favors, or thought they did, were sidestreet tailors, Polish grocers, farmers, Ed Bilchmann at the Camera Shop, and the second teller from the end at Mercantile Trust. But springing Nick had its pleasant side, too. He enjoyed visiting with Judge Sam White. Sam was a man who appreciated the important things: a sensible brief without rhetoric, good common sense about the problem in Asia or tapping phones, good plumbing in the house. And so maybe he’d go over this afternoon, when Sam would be in his cups. Then again, maybe not. Sometime today he had that, deed to take over to Merton Bliss. He’d said he’d bring it by days ago. And maybe he could drop in to visit his brother Ben when he was out in that neck of the woods.

“Monkeybusiness,” he said again.

He was sorry to have missed Warshower’s sermon. There, too, was a man who understood the important things. No buck-toothed sissy like the Methodist fellow. He towered above the pulpit like a druid, when the chores were done—the hymns, the responsive reading, the half-hour prayer, the reading of the scriptures—and he spoke of the good old-fashioned puzzles—the Last Judgment, the Writing on the Wall, the Swallowing of Sodom and Gomorrah. He wrote sermons like contracts, full of firstlies, secondlies, and thirdlies, devoid of obscure allusions and rant. When a man left the church after one of those sermons he knew exactly what he’d done that was right and what he’d done that was wrong. Hodge would feel confident sometimes halfway through Sunday afternoon, in those days with Millie, before her way of twisting things could break down even Warshower’s common sense. Nevertheless, the man was a comfort, his very existence satisfying in a world that incessantly demanded fine distinctions between things not worth a man’s thinking about: a world of jokes to be puzzled out and laughed at in the right places (how many times, in how many grim rooms had Millie thrown back her head and white throat, and laughed while Hodge sat chuckling fierce and baffled, heavy as iron in his chair!), a world of movies from Italy which a man had no choice but to sit through, somehow outlast, like a patient horse. Warshower’s very way of living, his stubborn, uncomplicated directness, was a sermon of hope to Hodge. When the Elders (Will Hodge Sr was one of them) would not put up money to get the cellar fixed at the manse, Warshower hired the work done himself and called a meeting of the congregation for a vote on whether or not they’d pay the bill. They’d taken a special offering, which came to only four dollars short, and Warshower preached on The Eye of the Needle, and prayed, as if without hope, for the people’s souls. He got his four dollars. From Will Hodge Jr, as it happened, who wasn’t a Presbyterian at all, but a Unitarian. Once more the subtle tyranny of the Congressman’s image.

Hodge sighed. He’d forgotten to buy cabinet hinges.

He, too (but he was not thinking of this), knew the power of the image, and in a way he’d been down both his sons’ roads and had found them both dead ends. Not knowing he was doing it, his mind on things more immediate—patching barn doors, calming Millie when her dander was up, milking, studying, shearing sheep, stewing over poor Tag’s bad luck—he had gone down Luke’s road fifteen years before Luke was born: cynical denial that the old man was what he seemed. Luke had never known the old man, knew only the sprawling farm he left, the barns, the big house, the stone fence now in disrepair, the iron gates, the dying tamaracks the old man’s father had brought into Genesee from God knew where—all of them female, by some fluke, and now all withering away without issue—so for Luke the cynicism was easy. But Hodge too, or the part of his mind that wasn’t busy, had managed cynicism.