The Sunlight Dialogues (23 page)

He had not had to hunt far for detractors. He might have known from his father’s own mouth that detractors were there to be found. He was a politician with no memory for names, and he was famous for snorting, “Names! I can barely keep track of the names of my enemies!” But for Will Hodge Sr, firmly grounded in reality, the cynicism had not worked for long. The old man was against tobacco—when he had to smoke a pipe for a Grange League play he’d stuffed it with alfalfa and driven the audience out of the hall—but he did not judge a man by his addictions, or countenance the suppression of tobacco by a righteous minority. He favored the tobacco tax, but only in hopes of discouraging nonsmokers, whom he overestimated. He was stubborn, his detractors said. But he would occasionally change an opinion when the other man’s reasons were better than his own; and where legitimate debate remained after all the evidence was in he would usually grant the point to be debatable, though he would never change his side. He was an idealist, they said, and that was true too. He’d never bought a lawbook in his life, had gotten along on his father’s books and had bought instead poetry, collections of essays and letters, speeches, books on music, palmistry, astronomy, voodoo, the Latin classics, philosophy. Off and on for years he had tried to learn Greek. Hodge recalled it with heaviness of heart, the way one remembers one’s first disappointment in love. He would go to his father’s study door and his mother would hurry toward him from the kitchen with an urgency she never showed at other times, her index finger over her lips, her left hand stretching out to him in a gesture strangely ambiguous, as though she were at once shooing him off and drawing him toward her. In the semidarkness of the hall her apron’s whiteness was luminous against the dark of her dress, and beside her the banister gleamed like old silver, reflecting the snowlight beyond the front door. At his feet lay the comfortable yellow glow from the crack beneath the study door, but at the head of the stairs—beyond her head bending down to him—the elderly gloom (that still went in his mind with the dimly remembered eyeless face of his grandmother) gave way to full darkness, and he was frightened. “Hush,” his mother would say, “your father is working.” Only when he was studying Greek were they kept from his room, he and his brothers and even Ruth, and when he came out he’d be irritable, out of sorts. In the end, Hodge’s mother had stopped it. It was a family story. Furious for once in her life, she’d said, “Arthur Taggert Hodge, why are you doing this? You’re an
American!”
He had stared, no doubt in disbelief, had calculated the enemy’s strength and had known the better part of valor. “Good point,” he had said, and had nodded, scowling. He was not only an idealist but an absolutist and perfectionist, incapable of leaving unresolved such unresolvable questions as, for instance, that of free will and necessity. Second only to the Word of God, he believed the word of Spinoza. His copy of the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
was underlined and marginally annotated from cover to cover (also disfigured by interlinear pencil translations: “I can read Latin,” he would say, “but only the nouns”). But if he was an idealist, bookish, he knew trades, too; knew the talk of farmers at the feedmill, a farmer and feedmill philosopher himself, and the talk of shopkeepers, ministers, doctors, bankers—whose taxes he had figured, whose suits he had carried into court, and whose political opinions he heatedly debated from morning to night when he was home from Washington. It had not taken Hodge long to see what no doubt he’d been subtly aware of all his life, that those who called his father an idealist were snatching at words to express a feeling that had nothing to do with the word they happened to get hold of: the old man was in blunt truth superior, an implicit condemnation of men who were not; in short, a source of unrest. They hinted at scandals (a woman in the past, an incident with a Negro hired man, a matter of graft), but it was rubbish. The old man’s secret was simple and drab: he liked his work and had a talent for it. Given the same combination of gifts but other aspirations—an aspiration, for instance, to be an operatic singer—he might have been an unexceptional man: a restless farmer, a timid seducer of hired girls, a small-town choir director, a drunkard. Or even the same gifts and the same aspirations brought together in another time and place might have stopped him. But he was lucky.

And so Hodge had toyed in the back of his mind with another kind of cynicism, and this, too, before Luke was born. He had dismissed his father’s achievements as matters of no importance, blind chance. It was a matter of fact that Will himself was not cut out for the great deeds his father had done; but the case was not so clear with Ben or Tag. They were both of them, like the Old Man, visionaries, yet they could argue fine points like Jesuits, had memories for facts and figures, and they both had a way with people. But Ben had bad eyesight—a chance collision of unlucky chromosomes the night of his conception—and perhaps in fact a general weakness of sense mechanisms, so that his hold on physical reality was tentative. He was moved more by books than by life (not that Will stopped to think all this out in the dry way a novelist is forced to present it); if he revelled in Sense—in the cry of a meadowlark or the rumble of one of his big machines—there was something faintly theoretical about his revelling. His sensations, though intense, were those of a man in a museum. It was different with Tag. All he, Tag, lacked was the Old Man’s invariable good luck in the conspiracy of outer events. He’d worked on a chair one time when he was six. Will Hodge Sr remembered it well. He was more Tag’s father than the Old Man was himself, after all. By the time Tag came, the Congressman was old and too busy with the world to be father to a young child. It was Will, the oldest of the sons, who played with Tag, took him to work in the field with him, drove him to school, to basketball games or speech contests or dances. He’d come across him, when Tag was six, working out in the chickenhouse, putting a new wooden seat on a long-discarded kitchen chair. Will had just stood for a minute, watching unobserved. Tag worked quickly and painstakingly, as if he had figured out in advance every last detail of the job he’d set himself. He’d made a pattern with a piece of oil-stained cardboard, had drawn it onto the wood and had laboriously cut it out with the keyhole saw. He was nailing it in place now, skillfully for a child of six. Will said, thumbs hooked in his overalls bib, “You gonna be a carpenter someday, Tag?” Tag smiled with a beauty of innocence that was moving to Will. “If you want me to,” he said. It wasn’t fake or goody-goody in Tag. It was a quality of loving gentleness he’d been born with. In the first months of his life he was a sympathetic cryer, and throughout his childhood he was peacemaker to the family. In fact, like Ben, he was born to be a saint, gentle and unselfish—he even had the look of a saint: straight blond hair as soft as gossamer, dark blue eyes, long lashes, a quick, open smile—and unlike Ben, he saw what was there, not angels in pear trees but pears. “Little Sunshine,” their father called him. Yet Tag had failed in the end, for all his innocence and goodness, had been beaten by the conspiracy of events. So the Old Man might have failed, if his luck had been bad.

It was true enough. The trouble with the theory was that the Congressman had been right about free will. It was a matter of fact, a thing not worth bothering to deny, to Will Hodge Sr, that freedom had limits, both within and without, which is to say merely that a man engaged in throwing a tantrum or a man starving is incapable of perfectly objective reason. Hodge’s father had written once to his minister brother: “A passionate man may feel overwhelming pangs of guilt, but only a reasonable man, sir, can achieve the high distinction of going to Hell.” Oh, the Congressman had been free, all right. Only a mind released from all passion could roll out such unashamedly grandiose prose.

That, too, his father’s freedom, Hodge had no doubt been aware of long before he understood it. He’d been aware of it, perhaps, as a young man, newly married, standing between the high iron gates of Stony Hill Farm and looking up past the shaded lawn at the porch where his father sat, grossly obese, white-haired, calmly blind, surveying the universe inside his skull. When it came to the Old Man that there was someone at the gate, he called down sharply, “William, is it you?”

“Yes sir,” he had answered. But he had not gone on for a moment. It was late afternoon, the shadows were long and the hills had a yellow cast, unreal, like hills in a painting. There was a smell of winter in the air, but the breeze was warm, as soft as January thawwind. The trees, the lawn, the fields, the long knolls sloping away toward the town of Alexander were all motionless and utterly silent. Signs of a change coming.

His father called, “Come up.”

When he stood before the Old Man on the porch he realized that something had happened, perhaps knew even what it was, though he had no words for the thing as yet. His father, too, had perhaps read something in the weather, he imagined. He did not at first notice his youngest brother in the shadows at the end of the porch, leaning on the wall with his hands in his pockets and his face as gray as ashes. Tag was fifteen now, still pale and gentle as a girl.

Hodge said, not because he believed it but in hopes of escaping a scene with Millie, “You ought to be inside, Dad. You’ll catch cold out here. A man your age—”

“Sit down,” he said. He continued to stare with his blind eyes at where he knew the front fence was, and the road beyond. The snowwhite hair above his ears was brittle and uncombed, as wiry as a dog’s hair, but someone—Ruth, not Millie, God knew—had trimmed the hair in his nostrils and ears. He sat as Hodge had seen him sit a thousand times—as Hodge, too, sat, and as his sons would sit—teeth closed lightly, lower jaw extended out beyond the upper, his elbows on his knees, fists locked together.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s come to me that I’ve made a mistake. Somewhere in the course of—” He tightened his lips, concentrating. “All of us, or the times, mebby. No matter who made it. We have troubles coming.
Troubles
coming. Be ready, suffer them philosophically. Trust the Lord.”

Hodge squinted, panicky. Only later would he realize that he was afraid, that moment, that he was seeing his father’s first lapse into real senility. He said, hoping Millie was out of earshot, “Money troubles, Dad?”

The old man half-turned his head toward him impatiently. “Who knows what kind of troubles?” he said. “Germany.”

Hodge laughed—it was like barking—and it was now that he noticed Tag standing with his hands over his face, very still.

But his father was saying, as if thinking it out for the first time, “There are always politicians. Good politicians. The people all flounder this way and that way, unsure what they want, unsure how to get it, unsure whether it’s good for them, and the politician comes along to distinguish for them what they want more clearly than they want it yet, shows them the disadvantages …” He stopped. He’d been down that road many times. More and more he repeated himself, struggling for the old clearheadedness in a stifling attic of increasingly baffling, antiquated opinions. He turned his head more, the blind eyes staring at Will as though they could see him. “Suppose we were to have war with Hitler, and suppose Hitler were to win?” he said.

“Dad, you’re stewing again,” Hodge said. “Let me help you inside.” Uncomfortably, he glanced again at Tag.

“Will, is that you out there?” Millie called.

Hodge jumped.

“No!” his father roared. “Not stewing.
Thinking.
Hitler could
win.
If not this one, the next one, or the next. From this point forward there’ll be Hitlers for a thousand years.” He thumped the porch with his cane.

“Well, we won’t be here to see it,” Hodge said. And then, in spite of himself: “What do you mean?”

“Will,” Millie called.

“I mean America,” he said. In his mouth the word was local, familiar. He might have been talking about the country. “I mean—” But the lucid moment was gone. “The devil,” he grumbled.

“You think we’re all Hitlers?” Hodge said, grinning, self-conscious because of his brother’s presence. He had no clear idea what he meant by a Hitler; he asked it from the wish of one part of his divided mind to keep the talk going until he understood.

“I mean—righteousness,” the Old Man said. “Insufficient failure—or too much failure—loss of the balanced vote. Unreason—or an excess of reason. The plots theory—”

Exasperated, Hodge said, “I was right the first time. You’re not thinking, you’re stewing. Let’s go in.”

But again he said no, and now, directly challenged, he straightened out his mind. “Listen,” he said. “You believe in reason. You believe in democracy. Reflection of Natural Law, you think. But suppose people
stopped
being reasonable. Suppose they got spread too far apart to know what the balance of the country was thinking, or the balance of the world.
E pluribus unum.
Hah. Can
India
grow reasonable? China? I don’t say suppose the right side goes under, I say suppose all sides are right as it seems to them and they all blur together and their beliefs grow confused and the
pluribus
becomes so complicated and, more important, so
dense
that no human mind or even group of minds can fathom the
unum.
Religion declines, and patriotism; law and justice become abstruse questions of metaphysics; the younger generation grows dangerous and irrational, shameless, selfish, anarchistic. Then someone steps up with some mad idea that’s just simple enough to look sensible, simple enough that busy shoemakers can know the affairs of the world are in competent hands, they needn’t concern themselves—as in Plato’s
Republic.
Hah! What if?”

Millie appeared in the doorway. The Old Man turned his head, then went on, merely raising his voice a little, to avoid interruption.

“I say this: What keeps this country sailing on an even keel is not mortality or divine favor: nothing of the kind. What keeps it going is the
professionals,
the professional politicians who know that after this vote there’s going to be another and another, for all the rumpus; you don’t put all your inheritance on one horse, no matter how it looks in the ring. However bitter the fight may look, among the professionals nobody’s hitting with all his might.
That’s
what makes continuity. If the professionals fail—if the people with all their indifference and all their monstrous opinions, or their no-opinions … There are always politicians. Good politicians. The people all flounder this way and that, unsure what they want. …” The vague look was back. To hide his confusion he thumped the porch again.