The Sunlight Dialogues (55 page)

Sitting in that small-town police station with that small-town chief, smelling the pungency of his small-town green cigar and hearing the twang of small-town reporters in the hallway—and more than that, yes: sitting in that green-treed town he’d more or less grown up in and loved the way he loved his own arms and legs—he had felt released: he had grown up, had finally broken free of the myth, the old hunger for the ancient south (or whatever the line was)—broken out of Eden, anyhow, released his childish clutch on the impossible: it was a transition place, an evolutionary stage he and his kind had broken out of for the world coming in: the city.

He drove to the office instead of home, moved his station wagon in and out of the Sunday afternoon traffic with confidence as ample as his belly, jaw thrown forward with comfortable superiority, and he looked up with satisfaction at the towering buildings of darkening concrete and brick, their upper reaches bright where the falling sunlight struck, their lower windows full, like abstracted eyes, with the reflected glory of neon and blue-gray smoke and the shining roofs of passing cars. He slowed with majestic benevolence for a brown dog wandering out in the street; stopped for the light when it was only yellow; and passing the old Methodist church he felt a warmth rushing up through his heart as though he were himself responsible for the lighted windows, the small pleasant crowd of idlers on the concrete steps preparing for the evening service.

There was a parking space waiting. There always was on a Sunday evening. He pulled his station wagon into it, got out and locked the doors. He bought a
Buffalo Evening News
with the air of a patron of the arts, though Louise would have a copy at the house already, and he unfolded it with the detached curiosity of a stockbroker as he let himself into the M&T lobby. He signed in, gave his usual polite greeting to the attendant-and-elevator-boy, and rode to the fourteenth floor. The old man—the “boy”—stared at the buttons Will Jr might have pushed for himself if things were done that way in the M&T Building, and Will Jr bowed his head and pretended to read. The old man had gray hair, huge spots on his neck, long spotted ears. One of the wrinkled hands folded behind him was missing two fingers. “Poor old Sam,” Will Jr thought, though he was unsure of the name, and shook his head. The elevator hung in space a moment, then settled level with the fourteenth floor, and when the door opened Will Jr stepped out. He observed that his shoes still shone like mirrors. He let himself into Hawley, Hawley & Poacher, allowed the door to click shut behind him, and walked to the seventh door on the left, his office, and turned on the lights. He phoned his wife.

“You’ll be late then?” she said. Her tone was an accusation.

“Something’s come up,” he said. “I’ll hurry, love. I give you my solemn assurance.” He smiled into the phone.

“Ok,” she said. After a moment: “Can you say hello to Danny?”

Will Jr wiped the sweat from his upper lip and smiled again. “Sure thing,” he said, “put him on.”

Then his son’s voice. “Hi.”

“Hoddy do-dee?” Will Jr said. A silence. “You doing everything your mommy tells you, honey?”

After a long silence the boy said, “Hi.”

The sweat was there again. Nevertheless he said jovially, “You and Sister been having lots of fun?” Then: “Is Mommy still there, honey?”

Again the boy said, “Hi.”

He said, “Can I talk to your mommy again, Danny?”

He heard the child say, forming the words carefully, “He wants to talk to you,” and then Louise was on again, and then Maddie, his six-year-old daughter. She said, “Hi, Daddy.” He could see her, standing with her blond head tipped, both hands on the telephone receiver.

“Hi!” he said.

“Bowser got out without his muzzle, Daddy,” she said.

Will scowled. “Did Mommy get him back?”

“We had to chase him, and we were by the store and we got some Spook.”

“How nice!” he said.

“Danny spilled his,” she said. “He cried and cried.”

“I should think so,” he said warmly. “That must have been
something!”
He laughed. Then: “Well, bye-bye, honey. I’ll see you soon.”

“I miss you, Daddy,” she said.

“I miss you too, honey,” he said. “Give Mommy a big Kiss for me. Bye-bye.”

He heard her hang up.

He replaced the receiver and leaned back in his padded swivel chair and covered his eyes with one hand. He was back in Buffalo, back in the old grind. He reached in his coat-pocket for the roll of Tums.
C’est la vie,
he thought. He sat forward. As he was reaching for the new collection form he’d been working on, he thought again of the little white stones Clumly had shown him, and his hand paused in mid-air. For the twentieth time, it seemed to him, the memory had almost come, but again it sank back and he could not catch what it was. He concentrated on the image that seemed to have released it, the hairless Chief with the green cigar in one hand, the stones in the other, his small eyes glittering. “What are these stones, Will? You seen them before?” Will had almost told him. It had been right on the tip of his tongue and perhaps if he had not pushed himself, if he’d been able to speak without thinking, it would have come out. But then the memory or half-memory was gone, and he was baffled. “I don’t know,” he had said. “They remind me of something, but—” Clumly was watching him, and even Clumly, no doubt, could see he was telling the truth. “If you remember, call me,” Clumly said. There was a hellish intensity in Clumly’s look. “I’ll do that,” Will said. “I’ll call,” and went on trying to remember. He drew the collection form toward him and fished in his inside coat-pocket for his pen. On the desk just beside the form lay a thick manilla folder with the neatly typed heading,
Kleppmann.
Organs inside his belly closed around the name and, once again, he felt sweat on his lip.

The Tums never helped, really, and he knew he was deluding himself in pretending to imagine they gave temporary relief, but he had no choice, he was a man mercilessly driven, as it seemed to him, both from without and from within. Day after day, whether he was at home or off on one of his innumerable trips, he worked lunatic hours, often from eight in the morning until midnight, and when he asked himself why—there were many in the firm who felt no such compulsions—he could find no adequate reason, or, rather, found too many.

He had not meant to get into legal collection: all the force of his past, all the force of his personal kindness, stood against the paltry business of debtor chasing. He had dreamed of going into politics, at first, which was almost the whole reason he had gone in with his father when he passed his Bar exams. Genesee County was small enough that a man could get a toe-hold, and the family was known there, known both personally and politically. And so Will Jr had gone to Batavia full of joy, in the rich sunlight of his idealism and personal ambition.

That was done with, shot down not by any campaign of his own but by what he’d learned campaigning for his father.

They’d bought a house in the country, fifteen miles from the office. It was a place two hundred and fifty years old, made of fieldstone, with beautiful chimneys at each end and a view of, you would have said, Paradise. It had a windmill and barns and a creek running through, and there were sugar maples on the wide, sloping lawn. The barns, made of native oak, were in good repair. They could live there all their lives, if they wanted. They could return to it between sessions at Albany or—who knew?—maybe Washington someday, just as Will Jr’s grandfather had returned year after year to Stony Hill. It was June when he took Louise there. He stood with Madeline on his shoulders—Danny was not yet born at the time—and he held Louise’s hand tightly in his own.

“It’s beautiful, Willie,” she said, eyes bright as the morning.

They had the place fixed up by fall; his father’s campaign for County Judge was winding up. But September and October are the saddening of the year in Western New York. In the morning the air snaps and there’s a smell of winter; at noon it warms to a kind of false hope—gray corn in the fields, gray expanses of frost-bitten grass. Wasps stir in the eaves, preparing for their sleep until spring. The shaggy, toothless old people who come out from the County Farm every spring to work as hired men or to beg put on their sweaters and overcoats and put their belongings in grocery bags with string handles and begin their trudge along the high-crowned gray dirt roads, going in. The evening slides in cold, and birds fly south. The Indians leave too, old men and boys who come out for the summer to do handywork or man the gypsum quarries, tanneries, trucking lines, construction jobs; they shrink back into the Reservation.

Will Jr, full of nervous energy and troubled thought, went calling for his father, wrote speeches for him, attended country banquets. No one in Genesee County had ever worked harder for public office, but the omens were bad. The blunt truth was that Will Sr was not good at it. Loving his father, loving his virtues and defects alike, he had not until now seen his father with the eyes of an outsider. Now he had to. The truth was that Will Hodge Sr did not have an open, engaging smile. When the Congressman smiled, in the old days, the room grew brighter, the very crops improved: his huge white teeth shone like enormous square pearls, and even a man who opposed him was softened. Uncle Ben had that smile, and Uncle Tag had had it—a smile as easy and natural and gentle as a child’s. They could smile at themselves as quickly as at anything else, and yet, however sunny their dispositions, their minds raced smoothly on, ingenious and just. They were invulnerable. They made you think of airline pilots or acrobats or millionaires. You felt safe. But Will Hodge Sir’s smile was rueful. It was as if he saw impossibilities at every turn. He would do his best to administer justice wisely, he promised, and there was no doubt whatever that he told the truth—yet you felt uneasy. And there were other troubles, more palpable. When Will Jr’s Uncle Taggert had fled, Will Sr had soberly covered the losses, had worked himself hard paying the debts a dollar on the dollar. Nonetheless, he was tainted by the event. There were even insinuations that Will Sr had cut corners in his own right. There was no question, if one saw the case with the eyes of God, that Will Hodge Sr was a better man than his opponent. But the case would not be judged by the eyes of God.

Louise said (they were kneeling on the carpet in the livingroom, working with tinker toys Madeline was too small to work—they frustrated her to tears of wrath—and the record player was on in the background, Spanish music that neither of them liked, though they wanted to like it, because friends did. The sun had set half an hour ago, and the sky was lifeless, as if the world had stopped turning and time was running down), “Will he win, Willie, do you think?”

Will Jr scowled, tugging at the lodged tinker toy. It seemed to him that the room smelled of urine, and he wondered why a child three years old was not trained. “Win?” he said.
“Hell
no!”

Madeline looked up at him.

They ignored her.

Louise put her hand on his shoulder. “Well,” she said, “maybe next time. Plenty of people—”

“Never,” he said. He let the tinker toy fall to the carpet and, helping himself with the arm of the couch, stood up. He went over to the window and stood rubbing his groin absent-mindedly, looking out at autumn.

“Well, one great politician is enough for one family,” she said.

Misunderstanding her “one great politician,” imagining she was talking about his own future, he said thoughtfully, “Politics is a dirty business. I wouldn’t have believed it.” Madeline was watching him again, her small face narrow and blank as a skull. He said, “I’m going for a walk.” He went to the door and fled.

It seemed to him remarkable, that night, that he should have thought this place his home. But an understandable error, yes. His hope, his foolish innocence had projected itself on the world and filled it with beauty the world had, itself, no interest in. Chemistry, he thought. Point of view. To a rabbit running for its life from a dog, the world was a white blur of terror. To a cow ruminating in a field, the world was a vast green comfortable stasis, and then at evening, when choretime came, the world was a great swollenness. Hah! Will Jr, in this depression, looked around him. Leafless trees sharp black against the gray of the sky, black barns angular and empty. (Why had he wanted a place with barns? Was he going to raise sheep for the wild dogs to feed on? Pigs to die in the August heat? Chickens, maybe, to escape their coops and hide their eggs and hatch baby chicks for cats to kill and disease to cripple and weasels to suck?) “Rat race,” he thought.

He thought of walking through the fields, down toward the swollen creek. But the ground was mushy from last night’s rain, and the wet grass would ruin his shoes. He walked around the yard, the lighted house solemn and distant as the moon, it seemed to him now. He decided to walk on the road. It was dark. The moon was hidden behind invisible clouds, but the dirt road itself gave off a kind of light, as though the earth he awkwardly walked on, the road uneven with pebbles, was alive, like himself, and full of useless energy, an outreaching of love toward nothing satisfactory. The lights in the farmhouses perched on the hills ahead of him were as far away as stars.

It was not his father’s failure that made him angry, it was his own. He had smiled when he did not feel like smiling, had shook hands when the muscles of his hands were limp with weariness and he felt only revulsion for the hand reaching out to his. He had not kissed babies, but he had cooed at them as he stupidly cooed at his own child, and if someone who saw through him, someone maliciously cruel and shameless, had raised some baby for his kiss, he would have kissed it. “Filth,” he thought. He was not fit for it, and for that matter politics was not fit for him. He’d been betrayed by the memory of a dead man.

He remembered the evenings in his grandfather’s livingroom at Stony Hill. He was no longer active in politics by that time, but people still came to him to ask his advice, get his “moral support” for their campaigns. The phrase had seemed curious and impressive to Will Jr once. He’d had some idea that the word
moral
was serious—that his grandfather was an anchor of goodness and stability, and the man who won his approval was a proved man of justice, Christian, one who would serve his state or county selflessly and wisely and do it good.