Hamilton Stark

Chapter 7. Ausable Chasm

THIS 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?):

And here, in her own, mature, self-aware hand, at the age of seventeen, describing the true nature of her relationship with the man while at the same time offering him its positive denial, which was, of course, the nature of her daily experience of the man:

It was never clear to me why Rochelle was graduating from college in Ausable Chasm, a small tourist town, once a mill town, located in upstate New York a few miles from Lake Champlain. I could not imagine anyone sending his child to such a college for academic reasons (unless the child were unable to matriculate anywhere else), and so far as I knew, Rochelle’s mother still resided in Lakeland, Florida, as had Rochelle, at least through her senior year of high school. It didn’t make sense to me that she should attend a small, non-descript college fifteen hundred miles from home, especially when there were so many right around home to choose from. I asked Hamilton about it during the drive west and north from his home in Barnstead. He had called me the week before to ask if I would accompany him to his daughter’s graduation, mentioning, as if it would help me decide to come, that the featured speaker would be Ezra Taft Benson. He did not mention, of course, that his own daughter would give the valedictory speech, or that it would be in Latin (of her own choosing — the first time in the history of Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science that the graduation speech had been given in Latin!). He told me about that, offhandedly, in Burlington, Vermont.

“Why,” I asked him as he drove his car onto the ferry at Burlington and we began the crossing of Lake Champlain, “why does your daughter happen to be graduating from a small, obscure college in upstate New York, when all along I thought she was living in central Florida with her mother and presumably would have gone to either a well-known, prestigious college in the New England states or else one near her home? Did they move north while she was in high school?” I prodded. I suspected there was a story here to be told me by someone.

It was a beautiful, sunshiny, mid-June day stuffed with bright yellows and jade greens. The mountains, the broad valleys, the almost giddy blue of the lake — it made me want to be either a farmer in this valley or a tourist. I could not decide which role would give me more of the place. It’s an ancient dilemma: We can never choose between the experience itself and our memory of it.

Hamilton’s answer didn’t make much sense to me. Not then, anyhow, except to let me know that he didn’t wish to discuss it. He simply told me that the girl was obviously trying to get closer to her father now that she was no longer wholly dependent on her mother, but that Ausable Chasm was as close as she dared come to where he happened to be. So I let the subject drop and tried to enjoy the day, the smooth lake, the immense sky above it.

At the campus, a complex of half a dozen small, square, brick buildings that from the outside resembled a munitions plant, we met Hamilton’s daughter, Rochelle, he for the first time since she was an infant, me for the first time ever. As we got out of his car — he was driving an air-conditioned, dark brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville at that time, quite luxurious — I asked him if Rochelle knew he was coming. He grunted that in response to her invitation he had sent her a post card so indicating.

“Is this the first time you will have seen her since she was an infant?” I asked him.

Again he grunted his answer, which was yes. I could tell from his grunts that he was somewhat tense and possibly even a bit frightened of the occasion. One could hardly blame him. I’m sure that, although he never mentioned it, her acceptance of him was fully as important to him as his acceptance of her was to Rochelle. What if she saw him and, flooded with memories of her mother’s angry descriptions of the man, said to him, “No, I have changed my mind, I don’t want you here, I don’t want you to come to my graduation!” Would he try to comfort her, try to convince her that he truly wanted to be there, reassuring her with his kind, soft and urgent words? Or would he simply spin on his heels and walk away, back to his car, and go home?

Luckily, when Rochelle came up to him and introduced herself, saying that she recognized him from snapshots her mother had shown her, he smiled graciously — one of the few times, perhaps the only time, I’ve seen Hamilton Stark smile graciously — and he took her hand in his and thanked her for inviting him. Rochelle was already six feet tall, a young woman with electrifying beauty, and as she stood there in the parking lot outside the auditorium in her royal blue gown and mortarboard, her hand in her father’s hand, her green eyes staring directly, searchingly, into his brown eyes, which were squinting from the bright sunlight, I felt tears running over and down my cheeks.

Though she and I barely spoke, except for the moment when Hamilton introduced us to one another, it seemed to me then, and was later confirmed by her own testimony, that we both felt a deep bond between us. Years later, six, to be exact, I was able to ask her about that first meeting at Ausable Chasm, to ask her how she had perceived me then. We were lying in bed together, drifting languidly from passionate peaks through hazy valleys all the way to the gray light of dawn, the time of night and first intimacy when lovers ask one another how they were seen before, when they were not lovers. It’s an ancient form of talk, one of the few reliable ways of finding out how one actually is in the world.

I lit a cigarette for her and, naked except for my socks and garters, walked across the room to the dresser — we were at my home, in my own bedroom, this the conclusion to an evening that had begun as a literary discussion on the subject of the modern novel — and fixed her a drink, cognac and soda. “Tell me,” I said to her, returning to the bed with her drink, “on that day we first met, your college graduation day, the day you told me about your father’s wanting to go to college and how he had failed to satisfy that desire and how that was all tied up with your desire to attend Ausable Chasm — on that first day, how did you see me? How did I seem to you? Can you remember?” I asked, handing her the glass. “You don’t mind telling me this, do you?” I asked, suddenly worried that I might have embarrassed her with my question. I still did not know how to anticipate her reactions to anything I might say or do, nor do I even today. She is more intelligent than I, but her thought sequences are linked in patterns and systems that are not as logical as mine, and consequently she is unpredictable to me. Excitingly so, however! I find myself enlarged, enriched, and challenged by her unpredictability. She accomplishes it, expresses it, in our relationship in such a way that it never makes me feel arrogant or humiliated (the two most conventional responses in a male to a female’s unpredictability).

“No,” she said in her low, early morning voice, “I don’t mind.” She was tired, I knew, as was I, but we were both nonetheless stimulated by the occasion. It produced in her a kind of languid animation that, whenever it appeared, made me want to make love to her again. But I resisted the impulse and attended her words.

“I saw you immediately as an ally,” she told me. “I looked into your face and watched how you watched my father. I knew then that you were probably the only other person on earth who was obsessed with him in a way that corresponded to my own obsession with him.” Then she stopped a second. “But you don’t want to hear about my use for you, do you? I mean, after all, as an ally you were useful to me. You were going to become a way for me both to justify and satisfy my obsession with my father. I did have other perceptions of you, perceptions that had nothing to do with any possible use I might make of you. Wouldn’t you rather hear those?” she gently asked me.

Indeed. I had an erection to cope with now. The milky light of dawn was entering the room like a thief, stealing the nighttime and our disembodied, anonymous voices, thrusting us back into our particular, constraining bodies, those vessels, those jugs, those ridiculous, pajama-shaped symbols of our true identities. (I believe this, I have always believed it. I have never regarded myself as anything more than my disembodied voice and have never thought of myself as more clearly seen, known, than when I am heard. This, of course, lies behind my need to pursue and understand Hamilton Stark — at least it’s what presents me with a rationale for my pursuit — for he is the only human being I have known who did not seem to exist solely through his disembodied voice.)

That day at Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, though, I almost gave up on Hamilton. I came closest then to believing that the entire view I held of him was nothing more than an objectification of my own psychological and philosophical needs. For the first time, and, I hope, the last, I seriously entertained the notion that I had, in essence, made up Hamilton Stark, had invented him, had taken an ordinary man with an unusual personality disorder and had structured his numerous symptoms into an image that satisfied a set of secret, shameful needs in me.

My true weaknesses always seem to derive from my sympathies. Hamilton has told me this, and it’s true. You will recall my sympathy for his second wife, the one he called “the actress,” and how my sympathy for her made me question his very authenticity. Well, the same thing happened, only in a more extreme fashion, that day when I first met Rochelle, discovered that she was giving the valedictory speech, saw her reaching out for her father’s love and part of his life, and saw him yank both back. I was horrified. This was going too far, I thought. Surely, cruelty has its metaphysical use and meaning, but there must be a point where it is simply and purely cruelty and has no use or meaning except for the perpetrator.

“I’m glad you came,” she said to him in a voice that, to me, seemed remarkably calm.

He squinted into the sun and, expressionless, said that he had come to hear Ezra Taft Benson speak, a privilege that heretofore he had been denied.

Rochelle asked him if he understood Latin.

He shook his head no and asked, surprised, if Benson were going to speak in Latin.

“No, not that I know of,” she said, smiling easily. “But I am. Would you like a translation of my speech?” she asked him coyly. “I’ve copied it out for you.”

Again he shook his head no.

The half-hour that followed was extremely strained: The three of us strolled around the parking lot, Hamilton in the middle, Rochelle on one side, and me on the other. We looked at the automobiles, commented on the makes and the number plates, and asked one another questions that could not be answered. At least not by any of us.

Rochelle: “Are you happy to know that your daughter is graduating from college?”

Hamilton: “Seems like a good idea.”

Me: “What are your plans, now that you’re graduating from college?”

Rochelle: “Everything depends on one thing.”

Me: “And what is that?”

Rochelle: “I’m not sure yet, and I can’t tell what I think it is.”

Hamilton: “What kind of a car is that, the little convertible sports job with the raggedy roof?”

Rochelle and Me: “I don’t know. Custom made, maybe?”

Hamilton: “Don’t you hate custom-made cars?”

Rochelle: “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

Me: “Why?”

Hamilton: “Who knows? Maybe I’m just trying to make conversation.”

Me: “Oh.”

Rochelle: “Have you been friends with my father for a long time?”

Me: “Relative to what?”

Hamilton: “Yeah, relative to what?”

Rochelle: “I don’t know. Forget it. I was just trying to make conversation.”

Me: “Oh.”

Hamilton: “Where are we supposed to sit?”

Rochelle: “I don’t know. Anywhere in the auditorium, I guess. Wherever you want to sit.”

Hamilton: “All right if we go and sit now?”

Rochelle: “If that’s what you want.”

Hamilton: “That’s what we want. Right?”

Me: “I guess so, you’re the host today. Or are you the host, Rochelle? I mean the hostess.”

Rochelle: “I’ll show you where the auditorium is. Then I’ll have to leave you and join my classmates for the march. I’ll be sitting on the platform.”

Hamilton: “With Benson?”

Rochelle: “I don’t know. I presume so.”

Me: “Well, should we wish you luck, Rochelle? Or are you the overconfident type?”

Rochelle: “Who knows? Relative to what, eh?”

Me (laughing): “Right.”

Hamilton: “Let’s go find a seat.”

Me: “Okay.”

Rochelle: “The auditorium’s right through those doors, straight ahead and to the right. Think you can find it all right?”

Hamilton: “Sound simple enough.”

Me: “No problem. Right, Hamilton?”

Hamilton: “No problem. Right, Rochelle?”

Rochelle: “No problem. Right?”

Me (laughing again): “Are you making fun of me?”

Rochelle: “I don’t know. See you after the speeches.”

I realize that I’m not explaining many things that the reader doubtless would like explained. Please believe me, I’m not leaving these questions unanswered merely because I have a perverse love of mystery. Quite the opposite; in fact, I despise mystery. Mystery is the last resort of the hysteric. It’s a frantic, final attempt to organize chaos, or rather, to give the appearance of having organized chaos. None of that for me. It’s too easy and too cheap a way out for a man who feels, as I do, morally compelled to abide with chaos all the way to the end, until either he has succeeded in answering all the questions at hand, unraveling all the tangles, explaining all the puzzles, solving all the riddles, or else he has succumbed to the snarl of chaos altogether. For such a man, for me, the mid-die, where “mystery” lies, is definitely excluded. I am an emotional man, yes, but I am not a romantic man. And though I may never ascend quite to those airy levels of pure reason where, for example, my friend C. strolls about so comfortably, at least I am clear about the nature of my goal and can measure with accuracy the distance I remain from it. This particular clarity and the measuring that results therefrom comprise, for me, the only possibilities for a moral life. All else is either fantasy or determinism.

For this reason, that day at Ausable Chasm I persisted in trying to find out why Rochelle was graduating from college here in the North. Ordinarily, if Hamilton indicated that he didn’t wish to discuss a subject, I deferred to him and changed the subject, never bringing it up again unless and until he indicated readiness. But my fascination with Rochelle, then, at the actual sight of her, drove me to push in ways I would have otherwise found rude, if not downright boorish, in myself as well as in anyone else.

“What’s the story?” I asked him. “What’s the explanation? How come?”

All of which he answered with a shrug, a downturned mouth with pouting lower lip, like a carp’s, a helpless flop of open hands at his sides. And after a while it occurred to me that he didn’t know the answer either, that it was likely, when he had learned that his daughter was graduating from Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, that he had been as surprised and puzzled as I.

I therefore ceased asking the man about it and promised myself to ask Rochelle instead. Unfortunately, whenever I was with her, I became so addled by her physical and spiritual presence that I forgot my promise altogether, and now, six years after making that promise, I still have not kept it, and thus I do not know why Rochelle graduated from an obscure college in upstate New York rather than one in central Florida. This distresses me. For now it is too late to keep that promise. Rochelle is gone from me except in memory and imagination. I will never know the answer to my question, and the reader will never know either.

To return: I handed Rochelle her drink and joined her in the bed. (This happens to be the imaginary point from which I can most easily recall the events of the day I spent in Ausable Chasm.) We were talking about the day we first met each other and how we had perceived each other then. She said that she had thought of me as a small man, short and slight, but later, after having seen me numerous times alone, realized that it was because I had been in the company of her father that first time and thus, when compared to his great height and overall bulk, had appeared much smaller than, in fact, I actually was. She was pleased, she told me, when she discovered that I was the same height as she and that, while my musculature was not exactly overdeveloped, I was nevertheless wiry and in quite good shape for a man my age.

Waving her compliments away, I gently asked her if she had seen her father and me from the speakers’ platform while she had been giving her speech. I wanted to know if she had seen my attentiveness. I confess it. Hurt somewhat by the comparison between her father’s and my physical size, I wished to have her compare my rapt attention with her father’s cruel inattention. So I risked causing pain. I risked the chance that, by invoking the image of her father sitting in the audience and apparently sleeping through her speech, with me perched on my chair, rapt and admiring next to him, she would feel again the pain that moment must have caused her.

“You were an angel,” she said, smiling into my face. She had cut through my ruse in one stroke, had comforted me without mocking me and at the same time had spared herself the pain of the memory. What a woman! Then, with laughter, she began to talk about Ezra Taft Benson’s speech. “Remember it?” she asked me. “That funny little old man with all that crazy fervor?”

Actually, I recalled nothing of Benson’s speech, except for the one line that Hamilton had continually quoted to me all the way back home in the car. I promptly related it to her: “The best defense is the one you never have to use,” I said.

She giggled, then reminded me that when Benson had uttered those words Hamilton had broken into applause, mortifying me, perhaps astonishing Benson, and inducing a few scattered, sheeplike souls in the audience to join him. I had completely forgotten that awful moment and for a few seconds relived my embarrassment, which had been quite painful. I wasn’t so much embarrassed because I was sitting next to a person who seemed to be reacting to a banality with inappropriate enthusiasm, as I was embarrassed because that man happened to be my hero. I did not point this out to Rochelle. I didn’t have to. After all, he was her hero too.

I may not have listed it among my earlier encomiums, but Rochelle’s memory is prodigious, photographic. Mine, of course, is ordinary. But she could recall details, entire conversations, books, films, any text at all, things and events in their entirety that I could but barely invent. Catalogues of things passed by on an afternoon’s drive in the country, newspaper articles and editorials verbatim, entire chapters from the Bible, the first paragraphs from novels she had read years ago, news accounts from radio and television that she’d listened to but moments before — it was unnerving, slightly otherworldly, and at all times not quite believable. I could never rid myself of my initial response to one of her recitations, which was that there must be a trick to it, a crib, a way of faking it somehow. At any rate, on this morning, when she noticed that I had preferred being amused by the Benson speech itself to being embarrassed by the associated image of Hamilton’s suddenly applauding a remark of, well, questionable morality, she quickly and kindly proceeded to recall for me the introduction given Benson by the president of the college, a Mr. Carlisle Bargeron.

“Remember,” she said, “in President Bargeron’s introduction, this bit of deathless prose: ‘Ezra Taft Benson was conditioned early in life for the political buffeting that was to come. In fact, he experienced mob abuse early in his life.’” Rochelle giggled and put on a pompous expression that mocked President Bargeron and continued. “‘Secretary Benson is not a ministerial man in appearance.’” She was recalling his words effortlessly; they came back to me as she spoke them. Surely she was making them up; but if she were, how could I recognize them as she spoke? “‘He could be taken for a well-groomed businessman, over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds. He greets you with a pleasant smile and has an easy laugh.’” She smiled at me. “He must have written that speech from old publicity handouts from the Eisenhower administration. Because there was old Benson, sitting right next to Mr. Bargeron in a folding chair, tiny, shriveled, scowling like a Puritan minister!” She laughed. “Do you remember the crescendo of the introduction?”

I shook my head no. Good God, until she had started quoting it, I had forgotten that there had even been an introduction in the first place.

“‘Secretary Benson stands at the crossroads, seeking in turn the tide!’” Then, wrapping her long arms across the front of her body, she broke into goodhearted laughter. Utterly without malice, her laughter seemed to enfold the very object of her mockery, President Bargeron, and even Benson himself in a hug of compassionate understanding. For a second I felt that her laughter included as its object Hamilton too, and even me. Swinging her long, tanned legs over the edge of the bed, she got up and, naked, unself-consciously crossed the room to the dresser and made herself another drink.

I must tell you that I was happier at that moment than I could remember ever having been before.

When she returned to the bed, she went on quoting, this time in a wheezy, high-pitched voice designed to affect the quality and tone of Ezra Taft Benson’s aged voice. “‘We need,’” she said sternly, “‘as we need no other thing, a nationwide repentance of our sins! In our rush for the material things, we have, indeed, forgotten to serve the God of this land. We must look beyond the dollar sign! Our greatness has been built on spiritual values, and if we are to survive we must find again what we once had and now have lost. I am speaking of the inner strength that comes from obedience to divine low!’”

Taking a sip from her drink. Offering me a sip. Then, amazingly, going on. “‘At least twenty great civilizations have disappeared! The pattern is shockingly similar. All, before their collapse, showed a decline in spiritual values, in moral stamina, and in the freedom and responsibility of their citizens. They showed such symptoms as excessive taxation, as bloated bureaucracy, as governmental paternalism, and in general a rather elaborate set of controls and regulations affecting prices, wages, production, and consumption.’”

She paused again, and then she began a recitation that to me was indeed beyond belief (I could not believe that she had merely heard the speech once; she had to have read a copy at some point), for she was now quoting Benson as he quoted yet another speaker, and she was quoting both exactly (as far as I knew): “‘After reviewing the decline and fall of these great empires and appraising the lessons taught, the historian Glover of Oxford University makes this cryptic comment: “It is better for the development of character and contentment to do certain things badly yourself than to have them done better for you by someone else.’”

Her voice, ordinarily low for a woman and tender, had tightened in her mimicry and had risen and, to be sure, had harshened somewhat, I was struck dumb by her ability not only to remember the man’s exact words but also to mimic his voice and mannerisms. What a woman! I said to myself.

“And remember how he ended his speech?” she reminded me.

I had not remembered at all, of course, until she began to quote it, and then as she spoke there returned to me in a rush a second embarrassing image, the image of Hamilton’s second outburst, which, fortunately, had not been perceived by Rochelle. It came as Benson was reaching the rhetorical peak of his message. The little man, visibly trembling with the emotion of his message to these young graduates, had cried out to them, “I love this nation! It is my firm belief that the God of Heaven raised up the founding fathers and inspired them to establish the Constitution of this land! This was ingrained in me as a youngster by my father and mother and by my church! It is part of my religious faith! To me, this is not just another nation! It is a great and glorious society with a divine mission to perform for liberty-loving people everywhere!” Here he hesitated a moment to wipe the spittle from his lips with his handkerchief. Then, continuing with fervor, he shouted, “Freedom is a God-given, eternal principle vouchsafed to us under the Constitution! It must be continually guarded as something as precious as life itself! It is doubtful if any man can be politically free who depends upon the state for sustenance! A completely planned and subsidized economy weakens initiative, discourages industry, destroys character and demoralizes the people!” At precisely this moment as Benson stepped away from the microphone, Hamilton had leaped to his feet and, brandishing one huge fist like a club, had bellowed, “Live free or die!” It was the New Hampshire state motto!

The rest of the audience had begun to applaud and a few individuals had risen to their feet, to prove their patriotism, perhaps, but possibly because of their genuine enthusiasm for the secretary’s words, and thus, luckily, Hamilton’s cry was lost on most of the people in the auditorium. Not on me, however, nor on the dozen or so people seated near us. And not on Ezra Taft Benson, either. The old man, by a quirk, happened to have been looking straight at Hamilton as he finished his speech, so when Hamilton leaped to his feet and bellowed the New Hampshire motto, Benson must have thought an enormous fanatic, an outsized Puerto Rican or some kind of Balkan anarchist madman, was about to attempt a suicidal assassination. The old fellow went white and staggered backward, clutching at his chest, clawed at it, and fell to the floor, where he began kicking his feet like a child having a tantrum.

In a second Mr. Bargeron, Rochelle and the minister who had offered the prayer at the beginning of the ceremonies had reached Benson and had pulled him back to his feet. Apparently they had not seen the cause of his fall and assumed he had tripped over a microphone wire because they were, all three, apologetic and concerned mostly that he might have hurt himself. The secretary, who by this time had realized he was not to be assassinated, smiled painfully and limped from the stage, disappearing quickly behind the curtain, ashen-faced, shaken, mumbling to himself.

Rochelle and I must have been remembering the same image — old Benson staggering backward, grabbing at his chest, falling over and kicking his feet on the floor, then being helped off the stage — for suddenly she looked at me in the gray, melancholy light and in a soft voice asked, “What really happened? What made that old man act like that … so terrified … as if someone were going to kill him? Did something happen that I, that I didn’t see? Did my father do anything?”

I knew that she wanted me to say no, to keep it a puzzle, but I couldn’t lie to her any more than I could lie to myself. So I told her, told her how her father had stood up fiercely with his enormous fist raised and had cried out the New Hampshire state motto, which, as she could tell immediately, was indeed threatening. To a timid listener it could sound like, “Live free or I’ll kill you!”

“Did he do that because he was carried away with enthusiasm for Benson’s speech?” Her voice was shaky, frightened, pleading.

“Oh, God, I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. But he has a way,” I explained, “as you probably know all too well, of praising a thing by condemning it and of condemning a thing by praising it. He has a way of making a positive statement from a double negative, and a negative statement from a double positive. The first skill is not rare, but the second is. You aren’t a native New Englander, as I am and as your father is, so you’re probably not as aware as I of the degree to which the skill operates in the culture as a means for self-expression. Practically any old Yankee farmer will let you know how cruel and relentless his winter has been, not by condemning it, but by smiling and perversely praising the facts that his thermometer has frozen, that his cattle and pigs all froze to death in January, that there was still ice on the lakes in mid-June. It’s almost an ironic point of view, an extremely highly developed form of sarcasm that they’re not even aware they possess. The late Latin poets possessed it, consciously, of course, and certain eighteenth-century English authors owned it also, again quite consciously. But rarely, if ever, has it been characteristic of an entire people. Hamilton, your father, seems to have developed it to an extremely high degree, mainly because at some early age he must have become conscious of it and realized that, if he pushed it to a still more extreme point, he could gain a much wider range of reference for it, could use it to criticize matters more complex than last winter’s awful weather. At least that’s my theory, Rochelle. And because I love the man, I choose to believe it. So I guess it’s more than a theory, it’s also a rationalization. I wish it were more than a rationalization, though. I wish it were a description.”

“I know,” she said softly, in almost a whisper. “If it were a description, you could believe that he despised Ezra Taft Benson, had utterly rejected him, and yet had managed at the same time to avoid subscribing to your and my liberal notions. Wouldn’t that be a profound and mature politics?” she said in a voice filled with wonder. “To be free to criticize and even to despise the old man’s reactionary position without, as a result, having to endorse any other. To offer yourself essentially as a critique, to be able to trust yourself that much! Why, you’d have to be a political genius to accomplish it!” she exclaimed. “Or some kind of Kierkegaardian ironist,” she added thoughtfully.

“That’s precisely what keeps me from deserting your father’s side at moments like that, like the time he shouted the state motto at Benson or when he fell asleep during your valedictory speech or mocked me for voting for people like Morris Udall … or all the other things he’s done that, on the surface, seemed mindless, cruel or intolerant.” Our enthusiasm for the man was growing again. Our fear and mistrust were on the wane. With bright eyes and rapid words we cheered each other on, and before long we were both loving and admiring him without qualification again.

It was more than merely possible that he had intended all this, had even foreseen it, and that it was his method of teaching us to see and understand the world more independently and with steadily increasing clarity. He was in many ways like a Sufi master or a wizened old peyote-chewing Indian shaman or a Zen Buddhist teacher who by indirection points direction out. But we are so naïve and ill-formed that, in our search for wisdom, we run around expecting to find it only in stereotypical figures — like desert-browned Sufis or raucous old Indian grandfathers or crisp Buddhist monks — never realizing that it is more in the nature of true wisdom that, for us, wisdom reside in the familiar form of a New Hampshire pipefitter who can’t seem to get along with people.

Reaching over, I took her by her smooth shoulders, pulled her to me, and felt her cool breasts press against my chest. “Oh, Rochelle!” I cried. “We must be strong! And I do believe that we’re stronger together than we are alone! Your father is probably the greatest man either of us will ever have the good luck to meet in our lifetimes. Alone we weaken, we forget how difficult and tangled is the path to true wisdom. But together we are strengthened, toughened, encouraged to push through the intellectual and emotional tangles and our own most private fears and insecurities and conditionings to the end, where we, too, can offer ourselves as critiques, as double positives, and finally, in the largest sense, as human beings!”

Needless to say, I was hovering somewhere between ecstasy and hysteria when suddenly, and thankfully, Rochelle taught me the utter ridiculousness of my feelings, showed me how far I still had to go before I could claim to possess a shred of the cloth Hamilton wore. She showed me also how much further along that path she had gone than I, showed me that while I might have glimpsed the master’s garment, she had actually touched it.

“I don’t think you understand the nature of religious experience,” she said evenly. “I’m sorry, but when a person reaches the point where he or she can claim to know what you are now claiming to know, he or she should be free to enact it. If he or she can’t, if he or she still needs help, then he or she really cannot say that he or she has the requisite knowledge. I’m sorry, but you’re much closer to the path when you’re greedily interrogating me about my father, when you’re splicing together your own personal and acquired knowledge of him, making of the man’s life a text, if you will, that will guide you straightway into the invention of your own life.” Gently, she pulled away from me and took a last sip from her glass. Then she smiled. “If you’ll fix me another drink, I’ll tell you how my father almost went to college.”

“What?” I was stupefied by the sequence — first a collusion, then a collision, and now a collusion again.

“Sure,” she said brightly. “I’ll tell you everything I know about him. And it’s quite a lot. I’ve done four years of research on his life so far, for that ‘novel’ of mine. You know, The Plumber’s Apprentice. I don’t feel possessive about that material anymore. I’m no more a professional novelist than you are, for heaven’s sake!” she laughed, and I had to laugh with her. “Go ahead, honey, fix me another drink and I’ll tell you all about how my daddy almost went to college.” She smiled and spoke with a southern accent that, as I rushed across the bedroom to the dresser where I had placed the cognac, soda and ice, nearly made me swoon.

“After all, honey,” she drawled from the bed, “you told me something this mo’ning I didn’t know about before, that stuff about how Daddy stood up and shouted the state motto and all? I oughta do the same thing for you now, shouldn’t I?” And she winked at me. Winked! What a woman!

I was certainly very confused. How, how had I lost control of the situation like this?

Then I remembered: it was the ecstasy and the hysteria — or rather, it was my having reached the point halfway between the two. After that, everything had gone haywire for me. Rochelle had taken complete control of the conversation, and of me, until there I was fetching her a drink in exchange for a tale I hadn’t even particularly wanted to hear anymore, and to make matters worse, I was doing it in a swoon. How would I ever be able to remember the tale, let alone determine its importance to my own tale? Oh, reader, dear reader, remember this, and let it be an example to you. In the book of your life, never permit yourself to invent a woman or a man who is capable of bewildering you while he or she seduces you. You will lose the thread of your argument, you will find your story line impossibly tangled, your plot utterly overthrown, and your faith in your powers of observation and analysis sliced to limp ribbons of insecurity. Call it love, call it whatever you will, but know the risk. If you must, as I must, think of your life as a novel and of the creatures therein as “characters,” then unless you keep yourself from falling in love with one of those creatures, you will have to give up the idea of control. You will have to become not an inspired author, but one who is simply not in control of his own novel. It happens, it happens frequently.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice hushed with contrition. “You’re right, you’re quite right, of course.” I handed her drink to her, and holding on to my own as if it were a kitten, I sat down next to her on the bed. “Please. Please tell me how Hamilton, how your father almost went to college. It’s a chapter in his life I know nothing about. I’d even forgotten it existed, that you had mentioned its existence that day after your graduation ceremonies, until you mentioned it again tonight, I mean this morning.”

“Yes, this morning. It’s late,” she yawned, stretching her long white arms in the milky light, and once again I found myself having to deal with my own tumescence.

“Tired?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered. “But still, I want you to hear this. It might help you to know important things about him. It’s a short story, I can tell it to you in a few minutes, and tomorrow, later today, I mean, I’ll let you have the chapter from my novel that describes the adventure. As a matter of fact,” she went on, “I’ve been thinking of turning the entire manuscript, even my notes and tapes, over to you, to let you use in any way that pleases you.” She yawned again, as if with disinterest in my response.

I was shocked. “What? What do you mean?” Her novel, the obsession-driven activity of her last four years? Give it up, just like that?

“Yes. I’ve made a decision. I think it’s a waste of my time to be writing a novel about the man — I mean that kind of self-consciousness, that kind of objectification. It all seems to run counter to what I’m to learn from the man. From what I am learning. It’s hard to describe. You write the novel. If you can. I can’t. And even if I could, I’d never bring myself to publish it,” she added with a wry smile.

I was twice shocked. She sat there, looking straight ahead into space, apparently close to emotionless, as if she had once witnessed a glory or a horror that I hadn’t, announcing as she was to me in a passionless voice that she was canceling out the work of four years of her young life, hard, diligent work, boring research, arduous travel, careful visioning and revisioning, until she had nearly perfected a style and had mastered the content. I, her most confirmed admirer, could not believe that she would cancel this enterprise, that she, simply and practically without feelings, would turn the manuscript over to me for my grimy use. (Relatively speaking, of course. I can’t pretend to be that self-deprecating.)

“Listen,” I said to her, “I love your novel!”

“Do you?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “It’s so … so … realistic!”

She said, “Well, you’ve still got a lot to learn, I’m afraid. But I can’t teach you. I’m still an initiate myself, you know. Here, here’s the story,” she began, and leaning back against the pillows, as the new day’s sunlight spilled into the room for the first time, she took a sip from her drink and told me the story of how Hamilton Stark almost went to college.

She was right. It wasn’t much more than a short story (she told it at one sitting), and, to fully understand the event, its subtler aspects, I did need the manuscript, which she delivered to me late that same afternoon. It was entitled “Fighting It, Giving Up,” Chapter Four, from The Plumber’s Apprentice. I’ve included it here, rather than try to summarize it or provide my own version, for the usual reasons: her handling of the material seems so much superior to what I could accomplish that only an insensitive egoist would proffer his own version instead. The name changes are the same as indicated earlier, when other portions of Rochelle’s novel were quoted. There is, however, one additional character here, the youth called Feeney, and though he appeared briefly in a chapter quoted in my Chapter Four, Addendum C, Rochelle’s Chapter Eight, “Return and Depart,” at that time I said that no one corresponded to Feeney in Hamilton’s, A’s, life. It now appears that I was wrong. Rochelle, through diligent, wily research, has uncovered the prototype for Feeney, a man named F., who now works as a machine operator in a tannery in Penacook. He and A. rarely see each other these days, and then only by accident.

Chapter 4

FIGHTING IT, GIVING UP

It positively amazed Alvin that he could get in his car and drive it over the hills for four hours roughly north and west, stop the car, get out, walk into a bar, order a drink, and be served legally. Well, not quite legally, even here in New York State, because he was only seventeen, but even so, it was still enough to astound him when he and Feeney strode through the door of the Valley Café in Ausable Chasm, New York, and each ordered a Seven-and-Seven, that the bartender merely served them and took their money.

It was a Friday in November, Alvin’s senior year in high school. He was a football star and a good student, “especially in math.” Everyone said so. He had driven to Ausable Chasm this day for an interview with the dean of admissions of the little-known engineering institute located at the edge of the small town. Feeney had gone along to keep him company and “for laughs,” he’d said, and while Alvin was being interviewed, he’d taken the car and had driven around the town looking for a bar that he thought, from its appearance, would serve them without asking for IDs. “I got a sixth sense for these things,” he had explained as he drove off in Alvin’s Ford.

It was a raw, rainy day, blustery and dark, and Alvin wore only a lightweight cloth raincoat over his charcoal gray flannel suit, and he carried no umbrella, so by the time he had located and entered the brick, armorylike administration building, his clothes, hair and shoes were soaked through. Miserably uncomfortable and smelling like a wet, long-haired animal, he sat through a painful fifteen-minute interview with a blond crew-cut young man who never once smiled as he asked Alvin questions about the size of Pittsfield High School, the percentage of the graduating seniors who went on to college, and the range of courses offered there. “We’ve never had an applicant from your school before,” the somber young man explained.

“Oh, I see,” Alvin said.

A few minutes later, when, in answer to the dean’s inquiry as to the possibility of Pittsfield’s football team winning the state championship, Alvin had laughed and said, “Never!” it was the dean who said, “Oh, I see.”

It had gone on like that, the two of them saying soberly, “Oh, I see,” perhaps half a dozen times each, ending with Alvin’s pointing out that he would need a scholarship, a full scholarship, to go to college, because his parents were unable to help him financially. “My father’s a plumber,” he added helpfully.

The dean had said, “Oh, I see,” one more time and then, “Yes,” and then, “Well, yes,” and had ushered him back to the outer office, where they shook hands and grimly parted.

By the time Alvin reached the coffee shop near the campus where he’d arranged to meet Feeney, he was again soaking wet and he was growling. He was still growling when he sat down across from Feeney in the plastic-seated booth, and Feeney laughed.

“Let’s get the hell outa here,” Alvin said. “I gotta get plowed!”

Feeney went on laughing. He always laughed when Alvin started growling. That Alvin Stock, what a crazy guy! He gets pissed at something, he starts growling like some kinda mad dog or something. Really growling, and loud. Anybody can hear it. Like he was gonna tear somebody up with his teeth. What a crazy guy!

The growl was new — or rather, it had only recently been noticed by others. Alvin himself was still not quite aware of it, not even when it was timidly pointed out to him. He wasn’t sure what people heard when they laughed and said, “Hey, man, calm down! You’re growling, for chrissake!” But he knew what he felt — a knot, at first tightening in his chest, high up, and then slowly loosening as it rose in his throat and finally, between clenched teeth, squirted from his mouth. For him, the sound was merely that of his breath exhaling under pressure from below, scraping against resistance from above, the physiological opposite of a sigh.

But what others heard was a frighteningly literal growl. For them it began with a deep rumbling from Alvin’s chest that thinned, tightened, and rose in pitch as it moved up his throat. Then, finally, after resonating in his mouth, the noise would flow like a metal ribbon between his teeth, usually driving anyone near him back a step or two in surprise and, for a second, fear. Then, when it was apparent that Alvin was not conscious of his noise, came the nervous laughter, the light mockery. In turn, his response was usually one of irritation and slight embarrassment — irritation that he was being distracted from expressing his anger, embarrassment that he was not fully aware of how he was being perceived. And too, from some corner of his mind, embarrassment that he was angry at all and had been found out, betrayed, almost, by a noise his body seemed to make involuntarily.

The Valley Café was a neighborhood tavern located in a row of wood tenements south of the center of Ausable Chasm at the edge of the Ausable Chasm River, which, a few miles downstream, emptied into Lake Champlain. It was a small place, a storefront, actually, with a dark bar along one side of the room and a dozen or so red plastic-seated booths along the other. At the back were three doors, one leading from behind the bar to the small kitchen, the second leading to a pair of filthy, unventilated restrooms, the third, marked by an Exit sign, leading to an alley. At the front there were two large plate glass windows painted dark green from the low sills to eye level, with a small red neon sign in each pane that rapidly blinked VALLEY CAFÉ.

The place was quiet, dimly lit, almost empty. In its own toughly cynical way, the bar was friendly. It worked hard at seeming to be no more than what it was, a neighborhood bar. Anything that was deliberately atmospheric, as if to attract strangers, would not have made sense, no more to the patrons than to the owners. A juke box was allowed, was not thought pretentious or, worse, naïve, but only if the songs were the type of melancholy love songs that celebrated stoical loss, songs ten years out of date sung by middle-aged crooners who’d broken in with the big bands in the thirties and forties.

Alvin and Feeney walked up to the bar and ordered Seven-and-Sevens from the beefy, T-shirted bartender. He was a chinless, balding man in his fifties, his thick arms covered with faded red and blue tattoos. His T-shirt was stretched tightly across a belly that clung to the front of him like a tortoise shell, below which he had tied a white apron like a bib. He served the boys quickly and went back to his post at the front of the bar, where he had spread his newspaper. Planting both elbows on the counter, his chin resting against his knuckles, he resumed reading, slowly moving his lips as he read.

In a few seconds, having grown accustomed to the semi-darkness of the room, the boys took a look around them to see where, in fact, they were and who was there with them. At the far end of the bar, in a bank of shadows, hunched a man in his late sixties, a serious afternoon drinker with a shot of blond whiskey and a glass of flat draft beer arranged precisely in front of him. In one of the booths, with his back to the bar, a young man in khaki work clothes was arguing in a hissing voice with a tubby, bleached-blond, middle-aged woman who was barely listening, but now and then making a low-voiced comment that would set the young man off and hissing again. He chain-smoked from a pack of Camels in front of him, and she affectionately studied her pink-painted fingernails. For a minute Alvin wondered why the young man was haranguing her. Were they married to each other? Lovers? Brother and sister? He gulped down the last of his drink and called for another.

Maybe she was a prostitute and he was her pimp. Naw, impossible. The guy’s wearing work clothes. Besides, she’s too old and fat to be a prostitute. What’s it like, he wondered, to fuck a woman that old and that fat?

She was looking across at him then, not quite staring, but openly, undeniably, looking at him. Alvin returned her gaze. Feeney, staring down into his glass, went on chattering, something about California, L.A., swimming year-round, beautiful cars, a ‘49 Olds 88… Alvin noticed that the woman’s face was not unattractive. She had bright, dark, heavily made-up eyes that were wide apart and low on her face, and a full mouth that she had painted pink, to match her fingernails. Her hair was short and curly, fluffy almost. The color of vanilla ice cream, Alvin thought. She was wearing a maroon short-sleeved sweater and a navy blue wool skirt, both of which clung tightly to her bulky, round torso. Her arms and breasts, though exceptionally large, looked firm to Alvin. Maybe she’s not really that old, he thought. In her late thirties, maybe. And the guy is her brother-in-law and he’s complaining about something that his wife, her sister, did to him, and she really doesn’t give much of a shit because she doesn’t like the guy much in the first place and he’s constantly whining in the second place. And anyhow, what she’s really interested in is me. Finishing off his drink, he ordered another.

Feeney ordered another too. “Gimme a coupla Slim Jims, will ya?” he said to the bartender.

Other people, mostly men, came into the bar, drank awhile, and left. It grew dark outside, and the bartender turned on a set of rose-shaded lights. Alvin played the juke box, half a dozen Frank Sinatra songs, and while the records played, Alvin, back at the bar, snapped his fingers to the beat. He drank, ordered again, and drank again.

Feeney started talking about the drive home, four hours, and Alvin said, “Yeah, yeah, sure. Later, later,” and because it was Alvin’s car, Feeney forgot about it. What the hell, he could always sleep in the back and let Alvin worry about the driving. He was only along for the laughs, he explained — but Alvin didn’t seem to hear him.

A pair of sailors, quite cheerfully drunk, wandered into the place and took stools next to Alvin and continued their drinking. The young man with the woman in the booth started to get up to leave, but as he rose from his seat, he saw that the woman was looking intently at Alvin, who was leaning off his stool in her direction, like a tower about to fall, and the young man quickly sat down again.

One of the sailors, a thin, red-headed boy with freckles swarming across his face, elbowed Alvin in the side and, grinning good-naturedly, said to him, “You got somethin’ goin’ with Blondie over there, ain’t you?”

Slowly Alvin turned and looked at the sailor. All he could see was the red-headed boy’s huge grin, a tooth-filled half-moon, and to Alvin at that moment the sailor’s great, goodhearted grin was the silliest, weakest thing he’d ever seen, so he said, “Whyn’t you mind your own fuckin’ business?” and watched with pleasure the collapse of the grin.

“Fuck you,” the sailor quietly offered, and he turned away.

Satisfied, Alvin resumed watching the woman in the booth, who had now placed herself so that Alvin could see her legs, crossed, halfway up her thighs.

By this time Feeney, too, had realized that Alvin’s attention was focused solely on one person, and also that the person’s attention seemed to be focused on Alvin as well. “Go easy, Al,” he warned. “We’re a long ways from home, y’know.”

Alvin brushed his friend’s warning aside with a crooked smile, and the next thing he knew he was standing beside the booth, staring down at the blond woman. “Buy you a drink?” he asked, flashing the same crooked smile he had given Feeney a moment before.

The woman looked up at him, her face wide open and pleased, but before she could answer, the man seated opposite her snarled, “Screw, kid. Get fuckin’ lost, will ya?”

In a dead voice Alvin said, “I didn’t offer to buy you a drink.” And for the first time he saw that the man was actually quite a bit older than he’d thought, was in fact the same age as the woman, probably in his late thirties. Up close, Alvin could see that the man was large, and muscular too, red-faced from working outside, with large tanned hands crossed with pencil-thick veins.

The man jammed an unlit cigarette between his thin lips, and with one motion he snapped open his lighter and lit the cigarette while with his free hand he pointed first his index finger at Alvin’s chest and then a hooked thumb at the barstool Alvin had just left. Inhaling deeply, blowing the smoke from flared nostrils, the man repeated his instructions: “Screw, kid. The lady’s with me. Now get fuckin’ lost, will ya!”

The woman smiled helplessly up at Alvin and remained silent.

Alvin looked coldly into the man’s pale blue eyes. “Shut up,” he said evenly. “I’m talkin’ to her, not you.”

“Lissen, honey, maybe some other time, okay?” the woman said to him in a husky voice. She was still smiling up at him.

“I’m from outa town, I’m leavin’ tonight, so whyn’t you let someone who’s just passin’ through buy you a drink? Whaddaya drinkin’, anyhow?” Alvin peered down into her glass, as if peering down a well.

“Gin and tonic.”

“Gin and tonic!” Alvin called to the bartender. “An’ another Seven-an’-Seven!” He started to sit down next to the woman, who quickly slid over to make room, when suddenly the man reached across and clamped onto Alvin’s wrist, stopping him.

“Kid,” he hissed, “if you don’t turn around an’ get the hell outa here I’m gonna take you apart.”

Swinging his other hand around in front of him, Alvin wrenched the man’s hand free of his wrist and threw it against the table. “You ain’t takin’ anybody apart tonight, pal.”

Alvin felt wonderful. Like a tractor or bull or tree. And fast, like a cobra or lariat or chain saw. And fearless, like a block of ice or a surgeon or the wind. Here was a big man who was older than he, a tough, wiry man facing him with threats and anger, yet to Alvin the man was like a curtain that could easily be brushed aside. So he turned all his attention to the woman, asking her name and did she live around here.

The man stood up and grabbed Alvin’s right shoulder. “Let’s go. Out.” His voice was hurried but low and smooth, almost pleasant, as if he were putting his cat out for the night.

At the bar, Feeney, the sailors, the bartender, and three or four other customers, all older men, were watching intently. Only Feeney looked frightened. He got off his stool and took a step toward the booth, then a sideways step toward the door that led out to the street and Alvin’s car. From the juke box at the back Frank Sinatra was singing “On the Road to Mandalay,” but otherwise the place was silent, still, and waiting.

Alvin looked down at the man’s hand clamped to his shoulder. He said, “You wanta step outside with me, pal? ‘Cause that’s the only way I’m goin’.”

“Some other time, kid. I ain’t got time to play games with punks like you. Now get outa here.”

“Screw you. Either you step outside with me, mister, and get the shit pounded outa you, or you just pick up your little lunchbox there and trot home alone. I plan to sit here awhile an’ have a drink an’ a talk with Mary. Is that your name, honey? What’s your name?” he asked the woman with the vanilla ice cream hair.

“Helen.”

“Terrific. Terrific. What’s you say you were drinkin’? Gin an’ tonic?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, honey. Bartender, let’s have a gin an’ tonic an’ a Seven-an’-Seven over here!”

“Okay,” the man in khakis said. “You want your head beat in, you’re gonna get it. Let’s go, sonny. Outside,” he said, and he let go of Alvin’s shoulder and strode angrily for the door in back that led to the alley.

Alvin grinned and slid out of the booth without looking back at the woman.

Feeney grabbed him by the arm. “C’mon, Al, let’s get the fuck outa here. Whaddaya doin’, for chrissakes? That guy’ll kill ya!”

Pulling silently away, Alvin started for the exit to the alley, and Feeney shrugged his shoulders and followed his friend, averting his eyes as he passed the woman in the booth.

Jumping from their stools, the pair of sailors followed. “I hope the bastard gets creamed,” the red-headed one said.

The bartender, wiping up the bar with a dirty gray cloth, shook his head as if disgusted and slightly bored by the whole thing. “Fuckin’ kid drinkers,” he mumbled to one of the men at the bar. “Who needs ‘em?” Then he called over to the woman, who was lighting a cigarette from a lit butt in the ashtray in front of her. “Hey, Helen, you still want that drink?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s payin’ for it?” the bartender asked, winking to the men along the bar.

“Whichever one comes back, Freddie. Whichever one comes back.” She laughed and started studying her pink fingernails again.

The man in the khaki work clothes was at least six feet tall and broad-shouldered, but still he wasn’t as tall as Alvin or anywhere near as wide. He was thick and compact, though, one of those men whose muscles are flat and short, an efficiently built, heavy-boned man with thick wrists and large hands.

When Alvin stepped out of the bar into the alley, he saw the man standing, facing him, a half-dozen paces away at the edge of a circle of light thrown by the single bulb burning over the door. In back of the man was a cinderblock wall about nine feet high, and beyond that was a belt of the dark gray, almost black sky that rose straight up from the river below. Next to the back door of the bar on either side were overflowing garbage cans and collapsing, rain-soaked, cardboard boxes. The ground was puddled and muddy, and a nasty, erratic wind was blowing.

Alvin shed his suit jacket and handed it to Feeney, who tried to lean himself casually against the side of the building. The sailors came out and stood next to him, grinning, their arms folded over their chests. With one hand Alvin unknotted his necktie and passed that to Feeney.

Feeney said, “Thanks.”

Alvin said, “Yeah.”

The man said, “C’mon, kid,” and crouched slightly, his fists in front of him, his head pulled down into his bulky shoulders, his feet planted firmly on the ground. A puncher.

Taking two quick steps forward, Alvin drew his fists up in front of his face, quite high up, leaned slightly off the balls of his feet and then, for the first time in his life, he started to fistfight. As if he were in a trance, thinking consciously of the mechanics of what he was doing no more than he would if he were eating a meal, he slid to his left, feinted once, and jammed his right fist, twice, as if firing it, under the man’s left arm, crashing his fist against the rib cage, driving the man off-balance to his side, where Alvin caught him with a knee slammed into the crotch as the man fell away. The man grunted and swung a couple of slow punches at Alvin’s head, both missing weakly, and Alvin started moving swiftly in and out, his fisted hands attacking the man’s neck, chest and belly, like a pack of dogs tearing at the sides of a wounded deer, moving too fast, too relentlessly, too automatically, for the man to avoid them. As he started to collapse backward toward the cinderblock wall, with Alvin driving on like a crowd, the man, spitting blood, groaned, “Enough!” Alvin grabbed him by the shirtfront, held him at arm’s length, and whacked him, hard, across the temple with one enormous paw, flipping the man out of his grasp into a heap in the mud. Walking over to him, he picked him up again and threw him back down again. He kicked him once on the shoulder. Then he left him alone.

“Jesus Christ!” Feeney yelled. “You did it! You really took the guy!” He was clapping Alvin on the shoulder and staring down at the man on the ground.

Alvin pulled his jacket and tie out of Feeney’s other hand and shoved his arms into the jacket and slung the necktie around his neck without knotting it. He turned and started straight down the alley toward the street.

“Hey! Where ya goin’? What about the broad? Where ya goin’?”

“Home,” Alvin grunted and kept on moving, head down, for the street.

“Okay, I’ll get your raincoat. You left it inside,” Feeney called to him.

“Yeah.” Then he was gone from sight.

Feeney turned around, a puzzled but still exhilarated expression on his face. “Jesus.” The sailors had gone back inside. The man on the ground was slowly, awkwardly getting to his feet. “You okay?” Feeney asked him quietly.

The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose. He stood, bent over, clutching his left side, breathing laboriously. His clothes were smeared with mud and fresh blood. “I gotta … busted … rib. I think… Tell Freddie… C’mere. Th’ bartender…”

“Sure.” Feeney walked somberly inside, told the bartender he’d better check the guy out and maybe get him a doctor or something, the guy seemed pretty busted up. Plucking Alvin’s tan raincoat from the coatrack, he pointedly avoided even a glance at the woman in the booth next to it and started walking out the door at the front.

“Where’s the other one?” the bartender asked. He had come out from behind the bar and was on his way toward the back door. “I don’t wanta see him in here again. You tell him that.”

“No sweat,” Feeney said, grinning. “No sweat at all.” Then he looked down at the woman. Serious-faced, she was sipping from her gin and tonic. She caught him staring, and without removing her pink lips from the rim of the glass, gave him the finger.

Feeney laughed and strolled happily out. When he reached the car and got in, he looked over at Alvin behind the steering wheel. He was smiling and the car motor was running.

“Feelin’ pretty tough, ain’t ya?” Feeney observed.

“Yeah. Like a bucket full of nails.” Then he jammed the car into gear, and they headed back to New Hampshire.

I was grateful for the story, grateful to Rochelle for having delivered it to me, for having written it in the first place. But the story complicated things for me far more than it simplified them. I asked Rochelle if it complicated things for her, too, and she said no, not really, which surprised me.

“But he sounds so ordinary,” I pointed out to her, “like almost any young man already determined at adolescence by social and familial past, one of those angry American youths locked into patterns of violence, drunkenness and sexual exploitation. Even if he eventually raised his consciousness to the point where he could direct his anger politically, rather than mutely against himself,” I observed to her, “he’d still be little more than another feeble example of the type called ‘working-class hero.’” And both Rochelle and I were claiming much more for him than that.

It was not exactly what I had been looking for in a story about Hamilton’s brush with a college education. I had wanted him to be offered a full scholarship, say, by Harvard or Princeton or Yale, and after visiting one of those campuses and encountering there for the first time an example or two of the academic mind, to reject the offered scholarship with some sort of truth-telling gesture of defiance. It would have made a marvelously effective vehicle for social satire.

“My father is not Holden Caulfield all grown up,” Rochelle said, sounding a little hurt.

I couldn’t tell if it was her author’s pride that had been bruised or the pride of a daughter who believes that she understands her parent better than any stranger can. In either case, though, she was justified in feeling hurt, so I apologized, first for my persistently soft-headed expectations that Hamilton’s past could be anticipated any more than could his future, and second, for not having immediately expressed my enthusiasm for the skill and restraint with which she had told her story.

“As always,” I explained to her, “your literary gifts amaze and delight me. Especially when placed next to my own awkward attempts.”

She smiled politely.

“Look,” I brightly said, “the sun has risen above the trees! Shall we go downstairs for breakfast? Or would you like to let me make love to you?”

“Oh, you devil. Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Eventually,” I confessed.

“You some kind of billy goat, honey,” she purred in that southern accent of hers, the one that stiffens me with lust.