Hamilton Stark

Chapter 8. 100 Selected, Uninteresting Things Done and Said by Hamilton Stark

1. HE DROVE PAST A HITCHHIKER without picking him up. The hitchhiker was a long-haired youth in an army field jacket whose stance and bulky physical proportions reminded him for a second, as he later said, of the author’s younger brother, now dead, whom Hamilton had met only once, several years before.

2. He bought a new saxophone (tenor) but still preferred the old one.

3. After placing a classified ad in the Concord Daily Monitor, he sold his new saxaphone for $25 less than he had paid for it. He considered the loss not bad at all. “Self-knowledge always has a price.”

4. Between his second and third wives, he perfected a technique for getting out of bed in the morning in such a way that he had to make the bed only once every ten days or so. The technique involved spreading his legs under the covers to the far corners of the bed and then dragging his long body toward the top of the bed, where, springing his weight with his arms against the brass rail headboard, he lifted himself to the floor. When he married for the third time he ceased this activity, but when the woman left he resumed it until he married again. He also employed the technique between his fourth and fifth wives and after his fifth wife had left.

5. He changed his brand of cigarettes twice in his life — from Chesterfields to Camels to Lucky Strikes, which he now smokes at the rate of one pack a day.

6. He never learned to fly an airplane, though he often expressed a desire to do so.

7. When he was twenty-six years old he learned to drive a bulldozer, an activity he still enjoys. So much so that when he was thirty he purchased his own bulldozer, a small Caterpillar that he painted black and keeps waxed and shiny, even the blade, which he retouches with black enamel after each use.

8. In winter he usually wears a navy blue woolen watchcap. He rarely covers his ears with it. They are small and turn red from the cold, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care.

9. He cut down a dying maple tree behind his barn and that winter used the wood for his fireplace. He remembered having looked at the tree from his earliest childhood, and he thought of this while he was cutting it into fireplace-length pieces. He used his chain saw for the cutting, used it expertly, especially for a man who was not a bona fide woodcutter.

10. He never in his entire life wore a pair of sandals. Never even tried them on in a shoestore.

11. He never defaulted on a debt, and his checking account was never overdrawn. Once, however, he was tempted to default on a television set he had bought on time from Sears, Roebuck & Co. He made his payments punctually for fourteen months, and when the set broke down for the fifth time, he threw it away in anger, tossed it over the fence into the field in front of the house. With ten months remaining, and no television set to be repossessed or repaired, he threatened in a letter not to make any more payments, but instead sent his checks in nine days late each month until the balance was paid. After that he was reluctant to purchase any more appliances on time; he said it made it more difficult for him to get rid of them when he wanted to.

12. At the end of each year he threw away the old calendar and posted a new one, making a careful point of using a different calendar altogether, different size, picture, advertiser, etc. He preferred calendars from plumbing and heating wholesale supply houses. The pictures were usually of New Hampshire winter scenes, though sometimes they were of bathrooms or furnaces.

13. One winter morning, as he prepared to leave for work, he observed that he always put his left glove on before his right. He reasoned that this was because he was right-handed. For the same reason, he reasoned, he always shaved the right side of his face before the left.

14. One summer afternoon, a Sunday, he tried to draw a picture of his house from the field in front of it. He made three careful attempts but wasn’t satisfied with any of them, so he threw them away.

15. “If I was governor of this state, I’d let them all go to hell. That’s the only way to govern.” (He was speaking to Democratic and liberal Republican critics of the present governor’s policies.)

16. The most horned-pout* he ever caught in one night was twenty-two, on June 17, 1964, on Bow Lake, alone.

17. Because of his size, he often had difficulty buying clothes until he was about thirty, when he came across an L. L. Bean catalogue in a privy. After that he always bought his clothes by mail order from L. L. Bean.

18. This is the sequence in which he read the several sections of the Sunday newspaper: comics; sports; obituaries; headlines and front page; editorial page; letters to the editor; classified ads. He followed this pattern with the weekday editions too. On Sundays, however, he was more conscious of there being a pattern and of his being free not to follow it if he so desired.

19. He talked to dogs in a gruff voice that seemed to send them cowering away. Once, however, he was almost bitten by a friend’s unusually courageous dog, which ended the friendship, such as it was.

20. Drawn into a leather-goods shop in Concord by the attractive window display, he was about to purchase an eighty-dollar briefcase, but at the last minute he changed his mind and bought a new wallet instead. “I like the smell of new leather,” he later explained.

21. To an insurance salesman as the man stepped from his car: “Get the hell outa here! If I’d wanted to buy anything, I’d have sent for you!” The frightened salesman drove off quickly enough to satisfy him.

22–39. Once a week, at various, though unvarying, times, he performed the following chores:

a. dumped his rubbish in the field in front of his house;

b. buried his garbage in a pit in the field in front of his house (except in winter, when the ground was frozen solid, in which case he simply permitted the garbage to freeze solid, until spring, when he could cover the moldering heap with earth);

c. swept out the barn and cleaned off his work-benches;

d. added a quart of STP additive to the crankcase of his car;

e. checked the tire pressure of all four tires, plus the spare, of his car;

f. in summer, mowed the lawns; in winter, chipped off any ice or snow that had accumulated on the gutters and scraped away any ice or snow on the walks and driveway that he had missed during the week (he shoveled and plowed out his walks and driveway immediately after every snowstorm, but often, because of the lateness of the hour or other responsibilities, had to leave the finish-work for the weekend); in the fall, raked any leaves that had fallen that week into a pile, which he burned (the ashes he piled next to the garden in back of the house until spring, when, before turning the soil, he spread them); in the spring, worked at least three hours cutting and pruning in the wooded areas surrounding the house and along the path up the mountain.

g. drove to Pittsfield, where he bought groceries at the IGA for the coming week, filled his car with Shell gas, stopped at Maxfield’s Hardware Store for any tools, nails, screws or other items he might need or had run out of during the previous week, stopped at the state liquor store for a half-gallon of Canadian Club and at Danis’s Superette for a case of Molson ale, and returned home;

h. except in winter and late fall, tended his flower beds and vegetable garden, usually between 4:00 and 6:30 P.M. on Saturday; in the late fall and winter, during these same hours, he cut and stacked firewood for the fireplace and the two wood stoves in the kitchen and barn;

i. read the New Hampshire Times (the Sunday edition of the Manchester Union-Leader);

j. repaired any furniture, appliances, tools, machinery, lamps, cupboard doors, faucets, shutters, shingles, gates or fence posts that, during the previous week, had broken or had begun to malfunction, leak, buzz, flap, or lean;

k. drank half a gallon of Canadian Club and a case of Molson ale, one shot and one bottle at a time;

l. watched one, and no more than one, sporting event on television;

m. sharpened, on the wheel in his workshop, all his butcher knives, axes, hatchets, and handsaws; sharpened his Swiss Army pocketknife while he was at it;

n. fired at least twenty rounds from his Winchester 30.06 rifle — at bottles and tin cans in the field in front of the house; sometimes he shot idly at crows in the field in front of the house; sometimes rats and woodchucks, and when his garden was up, rabbits;

o. as a spiritual exercise (though he never called it precisely that), once a week went twenty-four hours without uttering a word to another person; because of the requirements of his job, this usually took place at home on Sundays, where it was easier to accomplish without complications;

p. walked to the top of Blue Job Mountain behind the house and looked out over the land below, wished it were his as far as he could see, all the way to the limits of the horizon;

q. checked all the above items off his list, one by one, as he performed them, and when necessary, revised the list to accommodate the upcoming week and any changes in routine that might be necessitated.

40. As a matter of course he tossed all mail addressed to Occupant into the trash can in the kitchen or in winter directly into the wood stove. Once, though, as if on a whim, he opened and read a plea for contributions to Boys’ Town. After that he resumed tossing all such mail into the trash can or wood stove, as before.

41. He liked to open the glove compartment of his car and find it neat and orderly. Flashlight, registration, New Hampshire road map, sharpened pencil, matches, extra fuses tightly rolled in a strip of electrician’s tape.

42. To his third wife (Jenny): “I’d as soon wipe my ass with a corncob as this damned stuff. Can’t you buy better toilet paper than this? It’s like sandpaper, for Christ’s sake!” To his fourth wife (Maureen): “You trying to give me piles or something? How much d’you save, buying this cheap shit? It feels like emery cloth!” To his fifth wife (Dora): “This stuff feels like pie crust, for Christ’s sake! What gives?” He figured that, because of his size, he was more sensitive to the texture of toilet paper than normal-sized people were. He also knew that made no sense, but he didn’t care. Whether a thing made sense or not had nothing to do with whether it was true or not.

43. He didn’t like dogs. “All tongue, lips and flapping tails. No sense of their own worth. Which makes them worthless.”

44. He didn’t like cats. “Sneaky bastards. They love dying even more than death. Which in my book makes ’em unreliable.”

45. He didn’t like horses. “Should’ve gone extinct forty or fifty years ago, when they couldn’t compete with tractors or trucks anymore for work or with cars and bicycles for transportation. Besides, they’re ridiculous-looking. Bodies’re too big for their legs. I’d like ’em if they were the way they used to be, before the Arabs started screwing ’em up — dog-sized things, like white-tailed deer, only smarter. Probably made good eating.”

46. He hated domestic fowl of all kinds. “I don’t even like to eat one of the bastards, unless it’s cut up so I can’t recognize what kind of animal it was when it was still alive.”

47. He liked pigs. “Now you take your typical pig. That’s an animal with a developed understanding of its life. No delusions. Not like cows. Cows are under the impression that people keep them around because they like them. Pigs never make that mistake.”

48. What he hated about sheep was the way most people regarded them: “Most people think sheep are sweet and gentle. The truth is, sheep sleep twenty-four hours a day. As far as being alive goes, they’re located only one step this side of lawn furniture. Three stomachs covered with a woolly mitten. Personally, if it wasn’t for the mutton, I’d rather see a flock of cotton bales.”

49. “I’d make a lousy farmer,” he confessed. “Plants are okay, though. I don’t mind being around plants, long as they don’t get too cute, if you know what I mean.”

50. He claimed not to know his birth date. “I was barely there, for Christ’s sake.” When asked how old he was, he would answer, “About thirty-seven,” or, “About forty-two,” or whatever, always, of course, giving his correct age. He claimed his sense of time was different from most people’s in that it was more precise. Doubtless he knew his birth date and, when required by law, provided it, for he possessed a driver’s license, union card, Social Security card, and so on, like the rest of us.

51. Whenever in conversation the word “Florida” came up, he would interject, “Coney Island with palm trees.”

52. He did not believe in God. He said that when God believed in him, then he’d believe in them both. He made his statement somberly, with care, apparently with full awareness of its theological, philosophical and psychological implications.

53. He had lifetime subscriptions to The Farmer’s Almanac, Reader’s Digest, and National Geographic. Frequently, however, he sneeringly referred to an individual as, “The type of man who has a lifetime subscription to The Farmer’s Almanac,” or, “… to Reader’s Digest,” or, “… to National Geographic.” Once, when someone had the temerity to point out that he himself owned lifetime subscriptions to these very periodicals, he answered, “Of course. How else do you think I’d know the types?”

54. He woke at six o’clock every morning of his adult life, even when he did not have to go to work. He did not own an alarm clock and could when necessary wake himself earlier than six and at exactly the time he wished to waken. He seemed to require no more than five hours’ sleep a night. In providing this information, he explained that this was because when he went to bed he went to sleep immediately and when he slept he concentrated on it. “Like a machine,” he explained. “No, like a rock,” he added.

55. Exposés and public scandals seemed to make him sad, as if he were suddenly reminded of some great loss from his childhood.

56. “I hate a melee. If you want a fight, you ought to make it personal. Insult somebody. Insult his mother, his girl friend, his manhood, whatever it is he thinks needs protection.”

57. He never permitted any of his wives to make breakfast for him. Once Jenny, attempting to curry his favor, got up an hour earlier than he and prepared a breakfast of fried eggs, pancakes, sausages, fresh biscuits, coffee, and melon, and when he came downstairs and discovered this lovely meal, he was enraged and stormed out of the house. Later, when describing the event, he explained his rage by pointing out the control a woman can obtain over a man if he lets her imitate his mother. “Good intentions can’t dull a sharp knife,” he aphorized. In fairness, he also pointed out the control a man can have over a woman if she lets him imitate her father. “It’s how I kept all my women in line. While I kept them.”

58. He despised throw pillows, bric-a-brac, knickknacks, and souvenirs, scatter rugs, doilies, and imitation chandeliers, flower decals, pink appliances, the color off-white, and white-wall tires, decorated mailboxes, and lawn sculpture, and David Susskind, and game shows, and television weathermen. He believed that you are what you love, and therefore he despised people who loved any or all of these things. He also believed that you are not what you despise, and since you cannot very easily control what you love and thus cannot very easily control what you are, you therefore ought at least to make a concerted attempt to avoid being what would disgrace you. For him, then, the most interesting person was the one who hated more things than anyone else, and the least interesting was the one who loved more things than anyone else. Errol Flynn, he thought, was an example of an interesting man. Lee Harvey Oswald and Arthur Bremer were interesting. Gerald Ford, Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles were not.

59. He loved compression when, as a quality, it was joined to symmetry — as in algebra or symbolic logic, a portable tape recorder, a double-bitted ax, or a Maltese cross. In fact, his favorite design was a Maltese cross, and he frequently left it doodled behind him, on restaurant tablecloths, condensation on windows, sand, snow, and dust.

60. He wore no jewelry and carried no watch. “On principle,” he claimed. As with so much else.

61. He did not wear glasses.

62. The men were unloading a truckload of twenty-foot lengths of six-inch galvanized pipe. He was the foreman on the job site, and because it was only eight-fifteen in the morning and the four men unloading the truck were moving very slowly, two men to each length of pipe, he grew annoyed and left the shanty, where he had been laying out the day’s work on the blueprints, and told the crew they were unloading the pipe as if their intent were not to get the truck unloaded but were instead to avoid hurting themselves or tiring themselves out too early in the day, at which point he himself began unloading the pipe, yanking a length by himself from the pile, hefting it to his shoulder and carrying it to the stack twenty feet away, and there laying it gently, so as not to damage the threaded ends, down. The men looked at the sky and the ground. He came back to the truck and did it again. Then again. The men stood aside and watched him work, confused as to the point he was making. After he had unloaded ten lengths of pipe, he stopped before the men and calmly said to them, “You have to lift until everything turns black. Lift till you black out. You have to do it every day. The job will always be more than you can handle, anyhow, so the only point is to lift until everything turns black.” Then he walked back into the shanty and resumed laying out the day’s work. The men turned to each other for a second, grinned good-naturedly, and went to work unloading the pipe, as before, two men to each length, and moving slowly, with care, pacing themselves.

63. He suddenly remembered his father’s walk, his stride, efficient and regular, like a dog’s involving his body only from the hips down. He tried to imitate it and discovered that to do so he didn’t have to alter his own stride in the slightest. The discovery gave him a moment’s extreme pleasure, not because it meant that he resembled his father even more closely than he had thought (which would not have pleased him at all), but rather because he believed that his discovery of the similarity between his imitation and the remembered image had led him directly to a momentary awareness of the nature of all human beings. And who, indeed, would not experience such awareness, however momentary, with pleasure?

64. He visited his father’s grave only once after the funeral, the following summer, when the grass had returned. He walked about the plot for a few moments, admired the view of the river from the hilltop cemetery, and got back into his car and drove home. From the top of Blue Job Mountain behind his house, he could see the cemetery, three miles distant. His ancestors for two hundred years were buried there, and once, when this was pointed out to him, he seemed surprised and confessed that it had never occurred to him, even though he made it a habit to climb to the top of Blue Job once every week.

65. To Trudy, his first wife: “I can’t tell you I love you because I don’t know what the word means. I mean the word ‘I,’ not ‘love’ or ‘you.’”

66. To Annie, his second wife: “I can’t tell you I love you because I know what ‘you’ and ‘love’ mean and I don’t know what ‘I’ means.”

67. To Jenny, his third wife: “I can’t tell you I love you because I know what ‘you’ and ‘love’ mean.”

68. To Maureen, his fourth wife: “I can’t tell you I love you because I know what ‘you’ means.”

69. To Dora, his fifth wife: “I can’t tell you I love you.”

70. With regard to all five wives, he observed one evening that it would have been possible for him only to have told them he did not love them, because he would then be lying and thus he would know what he meant. He meant to lie. By this it seemed that he believed that the only statements a person could make, and also could attribute meaning to, were statements known by the speaker to be falsehoods.

71. Asked by a friend why he continued to marry, feeling as he did toward women in particular and things in general, his response was to shrug helplessly and say, “When you don’t despise a thing, you let yourself be powerless to resist its advances, when and if it advances.”

72. He disliked most curtains and drapes, all venetian blinds, overhead lamps, tools that were not kept in immaculate condition, and collections of any kind. “I believe in sets of things, not collections.”

73. “‘Everything implies its opposite.’ I read that. The writer didn’t understand what he was writing. He thought it was about logic instead of the world.”

74. He refused to return the greetings of his immediate neighbors, the people who lived along the road to his house, and after a while they ceased greeting him or waving to him when he drove past their homes on his way to and from town and work.

75. He seemed to attract the adulation of adolescent boys, and as long as they remained in awe in silence, he did not discourage it. But as soon as anything more was asked of him, a declaration of loyalty or affection, say, a simple explanation, he in turn asked more of them, and this inevitably drove the boys away, usually hurt, often angry, and always confused as to who had failed whom.

76. On a number of occasions, with something like glee, he quoted a well-known Jamaican proverb: “Me no send, you no come.” He claimed that it meant, “If I didn’t send for you, then you’re not here.”

77. He combed his hair the same way all his life — straight back without a part, cut fairly long, trimmed by a barber every three weeks. Even in his forties, he had no gray hair, and as a result it was difficult to guess his age. People took him for anywhere between twenty-five and fifty-five, depending on their opinion of how old they themselves looked.

78. He kept himself physically very clean, and every morning he shaved himself meticulously, using no cologne or aftershave lotion on his face other than coarse rubbing alcohol. He used a straight razor, which he honed daily on a two-inch-wide leather strop, and a mug and brush. The razor, strop, mug and brush had all belonged to his father, and every morning while he shaved he thought of his father every morning shaving who must have had some other way of calling forth his father, for the grandfather, the one who had died drunk in a snowbank, had been a bearded man. In that way, every morning while he shaved he was able to think of his grandfather, a man he had never met and who had never shaved. This process satisfied him doubly because it demonstrated for him the way he believed everything worked.

79. He participated in no sports, had not played a game of any kind since his adolescence. The only kind of fishing he did was what is called “bottom-fishing,” and though he owned numerous firearms, both rifles and handguns, he hunted only what he called “pests,” crows, woodchucks, rats that scavenged his rubbish and other used-up household articles dumped in the field in front of his house.

80. Where other people saw only white, he claimed to have recognized twenty-one different shades of the color of snow. What he said he saw were eight shades of gray, seven of yellow, and six of blue. His favorite snow color was “blue number four.” Black and white, as colors of anything, were unknown to him, he insisted.

81. Drunk, regardless of whether he was speaking to a stranger or to an acquaintance, he usually spoke in accents — Irish, Southern, Italian, and so on. Then after a few more shots of Canadian Club and bottles of ale, he would begin to speak in foreign languages, or what the people around him took for foreign languages. If a French-Canadian were present, he would speak a bit of French. Occasionally, if it came out that the person he was talking to was fluent in some other foreign language than French, in Spanish, say, or German, he would start dropping sentences, phrases, words, as well as entire paragraphs, that seemed to be in Spanish or German. No one ever challenged him on his proficiency, and surely no one dared to challenge his veracity. The people usually just smiled and nodded, the way they would if someone had merely introduced a pleasant non sequitur into the conversation, which by then would have been drunken, loud, and digressive anyway, full of fits and stops, starts and interruptions. What matter, then, if some of the fits and stops came in foreign languages that no one in the group, except the speaker, seemed to understand? In this way, he had spoken in recent years with dozens of French-Canadian lumbermen, millhands, and fellow construction workers, an Italian-American formalist painter from New York City with a summer house on Bow Lake, four Creole-speaking Jamaican transient farmworkers, a Portuguese fisherman visiting relatives in Fall River, a pair of Russian chemists at a convention in Breton Woods, a Venezuelan student at the University of New Hampshire, many Greek cooks, restaurant managers and waitresses, a Chinese Bible salesman, and six Japanese tourists. Additionally, in what he claimed were the original languages, he had made references to and quotations from numerous works of literature written in ancient Greek, Latin, Sanscrit, and Hebrew. As he rarely bothered to translate these into English, it was not known how accurately he was quoting the original, if at all. And of course, always at these times he was extremely drunk, and the personality he was exhibiting was so vivid that, while it could not be ignored, neither could it be taken seriously — that is, as literally a personality.

82. He wore size 13 EEE shoes, over-the-ankle, moccasin-toed workshoes with a steel-reinforced toe and heel. At all times he owned three pairs of these shoes, one brand-new, one two years old, and one four years old, all of them purchased by mail from L. L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. These were the only shoes he owned, and every two years, when he bought a new pair, he threw away the oldest pair, just tossed them over the fence into the field in front.

83. He sent the apprentice pipefitter, his very first day on the job, to the toolshed for a glass-stapler. After a while the boy returned, saying he couldn’t find it, and then, timidly, asked him what a glass-stapler looked like. He stared at the boy with apparent disgust and after a moment told him it looked just like it ought to look. “Keep in mind the function, and you’ll figure out the form,” he said grumpily and walked off. The boy asked the other men, who smiled and sent him on several wild goose chases before the boy finally figured out what was happening, and then everyone had a good laugh together. “You can’t find what doesn’t exist,” he advised the boy. “But remember, you can’t lose it, either.” The boy nodded somberly, as if understanding, and the men looked from one to the other and grinned knowingly. Later in the day, one of them said to the boy, “He’s a little crazy, y’know. But don’t let it worry you none, because he never lets it interfere with his job.”

84. He picked up the phone and dialed the first three digits of his sister Jody’s telephone number. He had prepared one sentence; it was: “Hello, let me speak to my mother.” From there on he planned to improvise. He had, however, forbidden himself to explain or apologize for anything. All else was permissible, depending on what she or his mother said. Then he stopped dialing and put the phone down. “If I’m not going to explain or apologize for anything, then I have no reason to be calling her. She should be calling me,” he later reasoned.

85. Inside his house, he walked around in his stocking feet. His shoes were always neatly set on a wicker mat next to the door.

86. He could find the cube and square roots of extremely high numbers in his head with nearly the rapidity of an electric calculator. He dismissed the feat as a trick of concentration that any fool could teach himself if he weren’t so happy being a fool.

87. He owned no photographs of himself. Whenever one came to him, he threw it away, just tossed it into the trash can under the sink without even examining it to see whether it was a good likeness or not.

88. Nor did he own a single photograph of anyone else, not a snapshot. If one were presented to him (as by his daughter Rochelle, numerous times), unless it was personally inscribed (as were all his daughter’s), he pitched it into the trash can under the sink. His explanation (no apology) was that he already knew what the subject of the photograph looked like; he didn’t need any machine to tell him what he already knew. If he were going to save any photograph, it would have to be of a person he’d never seen before, but he’d never found any reason to do that yet, as evidenced by the fact that he even threw out pictures of himself.

89. Suddenly everyone noticed that he was growling, his lips curled back, his eyes gone cold, his scalp drawn back from his face. A moment before, everyone had thought he was speaking in what he said was an Ashanti dialect of Twi, still spoken, he had told them, in parts of Ghana. He had seemed to be directing his utterances to a black woman reporter for the Detroit Free Press who was in the state to cover the presidential primary election. In fact, he had been directing all his attention toward the young woman in the gray-tinted aviator glasses, as had she to him, and here he was now, growling like some kind of trapped beast. The others at the table all started talking at once, each of them trying separately to change the subject, whatever it was. Soon he had ceased growling and his face had returned to normal. By then someone in the group was telling the others how little he thought of this guy McCarthy’s chances of beating LBJ in the primary. The black woman avoided looking at him, and when she spoke to anyone at the table, it was only to answer a quiet yes or no to a direct question. He in turn seemed to withdraw into himself, and after a half-hour, he got up silently and left the bar for another.

90. In his lifetime (thus far), he had made love, as it were, to nineteen different women. The first was when he was seventeen years old. The woman, five years older than he, a French-Canadian down from Quebec for the summer, working as a waitress in a resort hotel on Lake Winnepesaukee, was “experienced.” He was drunk at the time. The most recent was a forty-seven-year-old divorcée who works as a compositor in a Concord printing plant. He met her at the leather-upholstered bar of a cocktail lounge and took her back to her dingy apartment where they made love, as it were, on a Murphy bed. He was drunk at the time.

91. He saved all personal correspondence — all letters, post cards, telegrams, inscriptions, memos and notes — everything directed to him that was in the slightest way personal. Then he filed everything alphabetically by sender (he called it “author”).

92. Though he was married five times, he never wore a wedding ring. His reason was that in his work he might catch the ring on something that would rip his finger off. He’d seen it happen, lots of times.

93. He worried about diseases of the rectum, though he had never suffered from any such disease or affliction. He used his size as rationalization: anyone his height and weight made things hard on the rectum.

94. Whenever in conversation the words “New York City” came up, he would snort, “Babylon!”

95. After an act of violence, however minor (or major), he was extremely calm, clear-eyed and physically relaxed. Indeed, much more so than anyone else in the area. It didn’t give the effect of release as much as it seemed he had regained something precious that had been lost, something he had luckily plucked from the flux.

96. Every year he received four Christmas cards: one from each of his sisters, one from the union business agent for the Concord local, and one from the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican party. The first two were always signed in ball-point with just the first name of the sender; the other two were always unsigned, with the name of the sender printed by machine. The first two he filed alphabetically by author; the other two he promptly threw away. He himself sent out no Christmas cards, although his wives had all participated in the rite, secretly, however.

97. When other men told stories from their experiences in the military, he never contributed any stories from his experiences in the Army Engineers Corps, although, if questioned directly, he would not deny that he had had such experiences. In that way he usually gave the impression that he had been involved with “security matters” that simply could not be discussed without clearance from above. He did nothing to correct that impression, naturally. The same was true when the men he worked with told stories from their childhood or adolescence; he merely would not deny that he, like other people, had gone through a childhood and adolescence. The impression given was that either his childhood and adolescence had been totally uneventful and bored him to think or talk about now, or else he had suffered so profoundly that it was extremely painful to him to think or talk about now. Again, he did nothing to correct either of these impressions.

98. One rarely spent an evening or afternoon with him without his at some point asking this riddle: “If you can hold six eggs in your right hand, how many can you hold in your left?” Most people, whether they knew the “right” answer or no, said, “Six,” whereupon he placed six eggs one by one into the person’s right hand. Then he placed six more eggs in a group on a tabletop and instructed the person to go ahead and hold them in his left hand — without, of course, first emptying the right. His riddle answered (i.e., three or four, depending on how many eggs the person could pluck and hold with the fingertips of his left hand), there followed a demonstration of the denial of that very answer. He deposited the dozen eggs onto the tabletop, and then, as if plunging both his hands into a vat, he placed them simultaneously over all the eggs, covering them completely, and when he lifted his hands and turned them over, he was holding six eggs in his right hand and six in his left. On his face was a broad smile of triumph, as if he had proved, not to his audience but to himself, something that couldn’t be believed.

99. He knew that if he had been a small man, people would have behaved differently toward him. But he also knew that if he had been a small man, he would have behaved differently toward them. “Different solutions create different problems,” he concluded.

100. One night, shortly after his mother had moved out, he discovered a photograph album that she had accidentally left in an upstairs closet in a dark corner of the overhead shelf. Most of the pictures in the album were snapshots of him as a child taken in the summertime at the river, by the sea, in the sun-dappled meadow. He studied each picture for a long time, and when he had finished, he took the album downstairs and walked outside, coatless in the cold night air, and heaved the album over the fence, sending it in a long, fluttering arc into the darkness.