Hamilton Stark

Chapter 3. Three Tales from His Childhood

TRUTHFULLY, I planned from the beginning to bring into the narrative at precisely this point Rochelle’s version of three tales told to her by her father when she was a child. Or at least that is what she claims. It’s quite possible that she invented them herself (quite unlike her, however; her methods of composition depend heavily on observation and memory; she leaves formalism, fantasy, hallucination, meditation, etc., to others).

Let us think of this sequence of tales as coming from Rochelle’s own novel about her father, a project I will describe and speculate on in some detail later. At this moment I am concerned with her lovely, fragile ambivalence toward her father, a man she believes is either a demon himself or is merely possessed by one. I am also concerned that she believes it was not always true that her father either is a demon or is possessed by one. She believes that when she was a child, a young child, but one of indeterminate age, it seemed to her that her father loved her. That’s very important. It may be the hinge of her ambivalence. These tales are important to her (important to me for other reasons, which doubtless will soon become apparent) because it seemed to her that her father never loved her as much again as when he would take her like a flower into the curl of his huge arm and, at her urging, tell her tales from his childhood. Or so she believes.

Only three of those tales from the many that he told her remain with her today, perhaps because, above all his other stories, it was these three that bore significance for him, telling them, as he apparently did, three and four times over, when he never repeated any other tale even once. And too, it may be only that these three bore significance, later, for Rochelle herself, when, as emblems of an as-yet-unrevealed future, they foretold either the name of the demon he would become or the name of the demon who became him. Regardless, it was with stories such as these, tales from his childhood, that she first learned to perceive her father’s present perfected state (her very words), and that is the context in which, in her attempt at a novel, she offered them to others. It is not, of course, the context provided here, in spite of the fact that the prose style and narrative form are strictly Rochelle’s. The context offered here, my personal contribution, is merely the frame.

THE FIGHTING COCKS

Every morning Hamilton Stark [in Rochelle’s ms., this character is named Alvin Stock; for obvious reasons, I have substituted the name of the person she was really writing about. More on this later. The author.] fed and watered his father’s fighting cocks. His father had told him that it was his “job,” and for doing it Ham received every Sunday a small amount of money, which his father told him was called an “allowance.”

Ham also had to feed and water the chickens, but because he enjoyed doing that, he didn’t consider it part of his “job.” He had chosen a name for each of the ten hens, and whenever he discovered a gravel-colored egg in one of the nests, he thanked whichever bird had laid it, saying quietly in the dusty light of the henhouse, “Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Jane. Thank you, Harriet.”

Living in the henhouse with the hens was a fat old rooster named Henry. He was a Rhode Island red, like the hens. To Ham, Henry seemed shy, especially compared to the fighting cocks, because he only crowed twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, and quietly at that (unlike the fighting cocks, who crowed loudly and constantly). Ham liked Henry, and in spite of his shyness, Henry seemed pretty friendly toward Ham too. Not as friendly as the hens, maybe, but surely more friendly than those fighting cocks.

They were bantam fighting cocks, half the size of Henry and the other Rhode Island reds, but so fierce they had to be kept inside wire mesh cages in their own special corner of the henhouse. Also, they had their own caged sections of the henyard, which they got to in warm weather by way of their own little doorways. There were only two of them, and Ham’s father had named them Jack and Gene, after two famous boxers. “All these guys know is fighting,” he had said. “You wouldn’t want me to name them after a couple of violin players, would you?”

The fighting cocks made Ham’s father happy. He had brought them home with him, their cages stashed in the back of his pickup truck, early one summer evening, after having spent several hours in Pittsfield at the Bonnie Aire Café with some friends. He had bought them from a man he had met there, a lumberman from Canada who was going out west by train and couldn’t take them with him.

That first night Ham’s father had talked excitedly about staging cockfights with Jack and Gene. Even though he’d never actually seen a cockfight, he figured there wasn’t much to it once you had a pair of fighting cocks. Ham’s mother said that she really wasn’t interested in anything that had to do with animals such as that, and she had gone into the kitchen to wash the supper dishes. Then Ham’s father had fallen asleep in his chair by the radio.

As soon as he realized that his father had fallen asleep, Ham crept over to the cages, which his father had placed on the floor next to his easy chair, and he studied the strange-looking birds. The one named Jack was red, the one named Gene was yellow, and they both looked fiery — fast, sharp, sudden little birds with wildly round eyes, short orange combs, beaks like the points of scissors, and long knifelike spurs attached to the backs of their legs. They reminded Ham of snakes — their cold, unblinking eyes, the way they held their bodies motionless while they watched him, always from the side, turning only their wedge-shaped heads as Ham moved in a careful circle around their cages.

Finally he sat down on the floor next to the cages. His father was snoring. Reaching out one hand, Ham brushed the top of Jack’s cage and quickly yanked his hand back. The bird didn’t move. Trying the same thing with Gene, he joggled the cage a bit, knocking the bird off-balance for a second, but getting no other response from it. Moving back to Jack’s cage, he once again reached toward the mesh, and just as he felt the touch of the cold wire against his fingertips, he realized that the bird had lanced the palm of his hand with its beak, and a hot flower of pain filled his hand and shot up the length of his arm.

He screamed, and his father woke up, and his mother came running in from the kitchen. Blood was pouring from a small hole in the palm of his hand all over his flannel pajamas and bare feet. Ham kept screaming and slapping his hand against himself as if a tiny spot of fire were stuck to it.

Wrapping his hand with the dishcloth she had been carrying, his mother hurried him upstairs to the bathroom, where, after a while, she was able to calm him and wash and dress his wound. Then she took him into his room and helped him put on a clean pair of pajamas and tucked him into bed.

Kissing him good-night, she said, “Don’t be afraid,” in a voice that helped him not to be afraid, because it was a voice that told him she was not afraid.

Then she went downstairs, and he could hear her talking to his father, though he could not hear the words. Several times his father interrupted her, but she quickly resumed talking.

After a few minutes his father started talking, and his mother began to interrupt, but he kept on talking in his low, steady voice. And when he finished, he left the living room and came into the hall and started up the stairs.

He came into Ham’s room and sat down at the foot of the bed. “Let me see your hand, son.”

Ham extended his gauze-wrapped hand to his father, who examined the dressing for a second, then returned it. “Still hurt?”

“A little,” Ham said somberly.

“A lot, I bet.”

“Yes, a lot.”

“Did you learn something?”

“Yes. I guess so.”

“What?”

“To stay away from your fighting cocks?” he tried.

“No, not exactly,” his father said to him. “I don’t want you to be afraid of them, boy. And if you just stayed away from them, that’s all you’d be. Afraid. I want you to respect them. Do you understand the difference?” his father asked. “Respecting something that can hurt you is different from just being afraid of it. And to respect the fighting cocks you’re going to have to deal with them face to face. Maybe that way you’ll get over being afraid of them,” he promised. “Do you understand?”

“No … not really. Maybe I do.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. You will,” his father told him. And then he told him that he had a “job” for him. Every morning from then on Ham would have to feed and water the hens and roosters, including the fighting cocks. He would start the next morning, when they would do it together, so he’d know how much corn to give them and how to handle the fighting cocks so they wouldn’t hurt him or escape from their cages. But after that he would have to do it alone. It was a “job,” his father explained, because he was going to be paid for it — fifteen cents a week, every Sunday morning before church.

But Ham could not stop being afraid of the fighting cocks. He might have if one morning early that first week Gene, the yellow one, had not nipped off a piece of the meat of his hand between thumb and forefinger. After pitching corn into Gene’s cage, Ham simply had not been fast enough in pulling his hand away, and the bird had got him.

His father had showed him how to do it, but true safety depended on speed, so he was not sorry for Ham. “If you’d done it the way I showed you, he never would have got you. You’ve still got to learn how to respect those birds. It’s not fear that’ll get your hand out of that cage in time. It’s respect.”

So Ham had concentrated on speed that he believed was derived from respect rather than from fear. He practiced on old Henry, the Rhode Island red, whom he knew he respected and of whom he had no fear whatsoever. He would walk into the henhouse carrying a can of corn, and extending a handful of it, he would call, “Here, Henry! Here, Henry! Corn, Henry!” and the bird, head cocked to one side like a partially deaf old man, would stalk somewhat wobbly toward the boy, and when his beak was a few inches from Ham’s hand, the boy would throw the corn onto the cold, bare ground, and Henry would dive for it.

If that’s what respect feels like, Ham thought, I like it. I especially like it better than being frightened.

Nevertheless, when it came time to feed the fighting cocks, the only speed Ham developed seemed to depend on fear. He was terrified of the birds — their endless anger, their suddenness, the weapons they carried. Whenever he neared their twin cages in the corner of the henhouse, his hands started to throb, his arms grew weak, and his back and shoulder muscles stiffened. One night he dreamed that as he opened the sliding door to feed Jack, both cocks had flown out and had furiously attacked his face, hunting madly for his eyes, and he had awakened screaming. When his mother tried to get him to tell her about the dream that had frightened him, he had refused to tell her. “I can’t remember,” he had lied.

Throughout the fall, Ham struggled to overcome his fear of the fighting cocks. The birds had grown used to his feeding and watering them every morning, so they no longer treated his arrival as a chance to attack or escape but instead waited patiently for their food, which, as soon as Ham had slid back the door to their cage, they greedily devoured, swinging their heads like short hatchets swiftly chopping the corn to bits.

In spite of this change in the birds’ expectations regarding Ham’s arrival, a change that in some sense gave them a measure of reliability and even a type of kindness toward him, he was still frightened of them, and he continued to move his hand with the food or water dish in and out of their cages as if he were plucking hot coals from a fire. He tried to respect them for their new restraint, but he couldn’t. He knew that the reason they were no longer flying at him was merely because they were hungry and had realized that it was his job to feed them.

They didn’t like their cages, especially when every day the hens and old Henry left the henhouse to scratch in the fenced-in yard outside. Also, the daytime proximity of Henry and his harem amiably socializing together seemed to enrage the fighting cocks, and every hour or so the pair would crow angrily at the other birds. As always, Henry continued to crow only at sunrise and sunset.

Ham’s father no longer talked about arranging cockfights and making lots of money from Jack and Gene. Ham’s mother explained that it was illegal anyhow. “And with good reason,” she had said angrily, but that was as much as she would say.

Every Sunday morning, before Ham and his mother got into the pickup truck and drove to the church in the Center, his father, who never went to church except at Christmas and Easter, paid Ham his fifteen cents — a dime and a nickel. “Put the nickel in the collection plate. Save the dime,” he told his son each time he paid him.

And Ham did save the dimes. The first Sunday he had been paid, he had taken the calendar down from the kitchen wall, and studying it a while, had calculated that by Christmas he would have saved almost two dollars, which, he decided, he would use to buy Christmas presents — for his parents and his cousins. Until then, he had been too young to have any money of his own, and he had not been able to buy any presents for anyone. Like a baby, he had been forced only to accept. But now that he had a job, he was not a baby anymore.

Then one Sunday morning in early December, after it had snowed heavily all night long, the milky, overcast sky in the morning and the dense silence of the first snow caused everyone in the family to sleep a few minutes later than usual. Even old Henry overslept and didn’t crow until almost eight o’clock — a half-hour late at that time of the year.

In a rush to feed and water the birds, Ham neglected to close the door to Jack’s cage with the snap that locked it. He hurried back through the foot-deep snow to the house, and while his father shoveled out the long driveway to the road, he gulped down his breakfast and got dressed for church. Before he and his mother left, his father paid him.

Later, when they returned from church and walked into the kitchen, his father said somberly to Ham, “Leave your coat on, boy. I want you to come out to the henhouse and see something.” He got up from his chair, put on his own coat and hat, and led his son outside and along the narrow path he had shoveled to the henhouse.

At the door to the henhouse, his father stopped and lit a cigarette. Then he said, “Go on in,” and Ham swung open the door and stepped inside.

The cold-eyed fighting cocks, locked inside their cages, were striding rapidly back and forth. Across from them, in the farthest dark corner of the henhouse, the hens were huddled silently together in a rippling mass, all of them facing the wall. And in the center of the packed dirt floor lay the body of old Henry, shredded at the breast and head, with a flurry of blood-tipped feathers scattered about it on the floor.

Ham turned around and stepped back outside to where his father stood smoking and waiting for him. The sky had begun to clear, and the snow glared brightly in the sunlight, so that for several seconds Ham could not see.

He heard his father say, “You know what happened, don’t you?”

Ham tried not to cry and finally succeeded and answered, “The fighting cocks killed Henry.”

“You forgot to close Jack’s cage this morning, and after you and your mother left, all hell broke loose. By the time I got out here, Jack had killed the rooster and scared the hens so bad they probably won’t lay till spring.”

Ham said that he was sorry. He said it several times because it felt strange to him when he said it, almost as if he didn’t mean it, as if somehow he were glad that Henry was dead and the hens wouldn’t lay.

His father told him that being sorry never changed anything in this world. Never. “So the first thing you’re going to do is buy a new rooster for those hens. If we’re lucky we’ll get them laying again. It’ll probably help if we put the fighting cocks out in the barn right away, so this afternoon I’ll build a couple of coops for them out there. Up to now I kept them in here because it was easier for you to feed them all at once. Now it’ll be harder for you,” he said grimly.

“How much will a new rooster cost?” Ham asked, knowing the answer even before he heard it.

“Two or three dollars,” his father said, flicking his cigarette butt into the snowbank and heading for the house.

Ham stood there alone for a few seconds and then started running to catch up to his father, who had almost reached the house.

THE DRUNKEN PIGS

In certain years the family raised a pig. Always Poland China pigs. But there was a period of about five years when they were raising two pigs, every spring butchering the older of the two and replacing it immediately with a young one. In two years that pig would weigh one hundred and fifty pounds or more, and its turn, as the older of the pair, would have arrived.

By that time Ham, whose responsibility it was to feed them, would’ve grown attached to the bristly, pinkish white beast, so he was grateful that every time his father and Archie Carr, the butcher, packed one of the pigs into the back of Archie’s truck and drove off with it, they left behind a football-shaped and — sized piglet, so small it had to be fenced separately for a while to protect it from the clumsy, thrashing bulk of the remaining adult pig.

“Pigs don’t get along until they’re about the same size,” Ham’s father had explained. “Like people.” Then he had laughed down lightly at his son, and touching the boy’s coal black hair with his enormous fingertips he said, “Naw, not like people.”

Ham knew that they raised the pigs to kill and eat and that it saved them a lot of money. It was wartime, and even though his father worked hard every day as a plumber, Ham knew that they were poor, so he tried to think about the pigs the way he thought about the vegetable garden.

It wasn’t easy. The pigs themselves made it difficult for him. They had too much character for it. Certainly they rooted like potatoes in the dark ground of the pigpen, but sometimes Ham would stand on the rough board fencing of the pen and watch them snuffle through the dirt, and when the pigs realized that he was there, they’d stare up at him and wrinkle the loamy surface of the dirt with their buried noses, as if signaling to him. Besides, the pigs ate potatoes — or at least they ate the peelings, whole buckets of them, left over from Ham’s mother’s cooking at the end of each week.

And yes, it was true that the pigs were in fact shaped more like a summer squash than anything else — they surely weren’t shaped like animals, or people. Rounded at the ends, long and smooth-sided, so fat their tiny legs in soft ground were almost invisible, with a tendril-like tail at one end and leafy ears at the other, it should have been easy to think of them as nothing more than gigantic pinkish summer squashes. Except of course that they ate squashes, ate greedily the seedy cores that Ham’s mother scraped away when she was canning for the winter.

Another thing that made it hard for Ham to think of the pigs in the same way he thought of the vegetables from the garden was that the pigs made noises, grunts and loud, high squeals, which Ham thought he understood. One time the pigs broke loose from the pen and were very hard to find and catch because, once loose, they remained silent and out of sight. But when Ham’s mother discovered one of them rummaging noiselessly through her geranium bed over on the shady side of the house, the pig had started squealing loudly and had headed straight for the pigpen. The other pig, the older one, had wandered out behind the barn and had fallen through the wooden platform that covered an old unused well back there. Twelve foot down, standing in a foot of water in total darkness, the pig remained silent until Ham and his father, seeing that the cover had been broken, walked over to the well and peered down, and only then did the pig begin to squeal for help.

Also, the pigs liked Ham. Or at least it seemed to him that they did. They let him scratch their dry, scaly backs and smooth foreheads and often came to the fence when they saw him there. In calm silence the beasts would poke their snouts between the slats, and he would scratch them. One pig would even let Ham place two fingertips of one hand a short ways into its nostrils, dime-sized openings, as long as with his other hand the boy kept scratching the bony ridge of the snout.

They tried not to name the pigs. His father had pointed out that if they didn’t give them names, it would help Ham avoid becoming too fond of them. “They’re not pets. Remember that. No more reason to name a pig you’re going to eat in a year or two than name a damn apple tree,” he had explained.

Ham’s mother had agreed, but later, when Ham accidentally revealed to her that on his own he had secretly continued naming the pigs year after year, she had merely smiled. Because he had referred to only one of the pigs by name, Anne, she asked him the name of the other.

“Tricksie. I named her that because she looks like the one we had two years ago, and her name was Tricksie too,” he told her, pointing out the pig’s unusually long snout and small ears.

“Tricksie and Anne. Why Anne?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed to fit her,” he said. Then he asked her not to tell his father that he had named the pigs, and she assured him that she wouldn’t.

The September that Tricksie began her final season as a pig and Anne was more than half-grown, Ham and his mother harvested an unusually large crop of grapes. They were Concord grapes, large and purple and darkly sweet, that grew from several clusters of vines in front of the garden and along the south-facing side of the road.

For a week, every afternoon when school was out Ham would step down from the school bus and walk to the grapevines and work alongside his mother until suppertime. These were warm, pleasant afternoons for him, picking the dusky grapes in the golden September sunlight, talking quietly with his mother as they worked, chatting of school, his friends, his new teacher. He also liked asking her about what he was like when he was a baby, and she apparently enjoyed telling him. He asked her why she didn’t have another baby, and she said, “Maybe I will,” in such a way that he figured it was a decision. And that turned out to be the year before his sister Jody was born.

When he and his mother had finally picked all the grapes, having stored them each night in close-woven baskets in the cellar, his mother started making jelly with them. She’d never made grape jelly before, had never gathered a large enough crop, and she was excited at the prospect. She washed the grapes, and squashed them, and separated the skins and seeds from the pulp, the pulp from the juice. She saved the juice in Mason jars and used the cleaned pulp for the jelly. The skins and seeds, sloshing thickly in a five-gallon tub like a purple stew, she decided to feed to the pigs.

That afternoon when Ham got home from school, she asked him to carry the tub out to the pigpen and leave it for them. He dipped his fingers into the gooey mass and tasted it: sweet, and a little bit sour at the edges. But he was sure that the pigs, after a daily diet of grain mash and water, would consider it a treat.

Eagerly, he dragged the heavy tub across the back yard to the end of the barn where the pigpen was located, swung back the gate, and slid the tub inside. Closing the gate, he climbed up on the fence and watched Tricksie and Anne hungrily shove their snouts into the mushy substance.

After a few moments, the animals’ rapid eating began to slow, and Ham, bored, left them alone and returned to the house. He wondered if, after such a huge afternoon meal, they’d be hungry again in the morning, and he decided yes, because, after all, they were pigs, weren’t they?

The next morning, as he always did, Ham got up, dressed, came downstairs, and while his mother made breakfast, he went out to feed and water the hens, his father’s fighting cocks, and the pigs. These were his daily chores. It was a sparkling clear morning, cloudless and dry, with a light frost that silvered the grass and made it crackle under his feet as he walked. He went to the henhouse first, completed his tasks there, and went on to the pigpen, lugging the bucket of watery grain mash he had made up in the barn.

As he rounded the corner of the barn and neared the pen, he started to call, “Soo-ee! Soo-ee! Here, pig-pig-pig!” Then he saw them. Tricksie, the larger of the two, was lying on her side near the fence, facing away from it. Anne was also lying down, a few feet beyond Tricksie. Ham thought they were sleeping, so he called again, expecting them to scramble awkwardly to their feet and rush to the trough. When they failed to respond to his second call, he thought, They must be full from yesterday’s extra meal.

But then, coming closer to the fence, he realized that both pigs, though still the same size in relation to each other, in fact had nearly doubled in size. They both seemed as large and as round as hills, and as inert.

He put the bucket on the ground, reached around for a stick, and after a few seconds found the long, pointed maple branch he sometimes used to prod the pigs away from the trough while he filled it. Reaching through the slats of the fence with the stick, he poked Tricksie on the back, but got no result. She lay there as if she were a huge pile of sand.

Again he poked her. Nothing.

He then saw a purple trickle, like a string, from the pig’s fig-shaped anus, and he knew that she was dead. He looked over at Anne and saw the same purple string dribbling down the inside of one of her hams, and he knew that both pigs were dead.

Grabbing the stick firmly, he started whacking it against Tricksie’s hindquarters, her back, her swollen belly, swinging the stick in as long an arc as he could, whacking the pig’s body all the way up to the head, which he couldn’t quite reach, so he pitched the stick into the pen, climbed over the fence and jumped down into the muck, where he picked up the stick and resumed beating the carcass, swinging the stick from over his head, bringing it down hard against the pig’s ears, eyes, and snout.

He moved to the other pig and began to thrash its belly and head, too, again and again, when at last the stick broke off in his hand. He threw the piece of wood away and stood there in the deep, dark mud, weeping, and through his clenched teeth brokenly cursing his mother, calling her stupid, stupid, stupid.

THE EROTIC MOUSE

The winter that Ham’s sister Jody was born, his mother asked him from then on when he was playing in the house to please play in the front room. He was nine that year, and because he liked building things, he took up a lot of room when he was playing and usually left a great clutter behind him. This was why his mother, still tired from having the baby and too busy with feeding and caring for her to cope with Ham’s expansive play and the resulting mess, had insisted. “You never pick up after yourself, so from now on all your puzzles and model planes, all of it, gets done in the front room!”

The front room was an unfinished first-floor room to the right of the stairway as one entered the house, opposite the living room. In an earlier time it would have been a front parlor, a room set aside for special social events only. In size and window arrangements it matched the living room. It was almost exactly twenty-feet square, with two windows on the front wall and two on the side, a door that led from the front hallway and another that led directly into the back downstairs bedroom.

A standard Cape built late in the eighteenth century, the house, essentially foursquare, was filled to the eaves with symmetries. Downstairs, one could go from any one room to the fourth by walking in a circle centered on the chimney. Upstairs, the four small bedrooms, one of which Ham’s father had converted into a bathroom, fanned out from the chimney like the arms of a Maltese cross, all four equal in size and placement. Ham’s mother and father slept downstairs in the large bedroom, and Ham slept alone upstairs — at least until his sister Jody was no longer an infant, when one of the small bedrooms would be hers.

For years, ever since Ham could remember, the front parlor had remained empty, cold and unused — except when his cousins from Massachusetts came up to visit in the summer. Then, because of the mess and the noise of the three children, Ham’s mother had insisted, as she would later for Ham alone, that they play there. Which they did, happily. It provided them with the privacy and freedom to make their noise and clutter uninhibitedly.

But now, for reasons Ham could not identify, he was reluctant to use the front room. For a long time he had avoided even entering the room. Unable to explain his reluctance to himself, he surely was unable to explain it to his mother, and all he could do was shrug off her questions and say, “I don’t know, I just hate that room.”

Eventually, however, he relented. One March afternoon he moved all his puzzles and games, his Erector set and tools, his model airplanes and his drawing pads and crayons and watercolors, into the front room, one thing at a time, slowly, as if he had been ordered to move out of the house altogether.

The following afternoon he returned home from school, and while he was sitting on the floor in the middle of the bare room, working on a balsa and tissue paper model of a P-47 Warhawk, he remembered the last time he had spent an afternoon there. It was when, the previous summer, almost a full year ago, his two cousins from Massachusetts had been “sent to the country” by their parents. Ham liked his cousins, especially the boy, Daniel, who was his age. But he also liked the girl, Virginia, even though she was older than the boys by four full years. Her parents had nicknamed her Ginger, and Ham had always assumed that it was because of her reddish hair, which somehow reminded him of what ginger looked like. She was a good-natured and attentive girl, and she never seemed to object to keeping company with two boys four years younger than she. She was able to lead them without necessarily dominating them, achieving a balance that pleased all three and, for Ham’s mother, making the chore of suddenly having to care for three children less strenuous than it might have been.

But the last time they had come up to visit, Ginger had changed. Sullen, withdrawn and aloof from the boys, she had preferred staying in the kitchen with Ham’s mother to playing in the front room or, on sunny days, out in the barn and yard with the boys. Ham saw immediately that she had changed. She spoke to him in a voice heavy with sarcasm and condescension, and she treated her brother Daniel with outright contempt.

“What’s with her?” Ham asked Daniel after Ginger had sneered at the boys’ request that she join them in a game of Monopoly. It was raining, and the boys were sitting by a window in the front room, slightly bored, watching the rain dribble down the glass.

“She’s big stuff now,” Daniel explained. “She thinks she’s Miss America. All she does at home is look in the mirror. At night she locks herself in her bedroom and studies her titties in the mirror. No kidding, I seen her. I looked through the keyhole once an’ saw her doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Looking at her titties.”

“Her titties? Has she got those?” Ham didn’t remember noticing any pointy things protruding from her chest when she arrived.

“Yeah, little bitty titties!” Daniel laughed. “I seen ’em, lots of times.”

“How? Does she show them to you?”

“Naw. But I look at her through the keyhole in her bedroom door, and sometimes I walk in on her when she’s taking a bath or getting dressed or something, like it was an accident. Boy, she hates that. And sometimes I sneak up on her from behind and yank up her shirt or sweater and take a look and run away before she can even hit me. She doesn’t run as fast as she used to, so it’s real easy.”

“Yeah?” Ham was astonished by these turns in his cousins’ lives, and he was equally astonished by Daniel’s boldness.

“You want to see ’em?”

“See what?”

“Her boobs, the titties, stupid!”

“Sure,” Ham quickly answered. “How?”

“Easy. You call her in here, tell her you want her to explain something to you, something like about the Monopoly rules, and I’ll circle around through the living room and sneak up behind her and yank up her shirt. Okay? Got it?”

“Sure.”

“But when I do, you better be ready to take off, because she really gets mad,” Daniel warned.

Ham said he’d be ready, and Daniel went out of the front room into the living room. Then Ham started calling Ginger to come and explain something to him. “A Monopoly rule!” he yelled.

She sighed, got up from the kitchen table, and strolled through the downstairs bedroom to the front room. When she appeared at the door and asked, “Okay, what is it?” Ham momentarily lost his courage and was about to say “Never mind,” when he saw Daniel tiptoeing out of the bedroom behind her, his blue eyes gleaming excitedly, his fingers and hands poised to grab her shirttail, which he did, snapping it up to her armpits and exposing to Ham’s amazed eyes a tiny white brassiere strapped across her chest. Then, as she screamed, Ham started running, backward and out the door to the living room, through the living room to the kitchen and into the bedroom, where he ran into Ginger, who had remained standing in the doorway, her arms folded defiantly across her chest. Daniel, who had first fled into the kitchen and then had turned to follow Ham as he passed through, bumped into his cousin from behind and yelled, “Hurry up! Get going!” And then he saw her too.

They started to spin around and head back through the kitchen again, but she said, “Forget it, Daniel! I’m through chasing you. If you two want to be disgusting little sex fiends, go ahead. Here, take a good look,” she said, and she lifted her blouse and showed them her brassiere. “Satisfied?”

Ham felt his ears redden at the sight, and he turned around and ran from the room, all the way upstairs to his bedroom, where he sat down on the bed and waited for Daniel to come looking for him. While he waited, he promised himself, over and over, that he’d never look at Ginger’s titties again, no matter what her brother said, never.

Except when he happened to be in the front room, he hadn’t thought about it since it had happened. It was like almost forgetting it, or like having only dreamed it, parts of it — the part where Daniel sneaks up behind her, his eyes gleaming, his fingers outstretched and hooked a little, like Dracula’s, while Ginger stands in front of the door to the bedroom, talking peacefully to Ham about the Monopoly rules, when suddenly she bares her breasts to him, stands there leering, calling him a disgusting little sex fiend. That’s what he remembered whenever he had to spend more than a minute or two alone in the front room.

And inevitably, if he remained there, he remembered two other things, both of which caused him discomfort that was extreme and similar in feeling to the discomfort caused by the first memory. Like the one, the other memories were of events that had taken place in the front room. In one of them, he is with Ginger. She is about ten, and he is only six, and they are looking at each other’s genitals, touching them with fingertips, prodding, pulling tissue back, scrutinizing with excruciatingly gentle curiosity their respectively tiny organs.

They were not found out. No one burst in on them and pointed a huge finger and called them disgusting little sex fiends. Yet the memory gave Ham terrible discomfort, a deep sense of shame, and always, if at that moment he did not leave the front room, he would remember the other event that had taken place there. He would remember one spring morning, a Sunday before church, going into the front room from his parents’ bedroom, taking a short cut to the stairs, and as he runs through the room, he glimpses a tiny mouse huddled on the fireplace hearthstone, a brown mouse the size of a man’s thumb caught in a brick-walled corner. Ham stops and tiptoes over to the mouse, which cannot escape its corner and, as a final ruse, is stilled, trembling, waiting. The boy leans to his left and with his two hands removes a brick from the stack of a dozen or so that his father placed there, probably for some intended chimney repair, and the boy drops the brick onto the mouse, crushing its body but not killing it, so that it squeaks wetly, like an orange being squeezed for juice, and the boy must retrieve the brick, hold it up to his chin and drop it a second time, and then a third, and finally a fourth, when the mouse is dead.

Ham slowly got to his feet and walked from the front room to the kitchen, on his way passing through his parents’ bedroom, where the new baby slept in her white, gauze-shrouded basinette. His mother was resting. She was seated at the kitchen table looking at her fingernails. When he came into the room, she smiled and said hello to him and asked him to come stand next to her.

While she stroked his hair back with her hands, he asked her one more time if he had to play in the front room. She relented and said no, he didn’t have to.

But she wanted to know why he hated that room, when he used to love it so.

He was going to tell her about the mouse, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he remembered that she already knew about it. It had never been a secret. He had run proudly from the front room to the kitchen and had brought both parents back to see the dead animal. They had been pleased and amazed. His father had patted him on the head and had said, “Good boy,” and his mother had said, “I never would’ve been able to do that. I just would’ve run for the cat and let him do it!”

So he said nothing to his mother, nothing of the mouse and of course nothing about his cousins. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at his feet.

“You’re a strange one, Ham,” she told him, smiling. “But if you want to be here with me and the baby, I guess I’ll just have to give in and let you.”

After that he forgot about the mouse and did not remember it even when, now and then, because of some errand or helping his mother or father, he could not avoid going into the front room. And when he had forgotten about the mouse, he no longer remembered staring and poking at his cousin’s body, or her hands on his. And eventually he forgot the day she pulled up her own blouse and exposed her breasts to him.

If it seems strange that the daughter of a man like Hamilton Stark should treasure and retell in literary form these three tales of his childhood, the reader might remember that it’s only in the light of these stories that she is able to justify her love for the man. Otherwise, she might be forced to regard her love for him as perverse, lost, tangled in ropes of ritualized grief and reenacted trauma, possibly for the rest of her life, and certainly his.

And if it seems strange that a hero’s childhood should be described in this manner, please remember that my hero is both controversial and enormous, and therefore whoever would attempt to describe him objectively (excluding from his description the narrator’s personal sympathies and antipathies for the subject) runs the risk of being dominated by the subject. That is the reason for the mask, the format of the tales, the realism, the lack of realism.

There will be other masks, other formats, other castings of reality. You may continue to call this one Rochelle, if you wish, and of course she will continue to play a major role in the events being described. She is, after all, Hamilton Stark’s only child, and despite her having been deserted by him, she is crucial to our understanding of him. Actually, her absence from his life, because it was willed by him, is more revealing than her presence would be. I hope you like her. I do. She’s twenty-six years old, a long-boned, precisely featured, red-haired young woman with green eyes and clear white skin that’s almost translucent. She moves quickly but with grace and elegance. True elegance. If I were a younger man, I would court her. I would pursue her ceaselessly. For though she’s the kind of young woman who tends to draw organized, purposeful, self-centered men into changing their lives suddenly, radically, and, very often, disastrously, she’s also the kind of woman who’s astonished when it actually happens — though, to one not so affected by her charms, it’s never clear that she did not secretly desire the disaster.

But, to continue: