Hamilton Stark

Chapter 4. Addendum B

IN CHAPTER FOUR PROPER, Rochelle’s mother — whose name, by the way, is Trudy Brewer Stark (she retained her married name after the divorce) — mentioned in passing that her daughter Rochelle was at present “hitchhiking all over the country, sleeping by the side of the road and all, not afraid of anything or anyone…” From the text, it’s also apparent, or should be, that at the time of the mother’s speaking the daughter is approximately twenty-two years old. As it happens, this interview was made four years ago, which would make Rochelle twenty-six now, a figure that is consistent with the information she has personally made available to me on different occasions.

It is true, as her mother claimed, that when she was twenty-two Rochelle was traveling about the country in a somewhat casual manner. Or so it seemed. She carried all her worldly goods on her back in a large Kelty expedition pack, slept in a sleeping bag at the side of the road or wherever she happened to find herself at nightfall, and after a fashion “lived off the land” by shoplifting at supermarkets and fruit stands, stealing from gardens and orchards, and, whenever possible, picking wild berries, fruit and nuts.

She lived this way for about a year, most of which she spent retracing the footsteps of her father’s fearful flight from New Hampshire, his wanderings that followed the desertion of his wife and infant daughter in Lakeland, Florida, and, when he discovered that in fact he had not killed his father and that his long hegira had been essentially in vain, his swift return home to New Hampshire.

Rochelle’s journey, a fact-finding tour more than a hegira or pilgrimage, was not in vain. She returned home to her mother’s apartment in Lakeland with the information she had gone out for. Essentially, the information was geographic and social, material that would help her realize her ambition to write a realistic novel about a man who was very much like her father, Hamilton Stark. She was young, and she had not traveled much, and naturally she had felt somewhat intimidated by the task she had set herself, especially when it came to writing about a character who had traveled rather widely in his youth and had spent most of his life locked inside the social confines of the working class. But her year-long note-taking journey reassured her that she would have little difficulty handling the geographic and social realism that her novel, as she had conceived it, would require. This was the point at which she began her series of interviews with her father’s five ex-wives, several of his friends, and his mother, sisters and brother-in-law. As I have mentioned, the interview with her own mother was the first in this series.