Outer Banks by Russell Banks

  Obviously, while the chief sat in his patrol car in front of this very farmhouse and let his mind drift across the unpleasant details of his near-violent (or possibly violent, in fact) encounter with his brother-in-law, even though the encounter had taken place some eleven years ago, nothing like sympathy or understanding organized his thoughts. They merely drifted across the surface of the remembered event, and if a question were raised about any possible deeper motivation lying behind Hamilton’s outrageous behavior, he answered it immediately, saying to the questioner with complete confidence that what happened is what happened, and what happened is the kind of man Hamilton Stark is, a guy who’s mad at the world and wants as much of it for himself as he can get, no matter who gets in the way, no matter if it’s his mother or his sisters or anybody else. That’s how the chief would probably put it. In fact, that is pretty much how he did put it when, one afternoon, he was asked about that particular evening by Rochelle.

  Poor Rochelle. Even though she loved her father, she still did not understand the potentially mystical aspect of real estate in New England (the reader may recall that Rochelle was raised in central Florida), and thus she was unable to understand what storms of emotion Hamilton had been responding to when he had dispossessed his own mother. Naturally, this created a sharp conflict for her. No matter how diligently she analyzed the details of that evening, no matter how many interviews she conducted, visits to the house, careful reconstructions of the minutes of the evening and the months that preceded it, she was unable to get around the conclusion that her father had behaved in a wholly reprehensible way. And as a result of her examination, she (unlike the chief, who had no need of, nor interest in, neutralizing all emotions but love for the man) experienced considerable pain. If the chief were to read the final version of her novel, which describes in agonizingly honest detail her pain in this regard, he probably would agree fully with her description of the events that prompted her painful judgment of her father, but he would not understand why that judgment, once she had made it, gave her any trouble. As far as he was concerned, when you love somebody who turns out to be a bastard, you stop loving him. And not without a certain relief, probably.

  Some of this was going through the chief’s mind that gray February morning while he sat in his car outside the Stark house and waited for his assistant to arrive. I.e., When you love somebody who turns out to be a bastard… Yes, even for the chief, it was difficult to look at the house and not drop into examinations and speculations concerning the kinds of love and hate these Starks bore for each other and for themselves. They were no noisier than any other family in town, nor were they unconventional by way of education, travel or economics, and except for Hamilton, they were as careful to avoid eccentricity or drawing attention to themselves as practically everyone else in town. All this made it difficult to explain the intensity of their feelings—not so much the fact of the intensity as the fact that people were allowed to see that those feelings existed at all. It was unusual to know that much about a person or a family, especially when the family was as reticent and close-mouthed, as ordinary, as the Starks.

  Suddenly the chief’s ruminations were intruded upon by the whining voice of his assistant, Calvin Clark. “Hey, Chief!” the man cried through the closed window of the chief’s car. “What’s up?”

  The chief squeezed his large belly past the steering wheel and got out. “I got an anonymous tip last night that Ham Stark might’ve been shot,” he said, “so I came up here this morning to check it out. I figured it was just Howie Leeke calling me drunk from the Bonnie Aire or someplace—you know Howie, how he does—or I would’ve come out here last night.”

  “Sure, sure, Chief.” Calvin was gulping air, a habit that made it almost impossible for him to lie successfully. Whenever he became even slightly insincere, he found himself unable to keep from gulping while he talked, as if he were about to be beaten for his insincerity. Luckily for him, or perhaps merely as a result of his habit, he rarely lied outright. Politeness, however, often made it necessary for him not actually to lie but rather to speak with little or no sincerity, and since he was a polite man, he frequently found himself gasping like a fish out of water.

  “Yeah. So anyhow, I come out here this morning. Just to check it out, you know?”

  “Sure, Chief, sure.” Gulping.

  “And I found these,” the chief said dramatically, pointing with a thick finger at the trio of bulletholes in the window of Hamilton’s Chrysler.

  “Holy shit!” Calvin gasped appropriately. “What are they?”

  “Bulletholes. Thirty-thirty, I’d say. Maybe bigger.”

  “Yeah, sure, sure. Where’s Ham? He seen these yet? Boy will he be pissed. You know Ham.”

  “No, you… Jesus!” The chief stomped back to his car and got into it.

  “Where you going, Chief?” Calvin called.

  “Nowhere,” he answered, almost whispering it. Then, with authority, “Listen, take a look in the house for Ham. I’ll poke around out here and in the garage.”

  “Right, Chief,” Calvin said, promptly jogging toward the front door of the house. It was locked, and in a second he had disappeared around the corner of the house, checking the side door at the porch. The chief, sweating, restarted the engine of his car. After a few moments, Calvin appeared at the front of the house again, spreading his empty hands to show that he’d been unable to find Hamilton.

  “Not out here either!” the chief hollered out the car window. “It’s probably just some kind of crazy… Let’s head back to town, you can check by here late this afternoon!”

  Calvin walked slowly up to the chief’s open window. “You don’t think somebody shot him, do you? I mean, somebody hadda shoot them holes in his car,” Calvin reasoned.

  “The bastard probably did it himself. You know Ham.”

  “Yeah. Then who was it called you last night?”

  “I dunno. Probably Ham. It still could’ve been Howie, but I kinda doubt it now. Probably Ham made the call, just to get me pissed.”

  “Yeah,” Calvin gulped. He was shivering from the cold. The gray sky had seemed to tighten and lift a bit, and flecks of snow were drifting slowly down.

  “I’ll see you later, back at the office,” the chief announced. He cranked up the window, dropped his car into reverse, and backing around Calvin’s car, entered the turnaround behind it, spun the wheel hard to the left, and fled down the long driveway to the road.

  By the time he reached the center of town it was snowing hard, as if blankets of the soft flakes were being tossed against the ground. Boy, snow in February is depressing, the chief thought, and then he decided to go home for the rest of the day. He figured, with the snow and all, he’d be out on emergency calls most of the night, so he’d better catch some sleep while he could.

  CHAPTER 6

  Chapter Beginning as “His Second Wife Speaks of a Man She Calls ‘Your Father’ (from a Tape Recording)”

  HIS SECOND WIFE speaks of a man she calls “Your Father” (from a tape recording):

  “Yeah, my mother, she used to sit back in her chair and she’d clap her hands together, like this, and she’d say to me, ‘Annie, oh, Annie, you’re so pretty with that smile and those legs. With those legs, honey, you, you’re going to the top!’ She said, she said it often enough, boy, once a day at least, and she wasn’t the only one saying it, either. My God, Uncle Zack, my Aunt Harriet. I mean, even old Grover said it, old Grover the janitor in our building on East Eighty-sixth, even he said it, so by the time I was, say, oh, I dunno, twelve, thirteen, by that time I really believed it myself. I really, I believed it was gonna be true. I was going to the top. And you know what that meant to us, ‘getting to the top,’ it meant Show Business. SHOW BIZ. I guess because we were New Yorkers. You know. But also because we were all jokers, all of us, the whole family—comics, singers, mimics, like that. This was before television, of course, back in the forties and all, so to us Show Business didn’t mean TV, it meant the stage. T
he Musical Stage, honey, right up there in front of a live audience, people who really love ya, and you can feel ’em loving ya, nobody cares if you feel it, so you just take it in like the sun’s rays, and the more you get the better you get, no kidding, that’s how it works, Show Business. With the stage, I mean, not TV or movies. It’s different there, TV, the movies, because the audience there hates you if you look like you can feel ’em loving ya. They want to see you as if you’re all alone in the world or something, you know, as if they’re looking at you through one of those one-way mirrors that department stores have for detectives. Anyhow, to be good, really good, on the stage, you have to get special training, of course. No matter if you’re talented—talent’s as cheap as daisies and’ll do you about as much good as a dozen of ’em—unless you get the training, because you might, you maybe wouldn’t think so, but it’s not so easy to stand up there and let ’em love ya and let ’em know you can feel it, let ’em know you love it. Which of course is what keeps them doing it, loving ya. It really is not easy. I don’t care what you might think. It’s work. Hard work, honey. You wouldn’t believe—you’ve never been in show business, have you? I can tell. Never mind, I mean, I can tell from the way you walk and how you’re sitting, stuff like that, though of course you’ve got the looks, you could do it, I mean if you had the training and all, though you might be too old for it now. I was only a kid when I got started. I had the looks too, but like I said, talent’s cheap. Nothing. Nuth-ing. So I had to get started early, before I was ten, even, I got started. At first all I could do was sing, you know, like a little kid, but cute, I mean cute enough to get me on ‘Uncle Bob’s Rainbow House’ eight times in one year, and then when I started taking lessons it didn’t take long before I was good enough to sing with Major Bowes, and after that I did the ‘Rinso White’ commercial on radio. Did you ever hear that one? ‘Rinso White! Rinso White! Happy little washday song!” You’re too young for radio. Another radio show I was on was ‘Our Gal Sunday,’ where I had a singing part for thirty-six weeks running. And all this time I’m taking voice lessons, training to be heard, honey, not seen, not yet, anyhow. First things first, you know what I mean? But around the time I was eleven my mother says I ought to start getting ready to be seen, people are really starting to talk about how good-looking I am anyhow, so she starts me taking tap and modern ballet, and three afternoons a week the accordion. Things you can do out in front of people. Not like the piano or the cello or something like that, that hides you. My mama really had it figured, she really knew what she wanted for me and how she could get it for me. She wanted me to be seen, and naturally, to be loved for it, for being seen. Oh yeah, my mama just knew it, people were going to love me for letting them see me—and I was going to let them see everything I had, too. I was going to turn myself into a beautiful girl gracefully dancing up there on the stage, long white legs shining in the lights, feet in silver shoes tapping miraculously fast in complicated rhythms while the whole upper body and the accordion would swing back and forth in a slick kind of counterpoint! That girl was going to be me! That girl up there tap-dancing and playing the accordion, her fingers and arms moving as fast and as graceful as her feet and legs, with the music of the accordion and the crackle of the taps joined by the sweet sound of her own singing—that girl was going to be me! ‘Lady of Spain I Adore You.’ Sure. I was going to become an entire musical production, with the movement, the rhythm and the melody all together in a single body placed in the exact center of an enormous stage! I mean it, she meant it. That was my mama’s dream, God rest her soul, and naturally, before I was very old, it was my dream too. I guess when, I guess you’re more likely to do that, make your parent’s dream into your own. You know, when your parent dies young. Maybe, I don’t know, to work off the guilt or something. You know. Hell, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Why, I mean. Anyhow, it sure became my dream awful fast, and especially after mama died, which was the summer I turned sixteen and was starting to take voice with Estelle Liebling—you probably know who that is, Beverly Sills studied with her, though I didn’t know her then, even though we were about the same age. I guess we had our lessons on different days or something. I could hit a high G above high C then, would you believe, and that’s as good as Beverly Sills, though like I said, talent’s cheap, you have to have a lot more than talent to be a Beverly Sills. Anyhow, when my mama died I was sixteen. Cancer. My father died when I was two. Car crash. I went to live in the next block, over on Eighty-seventh, with Uncle Zack and Aunt Harriet and just threw myself into my lessons, tap-dancing and singing and playing the accordion, all of them, practicing eight and ten hours a day, probably driving everybody in the building nuts, but no one ever complained, because just like my mother, they were all sure I was going to the top. They all knew that someday I would make it big. Big. And then they could remember when. You know how people are. They like to be able to remember you when. And if you yourself are a true believer, I mean really believe, even to the point where it’s never actually occurred to you that you might not make it big, never even once occurred to you, pretty soon everyone who knows you starts thinking the same way. It never even occurs to them either that you won’t become a star. So long as you’re not a complete idiot, of course, so long as you’ve got some kind of recognizable talent. That’s the one thing you really need talent for, to convince people you’re not crazy because you happen to believe you’re going to become a star. It’s what makes them believe. In you. People, strangers practically, would start telling me on the elevator, ‘Annie, I just know you’re going to make it big! I can already see your name up in lights on Broadway!’ they’d say to me. Stuff like that. Only, the trouble was, pretty soon I was, I not only had to live up to my poor dead mother’s expectations for me, but the expectations of everyone who lived in the building too, and all my teachers, even my friends. So if the thought ever did occur to me that I might not make it, get to the top and become a world-famous tap dancer and accordionist—or the even more horrible thought that I might not really want to become it—well, you better believe those were thoughts I put out of my head in a hurry. I can remember lying in my bed in my room on Eighty-seventh, my legs and ankles stiff and aching from ten hours of practice, and suddenly I’d be thinking, I might not make it. I might not be good enough. I might not be lucky enough. Stuff like that. And pretty soon I’d start to think that those were thoughts that were being put into my head by my poor dead mother’s restless spirit, just to sort of test me. To discipline me. No kidding, that’s how I got around any doubts I felt in those days. I just figured it was Mama, doomed to wander through purgatory or someplace until I made it to the top. Mama somewhere out there helping to guarantee my becoming a star by toughening me up with bad thoughts. So I’d give the right response, I’d say, I’d tell myself, ‘Not a chance I won’t make it, not this kid, not me, not Annie Laurie!’ And then I’d roll over and fall asleep, probably with a smile on my face…”

  If I may, I’d like to state now that the above is a partial transcript of a tape recording made by Rochelle Stark during a series of lengthy interviews with her father’s second wife, Annie Laurie Stark, who now resides alone in a shabby tenement in Manchester, New Hampshire, middle-aged, depressed (I’m sure) and angry in ways she herself can never know, or she would probably try to kill someone—her ex-husband, a randomly selected stranger, or even herself.

  I will try to explain. I have not offered the transcript in its entirety here because the whole tape is too long, too painfully depressing and, finally, because of the several secrets she must keep from herself, a little confusing to the listener. Also, unless you happen to know the woman personally, boring.

  For one thing, if you do not actually hear the tapes, if you must read them, you cannot hear her tough, New York accent, its glitter, and thus cannot hear it cut against the enervated, listless quality of her language, the words she uses. It makes an interesting conflict, creating an effect of stoic bravery, that accent and those words. And then,
of course, there are the secrets, what she cannot mention, cannot bring herself to talk about to anyone, not even to patient, kind Rochelle, who, sitting across from her in the dusty, cluttered living room, knows what those secrets are. For while, naturally, you who read this account cannot see Annie, Rochelle, in interviewing the woman, could see her, and among the several things she could observe was that Annie Laurie is obese, is almost grotesquely fat. And because she will not speak of it under any circumstances (and no interviewer would be so callous as to force her), Annie’s obesity remains a secret. Well, not anymore.