Outer Banks by Russell Banks
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.
CHAPTER 9
The Uroboros: Being a Further Declension of the Central Image
Sometimes there is such a thing as too much integrity.
—ERROL FLYNN, My Wicked, Wicked Ways
IT HAD OCCURRED to me, on my own, that in my apparent need to justify, to myself if not to anyone else who cared to listen, the peculiar nature of my relation to Hamilton Stark, I ma
Thus, one evening when my friend and neighbor C. told me flatly that I had so far slighted Hamilton (A.) by my failure to address the question of his treatment of his mother, I had to agree.
On this particular evening C. had come over carrying a paper bag containing his bath soap, shampoo and towel. Every late August and September he visits me once every three days to bathe and later to drink a little wine and chat. His well, a dug well, goes dry every year at this time, whereas mine, a drilled well several hundred feet deep, continues to provide water, and naturally, it pleases us both to turn this neighborly service into a social occasion. While C. splashes about in the tub like a walrus, I often pull a kitchen chair up to the closed bathroom door and converse with him. I think at times like this, if someone could see us, he would believe that we were lonely men, and he could be right, except that we are not lonely at all. One way in which Hamilton has helped me in my well-known solitude, incidentally, is his insistence on maintaining the distinction between solitude and loneliness. And I believe that I, in my turn, have taught it to C. A solitary man is not necessarily a lonely man, unless he permits himself to fuzzy the distinction between his particular solitude and loneliness in general. That fuzziness inevitably results in self-pity, and self-pity necessarily drags along loneliness for its escort. It insists on its oppressive company, because self-pity, as if compulsively, always slaps at the presence of anyone who might offer pity and understanding instead. We are always alone, but we need not ever be lonely. What Hamilton demonstrated is that our recognition of the former, which is true whether we believe it or not, makes possible the reality of the latter, which is true if and only if we believe it so. Far be it for me to presume, but it made sense of some of his otherwise inexplicable enthusiasms, homeopathy, for instance, whose main maxim is, “Like cures like.” If you are lonely, he would say to me, don’t run out and fill your life with friends and acquaintances. Instead, direct all your attention to the inescapability of your solitude, your absolute oneness. The only way to cure a glutton of gluttony is to force-feed him. Starving him will only increase his appetite.
Most of us can understand and respect the logic of such a position, but few of us are strong enough to enact it. Hamilton, of course, by his example, shows us simultaneously both the price of exacting it and also the rewards. What more can one ask of his teacher? I ask you. And what less?
These thoughts, however, were not part of my conversation with C. He was sloshing about in the tub and shouting through the closed door about Hamilton’s (and A.’s) mother, Alma Stark (M.), and how, by my having neglected to present in any detail or believable complexity the nature of her relationship with her son, I had not merely been remiss as an author of a novel, but I had also invited the reader to deal superficially with my characters. “An otherwise excellent and amusing novel,” he warned me through the door, “can be robbed of its significance if you make it easy for your readers to deal superficially with your characters.”
I’m afraid that at first I found his theory specious, but I knew he was right about my having slighted poor, long-suffering Alma Stark. It kept her two-dimensional, robbed her of the true human complexity that I had granted, say, to Hamilton’s wives (so far). And I also knew C. was right in that by my slighting Alma, describing her as merely victim, I had also slighted my hero, Hamilton. I had made him appear as merely victimizer, insofar as I had described his relationship with his mother at all.
No, C. had me all right. I was going to have to stop in my accelerating rush toward the climax of this novel and go back, not to the beginning, but at least to Chapter Five, “Back and Fill,” and bring to bear a more scrupulously observant point of view than the one offered there, the town’s librarian’s, as I recall.
LET ME TRY my own point of view. I don’t really know the woman very well, have not met the woman she’s modeled after, A.’s mother M., more than twice, and casually at that, and of course I was not there the night Hamilton threw his mother out of what everyone thought was her own home. But I do know Hamilton (or rather, A., the man he’s modeled after) quite well, as well as anyone, with the possible exception of his daughter, knows him. And I’ve had numerous opportunities to discuss that evening with him, to draw out of him as much of his own point of view as he’s willing to share with anyone else. I think, therefore, I can give a fairly reliable account of what led up to and what followed from that evening, thus creating a somewhat different account of what actually transpired during that evening, the particulars of which, because they’ve been included in an earlier account, the librarian’s, and referred to several times, by Police Chief Blount, for instance, the reader is already doubtless quite familiar with.
Hamilton’s mother Alma had a habit of wringing her hands and, when they seemed to have been wrung out, of tweaking with her thumb and forefinger the loose skin under her chin. Wring and tweak, wring and tweak. I don’t know when she developed this habit, but Hamilton told me that he never recalled her to his mind’s eye without seeing her first wringing her hands and then pulling at her throat. He never recalled her with her hands in the air, palms out, in glee or happy surprise, or down at her sides, empty and disappointed. He could not remember her clapping her hands in excitement. Always they were wringing and tweaking, wringing and tweaking.
This image did not make him feel particularly happy. As a youth, he had responded to the gesture with shuddering, deep waves of guilt for nameless offenses, sins of omission as much as commission. In general, other people than Hamilton, strangers even, tended to respond to Alma Stark in much the same way. One had to ask oneself, even when meeting her for the first time, if one had not somehow, inadvertently, injured this woman, disappointed or deprived her, imposed on her, if one had not added, somehow, to her already unfairly heavy load of woe. For most people, the answer to the question of culpability was a simple denial. After which one tended to regard her through a skeptical lens tinted with pity. For, to most people, she proved immediately to be potentially manipulative, which was why most people felt justified in objectifying her somewhat by pitying her.
In a patriarchy, or any male-oriented society or household, husbands and sons are especially vulnerable to the trap that results from real or imagined injuries to women. It’s one of the very few routes to power for their wives and mothers, which, naturally, invites them to specialize in it, and, through disuse, all the alternative routes gradually get broken up and overgrown, until soon they are impassable altogether. Thus, Hamilton and his father were especially vulnerable to Alma’s particular specialization. They were both willing and conscious participants in a patriarchy, they were both raised, as conventional New En-gland Protestants, to prove their moral and spiritual worth by the nature and extent of their works, that is, by their worldly success, and they were both reared, in the Victorian manner, to be ashamed of human bodies. Since neither the father nor the son, for various and different reasons, had experienced much of what is conventionally called worldly success, and since both father and son had human bodies, they were forced into employing extreme and often cruel-seeming means of resisting the trap Alma’s generalized woe had created for precisely them.
To neutralize the effect of her wringing and tweaking, her sighs, her constantly wet eyes, her self-denying anticipation of needs he himself never even knew he had, Hamilton’s father applied the old male strategy of grim condescension. He disregarded her point of view, treated it as he would a simple child?
But this strategy couldn’t work as well for her son, because for Hamilton she was someone whom he first knew and continued for several years to know from the point of view of utter dependence. Condescension comes hard to sons, no matter how easily it comes to them later as husbands or fathers. For him to neutralize his mother’s wringing and tweaking, her long-suffering wet eyes, her whole series of practically irresistible invitations for him to draw on his guilt quotient, Hamilton had to devise a different and even crueler-seeming strategy. It was to affirm, as much as possible, his mother’s point of view. Let his father deny it, condescend to it, reject it any way he could. Hamilton would honor it, would validate it, would meet all its most stringent demands on him. If she felt injured or disappointed or deprived somehow, if she felt that her unfair burden of woe had been unfairly added to, he would do what he could to justify her feelings—to provide an objective correlative, as it were—by injuring her, by disappointing and depriving her, by adding, even if only slightly, to her burden of woe.
His description of the process by which he validated and honored her point of view went something like this: “When a lady makes a request, a gentleman has no choice but to meet that request. Sure, he can ignore it, but he wouldn’t be much of a gentleman, would he?” He was smiling, but the smile was characterized more by resignation than good cheer.