Russell Banks - Outer Banks

The death itself was not especially poignant or wrenching. It was expected. She had been ill for most of the previous winter and had fended off an attack of flu and then pneumonia, but clearly she was weakening and, in fact, had not been expected to survive the winter at all. She was eighty, still mentally alert, but no longer able to resist ordinary onslaughts against her body. The following November, she came down with a strep throat, and despite massive doses of antibiotics, she developed double pneumonia and had to be hospitalized in Concord, where, after struggling on for two more weeks, she died, quite peacefully in her sleep, of heart disease.

Though her last years obviously had been scarred by the wound Hamilton had inflicted on her when he had evicted her — a wound she could close only by refusing after that night ever to see her son again, refusing and regularly renewing that refusal, for the cut was deep and could be staunched only with difficulty — those last years, nevertheless, had been relatively comforting to her. She was able to convert her dependence on her daughters, Jody and Sarah, into something which caused her to suffer, and thus the integrity of her personality was sustained. Her daily round of activities included helping Jody with housework, cooking and cleaning up after the children (twin boys entering adolescence, people who, to her tongue-clucking satisfaction, seemed to regard her presence as they would a maid’s — or at least that’s how, sighing, wringing her hands and tweaking her throat, she would put it to her friends at the Ladies’ Aid Society, always adding, of course, “It must be hard for them, having an old lady suddenly come to live in a crowded little house with them”). After the first year, Chub had added a small bedroom to the trailer, off the back at the middle, like an awkwardly placed appendage, and she spent most of her evenings there, and while her daughter, son-in-law and their two children watched TV in the living room, she crocheted, wrote letters to the Barnstead boys in Vietnam, and read the Bible. It was a nice room, pine-paneled, with a single window that faced Chub’s gravel pit (a supplementary source of income for the family). She had her own bed, a dresser, a small desk under the window, and even a closet of her own, which she had filled with the rest of her possessions — her clothes, photograph albums, Christmas tree decorations, and the quilted spread that she had made the spring she married Hamilton’s father and that she had used on their bed for over forty years. But now she slept alone on a narrow, cotlike bed. It would look foolish, she remarked, if she used the quilt to cover this little bed. But she couldn’t bring herself to give it over to Chub and Jody, to lay it across their wide Hollywood bed in the master bedroom. She thought maybe she’d just leave it to them in her will. She’d leave the photograph albums to Sarah, who seemed more interested in them anyhow, perhaps because she was childless. At least that’s what she told the ladies at the Ladies’ Aid Society while they knitted, sewed, crocheted, and wove handy, warm articles for the Barnstead boys in Vietnam. As it turned out, however, she wrote no will; Sarah ended up with the quilt and Jody took the photographs and Christmas tree ornaments.

During these years, between Alma’s loss of her home and her death, no one in the family spoke to Hamilton or saw him socially. If one or several of them accidentally came up against the fact of his presence, at a bean supper or the Fourth of July Band Concert or in McAllister’s General Store, for instance, they ignored that fact and would not acknowledge its existence even to one another. One time Chub had backed his cruiser — his own station wagon, actually, outfitted at the town’s expense with a siren, blue glass bubble on top and two-way radio — into one of Hamilton’s cars, a year-old Cadillac, the car he’d driven to Rochelle’s graduation in Ausable Chasm, New York. Chub had driven up to Danis’s Superette without noticing Hamilton’s car and had parked next to it, both cars facing the store, and then, recognizing the dark brown Cadillac, he had realized that the owner doubtless was inside the grocery store and that they would unavoidably pass in the aisle, so he had immediately dropped his cruiser into reverse and had backed out quickly, clipping with his right front fender Hamilton’s finny taillight. While the glass was still tinkling to the ground, Hamilton had emerged from the store and had stared, expressionless, as Chub spun the wheel of the cruiser, tromped on the accelerator, and roared away.

No one spoke to Hamilton of the event that for all intents and purposes had severed him from his family, and naturally, he never brought up the subject himself — not necessarily because he was ashamed, however. It just was not his way to discuss his personal life, not even with people who happened to participate in his personal life, his wives, for instance. In fact, none of his wives learned of the split in the family from Hamilton himself, and there were three of them (wives) who came to live with him in the very house that had been as much the symbol of that split as cause. They found out from their friends and other associates in town, usually when someone, eager to obtain and circulate Hamilton’s point of view, would ask Jenny, the school nurse, or, later, Maureen or, still later, Dora, why on earth her new husband had kicked his mother out of her own house. Jenny, or Maureen or Dora, would demand to know what on earth the person was talking about, whereupon she would hear the generally accepted version of the story, so that the interviewee became interviewer, first of the friend or associate who happened to have made the query in the first place, then of Hamilton himself.

“Why on earth did you kick your mother out of her own house?” she would ask him finally.

His answer always went something like this: “A, it wasn’t her house. B, it was my house. And C, I didn’t kick her out against her will.” And that’s all he would offer as explanation or description of what had happened that night. If his wife of the moment persisted with questions, he would simply announce that his mother was the only person to whom he would explain or describe what had happened, but only if she first indicated to him that she neither understood nor remembered what had happened. “And so far,” he would say, “she’s given no such indication of stupidity or lapse of memory.” At which point it was clear that the interview had ended. Hamilton would go back to reading the paper or weeding the garden or repairing the toaster, and his wife would promise herself that she would inquire further into the matter, to be sure, but she would ask other people than her husband.

His first wife, of course, never heard as much as a rumor about the event, but his second wife, Annie, “the actress,” who had been visiting her aunt in the Bronx at the time, had been forced to rely on the town’s version of the story as much as any of the wives who came later. When she came back from the Bronx and her mother-in-law was no longer living with them in what Annie had regarded as her mother-in-law’s home, Hamilton had refused to tell her any more than he later told Jenny or Maureen or Dora: “A, it’s not her house. B, it’s my house. And C, I didn’t kick her out against her will.” This, to Annie’s bewildered, “Where’s your mother? Where are her clothes? Her things? ” Though she never actually judged him for what had happened (she always said, “Whatever it was that actually did happen that night”), it nevertheless was one of the things that she cited later when she chose to list her reasons for eventually becoming so frightened of him that she left and divorced him.

His third wife, Jenny, however, left and divorced him for no other reason than his supposed treatment, his mistreatment, of his mother and his refusal to confirm or deny the local description of that mistreatment (there was no local explanation for it, of course). It was assumed by the townspeople that because Jenny was middle-aged, childless, and, it was discovered, an orphan, she had married Hamilton with the hope of obtaining thereby a ready-made family. When it appeared that he was as orphaned and childless as she, and thus could not deliver what she desired from him, she had swiftly returned to her previous way of life as the school nurse and, later on, as athletic director of the girls’ sports program. Some people thought that Jenny may have been a lesbian and that her marriage to Hamilton had been a last, vain attempt to kindle and warm herself with a “normal” sexual relationship, but to believe that, they would have been compelled to attribute “normal” sexual proclivities and needs to Hamilton, which by then no one was willing to grant him. Not that anyone suspected he was homosexual. Rather, no one could imagine his being tender. People could easily understand why women were initially attracted to him—“After all,” they said, spreading their hands and lifting their eyebrows, “he is good-looking, in a largish way, and he makes a decent living, and he has a nice house, now. And he is a beautiful dancer. He’s a smooth talker, too, when he wants to be. So if you’d just met him, and if he wasn’t drinking too much, not drunk, I mean, well, who knows, there’s lots of women who might think he’d be a good catch. At least at first.” And indeed, five women in Hamilton’s lifetime so far had thought so and, as a result, had pitched themselves into his lap. And he had married them for it. As he put it when, after each divorce, he was asked why he had married the woman in the first place, especially as with each consecutive wife the courtship and marriage became more and more abbreviated: “Hey, what’s a man to do? When a woman tells you she loves you, you can’t tell her not to. And if you don’t particularly dislike the woman, there’s no point in telling her you dislike her. No woman wants to hear a lie like that, even when it’s true. And frankly, I never met a woman I disliked.” In recent years, however, he would add, “Course, I never met one I liked, either. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t have gotten married so many times, heh, heh, heh.”