Russell Banks - Outer Banks

His fourth wife, Maureen Blade, only eighteen when she married him, probably was too young to be able to evaluate her new and much older husband’s past behavior, or even his present behavior, for that matter. That’s both the advantage and disadvantage, for the elder, of choosing a mate who is still not much more than a child: she has not yet been exposed to enough adult behavior to recognize when it is abnormal. The whole idea of “normality” depends on the availability of a fairly large sampling, which would necessarily be unavailable to an eighteen-year-old girl, no matter how precocious. And Maureen was not thought to be especially precocious. By the time she had been Mrs. Hamilton Stark for six months, however, she had aged considerably, if not matured as well, and the whole question of precocity was no longer relevant. After her divorce from Hamilton, she resumed the use of her maiden name, Blade, but to no avail. No one could think of her as a maiden anymore. She was a young divorcée, a woman with a complicated past.

But Maureen was the only one of Hamilton’s five wives who already knew the story of his break with his mother when she married him. A psychiatrist might suggest that, in marrying him, she was working out, through identification with his well-known acts against his parent, her own desires to behave similarly toward her parent, a drunken lout, Arthur Blade, a chronically unemployed lout who had mistreated his eldest daughter for years, beating her and, it was rumored, even making sexual advances against her. One might, if one were that same psychiatrist, also suggest that in marrying Hamilton she was seeking a replacement for her father, for, not more than a month before the marriage, Arthur Blade had been committed to the New Hampshire State Hospital in Concord, where his extreme alcoholism could be treated, at least temporarily.

In any case, Hamilton refused to act the father for her, no more the kind father than the cruel; he treated her the way he treated any other adolescent, tolerating her enthralled presence, exchanging goods for services and vice versa, and whenever she asked for something more, some direct expression of his personal affection, say, he responded by demanding more of her first, such as more room in which to move without having to explain or justify his moves. “If you think you can make a man report back to you who he is, where he goes and where he cannot go, and that by doing so he will be acting out of love for you, you’re dead wrong. A man will do these things for you only if he is afraid of losing you. And fear of losing a woman and loving her are not the same thing. Actually, they may be opposites,” he told her, and immediately Maureen fell into confusion and despair, a state he encouraged and she endured for six months, until she at last realized that she would be rid of her confusion and despair only when she had got rid of her husband. She knew that she would then, as a direct result, have many other unpleasant thoughts and feelings to live with — such as what it meant to be an eighteen-year-old ex-wife in a small New Hampshire town — but she no longer cared. Besides, she could always say that he had treated her no better than he had treated his own mother. Then everyone would understand her leaving him, especially those people who had not been able to understand why she had married him in the first place.

So she told him that she wanted a divorce. He said, “Fine with me, if that’s what you want.” He would not contest it, as he had not contested any of his divorces (“I never contested the marriage, did I? Why should I contest the divorce?”), as long as there were no demands for alimony and no demanding property settlement. She could take whatever she wanted of what she had brought with her. Anything else she wanted he would sell to her at one-half the market value. So she packed her clothes in her battered suitcase and went back to live in her father’s house, to care for her five younger brothers and sisters until her father was released from the state hospital, at which time she hoped to move down to Manchester or some other city, maybe Boston, where she could find a job in a factory and get an apartment of her own and maybe buy a red car.

His fifth wife, Dora, on the other hand, until Alma’s actual funeral, knew nothing of her husband’s break with his family. Naturally, she knew about his other wives and his daughter Rochelle, for he made no secret of their existence. (Oddly, for such a talked-about man, he made no secret of anything; there was no question he would not answer; it’s just that very few people knew what to make of his answers or how to avoid having their next question manipulated by the answer to the preceding one.) She had asked, as did all but his first wife, if he had ever been married before, and he had answered, “Of course.” She asked him how many times. “Four.” So many! Were there any children? she wondered. “Yes.” And how many children? “One.” Hamilton never offered information gratuitously, so if you didn’t know ahead of time precisely what your question was, and then asked it, it was likely that he would never provide the answer. For instance, in the above interrogation, what Dora really wanted to know was, “Who, if anyone, do you love more than you love me?” To that question, he probably would have simply said, “No one.” Whether or not she felt comforted by his answer would depend on whether or not she had been able to assume that he loved her in the first place. Dora, however, believed that when a person told her he loved no one more than he loved her, he had already answered the question of whether or not he loved her in the first place. Thus it was not till later, after Alma’s funeral, that it even occurred to Dora to ask her husband if he loved her at all. “I can’t tell you I love you,” was his answer. Her next question, even though they had been married for no longer than a few months was, “Would you give me a divorce if I asked for it?” And, once again, he said, “Fine with me, if that’s what you want.” And by then, indeed, it was what she wanted. She had seen enough, heard enough, by then. The form of the interrogation, more than its content, and Hamilton’s strict and what seemed to some his almost fanatically pure adherence to the form had trapped her. As she would later say, “He didn’t exactly tell me to leave, but it was obvious to me that I had no choice.”

When she first met Hamilton, Dora knew nothing of the stories about him that had circulated for years in and around Barnstead, mainly because, until she married him, she had never been to Barnstead. She had been living in Concord at the time, in a small and rather drab apartment. And since her divorce six months earlier from her first husband, Harry Franklin, a man she had loved deeply and loyally for twenty-three years, she had lived there alone, extremely depressed, quietly trying to heal the deep, suddenly inflicted wounds that had precipitated the divorce. What had inflicted the wounds was her accidental discovery that her husband Harry Franklin had been a lifelong philanderer, and she alone, of all the people who had known him these many years, she alone had been unaware of this aspect of his character. In fact, to her embarrassment, she had thought of him as sexually cold, almost unresponsive, not just to her but to all women. She had even developed a kind of condescending, maternal affection for his nature, often referring to him as a cold fish, a stodgy haberdasher on whom, she felt, all sexual innuendoes and provocations were lost. And when finally his true nature came out (broadcast hysterically by one of his girl friends, who, not as trusting as Dora, had trailed him and had discovered that he was betraying her, too), she had felt as if he had yanked her legs out from under her. And when, through some perverse determination to “clear his conscience once and for all,” Harry had revealed to his poor wife the names of all the many women he had slept with over the years, continuing for weeks to remember and then to confess yet another old and all-but-forgotten liaison, when his confessions were finally over, Dora felt as if her life had been cut to pieces, the pieces cast into the sea, like so much garbage, to float there, swelling in the sun, picked at by gulls above and nibbled by passing fish below. It was in such a state, then, deeply depressed, beaten — a woman so deceived that any further deception would be meaningless, for there was now nothing left to “protect” her from — in such a state, one night after work, she had stopped for a drink alone in a cocktail lounge next to the typesetting shop where she was a compositor, and she had met Hamilton Stark.