Russell Banks - Outer Banks

They were seated at the leather-covered bar in the artificial gloom; he was a little drunk, and soon so was she. Perhaps she was attempting to put a little cynicism into her life, to see if it could lift her spirits a bit, even if only briefly, and when he had idly mentioned his displeasure with the place, what he called its “ad-man décor,” she had just as idly suggested that they adjourn to her apartment for the evening, where, she said, the décor was “early Woolworth’s.” He had asked her if she had a television set; she had said yes, a color set, and he had been delighted. There was a Frank Sinatra special on that night that he wanted to see. “Ol’ blue eyes,” he had called him. “You know that song he sings, ‘I Did It My Way’?” he asked her. She thought she knew the song. “Well, that’s me,” he said.

She married him within a week. The reasons were obvious to everyone who knew her. “She’s marrying the pipefitter because of what it’ll do to Harry,” they said. It was presumed that she did it so Harry Franklin would regard her new marriage as the act of a broken, possibly deranged woman, and therefore, people reasoned, he would feel guilty. “As well he should,” they clucked. It was, of course, no less possible that her marrying Hamilton after knowing him over drinks and color TV for only a week was the act of a broken, possibly deranged woman, in fact, and that how Harry the haberdasher might feel about it had never once occurred to her. But no one thought of that possibility. People tend to see ulterior motives everywhere these days, even in grief and woeful distraction.

They were married by a justice of the peace, a man who ran a large dairy farm and ice cream stand in Northwood, and a few days later, Hamilton’s mother died. Dora had barely unpacked her clothes and color TV. The kitchen set and bedroom suite they had purchased together, as a cynical nod to the forms of sentiment, had been delivered that afternoon, and she had just finished tucking in the linen, placing her combs, brushes, make-up and jewelry neatly on the dresser, moving first one article, then removing them all and starting over again, trying to make these dozen articles look as if they had been on top of that dresser for twenty-three years, when the phone rang. It was the first time it had rung in the three days since she had moved in, and she rushed out to the kitchen to answer it.

It was Sarah, Hamilton’s sister, she knew, even though they had never met, calling to inform her that her new mother-in-law, after a lengthy illness, had died in her sleep the night before. Funeral services would be held at the First Congregational Church in Barnstead at 1:00 P.M. on Saturday, December 1, two days later. Dora started to respond to this news and the, to her, peculiar way in which her new sister-in-law had conveyed it, but before she could utter a word, even a stammer of sympathy, Sarah had hung up.

That evening, when Hamilton came home from work (he was then the foreman for the plumbing, heating and air-conditioning systems on the new Tampax factory being built in the southwestern part of the state and was driving forty miles each way to work every day), she told him, word for word and in the same tone of voice, what Sarah had told her. She prefaced her bulletin, naturally, by telling him that his sister had called him that afternoon with some “shocking” news.

“Oh? Which sister?”

“Sarah.”

“What was the news?”

She told him.

“Anything else?”

“No, nothing else. Just ‘click,’” Dora said, miming the act of hanging up a telephone receiver.

“‘Click,’ eh?”

“Yes. ‘Click.’”

Hamilton sat down slowly at the kitchen table in the chair that faced the window. It was where his father had always sat. At breakfast he could see Blue Job as it caught the day’s first light, and in the late afternoon he could watch it lose light and slowly turn gray until finally it loomed darker than the sky that surrounded it.

He asked her to tell him when the funeral was to be held, and she repeated Sarah’s message. It was a message, she assumed, even though it had come in the form of an obituary notice. She wanted to ask him about Sarah, about his other sister, Jody, and about his mother, too, but she did not dare, not now. Until this moment, she had not once wondered about these people; she had been too preoccupied with how her marriage to Hamilton fit or did not fit into her own private, truncated past. And now that she wanted to know about his past, if for no other reason than to be better able to comfort him at such a bad time, she was afraid to — for he had begun to growl, low in his chest and throat, like a large and vicious animal. He sat there, looking dead-eyed out the window at the gathered darkness, his hands fisted heavily on the tabletop, and growled.

Very slowly, one silent step at a time, she backed away from him, and then left the room altogether. In seconds she had left the house and was outside in the front yard, standing next to the car, a green Chrysler airport limousine he had recently purchased, wondering if she should flee down the road in his car, which so far he had not allowed her to drive, or return to the house and try to comfort him. She had never heard anyone growl aloud like that, and she had never seen a person’s eyes go dead before, and she was terrified. Harry Franklin, when his mother had died, had cried like a baby, she remembered with sudden affection. And she had held him in her arms and crooned soothingly to him while for hours he had catalogued his childhood memories of the woman. What could this woman have done to Hamilton to have evoked such an enraged response? Clearly, it was rage — those eyes, that growl, the enormous fists on the smooth Formica-topped table — but rage at whom? Somehow it did not seem directed at his mother. No, the rage belonged elsewhere, and that was why Dora was so frightened that, rather than try to comfort him, she had fled from him, had tiptoed out to stand coatless by the car in the cold November twilight and wonder if she should flee still farther from him.

Suddenly he was there, standing at the door, his bulk filling the doorframe, his face burning darkly across the yard at her. He slowly reached one hand out and pointed a finger at her, as if it were the barrel of a gun. “Where the hell are you going?” he demanded in a low voice.

“I … well, I don’t know. I thought… I thought you wanted to be alone.” She started to wring her hands. The ground that lay between them, freshly frozen but already as bleak as tundra, seemed to undulate in slow waves, and she knew she was weeping. From across the field a wind chipped at her back, and she began to shiver from the cold.

“Get in here,” he ordered. “One woman already left me today. Don’t make it two.” He turned slowly around and disappeared into the darkness of the living room, leaving the door wide open for her.

She hesitated a second, then, still wringing her hands and shivering from the cold, quickly walked across the dead yard and followed him into the house.

He did not speak to her again that evening, nor did she attempt to engage him in conversation of any kind. As swiftly and unobtrusively as possible, she prepared their meal, a frozen sirloin that she broiled, frozen french fries and peas (his favorite meal, he had told her one evening the week before at her apartment in Concord when, quite by accident, she had presented him with the very same fare). And after they had eaten in silence, she had quickly cleared the table, washed the dishes, and had gone into their bedroom, which had once been his parents’ bedroom, adjacent to the kitchen. Off that room was the cold, unused front parlor, empty of furniture, curtainless, with a fireplace that he had blocked up years before. A few days earlier she had looked on this house as having what she called “marvelous potential,” and she had imagined redecorating it, starting with that old, tomblike parlor, which, because of fair days it filled to brimming with morning sunlight, she had thought would make an attractive master bedroom, then converting his parents’ old bedroom into a large and luxurious bath and dressing room. The upstairs, where there were two bedrooms and a connecting bath, she planned to use for guests. Her mother could come from Chicago and visit them, and her sister in Pittsburgh could come, and her father and his second wife, and her friend Gladys from Massachusetts could drive up during her vacation next summer. She had imagined new curtains, new carpeting, fresh paint. The house was squarely built, meticulously maintained and spacious, and it coaxed out all her most hospitable fantasies and plans, even though for the last six months she had been a woman who had felt that all her life’s plans had been for another, a previous life.