Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

If it seems strange that the daughter of a man like Hamilton Stark should treasure and retell in literary form these three tales of his childhood, the reader might remember that it’s only in the light of these stories that she is able to justify her love for the man. Otherwise, she might be forced to regard her love for him as perverse, lost, tangled in ropes of ritualized grief and reenacted trauma, possibly for the rest of her life, and certainly his.

And if it seems strange that a hero’s childhood should be described in this manner, please remember that my hero is both controversial and enormous, and therefore whoever would attempt to describe him objectively (excluding from his description the narrator’s personal sympathies and antipathies for the subject) runs the risk of being dominated by the subject. That is the reason for the mask, the format of the tales, the realism, the lack of realism.

There will be other masks, other formats, other castings of reality. You may continue to call this one Rochelle, if you wish, and of course she will continue to play a major role in the events being described. She is, after all, Hamilton Stark’s only child, and despite her having been deserted by him, she is crucial to our understanding of him. Actually, her absence from his life, because it was willed by him, is more revealing than her presence would be. I hope you like her. I do. She’s twenty-six years old, a long-boned, precisely featured, red-haired young woman with green eyes and clear white skin that’s almost translucent. She moves quickly but with grace and elegance. True elegance. If I were a younger man, I would court her. I would pursue her ceaselessly. For though she’s the kind of young woman who tends to draw organized, purposeful, self-centered men into changing their lives suddenly, radically, and, very often, disastrously, she’s also the kind of woman who’s astonished when it actually happens — though, to one not so affected by her charms, it’s never clear that she did not secretly desire the disaster.

But, to continue:

NO, REALLY, DEAR, I mean it. It’s time everyone stopped all this dancing around the few trivial facts of the man and got right down to where you can stick your nose up against them, so to speak. Forgive me for saying it this way, but the man, your father, is a despicable man. Always was. Despicable, pure and simple, and everyone who’s ever had the misfortune to know him knows at least that much about him, and especially everyone who’s ever been married to him, among whom I count myself the first, as you know.

But you’re his only child, dear, you’ve never been married to him, of course, so that’s probably why you keep going through all this hero-worshiping nonsense with the man. But only child or not, don’t forget the facts you have to ignore. Life’s like that, it’ll let you keep on ignoring the facts, practically forever, if you want to go that far, but eventually it’ll make you pay for it — or your children, or your wife or husband, or maybe even your grandchildren. Anyhow, somebody ends up paying, and I don’t plan on being that somebody for you. No, you’re practically grown now, old enough to know the truth about your father. You think now that he’s somebody to imitate, someone to admire and recommend to all your friends, someone who’ll defend you against your enemies, a confidant, an advisor, a teacher, a chum. When I get through, dear, you’ll know better than to imitate him. You’ll know not to expect him to defend you against anything. Hah, you’ll need someone to defend you against him! A chum. Some chum.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this now, why I waited so long to turn you against him. Well, blood is thicker than water, that’s how I always reasoned about the matter, and besides, I never wanted him coming back at me that I turned you against him, you his only child, the one he probably claims to love so much, but of course, only later, when you’re practically all grown up and it’s easy to love you, easy to be your father now — not that you weren’t a lovable child, no, of course not, you were a wonderful, cuddly, curly-haired little thing, everyone loved you, especially me, and I didn’t want your father claiming that I had turned you against him by only telling you the bad things about him, or only telling you things in a light that would make you think badly of the man your father. Let the child find out for herself, that’s what I always said, when people asked me if you knew what kind of a man your father was, and believe me, they asked, oh God, did they ever ask. They couldn’t believe it when you talked about him the way you did, when you bragged about his being a pipefitter, when you told people what a big shot he was, how he built the U.S. Air Force Academy all by himself, that place in Colorado, as if that weren’t one big lie. Brother, the things that man could tell a child. I remember my eyes filling with tears when I would hear you out on the back steps telling your little friends how your father had been a champion boxer. And when you told them he was a champion runner. And when you described his cars. His ability to play the saxophone. His enormous bicep. His black and thick hair. The curly mat of black hair on his chest. The broad shoulders, the hard-muscled back. The rocky thigh.

Well, you asked me for my thoughts and opinions and my memories of the man, and I’m going to give them to you, no matter what they do to your version of him. I know you’ll be asking the same of his other wives — or, I should say, ex-wives — so I won’t bother with what I know to be true of him after we got our divorce, because you’ll get plenty of that from the women who knew him later and better than I did during those particular years of his life. And who knows, maybe he’s changed. It sometimes happens. But even so, above all, I want to be fair to the man, because from what I’ve heard, he’s been fair to me. From what I’ve heard, he’s actually told people he still loves me, and that he loved me best of all, that I was his “true love.” I can understand that. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. We were so young, and you know what they say about young lovers, first lovers. Oh, I’ve gotten over him, all right, I mean, I can admit now that he was my first love, my true love, all that sort of thing, but I’m over him now. Because after all, you must remember he was the one who left. Not me. He was the one who walked out. Not me. He was the one who wanted the divorce, the one who got himself a lover while he was still married to me. Not me. I never did any of that. It makes it easier to get over someone if you’ve never done anything wrong to him. You can understand that.

But I’m sure that when he says I was his first love he’s telling the truth. I don’t think he lied to me about that, and maybe even after all these years he still does think of me that way. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing about him. You know what they say about first loves. We were young. I mean young . I was a fashion model then, for the Globe Department Store right here in Lakeland. A small-town girl, sure, but pretty. Some people said pretty enough to succeed as a fashion model in New York, even. You know all this, you’ve seen pictures, snapshots, and of course, you’ve talked to people who knew me then. Anyhow, that’s not important, except that naturally it helped me land your father.

He came south to Florida that winter, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father, your grandfather. Someone’ll probably go into all that in detail, so I won’t bother here. It’s a fascinating story, though. Whenever I tell people about it now, they simply refuse to believe that I believed it then, that he had killed his own father, I mean. But I always say, “Listen, if he believed it himself , why shouldn’t I believe it too?” Not many people can come up with an answer for that one.