Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

I poured the wine, standing next to C.’s chair while I poured, as if I were the wine steward and my library our club library.

C. tasted the wine, just a sip, almond-sized, and made a slightly dissatisfied face. “Cheese. A small slice of Gouda to neutralize the taste buds.”

I strode to the kitchen and returned with a wedge of Gouda on a small wooden plate, which I placed on the table next to C.’s chair. Then I filled both our glasses.

C. sliced a sliver off the wedge, popped it into his mouth, quickly chewed and swallowed. He cleared his mouth, as if to make a speech, and tasted the wine again.

Still standing, I waited through the sniff, the flip of tongue, the hold, and the drop.

“Excellent,” he pronounced.

As if relieved, I crossed the room to the fireplace, where, my glass held casually in one hand, my free arm draped like a sweater across the mantel, I assumed a posture that in the dim half-light of the carpeted, book-lined room would make a disinterested viewer think of Oliver Goldsmith. I watched C., legs crossed at the ankles, one hand flopping across the thick arm of the chair, the other posing his wineglass beneath his nostrils as if he were holding a long-stemmed rose, his cigar building a white tubular ash in the ashtray beside him, assume a posture in his chair that would make that same disinterested viewer think of my friend as Ford Madox Ford. Sometimes it was Paul Valéry, but usually, especially in winter, for some reason, it was Ford Madox Ford.

“You said something about listening to some tapes?” C. wheezed at me. Ordinarily he affected the wheeze when he was unsure of the direction of the conversation. It seemed to settle him down, make him the center of the room regardless of where the conversation might wander.

The recorder was inside a cupboard next to the fireplace. Leaning down and switching the first reel on, I quickly told C. that what he was about to hear was an unedited interview made by Rochelle Stark (whose real name C. of course was familiar with) with Hamilton Stark’s (A.’s) second wife, to whom I am referring here as Annie Laurie. “You’ve never met this woman, and I don’t believe we’ve ever discussed her before, have we?” I suddenly realized that I was speaking with the voice of an attorney addressing a jury. I couldn’t tell, however, if I was the prosecuting attorney or the attorney for the defense. I wasn’t even sure who the defendant was.

“No, although you have alluded to the fact of her continued existence. Somewhere in New Hampshire, I believe.”

“Yes. Manchester.”

“Ah. The Queen City.”

And here the tape began:

“What, what’s that thing you got there, a tape recorder? Is it on, is it turned on, honey? You aren’t going to record this, are you? Listen, honey, if you’re going to put this on tape I’ll have to be a lot more careful of what I say, especially with you being his kid and all. I mean, you know what they say about how blood and water don’t mix, don’t you? I’m not interested in a feud, starting some kinda family feud, not anymore, not now. On the other hand, I mean, what the hell, maybe it doesn’t matter anymore, I mean to him. Or anyone else either. There’s a lot of water gone under the dam, you know. What can it matter now, after all these years? I mean, so what if he happens to hear what I’ve got to say about him now, there’s plenty others who could say lots worse by now, I’ll bet. Besides, he can’t hurt me any, not anymore, not anymore. And it’s not like I was interested in making a good impression on him, if you know what I mean. Pretty hard to do now, ha, ha, ha. It’s been what, ten years now I’ve been sitting around thinking about what happened between your father and me, and you know what? Most of what I thought was true back then, ten years ago, when I divorced him, I really don’t think is true anymore, not that I’d do it all over again if I had the chance, believe me. I wouldn’t marry that man again in a million years, and I wouldn’t divorce him either. What’s done is done, and marrying and divorcing a man like your father is something you only want to do once. Jesus, isn’t it amazing how you never know what’s happening to you when it’s actually going on? You have to wait until it’s all over and done with before you can find out, and then it’s too late, you’ve forgotten too many things, you can’t remember what people said, or what they even looked like, or even the order, you can’t remember the order of things anymore, if you ever knew the order of things in the first place, for God’s sake. Makes you feel kind of helpless. I guess you can never know what really happens to you, not even afterward. Right? It’s kind of crazy. Think of all the trouble you’d save, though. I mean, if you knew what was happening at the same time as it was actually happening. Hah, it’s probably a good thing you don’t. You’d probably just kill yourself and save yourself the trouble of your whole life. Here I am, look at me, running on about nothing, old motormouth, that’s what your father used to call me. Old Motormouth. I’m sorry, honey, I know I talk too much, I’m really a great talker, or at least I used to be a great talker. I don’t get too many chances anymore, so I don’t know now, I mean, maybe I’m just a lady running off at the mouth…”

“How old was she when this was recorded?” C. asked in a flat voice.

“Thirty-one.”

“Not old.”

“No.”

“… twenty when I first met him, about your age, a few years younger, even. Jesus, we were a beautiful couple, I was really thin then, no kidding, I had to be, I was dancing with the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show every week, national TV, and they did a weight check every Thursday night, like they do with boxers, because after all, our bodies were our meal tickets, honey, our livelihoods, and if we put on a pound more than we were allowed, there was a dozen girls standing right behind each one of us ready and able to take our places on a moment’s notice. It was a grind, lots of pressure. Once you stepped out of that line-up, honey, you stayed out. We worked harder than anyone who hasn’t done it can know, new routines that the choreographers more or less made up on the spot and as we went along, practicing seven and eight hours a day right up to the dress rehearsal, which really wasn’t your actual dress rehearsal at all as much as it was just the first time we could do the entire number all together from start to finish, and usually there were half a dozen last-minute changes that we’d have to fit in before Saturday’s show, and then we’d have Sunday off, and then on Monday the whole thing would start over again. The life of a chorus girl isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, honey. We really were a lot like your professional athletes, like boxers or something. Except that we had the summers off, but not many of us could afford to loaf, or wanted to anyhow, so most of us took summer stock and chorus line jobs in musicals or night-clubs, which is how I met your father. I was in the chorus line, with a singing part, too, at the Lakeside Theater up in Laconia. You know the place probably, it’s pretty famous, over there by the lake, at that place they call the Weirs. Anyhow, your father went to see the show one night, alone, and he picked me out of the chorus line, so he says, and sent me a dozen yellow roses and a note backstage after the show. Believe it or not, it was the first time that had ever happened to me. A stage-door Johnny! Imagine! Me, little Annie Laurie, singled out of the chorus line by a man in the audience! Remember, honey, I was only twenty years old at the time, and sure, I was a big-city girl and he was supposed to be a country rube, but I’d been raised like a flower in a hothouse and he’d been brought up like a piece of moss on a rock, a chunk of lichen or something, so when he tried the old dozen-roses-and-a-note routine, I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker. Also, I was pretty lonely, spending the summer like that in the sticks, away from home for the first time, really, because back in New York I was still living with my Uncle Zack and Aunt Harriet, who had raised me after my mama died. So here I am, backstage in this dingy little barn theater beside the lake, taking off my make-up, and one of the stagehands comes knocking on the dressing room door with a dozen yellow roses and a note for “The Tall Blond Singer in the Chorus Line.” That’s how he’d addressed the card, and since I was the only one in the line with a singing part, one short number, which I had because it was a six-girl line and I was the only one who wasn’t completely tone-deaf, I knew the note was for me. I can still remember pretty well what it said. It was in that style of his, the way he wrote all his notes or letters or anything. Even the way he talked, most of the time. Flowers a token of esteem from member of audience. Would you have drink with sender. H. Stark . The note was typed, you know, with a typewriter, but it’s strange, I didn’t even notice that, or if I did, I certainly, I didn’t think anything about it, you know, like, What’s a member of the audience doing with a typewriter in his lap? I should have, of course. Thought about it, I mean. I guess he must’ve typed the note out at home before he came to the theater and brought it with him, and that’s strange, don’t you think? I mean, it was opening night. He couldn’t have known who he was going to send the flowers and note to until after he’d already got to the theater. The note on the flowers was in handwriting, somebody’s, probably the stagehand’s. I should’ve thought about stuff like that, at the time, I mean. I sure have since then, but a lotta good it’s done me. If I’d thought about it then I would’ve been able to know quite a lot about your father before I even set my eyes on him, but I guess I was too flattered and lonely to notice even. All I cared about was whether or not he was going to be young and handsome, so I asked the stagehand, and he told me sure the guy was young, you know how stagehands talk, and yeah, the guy was handsome. “Okay-looking,” was probably how he said it. “But the guy’s pretty big,” he told me. I remember that clear as a bell. I remember picturing to myself this tall, handsome stranger, as big as John Wayne and handsome as Robert Taylor, so when, when I walked out the stage door and saw your father, I had to pinch myself on the arm to be sure I wasn’t dreaming. He was very gallant, like they say, I mean at first he was. Real old-fashioned, kind of making these little bows when he’d open a door for me, attentive to every detail of the evening, like making sure that when he brought me a corsage, which he did every time we went out, at least at first, but making sure too that he had on a lapel flower that was the same as was in the corsage. Jesus, what a Romeo he was, that guy! But not one of your Latin lover types. Different. All the time serious as a preacher or something, talking like some kind of weird professor in that flat metallic voice of his about things that usually were pretty interesting, if you listened close, like about the history of Lake Winnepesaukee, which is the lake the theater was located on, or maybe discussing the fine points of the show, pretty well informed on theater, he was too, almost like one of those critics for the Times . I was really, I was surprised, up here in the woods like that, and all of a sudden here comes one of the local yokels, and it turns out he has this interest in theater and travel and history, all kinds of stuff, stuff I thought only New Yorkers were interested in. Jesus, honey, what a sucker I was. Twenty years old, getting sweet-talked by some big hunk of country meat. And by the time I let him sweet-talk me into bed with him, I was pretty much in love with him. He wasn’t my “first,” but he was the first man I fell in love with, really deep, you know? That was also the first time I saw him drunk, too, but it was too late for me to get out by then, the bastard. He had me hooked, so when he started getting mean and wild and drunk all the time, instead of running away from him, which is of course what I should’ve done toot sweet, I tried to comfort him. You know, to soothe his fevered brow, like they say. Wrong thing to do, honey. Dead wrong. You know, to soothe his fevered brow. All my hand on his brow did was jack up the temperature about ten degrees. Jesus. I’ll never forget his face, the way I saw it then, that first night in the motel with him, like the face of some kind of beast, all the time roaring and shouting stuff that didn’t make any sense at all to me, stuff that didn’t have anything to do with me, although he’d stare right into my face when he shouted, so naturally I thought at first he was shouting at me, that’s what anyone would’ve thought. It was the most frightening, scary thing I’d ever seen, I thought he was…”