Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

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.

But that night, as she sat on the edge of the double bed that she and her new husband had purchased a few days before, she looked around her, and all she saw was hopelessness and dark retreat. It was not the kind of hopelessness that was characterized by disorder or sloth, but the kind that makes itself known first by the ruthless paring down of the elements of a life to its essential, molecular units, then by a compulsive ordering of those units, a deliberate placement of remnants in self-referring relations that were abstract, geometric, intellectually pure, controlled. The house and its contents seemed suddenly, hopelessly, cold to her, like an arctic wind, and she began to think with fond nostalgia of her small, crowded apartment in Concord, its warm disarray and thoughtless clutter. (She did not dare to think of the house she had lived in before that, the house she had shared for twenty-three years with Harry Franklin.) She snapped off the light next to the bed, got slowly undressed in the dark, and slipped into the bed. She began to think that she had made a terrible mistake. It might not be too late. Harry was a good man, though flawed, cruelly flawed … and he had cried when she left him, cried like a baby…

Hamilton did not come to bed that night. Or at least not to their bed. Possibly he had slept in one of the upstairs rooms and had made the bed when he got up, but when she came into the kitchen at six-thirty, the ceiling light above the table was burning and his coffee cup and breakfast dishes, as usual, were soaking in the sink, and his car, as usual, was gone.

She heard the furnace kick over and start its low hum, and she checked the thermometer posted outside the kitchen window. Fourteen above zero. She hoped it wouldn’t snow for the funeral. Oh, God — the funeral. What should she do about the funeral? As the gray cold day wore on, she worried more and more fixedly about it. How was she supposed to act? What was expected of her? She could not understand how such a thing could have become problematic, but it had. She was surprised that she actually did not know what was the proper and appropriate thing to do. Funerals and weddings and birthdays — these were events in a life that were such integrated parts of its overall texture that one almost never questioned what was expected of one as a participant in those events. One simply knew. They were rituals of the culture, and she was one of the people who lived inside and sustained that culture. Why, then, was she so unsure of herself, so incapable of deciding what was expected of her by her husband, her sisters-in-law, the townspeople they lived among? She felt as if she had accidentally wandered into an alien land, where the rituals were obscure and exotic, where a wrong guess could be disastrous for her because outrageous to everyone else.

Around four in that afternoon, as it grew dark and the temperature began to fall again, she called the only florist in Barnstead, Herb Cotton, and ordered a large arrangement of white chrysanthemums to be sent to the church the next day in time for the funeral. She knew that she should have sent the flowers to the funeral home, but Sarah hadn’t said anything about which funeral home her mother’s body was lying in or whether there was to be a service there, and she didn’t dare call Sarah now and ask her.

“What should the card say?” the florist, presumably Herb Cotton, asked in a high, thin voice.

“What?”

“The card. What should we put on the card?”

“Oh… Well, I suppose … the usual, I guess.”

“The usual?”

“Yes … you know, ‘From Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Stark,’” she said with hope in her voice.

“This Mrs. Stark speaking?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” He paused. “Ham’s wife, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Yep. Wal, don’t you an’ ol’ Ham worry yourself. We’ll get

these over to the Heywoods’ Funeral Home tonight. They’ll still look good at the church tomorrow.”

“Oh… Well, thank you.”

“Good woman, y’know. That Alma Stark. That’s Ham’s mother, y’know.”

“Yes, I know. I… I never knew her.”

“Yep. Bye, now,” he said sharply.

“Good-bye,” she said, and she hung up the phone.

That evening, Hamilton arrived home three hours later than usual, only slightly drunk, but dark and glowering and filled with smoldering silence. She bobbed around him, gave him food, and stayed in the bedroom for the remainder of the evening, listening to him as he tramped heavily in and out of the house from the barn. Every now and then she could hear sounds that told her he was sorting out the tools, equipment, materials—“a place for everything and a thing for every place.” One minute she imagined him doing something that was wholly intentional, deliberate, no matter how bizarre-seeming. She imagined him, for instance, building a coffin for his mother, a hearse from his car, a graveside marker. But a minute later she could only imagine him doing something that was determined wholly by forces outside his conscious will, compulsive acts, no matter how ordinary or normal-seeming — and she imagined him sorting out jars of nuts and bolts, inventorying pipe and fittings, stacking kindling endlessly.