Russell Banks - Hamilton Stark

By now, quite frankly, I was too appalled to stop him. And thus C. went on uninterruptedly, dragging out one bit of so-called evidence after another, each time reasserting his diagnosis of “ unresolved oedipal conflict,” sounding more and more like a college psych major. I could barely believe what I was hearing! There was the pattern of Hamilton’s passively aggressive stance toward the women who became his wives — why there were so many of them, C. insisted. There was his inability to declare his love for any one of them, which, conjoined with his inability to say that he did not love any one of them and his apparent belief that the only alternative to loving someone, in particular a woman, was to hate him, or, in particular, her. And then there was “that gravestone business,” as C. called it, which indicated to him that the man was by now dealing with only barely repressed desires to remove the object of his obsession, the object of his “unresolved oedipal conflict,” by wishing her dead. And so “naturally,” C. had felt a rush of concern for Dora’s welfare, for with Hamilton’s mother finally dead and buried, his dark obsession would turn to the next closest substitute, his wife, and even if she were his most recent ex-wife, she would still be the next closest substitute for his dead mother. “Murder, my friend, is always the madman’s way out of an overpowering love-hate relationship.” Hamilton was giving evidence, to C., at least, of an increasing inability to sustain any relationship at all with a woman, as shown by the increased pace of his marriages and divorces. “How can I not be deeply concerned with the welfare, even for the very life, of any woman who falls prey to the charm of his enigmatic ways and his manipulative passivity, especially now, when he seems so close to losing what little ability he has had in the past of repressing his murderous impulses?”

How, indeed? I thought sarcastically. Yes, how? Oh bitter disappointment! Oh solitude! Oh inevitable betrayal! Oh silence, exile and cunning!

“You there?”

Oh lost and by the wind grieved point of view!

“Are you still there?”

Oh deep-wounding reason! Oh overreaching Apollonian perspective!

“Hello? Operator? Anyone there? I think I’ve been cut off. Operator? I think I’ve been cut off. I think the connections broken. Operator? Is anyone there?”

THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT for me to do but return to A.’s home in the town of B., locate the man, seek him out and face him there, and gather from that confrontation the evidence and information, the data, that would let me rest easily with my having at last rejected C.’s point of view. I was extremely distressed, perhaps even desperate. Everything was either falling apart or else was about to come together. I felt that if I stayed at home this bleak morning and continued to write my novel, for instance, or cooked a ham or read a bit of Livy, by nightfall everything indeed would have fallen apart. If, on the other hand, I drove myself across the center of the state to the town of B. and scrupulously searched A.’s house and adjacent grounds, I just might be able to discover a clue to where he was, and then I could follow the clue to where he was and meet with him there, my mind racked by dread and paradox, and the meeting would somehow set me at ease again.

Surely, I thought as I lay there in my bed and slowly put the receiver back on the telephone base next to me, surely, this is the final test of my faith. Never again will I ask myself to question the very sanity of my hero, and thus my own sanity as well. Never again, I swore, would I permit myself to be so torn, so divided, so alone. By the end of this day, I would have committed myself to following and, to the best of my abilities, emulating the man, or else I would have purged myself of him forever, would have freed myself at last from the glittering beauty of his image.

Thus my desperation and dread and fatigue were mixed with a certain gladness, for I knew that after today, one way or the other, my agony of self-division would be ended. For a second I wondered if the whole thing had been engineered by A. himself, as a final test of my loyalty and spiritual insight. But I quickly shoved that thought away. After today I would no longer be asked to plague myself with such fearful speculation, and knowing that, I also knew that any speculation today was pointless, was but the idle habit of my deeply troubled mind. Once a divided mind foresees resolution as inevitable, it no longer has sufficient cause to be divided.

I bounded from my bed and got dressed quickly in a woolen shirt and heavy flannel trousers — after having first glanced out the window at the cold, overcast day. It hadn’t yet started to snow, but clearly it was about to. Neglecting to shave or even to brush my teeth, I hurried downstairs to the kitchen, where I sat down and laced on my boots, pulled on my overcoat, cap, and driving gloves, and walked quickly, briskly, to the garage.

By eight-fifteen I was in Concord, headed west toward the town of B. As I skirted the downtown area and began the gradual climb away from the Merrimack Valley to the Suncook just beyond, the snow started falling, scattered flakes, hard and wind-blown. They came like bits of ash at first, tiny, dry flakes, isolate, drifting slowly to the ground as if settling to the bottom of a motionless sea. Soon, though, the snow was falling in swirls and waves that blew from the roadside in powdery sprays and fantails as the car, winding downhill from the ridge west of Concord, reached the Suncook River and brushed along the road that followed the river north and west toward the narrow uplifted head of the valley, where, near the horizon, I could make out the dark gray hump of Blue Job Mountain. Here the river, where it meandered, broadened, and then slowed, was frozen from bank to bank. The ice was invisible beneath the thick blanket of old snow. Sledges, sleds, snowmobiles and people afoot had left trails, paths and tracks across the smooth white skin of the river, scribbles and doodles that, from the road, looked random and pointless. Doubtless, when they were first laid down, the tracks and trails had followed a deliberate pattern, had logically sought a goal — just as had the black, curling ribbon on the road itself, which, seen from a map, would also look random, pointless, dropped from the sky to lie however it fell, as if only accidentally tying together two distant, named points on that grid. But, in fact the road had not been randomly drawn. It had been laid down atop the still narrower, unpaved, wagon route that nineteenth-century Yankee traders had built to carry granite and lumber from the mountains to the sea, and that road in turn had been laid down atop the old market road built by eighteenth-century farmers in the valley, who, in their turn, had been following the still older footpaths that the earliest settlers had worn smooth, their paths laid atop the Indian paths, which had followed the migratory movements of the animals, the deer and moose, the bear, and even, before these, the bison. And the animals had been following the river, this very river before me now, its smooth white surface crisscrossed and scribbled over, like a used sheet of paper, with the tracks, trails and footpaths following the invisible rivers, valleys and ridges of the makers’ whims and impulses.