John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“He embodied.”

Hodge nodded, remembering, and glanced over to see if he was being mocked. “Embodied all that was good. For his time and place. Or at any rate, he had a theory.” His stomach made a turn. “That is, it was my father’s belief that society is made up of disparate parts, if you know what I mean — elements, different groups, so to speak — and that they did not have any one single end. Each wanted, that is, his own special—” He searched for the word; his heart was beginning to race. He felt foolish, or stuffy; clumsy as a thing of wood.

“Thing,” said Freeman.

Hodge nodded, dubious. “For instance, he believed that the Jeffersonian ideal of the politician was unsound.” He cleared his throat, formal. “Believed that a man who tried to work out by his own lights what was best for mankind would inevitably come up with what he himself thought best, and that this was against the welfare of the whole. The spirit of Democracy. My father believed in pressures. Checks and balances. Like Spinoza. He would have been annoyed by the modern idea of getting out the vote — having Boy Scout parades and all the rest, to make people who have no real interest in government go to the polls and pull levers. He’d argue that those who have something at stake are the people who ought to vote, so that the Negro would vote when he finds himself—”

“Raped,” said Freeman.

“Yes,” said Hodge, uncomfortably, “or the farmer would vote when a specific program — you see what I mean.”

The young man solemnly nodded.

“I’m boring you,” Hodge said. And he knew it was true, or ought to be — Millie, at any rate, would be bored, and rightly, rightly. So would a reader if this were all a novel. He screwed up his face and glanced in the rear-view mirror.

“No,” the boy said.

“The theory was …” Hodge said. (Incredible talk, Hodge recognized, on a blue country road through yellow fields, beneath a blue, blue sky. Some of the houses were paintless and overgrown. There would be owls in them, and woodchucks under the floor. But there were hollyhocks in the rank yards, and grapevines thick with bitter grapes — mindless, pale survivors.) “The ideal politician, from this point of view, was not a man with some special insight into justice but simply a man talented at sensing, dispassionately, the specific desires of the people around him — experienced enough to guess what people from somewhere else would think about that specific desire, what roadblocks their representatives would throw up — and, finally, most important of all, shrewd enough to guess what would happen to the whole fabric if that desire were … met. Met. That was the theory.”

“Yeah. Great!” He nodded enthusiastically. But he was paying attention not to the words but to something else. To Hodge, Hodge had a feeling.

“Well, straying from the point. I have a son: he’s been active in all this. That’s why it’s on my mind. He’s an attorney too — like me. I think I said. Point is, my father’s theory is not as comforting as it used to be, not that I disavow it. It’s not so easy to be sure any more. The whole thing so big and complex … I read in the paper about how youth is following a man named Ginsberg. Who is Ginsberg? How is a man to keep up?”

“Ginsberg,” said Freeman. He tipped up the hat and scratched in through his hair.

“But that’s not it,” Hodge said thoughtfully. He saw again the dead woman in his bedroom. “The idea of pressures — order establishing itself that way — as if society were a pond in a field, where natural balance comes about by itself — so many tadpoles, so many water bugs, so many thises, so many thats — that is to say …” He paused, searching. “Tnings kill each other,” he said at last. “You look at a pond and you think, ‘How calm,’ but things are eating things all the time. Take my father’s family. He was a talented man. Everything he did, he did as if he was born to it. But he had a brother who committed suicide, and another one was ordinary all his life. And as for his sons, well, none of us—” He reflected on Ben’s falling barns.

Hodge had missed his turn. He slowed down, scowling, and turned in at the first farm lane, backed out, and started east again, Freeman seemed hardly to notice. “All right,” Hodge said. “So you begin to think what’s needed is an ordering intelligence.” He nodded to himself, and the boy riding with him waited, reserving judgment. “You begin to think pressure alone’s not enough. What’s needed is a king. A benevolent despot. And the same in the family — the old idea of the father, the judge and punisher, so on. A wife that keeps her place except when things get extreme. In my father’s family now. There’s a story they tell, when he was trying to learn Greek.” He told the story. For the first time the story came clear, or anyway clear in a new way. They came in sight of the steeples and chimneys of Batavia, and almost without interrupting himself, Hodge turned around and headed, once more, west, back toward the woods.

“So that’s what it is,” Hodge said. “All my life I’ve been patching up, trying to keep machines running that were worn out already. I suppose I should have asserted myself and invented a new machine. But I wasn’t an inventor. And yet you have to. There it is.” He told the story of Taggert.

Freeman shook his head, drumming his fingers on his hat. “The times are out of joint,” he said.

Hodge puckered his lips and brooded on the possibility that it had always been so, since the first age. Since Cain. “You have to do something, whether you’re fit for it or not,” he said.

“That’s it if that’s how you feel about it,” the boy said.

“Dad burn it!” Hodge said. He shoved on the brake and backed up and made the turn. “Almost missed it again,” he said.

“Well shit,” Freeman said encouragingly.

The car jounced over ruts and pebbles and clattered over the wood and old iron bridge, but Hodge hardly noticed. “Well all right,” he said, collecting his thoughts. “You have to be an ordering intelligence, whether you’re fit for it or not, whether or not you can see any kind of order.”

“Right,” said Freeman, “could be.”

“Vietnam, now. People say we shouldn’t be there. All over the world there are people that say that. Well maybe we shouldn’t, I’ve heard the arguments. But somebody has to be responsible. And who’s more fit for that than the United States?”

Freeman scratched his chin through the beard. “Hmm,” he said. He had a guilty look.

“We’ve exhausted every honorable alternative, isn’t that so?”

“Hmm,” Freeman said.

They had begun to pass Indian houses now. You could tell by the names on the mailboxes — Steeprock, Blue-eyes, Black. It was hilly country, and the houses were like houses anywhere, but odd. Some were far back from the road, indifferent to winter, set on the crowns of hills above driveways that would be impassable after the first of December; some were log cabins with elaborate extensions — new sections of tarpaper or asbestos shingles; one was no bigger than a large doghouse, a scale model of a real house but in fact a toy, like the houses set up on the Blind School lawns at Christmas — but there were people inside and a man sitting on a rocker on the porch, his bent head scraping the porch ceiling as he rocked. Hodge drove on, and when he came out of the woods he was in sight of the Long-house, where the meetings were, and beyond that stood the U.S. Government Activities Center, just off Indian land, where the troopers could get at it. He pulled up in front of the Activities Center and parked under the willows. He was still talking. There was a man in a felt hat with a hole in it, sitting on the long porch in front. Hodge’s rider leaned toward the windshield to look the place over, but he was still listening, nodding from time to time, shaking his head.