John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

His son drew in a bronchial charge of air and cleared his throat, his heart rested a little now from the short walk in from the street and up the four rubber-matted wooden steps to the office door. He was softer and more pale than Hodge Sr, not a small-town lawyer but a city one who occasionally would take a glass of whiskey. Out there it was hot, a muggy Sunday noon in August, but in here it was comfortable, the Venetian blinds closed against the light and the noise of St. Joseph’s church and the First Presbyterian church across from it, letting out their people, a block away. Hodge had given him already the books he’d come for, three large old canvas-bound volumes of Genesee and Erie County maps, Will’s property left in the office from the days of their brief, unhappy partnership. He had them leaning against the door, but he made no move yet to get out of his chair.

As always when in his father’s presence, Will Jr spoke loudly, forensically raising one finger, like a man full of confidence addressing a slow-witted jury. “Father, I stand in need of your widely acclaimed professional assistance.”

Hodge looked down, the rueful smile brightening for an instant. If he were not Hodge — dependable Hodge — if he were his younger brother Ben or his own son Luke, he would have been thrown into confusion by a labyrinth of conflicting, for the most part painful, emotions. Will’s voice was Hodge’s (Will Sr’s) own, but the tone and the elaborate verbiage came from Will’s mother, the former Mrs. Hodge Sr, whom Hodge had spent most of his adult lifetime pitying, hating, and — for reasons unfathomable to him — fearing. It was she, Millie, who had first called him “Father,” with a flip and yet heart-crushing scorn whose power over him he could not understand but secretly believed, without evidence, to be justified. She accused him of things he knew himself not guilty of (but he was guilty), taught him every bitter grief a cunning and systematic woman’s hatred could conceive, drove him half out of his mind with anguish until, at last, their two sons and daughter dispersed, they had gratefully escaped each other by divorce. Her language, that light barrage of big words that rolled effortlessly from her lightning tongue (as if not carefully thought out beforehand to the last detail, or so Hodge Sr supposed), was meant, he knew, as cruel mockery, but what it was she was mocking in him he could not make out; he too knew words. But on Will Jr’s tongue the words had no freight of scorn. Sometime, somewhere, without Hodge’s knowing it was happening, Will had turned his mother’s trick to his own use: had made that antic, orbicular language the shield of bravado between himself and a world he did not trust. That was a long time ago, a thing he had long since survived and forgotten; but the habit of the tongue was there, like a scar on bark, an occasional reminder to Hodge that Will had been moved too often in his childhood or lived too often away from his parents, with his grandparents, with his Uncle Ben, with strangers. But Hodge evaded the labyrinth. His mind walked over it as lightly and deliberately as Hodge himself had long ago walked the peaks of his father’s barns. He merely smiled, conscious of his pride in Will, glad Will was here, and waited to hear what was wanted.

Will said, lowering his finger and closing his hands together, “I mean, to speak without circumlocution, Nick’s in jail again. Voil à. The bail’s completely out of reach. I suppose you knew?”

Hodge pursed his lips and lifted his eyebrows, noncommittal. It was his brother Ben’s opinion that they’d done all they should for Nick.

“I could work on it, of course,” Will said soberly, his forehead wrinkled as though he were debating a matter of the greatest importance to thoughtful citizens (his voice boomed, political, a compensation for the confidence he did not feel in what he was saying), “as a matter of fact, I told Luke I’d see to it. But it would be better if you did, really. They owe you favors, after all. It’s out of my — ah — territory.”

Hodge laughed, the snort of a bull.

“Oh, I know, I know,” Will said nervously. He rolled his eyes up. “Luke should have come to you directly, c’est vrai. But I happened to run into him first. Louise and I stopped by the farm with the children and Luke told us about it, so—” He sighed profoundly.

“So you thought you’d make him grateful to me,” Hodge said, and again snorted.

“Now Pater,” Will began. But Hodge raised his hand (which was square), interrupting.

“What makes you think Luke wants him back?”

“Well of course he wants him back,” Will said. “Because he needs him on the farm, if no better reason.” Then, on second thought: “And Nick needs Luke, that’s the whole truth of it. Nick hasn’t been in trouble for a long time, living with Luke. And now suddenly this, a rather serious jam. He needs help, spiritual help, Father, and Luke’s good for him.” He brought down his fist on his knee.

Hodge opened the desk drawer and hunted through the mess for a pencil. There was an apple, slightly shrivelled. “All right,” he said with finality but no conviction. He found the stub of a pencil at last and scribbled a note to himself on the yellow tablet. He studied the paper unhappily, sharply remembering his younger son’s face, arrogant and sullen, handsome as his mother’s face (except for those ears, long as an elephant’s ears, and red) — quick to sneer, quick to smile, as hers was, a face as delicate as his own was blunt: his own, or Will’s, or his daughter Mary Lou’s — the face of Luke Hodge in whom all that was subtly wrong, for obscure reasons contemptible, in W. B. Hodge, Attorney at Law, came into enigmatic focus. (And he knew that what Will had come to do was not really necessary, had been unnecessary from before the beginning of Luke’s spat with humanity, because Hodge loved his upstart son, though love was not a word with which Hodge was comfortable, any more than Luke was comfortable with it. But however unnecessary the thing might be, it was also inevitable: the trifling tyranny, again, of the Congressman’s ghost.) Carefully, precisely, in order that there should be no mistake, Hodge recrossed the t ’s and redotted the i ’s in the scribbled note.

“I believe it was your idea that Luke take him in the first place,” Hodge said, still feeling, for some reason, petulant. He couldn’t say why he insisted on the point; certainly not to drive Will into a corner.

“Partly,” Will said with dignity. “Partly Luke’s.”

(But Will was wrong. It was during the time of their partnership that it had happened, before Will had moved from Batavia to the firm where he was now, in Buffalo. Sam White had appointed Will for the defense, the case being of no importance, and Hodge had driven over to the jail with Will. He’d gone there it must be a hundred times before and since, but that time stood out in his mind even now — the gleam of the polished bars directly in the path of the morning sun, the distinct grillwork of shadows in the cell falling away toward the canvas pallet and the metal John and the boy. Nick Slater had been fifteen then, skinny and small for an Indian, and timid. He was like a captured squirrel or rabbit, standing still at the back of his cage. His elbows jutted out like cornknives, and around his round face his thick black hair was as long as a woman’s; it hung level with his shoulders. He refused to talk to them, but it didn’t matter. The police had arrested him for petty larceny, a grocery store. The only question was the stiffness of the sentence he would get. On the way back to the office Will had said thoughtfully, “Father, we should get that young rapscallion out of there.” Hodge had said nothing. Will knew as well as he did that it wasn’t that simple. “If we could only place him,” Will said. He was sucking at the pipe he was trying out, in those days, to keep down his weight. As Hodge stopped at the Jackson Street light, Will exploded, “Luke! The kid could work for Luke!” “Hole on,” Hodge had said. But he’d known already that the thing was decided. And so before he knew what hit him, Luke Hodge was a legal guardian, as his Uncle Ben had been before him again and again, and as his grandfather the Congressman had been to half the countryside before that.