John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

A stormy business, inevitably, in which, inevitably, Will Hodge had played his miserable part. He’d stood one night six months ago now with his hands on the doorknob of Luke’s back door, puffing and holding the door shut tight against his son, bracing himself with one foot on the ice-crusted wall, shouting, “Settle down, Luke! The boy will be back!” But Luke was in no mood to settle down — too furious even to realize that there were other doors he might come out, and windows. “You’re God damn fucking right he’ll be back,” he shouted through the door. “Right back in the cell. And if he’s wrecked that truck of mine he’ll pay with a kidney.” The pounding of Hodge’s heart was a white hot maelstrom in his chest, and he couldn’t push up his glasses, which had slipped down his nose, because he didn’t dare let go of the icy doorknob. He was shaking all over, and he couldn’t tell whether it was because of the howling winter wind or because of the way his son shot out words, danced through words the way his mother did. Hodge roared, outraged, “You sound like your mother.” And instantly he regretted it, knowing that was Millie’s game, forcing their son to take sides. Luke stopped pulling at the door. He said, “Get out of here. Shit on you. Beat it.” His voice was ominously calm. Hodge said, not out of fear but out of pity — by morning Luke’s rage would have brought on a headache fierce enough to blind a horse—“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.” As always, the pity made it worse. Luke whispered, “Get out.”

It had all been for the best, however. Late that night when Nick Slater came back, lurching, half-skating up the driveway on foot, singing (Hodge sitting mournfully in the snowbank under the tamarack in Luke’s front yard), Luke was indifferent, befuddled by some drug he’d taken for the headache, and took Nick back without a word.)

“Oh, well, all right, my idea then,” Will said. “I see well enough what you’re driving at.” He opened his hands and ducked his head. “I admit it freely. I meddle. But look at me! How can I help myself? I’m weak!”

“No matter,” Hodge said, staring into the tablet, sliding his lower jaw beyond his upper. The word weak registered in his mind and he glanced over his glasses once more and smiled. After a moment he said, “How things going up there?”

“Oh, fine,” Will said, lowering his eyebrows, as embarrassed as Hodge Sr was at having asked. “I work too hard,” he said then, sternly. “I chase all over hell, and when I’m home I stay in the office night after night till eleven or twelve, trying to wind up that Kleppmann case. Been on it almost a year now. And then, what little time I have left—” He lost the thread. “Debilitating,” he said with a sigh.

Hodge nodded, thinking all at once of the apple in his drawer.

Abruptly, his son slapped his knee and bent forward, preparing to get up. “So you’ll spring Nick Slater for us?”

The rueful smile returned. “For Nick’s sake, as you say. I’ll see what I can do.”

Will laughed, reaching up to touch the bald place, then pressing his palms into his hams. He swung his loose weight further forward and rose like a whale. “Good. Merciful father, we thank you.” Hodge, too, was standing now. They shook hands, and as always Will hung on for a moment, still talking, holding his father’s hand in both his own. “Louise sends her love. Also the kids. You’ve got to get up there and see us one of these days.”

“I’ll do that,” Hodge said, pleased.

“I apologize for dragging you over from church, making you miss the sermon. No doubt it was a six-reel thriller, as usual. But as you see, it was a matter of the greatest delicacy.” He grinned and added soberly, “The truth is, I’ve been so consarned busy it was the only time I could make it.”

“No trouble,” Hodge said.

“It is trouble, and I’m sorry.”

“Bosh,” said Hodge.

“Just the same,” Will said, “we appreciate it.” He tightened his grip on Hodge’s hand, and to save his knuckles Hodge returned the grip. Will said, “Bon jour, Pater. Take care.” He twisted the hand, forcing his father to Indian wrestle. Hodge Sr grinned with his teeth clenched and stood like an iron-wheeled tractor. “Take care yourself,” he said.

Will Hodge Jr released his hand suddenly and laughed. Then, puffing, he went over to the door, bent for the albums of maps, and turned to say again, “Take care.” He took his hat from the rack, smiled at it, and put it on.

“Take care,” Hodge said. He hooked his tingling fingers around inside his suspenders, elbows going out like ducks’ wings, and, smiling as if his enormous son were some magnificent achievement of subtle wit, which he was, he walked behind Will through the outer office to the frosted-glass door which bore the neatly lettered sign, in reverse:

TAGGERT FAELEY HODGE

ATTORNEY

NO. 11 BANK ST.

BATAVIA, N. Y.

(Taggert Faeley Hodge was no longer here. He had fled in the night sixteen years ago, leaving ruins to his brother Will, and was now, the last anyone had heard, a salesman of used cars in Phoenix, Arizona.) Hodge watched his son go cautiously sideways down the steps, Will’s dimpled left hand on the iron railing, the flesh white as snow beneath the curly black hair, his right arm clamped over the albums of maps like a picture-framer’s vise. When Will was safely down on the sidewalk, puffing, starting out to where his Chevy wagon sat waiting with its right front wheel cocked up on the curb, Hodge closed the door and nodded thoughtfully, muttering to himself gruffly, “Monkeybusiness.” He sighed, thinking once more of Luke the irascible, then returned to his desk and sat down to rest a minute. He remembered the apple, frowned, and opened the drawer.

2

It was pulpy. But Hodge had expected that. He took a second bite. He had nothing to do, nowhere to go except out to lunch and, eventually, home to the apartment. However, his horizons did not seem to him noticeably drab. He enjoyed going out, never knowing whom he might run into, and back at the apartment he was making kitchen cabinets. He did not especially enjoy looking forward to springing Nick Slater. It wasn’t true — and Will knew it — that people owed him favors. The only people who owed Hodge favors, or thought they did, were sidestreet tailors, Polish grocers, farmers, Ed Bilchmann at the Camera Shop, and the second teller from the end at Mercantile Trust. But springing Nick had its pleasant side, too. He enjoyed visiting with Judge Sam White. Sam was a man who appreciated the important things: a sensible brief without rhetoric, good common sense about the problem in Asia or tapping phones, good plumbing in the house. And so maybe he’d go over this afternoon, when Sam would be in his cups. Then again, maybe not. Sometime today he had that, deed to take over to Merton Bliss. He’d said he’d bring it by days ago. And maybe he could drop in to visit his brother Ben when he was out in that neck of the woods.

“Monkeybusiness,” he said again.

He was sorry to have missed Warshower’s sermon. There, too, was a man who understood the important things. No buck-toothed sissy like the Methodist fellow. He towered above the pulpit like a druid, when the chores were done — the hymns, the responsive reading, the half-hour prayer, the reading of the scriptures — and he spoke of the good old-fashioned puzzles — the Last Judgment, the Writing on the Wall, the Swallowing of Sodom and Gomorrah. He wrote sermons like contracts, full of firstlies, secondlies, and thirdlies, devoid of obscure allusions and rant. When a man left the church after one of those sermons he knew exactly what he’d done that was right and what he’d done that was wrong. Hodge would feel confident sometimes halfway through Sunday afternoon, in those days with Millie, before her way of twisting things could break down even Warshower’s common sense. Nevertheless, the man was a comfort, his very existence satisfying in a world that incessantly demanded fine distinctions between things not worth a man’s thinking about: a world of jokes to be puzzled out and laughed at in the right places (how many times, in how many grim rooms had Millie thrown back her head and white throat, and laughed while Hodge sat chuckling fierce and baffled, heavy as iron in his chair!), a world of movies from Italy which a man had no choice but to sit through, somehow outlast, like a patient horse. Warshower’s very way of living, his stubborn, uncomplicated directness, was a sermon of hope to Hodge. When the Elders (Will Hodge Sr was one of them) would not put up money to get the cellar fixed at the manse, Warshower hired the work done himself and called a meeting of the congregation for a vote on whether or not they’d pay the bill. They’d taken a special offering, which came to only four dollars short, and Warshower preached on The Eye of the Needle, and prayed, as if without hope, for the people’s souls. He got his four dollars. From Will Hodge Jr, as it happened, who wasn’t a Presbyterian at all, but a Unitarian. Once more the subtle tyranny of the Congressman’s image.