John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Hodge sighed. He’d forgotten to buy cabinet hinges.

He, too (but he was not thinking of this), knew the power of the image, and in a way he’d been down both his sons’ roads and had found them both dead ends. Not knowing he was doing it, his mind on things more immediate — patching barn doors, calming Millie when her dander was up, milking, studying, shearing sheep, stewing over poor Tag’s bad luck — he had gone down Luke’s road fifteen years before Luke was born: cynical denial that the old man was what he seemed. Luke had never known the old man, knew only the sprawling farm he left, the barns, the big house, the stone fence now in disrepair, the iron gates, the dying tamaracks the old man’s father had brought into Genesee from God knew where — all of them female, by some fluke, and now all withering away without issue — so for Luke the cynicism was easy. But Hodge too, or the part of his mind that wasn’t busy, had managed cynicism.

He had not had to hunt far for detractors. He might have known from his father’s own mouth that detractors were there to be found. He was a politician with no memory for names, and he was famous for snorting, “Names! I can barely keep track of the names of my enemies!” But for Will Hodge Sr, firmly grounded in reality, the cynicism had not worked for long. The old man was against tobacco — when he had to smoke a pipe for a Grange League play he’d stuffed it with alfalfa and driven the audience out of the hall — but he did not judge a man by his addictions, or countenance the suppression of tobacco by a righteous minority. He favored the tobacco tax, but only in hopes of discouraging nonsmokers, whom he overestimated. He was stubborn, his detractors said. But he would occasionally change an opinion when the other man’s reasons were better than his own; and where legitimate debate remained after all the evidence was in he would usually grant the point to be debatable, though he would never change his side. He was an idealist, they said, and that was true too. He’d never bought a lawbook in his life, had gotten along on his father’s books and had bought instead poetry, collections of essays and letters, speeches, books on music, palmistry, astronomy, voodoo, the Latin classics, philosophy. Off and on for years he had tried to learn Greek. Hodge recalled it with heaviness of heart, the way one remembers one’s first disappointment in love. He would go to his father’s study door and his mother would hurry toward him from the kitchen with an urgency she never showed at other times, her index finger over her lips, her left hand stretching out to him in a gesture strangely ambiguous, as though she were at once shooing him off and drawing him toward her. In the semidarkness of the hall her apron’s whiteness was luminous against the dark of her dress, and beside her the banister gleamed like old silver, reflecting the snowlight beyond the front door. At his feet lay the comfortable yellow glow from the crack beneath the study door, but at the head of the stairs — beyond her head bending down to him — the elderly gloom (that still went in his mind with the dimly remembered eyeless face of his grandmother) gave way to full darkness, and he was frightened. “Hush,” his mother would say, “your father is working.” Only when he was studying Greek were they kept from his room, he and his brothers and even Ruth, and when he came out he’d be irritable, out of sorts. In the end, Hodge’s mother had stopped it. It was a family story. Furious for once in her life, she’d said, “Arthur Taggert Hodge, why are you doing this? You’re an American!” He had stared, no doubt in disbelief, had calculated the enemy’s strength and had known the better part of valor. “Good point,” he had said, and had nodded, scowling. He was not only an idealist but an absolutist and perfectionist, incapable of leaving unresolved such unresolvable questions as, for instance, that of free will and necessity. Second only to the Word of God, he believed the word of Spinoza. His copy of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was underlined and marginally annotated from cover to cover (also disfigured by interlinear pencil translations: “I can read Latin,” he would say, “but only the nouns”). But if he was an idealist, bookish, he knew trades, too; knew the talk of farmers at the feedmill, a farmer and feedmill philosopher himself, and the talk of shopkeepers, ministers, doctors, bankers — whose taxes he had figured, whose suits he had carried into court, and whose political opinions he heatedly debated from morning to night when he was home from Washington. It had not taken Hodge long to see what no doubt he’d been subtly aware of all his life, that those who called his father an idealist were snatching at words to express a feeling that had nothing to do with the word they happened to get hold of: the old man was in blunt truth superior, an implicit condemnation of men who were not; in short, a source of unrest. They hinted at scandals (a woman in the past, an incident with a Negro hired man, a matter of graft), but it was rubbish. The old man’s secret was simple and drab: he liked his work and had a talent for it. Given the same combination of gifts but other aspirations — an aspiration, for instance, to be an operatic singer — he might have been an unexceptional man: a restless farmer, a timid seducer of hired girls, a small-town choir director, a drunkard. Or even the same gifts and the same aspirations brought together in another time and place might have stopped him. But he was lucky.

And so Hodge had toyed in the back of his mind with another kind of cynicism, and this, too, before Luke was born. He had dismissed his father’s achievements as matters of no importance, blind chance. It was a matter of fact that Will himself was not cut out for the great deeds his father had done; but the case was not so clear with Ben or Tag. They were both of them, like the Old Man, visionaries, yet they could argue fine points like Jesuits, had memories for facts and figures, and they both had a way with people. But Ben had bad eyesight — a chance collision of unlucky chromosomes the night of his conception — and perhaps in fact a general weakness of sense mechanisms, so that his hold on physical reality was tentative. He was moved more by books than by life (not that Will stopped to think all this out in the dry way a novelist is forced to present it); if he revelled in Sense — in the cry of a meadowlark or the rumble of one of his big machines — there was something faintly theoretical about his revelling. His sensations, though intense, were those of a man in a museum. It was different with Tag. All he, Tag, lacked was the Old Man’s invariable good luck in the conspiracy of outer events. He’d worked on a chair one time when he was six. Will Hodge Sr remembered it well. He was more Tag’s father than the Old Man was himself, after all. By the time Tag came, the Congressman was old and too busy with the world to be father to a young child. It was Will, the oldest of the sons, who played with Tag, took him to work in the field with him, drove him to school, to basketball games or speech contests or dances. He’d come across him, when Tag was six, working out in the chickenhouse, putting a new wooden seat on a long-discarded kitchen chair. Will had just stood for a minute, watching unobserved. Tag worked quickly and painstakingly, as if he had figured out in advance every last detail of the job he’d set himself. He’d made a pattern with a piece of oil-stained cardboard, had drawn it onto the wood and had laboriously cut it out with the keyhole saw. He was nailing it in place now, skillfully for a child of six. Will said, thumbs hooked in his overalls bib, “You gonna be a carpenter someday, Tag?” Tag smiled with a beauty of innocence that was moving to Will. “If you want me to,” he said. It wasn’t fake or goody-goody in Tag. It was a quality of loving gentleness he’d been born with. In the first months of his life he was a sympathetic cryer, and throughout his childhood he was peacemaker to the family. In fact, like Ben, he was born to be a saint, gentle and unselfish — he even had the look of a saint: straight blond hair as soft as gossamer, dark blue eyes, long lashes, a quick, open smile — and unlike Ben, he saw what was there, not angels in pear trees but pears. “Little Sunshine,” their father called him. Yet Tag had failed in the end, for all his innocence and goodness, had been beaten by the conspiracy of events. So the Old Man might have failed, if his luck had been bad.