John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Then Hodge’s mother was standing in the doorway, a little behind Millie, wringing her hands, saying: “Politics!”

Hodge said, though he would have gone on with it if the women weren’t there, “Well, the world will make out.”

“Will, I want to talk to you,” Millie said, pushing at the screen.

He ignored her.

The Old Man studied him for a long time, or so it seemed: scrutinized his memory of him. Then he turned his head slowly and looked at Tag. Suddenly, as if discovering something — some terrible and holy secret that had slipped his mind — he smiled. He said, “Yes, no doubt you will. The world will learn. Sure as day.”

Hodge could not explain, afterward, the peculiar power of that moment for him. The words were trifling, absurd if one looked them over too closely. The expression on the Old Man’s face was not uplifting, not glorious, though it is true that his slightly shaking chin jutted upward and out as though he were about to fly. An image for a poster. Nevertheless, Hodge was powerfully moved, jolted as if by electric shock of love: the head ten inches from his own was suddenly gigantic, and looking into the hairy ear Hodge seemed to see past all galaxies into the void where, behold, there was light. All the rest of his life he would not be able to speak of that moment without a sharp upsurge of mysterious, perhaps childish elation, and also fear, and all the rest of his life he would be troubled, occasionally, by a new attack of that extraordinary feeling: a sense of the world transfigured, himself transformed to the pure idea of older brother in a fated house, a family destined for glory or terrible sorrow, he couldn’t say which. He did not go out in pursuit of such moments. He fled them, if anything. They thrilled every fiber of his body, shifted his mind to a higher gear than it normally used (as if some door opened, as doors occasionally opened in his dreams, revealing, beyond some mundane room, vast recesses obscurely lighted and charged with warm wind and a deep red color, beautiful and alarming): he thought them dangerous, possibly mortal, like the shocking pleasure (he imagined) of falling from a roof. Or rather, to speak precisely, he for the most part thought about them nothing whatever, merely dreaded them in the back of his mind, and went on with the work at hand.

The Congressman would have done the same. Two hours before that conversation on the porch — it was this that Millie had been eager to tell him, this that had shattered his younger brother — his father had suffered a heart attack. Hodge’s mother was badly shaken, Millie excited, but the Old Man, even before the doctor could make it from Alexander, was coolly talking politics. And not to evade reality. To Hodge’s father, politics was more interesting than dying. Dying (if he was dying, which as it turned out he was not, yet) was merely an annoying — a disgusting — interruption.

Neither could Hodge explain even now, over thirty years later, what it was that the nations — and he himself, perhaps — were going to learn. He’d long ago quit worrying about it. The troubles had come, his father had been right enough about that — both international troubles and private — and were coming still. But they managed, Hodge and the world. If his father had discovered the formula that would quiet their unrest (and perhaps he had: he’d given a bewildering emphasis to those final words, “Sure as day”), he’d taken the secret with him to the grave. They would muddle through without it.

And so, renouncing cynicism, in the back of his mind he had taken the road Will Jr would take: emulation. Had allowed himself to be tyrannized by the Old Man’s achievements. It was no one’s fault — the fault of a ghost: the casual effect of time, of inevitable change, generations of Presbyterian ministers, gentleman farmers, public servants, lawyers, judges, all rising together in the apparition of one man who in his prime had a quick, deep brain and the eyes of a Moses and a voice like ricocheting thunder calling down God’s wrath on Federalization. The brain was gone from the light of the sun, had shattered into its specialties in the Old Man’s sons and daughter, but the eyes were still living, and the voice. Will Jr had the voice; Hodge had it himself, and Ben and Tag — in fact every one of his four brothers and almost all their sons; but you seldom heard it fully opened now, except when they laughed or, meeting at a wedding or a funeral, argued politics. It was the image, ghost, archaic (as even Will Jr knew) but still compelling, that had once made Hodge seem to himself a fool and now made him a disappointment to his elder son. He accepted it, now that the partnership was so much water gone under the bridge. For Hodge was a singularly reasonable man, as his father, despite stubbornness, had been before him. (The stiffness of the Old Man’s back — exaggerated in the faded photograph which hung, thoroughly inconspicuous, centered above faded, obsolete world maps and a 1937 chart of the kings and chief ministers of the sundry nations, behind Hodge’s desk — was an effect merely of time and place: a matter of style. Hodge, too, and even Will, had flaring nostrils, coarse hair in the nose and ears and curling on the backs of the fingers, but no stranger would have mistaken them for avenging angels, trumpets of Justice in days of rank corruption. The times were wrong, not incorrupt and not out of joint but subtly mellowed, decayed to ambiguity: If right and wrong were as clear as ever, they were clear chiefly on a private scale, and though God was in his Heaven yet, He had somewhat altered, had become archetypal of a new, less awesome generation of fathers: Wisdom watching the world with half-averted eyes, chewing His ancient lip thoughtfully, mildly, venturing an occasional rueful smile.)

He had nibbled the apple, pulpy as it was, to the bright black seeds. He wondered where it had come from and why he had not eaten it before. “Client,” he thought. “Some farmer.” And then: “Odd.” If he were not Hodge — invincible Hodge! — he would have thought of Snow White, poison; or of Adam and Eve; or of love grown older. He thought: “Snow-apple,” and was distinctly pleased that he still remembered the name.

Beyond the closed Venetian blinds, in the parking lot between the office and the back wall of the Methodist church, small children were playing a singing game he remembered from a long, long time ago:

McGregor got up and he gave her a thump,

Gave her a thump, gave her a thump. .

Again the rueful smile came. Italian kids. He’d seen them there often, glancing over his spectacles briefly, absent-mindedly, as he passed the window with a sheaf of papers for Betty in the outer office to sort and file. But he couldn’t remember having noticed before what sort of game they played. He wondered, briefly, whether Will would remember it too, and whether he would associate the game with the long green hills of Stony Hill Farm or with some other place, Albany, say, in Hodge’s belated law-school days, or Buffalo, or Leroy, or Ben’s place. The question entered and left his mind in a single instant, no more than a trifling impulse of the blood, a question he would no more have asked if Will were there than he would pause now to consider it. The world it came from was not his world. That was his immunity to the Old Man’s power, and also it was his weakness. His mind glanced from the children playing in the parking lot to the sooty church window, one small pane of which was broken, to the sill he’d forgotten to fix at home. He felt himself at the edge of some unpleasant recollection, but the instant he knew it was there it was gone, and he was waiting again, reading the scrawled note on the corner of his desk: Obtain the release of Nick S. On a smaller sheet there was another note, in Betty’s hand: Check ins. pol. on converted School Bus for Ben.