John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Will scowled. “Did Mommy get him back?”

“We had to chase him, and we were by the store and we got some Spook.”

“How nice!” he said.

“Danny spilled his,” she said. “He cried and cried.”

“I should think so,” he said warmly. “That must have been something!” He laughed. Then: “Well, bye-bye, honey. I’ll see you soon.”

“I miss you, Daddy,” she said.

“I miss you too, honey,” he said. “Give Mommy a big Kiss for me. Bye-bye.”

He heard her hang up.

He replaced the receiver and leaned back in his padded swivel chair and covered his eyes with one hand. He was back in Buffalo, back in the old grind. He reached in his coat-pocket for the roll of Tums. C’est la vie, he thought. He sat forward. As he was reaching for the new collection form he’d been working on, he thought again of the little white stones Clumly had shown him, and his hand paused in mid-air. For the twentieth time, it seemed to him, the memory had almost come, but again it sank back and he could not catch what it was. He concentrated on the image that seemed to have released it, the hairless Chief with the green cigar in one hand, the stones in the other, his small eyes glittering. “What are these stones, Will? You seen them before?” Will had almost told him. It had been right on the tip of his tongue and perhaps if he had not pushed himself, if he’d been able to speak without thinking, it would have come out. But then the memory or half-memory was gone, and he was baffled. “I don’t know,” he had said. “They remind me of something, but—” Clumly was watching him, and even Clumly, no doubt, could see he was telling the truth. “If you remember, call me,” Clumly said. There was a hellish intensity in Clumly’s look. “I’ll do that,” Will said. “I’ll call,” and went on trying to remember. He drew the collection form toward him and fished in his inside coat-pocket for his pen. On the desk just beside the form lay a thick manilla folder with the neatly typed heading, Kleppmann. Organs inside his belly closed around the name and, once again, he felt sweat on his lip.

The Tums never helped, really, and he knew he was deluding himself in pretending to imagine they gave temporary relief, but he had no choice, he was a man mercilessly driven, as it seemed to him, both from without and from within. Day after day, whether he was at home or off on one of his innumerable trips, he worked lunatic hours, often from eight in the morning until midnight, and when he asked himself why — there were many in the firm who felt no such compulsions — he could find no adequate reason, or, rather, found too many.

He had not meant to get into legal collection: all the force of his past, all the force of his personal kindness, stood against the paltry business of debtor chasing. He had dreamed of going into politics, at first, which was almost the whole reason he had gone in with his father when he passed his Bar exams. Genesee County was small enough that a man could get a toe-hold, and the family was known there, known both personally and politically. And so Will Jr had gone to Batavia full of joy, in the rich sunlight of his idealism and personal ambition.

That was done with, shot down not by any campaign of his own but by what he’d learned campaigning for his father.

They’d bought a house in the country, fifteen miles from the office. It was a place two hundred and fifty years old, made of fieldstone, with beautiful chimneys at each end and a view of, you would have said, Paradise. It had a windmill and barns and a creek running through, and there were sugar maples on the wide, sloping lawn. The barns, made of native oak, were in good repair. They could live there all their lives, if they wanted. They could return to it between sessions at Albany or — who knew? — maybe Washington someday, just as Will Jr’s grandfather had returned year after year to Stony Hill. It was June when he took Louise there. He stood with Madeline on his shoulders — Danny was not yet born at the time — and he held Louise’s hand tightly in his own.

“It’s beautiful, Willie,” she said, eyes bright as the morning.

They had the place fixed up by fall; his father’s campaign for County Judge was winding up. But September and October are the saddening of the year in Western New York. In the morning the air snaps and there’s a smell of winter; at noon it warms to a kind of false hope — gray corn in the fields, gray expanses of frost-bitten grass. Wasps stir in the eaves, preparing for their sleep until spring. The shaggy, toothless old people who come out from the County Farm every spring to work as hired men or to beg put on their sweaters and overcoats and put their belongings in grocery bags with string handles and begin their trudge along the high-crowned gray dirt roads, going in. The evening slides in cold, and birds fly south. The Indians leave too, old men and boys who come out for the summer to do handywork or man the gypsum quarries, tanneries, trucking lines, construction jobs; they shrink back into the Reservation.

Will Jr, full of nervous energy and troubled thought, went calling for his father, wrote speeches for him, attended country banquets. No one in Genesee County had ever worked harder for public office, but the omens were bad. The blunt truth was that Will Sr was not good at it. Loving his father, loving his virtues and defects alike, he had not until now seen his father with the eyes of an outsider. Now he had to. The truth was that Will Hodge Sr did not have an open, engaging smile. When the Congressman smiled, in the old days, the room grew brighter, the very crops improved: his huge white teeth shone like enormous square pearls, and even a man who opposed him was softened. Uncle Ben had that smile, and Uncle Tag had had it — a smile as easy and natural and gentle as a child’s. They could smile at themselves as quickly as at anything else, and yet, however sunny their dispositions, their minds raced smoothly on, ingenious and just. They were invulnerable. They made you think of airline pilots or acrobats or millionaires. You felt safe. But Will Hodge Sir’s smile was rueful. It was as if he saw impossibilities at every turn. He would do his best to administer justice wisely, he promised, and there was no doubt whatever that he told the truth — yet you felt uneasy. And there were other troubles, more palpable. When Will Jr’s Uncle Taggert had fled, Will Sr had soberly covered the losses, had worked himself hard paying the debts a dollar on the dollar. Nonetheless, he was tainted by the event. There were even insinuations that Will Sr had cut corners in his own right. There was no question, if one saw the case with the eyes of God, that Will Hodge Sr was a better man than his opponent. But the case would not be judged by the eyes of God.

Louise said (they were kneeling on the carpet in the livingroom, working with tinker toys Madeline was too small to work — they frustrated her to tears of wrath — and the record player was on in the background, Spanish music that neither of them liked, though they wanted to like it, because friends did. The sun had set half an hour ago, and the sky was lifeless, as if the world had stopped turning and time was running down), “Will he win, Willie, do you think?”

Will Jr scowled, tugging at the lodged tinker toy. It seemed to him that the room smelled of urine, and he wondered why a child three years old was not trained. “Win?” he said. “Hell no!”

Madeline looked up at him.

They ignored her.

Louise put her hand on his shoulder. “Well,” she said, “maybe next time. Plenty of people—”

“Never,” he said. He let the tinker toy fall to the carpet and, helping himself with the arm of the couch, stood up. He went over to the window and stood rubbing his groin absent-mindedly, looking out at autumn.