John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Well, one great politician is enough for one family,” she said.

Misunderstanding her “one great politician,” imagining she was talking about his own future, he said thoughtfully, “Politics is a dirty business. I wouldn’t have believed it.” Madeline was watching him again, her small face narrow and blank as a skull. He said, “I’m going for a walk.” He went to the door and fled.

It seemed to him remarkable, that night, that he should have thought this place his home. But an understandable error, yes. His hope, his foolish innocence had projected itself on the world and filled it with beauty the world had, itself, no interest in. Chemistry, he thought. Point of view. To a rabbit running for its life from a dog, the world was a white blur of terror. To a cow ruminating in a field, the world was a vast green comfortable stasis, and then at evening, when choretime came, the world was a great swollenness. Hah! Will Jr, in this depression, looked around him. Leafless trees sharp black against the gray of the sky, black barns angular and empty. (Why had he wanted a place with barns? Was he going to raise sheep for the wild dogs to feed on? Pigs to die in the August heat? Chickens, maybe, to escape their coops and hide their eggs and hatch baby chicks for cats to kill and disease to cripple and weasels to suck?) “Rat race,” he thought.

He thought of walking through the fields, down toward the swollen creek. But the ground was mushy from last night’s rain, and the wet grass would ruin his shoes. He walked around the yard, the lighted house solemn and distant as the moon, it seemed to him now. He decided to walk on the road. It was dark. The moon was hidden behind invisible clouds, but the dirt road itself gave off a kind of light, as though the earth he awkwardly walked on, the road uneven with pebbles, was alive, like himself, and full of useless energy, an outreaching of love toward nothing satisfactory. The lights in the farmhouses perched on the hills ahead of him were as far away as stars.

It was not his father’s failure that made him angry, it was his own. He had smiled when he did not feel like smiling, had shook hands when the muscles of his hands were limp with weariness and he felt only revulsion for the hand reaching out to his. He had not kissed babies, but he had cooed at them as he stupidly cooed at his own child, and if someone who saw through him, someone maliciously cruel and shameless, had raised some baby for his kiss, he would have kissed it. “Filth,” he thought. He was not fit for it, and for that matter politics was not fit for him. He’d been betrayed by the memory of a dead man.

He remembered the evenings in his grandfather’s livingroom at Stony Hill. He was no longer active in politics by that time, but people still came to him to ask his advice, get his “moral support” for their campaigns. The phrase had seemed curious and impressive to Will Jr once. He’d had some idea that the word moral was serious — that his grandfather was an anchor of goodness and stability, and the man who won his approval was a proved man of justice, Christian, one who would serve his state or county selflessly and wisely and do it good.

But the world the Old Man had created at Stony Hill was different from the world where he worked, doggedly honest but out of place, in the end. Stony Hill Farm, inside its stone walls, was as self-contained and self-perpetuating, even as serene — or so it had seemed to Will Jr’s childish eyes — as Heaven itself. It was a garden for idealism, where there was painting and poetry and card tricks, and sober worship on Sunday evenings; where neighbors got together and spoke thoughtfully of the Future of the United States, and of taxes and balanced trade and the troubles in Europe. It made you want to be a minister.

All mere illusion, he knew now. Mere entertainment. But if there was no God, there was no Devil either. So much for absolutes, then. So much for politics. He would throw it all up and go — where?

That was the point he’d come to, that night on his angry walk. He stopped. He was standing on a high hill where he could look down on all the Wyoming Valley — the lights of the village far in the distance, the nearer lights of farmhouses going out one by one, like Einstein’s furthermost stars. “A man should try to be a father,” he said aloud. “Make the best of things. Not improve the world so much as make it tolerable for his children.” Immediately, he scowled. It didn’t sound convincing. He loved his daughter: going in to her crib at night when she lay there asleep and vulnerable he felt himself almost at the point of tears. But the fact remained, she would not obey or respect him. When he played with her he often ended up hurting her. He was a big man, and clumsy, and the more inexpressible his emotions became the more he felt the need to burst through the isolating walls by sheer muscle. He’d broken Maddie’s arm once. He was bouncing her on the bed — a foolish thing to do, he knew at the time, but she liked it, and he felt joyful, dropping her to the mattress and catching her as she bounced up to his arms again with a child-laugh like bells — and suddenly Louise was there, reaching out, crying “Willie, stop it! You’ll break her neck!” He missed his rhythm and the child fell with her arm tucked under her, and when he snatched her up her eyes rolled up out of sight and her body went stiff and he knew beyond any shadow of a doubt — though he was wrong, thank God — that she was dead. He ran to the garage with her, threw open the car door, and lay her down in the seat and drove — it must have been at speeds of ninety and more — to the hospital in Batavia. “Never again, dear God,” he’d said, and if she was dead, as he thought, he swore he would kill himself. But by the time they reached the hospital she’d come to again, and when the doctor looked her over in the Emergency Room he said she’d only broken her arm. Not even a break, in fact. A minute crack. Will Jr seldom rough-housed with Maddie now. But he could no more talk with his daughter than with Louise, could only hug her until she cried out in alarm, or shake her hand so hard it made her eyes widen. It would be the same with his son (the son still unborn, almost undreamt-of, the night of his walk), and it was the same with his brother, his father, his sister — the same as it would be two years later in Buffalo, when he would accidentally push his good friend through a window at the Unitarian church. And it had been the same with Ben Jr, before he was killed, and with all Will Jr had ever known and loved. And so his speech to himself that night rang hollow: Make the best of things. He stood watching the farmhouse lights go out one by one, and he imagined the stars going out one by one, and he thought, Where will I go? What will I do? and answered, Nowhere. Nothing.

The air had been hushed, a moment ago. Breathless. Now it was stirring, and it came to him that it was going to rain again tonight. He was miles from home. He turned back and began walking hurriedly, and then as the wind mounted and the trees began creaking above the road, he began to run. He became irrationally frightened, almost terrified. When he reached the house he was wet to the skin and the wind was howling like a banshee in the trees, and he was breathing so hard it was as if his throat was afire.

Louise said, “Willie!” bending to him, white, and he gasped, “It’s all right. I made it. Everything’s all right!” The next morning he ended the partnership.

It was that same year that his father had broken with his mother.

Will Jr removed his hands from his eyes and sat brooding, staring at the drab yellow walls of his office. There were no books here. He had no need of them in his specialty. When he had a research job to do for HOME — Housing Opportunities Made Equal-one of his numerous social causes, he could go to the firm’s research library on the sixteenth floor. Or when the State assigned him a defense. It took no great reading to deal with the usual humdrum debtor or even with professional skips — a man like Kleppmann, for instance.