This image did not make him feel particularly happy. As a youth, he had responded to the gesture with shuddering, deep waves of guilt for nameless offenses, sins of omission as much as commission. In general, other people than Hamilton, strangers even, tended to respond to Alma Stark in much the same way. One had to ask oneself, even when meeting her for the first time, if one had not somehow, inadvertently, injured this woman, disappointed or deprived her, imposed on her, if one had not added, somehow, to her already unfairly heavy load of woe. For most people, the answer to the question of culpability was a simple denial. After which one tended to regard her through a skeptical lens tinted with pity. For, to most people, she proved immediately to be potentially manipulative, which was why most people felt justified in objectifying her somewhat by pitying her.
In a patriarchy, or any male-oriented society or household, husbands and sons are especially vulnerable to the trap that results from real or imagined injuries to women. It’s one of the very few routes to power for their wives and mothers, which, naturally, invites them to specialize in it, and, through disuse, all the alternative routes gradually get broken up and overgrown, until soon they are impassable altogether. Thus, Hamilton and his father were especially vulnerable to Alma’s particular specialization. They were both willing and conscious participants in a patriarchy, they were both raised, as conventional New England Protestants, to prove their moral and spiritual worth by the nature and extent of their works, that is, by their worldly success, and they were both reared, in the Victorian manner, to be ashamed of human bodies. Since neither the father nor the son, for various and different reasons, had experienced much of what is conventionally called worldly success, and since both father and son had human bodies, they were forced into employing extreme and often cruel-seeming means of resisting the trap Alma’s generalized woe had created for precisely them.
To neutralize the effect of her wringing and tweaking, her sighs, her constantly wet eyes, her self-denying anticipation of needs he himself never even knew he had, Hamilton’s father applied the old male strategy of grim condescension. He disregarded her point of view, treated it as he would a simple child’s. She thinks she’s suffered, he would snort. Hah, she doesn’t even know what suffering is. She doesn’t know how lucky she is!
But this strategy couldn’t work as well for her son, because for Hamilton she was someone whom he first knew and continued for several years to know from the point of view of utter dependence. Condescension comes hard to sons, no matter how easily it comes to them later as husbands or fathers. For him to neutralize his mother’s wringing and tweaking, her long-suffering wet eyes, her whole series of practically irresistible invitations for him to draw on his guilt quotient, Hamilton had to devise a different and even crueler-seeming strategy. It was to affirm, as much as possible, his mother’s point of view. Let his father deny it, condescend to it, reject it any way he could. Hamilton would honor it, would validate it, would meet all its most stringent demands on him. If she felt injured or disappointed or deprived some-how, if she felt that her unfair burden of woe had been unfairly added to, he would do what he could to justify her feelings — to provide an objective correlative, as it were — by injuring her, by disappointing and depriving her, by adding, even if only slightly, to her burden of woe.
His description of the process by which he validated and honored her point of view went something like this: “When a lady makes a request, a gentleman has no choice but to meet that request. Sure, he can ignore it, but he wouldn’t be much of a gentleman, would he?” He was smiling, but the smile was characterized more by resignation than good cheer.
I had asked him pointblank why he had behaved toward his mother in a way that the rest of the community had regarded as a heinous way to behave toward one’s mother. He had first obtained the power, legal and financial, to evict his mother from the home she had lived in all her adult life, the house she had raised three children in and where she had lived in wedlock with a man, his own father, for over forty years, the house that had become the source and final resting place for a lifetime’s most personal memories and associations. He had obtained the power to evict her from this house, had obtained it under the guise of helping to care for her in her dependent old age, and, horror, he had used that power. He had gone ahead and evicted her. He had forced her to accept the extra room in her daughter Jody’s small and crowded trailer and to have the costs of her room and board paid by her other daughter, Sarah. Hamilton had forced Alma into becoming her daughters’ burdens of woe, he had forced her into deepening their sense of having been injured. He had given them, thereby, control over her. For he had forced her into the role, for the first time in her life, of victimizer, of depriver, of oppressor.
This was not, of course, what the community saw in it, but it is what eventually I came to see in it. Gradually, as I pondered Hamilton’s cryptic, seemingly irrelevant answers to my questions, I came to believe that his eviction of his mother that night was an almost inevitable consequence of the years in which he had honored her need to be injured. Doubtless, in time she had gradually come to realize that he did not feel guilt for his role as injurer, at which point she played her last card, so to speak. She would force him to reject her altogether. She would up the ante. Which, from Hamilton’s point of view, gave him no alternative but to raise her bet and force the next round of the game into play. Did she want him to be that ungrateful a son? All right, if that’s what she wanted, it’s what she got. After all, she was his mother and he could do no less for her than try to provide for her what she really wanted.
“I learned something about women from that experience,” he told me one evening at the Bonnie Aire, where we had gone for a few drinks. It was a hot, overcast, Friday night, the July following his eviction of his mother.
What had he learned about women? I asked him (having at the time intimations of some future troubles with women, whom I then understood almost not at all).
He learned, he told me, a woman’s greatest power over a man is her ability to turn her suffering into a virtue. She converts the one into the other, completely. She makes a condition of being female — and a wife and mother — into an ethical feat, which feat we as men have no choice but to reinforce. Most men don’t understand this conversion, he explained, and that’s why most men, rather than reinforce the conversion, deny that it’s even taken place. They treat their women as if they were still suffering. But what we’re supposed to do, what they want us to do, is to reinforce the conversion by acknowledging it and making it possible for the process to continue. So, naturally, what they want is for us to increase their suffering, to build their supply of it back up at least to where it was before they managed the difficult task of converting it into something that gave them power, the power of possessing virtue.
He paused and chugged down his glass of ale as chaser to the shot of Canadian Club he had tossed down right before speaking. I remained silent. Hamilton seldom spoke at this length (not to me, not about a subject that he knew was important to my understanding of him), and I didn’t want to distract him with my presence.
“And I’ll tell you something, something that I’ve not told anyone else,” he said, looking down at the empty glass, turning it in his huge hands. “It ain’t easy, giving them what you know they want. Especially when it’s your mother. Because the spring the whole thing, the conversion thing, works off is guilt. Male guilt.” He explained that it’s only to a man that a woman’s suffering looks like an ethical feat. Other women look at it with envy, or, if they’re a little protective of their own brand of pain, they see it as pathetic, or maybe they look at it with fear, because they know a woman who suffers more than they do cannot honor their own conversions. But a man sees it differently. Only a man can admire the pain, can acknowledge the bearer of it as virtuous. And the reason a man sees it this way is because he bears with him a quantity of guilt, nameless because he’s born with it, having been born male in this world where one-half of the species dominates the other half. Hamilton wasn’t saying it was right or wrong, that domination. He was just saying that it exists. The dominant one in any pairing off feels guilty for that fact, whether he knows it or not. And because most men don’t know they feel guilty, guilt in general, rather than in the particular case, most men don’t see what’s being asked of them by the particular cases before them.