But, I, as C. quite rightly pointed out, I was no man’s daughter, spurned or otherwise. Which was doubtless why I had chosen to describe the same man with the image of the holy man, the man outside all social prescriptions for meaningful behavior, the man who uses his life as allegory, who, to demonstrate human ordinariness, heaps ashes on himself, who, to demonstrate the vanity of human wishes, forgoes all normal access to praise and achievement, the man who, to demonstrate the possibility of self-transcendence, denies the claims the rest of us honor.
We are the only creature that does not know what it is to be itself, C. went on. We are the only creature that must perceive itself through the use of images. The limits and the possibilities implied by those images, then, are the limits and possibilities for our perceptions of ourselves. And because we can hardly be expected to exceed the morphology of our perceptions, then it’s clear that our images of ourselves determine the morphology of our very lives. Rochelle saw her father through the image of a particular kind of demon-possession, one that combined and thus explained his peculiar juxtaposition of drunkenness, lust and rage. I had tried to convert her to my point of view, which depended on her coming to see him as a holy man. C., in his turn, was recommending that I see Hamilton as a spiraling uroboros. We were all three trying to perceive him, to imagine him into a reality in our own lives, by means of a coherent image. Yet he persisted in resisting our imaginations. The demon had fallen away in the face of Hamilton’s obvious intentionality. No man possessed could be that willful. And the holy man was rapidly being secularized by what appeared to be compulsive behavior rather than self-conscious, exemplary behavior designed to be taken as allegorical. And now this somewhat pathetic and depressing image of the self-devouring serpent had come to control my perceptions of the man. The time had come to try to discover how Hamilton perceived himself, if at all. And if this could not be determined, to ask oneself if, indeed, one had invented him altogether.
Thank heaven for C.! If it hadn’t been for his presence in my life, his very presence that evening in my library, I would at that moment have felt wholly alone.
Chapter 10. Graveside
THIS IS A PAINFUL CHAPTER for me to write. Before I’m through with it, I will have lost my best friend, will have sent him from my house into the snowy cold, leaving me behind, remorseful and, to counter remorse, desperate for justification. A dangerous state for a rationalist: it’s when he is most tempted to depart from reality and fly off into the soothing heavens of reason.
It began with the death of Alma Stark — not the actual fact of her dying, but later, in my describing it. It’s possible that it began earlier, of course, in Chapter Nine, where I told of Hamilton’s meeting and consequent marriage to Jenny, but I was not aware then of any irreconcilable differences between my and C.’s points of view. At that time, despite the differences between us, I was still able to use C.’s point of view to inform my own, as I had been doing all along. So that at the end of Chapter Nine, while I may have seemed disconsolate at having to lose Rochelle, I could still console myself with the continued presence of C. But all that was before I had told of the death of Alma Stark.
The death itself was not especially poignant or wrenching. It was expected. She had been ill for most of the previous winter and had fended off an attack of flu and then pneumonia, but clearly she was weakening and, in fact, had not been expected to survive the winter at all. She was eighty, still mentally alert, but no longer able to resist ordinary onslaughts against her body. The following November, she came down with a strep throat, and despite massive doses of antibiotics, she developed double pneumonia and had to be hospitalized in Concord, where, after struggling on for two more weeks, she died, quite peacefully in her sleep, of heart disease.
Though her last years obviously had been scarred by the wound Hamilton had inflicted on her when he had evicted her — a wound she could close only by refusing after that night ever to see her son again, refusing and regularly renewing that refusal, for the cut was deep and could be staunched only with difficulty — those last years, nevertheless, had been relatively comforting to her. She was able to convert her dependence on her daughters, Jody and Sarah, into something which caused her to suffer, and thus the integrity of her personality was sustained. Her daily round of activities included helping Jody with housework, cooking and cleaning up after the children (twin boys entering adolescence, people who, to her tongue-clucking satisfaction, seemed to regard her presence as they would a maid’s — or at least that’s how, sighing, wringing her hands and tweaking her throat, she would put it to her friends at the Ladies’ Aid Society, always adding, of course, “It must be hard for them, having an old lady suddenly come to live in a crowded little house with them”). After the first year, Chub had added a small bedroom to the trailer, off the back at the middle, like an awkwardly placed appendage, and she spent most of her evenings there, and while her daughter, son-in-law and their two children watched TV in the living room, she crocheted, wrote letters to the Barnstead boys in Vietnam, and read the Bible. It was a nice room, pine-paneled, with a single window that faced Chub’s gravel pit (a supplementary source of income for the family). She had her own bed, a dresser, a small desk under the window, and even a closet of her own, which she had filled with the rest of her possessions — her clothes, photograph albums, Christmas tree decorations, and the quilted spread that she had made the spring she married Hamilton’s father and that she had used on their bed for over forty years. But now she slept alone on a narrow, cotlike bed. It would look foolish, she remarked, if she used the quilt to cover this little bed. But she couldn’t bring herself to give it over to Chub and Jody, to lay it across their wide Hollywood bed in the master bedroom. She thought maybe she’d just leave it to them in her will. She’d leave the photograph albums to Sarah, who seemed more interested in them anyhow, perhaps because she was childless. At least that’s what she told the ladies at the Ladies’ Aid Society while they knitted, sewed, crocheted, and wove handy, warm articles for the Barnstead boys in Vietnam. As it turned out, however, she wrote no will; Sarah ended up with the quilt and Jody took the photographs and Christmas tree ornaments.
During these years, between Alma’s loss of her home and her death, no one in the family spoke to Hamilton or saw him socially. If one or several of them accidentally came up against the fact of his presence, at a bean supper or the Fourth of July Band Concert or in McAllister’s General Store, for instance, they ignored that fact and would not acknowledge its existence even to one another. One time Chub had backed his cruiser — his own station wagon, actually, outfitted at the town’s expense with a siren, blue glass bubble on top and two-way radio — into one of Hamilton’s cars, a year-old Cadillac, the car he’d driven to Rochelle’s graduation in Ausable Chasm, New York. Chub had driven up to Danis’s Superette without noticing Hamilton’s car and had parked next to it, both cars facing the store, and then, recognizing the dark brown Cadillac, he had realized that the owner doubtless was inside the grocery store and that they would unavoidably pass in the aisle, so he had immediately dropped his cruiser into reverse and had backed out quickly, clipping with his right front fender Hamilton’s finny taillight. While the glass was still tinkling to the ground, Hamilton had emerged from the store and had stared, expressionless, as Chub spun the wheel of the cruiser, tromped on the accelerator, and roared away.
No one spoke to Hamilton of the event that for all intents and purposes had severed him from his family, and naturally, he never brought up the subject himself — not necessarily because he was ashamed, however. It just was not his way to discuss his personal life, not even with people who happened to participate in his personal life, his wives, for instance. In fact, none of his wives learned of the split in the family from Hamilton himself, and there were three of them (wives) who came to live with him in the very house that had been as much the symbol of that split as cause. They found out from their friends and other associates in town, usually when someone, eager to obtain and circulate Hamilton’s point of view, would ask Jenny, the school nurse, or, later, Maureen or, still later, Dora, why on earth her new husband had kicked his mother out of her own house. Jenny, or Maureen or Dora, would demand to know what on earth the person was talking about, whereupon she would hear the generally accepted version of the story, so that the interviewee became interviewer, first of the friend or associate who happened to have made the query in the first place, then of Hamilton himself.