Mooney stopped in front of the church. Hamilton’s green Chrysler was slightly ahead of him and on the other side of the road. Dora had reached for the handle to open the door when suddenly Sarah spun in her seat and faced her. Her wide face was torn unexpectedly with furious weeping and she bellowed into Dora’s shocked face, “You fool! You fool! I don’t even feel sorry for you!” Then she began to sob and turned away, burying her face in her hands. Her husband said nothing. He reached one hand across and patted his wife’s knee; it was a practiced gesture, a fruitless one, but one he could not let himself forgo.
Slowly, silently, Dora got out of the car, crossed the road, and started to walk to Hamilton’s car. She knew the woman was right, Sarah, her husband’s own sister. For she was a fool, a pathetic, middle-aged, solitary fool, and she deserved no pity for it, none at all. Opening the heavy door of the car and holding it open for a second, she looked in at her husband, the man whose name a week ago in a dark haze she had attached to her own, and she decided, as she got into the warm interior of the car and closed the door behind her, that she would leave him, she would flee this man as soon as she dared, as soon as she no longer feared he would kill her for it.
The ringing of the telephone next to my bed clanged into my dream and woke me. I groped for a second, half-blind in the semidarkness, and found the receiver and finally stopped the ringing. As I drew the receiver to my ear I checked my watch — Was it morning or evening? What day? What night? As if by answering these questions one might know who would be calling and breaking so unexpectedly into one’s sleep. And while my eyes, fixed on the luminous face of my watch, told me that it was 6:25 A.M. and that the day was Monday, February 5, and that the year was 1975, my ear, pressed to the cool, smooth, plastic face of the receiver, told me that it was my friend C. who was calling me at this early hour, still a half-hour before sunrise.
He spoke sharply, before I myself had said a word. “Did I wake you?”
My mouth felt sourly dry — too much cognac and too many cigars the night before. “Well, yes, but it was time to get up anyhow. I was up late last night,” I said, as explanation for my still being in bed a half-hour before sunrise. (C. sleeps almost not at all, or rather, never for longer than two or three hours at a time; over a period of twenty-four hours, however, he probably averages eight full hours of deep sleep — but as a result, he has lost touch with normal, if not exactly “natural,” sleeping habits, and thus I never know when he will call me and I never know when not to call him.) “Working,” I added guiltily.
“Ah, yes. On your novel.”
There was no point in my denying it, so I said nothing. The room was filled with soft, dark shadows, as if it were under water, and I sensed a snowstorm coming.
“Well, I wanted to know if she’s all right.”
“Who?”
“Oh, sorry! Dora. Or the one you call Dora. I’ve been reading your Chapter Ten and sitting here pondering her fate, and I must confess it, you’ve given me cause for concern, even alarm.”
“Alarm?” This surprised me. “For whom?”
“Why, for Dora. Or whoever she is — A.’s fifth ex-wife. Is she all right?”
“All right? Well, yes, yes… I mean, I suppose so. She left him over a year ago, you know. Why, what’s wrong?”
“Is she back with her husband, the haberdasher?” he asked nervously.
“Oh, yes, certainly. They were married again, the day her divorce from Hamilton, A., came through. Sometime early this winter, as I recall. No. C., Dora’s fine now, fine. She’s even gone back to her old job at the typesetting company. I imagine her time with Hamilton, I mean A., seems like a bad dream to her now. Which, of course, is a shame.”
“How’s that again?”
“Eh? A shame. I said it’s a shame that she considers her few months with A. as she would a bad dream.”
“Well, if you asked me, and I’m beginning to think that you wouldn’t, but if you asked me, I’d tell you that I think she’s damned fortunate to be able to think of it as a bad dream. She’s lucky to be able to think at all!”
“Wha…?”
“The man’s dangerous. And surely you see that,” he said, his voice suddenly lowered.
“Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” I laughed. “Dangerous? Perplexing, yes. Frustrating, certainly. But dangerous? No, my dear friend, I think not.”
“You sound irrational, man,” he informed me quietly. Was there a tainting touch of condescension in his voice? I couldn’t tell. Perhaps he actually believed what he was saying, perhaps to him I did sound irrational. But to me, his assertion that Hamilton was dangerous, and was dangerous specifically to Dora, his ex-wife, was, well, hysterical. No, if anyone sounded irrational this gray predawn, it was my old friend C., the man I was accustomed to regard as an almost pure thinker.
“C.,” I said calmly, “what’s got you off on this ‘dangerous’ tangent? If you’re afraid for Dora’s welfare, for heaven’s sake, or her physical safety, you might as well be afraid for mine as well,” I said.
“Indeed.” His voice was still low, and then very carefully he began to try to “reason” with me, as he put it, though I must say right here and now that what he had to say did not sound particularly reasonable at all. I will concede that he was sincere, however, and that he was not condescending to me. And I do believe that the man was genuinely afraid that Dora, and possibly I myself, were in danger of being killed by Hamilton Stark. Yes, that’s right, killed. By Hamilton, my Hamilton, good old Ham Stark. My hero, for God’s sake!
The way C. saw it, he told me, the very inability of practically every intelligent or sensitive person who came into close contact with Hamilton to determine with confidence whether the man’s behavior was deliberate and intentional or out of control and compulsive — that very inability made the question of whether Hamilton was dangerous or not a very real question, one that any responsible person, as well as any other kind of person who chose to associate with Hamilton, had to try to answer. Then C. went down a quick list of people who, close to Hamilton in various ways, had been unable to determine whether his behavior was intentional or compulsive — Rochelle, who tried so hard for so long, and for all I know may still be trying as she reads this, and Rochelle’s mother, and Annie, Hamilton’s second wife, and probably Alma, his mother, although, from the evidence, one couldn’t be sure, and Dora, and then, of course, me. On the other hand, people like Jody and Chub Blount, probably Sarah and her husband, Sam Mooney, too, and Hamilton’s third and fourth wives, Jenny the nurse and Maureen the waif, and most of the townspeople who knew Hamilton considerably less than intimately — these people all were convinced that the man was stark raving mad, out of control, dangerous. They had no doubts. Whether they could come up with a sure diagnosis or not didn’t matter; they believed he was ill and that the nature of his illness put them in various kinds of danger.