There was a brief period when he and I were still willing to argue politics. I am a moderate Christian Socialist and at the time of this writing have cast my presidential ballot for the following individuals: Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, Rogers Morton (write-in), and Morris Udall (write-in). Hamilton, though he has voted in every presidential election since 1948, has voted for only one man — Ezra Taft Benson. At least that is what he tells me. And I have no reason to doubt that if Hamilton votes in 1976, he will vote yet again for Mr. Benson, even though by then Benson may well be dead and out of the running altogether. And who knows, Hamilton may write in Benson’s name anyway. He used to quote Benson to me until, my ears burning, I begged him to stop. “You want to hear what a wise man said? ‘It’s just too bad, it’s really sad, but there has to be a loser.’ Now that’s my idea of presidential wisdom!” Hamilton would exclaim. “I love that … ‘it’s really sad,’ heh heh heh. You talk about your Kennedy wit. What about the Benson wit?”
I suppose in a certain perverse light Benson’s remarks could have been seen as witty, but to me they seemed cruel and shallow. The difficulty in arguing politics with Hamilton was that I could never tell for sure whether or not he was being serious. It was never clear that, by taking such an extreme position and then defending it with quotes from someone like Ezra Taft Benson, he wasn’t mocking me. Here are some other sentences Hamilton quoted and claimed were uttered by the man: “There’s no way a man can live a useful life without stepping on a few people’s toes.” “It’s in the nature of freedom not to know what a man will do with it.” And, “The best defense is the one you never have to use.” Actually, this last sentence I heard myself as it came from the crinkled lips of the ancient parchment-skinned Ezra Taft Benson. He gave the graduation speech at Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, Ausable Chasm, New York, in 1969. I was in the audience because Hamilton Stark was in the audience; he was there, first, because his hero Ezra Taft Benson was giving the graduation speech, and second, because his daughter Rochelle was giving the valedictory speech. Frankly, I think Benson’s speech meant more to Hamilton than his daughter’s did — Hamilton either fell asleep or pretended to fall asleep during the latter — but for me, that day was momentous. It was the day I first met Rochelle, Hamilton’s daughter. Benson could have collapsed from a heart attack during his speech and I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. And the only reason that today I can recall the merest scrap of his speech—“The best defense is the one you never have to use”—is because Hamilton quoted it to me a dozen or more times during the drive back to Barnstead.
I had never met Rochelle, though of course I knew of her existence, had listened to Hamilton talk about her for years, and had seen pictures of her, first her grade school photographs, then junior high school, and most recently, four years ago, her high school yearbook photograph. So, in a manner of speaking, I knew what to expect. I had seen her image change, gradually, year by year: from that of a bright-faced, wide-eyed, mischievous three-year-old (taken at nursery school), in which she wore a kelly green daysuit that contrasted beautifully with her then flame red hair; to the image of a gap-toothed seven-year-old grinning proudly into the camera, her now deeper red hair in braids tied around her head, her green eyes flashing with innocent affection; to the image of a sober-faced, sexually serious adolescent, an intense face already full of intellectual grace and sensual force, with a touch of the bewilderment that such rare presences in such inordinate quantities must have caused her; and on to the most recent image, the tall, almost statuesque, even though delicate and slender, young woman, her deep red hair now tumbling roughly, densely, over her shoulders, her eyes warm, intelligent, disciplined, her mouth in a slight smile as if about to speak, full and promising, her neck long, proud, elegant. And of course, because these photographs were all inscribed to her absent, never seen nor even directly remembered daddy, I was able to trace the development of her character over the years by studying the changes in her handwriting and the language she used to inscribe her photographs. From her nursery school photograph (precociously, I thought):
And then, sadly asserting her relation to him, a six-year-old who could no longer even recall the presence of the man, who knew him only as a name and burning need:
Here she is at ten, obviously after having read a bit of Shakespeare (one wonders what her mother made of the little girl’s reading habits: a fifth-grade child poring over Lear?):
And here, in her own, mature, self-aware hand, at the age of seventeen, describing the true nature of her relationship with the man while at the same time offering him its positive denial, which was, of course, the nature of her daily experience of the man:
It was never clear to me why Rochelle was graduating from college in Ausable Chasm, a small tourist town, once a mill town, located in upstate New York a few miles from Lake Champlain. I could not imagine anyone sending his child to such a college for academic reasons (unless the child were unable to matriculate anywhere else), and so far as I knew, Rochelle’s mother still resided in Lakeland, Florida, as had Rochelle, at least through her senior year of high school. It didn’t make sense to me that she should attend a small, nondescript college fifteen hundred miles from home, especially when there were so many right around home to choose from. I asked Hamilton about it during the drive west and north from his home in Barnstead. He had called me the week before to ask if I would accompany him to his daughter’s graduation, mentioning, as if it would help me decide to come, that the featured speaker would be Ezra Taft Benson. He did not mention, of course, that his own daughter would give the valedictory speech, or that it would be in Latin (of her own choosing — the first time in the history of Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science that the graduation speech had been given in Latin!). He told me about that, offhandedly, in Burlington, Vermont.
“Why,” I asked him as he drove his car onto the ferry at Burlington and we began the crossing of Lake Champlain, “why does your daughter happen to be graduating from a small, obscure college in upstate New York, when all along I thought she was living in central Florida with her mother and presumably would have gone to either a well-known, prestigious college in the New England states or else one near her home? Did they move north while she was in high school?” I prodded. I suspected there was a story here to be told me by someone.
It was a beautiful, sunshiny, mid-June day stuffed with bright yellows and jade greens. The mountains, the broad valleys, the almost giddy blue of the lake — it made me want to be either a farmer in this valley or a tourist. I could not decide which role would give me more of the place. It’s an ancient dilemma: We can never choose between the experience itself and our memory of it.
Hamilton’s answer didn’t make much sense to me. Not then, anyhow, except to let me know that he didn’t wish to discuss it. He simply told me that the girl was obviously trying to get closer to her father now that she was no longer wholly dependent on her mother, but that Ausable Chasm was as close as she dared come to where he happened to be. So I let the subject drop and tried to enjoy the day, the smooth lake, the immense sky above it.