ROCHELLE: “Are you happy to know that your daughter is graduating from college?”
HAMILTON: “Seems like a good idea.”
ME: “What are your plans, now that you’re graduating from college?”
ROCHELLE: “Everything depends on one thing.”
ME: “And what is that?”
ROCHELLE: “I’m not sure yet, and I can’t tell what I think it is.”
HAMILTON: “What kind of a car is that, the little convertible sports job with the raggedy roof?”
ROCHELLE AND ME: “I don’t know. Custom made, maybe?”
HAMILTON: “Don’t you hate custom-made cars?”
ROCHELLE: “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
ME: “why?”
HAMILTON: “Who knows? Maybe I’m just trying to make conversation.”
ME: “Oh.”
ROCHELLE: “Have you been friends with my father for a long time?”
ME: “Relative to what?”
HAMILTON: “Yeah, relative to what?”
ROCHELLE: “I don’t know. Forget it. I was just trying to make conversation.”
ME: “Oh.”
HAMILTON: “Where are we supposed to sit?”
ROCHELLE: “I don’t know. Anywhere in the auditorium, I guess. Wherever you want to sit.”
HAMILTON: “All right if we go and sit now?”
ROCHELLE: “If that’s what you want.”
HAMILTON: “That’s what we want. Right?”
ME: “I guess so, you’re the host today. Or are you the host, Rochelle? I mean the hostess.”
ROCHELLE: “I’ll show you where the auditorium is. Then I’ll have to leave you and join my classmates for the march. I’ll be sitting on the platform.”
HAMILTON: “With Benson?”
ROCHELLE: “I don’t know. I presume so.”
ME: “Well, should we wish you luck, Rochelle? Or are you the overconfident type?”
ROCHELLE: “Who knows? Relative to what, eh?”
ME (LAUGHING): “Right.”
HAMILTON: “Let’s go find a seat.”
ME: “Okay.”
ROCHELLE: “The auditorium’s right through those doors, straight ahead and to the right. Think you can find it all right?”
HAMILTON: “Sound simple enough.”
ME: “No problem. Right, Hamilton?”
HAMILTON: “No problem. Right, Rochelle?”
ROCHELLE: “No problem. Right?”
ME (LAUGHING AGAIN): “Are you making fun of me?”
ROCHELLE: “I don’t know. See you after the speeches.”
I REALIZE THAT I’m not explaining many things that the reader doubtless would like explained. Please believe me, I’m not leaving these questions unanswered merely because I have a perverse love of mystery. Quite the opposite; in fact, I despise mystery. Mystery is the last resort of the hysteric. It’s a frantic, final attempt to organize chaos, or rather, to give the appearance of having organized chaos. None of that for me. It’s too easy and too cheap a way out for a man who feels, as I do, morally compelled to abide with chaos all the way to the end, until either he has succeeded in answering all the questions at hand, unraveling all the tangles, explaining all the puzzles, solving all the riddles, or else he has succumbed to the snarl of chaos altogether. For such a man, for me, the middle, where “mystery” lies, is definitely excluded. I am an emotional man, yes, but I am not a romantic man. And though I may never ascend quite to those airy levels of pure reason where, for example, my friend C. strolls about so comfortably, at least I am clear about the nature of my goal and can measure with accuracy the distance I remain from it. This particular clarity and the measuring that results therefrom comprise, for me, the only possibilities for a moral life. All else is either fantasy or determinism.
For this reason, that day at Ausable Chasm I persisted in trying to find out why Rochelle was graduating from college here in the North. Ordinarily, if Hamilton indicated that he didn’t wish to discuss a subject, I deferred to him and changed the subject, never bringing it up again unless and until he indicated readiness. But my fascination with Rochelle, then, at the actual sight of her, drove me to push in ways I would have otherwise found rude, if not downright boorish, in myself as well as in anyone else.
“What’s the story?” I asked him. “What’s the explanation? How come?”
All of which he answered with a shrug, a downturned mouth with pouting lower lip, like a carp’s, a helpless flop of open hands at his sides. And after a while it occurred to me that he didn’t know the answer either, that it was likely, when he had learned that his daughter was graduating from Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science, that he had been as surprised and puzzled as I.
I therefore ceased asking the man about it and promised myself to ask Rochelle instead. Unfortunately, whenever I was with her, I became so addled by her physical and spiritual presence that I forgot my promise altogether, and now, six years after making that promise, I still have not kept it, and thus I do not know why Rochelle graduated from an obscure college in upstate New York rather than one in central Florida. This distresses me. For now it is too late to keep that promise. Rochelle is gone from me except in memory and imagination. I will never know the answer to my question, and the reader will never know either.
TO RETURN: I handed Rochelle her drink and joined her in the bed. (This happens to be the imaginary point from which I can most easily recall the events of the day I spent in Ausable Chasm.) We were talking about the day we first met each other and how we had perceived each other then. She said that she had thought of me as a small man, short and slight, but later, after having seen me numerous times alone, realized that it was because I had been in the company of her father that first time and thus, when compared to his great height and overall bulk, had appeared much smaller than, in fact, I actually was. She was pleased, she told me, when she discovered that I was the same height as she and that, while my musculature was not exactly overdeveloped, 1 was nevertheless wiry and in quite good shape for a man my age.
Waving her compliments away, I gently asked her if she had seen her father and me from the speakers’ platform while she had been giving her speech. I wanted to know if she had seen my attentiveness. I confess it. Hurt somewhat by the comparison between her father’s and my physical size, I wished to have her compare my rapt attention with her father’s cruel inattention. So I risked causing pain. I risked the chance that, by invoking the image of her father sitting in the audience and apparently sleeping through her speech, with me perched on my chair, rapt and admiring next to him, she would feel again the pain that moment must have caused her.
“You were an angel,” she said, smiling into my face. She had cut through my ruse in one stroke, had comforted me without mocking me and at the same time had spared herself the pain of the memory. What a woman! Then, with laughter, she began to talk about Ezra Taft Benson’s speech. “Remember it?” she asked me. “That funny little old man with all that crazy fervor?”
Actually, I recalled nothing of Benson’s speech, except for the one line that Hamilton had continually quoted to me all the way back home in the car. I promptly related it to her: “The best defense is the one you never have to use,” I said.
She giggled, then reminded me that when Benson had uttered those words Hamilton had broken into applause, mortifying me, perhaps astonishing Benson, and inducing a few scattered, sheeplike souls in the audience to join him. I had completely forgotten that awful moment and for a few seconds relived my embarrassment, which had been quite painful. I wasn’t so much embarrassed because I was sitting next to a person who seemed to be reacting to a banality with inappropriate enthusiasm, as I was embarrassed because that man happened to be my hero. I did not point this out to Rochelle. I didn’t have to. After all, he was her hero too.