And so Hodge had toyed in the back of his mind with another kind of cynicism, and this, too, before Luke was born. He had dismissed his father’s achievements as matters of no importance, blind chance. It was a matter of fact that Will himself was not cut out for the great deeds his father had done; but the case was not so clear with Ben or Tag. They were both of them, like the Old Man, visionaries, yet they could argue fine points like Jesuits, had memories for facts and figures, and they both had a way with people. But Ben had bad eyesight—a chance collision of unlucky chromosomes the night of his conception—and perhaps in fact a general weakness of sense mechanisms, so that his hold on physical reality was tentative. He was moved more by books than by life (not that Will stopped to think all this out in the dry way a novelist is forced to present it); if he revelled in Sense—in the cry of a meadowlark or the rumble of one of his big machines—there was something faintly theoretical about his revelling. His sensations, though intense, were those of a man in a museum. It was different with Tag. All he, Tag, lacked was the Old Man’s invariable good luck in the conspiracy of outer events. He’d worked on a chair one time when he was six. Will Hodge Sr remembered it well. He was more Tag’s father than the Old Man was himself, after all. By the time Tag came, the Congressman was old and too busy with the world to be father to a young child. It was Will, the oldest of the sons, who played with Tag, took him to work in the field with him, drove him to school, to basketball games or speech contests or dances. He’d come across him, when Tag was six, working out in the chickenhouse, putting a new wooden seat on a long-discarded kitchen chair. Will had just stood for a minute, watching unobserved. Tag worked quickly and painstakingly, as if he had figured out in advance every last detail of the job he’d set himself. He’d made a pattern with a piece of oil-stained cardboard, had drawn it onto the wood and had laboriously cut it out with the keyhole saw. He was nailing it in place now, skillfully for a child of six. Will said, thumbs hooked in his overalls bib, “You gonna be a carpenter someday, Tag?” Tag smiled with a beauty of innocence that was moving to Will. “If you want me to,” he said. It wasn’t fake or goody-goody in Tag. It was a quality of loving gentleness he’d been born with. In the first months of his life he was a sympathetic cryer, and throughout his childhood he was peacemaker to the family. In fact, like Ben, he was born to be a saint, gentle and unselfish—he even had the look of a saint: straight blond hair as soft as gossamer, dark blue eyes, long lashes, a quick, open smile—and unlike Ben, he saw what was there, not angels in pear trees but pears. “Little Sunshine,” their father called him. Yet Tag had failed in the end, for all his innocence and goodness, had been beaten by the conspiracy of events. So the Old Man might have failed, if his luck had been bad.
It was true enough. The trouble with the theory was that the Congressman had been right about free will. It was a matter of fact, a thing not worth bothering to deny, to Will Hodge Sr, that freedom had limits, both within and without, which is to say merely that a man engaged in throwing a tantrum or a man starving is incapable of perfectly objective reason. Hodge’s father had written once to his minister brother: “A passionate man may feel overwhelming pangs of guilt, but only a reasonable man, sir, can achieve the high distinction of going to Hell.” Oh, the Congressman had been free, all right. Only a mind released from all passion could roll out such unashamedly grandiose prose.
That, too, his father’s freedom, Hodge had no doubt been aware of long before he understood it. He’d been aware of it, perhaps, as a young man, newly married, standing between the high iron gates of Stony Hill Farm and looking up past the shaded lawn at the porch where his father sat, grossly obese, white-haired, calmly blind, surveying the universe inside his skull. When it came to the Old Man that there was someone at the gate, he called down sharply, “William, is it you?”
“Yes sir,” he had answered. But he had not gone on for a moment. It was late afternoon, the shadows were long and the hills had a yellow cast, unreal, like hills in a painting. There was a smell of winter in the air, but the breeze was warm, as soft as January thawwind. The trees, the lawn, the fields, the long knolls sloping away toward the town of Alexander were all motionless and utterly silent. Signs of a change coming.
His father called, “Come up.”
When he stood before the Old Man on the porch he realized that something had happened, perhaps knew even what it was, though he had no words for the thing as yet. His father, too, had perhaps read something in the weather, he imagined. He did not at first notice his youngest brother in the shadows at the end of the porch, leaning on the wall with his hands in his pockets and his face as gray as ashes. Tag was fifteen now, still pale and gentle as a girl.
Hodge said, not because he believed it but in hopes of escaping a scene with Millie, “You ought to be inside, Dad. You’ll catch cold out here. A man your age—”
“Sit down,” he said. He continued to stare with his blind eyes at where he knew the front fence was, and the road beyond. The snowwhite hair above his ears was brittle and uncombed, as wiry as a dog’s hair, but someone—Ruth, not Millie, God knew—had trimmed the hair in his nostrils and ears. He sat as Hodge had seen him sit a thousand times—as Hodge, too, sat, and as his sons would sit—teeth closed lightly, lower jaw extended out beyond the upper, his elbows on his knees, fists locked together.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s come to me that I’ve made a mistake. Somewhere in the course of—” He tightened his lips, concentrating. “All of us, or the times, mebby. No matter who made it. We have troubles coming. Troubles coming. Be ready, suffer them philosophically. Trust the Lord.”
Hodge squinted, panicky. Only later would he realize that he was afraid, that moment, that he was seeing his father’s first lapse into real senility. He said, hoping Millie was out of earshot, “Money troubles, Dad?”
The old man half-turned his head toward him impatiently. “Who knows what kind of troubles?” he said. “Germany.”
Hodge laughed—it was like barking—and it was now that he noticed Tag standing with his hands over his face, very still.
But his father was saying, as if thinking it out for the first time, “There are always politicians. Good politicians. The people all flounder this way and that way, unsure what they want, unsure how to get it, unsure whether it’s good for them, and the politician comes along to distinguish for them what they want more clearly than they want it yet, shows them the disadvantages …” He stopped. He’d been down that road many times. More and more he repeated himself, struggling for the old clearheadedness in a stifling attic of increasingly baffling, antiquated opinions. He turned his head more, the blind eyes staring at Will as though they could see him. “Suppose we were to have war with Hitler, and suppose Hitler were to win?” he said.
“Dad, you’re stewing again,” Hodge said. “Let me help you inside.” Uncomfortably, he glanced again at Tag.
“Will, is that you out there?” Millie called.
Hodge jumped.
“No!” his father roared. “Not stewing. Thinking. Hitler could win. If not this one, the next one, or the next. From this point forward there’ll be Hitlers for a thousand years.” He thumped the porch with his cane.
“Well, we won’t be here to see it,” Hodge said. And then, in spite of himself: “What do you mean?”
“Will,” Millie called.
“I mean America,” he said. In his mouth the word was local, familiar. He might have been talking about the country. “I mean—” But the lucid moment was gone. “The devil,” he grumbled.
“You think we’re all Hitlers?” Hodge said, grinning, self-conscious because of his brother’s presence. He had no clear idea what he meant by a Hitler; he asked it from the wish of one part of his divided mind to keep the talk going until he understood.
“I mean—righteousness,” the Old Man said. “Insufficient failure—or too much failure—loss of the balanced vote. Unreason—or an excess of reason. The plots theory—”
Exas
perated, Hodge said, “I was right the first time. You’re not thinking, you’re stewing. Let’s go in.”
But again he said no, and now, directly challenged, he straightened out his mind. “Listen,” he said. “You believe in reason. You believe in democracy. Reflection of Natural Law, you think. But suppose people stopped being reasonable. Suppose they got spread too far apart to know what the balance of the country was thinking, or the balance of the world. E pluribus unum. Hah. Can India grow reasonable? China? I don’t say suppose the right side goes under, I say suppose all sides are right as it seems to them and they all blur together and their beliefs grow confused and the pluribus becomes so complicated and, more important, so dense that no human mind or even group of minds can fathom the unum. Religion declines, and patriotism; law and justice become abstruse questions of metaphysics; the younger generation grows dangerous and irrational, shameless, selfish, anarchistic. Then someone steps up with some mad idea that’s just simple enough to look sensible, simple enough that busy shoemakers can know the affairs of the world are in competent hands, they needn’t concern themselves—as in Plato’s Republic. Hah! What if?”
Millie appeared in the doorway. The Old Man turned his head, then went on, merely raising his voice a little, to avoid interruption.
“I say this: What keeps this country sailing on an even keel is not mortality or divine favor: nothing of the kind. What keeps it going is the professionals, the professional politicians who know that after this vote there’s going to be another and another, for all the rumpus; you don’t put all your inheritance on one horse, no matter how it looks in the ring. However bitter the fight may look, among the professionals nobody’s hitting with all his might. That’s what makes continuity. If the professionals fail—if the people with all their indifference and all their monstrous opinions, or their no-opinions … There are always politicians. Good politicians. The people all flounder this way and that, unsure what they want. …” The vague look was back. To hide his confusion he thumped the porch again.
“Dad,” Tag said.
Then Hodge’s mother was standing in the doorway, a little behind Millie, wringing her hands, saying: “Politics!”
Hodge said, though he would have gone on with it if the women weren’t there, “Well, the world will make out.”
“Will, I want to talk to you,” Millie said, pushing at the screen.
He ignored her.
The Old Man studied him for a long time, or so it seemed: scrutinized his memory of him. Then he turned his head slowly and looked at Tag. Suddenly, as if discovering something—some terrible and holy secret that had slipped his mind—he smiled. He said, “Yes, no doubt you will. The world will learn. Sure as day.”
Hodge could not explain, afterward, the peculiar power of that moment for him. The words were trifling, absurd if one looked them over too closely. The expression on the Old Man’s face was not uplifting, not glorious, though it is true that his slightly shaking chin jutted upward and out as though he were about to fly. An image for a poster. Nevertheless, Hodge was powerfully moved, jolted as if by electric shock of love: the head ten inches from his own was suddenly gigantic, and looking into the hairy ear Hodge seemed to see past all galaxies into the void where, behold, there was light. All the rest of his life he would not be able to speak of that moment without a sharp upsurge of mysterious, perhaps childish elation, and also fear, and all the rest of his life he would be troubled, occasionally, by a new attack of that extraordinary feeling: a sense of the world transfigured, himself transformed to the pure idea of older brother in a fated house, a family destined for glory or terrible sorrow, he couldn’t say which. He did not go out in pursuit of such moments. He fled them, if anything. They thrilled every fiber of his body, shifted his mind to a higher gear than it normally used (as if some door opened, as doors occasionally opened in his dreams, revealing, beyond some mundane room, vast recesses obscurely lighted and charged with warm wind and a deep red color, beautiful and alarming): he thought them dangerous, possibly mortal, like the shocking pleasure (he imagined) of falling from a roof. Or rather, to speak precisely, he for the most part thought about them nothing whatever, merely dreaded them in the back of his mind, and went on with the work at hand.
The Congressman would have done the same. Two hours before that conversation on the porch—it was this that Millie had been eager to tell him, this that had shattered his younger brother—his father had suffered a heart attack. Hodge’s mother was badly shaken, Millie excited, but the Old Man, even before the doctor could make it from Alexander, was coolly talking politics. And not to evade reality. To Hodge’s father, politics was more interesting than dying. Dying (if he was dying, which as it turned out he was not, yet) was merely an annoying—a disgusting—interruption.
Neither could Hodge explain even now, over thirty years later, what it was that the nations—and he himself, perhaps—were going to learn. He’d long ago quit worrying about it. The troubles had come, his father had been right enough about that—both international troubles and private—and were coming still. But they managed, Hodge and the world. If his father had discovered the formula that would quiet their unrest (and perhaps he had: he’d given a bewildering emphasis to those final words, “Sure as day”), he’d taken the secret with him to the grave. They would muddle through without it.
And so, renouncing cynicism, in the back of his mind he had taken the road Will Jr would take: emulation. Had allowed himself to be tyrannized by the Old Man’s achievements. It was no one’s fault—the fault of a ghost: the casual effect of time, of inevitable change, generations of Presbyterian ministers, gentleman farmers, public servants, lawyers, judges, all rising together in the apparition of one man who in his prime had a quick, deep brain and the eyes of a Moses and a voice like ricocheting thunder calling down God’s wrath on Federalization. The brain was gone from the light of the sun, had shattered into its specialties in the Old Man’s sons and daughter, but the eyes were still living, and the voice. Will Jr had the voice; Hodge had it himself, and Ben and Tag—in fact every one of his four brothers and almost all their sons; but you seldom heard it fully opened now, except when they laughed or, meeting at a wedding or a funeral, argued politics. It was the image, ghost, archaic (as even Will Jr knew) but still compelling, that had once made Hodge seem to himself a fool and now made him a disappointment to his elder son. He accepted it, now that the partnership was so much water gone under the bridge. For Hodge was a singularly reasonable man, as his father, despite stubbornness, had been before him. (The stiffness of the Old Man’s back—exaggerated in the faded photograph which hung, thoroughly inconspicuous, centered above faded, obsolete world maps and a 1937 chart of the kings and chief ministers of the sundry nations, behind Hodge’s desk—was an effect merely of time and place: a matter of style. Hodge, too, and even Will, had flaring nostrils, coarse hair in the nose and ears and curling on the backs of the fingers, but no stranger would have mistaken them for avenging angels, trumpets of Justice in days of rank corruption. The times were wrong, not incorrupt and not out of joint but subtly mellowed, decayed to ambiguity: If right and wrong were as clear as ever, they were clear chiefly on a private scale, and though God was in his Heaven yet, He had somewhat altered, had become archetypal of a new, less awesome generation of fathers: Wisdom watching the world with half-averted eyes, chewing His ancient lip thoughtfully, mildly, venturing an occasional rueful smile.)