Hodge bent his head and looked up-from-under at him through his shaggy eyebrows. He slid his jaw out. “Write it to Taggert Hodge,” he said.
The old man blanched. Hodge had expected something like that, had more or less expected the jerk of the lips, too, and the closing of the checkbook. “My lawyer will be in touch with you,” Paxton said.
Hodge nodded. “Fine.”
But as once more he turned to leave, the old man said, “What’s your game, Hodge? You knew I wouldn’t do that.” Eyes mere slits.
Hodge pursed his lips. At last, slowly, as if thoughtfully, watching his stubby, scuffed shoes as he moved, he crossed to Paxton’s desk. The old man waited, and though he seemed in command as usual, Hodge could sense that all his power was drained from him now, because for once in his life he couldn’t tell which battlements to defend. That was what Hodge was counting on, though now he was already suspecting he’d made a mistake. But Paxton’s hands were liver-spotted, his mouth pale. Wolf without teeth. It could work, he thought, and doubted it. He put his hands in his suitcoat pockets and balled them to fists. He said, “You control grown sons like babies. They haven’t got a dime of their own.”
“That’s my business,” Paxton said, baffled. He wasn’t confident of it. You could see the wheels spinning in his head.
Hodge met his red-veined eyes as still as dust and pressed quickly. “Set them up in something. Put them on their feet.”
“You know I can’t do that. What in hell are you talking about?”
“Why can’t you?”
Paxton hung fire. “My sons hired you?”
It was a question he’d forgotten to expect. He said again, “Why can’t you?”
After a moment, quietly, the old man said, “Because they’re sick, irresponsible, and dumb.”
Hodge nodded, panicky. “I’ll see you in court.” The phrase, totally unplanned, pleased him and gave him a feeling of hope.
But Paxton shook his head. “Wait up.” He took a deep breath and then another, the deep breaths of a man very sick himself. “What have they promised you?” he asked.
“Nothing.” It was the truth, strictly speaking, but he was on bad ground. The sons had said they couldn’t help Taggert with Kathleen’s treatment, because the old man held the pursestrings. He’d thought at the time, They’re weaklings. They’d do it if we found the right pressure.
Still the old eyes searched him, cunning and baffled and something else too; after an instant Hodge caught what it was: wounded.
“Little fools,” he said. “Going to you of all people! I never would have believed they had the guts.”
“But you’ll take the deal,” Hodge said. He had lost.
Paxton shook his head, but it didn’t mean no; not yet. “They’re fools,” he said. There was pity in it as well as disgust. Then, icily: “You should have advised your clients they’ll be disinherited. You warned them?”
Hodge had gone too far—the old man would talk to his sons and the whole shabby trick would be out. “My clients?” he said, clumsily. “Your sons are no clients of mine. You jump to conclusions.”
Paxton’s rage flared up and died away again in an instant. A semi came rumbling past the window, and whatever it was that the old man said to himself Hodge missed. The phone rang on the desk. Paxton ignored it. He closed his eyes for a moment, frowning, and breathed deeply again. “I see,” he said at last, and Hodge knew it was true. Assuming all motives in the world were hate and selfishness, Paxton had guessed right again. “You think you can get them to support their sister.” He did not bother to look up for confirmation. He was himself again, firm and full of lightning. “You miscalculate. They’ll be bankrupt inside six months.” He remembered the checkbook. As if in terrible weariness or worse, he opened the desk drawer with his right hand and with his left slid the checkbook over and let it fall in. He got up and went to the window to look without interest at his trackbarns. “You all think I’m wrong,” he said. “All of you. Even her.” Hodge couldn’t tell if he meant Kathleen or his wife.
The old man’s office was cold. Hodge lowered his chin to his chest and waited for it to be over.
But then something happened, inside Paxton’s mind. Hodge would never know what, though he had his guesses. Without turning from the window, Paxton said, “All right.” A silence, and then, after another moment, “You win.” He took another deep breath. He would say no more.
Hodge withdrew. He had succeeded, he had not won. But he’d gone there, at least he’d done that.
It was in April, two months later, that Paxton went into the hospital with the first of his heart attacks. Hodge understood.
Now he frowned. Stores were closing, the lights of the city dying out. It came to him that in his moon-gathering—his self-pity, to name its name—he had failed to register the arrival of the square dark red Hudson, shiny as wine, which he recognized instantly, now that he noticed it, as Judge Sam White’s old car. It was parked in front of the police station, empty. He’d gone in, then; no doubt to talk to Clumly. It was not usual for the Judge to come out in the world except for brief midday visits to his office. Uphill was gone from in front of the firehouse, and so had most of the men who’d been sitting there. Hodge tipped his head, musing, then opened his door quietly and got out. Hands in pockets, he walked in the direction of the fire-house until he had a clear view of Clumly’s office through the window. He couldn’t see the Judge, but Clumly was there all right, standing in the middle of the room, nodding to someone and looking at a paper in his hands.
Behind Hodge, someone said, “Funny things going on over there.” A high thin country voice.
He turned. It was one of the firemen, a young man with milky white hair and thick glasses. Hodge nodded, trying to make out the fireman’s features. He gave the fireman no answer, and the silence grew.
“Winter’s coming,” the young man said at last. “They’ll be hoarfrost soon. You wouldn’t believe it, a hot night like this, but it’s coming. First hoarfrost. After that—ice.”
“It’s hot all right,” Hodge said. “Not a breath stirring.”
Clumly was still there, nodding at the paper in his hands.
“The horses have long coats,” the fireman said. “Happened early last year, too. Storms coming, bad ones. We’ll be fighting fires and they’ll be ice on our boots. I don’t like it.”
Hodge looked at him. Still he could make out no features, only the whiteness of the young man’s face and hair against the darkness of the firehouse wall. The glasses glittered with pinpoints of light. At last Hodge grunted as a sign of agreement and moved away toward his car.
“You believe in omens?” the man called after him.
Hodge sucked his upper lip under his lower and was silent.
Ten minutes later, Hodge seated in his car again, the Judge came out, walking slowly, as if not from age and drunkenness but by laborious choice, and climbed tortuously into his car and ground on the starter, with the key off perhaps, and at last got the motor going. Oil fumes billowed up. The square car started very smoothly and inched down the street, solemn and oblivious, like an old Phaeton carriage from another time and place, unhurried, dire of purpose.
Then Clumly’s office light went off, and the same instant—not by coincidence, Hodge had a feeling—the bearded Freeman appeared beside the Plymouth, opening the door.
“You brought food?” Hodge said—though even now, after all this time, he wasn’t hungry.
“I forgot,” Freeman said lightly and shrugged like a minstrel-show Negro. He was watching the police station.
Clumly came down the steps, glancing left and right. He came hurrying, bent forward at the waist, but he did not go around the side to the garage but continued walking, out to the Main Street sidewalk and then to the left, toward the center of town. It must be after eleven by now. Hodge watched him hurrying along, bent and suspicious, and not until he was nearly out of sight—beyond the darkened theater marquee, and beyond the blue light that f
ell across the sidewalk from the clock in Brenner’s Jewelry Store window—did Hodge start up his car. He pulled over again and switched off the headlights in front of Fargo’s Dairy Bar, dark except for the night-light. Clumly hurried on, his head down, his mind far, far away. Hodge started up the car again, then realized that the old man was turning toward the Presbyterian church. He switched off the ignition.
“We’ll walk it from here,” he said.
Sadly, Freeman shook his head.
“You can stay, you understand,” Hodge said.
“I’ll come,” the young man said. “Shoot.”
They started out. When they reached the corner Clumly was standing on the church steps, smoking his cigar. Hodge stepped back out of sight, drawing Freeman with him. Again, sadly, Freeman shook his head. When Hodge peeked around the corner, Clumly had vanished.
“He went in,” Freeman said.
“How you know?”
Freeman shrugged, infinitely sad.
Hodge nodded grimly and murmured, “Let’s go.”
And so they sat in the muggy darkness, peeking down out of the balcony, squinting unbelieving as spectators at a witches’ dance. Will Hodge sucked deep for air, as Paxton had done fifteen years ago and, like Paxton, could not get it. “They’re both stark raving mad,” he whispered. The boy’s face was frozen to a wince. Again Hodge sucked for air, but he was drowning. The church walls rang with Taggert’s voice as they would to a tolling of bells. Hodge had been grief-stricken enough at sight of the police photograph, but that had been, all the same, abstract. He had not recalled until this moment, his brother’s rich voice ringing sweetly and terribly in the darkness of the church, the unbearable pain of love. So, once, like Paxton, he had sucked for air in his bedroom, in the darkness, looking out on the brightly moonlit lawn where under the walnut trees Millie stood naked and beautiful and the boy he had hired three weeks ago, Raymond, stood six feet away from her, naked, erected, advancing slowly, like a dancer (a boy he too had known from the start to be gentle and wise in a boy’s way, graceful, not eager to cause him pain: whom Hodge had for three weeks watched her seducing, gently, gently, or he’d watched the boy seducing her—for who could say where the blame belonged, since each of them was playing the game by rules not clearly understood, playing it toward an outcome neither of them anticipated except in secret, an end they no doubt imagined would never come, not in life, could come only in books: so that only he, Will Hodge, had known the whole deadly process with certainty, by the knotting of his belly, and he’d done nothing, hadn’t known what to do—had barked “Millie!” once when she overleaped all the bounds of decorum (but overleaped only in play of course, play)—and had once said, “Millie, stop teasing that boy,” but she’d said, “Why not? Good God, I’m old enough to be his mother!” which wasn’t true, strictly, and he’d said so and had been made a fool of, as usual, because she was wrong by only—“Bald-headed Jesus!” she said—“three years!”—had had no choice but to do nothing because if he tried the only thing possible, an appeal to tradition, common decency, shame, it would make him appear just the stodgy fool he was: it was only play). When Raymond went to the movies after work—set off with some pretty, harmless girl from some neighbor’s farm—Millie would say lightly, “Give us a hug good-bye, Ray,” and laughing, playing, he would hug her, then he would come over blushing and would soberly, fondly, grip Will Hodge’s hand. Hodge stood at the window, his stomach gone lead, his chest so light he felt he was falling endlessly, and he knew himself helpless and moreover guilty and foul. He could shoot them, he thought ruefully, and he would have smiled if it weren’t for the pain at his heart. And wondered if there were really men so stupid and vicious as to shoot their unfaithful wives and their wives’ lovers. He understood that he hated them both fiercely, and fiercely loved them. He was overcome with sobbing. They clung to each other—Hodge stood watching the blurred white image—and then, gently, gently, went down on the grass.
He said nothing, afterward. She grew more loving and tender than before and he thought that it had been good for her, his own puritanical ideas were wrong and pernicious. Sometimes, after that, she would go walking with Raymond, or would ride into town with Raymond when he went for feed. Hodge walked gingerly, whenever they were gone, and was sick with jealousy and grief, and watched the clock. At supper Millie and Raymond would joke, their quick wits leaping, their eyes bright as stars, and Hodge would feel dizzy with love and joy that would fall away later like a stone down a well when he awakened in the middle of the night and found her gone. When he heard them talking in the kitchen he would creep up on them, heart hammering, convinced that they were doing it again. They never were. When he questioned her, as cautiously as possible, she was evasive, sometimes smiled. He had done nothing, could find no purpose, no justification except his pain, which perhaps was self-pity. He would close his fists on the pillow, full of tears.
Taggert seemed to explode. Something darted backwards. There was red light and smoke and then nothing, only poor old Clumly staggering to his feet and groping forward toward where the flash had been, Freeman leaning, far far forward, trying to make out where Taggert had gone; but he’d vanished. Clumly was at the pulpit now, moaning his outrage.
“Jesus,” Freeman said. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Hodge said. It was not sufficient, he understood. It was what he’d been saying all his life—what he’d said when Taggert was first beginning to dip into the till, what he’d said with Millie, with Luke, with Will Jr, with Ben, with Mary Lou’s husband. One had to act, for better or worse, act. But act against whom? A pitiful policeman gone crazy? His own mad brother? “Well keep watching,” he said. Conviction flared up. “We’ll follow him.” Taggert would leave soon, yes; flee to some retreat. When he was gone, out of danger, they would go to the police, reveal the whole thing, put Clumly away where he belonged and bring Taggert back when the men at the police station were calmer, less likely to shoot and ask questions later.
Like an old Egyptian priest, Clumly came slowly down the aisle toward them, carrying a black box. Hodge ducked down and drew Freeman after him.
“That’s it,” Hodge said, knowing he was dangerously wrong, as usual, “we’ll keep an eye on him.” They heard the door open, below, then close. Hodge stood up. Freeman, almost invisible in his black hat and coat, went on sitting. “Are you coming?” Hodge whispered.
After a time Freeman said, “No. I’ll stay.”
“Why?” Hodge whispered. He realized that they were alone and said it aloud. “Why?”
Above the pulpit hung a cloud of dead gray smoke. The pale light of streetlamps shining through the stained-glass windows along the side wall threw shadows over the room. Nothing stirred. It was as if time had ended, and the world were not motion after all but an engine broken down.
“Don’t you believe in omens?” Freeman said.
“You were listening,” Hodge said. “You were watching when I talked to that fireman.”
“Yeah,” the boy whispered. “And I do believe in omens.”
Will Hodge inhaled. The night was hot. The sky god was misanthropic, his brother had said, and the underworld god was totally indifferent to man.
He saw their two white bodies in the moonlight, slowly dancing, reaching toward each other as if in sorrow. “Omens,” he said. His voice broke. Suddenly, boldly, seizing the word with all his force, he said: “Bosh!”
Then, trembling, Hodge left the church.
XIV
The Wilderness
And Misery’s increase
Is Mercy, Pity, Peace.
—William Blake
1
3 p.m. Louise Hodge stands at the window in her husband’s study, once the sunporch, looking out, unseeing, at the street. Danny is asleep upstairs, Madeline still at school. Louise holds the Pride in one hand, the dust-paper in the other. It is useless to try to clean up in here—folders, files, manilla envelopes everywhere, even the papers on the floor sacros
anct, the wastebaskets not to be dumped except by Will himself. Yet she comes, from time to time, full of high resolve, partly because standing here in Will’s cluttered study (the old pipes he has not smoked in years clumsily lined up in the crudely homemade piperack which stands on the windowsill, pipe-cleaners sticking out from the pipestems) she can sometimes feel her life is not, after all, completely senseless.
He’ll drive himself crazy, she thinks. He works night and day and hates it, or anyway no longer has any faith that the work he does makes sense, yet likes nothing else either—except singing in the choir, which he no longer has time for, or playing the cello, except that the longer he goes without playing the more frustrated he is when he gets to it again. Once we used to go to movies; not now.
She shares his indifference. Every time they go there’s some tiresome picture about sex—the hilarious adventures (as the posters say) of some girl who bats her eyelashes or some would-be gallant who cannot erect, or some fool who has too many fiancées (each and all indescribably dull)—or they go to some art film, some profound and daring psychological analysis (the posters claim) of a nymphomaniac or frigid woman or a rapist or molester of children. Is there nothing else left to talk about? What is worse, one cannot even admit to one’s boredom. The parties—the few they go to—are worse than the movies.
“What’s the matter with them all?” Louise Hodge asks the street. Their party friends, she means. It was better at home, in her childhood, when all people talked about was neighbors or accidents or the shortest route to Cincinnati, or they quoted long conversations that had no point, or told of their kidney stones.
But she knows well enough what the trouble is. They don’t know the same people, living, as they do, in twenty different suburbs—all identical but having nothing in common, nothing human anyway: not Mrs. Wartz, ninety-two, who just fell down the cellar stairs, or Charley Parish who married that girl from Rome, Italy, and her not half-grown. They could talk, if they talked of such things at all, only in wearisome abstractions, not of neighbors but of what neighbors in general are like—the coffee klatches, the crabgrass business, the children in the yard. Not of particular places but of the abstract idea of a shopping center, and then sometimes a spurt of excitement when you mention some huge, dull store where everybody’s been. And to complicate matters, one is—their circle is—polite. Too much comparison of neighbors or shopping centers can turn into rivalry. Undemocratic. What the women want to talk about the men find disgusting; what the men would say bores the women to tears; and for the men to leave the women would be unchivalrous. Or worse, would reveal that what all conversation turns on, sex, is fit only for the dark.