Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks Page A

you against him by only telling you the bad things about him, or only telling you things in a light that would make you think badly of the man your father. Let the child find out for herself, that’s what I always said, when people asked me if youknew what kind of a man your father was, and believe me, they asked, oh God, did they ever ask. They couldn’t believe it when you talked about him the way you did, when you bragged about his being a pipefitter, when you told people what a big shot he was, how he built the U.S. Air Force Academy all by himself, that place in Colorado, as if that weren’t one big lie. Brother, the things that man could tell a child. I remember my eyes filling with tears when I would hear you out on the back steps telling your little friends how your father had been a champion boxer. And when you told them he was a champion runner. And when you described his cars. His ability to play the saxophone. His enormous bicep. His black and thick hair. The curly mat of black hair on his chest. The broad shoulders, the hard-muscled back. The rocky thigh.
    Well, you asked me for my thoughts and opinions and my memories of the man, and I’m going to give them to you, no matter what they do to your version of him. I know you’ll be asking the same of his other wives—or, I should say, ex-wives—so I won’t bother with what I know to be true of him after we got our divorce, because you’ll get plenty of that from the women who knew him later and better than I did during those particular years of his life. And who knows, maybe he’s changed. It sometimes happens. But even so, above all, I want to be fair to the man, because from what I’ve heard, he’s been fair to me. From what I’ve heard, he’s actually told people he still loves me, and that he loved me best of all, that I was his “true love.” I can understand that. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me. We were so young, and you know what they say about young lovers, first lovers. Oh, I’ve gotten over him, all right, I mean, I can admit now that he was my first love, my true love, all that sort of thing, but I’m over him now. Because after all, you must remember
he
was the one who left. Not me.
He
was the one who walked out. Not me.
He
was the one who wanted the divorce, the one who got himself a lover while he was still married to me. Not me. I never did any of that. It makes it easier to get over someone if you’ve never done anything wrong to him. You can understand that.
    But I’m sure that when he says I was his first love he’s telling the truth. I don’t think he lied to me about that, and maybe even after all these years he still does think of me that way. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing about him. You know what they say about first loves. We were young. I mean
young
. I was a fashion model then, for the Globe Department Store right here in Lakeland. A small-town girl, sure, but pretty. Some people said pretty enough to succeed as a fashion model in New York, even. You know all this, you’ve seen pictures, snapshots, and of course, you’ve talked to people who knew me then. Anyhow, that’s not important, except that naturally it helped me land your father.
    He came south to Florida that winter, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father, your grandfather. Someone’ll probably go into all that in detail, so I won’t bother here. It’s a fascinating story, though. Whenever I tell people about it now, they simply refuse to believe that I believed it then, that he had killed his own father, I mean. But I always say, “Listen, if he believed it
himself
, why shouldn’t I believe it too?” Not many people can come up with an answer for that one.
    Anyhow, it was the winter he thought he murdered his father that I first met your father. He came south to Florida, hitchhiking, with nothing more than what he could put in a single battered suitcase. Why he chose Lakeland I’ll never know for sure, but I think it had