Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks Page A

your father, and Eddie would shake his head, No, not yet, so I’d wait and wait and wait, a half-hour, anhour, and hour and a half, until finally I’d know that he wasn’t coming, and I’d walk on home to my apartment, fix myself some supper, take a long bath, and try to sleep—until along about one in the morning, when I’d still be awake, tossing and turning, and there’d come a loud banging on the door. Jumping out of bed, I’d rush to the door, and when I opened it, I’d see him, standing there, a vicious snarl across his face, bloodied lips and cut eyes, bruises and scrapes, torn clothing, with a half-emptied bottle of whiskey in his hand. “Ran into a little bit of trouble down at th’ Tam,” was how he’d explain all the cuts and bruises. Then, using nothing but the foulest language, he’d describe in gory detail how he’d single-handedly beaten up half a dozen sailors or brickmasons or electricians or “crackers,” though I was never sure what he meant by the word, who he was referring to, exactly. Probably just anyone he couldn’t identify any other way by uniform and such. Anyhow, he’d stagger into my apartment, brushing off my foolish attempts to clean him up and bandage his cuts, pushing me and any sympathy I might have away, physically shoving me into a corner of the room, where I waited, slowly growing frightened of him, as he talked to himself, only to himself, and drank the whiskey from the bottle, growling like a dog, literally growling and curling his lips back and showing his teeth, snapping and snarling, rambling on about his “enemies,” turning everyone into an enemy—his parents, his sisters, his friends in New Hampshire and the people he’d met here in Florida, and of course, even me. Then, after a while, especially me. I was becoming his worst enemy. Every time he came in that drunk and torn up from fighting in the taverns, he would end the night by cursing at me, spitting out horrible names, a little more horrible each time it happened, a little more personally cutting, slicing into the parts of me that were the tenderest parts, taking the cruelest advantage of whatever fearsand secrets I might have revealed to him some other night when we had been holding each other tenderly. Teasing and mocking me for my fears, threatening to expose my secrets, he’d call me “stupid” and “idiotic” and “sentimental” for a while, and then “selfish” and “insensitive” and “cruel,” and finally, “whore” and “leech” and “nag”—those last three, it always came down to them, whore and leech and nag. That’s what probably made them hurt so much, the fact that it always came down to the same three names. If he had just been lashing out at the world in general, he might’ve ended up calling me lots of awful things, sure, but all different. But because he always called me only those three, and all three, never one without the other two, he made me think that he really believed it about me, that even when he was sober and being kind to me, he still thought of me as a whore, a leech, and a nag. And of course, because I loved him and he was a man, I started seriously wondering if I was a whore or a leech or a nag, and there was just enough guilt for my own sexual interests in life, just enough dependency, and just enough nagging for me to slip slowly into believing that I
was
those things he was calling me, until I too thought of myself as a whore, a leech, and a nag. I even felt sorry for him for having to put up with me, for having fallen in love with me. So when he asked me to marry him I was so grateful, and so eager for the chance to prove by my loyalty that I wasn’t a whore and by my wifely support and devotion that I wasn’t a leech and by my trust and obedience that I wasn’t a nag, that I said, “Yes,” I said, “Oh, yes, yes, oh God, yes! Yes, yes,” I said, “yes.”
    Well, that’s way behind me now, and I’ve forgiven him, forgiven him for all of