I had never met Rochelle, though of course I knew of her existence, had listened to Hamilton talk about her for years, and had seen pictures of her, first her grade school photographs, then junior high school, and most recently, four years ago, her high school yearbook photograph. So, in a manner of speaking, I knew what to expect. I had seen her image change, gradually, year by year: from that of a bright-faced, wide-eyed, mischievous three-year-old (taken at nursery school), in which she wore a kelly green daysuit that contrasted beautifully with her then flame red hair; to the image of a gap-toothed seven-year-old grinning proudly into the camera, her now deeper red hair in braids tied around her head, her green eyes flashing with innocent affection; to the image of a sober-faced, sexually serious adolescent, an intense face already full of intellectual grace and sensual force, with a touch of the bewilderment that such rare presences in such inordinate quantities must have caused her; and on to the most recent image, the tall, almost statuesque, even though delicate and slender, young woman, her deep red hair now tumbling roughly, densely, over her shoulders, her eyes warm, intelligent, disciplined, her mouth in a slight smile as if about to speak, full and promising, her neck long, proud, elegant. And of course, because these photographs were all inscribed to her absent, never seen nor even directly remembered daddy, I was able to trace the development of her character over the years by studying the changes in her handwriting and the language she used to inscribe her photographs. From her nursery school photograph (precociously, I thought):
And then, sadly asserting her relation to him, a six-year-old who could no longer even recall the presence of the man, who knew him only as a name and burning need:
Here she is at ten, obviously after having read a bit of Shakespeare (one wonders what her mother made of the little girl’s reading habits: a fifth-grade child poring over Lear?):
And here, in her own, mature, self-aware hand, at the age of seventeen, describing the true nature of her relationship with the man while at the same time offering him its positive denial, which was, of course, the nature of her daily experience of the man:
It was never clear to me why Rochelle was graduating from college in Ausable Chasm, a small tourist town, once a mill town, located in upstate New York a few miles from Lake Champlain. I could not imagine anyone sending his child to such a college for academic reasons (unless the child were unable to matriculate anywhere else), and so far as I knew, Rochelle’s mother still resided in Lakeland, Florida, as had Rochelle, at least through her senior year of high school. It didn’t make sense to me that she should attend a small, non-descript college fifteen hundred miles from home, especially when there were so many right around home to choose from. I asked Hamilton about it during the drive west and north from his home in Barnstead. He had called me the week before to ask if I would accompany him to his daughter’s graduation, mentioning, as if it would help me decide to come, that the featured speaker would be Ezra Taft Benson. He did not mention, of course, that his own daughter would give the valedictory speech, or that it would be in Latin (of her own choosing — the first time in the history of Ausable Chasm College of Arts and Science that the graduation speech had been given in Latin!). He told me about that, offhandedly, in Burlington, Vermont.
“Why,” I asked him as he drove his car onto the ferry at Burlington and we began the crossing of Lake Champlain, “why does your daughter happen to be graduating from a small, obscure college in upstate New York, when all along I thought she was living in central Florida with her mother and presumably would have gone to either a well-known, prestigious college in the New England states or else one near her home? Did they move north while she was in high school?” I prodded. I suspected there was a story here to be told me by someone.
It was a beautiful, sunshiny, mid-June day stuffed with bright yellows and jade greens. The mountains, the broad valleys, the almost giddy blue of the lake — it made me want to be either a farmer in this valley or a tourist. I could not decide which role would give me more of the place. It’s an ancient dilemma: We can never choose between the experience itself and our memory of it.
Hamilton’s answer didn’t make much sense to me. Not then, anyhow, except to let me know that he didn’t wish to discuss it. He simply told me that the girl was obviously trying to get closer to her father now that she was no longer wholly dependent on her mother, but that Ausable Chasm was as close as she dared come to where he happened to be. So I let the subject drop and tried to enjoy the day, the smooth lake, the immense sky above it.
At the campus, a complex of half a dozen small, square, brick buildings that from the outside resembled a munitions plant, we met Hamilton’s daughter, Rochelle, he for the first time since she was an infant, me for the first time ever. As we got out of his car — he was driving an air-conditioned, dark brown Cadillac Coupe de Ville at that time, quite luxurious — I asked him if Rochelle knew he was coming. He grunted that in response to her invitation he had sent her a post card so indicating.
“Is this the first time you will have seen her since she was an infant?” I asked him.
Again he grunted his answer, which was yes. I could tell from his grunts that he was somewhat tense and possibly even a bit frightened of the occasion. One could hardly blame him. I’m sure that, although he never mentioned it, her acceptance of him was fully as important to him as his acceptance of her was to Rochelle. What if she saw him and, flooded with memories of her mother’s angry descriptions of the man, said to him, “No, I have changed my mind, I don’t want you here, I don’t want you to come to my graduation!” Would he try to comfort her, try to convince her that he truly wanted to be there, reassuring her with his kind, soft and urgent words? Or would he simply spin on his heels and walk away, back to his car, and go home?
Luckily, when Rochelle came up to him and introduced herself, saying that she recognized him from snapshots her mother had shown her, he smiled graciously — one of the few times, perhaps the only time, I’ve seen Hamilton Stark smile graciously — and he took her hand in his and thanked her for inviting him. Rochelle was already six feet tall, a young woman with electrifying beauty, and as she stood there in the parking lot outside the auditorium in her royal blue gown and mortarboard, her hand in her father’s hand, her green eyes staring directly, searchingly, into his brown eyes, which were squinting from the bright sunlight, I felt tears running over and down my cheeks.