What had he learned about women? I asked him (having at the time intimations of some future troubles with women, whom I then understood almost not at all).
He learned, he told me, a woman’s greatest power over a man is her ability to turn her suffering into a virtue. She converts the one into the other, completely. She makes a condition of being female — and a wife and mother — into an ethical feat, which feat we as men have no choice but to reinforce. Most men don’t understand this conversion, he explained, and that’s why most men, rather than reinforce the conversion, deny that it’s even taken place. They treat their women as if they were still suffering. But what we’re supposed to do, what they want us to do, is to reinforce the conversion by acknowledging it and making it possible for the process to continue. So, naturally, what they want is for us to increase their suffering, to build their supply of it back up at least to where it was before they managed the difficult task of converting it into something that gave them power, the power of possessing virtue.
He paused and chugged down his glass of ale as chaser to the shot of Canadian Club he had tossed down right before speaking. I remained silent. Hamilton seldom spoke at this length (not to me, not about a subject that he knew was important to my understanding of him), and I didn’t want to distract him with my presence.
“And I’ll tell you something, something that I’ve not told anyone else,” he said, looking down at the empty glass, turning it in his huge hands. “It ain’t easy, giving them what you know they want. Especially when it’s your mother. Because the spring the whole thing, the conversion thing, works off is guilt. Male guilt.” He explained that it’s only to a man that a woman’s suffering looks like an ethical feat. Other women look at it with envy, or, if they’re a little protective of their own brand of pain, they see it as pathetic, or maybe they look at it with fear, because they know a woman who suffers more than they do cannot honor their own conversions. But a man sees it differently. Only a man can admire the pain, can acknowledge the bearer of it as virtuous. And the reason a man sees it this way is because he bears with him a quantity of guilt, nameless because he’s born with it, having been born male in this world where one-half of the species dominates the other half. Hamilton wasn’t saying it was right or wrong, that domination. He was just saying that it exists. The dominant one in any pairing off feels guilty for that fact, whether he knows it or not. And because most men don’t know they feel guilty, guilt in general, rather than in the particular case, most men don’t see what’s being asked of them by the particular cases before them.
He was sweating across his forehead and upper lip. Two large fans, one in each of the back corners of the tavern, were not cooling the place much. The temperature outside was the same as the temperature inside, and all the fans accomplished was to create movement in the heated air, which was sufficiently close to body temperature so as to be incapable of cooling anybody. The bartender leaned morosely on his elbows and stared at the front door. There were no customers aside from Hamilton and me. The waitress, a tubby woman with frizzy orange-dyed hair, sat on one of the barstools, her tray plopped on her lap. Hamilton and I were in a booth close to the door.
A man’s guilt, he told me then, wants him to eliminate the suffering of the particular case in front of him, so gradually he tries, and sometimes he thinks he succeeded, only to see it reappear a moment later, in her face, her hands, her voice. Some men, after a while, realize that the particular case has nothing to do with their generalized guilt, and what they do is to dismiss the particular case, to deny its hold on them. As Hamilton’s father had done. He had ended up ignoring Alma’s virtue and had treated her suffering “as a plain pain in the ass,” to use Hamilton’s words. It’s easier on the man that way, he explained. But harder on the particular case, the woman. The only honorable thing a man can do is, first, realize that this particular case’s pain has nothing to do with his guilt. That lets him deal realistically with the particular case, but it also means that he can’t kid himself about there being any easy removal of his generalized guilt. “No,” he declared, “you’ve got to learn to live with it. You’re not going to change society, so you just have to learn to live with it. Right?”
“Right. Right.”
“But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, any of it. You’ve still got to face down that guilt every time some woman comes up to you wringing her hands in despair,” he went on. It’s hardest, he explained, when the woman is your mother, because if she practiced “smotherhood” on you while you were young and helpless and completely dependent on her for information about the world, then she’s going to have a strong hold on your guilt. She won’t be able to help it. “Smotherhood,” he said, glossing the term for me, is a self-defeating, usually unconscious way of deluding a son into thinking that all his guilt is directly related, as effect, to his mother’s pain and apparent powerlessness. And this delusion gets set into the son’s mind long before he can think for himself. So that later on, when he tries to respond rationally to the demands some woman’s pain is putting on him, if that woman happens to be his mother, he’s still got to deal with the old, deep-seated delusion that his only honorable response is the guilt-ridden one. In the particular case of Hamilton’s own mother, he felt that he had been put to the ultimate test. She had made it clear to him that the only way he could honor her conversion of generalized suffering into particularized forbearance was to kick her out of her own house. Which, after a lot of tugs in the opposite direction, he did. “It wasn’t easy,” he sighed. Then he waved to the waitress for another round.
“I bet it wasn’t,” I said admiringly. Perspiration was running off our faces. I unbuttoned my cuffs and rolled up my sleeves to the elbows, then loosened my collar and took off my necktie. I had long since removed my sport coat. Hamilton was wearing a clean white T-shirt and work pants — not that it matters, except peripherally with regard to what happened next.
The waitress, whose name was Linda, a cheerful type who seemed resigned to spending the rest of her life doing just what she was doing then, brought us another round, our third or fourth, I can’t recall, and slowly, her tray slapped her thigh, walked back to the bar and hitched herself up onto a stool and resumed staring at the front door. The bartender, whose name was Lee, a town “character” who played Rudoph the Red-nosed Reindeer every year in the Kiwanis Club’s Christmas Pageant, went on peering morosely into the hot empty space a few feet in front of him. He was obviously lost in thought, puzzling his way around a bit of supper caught behind a tooth, his mind a single, low-frequency hum of passive attention that, having fallen upon his tooth, seemed glued there. In the corners of the room, the two standing fans whirred uselessly away at the heated air as the screen door swung open and a woman walked in from the street, alone. The door banged behind her, and she looked around the room, smiled at Hamilton and me slightly, and walked directly to the bar, where she ordered a gin and tonic.
She was around forty, a good-looking woman, more handsome than pretty, wearing a sleeveless blouse that exposed her muscular arms and drew attention to the amplitude of her bosom. Her corn-blond hair, long and healthy-looking, was wound into a Teutonic bun behind her head. Her white Bermuda shorts were tight and made of such heavy cloth that they seemed to armor her lower body rather than merely to cover it. Though she had been in town, living in an apartment over Paige Realty, for no more than two weeks, certain things about here were already known by just about everyone else in town: She was the new school nurse, she was from Concord, the capital, where she had previously worked in an old-age home, she was unmarried, probably had never been married, she had a loud, commanding voice and a hearty laugh and she liked, on these hot evenings in July, to come out of her sweltering apartment around nine for a couple of gin and tonics and a little conversation with “the boys.” Her name was Jenny, and within two weeks she was Hamilton Stark’s third wife.