The Hair of Harold Roux (2 page)

In this gorgeously written and absolutely compelling novel, Thomas Williams
does
reach those swirling fragments, he does locate the pain, and the result is a shimmering work of truth and beauty.

Thomas Williams died a year and a half after that publication party at my father’s house. I never saw or spoke to him again.
My father died nine years later. Both men, fortunately for us, left behind their life’s work. But not all of it is still in print, and that is why this new publication of
The Hair of Harold Roux
is such cause for celebration. William Faulkner wrote: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”

Thomas Williams has achieved that here, his aim as true as ever, and I still see him and my father in the sun’s last light over the mountains, taking turns squinting down the barrel as precisely as possible, talking quietly about their daily discipline, this constant tending of that small fire which today, for both of them, burns so brightly, these flesh and blood stories that give us such rich and enduring life.

—Andre Dubus III

A
aron Benham sits at his desk hearing the wrong voices. The human race he has been doomed to celebrate seems to be trying to prove to him that nothing is worthwhile, nothing at all. He sits in his small study surrounded by the interesting, haphazard fragments of the business of his life—books, stacks of old galley proofs, knives, pencils, pens, typewriter, dictionaries, shelves of old and new quarterly magazines, catalogs, incunabula. A wooden filing cabinet is filled to its drawer tops with stacks of papers, letters and manuscript pages as if each drawer were a bushelbasket. His one firm label in this area seems to be “miscellaneous.” And yet it is his work to seek meaning and order. On the shelf just above his desk are his five books in their various editions and translations, each full of words he has painfully arranged in order.

But right now it seems to him that his world, with perhaps a temporary remission now and then, is departing upon a long slide away from any sort of rational middle, like a psychotic plunging toward his bleak end. Nobody is listening to anybody else. He wonders where he stands between chaos and that other order, the order of death—wonders if there is still a place to stand. Throughout the world he cannot leave,
all of those in power seem corrupt, dimwitted or insanely committed to false assumptions. Children are being starved to death by the millions, yet twice as many more are being born into starvation and despair. The Prince of Peace has revealed himself to be in thrall to a legalistic code suited to the ages of plague. The tide of fascism he once observed from the shore now seems to have risen to the foundations of his house.

He leans over his notebook, feeling the ghosts of words in his fingers, but instead of words he draws a human torso. It is the body of a woman, slim-waisted, and now he draws, below the weakness, the vulnerability of the slim center, the hips’ heartbreaking generosity, then the delicate bulge of belly implying all the inner complexities of life, passion, creation. He feels that this drawing has been called up by a certain episode in his past that has now turned dreamlike, bittersweet. In the sudden, sinking aura of memory he scribbles over the drawing, tears out the page and crumples it. Perhaps there is no longer enough time in his life to go back and illuminate to himself that dark episode; one never knows until the search is under way. He can think about it, try to explain it, but mere words of definition bore him because they are too simple, too full of lies. They can never be responsible for the exact quality of light that slants across his desk now, or through the pines of years ago; for the deep complexities of those undiscovered metaphors. But why go on, why describe, why search for the metaphor that would touch the scene with life? Because exercise begets energy, life begets life, rest is illness, paradox is all.

“Paradox,” he says out loud, surely startling all his mute possessions. Against the pain of memory he holds the word. Para, parasol, parachute, parabellum. Dox, doxy, doxology—paradoxology. Remember that actual events are seductively plausible and contain meaningless emotion, like dreams; false importance, like dreams. If he can only begin, perhaps the realities of this unborn fiction will compel him forward out of the rigid past, away from a present that seems to deserve either tears or hysterical laughter, into the world of meaning.

But that world is, as always, contingent upon this real one, this small globe with its thin skin of air the gods of money and pride are so busily destroying, this world hermetically sealed by blackness of absolute zero.

So celebrate the race, celebrant. He hears cold cheers, ancient voices full of cracked glee, the voices of the dead.

It is 11:30 A.M., the sun just coming out again, now just missing the edge of his desk. Fire along the carpet. His wife should be home soon from the supermarket, the trunk of the car full of bags of groceries, bags within bags within life-proof plastic—at least fifty or sixty dollars’ worth. The children are at school. He is supposed to call the septic tank man. He is supposed to make an appointment to have the car headlights adjusted because they point too high now that the snow tires have been changed. There are several other things he is afraid he has forgotten.

It is spring, and many of the birds are back. Across the road in the dying elms grackles and starlings jabber and creak, a strange descending tonality in their voices, like distant arguments in Italian.

Now the telephone in the front hall begins to ring, its smug, brainless imperative repeating, seeming to listen, repeating with impatience, even anger. He has to go to it.

“Hello?” he says into its network of infinite possibilities.

“Professor Benham?” A woman’s ragged voice.

“Yes?” he says, fear waiting.

“Professor Benham? This is Louise Rasmussen, Mark Rasmussen’s mother?”

Whenever he is confronted by emotional disintegration his spirit immediately capitulates, his heart beats erratically, his palms grow damp.

“Yes, Mark Rasmussen,” he says, thinking that he would never use a telephone to convey anything but cool information. He tries to hold on to this calm thought.

“Professor Benham, he’s disappeared! He’s left school again and we don’t know where he’s gone! He hasn’t been to any classes for three weeks and his roommates—the people he
lives with—won’t tell us anything! They say they don’t know where he is!”

First he thinks of Mark’s homely, intelligent face, upon which the ironies of despair constantly flicker as he suppresses one inexpressible joke after another—a gnomelike, grayish young face above its tangled beard. It is a face that allows laughter only. Mark would never blat out his feelings this way.

“Have you talked to the dean?” Aaron’s fraudulently calm voice enters the telephone’s electronic diaphragms and filters. Her voice continues, too intimately near his unprotected brain. He can feel her breath that really isn’t there, as if she might at any moment insert her hot ravaged tongue in his ear. He shudders for Mark. Who wouldn’t want to flee this swampy intensity?

“Yes! He told us about Mark not going to any classes and that’s how we found out that you were Mark’s adviser and how you might have some idea …”

She stops, demanding by her silence that he take over her sentence, her problems. But after a moment she takes hold again, her voice weeping and demanding, and he thinks good God he can
see
this woman he’s never seen who’s lost her whelp, her offspring she never understood under all that creepy weirdo hippie hair anyway. But Mark is her child, isn’t he? He came from her womb.

“We don’t even
know
any of his friends! We don’t even know what they look like he wouldn’t bring them home after what happened last fall … what awful drugs he’s taking or what!
Mir, mir, mir
,” she utters, weeping those syllables.

He can see her, the granulated skin of her soft cheeks, her eyes ugly from crying. She is probably not much older than he is, but Mark seems much more his contemporary than this damp maternal force. He resents the tears of pity that have got in the way of his vision.

“I’m on leave this year,” he says, “so Mark has another adviser …”

“Yes. Professor Parker. We know! But he only signed
Mark’s schedule, that’s all he knows about Mark at all! That’s all he knows about Mark!”

“I’ll see what I can find out for you.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you! We thought you might know some of his friends. He must have friends. Students. We just don’t even know who his friends
are
, Professor Benham!”

“Well,” he says, still amazed by his falsely steady voice, “I knew who some of them were last spring. Let me have your telephone number so I can let you know if I find out anything.”

She gives him a number in the town of Somerville, a depressed little mill town fifteen miles or so from the university. But Louise Rasmussen wants to talk further, to try to explain now that her original question has been answered. She sounds as though explanation is more her forte, and Aaron remembers that Mark once told him she used to be a grammar school teacher. Yes, she e-nun-ci-ates. Guilt and self-justification: “What did we do wrong? We’ve given Mark everything, Professor Benham! Everything!”

He wants to tell her that she probably didn’t do anything wrong, but of course that’s no answer because it isn’t much of a reason for all that hair and those raggedy clothes and that funny smell of burning rope. He wonders if the Rasmussens wouldn’t have preferred some other variety of freak—a mongoloid, perhaps.

“What did we do wrong? What did we do wrong?” How many times has he heard that self-defeating cry? He is irritated now, because God! these women with their middle-aged quirky crazy desperation hung out like the raw flesh of a wound!

“I’ll see what I can do, Mrs. Rasmussen,” says the benevolent, paternal voice of the professor.

“We’ll be eternally grateful! We love Mark so much! Thank you! Thank you!”

And again he is betrayed into tears by her worry and grief. She finally hangs up and he howls to his empty house
with the ear-popping intensity of a tortured baboon.

When he is through howling, Aaron stands at the kitchen stove listening to the tiny whines the coffeepot emits while it is heating. A cigarette hangs dry in his lips. Yes, he’ll probably be able to locate Mark, and he’ll do it because he said he would, and because Mark was once one of his most talented students. Presumably Mark is still talented, but Aaron has learned not to become overexcited by any sort of potential. It is as if a specific solvent for talent has been introduced into the national diet. Perhaps it is a new symptom of ecological poisoning.

With a heavy, soggish feeling, he realizes that soon he’ll have to go back to teaching. For every student with Mark’s iron in him, there are so many others. Unused talent can break your heart, but the others deaden the soul. So many times in the last ten years he has so patiently explained that self-indulgence is not art, that in spite of all temporal evidence to the contrary what is gained is earned. How many thousand more poems must he read beginning thus:

Kaleidoscope of the City

comes

neonpulsing

the I Ching

opens

leaves

silhouettes

upon

the

burning

we

ecstaticly

Revitalyse
!

Or thus:

Violets vibrating

My pad

Warm asleep

Hare

Hare

Hare Krishna

Hare

Hare

Hare Krishna

Strung

Out

Beautiful

Hare

Hare

Hare Krishna

How many thousand more times must he with sweet reason convey the information that he is neither pleased nor dismayed by
any
statement of belief or of feeling or by any object supposedly disgusting or supposedly beautiful unless it is made so by the poet. And heaviest of all is the knowledge that he will always search until he finds something, some small, possibly accidental voltage engendered here or there between a word and a word or a phrase and a phrase, and, in mentioning this, store up somewhere in his psyche another dangerously explosive charge, until …

But not Aaron Benham, that kindly sufferer of fools.

And then there is still poor Mark, whom he has known now for at least seven years and who has been through most of the major storms and awakenings of his times, beginning with sit-ins in the South, with SNCC, jail, a beating that left him with a broken hand, and on up the twisted years of the late sixties and into the seventies. Chicago, Washington; after the Cambodia-Kent State-Jackson State spring he disappeared for more than a year and came back sad, cynical, allowing that maybe he’d try to write again. Aaron hasn’t seen him for a month or more, but then Mark knows he is on leave and trying to work, and beyond Mark’s usual brashness is a perhaps inordinate respect for those who are working.

Aaron is back at his desk, his bitter coffee in hand. Suddenly he puts the coffee cup down, walks to the corner of his study and picks up a rifle, black cold metal embraced by the organic walnut of its stock, the long bolt silvered by the locking slides of the fifty and more years of its existence. It was manufactured in January 1918 for a quaint war now passed out of all but a few living memories. The rifle in his arms becomes part of him, part of his humanity. Why else has it evolved to fit shoulder and arms and eye with such perfection, even comfort? His heritage over the generations, slowly evolved from matchlock and harquebus into this smooth instrument of his culture.