Hamilton Stark by Russell Banks

of the stairway as one entered the house, opposite the living room. In an earlier time it would have been a front parlor, a room set aside for special social events only. In size and window arrangements it matched the living room. It was almost exactly twenty-feet square, with two windows on the front wall and two on the side, a door that led from the front hallway and another that led directly into the back downstairs bedroom.
    A standard Cape built late in the eighteenth century, the house, essentially foursquare, was filled to the eaves with symmetries. Downstairs, one could go from any one room to the fourth by walking in a circle centered on the chimney. Upstairs, the four small bedrooms, one of which Ham’s father had converted into a bathroom, fanned out from the chimney like the arms of a Maltese cross, all four equal in size and placement. Ham’s mother and father slept downstairs in the large bedroom, and Ham slept alone upstairs—at least until his sister Jody was no longer an infant, when one of the small bedrooms would be hers.
    For years, ever since Ham could remember, the front parlor had remained empty, cold and unused—except when his cousins from Massachusetts came up to visit in the summer. Then, because of the mess and the noise of the three children, Ham’s mother had insisted, as she would later for Ham alone, that they play there. Which they did, happily. It provided them with the privacy and freedom to make their noise and clutter uninhibitedly.
    But now, for reasons Ham could not identify, he was reluctant to use the front room. For a long time he had avoided even entering the room. Unable to explain his reluctance to himself, he surely was unable to explain it to his mother, and all he could do was shrug off her questions and say, “I don’t know, I just
hate
that room.”
    Eventually, however, he relented. One March afternoon he moved all his puzzles and games, his Erector set and tools, his model airplanes and his drawing pads and crayons and watercolors, into the front room, one thing at a time, slowly, as if he had been ordered to move out of the house altogether.
    The following afternoon he returned home from school, and while he was sitting on the floor in the middle of the bare room, working on a balsa and tissue paper model of a P-47 Warhawk, he remembered the last time he had spent an afternoon there. It was when, the previous summer, almost a full year ago, his two cousins from Massachusetts had been “sent to the country” by their parents. Ham liked his cousins, especially the boy, Daniel, who was his age. But he also liked the girl, Virginia, even though she was older than the boys by four full years. Her parents had nicknamed her Ginger, and Ham had always assumed that it was because of her reddish hair, which somehow reminded him of what ginger looked like. She was a good-natured and attentive girl, and she never seemed to object to keeping company with two boys four years younger than she. She was able to lead them without necessarily dominating them, achieving a balance that pleased all three and, for Ham’s mother, making the chore of suddenly having to care for three children less strenuous than it might have been.
    But the last time they had come up to visit, Ginger had changed. Sullen, withdrawn and aloof from the boys, she had preferred staying in the kitchen with Ham’s mother to playing in the front room or, on sunny days, out in the barn and yard with the boys. Ham saw immediately that she had changed. She spoke to him in a voice heavy with sarcasm and condescension, and she treated her brother Daniel with outright contempt.
    “What’s with her?” Ham asked Daniel after Ginger hadsneered at the boys’ request that she join them in a game of Monopoly. It was raining, and the boys were sitting by a window in the front room, slightly bored, watching the rain dribble down the glass.
    “She’s big stuff now,” Daniel explained. “She thinks she’s Miss America.