Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner

Author:John Gardner
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Mystery, Modern, ebook, Contemporary, book, Classics
ISBN: 9780811216708
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Published: 1972-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2

“Rat race,” he thought.

“Perdu.”

But it wasn’t just himself. Something had gone wrong with all of them—his father and mother, his brother Luke, his sister, the times in general. It was no good fretting and whining about it, but just the same it was there, a fact. Somehow one had to escape it.

A specialist in collections. Who would have thought it!

They could have found no one less suited for the work—an idealist, sentimental, generous, fond of good music and books (he was a member of the Columbia Record Club and three different book clubs). He loved movies. He sang in the church choir—the Unitarian church four blocks from his house. He’d even tried cello lessons, six months ago now—had sat up late squinting heartsick at the page and clumsily laboring like an anxious dinosaur in glasses, Louise knitting in the semidarkness behind him. The cello would help him relax, he had said. In his childhood, living on Uncle Ben’s farm, he’d spent hours playing “Danny Boy” and “Old Man River,” playing and singing at the top of his voice. But it hadn’t relaxed him, of course. The opposite. He didn’t have time to practice, and going to his lesson unprepared made the sweat run down him in rivers. When he did get to practice, on the other hand, he felt guilty because he was using up time he should properly have spent with his family. Just the same, a strange man to be hunting down debtors, seizing bank accounts, property, wages, getting judgments from the courts. Three or four days a week at least he was off on the road somewhere, hunting through documents in Albany, chasing down stocks in New York or Pittsburgh or Kansas City, investigating the debtor’s associates and family. He, Will Hodge Jr, who had hated travel all his life and could get airsick merely by watching a big plane land.

There had been a kind of cruel inevitability about his becoming what he’d become. He was by nature a man who worked feverishly at whatever he did. It was that that had decided them on putting him into collection. The workload there was heavy and also vital, and the man who had done the job before him had been even less suited for the work, apparently, than Will. There were accounts six months old that hadn’t even been acted upon, and some of them were accounts with the firm’s most important clients. Mercantile Trust had collection accounts worth hundreds of thousands. To goof on them meant more than losing those accounts: it could mean losing their merger cases too—their tax cases, their suits, and on across the board. And so, much as he hated the work, he had thrown himself into it. He had tried at first to do everything in person—writing letters, pursuing examinations, chasing, demanding, seizing. It was all very well to throw injunctions around, seize property, put a man out of work by taking his wages and inconveniencing his employer, but one did not have to do it impersonally, brutally, so it had seemed to Will at the start.

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