Russell Banks - The Darling

The college girl watched the others, and when they lowered their heads and closed their eyes, she did the same and for the first time heard her fiancé pray aloud to God and His resurrected Son. When he had finished, In Jesus’ name, amen , she opened her eyes and saw the cold, clotted vichyssoise suppurating in the dish before her. Oh, dear, she must have thought. What have I gotten myself into?

No one spoke. Silver clanked. The father slurped. The maid arrived with bread and soundlessly paddled back across the thick carpet to the kitchen. Finally, the son, the Yale medical student, cleared his throat, placed his soup spoon carefully down, and said, “Mother? Father? I have an announcement to make.”

The others looked up and placed their soup spoons as carefully down as he. The college girl did as they and put her hands in her lap. The mother dabbed at the corners of her thin, lipless mouth with her napkin. The girl did the same. The father turned in his chair to face his son, as if interviewing him for a position at the bank.

“Announce away!” Father Musgrave ordered.

The son, a tall, too-thin boy of twenty-four with permanently tousled brown hair and a large Adam’s apple, cleared his throat again and said, “Well, I’ve asked a girl to become my wife.” He looked across the table at the girl who would become my mother and smiled nervously, and the girl smiled back in a way that she hoped was reassuring and proud. “And I’m happy to say that she’s accepted!” he declared and laughed awkwardly. “How about that?”

There was a brief silence. His father turned back to his soup, as if deciding not to hire the boy after all.

His mother said, “That’s nice, dear,” followed by a long pause. “Who’s the girl?”

The story always ends there, its point, as far as my mother was concerned, made. She was the only one who told it, and she never told it with my father present and of course never in front of my grandparents. She believed that it was about her, after all, not them. But I had always wondered, what happened then? Did the girl get up from the table and run out? Did the boy try to smooth over the sudden rumples in the occasion by quickly excusing himself from the table and following his fiancée to the foyer? She already had her coat on and buttoned, tears of shame and humiliation in her eyes, and he held her by the shoulders and explained that she mustn’t take it personally, his parents were cold only because they were frightened.

“That’s what powerful people do when they’re frightened, darling, they go cold on you.” I can hear him now, his voice seductively calm, so reasonable sounding — a kindly, wise man, even back then, when he was little more than a college boy. “They have only me, you know. And they’re afraid of losing me to you.”

They touched hands lightly, and the girl took off her coat, wiped her tears away, and the two returned to the table as if nothing untoward had happened.

But I know it didn’t go like that.

The girl who would become my mother didn’t leave the table. She wouldn’t dare. She sat there instead with a sickly smile pasted onto her face and wondered, as she would for the rest of her years, if she had been insulted, which was why she told the story repeatedly. And the boy who became my father, his voice raised a register, as if driven by excitement rather than fear, said, “The girl I’ve chosen to marry is right here with us today! It’s Iris!”

My grandparents turned their hard gazes on my mother, and both of them nearly smiled, as if suppressing frowns. My grandmother said to my mother, “Well, then, welcome to the family, Iris.”

“Yes,” my grandfather said. “Welcome.”

And my mother said, “Thank you. Thank you both.”

She herself had no family to which she could welcome them and thus, struggling to find something appropriate to say, could only say thank you, over and over, and in time came to believe that her gratitude was genuine.

Except for an aunt in Windsor, Ontario, my mother was alone in the world. Her parents had been killed in the crash of a small private plane piloted by her father, my other grandfather. He had been a speculator in Canadian farmland, very successful. He and his wife were returning to Windsor from a combined western holiday and the auction of a cattle ranch in Alberta, when, somewhere over Lake Superior, with my grandfather at the controls, the plane entered a suddenly rising zone of thunderstorms and didn’t come out the other side. Their bodies were never recovered, and my mother’s aunt, her sole surviving relative, delayed telling my mother for nearly a month, waiting for the girl to finish her exams at Smith. It was my mother’s freshman year, the first time the girl had been away from home, so no need to make things worse than they were, losing both parents like that, by obliging her to postpone or cancel her end-of-semester exams. There was no funeral to come home to, anyhow, and my mother’s aunt, who had been managing her now-deceased brother’s office for years, while he flew about the continent buying and selling tracts of land, could easily take care of any legal and financial matters that came up. She had power of attorney, and the girl was a minor.

My mother seemed to have spent her entire life in a state of low-grade mourning, which was why she never wanted more than one child. She still loved her own prematurely lost childhood too much, or so I believed then, to give it up and try becoming an adult.

With my father, it was different. But only in degree, not kind. In fear of his parents’ disapproval of any family structure unlike theirs — a mother, a father, and a single, obedient, overachieving child — he had cut his life to fit their template. He became a pediatrician, eventually, and through his child-rearing books, a world-famous pediatrician, not out of a love of children, but as a secret rebuttal to his parents’ unwillingness to love their single, obedient, overachieving child. And because all the world’s children were his, none was. Except me, of course. I was his child. But much of the time when growing up, I felt less his child than his test case, the proof in his pudding, exhibit A-to-Z put forward to an adoring public as evidence of the wisdom and practicality of Dr. Musgrave’s theories on progressive and humane child-raising in America at mid — twentieth century.

But all that was before 1968, before the Chicago Democratic Convention and 1969 and the Days of Rage and my arrest, indictment, and flight, and before the years in the Weather Underground, the bombings, the robberies, the terrorist campaign against the war, against colonialism and U.S. imperialism — all that was before Africa.

WOODROW WASN’T EXACTLY sure, but he thought that altogether he had forty-two brothers and sisters. Maybe more.

My mouth dropped. Woodrow smiled. An old joke. But that was counting all his father’s children by his four wives, he said, still smiling. From his father’s first wife, he farther explained, there were only five children, of which he, Woodrow, was the youngest, which is why he had been allowed to attend missionary school and from there enroll in a preparatory school here in town, in Monrovia, and then, on a church-sponsored scholarship, travel to the United States, where he had studied business at Gordon College, a Baptist school in Beverly, Massachusetts, only a few miles from Emerson, the town where I had grown up. Woodrow’s older brother, Jonathan, and his three sisters had stayed in the village, because of their responsibilities to the family. Woodrow had met his responsibilities to the family by finding jobs for about twenty of his half-siblings and cousins so far, in the government of President William Tolbert and in the True Whig party, of which he was a national officer, as were all cabinet ministers and sub-ministers. He was able to do this, he said proudly, because his mother and grandmother were Americos, descended directly from the African-American founders of the Republic of Liberia, and not full-blooded Kpelle like his father and grandfather, who were headmen descended from headmen.