Russell Banks - The Darling

Fame is like a drug, and when one person in a family is famous, it affects everyone else in the family, shaping and deforming it in many of the same ways an alcoholic or drug addict does. You can’t ignore fame — it colors everything — but you’re not allowed to acknowledge it openly, either. It’s why you prefer to associate with other people who are famous or who have someone famous in their family. They understand. You can trust them the way an addict trusts his fellow addicts and enjoy their company the way an alcoholic enjoys the company of drunks. They make you feel normal.

And now that we are at least in touch by mail, if there is any way we can be of help to you, anything we can send to you, medical supplies, clothing, books, or money, whatever, just tell me and I’ll have it sent at once. Do you, by the way, have access to a telephone? You could call us collect anytime, you know. Of course, that may still be a little too much exposure. In which case, your mother and I will happily rely on your letters.

With love ,

Dad

BM/ia

Another two weeks went by, and then came my mother’s letter, handwritten on her embossed, peach-colored, personalized stationery. Still, such a lady. I hadn’t answered Daddy’s letter and didn’t for many months, and when I did, kept it short and impersonal, for reasons suggested, I assume, by his letter to me and for reasons I’ll likely explain later. Mother’s, however, I answered at once. Hers to me first. Then mine to her.

Dear Hannah ,

I was so happy and relieved to hear from you again and to know that you’re safe and sound, even if you are in far-off darkest Africa. I can well imagine you out there, believe it or not, as it somehow seems almost like an extension of your unselfish and adventurous nature. I am sure that your generosity of spirit and lifelong compassion for the poor are contributing mightily to the welfare of the people there. In fact, I wonder if it’s possible that your social commitment can be put to even better use among the Africans than it could here at home, where there is little but opposition to change.

Mother always viewed my political commitment the same as she viewed her own, as noblesse oblige, as a modest way of acknowledging that one had only by accident acquired social and financial privilege. It wasn’t that the poor and downtrodden were exploited; they were merely less fortunate. In that way, one avoided contending with any self-incriminating guilt and felt free not to surrender one’s privilege.

I’ve been remembering so much lately, ever since your letter arrived, remembering you as a child, my blond, blue-eyed baby girl with the heart of gold who used to bring home all the lost and abandoned animals in the neighborhood, and even some that hadn’t been lost or abandoned and had to be returned to their owners, and a few years later bringing home all those bedraggled, sad-faced children, your schoolmates from Huntington Chase, “the losers,” as you once explained to me when I asked who were these children, and when you went off to Rosemary Hall how every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter break you would come home with the students who for whatever reason couldn’t be with their families for the holidays. Do you remember the girl named Anna from Jordan, or was it Turkey? I remember sitting up late one Christmas Eve with her, decorating the tree and telling her the story of each of the tree ornaments, how they were passed down from your father’s family and how every Christmas we added three new ornaments to the collection, one for each of us. I told Anna how every ornament had a special emblematic meaning in our family. You were out on a date, as I recall, and your father couldn’t get home until halfway through Christmas dinner the next day, but your friend Anna loved the stories, all those Musgrave associations going back to the early 1800’ s, when the tree ornament collection first began, and she and I were able to get very close that night. And of course I’ve been remembering your college years, when political activism became so central to your life, the summers in the South working with SCLC registering black voters, when we were so worried about you that your father went South, too, and joined the marches himself, although of course he was there mainly because of his own passionate commitment to civil rights. That was the period when your principles and character had begun to change and shape ours, which leads me to say what I wanted to say at the start of this letter: that your principles and character have probably had a greater impact on my life, and I dare say on your father’s, too, than ours have had on yours. And I want you to know, Hannah, that despite the difficulties and anxieties we’ve experienced as parents in the last twelve or fifteen years, we are grateful to you for that. Many is the time when late at night, taking the measure of our lives (as we long-married couples sometimes do, my dear), your father and I have said to each other, “If it weren’t for Hannah, we’d have probably ended up a couple of country-club Republican fuddy-duddies.” That possibly sounds funny coming from me, but it’s true, and I want you to know it. We are thankful to you, Hannah, and thankful for you.

My mother’s letter, more than my father’s, brought with it a flood of memories. As she had intended, no doubt. They were not, however, the memories she had hoped to evoke. Within the structure of our family, we each from the beginning performed different, supportive functions, and our memories of the early years more clearly reflected those differences than the overall structure of the family itself. Over the years, on my farm here in Keene Valley, I’ve seen that a river or a stream running through a valley or plain or tumbling over rocks across and down the side of a mountain, like an artery or vein, brings that otherwise immobilized land to life and implies the existence, embedded like a heart, of a separate source of life. Without the Ausable River running through it, my farm would be inert, stilled, and were it not for the wind in the trees — a noise from the sky, not the earth — the land would be utterly silent. It may seem arrogant, but in my youth I sometimes felt that I was the river running through the lifeless, soundless landscape of my dry little family. Yes, I abandoned them and ran off to sea, as it were, and disappeared there for years. But I never forgot the pleasure and meaning that I took from my perceived role in the family as life-giver, as the creator of movement and change. It gave me a sense of power that I got from no other source. My mother’s letter brought all that back to me. Living up to that role had seemed my life’s destiny. An only child, I had, practically from birth, felt best defined in terms of my relation to my parents. Our family was a trihedron, a closed, three-sided, geometric form. In deserting my mother and father, running off as I did to change the world by any means necessary, I broke the thing apart, depriving all three of us of an essential aspect of our shared and individual identities. I knew at the time what my desertion would do to them, but I didn’t care then. I knew that, without my ongoing, supportive presence as one side of our three-sided family, they would break off into a pair of monads, and each of them would end up with a solitary life for which neither had the slightest preparation. Or else they would pretend that I had not left at all, that the river still ran through their pastoral valley, somewhat dwindled, perhaps, reduced to a trickle, but still there, still flowing, greening their grasses and causing their flowers to bloom and the leaves on their trees to bud and open in the sun.

Well, I almost started to cry, writing that. I may have to re-write this letter entirely if I can’t stop being so maudlin. I do want to assure you that both your father and I continue to enjoy good health — although I had my gall bladder removed last summer, which was no big deal, really, and actually helped me shed a few excess pounds, thanks to the two-month-long nonfat diet that preceded the surgery. We’re as physically active as ever, especially your father, who has taken up bicycling lately with the same discipline and energy that he devotes to everything in his life. I’m content with tennis (mostly doubles nowadays) and golf in the summer months and swimming at the club pool in the winter. We’ve kept up with most of our old friends, all of whom constantly ask after you, of course, and we even took a white-water rafting trip down the Grand Canyon this spring with Bibby and Marsh Mansfield and John Kerry and his lovely wife (he’s a young Kennedy-type liberal Democrat running for Congress in the 5 th district, a man who many of us think has presidential potential, certainly more than Teddy, but don’t get me started there). We don’t travel quite as much as we used to, although your father still does a fair amount of lecturing and book promotion for his publishers around the country and abroad. The Carter administration has asked him to join several federal commissions on health and childcare and so on, but he has steadfastly refused. He does serve on a number of corporate boards now, however, which take up a lot of the time that he once devoted to political activism. But with the war in Vietnam over and the struggle for civil rights behind us, he is much less active in politics, as am I, of course. Mostly, we’re engaged now by local and environmental issues, where we inevitably end up siding with the young idealists against the greedy capitalists. So, not too much has changed, I guess!