Russell Banks - The Darling

In any case, by the time Woodrow and I were married, I had come to love my job.

“BUT WHO’S GOING to replace me?” I asked him. It was the very first morning after we’d returned from our two-day honeymoon. We were finishing breakfast on the terrace adjacent to our bedroom, and Woodrow had informed me that I might prefer to stay home today, since I no longer had to work. I would not have to give notice that I was quitting; he’d already done that for me. Jeannine refilled my coffee cup and padded barefoot back through our bedroom to the kitchen.

“Not your problem who’ll replace you, Hannah. The woman, Elizabeth, she can fill in for you until the Americans send someone over. They know about the need, I’ve already informed them that you will have to be replaced. They tell me they have some big, rich foundation ready to expand funding for the position, so they can afford to send an American graduate student over soon, which is nice and what they prefer anyhow. One of their own. The new person should be along shortly. A matter of weeks. Maybe days. So you needn’t concern yourself. Nothing will be lost in your absence, my dear.”

“Terrific. Great. Elizabeth is barely literate,” I said. “She’ll screw everything up. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get those records straight and reliable when I first took over, after she’d been ‘filling in’ for the previous clerk of the works? It took months!”

“Hannah darling, they’re chimpanzees . Animals. Animals and numbers, that’s all. Anyhow, what does it matter?” He touched the corners of his mouth with his napkin and stood up to leave. “It’s just a way to keep money flowing from one hand to the other.”

“No, it’s science! Medical science.”

Woodrow looked down at me as if I were a child, and laughed, genuinely amused. “I’ll see you this evening, my dear little bride,” he said, and strolled to his waiting car.

Woodrow was right — the lab was a shabby, inept operation, and it was ridiculous to call it a “lab” and think of the work done there as science, much less medical science. It was the broken-down tail end of an elaborate scam, a way for a pharmaceutical company to gather data that would back up its claims for a product; a way for a university to get funding for professors’ and graduate students’ salaries and brand-new lab equipment, possibly a whole new university department; a way for Woodrow’s underfunded ministry to get a few American health workers and some decent medical equipment into Liberia and paid for by someone else. And it had been a way for me to finance my stay in Africa, avoiding arrest in the U.S., and most important, a way for me to come up from underground.

Everything in Liberia worked like this. No one in the country gave a damn if a system or an organization didn’t work; no one cared if roads financed by U.S. aid weren’t built or buildings never finished or machinery, trucks, buses, and cars never repaired — as long as the money to build, finish, and repair kept moving from one hand to the other. The country was a money-changing station. Corruption at the top trickled all the way down to the bottom.

AND SO BEGAN the period when my life made no sense to me. I stayed home and shopped and cooked with Jeannine and supervised her care of my sons, the care of my house, even the care of my husband, and did little else, and acted as though it were normal, even desirable, to live this way. Time passed quickly, as it does when you don’t question the role you’re playing, when you’re barely even aware of it as a role. Everything and everyone else fits — the script is written, all the other actors know their cues and lines and where to stand, and the play continues without intermission or interruption day in and out, twenty-four hours a day, season after season, year after year, until you don’t even know you’re in a play.

All the while, however, the larger world of Liberia was following a different script. I was little aware of it — oh, I listened to the news, the gossip and rumors, Woodrow’s nightly reports, heated discussions among our friends. But because I was not a Liberian myself, I listened as if they were talking about events in a distant land. Instead, I let myself be caught up in the solidly quotidian details of the daily life of a genteel Americo wife and mother — living like my mother in the fifties and sixties, who, until her daughter managed to get herself onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list, went sweetly and quietly and cooperatively about her proper business — clipping flowers for the table; making lists and menus for the cook, guest lists for parties, travel arrangements for her husband; shopping for curtains, clothing for her children; making doctors’ and dentists’ appointments for her children; enrolling them in uplifting and socially advancing classes.

But there was so much else that I could and should have been doing with my life then that it embarrasses and hurts me to be telling it now. For this I do feel guilt, and not mere embarrassment. What was I thinking? A woman in her mid-thirties, out from under the shadow of her parents at last, no longer underground or on the run, I was free to float, moved only by the current of my real character. And my character had led me into this quiet eddy of nearly stilled, slowly circling water. I’d washed up in a small, backward, provincial country in Africa, where I was a privileged member of the elite, not merely an expatriate or a foreign national employed by her government or by some huge American or European corporation, like all the other white people here. Distinct from the other whites in spite of my skin color, I was rather grandly financed by a man who held a high government position. I had three small children to keep me distracted and more or less busy, a handful of practically indentured servants to leave me time for naps and leisurely walks in my garden, a ready-made social circle of men like my husband and women whose roles matched mine, except for the fact that they were all native Liberians and preferred to keep relations with me, the unavoidable outsider, superficial and strictly social. I was neither one thing nor the other, neither expat nor Liberian national, and thus had no responsibilities to anyone but myself, my children, and my husband, who essentially made no more strenuous demands on me than a small den of Cub Scouts might make on their den mother.

And everyone wanted me to stay exactly where I was. You’re beautiful, Hannah darling, don’t ever change. Stay in your box . Woodrow liked boxes. He liked keeping his colleagues, his friends, his sons, me, and his people all in separate compartments, one stacked upon the other, like the cages that held the chimps. His life at home, his work at the ministry, and his political and associated social lives were one stack of boxes, which he kept in the city. A second stack he stashed in the bush, in Fuama, where, for all I knew, he had a second or even a third wife in a box and had other children, though he certainly never mentioned that possibility, and I did not ask. Nor was I at all clear as to where the box with me inside was positioned, other than in the city stack. Somewhere near the middle, probably, once we were married. That box, unbeknownst to me, was slipping gradually towards the bottom.

The Liberians we saw socially in Monrovia preferred to position me at the polite edge of their circle, men and women alike, which was understandable, given my ignorance of their deeper ways and experiences and our vast differences of background, and which was how I preferred it myself. It made it easier for me to keep track of who I really was, to keep my several not-quite-serial identities from overlapping or becoming confused with one another — Hannah Musgrave, Dawn Carrington, Hannah Darling, Mammi, Miz Sundiata, each with her own past, present, and, presumably, future. Since childhood, compartmentalizing had been one of my strengths, after all. That and numbers. Like Woodrow, perhaps. Not boxes inside of boxes, or in a vertical stack like his, but rather side by side, boxes next to boxes, a row of them stretching from one horizon of my awareness to the other. And I could slip unseen from one to the next, as if each had a secret doorway connected to the box beside it.