Russell Banks - The Darling

I WOKE JUST before dawn with a boulder of rage lodged in the middle of my chest and a desire to break someone’s skull with it. But I didn’t know whose head to aim it at. Woodrow lay snoring beside me, a secondary target. I shoved his bare shoulder. He blinked slowly several times and yawned like a house cat, all teeth and tongue.

“I’m going to wake the boys and tell them,” I said. “I thought you’d want to know.”

“Tell them? Now?” He licked and smacked his lips. “We’ll tell them together. It’s better that way.”

“No. I’d rather do it alone.” I pushed the pale shroud of mosquito netting aside and left the bed and in the cool half-darkness began to dress.

“What will you say to them?” he called.

“Oh, you needn’t worry, Woodrow. I won’t tell them the truth. I’ll lie. I’ll protect you. I’ll even protect the president.”

“How? What will you say to them? They’re too young to understand.”

“Yes. Well, so am I,” I said. “I don’t know, I’ll make it up, for Christ’s sake.”

“Please, Hannah, don’t swear. Is there coffee? I don’t smell it.”

“It’s too early. No one else is up. Not even Jeannine,” I said, and swept from the room, righteous and wrathful. It was an act, however, sweeping from the room. The boulder of rage still weighed me down. I may talk to my husband with rare animation and force, I may look swift to him, perhaps even graceful; but I felt inside as if I were pushing the words and my body through pudding.

I strode past Jeannine’s cubicle and with customary but useless irritation noted that the door was shut (“What if they woke in the night and needed you, Jeannine? What if they needed you to kill a snake?”) and entered the boys’ room. The curtains were drawn, but even in the dark I knew where everything was located and strode through the small, cluttered room as if the lights were on. Their three small cots were positioned side by side along the far wall, as in a barracks. Wheeled toys, trucks and tractors and excavators, lay scattered about the room. Stacks of picture-books, balls and bats, and Dillon’s plastic guns were everywhere, and crayon drawings like primitive graffiti, a map of the world, and photos of African animals cut from old copies of National Geographic were taped to the walls. In corners and atop the dressers lay piles of clothes, sneakers, and costumes and dishes and plastic cups from bedtime snacks. It was the overstocked bedroom of pampered and privileged little boys from anywhere in the Western world. I could make out only outlines in the shadowed room, but all their stuff, here in the heart of equatorial Africa, suddenly looked weirdly out of place to me, as if it belonged instead in a suburb of Boston. I was already starting to disappear from my sons’ real, everyday life, as if going underground again.

From a block away came the first call of a backyard rooster. Doves gulped and gurgled on the dew-wet grass just outside the window, and palm fronds nicked one another in the soft, offshore breeze. Up close, I saw that Dillon was awake. He stared at me through the gauzy netting, expressionless, as if he’d been anticipating my arrival and I’d arrived late. The twins in their cots lay sleeping in identical parallel positions, facing the wall away from me and from the world at large.

I drew back the netting and sat down on the edge of Dillon’s narrow bed. “You’re awake early,” I said and stroked his cool, bare arm. He said nothing and continued gazing at the spot by the door that I had filled seconds ago, as if an afterimage lingered there — my fading white shadow. Without getting up, I reached with both hands to the twins’ cots, brushed the netting away, and gently held each boy’s ankle, waking the two as if waking one. They turned, rubbed their eyes, sat up in tandem, and smiled.

Paul and William, though not delicate or fragile, were small for their age, almost preternaturally quiet, and except with one another, kept their own council. From infancy the twins had remained a mystery to me, unlike Dillon, who seemed more and more to resemble the child I had been. Paul dominated his brother William, as one twin always will, but gently, politely, and neither was shy or insecure. Paired, the two more than made up for their lack of size and loquacity and made a fiercely combative team, especially when threatened by their older brother. He, on the other hand, was tall for his age, rangy and prematurely muscled. Dillon was a natural athlete and was already, at seven, the size of a boy of ten. Woodrow had recently enrolled him in twice-a-week tennis lessons and had begun asking me about colleges in the United States where a boy could learn to play “top-level tennis.”

Princeton, I’d guessed. Probably Stanford. But how on earth would I know? I demanded. Wasn’t he being a little premature? The boy was barely seven, for heaven’s sake. Which Woodrow had laughed off, noting that his parents and mine had set us upon our paths as early as five or six, had they not? And unless we wanted our sons simply to follow in their father’s footsteps, we would have to show them right from the beginning a different and better way of life. We did not want our sons to follow the same path as their father, did we? Not that there was anything wrong with that path, of course. Woodrow simply felt that his sons should rise above their father — above their mother as well, I assumed — to the same degree as he had risen above his.

Maybe Woodrow’s dream of his handsome brown sons playing tennis at Princeton was no less realistic than any other. They had advantages he’d barely dreamed of, after all. They were the sons of an educated, high-up city man. They were half American, their mother from a “good” American family. They were half white. Sometimes, when sitting up late and in his cups, he would declare, “My sons will be very big men in the big world! Captains of industry, Hannah! Head of the United Nations! Presidents! Big men! ”

It was more a promise than a prediction, as if it were up to him. I wondered what broken-promised path we were setting his sons on now. His sons? My sons. It was a faint and overgrown path, winding both into the jungle and out of it, and we had no map to give them, no way to guess where it led. I was about to abandon my boys, to leave them in the care of this weak Christian man, their poor father, confused and self-divided, who had recently become a barely tolerated enemy of the state, and his extended family, hopelessly impoverished, powerless people whose language and culture were to me so far beyond exotic as to be practically meaningless and unintelligible. What clearing in the jungle would these people find for my little boys? And what guiding role in their future lives would I play now? I had only Woodrow’s vague assurance that soon I would be able to rejoin them, either here or in the United States. But how soon? It all depended on the life expectancy, political or otherwise, of Samuel Doe, the unpredictable and treacherous president of the Republic of Liberia — an eventuality that neither I nor Woodrow could effect in the slightest.

I had never left my sons for longer than a single day and was as new at this as they. I told myself that I had no choice in the matter, none, and quickly hardened wholly into stone. To my freshly wakened, still sleepy little boys, I said, “I’m going to have to go away for a time and leave you with Papa and Jeannine.”

Dillon turned to the window, as if seeking a way out of the moment without having to push past me. The twins opened their eyes wide and made little Os with their mouths and at once turned for an explanation, not to me, but to each other. None of the three could look at me. I said that the president wanted me to go back to the United States for a visit, but he couldn’t let them or Papa go with me just yet — Papa because his work for the government was too important, and them because they were Papa’s sons and, like him, were Liberians. I knew it made no sense to them, but couldn’t think of an adequate lie. Because the truth made no sense, I wanted them to hear it, as if by punishing them with nonsense I were somehow punishing their father. “It’s not my fault,” I said. “I would like to stay here, or else take you with me. But the president won’t let me. The president is a very strange man,” I told them. “He thinks if I’m not here with you and Papa, he’ll be able to keep Papa working for him and not helping the people who are against him. That’s silly, of course, but it’s what he believes, and he’s the president. And he thinks if you go to America with me, then Papa will want to go, too.”