Russell Banks - The Darling

There were alternatives, of course. Thanks to the generosity, if you want to call it that, of Samuel Doe, I had enough cash in my backpack to go anywhere in America. Although I hadn’t communicated with them in years, I knew that without too much trouble I could make quick contact with old friends and associates from the Movement, people who would welcome me back into the fold from the cold, who would let me sleep on a couch or cot until I found a place of my own, who would provide me with a new name, social security number, and driver’s license, and would pass me from safe house to safe house, from friend to acquaintance to complete stranger, until I ended up separated from myself by seven or eight degrees, living in some small town in eastern Oregon, working as a school nurse and sharing a double-wide trailer with a divorced lineman who thought I was who I said I was.

It was 1983, the war against the war was long over, Ronald Reagan was president, and young Americans were more interested in getting rich by the time they turned thirty than in refusing to trust anyone who’d already turned it. It was, in a sense, the perfect time for me to have returned, the perfect time to show my back to all that I had thought and believed and dreamed and done and failed to do, and start over. I could become a social worker in Albany, a caterer in East Lansing, Michigan, an ambulance driver in St. Louis. Or I could go back to New Bedford, where Carol was probably still living with her daughter, Bettina, and waiting tables at the same seafood restaurant, maybe still renting the same third-floor walkup apartment, and if in the meantime she hadn’t hooked up with one of those wiry, ponytailed men with tattoos crawling over their chests and arms whom she seemed irresistibly drawn to, she would let me have my old room back. Or I could simply strike out on my own, wade into America’s vastness and anonymity, bobbing up someplace I’d never been before, with a new life story already forming, one bit of false information sticking to another, like the beginnings of a coral reef that someday will seem to have been there all along, as substantial and self-evidently true as the continent itself.

That’s the real American Dream, don’t you think? That you can start over, shape-change, disappear and later reappear as someone else. That you can survive the deliberate murder of your personal past and even attend your own funeral, if you want, and watch the mourners from the shade of a grove of trees a short way off, be the stranger at the edge of the crowd, her presence barely noticed or remarked upon. I don’t know who she is, a friend of someone in the family, I guess . And when everybody has finally left the cemetery, and you’re alone there, you come forward and pluck a flower from one of the baskets left at the graveside, put it in your hair, if you want and, like a happy ghost, walk off with the secret knowledge that down in the darkness under the dirt the coffin is empty, there’s only sawdust inside it or rocks or a dummy stuffed with straw.

I pushed my duffel ahead of me into the back seat of a taxi and got in. The driver, a flat-faced Boston Irishman wearing a Red Sox cap, half turned to me. “Hiya, how ya doin’?” he said. “Where ya wanna go?”

BY THE TIME the cab stopped in front of number 24 on gracefully curved, tree-lined Maple Street, it was almost dark. Lawn sprinklers carved silver arcs above the mint-green lawns. Wide, sloping paved driveways led to two- and three-car garages, breezeways, and screened side porches. The thick-leaved trees along the street were maples, of course, forty and fifty years old. The neighborhood was long established, a planned community from the early 1920s of large, neocolonial homes planted on nineteenth-century farmland and lately painted in neocolonial colors with names like baguette, flannel, and persimmon, with coiffed hedges and manicured yards the size of boarding-school playing fields. They were comfortable, oversize houses that had been designed to shelter well-educated, calm, orderly families with inherited money for up to three generations before being sold off to strangers with new money. My parents’ house — a three-bedroom Cape Cod with dormers and an attached el for my father’s study and home office — was slightly more modest than the others. They’d paid cash for it with a gift provided by Daddy’s father shortly after I was born, only a few years into their marriage and Daddy’s medical career. Except for dorm rooms at Rosemary Hall and Brandeis, until I was in my mid-twenties, it was the only home I had known.

I walked up the driveway, crossed to the breezeway at the side of the house, and approached the kitchen door. In all those years away, nothing had changed — the smell of moist, freshly cut grass; the cluttered breezeway and the wooden glider; Daddy’s rusting, rarely used grill; Mother’s meticulous flower gardens in back; the tool shed by the crab-apple tree. And balanced in the crotch of the old oak in the farthest corner of the yard, my tree house, a lean-to tacked to a small platform, a nestlike, secret sanctuary and watchtower that in summer became nearly invisible in the leaves of the oak tree.

I was trapped in a time warp. On the other side of the window, my mother sits at the kitchen table with a Manhattan in front of her and waits for Daddy to come home late again and gets a two-cocktail jump on him. The table has been set, and their supper stays warm in the oven, and she’s probably thinking about tomorrow’s schedule, making mental lists of things to do and menus and guest lists, which she’ll write out later before bed, after she’s checked with Daddy to be sure she’s included everyone he wants and has not listed anyone he’d prefer not to see, to be sure she’s remembered to unwrap the punch bowl and glasses and hasn’t forgotten to ask the housekeeper to work late and help serve the canapés and hors d’oeuvres and clean up afterwards.

I stood by the door watching my mother as if she weren’t real, as if studying a tableau vivant, amazed by how lifelike it was, when suddenly she moved her hand and raised her glass to her lips, and I jumped, startled by her movement. She turned towards the door, and saw me. She wrinkled her brow as if puzzled and then squinted like a bird watcher trying to remember the correct name of an unfamiliar type of sparrow. For a long moment, we stared at each other through the glass, mother and long-lost daughter. Or was it daughter and long-lost mother? She had grown old. Her crepey throat and arms belonged to an elderly woman, and her back was rounded, and her hair, still carefully cut and set in the shape of a tulip, had gone white and was a fluffed, thinned outline of what it once had been. She wore a pale blue short-sleeve blouse and loose madras skirt and L. L. Bean docksiders, the off-duty summer uniform of an elderly Yankee matriarch.

I opened the door and entered, shucked my backpack, and set my duffel down. Mother half rose from her chair, then sat slackly back. Her mouth opened in astonishment. There was a film of fear over her face, as if she expected her feelings, in a cruel and unexpected way, to be suddenly hurt. This was the sort of moment that Mother tried at all costs to avoid. She only had old roles for it, half-forgotten lines from other, slightly different scenes, gestures and words that may or may not come off as appropriate. In a loud, flattened voice, she said, “Why, it’s Hannah! What a wonderful surprise!”

I moved close to her and put my arms around her bony shoulders and kissed her dry, crinkled cheek. Her body smelled the same, lavender and rye, but it was a shrunken, fragile version of the body I so clearly remembered. She made a dry, chugging sound and began to cry. She grabbed my wrists and drew back from me. “It’s really you, Hannah! It’s really you!”