Russell Banks - The Darling

“It’s really me.”

“Can you stay for dinner?” she asked, grabbing a line at random from some other surprise visit. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have prepared some—”

“I can stay,” I said, cutting her off. “I can stay for as long as you like. And I’m sorry I didn’t warn you. But I didn’t know until the last minute that I’d be able to get here. I didn’t want you and Daddy to make plans for me and then not be able to come.”

“No, no, that’s fine, Eleanor made up a beef stroganoff this afternoon before she went home, and there’s plenty for both of us. We’ll have a nice bottle of wine and celebrate. I think there’s a tart, an apricot tart that I bought yesterday at this excellent little bakery that a lovely young couple just opened in town—”

“Mother,” I said, cutting her off again, more for my sake than hers. “It’s fine. Anything is fine. I didn’t come home to eat. I came home to see you and Daddy. To be with you and Daddy.”

“Of course, dear. I’m sorry. It’s just that… I’m so excited to see you, and so surprised! Will you be able to spend the night? There’s plenty of room, naturally. Your old bedroom … it’s right where it always was, a little bit redecorated, of course, more in the order of a guest room now, as the old guest room is where Eleanor sleeps when she stays over, which she does from time to time. You remember Eleanor, don’t you? Oh, no, I don’t think you ever met Eleanor. She came to work for us after you went to Cleveland, I think, but you’ve heard us speak of her, she’s lovely and has been such a help to me…”

“Mother, I’ll stay the night. I may stay many nights. Where’s Daddy?”

Her reading glasses hung from her neck by a thin silver chain. She lifted them and carefully placed them before her eyes, as if I’d asked her to read her answer from a manual. “Sit down, Hannah. Yes, Daddy’s not … well. He’s not here,” she declared. “Would you like a drink?” she asked brightly.

“Jesus Christ, Mother, no! I mean, yes. Why not? What do you mean, ‘not well’? And ‘not here,’ for Christ’s sake.”

“Please, Hannah, you don’t need to swear. I’ll tell you everything. Just let me … let me gather my wits. This is such a surprise. What would you like to drink?”

“Anything. Gin, I guess.”

“Ice? With vermouth?” She got up and went to the liquor cabinet next to the refrigerator and started rummaging among the bottles.

“Anything, Mother. Anything. Tell me about Daddy. If you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not. I’m sorry. It’s just … the surprise and all, I didn’t expect…” she trailed off, fussing with my drink. I sat down at the table and said nothing and waited. She set the glass before me. “No vermouth? I can make it a martini. Your father loved his dry martinis.”

“No, this is fine, thanks. Tell me about Daddy, Mother.”

“I didn’t know if I should write you, it’s been so long since we’d heard from you, and I wasn’t sure where to write. And I didn’t want to upset you unnecessarily, especially with you being as I supposed way out there in Africa and unable to do anything for him anyhow…”

“For God’s sake, Mother, get to it!”

Her lower lip quivered. She was about to cry. “I don’t… I’m sorry, it’s just, it’s just that it’s hard to know how to talk to you, Hannah. You’re so… I didn’t expect…” and she started to weep. My cue to embrace and comfort her. To feel guilty and apologetic for demanding simple, unadorned information. To be punished for trying to evade her manipulation of my emotions. In a way all too familiar to me, with her tears Mother was making herself — and not Daddy and my desire to know what had happened to him — the subject.

And, naturally, I responded with no response. Just as I did all those years ago, starting when I was a child and discovered that the only response useful to me was no response — it kept my emotions intact and still my own, and it punished her back, punished her for her self-absorption, her relentless shifting of the subject, no matter how dramatic, poignant, or dire, to herself.

My mother was a closed circuit. All her poles and the pronouns that represented them were reversed. Of strangers, she would say, “She hasn’t met me yet.” Of people who passed for dear friends, she would say, “I’m her dearest friend.” It wasn’t a psychological disorder; it was a metaphysical disfigurement. It was beyond her control, and I should have been kinder towards her. But at that moment in the kitchen I couldn’t give her what she wanted — an embrace, an apology, an expression of concern for her, not for Daddy, and surely not for me. And even though I was concerned for her, I chose not to respond to her weeping. I ignored it, as if she were merely pausing to organize her thoughts. Which in a sense she was, if tactics unconsciously deployed can be viewed as thoughts.

“I’m terribly sorry, dear.” She sniffled and took a bracing swallow from her drink. “It’s been a … a very difficult time for me. I’ve been so alone,” she said and began to weep again, caught herself and bravely plowed ahead. “Three weeks ago, Hannah, your father suffered a massive stroke. A cerebral hemorrhage.”

No response . I said nothing. And consequently almost felt nothing.

“I was here in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I’d let Eleanor go home early that day, it was Friday, Fourth of July weekend, and Daddy was in his study, and I heard a loud noise. A thump. It was like the sound of a dictionary being accidentally dropped,” she said, an image she had no doubt memorized, rehearsed, and taken on the road, where it must have played well. “I called to him, ‘What was that, dear?’ I called again, ‘What was that, dear?’ But the study door was closed, as usual when he doesn’t wish to be disturbed, so I assumed he hadn’t heard me and it was nothing serious and I went back to cooking. I was making my famous porcini risotto, and for another thirty minutes that took all my attention. Because of the stirring and the slow addition of the chicken stock, you know. That and the salad and setting the table. I even went outside and cut some flowers for the table, and I never knew a thing was wrong, until dinner was ready to be served, and I went to the study door and knocked and called to him. ‘Dinner is served, Bernard!’ No answer.” She took another sip from her drink, which would soon need replenishing. I remembered how she loved to finish her Manhattans like an adorable child by sucking the cherry from her fingertips with a pouty flourish, and wondered if she’d wait until she finished her story, the story of how she experienced her husband’s stroke.

“I called a second time,” she went on. “Still no answer. So I opened the door. I had an awful feeling that something was wrong, a foreboding, almost, and then I saw him. He was lying on the floor beside his desk, and I realized that what I’d thought was the dictionary falling had actually been him! Daddy ! And I felt awful for it, for having all that time been fussing about in the kitchen and dining room, while he was lying on the floor only a few feet away and needing me but unable to call out for me.”

Now she began to cry in earnest, for it was the climax of her story, and from here on she’d have trouble keeping it from being Daddy’s. Grudgingly, I said that she couldn’t possibly have known what had happened to him or done anything other than what she did, and nudged her forward.

He was unconscious, she said, and at first she thought it was a heart attack and regretted that she’d never learned CPR. Not knowing what else to do, she called 911 and waited there beside him, with his head in her lap, for the ambulance to arrive. “It was the worst fifteen minutes in my life, waiting for that ambulance,” she said. “Do you want another?” she asked.