Russell Banks - The Darling

“I’m fine,” I said. “Tell me the rest. I assume they did an MRI and CAT scan. And operated on him at once.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said brightly and brushed those old tears away. She smiled into her now-empty glass, plucked the cherry from it, and popped it into her mouth, sucked for a second, chewed, and swallowed. “Ralph Plummer, he operated that very night. Immediately. At Mass General. Ralph’s the best in the business. I stayed with Daddy all night, of course, except when he was those seven hours in surgery, and I’ve been right there by his bed most of every day since. He’s still at Mass General. In the intensive care unit. We’re trying now to decide where he should go next, Ralph and I and Freddie Rexroth, along with several of Daddy’s old friends and medical colleagues.”

She continued her story, but I barely listened now. Between the instant that the artery in Daddy’s head burst and when he arrived at the hospital for diagnosis and treatment, more than an hour must have passed. I had enough medical experience and training to know what happened. While his skull was filling with blood, his brain was being compressed inside the skull case, cutting off the circulation of blood and oxygen to other parts of his brain, until the cells began to die and neurons started blinking out, darkness sweeping across his mind like a power failure spreading across a city grid, one neighborhood after another plunged into the gloom of permanent night. The prescribed treatment — a hole drilled in the skull, surgery to alleviate the pressure and tie off the burst vessel and siphon off the clotted blood — would have caused more damage to his brain than the hemorrhage. Tissue would have been inadvertently, unavoidably, removed. My father’s brain was no longer my father’s brain. And his body was no longer his body. If three weeks after surgery he was still in the ICU at Mass General and hadn’t been moved to a rehab facility, then there would be no recovery, no return. He was alive, thanks to modern medical technology and the surgical skills of Dr. Ralph Plummer, “the best in the business,” but he no longer had a life. Unless, of course, Mother was exaggerating.

I realized that she had asked me a question and was waiting for an answer. “What?”

“I said, ‘Why did you stop writing to us?’ I’m sorry to bring it up, but we worried so. And wondered. We wondered about your life, Hannah. Especially after you wrote us that you had married a man out there, a Libyan.”

“Liberian.”

“Yes. Liberian. Why did you stop answering my letters?”

“What letters? I wrote you about Woodrow and said that I was pregnant, remember? After that I never heard from either of you. I know, I know, my tone was probably a little harsh, that’s the way I was in those days. But still—”

“That’s not true , Hannah. For a long time, both your father and I wrote you. We did. And then he stopped. Because of his wounded pride. But I kept on for a long time, Hannah. Then I just sent cards, Christmas cards and birthday cards. Finally, I gave up, too.” She looked at her hands in puzzlement, as if trying to recognize whose they were. Then she looked at mine. “I see you’re wearing a wedding ring,” she said, almost wistfully.

“Yes. All those letters and cards, were they addressed to Hannah Musgrave, Mother?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’m not Hannah Musgrave. Haven’t been for years.”

“You’re not? ” Genuine astonishment. “Who are you, then?” Genuine curiosity.

“Good question.” I got up and walked around the kitchen and poked into the cabinets, the refrigerator, even the freezer. Everything was the same and in the same place as when I last looked, fifteen years ago — the china, the glassware and silver, cutlery, pots and pans, the canned goods and packaged food. In fifteen years, nothing in this room had changed. I leaned against the counter, arms folded, and said, “I’m Missus Woodrow Sundiata. First name, Hannah. Mother of three sons, Dillon, William, and Paul. Or maybe over here I’m Dawn Carrington. That’s what my passport says, anyhow. A fugitive. Still underground.”

“Three sons! Oh, my! I’m a grandmother! ”

“Yes, you are. Congratulations. But your letters and cards — if they were addressed to Hannah Musgrave and were mailed after I got married to Woodrow — disappeared, no doubt, into the famously inept Liberian postal system.”

“That explains it, then,” she said brightly. “Your father, you know, made some inquiries a few years ago. He met someone in the foreign service, an American who was stationed out there; he met him in Washington once at some official State Department dinner and asked after you. Discreetly, of course.”

“Of course. What’d he learn?”

“Nothing. The man said he’d check when he returned to Liberia, which he did, and he wrote back to Daddy that there wasn’t any record of an American woman named Hannah Musgrave residing in Liberia. So we assumed that you’d left the country. We thought you might even be in the United States. Underground. Like before. And that we’d hear from you eventually. Like before. But, Hannah,” she said, smiling, her eyes suddenly glistening with apparent joy, “I’m a grandmother! How wonderful. Tell me about my grandsons. I’ll warm up Eleanor’s stroganoff for us,” she said, and went to the refrigerator, flipping the oven on as she passed the stove. “Tell me everything! Oh, if only Daddy could hear this. You’ll see him tomorrow, dear,” she said in a comforting tone, switching emotional levels too rapidly for me to keep up.

I tried, however, and soon found myself switching topics with the same reckless abandon. I described Dillon first, his temperament and good looks, and then told her a little about our house on Duport Road, mentioning in passing that in 1976 I’d traveled from the States first to Ghana and then to Liberia on a phony passport, which I’d used when leaving Liberia and returning now to the States as well, and explained briefly and in a vague way why I’d been obliged to leave without my sons or husband, which utterly confused her. So I returned to my sons themselves, telling her about the twins, and then a little about the country itself and Woodrow’s family in Fuama, whom she thought “charming” and “interesting.”

She asked me if I had pictures of Woodrow and the boys.

“No. I mean, not with me.”

“You don’t? Why on earth not, Hannah?”

I had to think for a minute. “I stopped carrying pictures of family years ago, Mother. When I was underground.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, when you were underground. Are you still underground, then?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“Oh.”

I told her about my work at the lab and how it had ended and then later had evolved into caretaking the chimps, which she also found “charming” and “interesting,” causing me to switch back to the subject of Woodrow and his precarious position with the government of Samuel Doe, without telling her what I knew about Samuel Doe, whom she knew as the more or less democratically elected, anti-communist leader of an African nation, someone much favored by the Reagan administration.

“I read everything I can about Liberia,” she said. “The New York Times , of course, and just recently a novel by Graham Greene that was pretty depressing, to tell the truth, but it gave me the flavor of the place—”

“ The Heart of the Matter ?”

“Yes, I think that was it.”

“That’s Sierra Leone, Mother. And a long time ago.”

“Oh.”

I asked her to tell me more about Daddy, his condition, the effects of the stroke and surgery. But it was almost as if she didn’t know the answers. She was as evasive and vague about his condition as I had been about Samuel Doe. She kept saying, “You’ll see tomorrow. I’ll arrange to have his doctors speak with you. He’s pretty incapacitated, dear, so prepare yourself. I always try to be cheerful and optimistic when I’m with him. But it’s difficult. And sometimes when I leave his room I just break down in tears. Shall I open a bottle of wine? It is a special occasion, after all. How about a special red?”