Russell Banks - The Darling

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Will he be able to recognize me?”

“Oh, my goodness,” she said and set napkins, plates, and silver on the table. “Of course , he will.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Mother and I drove into Boston, and before seeing Daddy, we met first with the surgeon, Dr. Plummer. I had insisted on it. I was still hoping that Mother had exaggerated the seriousness of Daddy’s condition. The surgeon strolled into the waiting room where we sat on overstuffed, turquoise easy chairs and stood over us, poking through a folder that I assumed was Daddy’s file. He was a Top Gun type, a forty-year-old athlete with a military buzz cut, titanium eyes, and a mouthful of very white teeth. He wore pressed chinos and a tight-fitting, navy blue polo shirt, all muscle and sinew and as clean as an action figure.

“Looks like an intracerebral hemorrhage,” he said, shuffling through the papers as if reading them for the first time. “Big bleed. Caused probably by high blood pressure. That and blood vessels weakened by old age. The scans indicated the stroke was catastrophic.”

“Catastrophic,” I said.

“Yes.” He checked his watch.

“That means he’ll die from it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Mother interrupted.

“Yeah, usually it does. With someone your father’s age, death usually occurs within a few hours of the event. Or at the most a few days.”

“And when it doesn’t?” I asked.

“Not my area,” he said.

“Will he get better? Will his condition improve?”

He glanced through the sheaf of papers. “Hard to say. Age’s against him. Guess he’s otherwise in good shape. Heart, lungs, et cetera. Once he’s in rehab, they’ll make an evaluation.”

“How long might my father have to remain in intensive care?”

“Not my area,” he said again. “Speak to the attending physician on that.” He checked the file again. “Doctor Rexroth.”

“Freddie. Freddie Rexroth,” Mother said. “A dear.”

“Surgery went okay, though. A case like this, we don’t like to opt for surgery. The age thing. A batch of tissue, brain tissue, always gets scraped off, no matter how good you are. And I’m good. Some guys want to try a spinal tap first. But with a lumbar puncture you can get cerebral herniation. Brain tissue, because of the pressure inside the skull, gets sucked through the transtentorial notch into the cerebellum and the stem. Bad news. So we opted to cut,” he said, closing the file with relish, as if the memory of the cutting had unexpectedly pleased him. “Anything else?” he asked, and smiled.

“No,” I said.

MOTHER ENTERED Daddy’s room ahead of me. “Good morning!” she chirped. “I’ve brought someone to see you, Bernard. And you’ll never guess who it is.” She waved me onto center stage. “Ta- da!”

I came slowly forward and stood at the foot of his bed. His head was wrapped in a gauze turban. Wires monitored his heartbeat and blood pressure, and plastic tubes snaked in and out of his nostrils, mouth, and the veins of both wrists, pumping oxygen, nourishment, and medications into his body and removing spittle and phlegm and urine. My father’s heart, liver, and kidneys were strong. He had taken good care of his body and had exercised it regularly, drank moderately, never smoked. But he’d been attached to this elaborate apparatus for twenty days, and he probably looked the same today as he had when they first wheeled him in from the operating room. He’d look the same in twenty weeks. Twenty months. Twenty years. His body was outliving him.

“Stand over here, dear,” Mother said, sotto voce. “On his right side. It’s his left that’s paralyzed, and they think his vision on that side is still impaired, too. Poor thing.”

I obeyed and passed behind her. There were bars along the sides of his bed to keep him from tumbling out, but with all the tubes, cords, and wires, I couldn’t imagine him moving. His head was propped by a pillow, and he wore a white hospital gown. A tuft of gray chest hair fluttered above the collar of his gown. I avoided looking directly at his face, as if I knew I’d learn there a thing I did not want to know. The skin of his forearms and hands was like yellowed parchment. His fingernails were clean and professionally manicured.

Finally, I dared to look at his face. And it was like seeing my father in his coffin, as if Mother and I were attending the funeral of Dr. Bernard Musgrave, my dead father, her late husband, who lay there with his eyes closed imitating sleep. The color of his face was a little too bright against the white background, and his chin and cheeks had been freshly shaved by a stranger, a patch of three-day grizzle missed here, another there. The hair keeps on growing after the rest of the body has died, doesn’t it? Like the fingernails and toenails. My father’s internal organs might still function, thanks to the machines attached to them, but it was the same sort of meaningless continuity as the ongoing growth of his beard and fingernails.

“Look who I’ve brought!” Mother exclaimed. “ Look , Bernard!”

His eyes flashed open, then closed. “Let him be, Mother,” I said, turning to her, catching the anger on her face, shocked by it, but then, just as quickly, not shocked.

“No, see, he’s awake,” she said.

I turned back, and he was staring straight up, as if at the ceiling. “Hello, Daddy,” I whispered. “It’s me, Hannah.”

“You’ll have to speak up. He isn’t wearing his hearing aid.”

“Hearing aid? Daddy has a hearing aid?”

“He’s had it for years, Hannah. But they won’t let him use it here. Because of the battery or something, with all the electronics,” she said and tossed a disdainful wave at the bank of blinking monitors.

I reached down and touched his dry cheek. He watched my hand descend, but didn’t move his head. He still hadn’t looked at me. I was afraid to raise my voice, afraid it would crack, and I’d cry. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be tough, clear headed, rational. I knew what I was supposed to feel ; I needed to know what to think . I couldn’t count on Mother for guidance; she had neither feelings, with the probable exception of anger, nor thoughts, except for a set of self-revising strategies for attention.

“Bernard!” she said in a loud voice. “Look who I brought to see you! It’s Hannah , Bernard!” Then, in a stage whisper, “It’s the medication. He’s very heavily sedated, you know.”

I positioned myself directly over him, cutting off his view of the ceiling, and saw my face reflected in the pupils of his eyes. For a long moment, we stared at each other like that, unblinking, dry eyed, as if staring into the distance through fog. But we were only inches away from what we were trying to see in each other’s eyes, the thing that had always been there, from my infancy on. I can remember it from almost that far back, when he would look down at me in my crib, and we would fix our gazes on one another’s eyes. I saw him, and at the same time in the same way, he saw me, and in that instant he and I became real to one another and to ourselves. By that means we both came into existence. My father had given life to me, whether by accident or intention, it didn’t matter; and I had given it back to him, an exchange begun probably at my birth.

It was an exchange from which Mother had been excluded. Not because Daddy or I wished it, but because we both knew that she was incapable of truly seeing anyone, even herself. All my life, whenever I tried to see into my mother’s eyes, I saw two tiny, mirrored disks that bounced my gaze back at me. I never shared with Mother the eye contact that secures for you the knowledge that you are as real as the world itself, as certain of your own existence, regardless of its meaninglessness and contingency, as you are of the world’s. The opacity of my mother’s gaze deprived me of that certitude and security and made me resemble her from time to time in ways that would later shame me. And by now you know some of those ways. How I saw, or more precisely, how I did not see, my sons, for instance. Or my husband. It wasn’t as though I could have seen them, if only I’d tried. Like my mother, I was incapable of seeing them. It was beyond my capacity. Woodrow was always my black African husband, Woodrow . He was never simply Woodrow. And my sons were my black African husband’s three sons. The eldest and the twins . They were never Dillon, William, and Paul. It’s why I was able to leave them with such ease and so little regret. Simply, they weren’t as real to me as I was to myself. They weren’t even as real to me as my dreamers. Not until later, much later. And by then it was too late.