Russell Banks - The Darling

And now my father was no longer real to me, except in memory. A dry, white crust of spittle was stuck to a corner of his mouth. I wet my fingertips and washed it off. His face was the one I’d known all my life, but it wasn’t my father’s face anymore; it belonged to one of my ancestors, a pale, lipless Puritan with a beaked nose and cold blue eyes. It was more a mask than a face. A death mask. I made one last attempt to see if the person peering through the eye holes was still alive, and I said, “Daddy, are you in there?”

“Speak loudly,” Mother said. “He can’t hear you. The hearing aid.”

I turned and said, “Mother, just shut the fuck up.”

She looked scared, as if I’d struck her, and pasted a thin smile onto her lips and, with thumb and forefinger, mimed locking her mouth with a key and throwing the key away. The sickly smile and her rage-filled eyes made her look like a happy executioner. Is this my mother? Is this who she really is?

“Leave us alone for a few minutes, okay? Why don’t you see if Doctor Rexroth is in the building. We should speak with him later.”

She nodded, turned, and left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

I leaned down and reconnected my gaze to my father’s, as if resuming a deeply familiar ceremony that had been briefly disrupted by an erratic member of the congregation, someone with a coughing fit who had politely removed herself from the hall. I kissed his forehead, and his eyes slowly closed. “Hello, Daddy,” I said. You’re not going to recover from this, Daddy. You’re not coming back to us. It took too long for Mother to get help, too long to get you onto the operating table, too long for me to come home. And now it’s too late for me to be of any use to you. Too late for me to thank you for loving me. You loved me almost in spite of yourself. But it was enough to make me capable of being thankful, at least, no matter how late it’s come. I am who I am at bottom and who I am not because of who you and Mother were and were not. It’s because of who you were, Daddy, that I’m able to be someone at all. If I hadn’t had you, if all I’d had was Mother, I would be her. I’d be no one. An absence. You saved me from that, Daddy. You —

“My name.” He said the words in a small, child-like voice.

“What, Daddy?”

His eyes were wide open, staring into mine. “My name.”

“Your name is Bernard. Bernard Musgrave. Doctor Bernard Musgrave.”

“My name.” It was a statement almost, not a question, with equal stress on both words.

“Want me to say my name? Is that what you want, Daddy?”

“My name,” he said. “My name. My name.”

“My name is Hannah. Hannah Musgrave, Daddy.”

“My name.”

“ Your name, then. It’s Bernard—”

“My name.” He’d grown more fretful now, as if the words were a command, a deeply encoded order, and I was expected to know the cipher to the code. “My name! My name!”

“I don’t know what you want, Daddy.”

“My name. My name. My name.” It became a flattened chant, a strange, mystifying song.

I decided simply to listen. And soon, after eight or ten repetitions, the chant changed tone, timbre, and tune, and he seemed to be speaking whole sentences, then paragraphs, but using only those two short words. My name my name my name my name , it went — questions, answers, declarations, pauses, all the parts of an extended monologue. My name? My name! My name my name my name. My name. My name my name? My-y-y-y NAME! My nam-m-m-e, MY name.

As suddenly as it began, it stopped. He went silent. His eyes closed, and he collapsed in on himself, as if exhausted. His face slackened, and his breathing slowed, and he seemed to have fallen peacefully asleep. I touched both his cheeks, his forehead, and his lips, and then touched my own cheeks, forehead, and lips.

And that was the end of it. I left the hospital with Mother. According to the death certificate he died within an hour of our departure.

IN THE DAYS that followed, I moved into my old room, now the guest room, though I did not unpack my duffel. I helped Mother with the funeral arrangements and worked behind the scenes, advising her on her dealings with the accountants and lawyers, and helped her go through Daddy’s papers and files. The New York Times and the Boston Globe each gave him a half-page obituary with a photograph from the early 1970s of Daddy marching arm in arm with the Berrigan brothers in Washington at the march that earned him two whole paragraphs in Norman Mailer’s book Armies of the Night , a point that had been of considerable pride for him. Both obituaries mentioned his daughter, Hannah, naturally, a member of the Weather Underground, “indicted in Chicago in 1969 and a fugitive still at large.”

I stayed completely out of public view and even at home lay low and spoke to no one on the phone. I instructed Mother to say, only if asked, that as far as she knew Hannah was still in Africa and unable to return to the U.S., and to tell Eleanor that I was Mother’s niece from Ottawa and my name was Dawn Carrington. It wasn’t exactly deep cover; it was more like being in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program.

We argued over that. Mother insisted that I ask one of Daddy’s famous lawyers to negotiate my surrender in exchange for a suspended sentence, as so many other Weathermen and — women had done; I insisted that no Reagan-appointed federal prosecutor, especially in an election year, would agree to letting me off without jail time. “And there’s no way, Mother, that I’m going to jail for two or three or more years. Not now, not ever, not after all this time on the run. And not with a husband and three children who expect me to come straight back to them as soon as President Doe gives the word.”

“I just don’t understand all that,” she said. It was the day of the funeral. Eleanor had gone ahead early to prepare the post-burial reception at Saint Tim’s. A public memorial service at Riverside Church in New York City would be held later in the summer, when most of the people who would want to memorialize Daddy would have returned from the Hamptons, the Vineyard, and Maine. The funeral itself had been advertised as a private service for family and close friends, but Mother had extended her personal invitation to well over a hundred people, friends and acquaintances and colleagues alike, and most of them had said they’d be there. They’d be there for her, she kept saying. “Ruth and Roy Pelmas, sweet things, they said of course they’ll come, they’ll come out of love for Daddy and for me. So many of our friends know how hard it’s going to be for me with Daddy gone. Perhaps you could make a list of everyone who comes to the funeral. And get the names of those who send flowers. So I’ll know who to write my thank-yous to.”

“No, Mother, I can’t. I’m not going to be at the funeral.”

“ What? And why not, may I ask? Your own father’s funeral!”

For what must have been the tenth time since my homecoming, I described the risk I ran just being in the country, let alone sleeping in my parents’ house, which, for all I knew, was still under surveillance. “And Daddy’s funeral is definitely going to have a team of FBI agents attending, Mother. You know that. What are you trying to do, set me up for a bust?”

“How can you say such a thing!” she cried.

“Just kidding, Mother.”

“How can you even think it?” she continued. “After all I’ve done for your father. And for you, too, young lady. Your political views were never mine, you know, and many of your father’s weren’t either.”

“I was kidding.”

“But even so, I stood by you. Year in and out. I made sacrifices, Hannah. Real sacrifices.” Her eyes narrowed, and her mouth tightened, as muddled anger cleared, rose, and spilled over. We had moved into Daddy’s study and had been shuffling through his files in search of a life-insurance policy whose premiums she was sure he had been paying for years. Mother had never paid a monthly bill herself, not even Eleanor’s paycheck, or balanced a checkbook or reconciled a bank statement. She had no idea how little or how much money she now controlled, no notion of whom Daddy owed money to or who owed money to him. She hadn’t so much been widowed as orphaned. And she was angry at Daddy for that. And angry at me, who had apparently not been similarly orphaned. And angry at everyone who, in offering their condolences, praised Daddy and not her, remembered his wise and witty sayings and not hers, expressed gratitude for his many public services and good deeds and none for hers. She was angry at dear old Reverend Bill Coffin, who was supervising the funeral service at Saint Timothy’s Episcopal Church and presiding over the burial, mad at him for knowing which music by Bach and which by Charles Mingus and Judy Collins Daddy would want played and which passages from the Bible he’d want read over his casket. She was angry that Daddy’s death was his and not hers.