Russell Banks - The Darling

You must think I’m being unkind, remembering her this way. But it was the first time that I had seen and understood my mother so clearly, and I felt a terrible, sad pity for her. In the midst of my own grieving, I saw that she was unable to grieve, which made her loss that much greater than mine. In the midst of my swelling gratitude for my father’s love, I saw that she felt only resentment and bitterness towards him. It was if I had loved, and been loved by, a man whom she had never even met.

I placed my hand over hers and said, “I know you made sacrifices, Mother. You sacrificed a lot. For both me and Daddy. And you deserve recognition for that. I’m sorry that we both had to ask so much of you. I truly am,” I said, and meant it.

Her eyes filled and tears spilled across her cheeks, and she buried her face against my shoulder and sobbed for several moments, like a child who had been lost and now was found.

Eleanor came back from the church in time to drive Mother to the funeral in Daddy’s Buick. I waved goodbye to her, then walked into Daddy’s study and flopped down in his red-leather chair. His throne, he used to call it, where he read, listened to music, drank his dry martinis, and held court. As a child and later as a teenager, I had loved sitting on the carpet beside his chair, and I read there, and sometimes he talked to me about things that I knew he rarely, if ever, spoke of with Mother. Music, science, politics, religion — he talked to me of these things as if I were an adult. And now, probably for the first time, I was seated in his chair, and I was an adult. The king is dead. Long live the queen .

After a few moments, I got up and went to his wide mahogany desk, opened the stationery drawer, and took out a sheet of letterhead paper and an envelope. I sat down and began to write.

Mother, I want to make things easier for you, and the only way I can do that is to go away and stay away. I’ll be fine, so you mustn’t worry about me. And you’ll be fine, too. Someday I’ll be able to come back and be with you in a natural, normal way that won’t ask any sacrifices from you or from me. But that’s impossible now. When I’m settled again, I’ll contact you. Until then, please know that I love you, just as I know that you love me.

And signed it with my initial. I folded the letter and sealed it in the envelope, wrote “Iris Musgrave, Personal” on the outside, and carried it into the kitchen, where I placed it under the sugar bowl on the breakfast table.

I went upstairs and grabbed my duffel and took a last look around at my old room — it wasn’t my room anymore; it hadn’t been mine for a lifetime, it seemed. It was truly a guest room now. I lugged my duffel out to the garage and tossed it into the trunk of Mother’s Toyota, a red, five-year-old, woman’s car. Perfectly anonymous. And drove away.

At the cemetery, I parked a short way downhill from the Musgrave family plot, where I could see the grave site and my ancestors’ headstones and not be seen myself. I sat in the car and smoked. Good old Marlboros. At the urging of Woodrow, who said he hated to see a woman with a cigarette in her hand, I’d stopped smoking. After seven years, I’d picked up the habit again.

I sat there under a blue, cloudless sky in a kind of reverie, inhaling tobacco smoke mingled with the smell of newly mown grass, listening to birdsong and the distant thrum of a lawn mower, adjusting slowly to the peace of resolution. Shortly, the funeral cortege began to arrive — the long, black hearse with the casket and baskets of cut flowers; the trailing line of mourners’ cars; a pair of Cambridge police cruisers to escort the cortege; a van from one of the Boston TV stations; and two nondescript sedans with two nondescript middle-aged men in each — FBI agents, I assumed — who remained inside their cars when the others got out and walked across the grass to the grave. Fifty or more cars were parked along the lane that passed the Musgrave family plot, and a crowd of nearly a hundred mourners had gathered at the grave, most of them well-dressed, elderly white people, all of whom looked vaguely familiar to me, as if as a girl I’d seen them at my parents’ cocktail parties and hadn’t seen them since. There were no pallbearers. Two men from the funeral home transferred the casket from the hearse to the grave on a wheeled, stretcherlike dolly, rolled it onto a platform, and lowered it efficiently, smoothly, into the ground.

Reverend Coffin, in ministerial robes, read from his Book of Common Prayer; my mother in black, her face covered by a veil, visibly wept; a man standing behind her passed his handkerchief to her. At the back of the crowd a black teenage boy with a trumpet stood forward, raised the trumpet to his lips, and began to play a slow, stately piece that I recognized at once. It was from Daddy’s favorite composition by Charles Ives, “The Unanswered Question,” a strange, haunted, and haunting tune, like a long, unspoken cry from the other side of this life. It was more a warning from the dead than a welcome. When I was a child and adolescent, I’d listened to my father listening to it a hundred times, but until now had never heard it myself. It was my father’s true voice, the one I knew and loved best. The music floated down to me from the grave, spectral, implacable, and disjointed. The tempo increased, the music built, and I pictured my father rising from his leather chair, his mournful expression fading, and he beginning to dance a syncopated waltz, turning and stepping elegantly around the book-lined room, not quite happy, not quite manic, but a little of both. He lifted me in his arms and danced with me, my feet dangling far above the carpet, until gradually he seemed to tire, and he let me down and released me. The music grew heavier, slower, lower, and my father sat back down into his chair. The music reached the furthest extension of its mystery and longing, and at last ended in permanent silence. My father placed his hands on his knees, looked down at me seated on the floor beside him, and closed his eyes.

THE CROWD BEGAN to break apart, and people headed for their cars. I started the Toyota, backed and turned it around, and made for the exit ahead of them. I don’t think anyone noticed my presence or saw me leave. It was by then late afternoon, and the leafy streets of Cambridge were golden in the sunlight. College boys and girls lounged and read and flirted with one another on the green banks of the Charles River, while sculls skimmed across its surface like elongated water bugs. I took the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge into Boston and passed through Copley Square, made my way across the newly gentrified South End, and just ahead of rush-hour traffic picked up I-95, in the southbound lane.

At the time, there seemed nowhere else to go, so I drove to New Bedford. And no one else to turn to, so I turned to Carol. I wanted to erase as much of the last seven years of my life as possible. I wanted to be like one of those husbands who leaves the house for a loaf of bread and disappears for seven years and then one day shows up again on the doorstep and is welcomed back into the family, as if he’d never left it.

It was late when I pulled up in front, nearly ten o’clock, and there was no one on the street. The house was the same sad, sorry triple-decker in need of repairs and paint, with laundry drying on clotheslines out back, uncollected trash at the curb, and a pair of beat-up old cars on cinder blocks in the driveway. Empty beer cans and soda bottles and fast-food wrappers cluttered the stoop. The tenants who’d earlier sat out there drinking and socializing, now that their sweltering apartments were habitable again, had retreated to their TVs and bedrooms, leaving their refuse behind.

The tag under the third-floor mail slot still had Carol’s name on it — and mine, too: D. Harrington. I pushed open the door and stepped into the dark, musty hallway and reached automatically for the wall switch next to the door. I flipped on the low-wattage lights and followed them up two flights of bare stairs to the landing at the top, inhaling the familiar smell of moldy old linoleum, corned beef and cabbage, and stale cigarette smoke.