The Darling by Russell Banks
Dear Woodrow,
It feels strange to be writing to you like this, as if we’re on different planets. In spite of everything, however, you are still my husband and I’m still the mother of our three sons. Yet from this distance and for a variety of reasons which I’ll not trouble you with, I feel like an unnatural wife and mother and have no idea of how you and the boys feel towards me. Do you hate me? Are you glad that I am so far from you? I sometimes think that my absence has freed you to live a more natural life, a normal life, something that my presence made nearly impossible for you.
I wondered if now I was living a more natural life, too, if this was my normal life, or if I even had one. What were other women like me, my social peers and contemporaries, doing now? I wondered. They were white, American baby boomers born to privilege and trained to sustain that privilege and pass it on to their children. They’d had their taste of political activism in the sixties, “experimented” with drugs and sex, and after a year or two of graduate school had chosen mates with the same degree of ease and confidence with which, thanks to the women’s liberation movement, they’d slid into professions. By now they’d had two-point-three babies, at least one short-lived love affair, and seen a shrink once a week for a year or two to deal with guilt, marital strife, and early-onset depression generated by the failure of the women’s liberation movement to make them feel liberated. Most of them had resolved the conflict between child-rearing and career by temporarily shelving the career, and half of them had gone through a divorce, or would as soon as the children became teenagers and went off to boarding school. They were worried about their weight and their husbands’ eye for younger women. They were becoming their mothers. But what about me? What had I done all those years? Who was I becoming?
I don’t want to burden you with my feelings. They haven’t been of much use or interest to you in the past and are probably even less so now. I’m writing so that you and the boys (if you choose to relay this information to them) will know where I am and that I still love you. Though it has been very painful for me to have been exiled like this, I do not blame you for it. I know that you (and I) had no choice in the matter. I also know that someday this separation will be over and we will be together as a family again. Perhaps you have worried about me since I left Monrovia three months ago. Perhaps you haven’t. I have no way of knowing. Surely the boys have wondered how and where I was? I think of them all the time, especially at night when I am alone, and I can hardly keep from crying. I’m living with an old friend who has taken me in and I’ll soon be working as a volunteer at the school that my friend’s daughter attends. I’ll be the school librarian and will be with children all day long. My friend’s daughter is a lovely child and we’ve grown close, but it only makes me miss my own children all the more. Please tell me how they are faring without me. Naturally I hope that they are doing so well and are so happy that they barely notice my absence. At the same time I want to think that they miss me as much as I miss them.
It wasn’t true that I could hardly keep from crying at night. Nights, after I put Bettina to bed, I sat up reading paperbacks of nineteenth-century English novels—Dickens, mostly—waiting for Carol to come home from work. She got back to the apartment shortly before ten, and on Fridays and weekends came in around midnight. Our routine varied little. We’d smoke a joint together, watch a half-hour of television, and go to bed, and once a week or so, seduced more by the pot than each other’s bodies, we’d make slow, languorous love to one another. It was more a form of mutual masturbation than actual love-making, and afterwards I slept deeply and without dreams.
There is some sad news—sad to me, at least. Within days of my return to the States, my father passed away. I know you always thought of me as something of an orphan, a woman without a family, but I’m not. I loved my father very much, although from afar, and always hoped that you and the boys and my parents would come to know one another. Now that’s impossible—at least with regard to my father. Perhaps someday you will know my mother, however, even though I myself find her very difficult to be with, for reasons I’m sure you would never understand or respect. But that’s all right. I’ve grown used to the deep differences between you and me and accept them and do not mind them. I hope you can feel the same way.
A week earlier, I’d suddenly found myself worrying about my mother’s health and telephoned her in Emerson. Relieved when she didn’t pick up, I left a message on her answering machine “It’s Hannah. I’m staying with friends. If you need to reach me in an emergency, call The Pequod Restaurant in New Bedford and ask for Carol. She’ll know how to reach me. But call only if it’s an emergency. And don’t worry about your car. I’ll return it as soon as I have one of my own. ’Bye.”
That night I said to Carol, “If anyone ever calls you at work and wants to send a message to someone named Hannah, it’s okay. That’s me.”
“Who is?”
“Hannah. It’s not really me. It’s what my mother calls me.”
“Don, that’s weird.”
“It’s just a family nickname.”
“No, weird that you never talk about her.”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
“I know.”
“That’s weird, Don.”
“I know.”
You can write to me (if you wish to) at this address as I expect to be here until I’m able to return to Monrovia without endangering you or the boys in any way. From this distance it’s hard for me to believe that you are in danger, yet I know it’s true. There is no news here of Liberia, and I have no Liberian contacts except through the embassy in Washington and the consulate in New York, and I’m afraid to get in touch with anyone there, for reasons I’m sure you understand all too well. I don’t know how private this letter is, so there are certain personal matters I won’t go into here, for obvious reasons. We are still husband and wife, after all, and I still have many wifely thoughts that are meant for your eyes and ears only. You were never much for writing letters, unless on official ministry business, but I do hope you’ll write back to me and tell me as much as you can of your and the boys’ circumstances. I’ll understand if you have to be circumspect. These days one can’t be too careful. But surely the boys can write to me? And I to them? We haven’t been forbidden that, have we? Well, I’ll know the answer to that if this letter goes unanswered by you and I do not hear from my sons. I don’t know if I could bear that, Woodrow. But I don’t know what I can do about it. My life as a wife and mother is not in my hands anymore. Perhaps yours, as a husband, is not in your hands anymore either. I don’t mean to sound overly dramatic, but I need you to tell me what I am to do with my life. I have very few options, and they are somewhat extreme. What I want is to come home to Monrovia (yes, it is my home, I have no other). I want to come home to my husband and my three sons.
Love,
Your Hannah
My options were extreme. And few. I thought of following Charles to Libya and imagined myself in fatigues and a black beret and an M-16, a latter-day Patty Hearst without the Stockholm syndrome to cloud my mind and divide my heart. A guerrilla fighter. A liberator with a nom de guerre, Nonnie, after the famous female chieftain who led the escaped Jamaican slaves in the Maroon wars. And when Charles’s war of liberation was won, I would have a role in the new revolutionary government and would be able to protect my husband from the victors’ execution squads and would be reunited with my Liberian sons. And then I thought of moving back in with my mother in Emerson and taking care of her in her old age, becoming one of those faithful maiden daughters who, forsaking marriage and children, dedicates her life to the care and feeding of an aged, demanding parent. And to the end of her days my mother would be truly grateful to me, making my mind and heart clear and undivided, and when she died, I would inherit the house on Maple Street and my father’s fortune, which I would use to start a home for abused children from the inner city. And I thought of staying in New Bedford with Carol and Bettina u
Hannah darling,
I read your letter with great pleasure and have conveyed your words of motherly love to the boys. It pleased them very much. They are fine and in good health. Jeannine has taken excellent care of them.
There is little news to report. Things here are very much the same as when you left, politically and otherwise. I have spoken about your situation to our American friend, who seems to have some influence with the president. He tells me that he can arrange a meeting between the president and the U.S. ambassador, Mr. Wycliffe, on the matter of your return. Our friend tells me that in exchange for certain favors, which he did not divulge, it may soon be possible for us to be a reunited family. This would be wonderful for all.
I am sorry to learn of your father’s passing. I too regret that I never met him, but I’m sure he was a fine gentleman and doctor of medicine. Please give my condolences to your mother.
I have enclosed several Polaroid pictures of the boys. Also, Jeannine has asked me to include herein letters from the boys to you that I think you will find quite charming indeed. Jeannine has been learning to read and write in a class taught in town by one of the Peace Corps volunteers. She tells me that she will write to you herself when she has graduated from her class. She is very proud of her newly acquired skills but is not yet ready to expose them to you, whom she greatly admires.
When I first arrived in Monrovia and through Woodrow came to know Sam Clement, I carefully avoided him. The cultural attaché at the American embassy, he was present at any official gathering that was deemed insufficiently high level for the U.S. ambassador to attend in person, but I was almost always able to slip out of the receiving line and head for the ladies’ room before he got close enough to shake the hands of the minister of health and his American wife. Then for a few years he was no longer there. Woodrow mentioned that he’d heard Sam had gone to work in Zimbabwe for the new national telephone company that the Americans were setting up. In 1980, after Samuel Doe and his cohort butchered President Tolbert and his cabinet and took over the government, Sam returned to Monrovia, once again as the cultural attaché. By this time I had become accepted in what passed for high society in Monrovia and had grown more secure in my identity as the white, foreign-born wife of the minister of health and no longer avoided Sam. He became Woodrow’s and my American friend. He loaned me books and newspapers and magazines from the embassy library. He once drank too much gin at a dinner party at our house and followed me onto the terrace and tried to kiss me, and when I gently declined, he apologized profusely and seemed genuinely embarrassed and sorry. I wasn’t at all offended. Mostly surprised. I had thought he was homosexual.
I will write to you again as soon as there is news. If you can, would you please send a first-quality video camera and VCR to me? They are very expensive here and only a few poor brands are available. Sony is the best. You should have it shipped to me at the ministry. Thanks in advance.
Your loving husband,
Woodrow Sundiata
The brief letters from the boys were in pencil on lined tablet paper a lot like the paper I had torn from Bettina’s tablet for my letter to Woodrow. I quickly read the letters and put them into my backpack and then looked at the four Polaroid photos, splotchy and already fading, as if the Liberian heat and humidity had partially spoiled the film. I merely glanced at them—one photo was of Dillon, Paul, and Willy standing together on the lawn stiffly at attention, unsmiling in their Sunday school suits, with the huge, red bougainvillea behind them; the other three were of each boy in the same spot alone. I put them into my backpack with the letters. Which is how I still have them in my possession today.
Dear Mammi,
School is very fun. My new teacher is Mrs. Mbeko and she is very fat, but I like her. She makes jokes all the time. Pappi bought two new dogs. They are named Bruno and Muhammad Ali. They are mastiffs and are both brothers, but not twins like Willy and Paulie. Bruno is bigger than Muhammad Ali. He weighs 125 lbs. Pappi won’t let us play with them yet because they are to be watchdogs and should not become friends with anyone, even the people they are watching. Jeannine is the one who feeds them. Bruno killed a cobra in the garden. I miss you. I hope you will come home soon. Love,
Dillon
Jeannine. Always Jeannine. My shadow self. It was probably she who stood in front of the boys with the camera and snapped the pictures. It was probably she who urged them to write to their Mammi, then gave the letters and pictures to Woodrow one evening and suggested that he send them to me. She was better at being me than I was.
Dear Mammi,
How are you? I am fine. We went to the beach. School is nice now. It rained every day so far. Our new dog Bruno ate a spitting cobra. It was six feet long. Love,
Paulie
Spitting cobras lurk in every flower garden. They aim their poison at the eyes of man or beast and can hit their target from ten feet away. A large, courageous watchdog can kill it, but may die itself as a result. Everything that lives in Liberia and that you kill will eventually kill you for it. Something rots beneath the soil and taints the air above it.
Dear Mammi,
How are you? We miss you a lot. What is America like? Pappi showed on a map where you live now. Is it nice there? I hope it’s not too cold! I have to go now. Goodbye! Love,
Willy
The leaves had fallen to the ground, and autumn was becoming winter. I had forgotten how unjust and autocratic the approach of a northern winter seems. I said to Bettina that the bare branches of the trees in the small park that she and I crossed every day on the walk to and from her school looked like the scrawny arms of beggars.
“Yeah, right,” Bettina said.
“They do. And they’re asking the sky for the return of light and warmth. They’re begging for the simple kindness of the sun. But it’s abandoned them for the tropics.”
She shook her head and said, “You are such a bummer, Don. You sound like winter is something to feel good about. But what you’re really saying is a total bring-down.”
“Yeah, right.”
Dear Woodrow,
Your letter and the photos and the letters from the boys arrived today. Thank you for doing that. They made me very happy and also very sad, as I’m sure you can understand. I’ve put the photos in little frames and keep them on my dresser where they are the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night.
I am glad to hear that our American friend is trying to be of help. I do want badly to come home and will do anything that President Doe requires of me. At the same time I don’t want to do anything that puts you or the boys in danger, even if it means we must continue to live apart like this.
Thank you for your kind words about my father. I am sure that, had you two met, you would have been friends. You are alike in many ways and would have understood one another. I have shipped a Sony VCR and video camera to you at the ministry. I hope you’ll use the camera to make videos of the boys, so that someday when I return I can watch them. Perhaps you could make videos and send them to me now, and I could watch them here. You could set the camera in front of the boys and let them talk to me directly, right into the camera. They might like that better than writing letters to me. Woodrow, I want you to know that if the president will allow me to return to my family, I will be his loyal supporter and will do everything in my power to help him and the people of Liberia. Please convey these exact words to him. It can’t hurt to do that, and it might help. Please give my love to the boys and my thanks to Jeannine for taking such good care of them in my absence. I am writing to them myself and will mail the letters to them separately so they’ll each have the pleasure of opening their own mail sent all the way from
Your loving wife,
Hannah
I tried several times to write an answer to Dillon, Paul, and Willy, but could not do it. I couldn’t locate the right voice, a voice as natural and easy as theirs. In correspondence as much as conversation, one takes on the tone of one’s correspondent. That’s how it has always been for me, anyhow, and is probably why I am reluctant to open a conversation. He who writes or speaks first gets to set the tone. And my sons had written first. I kept putting off the moment when I would finally have to write back to them, until days became weeks and it was almost too late to answer without having a plausible excuse for the delay. And then came the letter from Woodrow.