The Darling (37 page)

I walked up the driveway, crossed to the breezeway at the side of the house, and approached the kitchen door. In all those years away, nothing had changed—the smell of moist, freshly cut grass; the cluttered breezeway and the wooden glider; Daddy’s rusting, rarely used grill; Mother’s meticulous flower gardens in back; the tool shed by the crab-apple tree. And balanced in the crotch of the old oak in the farthest corner of the yard, my tree house, a lean-to tacked to a small platform, a nestlike, secret sanctuary and watchtower that in summer became nearly invisible in the leaves of the oak tree.

I was trapped in a time warp. On the other side of the window, my mother sits at the kitchen table with a Manhattan in front of her and waits for Daddy to come home late again and gets a two-cocktail jump on him. The table has been set, and their supper stays warm in the oven, and she’s probably thinking about tomorrow’s schedule, making mental lists of things to do and menus and guest lists, which she’ll write out later before bed, after she’s checked with Daddy to be sure she’s included everyone he wants and has not listed anyone he’d prefer not to see, to be sure she’s remembered to unwrap the punch bowl and glasses and hasn’t forgotten to ask the housekeeper to work late and help serve the canapés and hors d’oeuvres and clean up afterwards.

I stood by the door watching my mother as if she weren’t real, as if studying a tableau vivant, amazed by how lifelike it was, when suddenly she moved her hand and raised her glass to her lips, and I jumped, startled by her movement. She turned towards the door, and saw me. She wrinkled her brow as if puzzled and then squinted like a bird watcher trying to remember the correct name of an unfamiliar type of sparrow. For a long moment, we stared at each other through the glass, mother and long-lost daughter. Or was it daughter and long-lost mother? She had grown old. Her crepey throat and arms belonged to an elderly woman, and her back was rounded, and her hair, still carefully cut and set in the shape of a tulip, had gone white and was a fluffed, thinned outline of what it once had been. She wore a pale blue short-sleeve blouse and loose madras skirt and L. L. Bean docksiders, the off-duty summer uniform of an elderly Yankee matriarch.

I opened the door and entered, shucked my backpack, and set my duffel down. Mother half rose from her chair, then sat slackly back. Her mouth opened in astonishment. There was a film of fear over her face, as if she expected her feelings, in a cruel and unexpected way, to be suddenly hurt. This was the sort of moment that Mother tried at all costs to avoid. She only had old roles for it, half-forgotten lines from other, slightly different scenes, gestures and words that may or may not come off as appropriate. In a loud, flattened voice, she said, “Why, it’s Hannah! What a wonderful surprise!”

I moved close to her and put my arms around her bony shoulders and kissed her dry, crinkled cheek. Her body smelled the same, lavender and rye, but it was a shrunken, fragile version of the body I so clearly remembered. She made a dry, chugging sound and began to cry. She grabbed my wrists and drew back from me. “It’s really you, Hannah! It’s really
you!”

“It’s really me.”

“Can you stay for dinner?” she asked, grabbing a line at random from some other surprise visit. “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have prepared some—”

“I can stay,” I said, cutting her off. “I can stay for as long as you like. And I’m sorry I didn’t warn you. But I didn’t know until the last minute that I’d be able to get here. I didn’t want you and Daddy to make plans for me and then not be able to come.”

“No, no, that’s fine, Eleanor made up a beef stroganoff this afternoon before she went home, and there’s plenty for both of us. We’ll have a nice bottle of wine and celebrate. I think there’s a tart, an apricot tart that I bought yesterday at this excellent little bakery that a lovely young couple just opened in town—”

“Mother,” I said, cutting her off again, more for my sake than hers. “It’s fine. Anything is fine. I didn’t come home to eat. I came home to see you and Daddy. To be with you and Daddy.”

“Of course, dear. I’m sorry. It’s just that… I’m so excited to see you, and so
surprised!
Will you be able to spend the night? There’s plenty of room, naturally. Your old bedroom … it’s right where it always was, a little bit redecorated, of course, more in the order of a guest room now, as the old guest room is where Eleanor sleeps when she stays over, which she does from time to time. You remember Eleanor, don’t you? Oh, no, I don’t think you ever met Eleanor. She came to work for us after you went to Cleveland, I think, but you’ve heard us speak of her, she’s lovely and has been such a help to me…”

“Mother, I’ll stay the night. I may stay many nights. Where’s Daddy?”

Her reading glasses hung from her neck by a thin silver chain. She lifted them and carefully placed them before her eyes, as if I’d asked her to read her answer from a manual. “Sit down, Hannah. Yes, Daddy’s not … well. He’s not here,” she declared. “Would you like a drink?” she asked brightly.

“Jesus Christ, Mother, no! I mean, yes. Why not? What do you mean, ‘not well’? And ‘not here,’ for Christ’s sake.”

“Please, Hannah, you don’t need to swear. I’ll tell you everything. Just let me … let me gather my wits. This is
such
a surprise. What would you like to drink?”

“Anything. Gin, I guess.”

“Ice? With vermouth?” She got up and went to the liquor cabinet next to the refrigerator and started rummaging among the bottles.

“Anything, Mother. Anything. Tell me about Daddy. If you don’t mind.”

“No, of course not. I’m sorry. It’s just … the surprise and all, I didn’t expect…” she trailed off, fussing with my drink. I sat down at the table and said nothing and waited. She set the glass before me. “No vermouth? I can make it a martini. Your father loved his dry martinis.”

“No, this is fine, thanks. Tell me about Daddy, Mother.”

“I didn’t know if I should write you, it’s been so long since we’d heard from you, and I wasn’t sure where to write. And I didn’t want to upset you unnecessarily, especially with you being as I supposed way out there in Africa and unable to do anything for him anyhow…”

“For God’s sake, Mother, get to it!”

Her lower lip quivered. She was about to cry. “I don’t… I’m sorry, it’s just, it’s just that it’s hard to know how to talk to you, Hannah. You’re so… I didn’t expect…” and she started to weep. My cue to embrace and comfort her. To feel guilty and apologetic for demanding simple, unadorned information. To be punished for trying to evade her manipulation of my emotions. In a way all too familiar to me, with her tears Mother was making herself—and not Daddy and my desire to know what had happened to him—the subject.

And, naturally, I responded with no response. Just as I did all those years ago, starting when I was a child and discovered that the only response useful to me was no response—it kept my emotions intact and still my own, and it punished her back, punished her for her self-absorption, her relentless shifting of the subject, no matter how dramatic, poignant, or dire, to herself.

My mother was a closed circuit. All her poles and the pronouns that represented them were reversed. Of strangers, she would say, “She hasn’t met me yet.” Of people who passed for dear friends, she would say, “I’m her dearest friend.” It wasn’t a psychological disorder; it was a metaphysical disfigurement. It was beyond her control, and I should have been kinder towards her. But at that moment in the kitchen I couldn’t give her what she wanted—an embrace, an apology, an expression of concern for her, not for Daddy, and surely not for me. And even though I
was
concerned for her, I chose not to respond to her weeping. I ignored it, as if she were merely pausing to organize her thoughts. Which in a sense she was, if tactics unconsciously deployed can be viewed as thoughts.

“I’m terribly sorry, dear.” She sniffled and took a bracing swallow from her drink. “It’s been a … a very difficult time for me. I’ve been so alone,” she said and began to weep again, caught herself and bravely plowed ahead. “Three weeks ago, Hannah, your father suffered a massive stroke. A cerebral hemorrhage.”

No response
. I said nothing. And consequently almost felt nothing.

“I was here in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I’d let Eleanor go home early that day, it was Friday, Fourth of July weekend, and Daddy was in his study, and I heard a loud noise. A thump. It was like the sound of a dictionary being accidentally dropped,” she said, an image she had no doubt memorized, rehearsed, and taken on the road, where it must have played well. “I called to him, ‘What was that, dear?’ I called again, ‘What was that, dear?’ But the study door was closed, as usual when he doesn’t wish to be disturbed, so I assumed he hadn’t heard me and it was nothing serious and I went back to cooking. I was making my famous porcini risotto, and for another thirty minutes that took all my attention. Because of the stirring and the slow addition of the chicken stock, you know. That and the salad and setting the table. I even went outside and cut some flowers for the table, and I never knew a thing was wrong, until dinner was ready to be served, and I went to the study door and knocked and called to him. ‘Dinner is served, Bernard!’ No answer.” She took another sip from her drink, which would soon need replenishing. I remembered how she loved to finish her Manhattans like an adorable child by sucking the cherry from her fingertips with a pouty flourish, and wondered if she’d wait until she finished her story, the story of how she experienced her husband’s stroke.

“I called a second time,” she went on. “Still no answer. So I opened the door. I had an awful feeling that something was wrong, a foreboding, almost, and then I saw him. He was lying on the floor beside his desk, and I realized that what I’d thought was the dictionary falling had actually been
him
!
Daddy
! And I felt awful for it, for having all that time been fussing about in the kitchen and dining room, while he was lying on the floor only a few feet away and needing me but unable to call out for me.”

Now she began to cry in earnest, for it was the climax of her story, and from here on she’d have trouble keeping it from being Daddy’s. Grudgingly, I said that she couldn’t possibly have known what had happened to him or done anything other than what she did, and nudged her forward.

He was unconscious, she said, and at first she thought it was a heart attack and regretted that she’d never learned CPR. Not knowing what else to do, she called 911 and waited there beside him, with his head in her lap, for the ambulance to arrive. “It was the worst fifteen minutes in my life, waiting for that ambulance,” she said. “Do you want another?” she asked.

“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.