The Darling (39 page)

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.

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.