The Darling

Chapter III

THE SIGHT OF SO MANY white people rushing to get through passport control and customs at JFK nearly sent me running back to the plane. I had not seen a majority of white people gathered together in one place in nearly ten years. There were some blacks in the crowd, of course, men wearing safari jackets, guayabera shirts, or dashikis, women in long, colorful wraps — my fellow travelers from Africa. Another cluster of weary, well-dressed families whose very foreignness made them look comfortably familiar to me had come off a flight from Delhi. Most of the white people, me included, wore jeans and sneakers and tee shirts, summer travel apparel for European tourists in the States and Americans returning from abroad. Many of them, as did I, wore small, papoose-sized backpacks. They were my people, members of my tribe.

But the whites didn’t look quite human to me. Their faces were all the shades of an English rose garden, from chalk to lemon yellow to pink to scarlet, and their noses and ears were too large for their heads, their hair was lank and hung slackly down and, where it wasn’t held in place by a cap or hat, seemed about to slip off their skulls and fall to the floor. They looked dangerous, so self-assured and knowing, so intent and entitled, as they rushed to stand in neat rows and handed their passports to the uniformed officers waiting in booths like bored ticket takers at an amusement park.

When my turn came, before presenting my passport, I opened and glanced into it, half expecting to see there a photograph of a black woman — someone who did not resemble these white people — and surprised myself with the face of a woman named Dawn Carrington, who did indeed resemble the white people. The officer, a gaunt man in his forties with strands of thinning black hair combed sideways over the top, took the passport and examined the photograph carefully and matched it with my face. He breathed through his mouth as if suffering from a cold. He flipped the blank pages, then paused over the page that had been stamped years earlier, first in Accra and when I came over to Liberia. He cleared a clot of phlegm from his throat and said, “You’ve been away for quite some time.”

“Yes. I was married there,” I said. “To an African.”

“And your husband? Is your husband traveling with you, Mrs…?” he looked again at my photo. “Carrington.”

“No.”

“I see.” He hovered over the information for a second, then pursed his lips as if about to whistle. “So you reside in Liberia, then?”

“Yes. I have… I have children born there.”

“I see. How many?”

“Three. Three sons.”

“I see.” Another long pause. He gazed over the heads of the swelling crowd and into the distance. “How long will you be away from your husband and children, then?”

“I’m not sure. Not long. I’m here to visit my parents,” I quickly added, surprised to hear it said like that, so frankly and easily. Surprised to find myself telling him the truth.

“I see.” He handed the passport back and stared at me for a second, as if he knew me from a distant past, and I returned his stare, as if he did not. He twitched his narrow, red nose, wrapped it in a hanky and blew. “Well, welcome home, Missus Carrington,” he said and blew again.

BY THE TIME I got out of the terminal, it was mid-morning, and the air was already hot and humid and gritty with soot — New York City in late July. I rode into Manhattan in a taxi driven by a very large, middle-aged black man whose shaved head glistened with sweat, and I started to feel safe again: I’d made it through passport control and customs and had gotten away from the white people. From the name posted on the divider, Claude Dorsinville, I guessed that the cab driver was Haitian. Yes, he said, from Port-au-Prince, but he had lived in Brooklyn for fifteen years. His children were Americans. I asked him if he wanted to return to Haiti someday. “Yes, yes!” he said. “But not till America go down there an’ bomb the hell out of my country and get rid of the Duvaliers. Just like they did in Grenada,” he added.

A half-hour later, when I walked into the cavernous space of the main concourse at Penn Station, I looked around and found myself surrounded once more by white Americans — prosperous, well-fed, loud, and purposeful men, women, and children, with only a sprinkling here and there of black people. Suddenly, I was sure I was being followed. I glanced behind me and scrutinized the faces of the commuting businessmen and — women, the Eastern seaboard travelers, the college students, even the children standing in line with me for tickets. Who among you knows who I really am and is waiting for me to give myself up? Who among you will reveal me to the others? An ageless woman wrapped in a tattered tan overcoat and wearing gloves and a knit cap scuffled unnecessarily close and seemed to study my face for a second too long. Was she a panhandler? Why didn’t she ask me for money? I tried to appear distracted by deep thoughts. Just another traveler, an ordinary citizen heading wearily home. I tried to look like what I was — an American, upper-middle-class, white lady in her natural habitat. But it was as if I were back traveling underground, incognito and in danger of being suddenly recognized and denounced by a stranger, exposed, my artful disguise ripped away, the bomb hidden in my duffel carefully removed and defused, my backpack emptied and false IDs laid out on a steel table in an interrogation room, while I am forced to look down at them and answer the question Which of these women is you?

On the train, I managed to find a seat alone at the rear of the last car, where I could watch the other passengers without being easily watched back. By New Haven, I had calmed sufficiently to realize that maybe I wasn’t so much paranoid as merely exhausted, jet-lagged, and hungry. Cautiously I made my way forward to the café car, bought a plastic-wrapped tuna sandwich and a cup of coffee, returned with them to my seat, and later slept and did not wake until the train pulled into Boston’s South Station. End of the line.

Whenever I’d been asked, whether by the officer at JFK or at home by Woodrow or the boys or by Sam Clement or anyone else, whom in America I planned to visit, I had said the obvious and expected thing: Why, I’m going to visit my parents, my mother and father, in Emerson, Massachusetts. In a vague and general way, though it was the truth, it was not so much a travel plan as merely a way of postponing the choice of a destination. Until the moment that I actually arrived in Boston and walked out of South Station into the rusty, fading, early-evening light and crossed to the line of taxis waiting at the curb and realized that, once in the cab, I would have to tell the driver to take me to a house in the suburbs, 24 Maple Street in Emerson, Don’t worry, I know the way and will give you directions, until that moment, I had not been committed to a specific travel plan. I’d had no itinerary.

There were alternatives, of course. Thanks to the generosity, if you want to call it that, of Samuel Doe, I had enough cash in my backpack to go anywhere in America. Although I hadn’t communicated with them in years, I knew that without too much trouble I could make quick contact with old friends and associates from the Movement, people who would welcome me back into the fold from the cold, who would let me sleep on a couch or cot until I found a place of my own, who would provide me with a new name, social security number, and driver’s license, and would pass me from safe house to safe house, from friend to acquaintance to complete stranger, until I ended up separated from myself by seven or eight degrees, living in some small town in eastern Oregon, working as a school nurse and sharing a double-wide trailer with a divorced lineman who thought I was who I said I was.

It was 1983, the war against the war was long over, Ronald Reagan was president, and young Americans were more interested in getting rich by the time they turned thirty than in refusing to trust anyone who’d already turned it. It was, in a sense, the perfect time for me to have returned, the perfect time to show my back to all that I had thought and believed and dreamed and done and failed to do, and start over. I could become a social worker in Albany, a caterer in East Lansing, Michigan, an ambulance driver in St. Louis. Or I could go back to New Bedford, where Carol was probably still living with her daughter, Bettina, and waiting tables at the same seafood restaurant, maybe still renting the same third-floor walkup apartment, and if in the meantime she hadn’t hooked up with one of those wiry, ponytailed men with tattoos crawling over their chests and arms whom she seemed irresistibly drawn to, she would let me have my old room back. Or I could simply strike out on my own, wade into America’s vastness and anonymity, bobbing up someplace I’d never been before, with a new life story already forming, one bit of false information sticking to another, like the beginnings of a coral reef that someday will seem to have been there all along, as substantial and self-evidently true as the continent itself.

That’s the real American Dream, don’t you think? That you can start over, shape-change, disappear and later reappear as someone else. That you can survive the deliberate murder of your personal past and even attend your own funeral, if you want, and watch the mourners from the shade of a grove of trees a short way off, be the stranger at the edge of the crowd, her presence barely noticed or remarked upon. I don’t know who she is, a friend of someone in the family, I guess. And when everybody has finally left the cemetery, and you’re alone there, you come forward and pluck a flower from one of the baskets left at the graveside, put it in your hair, if you want and, like a happy ghost, walk off with the secret knowledge that down in the darkness under the dirt the coffin is empty, there’s only sawdust inside it or rocks or a dummy stuffed with straw.

I pushed my duffel ahead of me into the back seat of a taxi and got in. The driver, a flat-faced Boston Irishman wearing a Red Sox cap, half turned to me. “Hiya, how ya doin’?” he said. “Where ya wanna go?”

BY THE TIME the cab stopped in front of number 24 on gracefully curved, tree-lined Maple Street, it was almost dark. Lawn sprinklers carved silver arcs above the mint-green lawns. Wide, sloping paved driveways led to two- and three-car garages, breezeways, and screened side porches. The thick-leaved trees along the street were maples, of course, forty and fifty years old. The neighborhood was long established, a planned community from the early 1920s of large, neocolonial homes planted on nineteenth-century farmland and lately painted in neocolonial colors with names like baguette, flannel, and persimmon, with coiffed hedges and manicured yards the size of boarding-school playing fields. They were comfortable, oversize houses that had been designed to shelter well-educated, calm, orderly families with inherited money for up to three generations before being sold off to strangers with new money. My parents’ house — a three-bedroom Cape Cod with dormers and an attached el for my father’s study and home office — was slightly more modest than the others. They’d paid cash for it with a gift provided by Daddy’s father shortly after I was born, only a few years into their marriage and Daddy’s medical career. Except for dorm rooms at Rosemary Hall and Brandeis, until I was in my mid-twenties, it was the only home I had known.

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.

“Good question.” I got up and walked around the kitchen and poked into the cabinets, the refrigerator, even the freezer. Everything was the same and in the same place as when I last looked, fifteen years ago — the china, the glassware and silver, cutlery, pots and pans, the canned goods and packaged food. In fifteen years, nothing in this room had changed. I leaned against the counter, arms folded, and said, “I’m Missus Woodrow Sundiata. First name, Hannah. Mother of three sons, Dillon, William, and Paul. Or maybe over here I’m Dawn Carrington. That’s what my passport says, anyhow. A fugitive. Still underground.”

“Three sons! Oh, my! I’m a grandmother!”

“Yes, you are. Congratulations. But your letters and cards — if they were addressed to Hannah Musgrave and were mailed after I got married to Woodrow — disappeared, no doubt, into the famously inept Liberian postal system.”

“That explains it, then,” she said brightly. “Your father, you know, made some inquiries a few years ago. He met someone in the foreign service, an American who was stationed out there; he met him in Washington once at some official State Department dinner and asked after you. Discreetly, of course.”

“Of course. What’d he learn?”

“Nothing. The man said he’d check when he returned to Liberia, which he did, and he wrote back to Daddy that there wasn’t any record of an American woman named Hannah Musgrave residing in Liberia. So we assumed that you’d left the country. We thought you might even be in the United States. Underground. Like before. And that we’d hear from you eventually. Like before. But, Hannah,” she said, smiling, her eyes suddenly glistening with apparent joy, “I’m a grandmother! How wonderful. Tell me about my grandsons. I’ll warm up Eleanor’s stroganoff for us,” she said, and went to the refrigerator, flipping the oven on as she passed the stove. “Tell me everything! Oh, if only Daddy could hear this. You’ll see him tomorrow, dear,” she said in a comforting tone, switching emotional levels too rapidly for me to keep up.

I tried, however, and soon found myself switching topics with the same reckless abandon. I described Dillon first, his temperament and good looks, and then told her a little about our house on Duport Road, mentioning in passing that in 1976 I’d traveled from the States first to Ghana and then to Liberia on a phony passport, which I’d used when leaving Liberia and returning now to the States as well, and explained briefly and in a vague way why I’d been obliged to leave without my sons or husband, which utterly confused her. So I returned to my sons themselves, telling her about the twins, and then a little about the country itself and Woodrow’s family in Fuama, whom she thought “charming” and “interesting.”

She asked me if I had pictures of Woodrow and the boys.

“No. I mean, not with me.”

“You don’t? Why on earth not, Hannah?”

I had to think for a minute. “I stopped carrying pictures of family years ago, Mother. When I was underground.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, when you were underground. Are you still underground, then?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“Oh.”

I told her about my work at the lab and how it had ended and then later had evolved into caretaking the chimps, which she also found “charming” and “interesting,” causing me to switch back to the subject of Woodrow and his precarious position with the government of Samuel Doe, without telling her what I knew about Samuel Doe, whom she knew as the more or less democratically elected, anti-communist leader of an African nation, someone much favored by the Reagan administration.

“I read everything I can about Liberia,” she said. “The New York Times, of course, and just recently a novel by Graham Greene that was pretty depressing, to tell the truth, but it gave me the flavor of the place—”

“The Heart of the Matter?”

“Yes, I think that was it.”

“That’s Sierra Leone, Mother. And a long time ago.”

“Oh.”

I asked her to tell me more about Daddy, his condition, the effects of the stroke and surgery. But it was almost as if she didn’t know the answers. She was as evasive and vague about his condition as I had been about Samuel Doe. She kept saying, “You’ll see tomorrow. I’ll arrange to have his doctors speak with you. He’s pretty incapacitated, dear, so prepare yourself. I always try to be cheerful and optimistic when I’m with him. But it’s difficult. And sometimes when I leave his room I just break down in tears. Shall I open a bottle of wine? It is a special occasion, after all. How about a special red?”

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever. Will he be able to recognize me?”

“Oh, my goodness,” she said and set napkins, plates, and silver on the table. “Of course, he will.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Mother and I drove into Boston, and before seeing Daddy, we met first with the surgeon, Dr. Plummer. I had insisted on it. I was still hoping that Mother had exaggerated the seriousness of Daddy’s condition. The surgeon strolled into the waiting room where we sat on overstuffed, turquoise easy chairs and stood over us, poking through a folder that I assumed was Daddy’s file. He was a Top Gun type, a forty-year-old athlete with a military buzz cut, titanium eyes, and a mouthful of very white teeth. He wore pressed chinos and a tight-fitting, navy blue polo shirt, all muscle and sinew and as clean as an action figure.

“Looks like an intracerebral hemorrhage,” he said, shuffling through the papers as if reading them for the first time. “Big bleed. Caused probably by high blood pressure. That and blood vessels weakened by old age. The scans indicated the stroke was catastrophic.”

“Catastrophic,” I said.

“Yes.” He checked his watch.

“That means he’ll die from it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Mother interrupted.

“Yeah, usually it does. With someone your father’s age, death usually occurs within a few hours of the event. Or at the most a few days.”

“And when it doesn’t?” I asked.

“Not my area,” he said.

“Will he get better? Will his condition improve?”

He glanced through the sheaf of papers. “Hard to say. Age’s against him. Guess he’s otherwise in good shape. Heart, lungs, et cetera. Once he’s in rehab, they’ll make an evaluation.”

“How long might my father have to remain in intensive care?”

“Not my area,” he said again. “Speak to the attending physician on that.” He checked the file again. “Doctor Rexroth.”

“Freddie. Freddie Rexroth,” Mother said. “A dear.”

“Surgery went okay, though. A case like this, we don’t like to opt for surgery. The age thing. A batch of tissue, brain tissue, always gets scraped off, no matter how good you are. And I’m good. Some guys want to try a spinal tap first. But with a lumbar puncture you can get cerebral herniation. Brain tissue, because of the pressure inside the skull, gets sucked through the transtentorial notch into the cerebellum and the stem. Bad news. So we opted to cut,” he said, closing the file with relish, as if the memory of the cutting had unexpectedly pleased him. “Anything else?” he asked, and smiled.

“No,” I said.

MOTHER ENTERED Daddy’s room ahead of me. “Good morning!” she chirped. “I’ve brought someone to see you, Bernard. And you’ll never guess who it is.” She waved me onto center stage. “Ta-da!”

I came slowly forward and stood at the foot of his bed. His head was wrapped in a gauze turban. Wires monitored his heartbeat and blood pressure, and plastic tubes snaked in and out of his nostrils, mouth, and the veins of both wrists, pumping oxygen, nourishment, and medications into his body and removing spittle and phlegm and urine. My father’s heart, liver, and kidneys were strong. He had taken good care of his body and had exercised it regularly, drank moderately, never smoked. But he’d been attached to this elaborate apparatus for twenty days, and he probably looked the same today as he had when they first wheeled him in from the operating room. He’d look the same in twenty weeks. Twenty months. Twenty years. His body was outliving him.

“Stand over here, dear,” Mother said, sotto voce. “On his right side. It’s his left that’s paralyzed, and they think his vision on that side is still impaired, too. Poor thing.”

I obeyed and passed behind her. There were bars along the sides of his bed to keep him from tumbling out, but with all the tubes, cords, and wires, I couldn’t imagine him moving. His head was propped by a pillow, and he wore a white hospital gown. A tuft of gray chest hair fluttered above the collar of his gown. I avoided looking directly at his face, as if I knew I’d learn there a thing I did not want to know. The skin of his forearms and hands was like yellowed parchment. His fingernails were clean and professionally manicured.

Finally, I dared to look at his face. And it was like seeing my father in his coffin, as if Mother and I were attending the funeral of Dr. Bernard Musgrave, my dead father, her late husband, who lay there with his eyes closed imitating sleep. The color of his face was a little too bright against the white background, and his chin and cheeks had been freshly shaved by a stranger, a patch of three-day grizzle missed here, another there. The hair keeps on growing after the rest of the body has died, doesn’t it? Like the fingernails and toenails. My father’s internal organs might still function, thanks to the machines attached to them, but it was the same sort of meaningless continuity as the ongoing growth of his beard and fingernails.

“Look who I’ve brought!” Mother exclaimed. “Look, Bernard!”

His eyes flashed open, then closed. “Let him be, Mother,” I said, turning to her, catching the anger on her face, shocked by it, but then, just as quickly, not shocked.

“No, see, he’s awake,” she said.

I turned back, and he was staring straight up, as if at the ceiling. “Hello, Daddy,” I whispered. “It’s me, Hannah.”

“You’ll have to speak up. He isn’t wearing his hearing aid.”

“Hearing aid? Daddy has a hearing aid?”

“He’s had it for years, Hannah. But they won’t let him use it here. Because of the battery or something, with all the electronics,” she said and tossed a disdainful wave at the bank of blinking monitors.

I reached down and touched his dry cheek. He watched my hand descend, but didn’t move his head. He still hadn’t looked at me. I was afraid to raise my voice, afraid it would crack, and I’d cry. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to be tough, clear headed, rational. I knew what I was supposed to feel; I needed to know what to think. I couldn’t count on Mother for guidance; she had neither feelings, with the probable exception of anger, nor thoughts, except for a set of self-revising strategies for attention.

“Bernard!” she said in a loud voice. “Look who I brought to see you! It’s Hannah, Bernard!” Then, in a stage whisper, “It’s the medication. He’s very heavily sedated, you know.”

I positioned myself directly over him, cutting off his view of the ceiling, and saw my face reflected in the pupils of his eyes. For a long moment, we stared at each other like that, unblinking, dry eyed, as if staring into the distance through fog. But we were only inches away from what we were trying to see in each other’s eyes, the thing that had always been there, from my infancy on. I can remember it from almost that far back, when he would look down at me in my crib, and we would fix our gazes on one another’s eyes. I saw him, and at the same time in the same way, he saw me, and in that instant he and I became real to one another and to ourselves. By that means we both came into existence. My father had given life to me, whether by accident or intention, it didn’t matter; and I had given it back to him, an exchange begun probably at my birth.

It was an exchange from which Mother had been excluded. Not because Daddy or I wished it, but because we both knew that she was incapable of truly seeing anyone, even herself. All my life, whenever I tried to see into my mother’s eyes, I saw two tiny, mirrored disks that bounced my gaze back at me. I never shared with Mother the eye contact that secures for you the knowledge that you are as real as the world itself, as certain of your own existence, regardless of its meaninglessness and contingency, as you are of the world’s. The opacity of my mother’s gaze deprived me of that certitude and security and made me resemble her from time to time in ways that would later shame me. And by now you know some of those ways. How I saw, or more precisely, how I did not see, my sons, for instance. Or my husband. It wasn’t as though I could have seen them, if only I’d tried. Like my mother, I was incapable of seeing them. It was beyond my capacity. Woodrow was always my black African husband, Woodrow. He was never simply Woodrow. And my sons were my black African husband’s three sons. The eldest and the twins. They were never Dillon, William, and Paul. It’s why I was able to leave them with such ease and so little regret. Simply, they weren’t as real to me as I was to myself. They weren’t even as real to me as my dreamers. Not until later, much later. And by then it was too late.

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.

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.

I knocked lightly at first. No answer. Maybe she’s asleep. I knocked again, more forcefully. Someone, a woman in high heels, approached from inside. That’s not Carol, I thought. A barefoot gal, Carol never wore shoes at home, let alone high heels. Someone’s replaced me, someone kinder than I, someone who, late at night, tells her the truth about herself.

A familiar, lilting voice called, “Who’s there?” It was Carol.

“It’s me. Dawn.”

“Don? Oh, my God! Don!” The door swung open, and she came rushing towards me. We flung our arms around each other and kissed on the lips, and then stepped back and looked at each other, grinned shyly like kids, and hugged again. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “Wow! Don! You look the exact same as you used to. Except your hair’s a lot longer.” She lifted my hair off my shoulders and hefted it in both hands, framing my face.

“It’s gotten pretty gray,” I said, and felt oddly conscious of my looks. “In this light you just can’t see it.”

Laughing, she pulled me into the apartment and locked the door. In high heels, she was as tall as I. Her hair had grown out, too, a mass of dark curls that she wore loose over her shoulders like a shawl, and she was wearing makeup, elegantly applied eye shadow and rouge, which was new, and a simple black dress with spaghetti straps. Very chic. I touched the tattoo of a rose on her bare shoulder. “I remember that,” I said softly. “Look at you. How beautiful you are. You must be just going out. Or just coming in?”

“These are my work clothes,” she said brightly.

“Oh.”

She saw my expression and hurried to explain that she was still working at the same restaurant, the old Clam Shack. She’d been promoted from waiting tables to assistant manager and hostess. “But it’s a kind of like a fern bar now, called The Pequod. I’ll tell you everything,” she said. “There’s so much news. And I can’t wait to hear all about you. I’m sure you’ve got news. I’ve even heard a little of it already,” she said and walked down the hall ahead of me.

“What? Who from?”

“You’ll see,” she answered and disappeared into the living room. I could hear the television, the chatter and buzz of a baseball game. “Guess who’s here,” she sang. Bettina must be about nine now, I thought.

But no child was there. The person slumped in the couch watching television was Zack. My one-time comrade-in-arms, my fugitive traveling companion. Impossible, I thought. I’m dreaming. But no, it was he, all right, the grand deceiver and unapologetic schemer, just as shocked to see me standing in the doorway off the hall as I was to see him slouched on Carol’s couch in front of the TV, a big blue can of Foster’s lager in one mitt, a bunch of pretzels in the other.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “The gang’s all here.” He smiled broadly, flashing those fabulous teeth and glittery blue eyes, then stood up and wrapped me in his long arms. He was unshaven and had put on weight and developed an early paunch, which made him seem not merely a very tall man, but a very large man.

Carol beamed like a proud parent. Zack aimed the remote at the TV and snapped off the sound. “So, babe, what brings you to our fair city?” He lighted a cigarette, sat back down, stretched out his long legs and crossed them at the ankles. He wore khakis and a tee shirt and sneakers, and looked like a factory worker after a long day on the line.

“I should be asking that of you,” I said.

“Me? I live here. Welcome to our humble abode,” he said, and then added, “Missus Sundiata.”

Mrs. Sundiata? I laughed, as if he’d been uncannily witty, and quickly asked Carol, “Where’s Bettina? How old is she now?”

“Nine and a half, in fourth grade. Amazing, huh? She’s at my mom’s. She stays there ’cause we both work nights on Fridays and Saturdays. Me at The Pequod and Zack in his cab. We only just came in ahead of you,” she said. “You hungry? We were gonna order in Chinese.”

I said sure, and Carol kicked off her shoes and headed for the kitchen, and I followed. Zack hit the remote and went back to his game.

As soon as we were out of his hearing, I said, “So he’s actually living here? With you and Bettina?”

“Yeah. It’s kind of weird, I guess. But we’re okay together. For now, anyway. What do you want, fish or meat or what?” She pulled a Chinese restaurant flyer from a stack of take-out menus on the table by the phone. The kitchen smelled of fresh paint and looked clean and well kept. More so, certainly, than when I lived here.

“I don’t care. Anything. You know me.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know you.”

She dialed and ordered, and when she hung up the phone I asked her how long she and Zack had been together. “As a couple, I mean.”

“Only about six weeks. Since he got out.”

“Out?”

“I’ll let Zack tell you the whole story. It’s pretty complicated. But he was in prison over in Plymouth, the federal prison, sort of a minimum-security place.”

“Prison?”

“He’ll tell you. Six months was all. Anyhow, one day out of the blue he calls me up, and we talked, and then I started going out there to visit him. He didn’t have anyone else to visit him, and I felt sorry for him. Even though him and you ran out on me like you did. But he explained all that. I got over it.”

“I… I’m sorry about that, Carol. At the time—”

“Yeah, it’s okay. I’m over it. Anyhow, we started writing letters and all, and before you know it we’d gotten real close and all. So when he was released, it seemed sort of natural for him to move in with me. He’s been real sweet. He helped fix up the apartment and everything. He even got his old job back driving a cab. Different company, of course. The other company went out of business, so nobody remembered how he ran out on them. When you and him went to Africa back then.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “You do know Zack lied to me about that. We never really had to leave, or at least I didn’t. But I thought—”

Zack suddenly appeared beside me. “Fucking Yankees,” he said and grabbed a fresh can of beer from the refrigerator. “You filling in the details for ‘Dawn’?” he asked Carol.

“You tell me your story, Zack, and I’ll tell you mine,” I said.

He sat down at the table. “You’ll show me yours if I show you mine? Sounds fair. Except I already know yours.”

“C’mon, Zack, be straight with me.” I sat across from him and gave him a hard stare. Carol stood behind me with a friendly hand on my shoulder. “How do you know my story?” I asked him.

“A guy I met knows you.”

“And who might that be?”

“Okay, babe, I’ll tell you everything,” he said. He had done very well in Accra buying and selling Ghanaian arts and antiquities. He’d bought himself a house, set up two galleries and a warehouse for selling work wholesale to galleries in the U.S. and Europe. A year ago he’d come across a private collection of very old gold and bronze masks and plaques and other artifacts from Benin owned by a retired British army colonel who had stayed on in Ghana after independence. The colonel had died, and his widow had asked Zack to sell the collection abroad. For his trouble he was to receive a third of the selling price. “This was a major collection, man. Museum-quality stuff. Off the scale. Probably worth two, two point five million at auction. But you’d have to show provenance, pay the auction house a fat commission, pay New York and federal taxes, all that. By the time I got my piece, it’d be a small piece. Besides,” he said, “I didn’t have an export license and couldn’t move the stuff out of the country myself without a Ghanaian partner, who’d probably want half of whatever I got. So I guess I had what you’d call a Maltese Falcon moment.”

He had painted over the gold and bronze artifacts — masks, wall hangings, statuary, and pendants — with gray, latex-based housepaint that could be removed without damaging the objects. He carried the objects to the States in his luggage and a beat-up cardboard box tied with heavy twine. Claiming that the lot was made up of cheap souvenirs not to be resold, he declared its value at six hundred dollars, and thought he’d made it, until the customs officer pulled out a pocketknife and scraped the paint off the chin of one of the gold masks. Zack’s family had refused to help him or even see him, and since all his property and cash were in Accra, he couldn’t raise bail and spent a month in jail in Charlestown awaiting trial. He had to accept a public defender and got sent to Plymouth for six months. “If I’d had a decent lawyer, I’d have gotten a suspended sentence.”

“If you hadn’t been greedy, you’d never have been arrested,” I said.

The doorbell rang, and Carol hurried off to meet the delivery man at the bottom of the stairs. “End of story,” Zack said. “It could’ve been worse. It was mostly white guys convicted of white-collar crimes, short-termers in for tax evasion, kiting checks, insurance fraud. Small fish, most of them. People were catching up on their reading and taking mail-order courses in art appreciation.”

“What about Carol?” I asked.

“What about her? She’s been great, man. My port in a storm. She came out to see me every week, when no one in my family would bother making the trip. When I got out, she picked me up and brought me here and said I could stay with her and Bettina till I got back on my feet. The rest is history, man.”

“You started sleeping together, I suppose.”

“First thing, man. You’re not jealous, are you?”

“A little. Yeah.”

Carol returned with the food and spread it out on the table, and the three of us ate and drank beer. After a few moments, I asked Zack again how he knew my story. I wasn’t convinced he did know it. When I left Accra I’d not told a soul where I was headed. I’d never written from Monrovia to him or any of his friends or mine and didn’t believe that anyone who knew me in Liberia also knew him.

“Actually, I figured you’d gone back to the States. A-mer-i-ka. But then I met an old friend of yours,” he said. “In Plymouth. One of the inmates. He claims to know you and your husband well. Very well.”

“Who? What’s his name?”

“Charlie. But he hates being called that. Charles is his name. I used to call him Chuck, just to piss him off.”

“Charles?”

“Charles Taylor,” he said. “Remember him? He got sent up about a month before I got out, so we weren’t exactly buddies. But I pegged him right away for an African, and I thought maybe he’s from Ghana. You can always tell an African black guy from an American black guy, even without hearing him. They walk differently. Turns out he’s Liberian. And turns out he knows your old man very well. And knows you pretty good, too. You ever sleep with him?”

“No! For Christ’s sake, Zack!”

“Too bad. He lied. African guys, man, they want you to think they’ve fucked every white woman they ever said hello to. Anyhow, he told me a whole lot of other stuff, which I assume is true. Stuff about you and your kids and all, and about your husband, Woodrow, who Charlie thinks dropped a dime on him so he’d get nailed by the feds when he got to JFK. True?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “More pathetic, actually.”

Carol said, “I think it’s great you have kids, Don. I bet you’re a terrific mother.”

“Not so terrific,” I said.

“You know, you are a damned attractive woman,” Zack said suddenly, as if it had just that second occurred to him. “You both are,” he continued. “Two incredible-looking women!”

I looked at Carol. He was right about her, at least. She smiled, as if agreeing with Zack — about me, anyhow. A cascade of memories washed over me, memories of Carol when we first found solace and simple pleasure in each other’s arms. In different ways, even though most of my injuries had been internal and self-inflicted, we’d both in a sense been battered women. She’d been victimized by men generally; I’d been victimized by ideology. In each other, we’d both for the first time found someone we could trust. More than anything else, simple tenderness and intimacy were what we wanted then. We were too weak and shaken to be alone, and too wounded and confused to be with another person. Especially with a man. I’d invalidated and tried to overthrow all the old forms of tenderness and intimacy between men and women — missionary-position sexual relations, monogamy, fidelity, state-recognized and — regulated marital roles and responsibilities, even childcare — and afterwards found myself with nothing to replace those forms. I’d deliberately set out to shatter in mere months a social structure that had taken fifty thousand years to harden. It was like jumping from a ship that was in no danger of sinking and finding myself alone in a tiny rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

I’d chosen to abandon that ship, but Carol had been tossed off hers. The captain and crew had left her on a desert island, a castaway. One night I rowed solemnly, hopelessly, to shore, and there we were, the two of us, marooned together. I figured her for a working girl right off, barely twenty, heavy eye makeup, miniskirt, and fishnet stockings — the whole uniform. She stood at the end of the bar nursing a drink made with grenadine, trying to look exotic and available for a reasonable price to the crowd of half-drunk construction workers and fishermen bonding beneath the TV screens and around the pool table. A blow job in the parking lot, a quickie in the men’s room with the door locked, or an hour in a motel out on Route 28—it’s all the same to her, I figured, merely a way, the only way available, to pay the rent and buy food for herself and her kid and maybe get high enough to ignore for another day the way she makes her living. Until, of course, the drugs turn on her, and the way she makes her living becomes the only way she can get the money to get high. I could see by her stoned gaze, her flattened, self-amused affect, that she was on the verge of that turnaround. In six months, I thought, she’ll be doing tricks strictly to get high.

It was nine o’clock. I offered her twenty dollars to come back to my apartment with me, and she said, “Sure, why not?” At the apartment, we drank a bottle of cheap red wine and quickly found ourselves talking like friends from high school, and never got around to having sex that night. She was bright and funny and warm, and at a time when I hated myself for having failed to save the world, she made me feel that I could at least save her.

Her daughter was at a sister’s place, she said, and was okay till midnight, when the sister, who worked the night shift at the clam cannery, went to work. At eleven-thirty, I invited Carol to move in and share my apartment, take the larger of the two bedrooms for herself and her daughter. I’d carry the rent and cover food and other costs until she got herself cleaned up and found a job. She accepted, and shortly after midnight she and Bettina moved in. Two nights later, Carol and I were lovers. In a week, she had a part-time job as a waitress that after a month became full-time.

And look at her now, I thought, a free and independent woman who’s saving someone else. She’s become what I tried to be and couldn’t.

Carol, Zack, and I sat up late drinking beer, smoking pot, and elaborately talking around the difficult question of who was going to end up in bed with Carol. We played an old Neil Young tape over and over, seventies ballads and hymns that celebrated reckless abandon, which didn’t help change the unstated subject. We wandered back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, feigning interest in how Carol had redecorated the place. The walls and woodwork had all been repainted in new colors like mauve and taupe and lapis. My old room was now Bettina’s. The Che Guevara and John Brown posters had been replaced by New Kids on the Block and Paul McCartney in a band called Wings.

Finally, we three found ourselves standing together at the door to the bedroom Carol shared with Zack. The double bed was unmade, and a harried working mother’s clothes draped from chairs and the dresser.

“Sorry about the mess,” Carol said. “Zack’s such a neatnik and takes care of most of the place, but he refuses to pick up after me in the bedroom. It’s the one thing we fight about.”

Zack crossed in front of us and flopped down in the middle of the bed. “C’mere, you,” he said.

“Who?” Carol asked.

“Both of you.”

“Zack,” I said. “I’m not your type, remember? And you’re not mine.” Carol walked over, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Zack began to stroke her bare arm.

“Yeah, but you’re Carol’s type,” he said. “And she’s yours.”

Carol and I looked at each other. When the object of your past desire is placed in front of you like that, sexual nostalgia can be very powerful. There are so many vague, lingering memories of having once been satisfied and so few specific details that you want to revisit the source.

Zack reached over to the bedside table and lighted a chunky blue candle. I hit the wall switch, and he said, “That’s better. Now, c’mon over here with us.”

I stayed put by the door. “Is a threesome what you’re after?”

“I wouldn’t mind. But if you’re not into that, it’s okay by me. There’s other possibilities.”

“What about you, Carol?”

She shrugged. Zack slowly unzipped the back of her dress, and she looked down and smiled coyly.

“Maybe you’d like to watch me and Carol,” Zack said. “Or maybe you’d like me to watch you and Carol. Like I said, there’s other possibilities. I’ve never seen two women make love before. In real life, I mean.”

“Real life,” I said. “Is this real life?”

“It’s not a movie, man,” he said. “Come on over here. You know you want to.”

I took one step, then two, and then I was standing beside Carol on the bed. Zack slid over to make room. I sat down, my ears buzzing like a teenager’s, and placed one hand over hers. With my other hand, I brushed her hair off her shoulder and touched her throat. She turned to face me, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the lips.

And the rest? Well, you know the rest.

No, that’s not true. You don’t know the rest. You don’t know that Zack and I both made love to Carol. You don’t know that while he fucked her I leaned back against the headboard and watched them and touched myself and for the first time in my life was swallowed whole by sexual pleasure. I left my body behind and merged with theirs and had no thoughts, no awareness of my mind or body. You don’t know that afterwards I felt deep, nearly inexplicable gratitude to Zack and Carol, as if they had gone through a terrible, mind- and body-searing ordeal solely for me, so that I would not have to endure it myself. Though, of course, unlike me, all they had done was take their pleasure.

THE NEXT MORNING, after a breakfast as casual and companionable as if we had been sharing the kitchen for months, Carol drove over to her mother’s apartment in the East End to pick up Bettina, leaving me and Zack for the first time alone in the apartment. I was washing the dishes from breakfast and the night before; he sat at the table smoking a cigarette and reading the sports section of the morning paper. He seemed content. He knew that what happened last night was going to continue for a while, at least until something unforeseen, a factor outside the equation, stopped it. Instead of waiting for Carol and me to betray him in secret and then, after a period of deception, displace him, Zack had right away made me a player in his sexual relations with her. I hadn’t seen that coming. He liked having me watch them make love. It put him in control of the sexual aspect of my relationship with Carol, which was the only part of it that had threatened him.

Zack looked up from the paper and smiled. “So, babe, do you think you’ll go back to Liberia?”

“I have three sons and a husband there.”

“That doesn’t mean you’ll go back, though.”

“No. But I will, as soon as it’s allowed.”

“By whom?”

“The president, Samuel Doe.” I gave him the short version of the events leading up to my departure from Liberia, including the reasons for Charles’s flight and Woodrow’s brief arrest. Mention of Charles brought a wide grin to Zack.

“So my man Charlie is very cool after all,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s true, he skimmed over a million bucks from some fund over there? Him and your husband?”

“Yes.”

“That bastard. I thought he was lying to me. I thought it was all a con.”

“What was?”

“He told me he’s willing to turn a million bucks over to anyone who can spring him from prison and get him out of the country. He’s a very political guy, you know, a guy with large freedom-fighter ideas and big ambitions.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well, he is. A genuine comrade. I was telling him about our years in SDS and Weather, which was naturally of great interest to him. And at some point I told him how Weather had sprung Timothy Leary out of a California prison and got him all the way to Algeria, and Charlie goes nuts for it.”

“Goes nuts for what?” I leaned against the sink and faced him. I wasn’t sure where this was leading, but the conversation made me anxious. I was reasonably certain that Charles was smarter than Zack and probably more cynical, too.

“For having Weather break him out. Doing a Tim Leary. I tell him Weather doesn’t even exist anymore, it’s just a few people still more or less underground, like you, and that’s it. Then he says he’s got a million bucks U.S. stashed in an offshore bank that he’ll turn over to anyone who successfully gets him out of prison and out of the country. He’s got some kind of deal with Ghaddafi, but he’s got to get to Libya, where there’s all these training camps for African freedom fighters looking to liberate their homelands.” Zack looked past me and out the kitchen window to the cloudless, morning sky. “You know, we can do this, babe. You and me.”

“Forget it, Zack.”

“Just hear me out, man. I can’t do it alone, I’m an ex-con and still on parole and can’t get inside to talk to Charles personally and privately. You know, to coordinate things. But you can, Miss Dawn Carrington. Or Musgrave. Or Sundiata. Whoever you are these days. I assume you still know how to cook up a phony passport that would get Charles out of the States.”

I laughed. “Yeah. I can. But tell me why I should do this, Zack. It’s high risk. And for what?”

“For the dough. But also because this guy is the real thing, babe. A Third-World freedom fighter. And he’s got plans for your man, Doe. Big plans. And besides, seems to me you’ve got some interests back there in Liberia that would make you want to get Charles Taylor the hell out of an American prison and back in action in Africa. You’ve got to talk to this guy, man. He’s been through it. He’s the kind of revolutionary we were, only we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This cat is heavy. If we can help him get back to Africa, then he’ll be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, I’m telling you, man, with Charles Taylor in jail here and Samuel Doe in power over there, you may never see your husband and kids again.”

“You don’t understand, Zack. Charles thinks Woodrow flipped him to save his own neck.”

“Not true, babe! He told me Woodrow was cool. Actually, the way I read it, Charlie probably flipped Woodrow and feels bad about it. He didn’t say that exactly, but I got the picture. The bad guy in this is Doe. He’s the one your husband’s got to worry about.”

“I can’t, Zack. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. With you and Carol, I mean. In New Bedford.”

“Just talk to Charles, man. Go out and visit him in Plymouth. It’s real easy. The place is minimum security. All you’ll need is an ID, which you’ve got, and a home address. You can use this address. Just talk to the guy. Then decide. Okay?”

I didn’t answer. Then, after a few seconds, I heard myself say, “Okay. I’ll talk to Charles. Once.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

“No, it’s not, Zack,” I said and grabbed his empty coffee cup and overflowing ashtray. “You’re also asking me to wash your dirty dishes.”

“Hey, no way, babe!” He took the cup and ashtray back. “Here, let me do that.”

IT MAY SEEM STRANGE to you, but something about prisons, jails, cages comforts me. All my life I’ve run from confinement and tried to keep others, even animals, from being imprisoned. Yet whenever I come close to an actual place of confinement, whenever I’m physically in its proximity, something inside me clicks off and something else clicks on. Dread gets replaced by complacent, almost grateful acceptance. When with hundreds of other demonstrators I was arrested and jailed in Mississippi and Louisiana and later in Washington and Chicago and spent a night or two in a cell awaiting bail and quick release, while the others rattled their cages and chanted in continuing protest and sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Amazing Grace,” I sat quietly cross-legged on the floor in a corner of the cell and gave myself over to the logic and clarity of imprisonment, as if, having relinquished my physical freedom, I was somehow free in a new and more satisfying way. In later years, driving past the high, razor-wired walls of state or federal prisons or catching a passing glimpse of the barred windows of a county jail, after the first flush of fear and anxiety passed, a certain restfulness came over me, and an ease that was almost a longing took my mind. In zoos I gazed into the cages and pens with an edge of envy. When I cared for the chimps all those years, partly it was so that I could vicariously join them in their iron-barred boxes. It still goes on. Today, at my farm in Keene Valley, even though I’m ideologically committed to providing my livestock and birds, all my animals, with as much free range as possible, I confess that I regularly have to argue away a desire to set Anthea and the girls to work building fences, pens, and cages for them. The freedom of the dogs to roam the woods, to abandon the farm any time they wish and race through the forest in pursuit of deer, threatens me. Something low in me wants to lock them in the barn, keep them on leashes tied to the porch railing, or just keep the beasts locked inside the house.

I know, of course, that it’s what I want done to me, not to my poor dogs. Not to my sheep and ducks and geese and my hens. Not to my dreamers. And not to Charles Taylor. Though when I visited him that day in federal prison in Plymouth, I did think, as I parked my mother’s car in the lot and saw the stately, brick, Victorian residence of the superintendent, the barracks that housed the security personnel, the neatly trimmed, sun-splashed lawns and spreading oak trees, and the sprawling complex of what looked like the dormitories of a small, slightly impoverished state college, and the high chain-link fence topped with strands of barbed wire that surrounded the prison, I did think, Charles must be very happy here.

He was not happy. He was furious. Even before he sat down at the table in the visiting room, he was talking full speed, practically spitting the words in that loud, high-dramatic mode that West African men use in response to perceived insult and impersonal injustice taken personally. “This a bad t’ing they done t’ me, all of ’em! Doe, him an’ the U.S. gov’ment them, an’ your sweet li’l husband, Woodrow, too, especially him, Hannah!” He scraped his chair up to the table and glowered at me.

“Dawn,” I said in a low voice. “Dawn Carrington.” The room was a low-ceilinged hall half the size of a high school cafeteria with a dozen square tables placed so as to be in plain view of a guard, who monitored the room from behind a desk on an elevated stage at the front. A row of food- and drink-vending machines were posted along one wall. Seated at several of the other tables a half-dozen inmates with their lawyers, wives, and girlfriends engaged in quiet conversation, domestic problems mixed with legal and financial strategies.

“How’s that?” Charles lifted his eyebrows in puzzlement.

“My name. It’s Dawn. Here.”

“Oh, okay.” He smiled knowingly. “Okay by me. Who tol’ you where I was? Who sent you here?” He looked healthy and strong, as if he’d been lifting weights. He wore a tight, white tee shirt and loose-fitting dungarees and sneakers. I’d never seen him without a tailored suit and tie or the occasional pressed and starched guayabera shirt. Charles was strikingly handsome back then. His smooth, round face shone with health and vigor and self-confidence, and he looked like a professional athlete. His hair was cut tight to his skull like a glistening black cap, and his skin was the color of polished old mahogany.

“Zack Procter said you might like to see me.”

Charles smiled broadly. “Oh, yeah. Zack.” He laughed. “Zack! When he tol’ me all about you, I didn’ believe the man at first. But then I put two an’ two together an’ come out four.” He paused and examined my face as if looking for a scar. “You always been a mystery woman to me, y’ know. Especially bein’ married to Woodrow an’ all. It always seem t’ me you could be fryin’ bigger fish, if you know what I mean. Your man Zack, he thinks he a big-time freedom fighter an’ all that,” he said and laughed. “What about you? You a freedom fighter too? Dawn. What your last name now?”

“Carrington. Actually, no, I’m not. Not anymore.”

“What are you, then? Who are you?” He laughed again.

“Good question,” I said and laughed with him. I liked Charles and for a long time had been sexually attracted to him. His large, open face and intelligent eyes, his easy smile, his immense physical energy pleased and relaxed me and, for the moment at least, distracted me from the confused jumble of my emotions. Grief, guilt, fear, and anger: different feelings aimed at different people. Grief over my father’s death; guilt for having abandoned my children and now my mother, too; fear of being arrested and sent to jail; and anger at Woodrow and Samuel Doe for sending me out of the country. Yet, at the same time, in a brand new way, I was grateful to them all: to my father for having let me see him diminished and dying, a mere mortal at last; to my children and my mother, who I had to say were probably better off without me; to the FBI who, with their warrant for my arrest, had driven me back underground, returning me to Zack and Carol, giving me the chance now to conduct an operation that might redeem me for long years of political passivity and cowardice. I was grateful even to Woodrow and Samuel Doe for breaking me out of my Liberian cocoon. Charles distracted me from that muddle of emotions, he energized me, creating for me a context that for the first time in many years let me feel like a woman of principle. A woman capable of acting on her principles.

I said to him, “Zack says you have a plan.”

“Of course I have a plan! I always have a plan. Ever since the day that monkey Doe stole my country an’ now has stole everyt’ing in it I’ve had a plan. Why you t’ink that monkey an’ his CIA friends put me in this cage? They scairt of me, y’ know. An’ for good reason. I got friends in high places all over Africa who would like nothin’ better than to see that monkey’s head on a stick an’ the Americans gone home an’ the people of Liberia rulin’ themselves for the first time in history.” On the day of Doe’s coup, he said, he’d decided to overthrow him by any means necessary and give the country back to the people. All the people, he emphasized, not to the Americos and their white American overseers who had run it like their plantation for a hundred and fifty years. And not to the Russians and the Chinese either. He would establish a socialist democracy, he said, the kind of localized, tribe-based socialism that lay at the heart of every African tradition. Speaking rapidly and building steam as he went on, Charles declared that, if given a chance, this could be accomplished in Liberia, he was sure of it. Because of Liberia’s peculiar history, it could happen. Even though he knew that similar attempts to create a democratic socialist “third way” had failed elsewhere; in Kenya and Ghana and Jamaica and Cuba and Chile, they had failed because the U.S. and other capitalist countries had sabotaged leftist governments and leaders even before they’d had a chance to consolidate their power. I had never heard Charles or any other Liberian talk this way before. The only people I had ever heard say these things were white American intellectuals, fantasists, neo-Marxist theoreticians whose idea of Africa was based on the Black Power movement of the sixties and seventies and Stokely Carmichael in a dashiki and Huey Newton in leather and black beret posing with his automatic rifle in a high-backed bamboo chair. It took a decade for us to admit it, but the dream of a truly democratic socialist revolution in America or anywhere else in the so-called developed world had died shortly after 1969, probably in Chicago at the end of a police club in a cloud of tear gas. In small, mostly agrarian countries like Cuba and Vietnam, and for a while in Jamaica, the dream had lingered on a few years longer, before it got appropriated by strongmen and their party chieftains or undermined by coups and assassinations engineered by the old colonial powers. But as Charles continued to describe his vision of a Liberia that was free and democratic and economically self-sufficient, a small country quietly going about its own business of providing its own food and shelter and health care and education, trading its agricultural products with the rest of the world for the technology and manufactured goods it would require and no more than what it required — no luxury goods, he said, no Mercedes limos or Rolex watches, no private jets, nothing imported that did not advance the people as a whole — I began to believe that it could be done. It could happen, and very possibly Charles Taylor was the man who could make it happen.

He asked me if I had some cash on me.

“What? What do you mean?”

He pointed to the row of vending machines lined up like sentries along the wall. “I want a Coke,” he said.

We got up from the table and walked to the cold-drink machine. “You do it,” he said and indicated a line painted on the floor a few feet out from the machine. “Can’t cross that line. You can, but not me. Don’t ask why,” he said. “Prisons is all about rules.”

I bought us each a Coke. We returned to the table and he resumed talking. The guard at the front of the room occasionally looked up from the magazine he was reading to survey his charges, but otherwise we were unobserved, ignored, unheard, as Charles unfolded to me his grand plan, and I took it in and with reckless ease and alacrity believed in its feasibility and, by the end of our meeting, its necessity.

Hearing this, you must think that I was unforgivably naive, that I had learned nothing about people or the world outside a university classroom, that I had been asleep for ten or more years, as if in my early twenties my mind and heart had been put into suspended animation. You must think that my slow, sheepish withdrawal from Weatherman and the Movement, where I had been positioned only at the margins anyhow, that my flight to Ghana with Zack, the years I lived in Liberia with Woodrow, bearing his children and raising them and taking care of Woodrow’s home for him, the years I spent being other people, had displaced, erased, obliterated the girl I had been in my early twenties. The idealistic girl who was passionate about justice, especially for people of color, the girl who was convinced that in the fight for justice her life and sacrifice would count for something. The girl who, in the interests of justice and equality for all people everywhere, was perfectly willing to break as many laws as seemed necessary. The girl who found moral clarity in the phrase by any means necessary.

You would be right, of course, for that girl had indeed been replaced by another. But also wrong. Caught as I was that morning in a descending whirl of conflicting needs and desires, unable to grasp onto anything or anyone solid, with no plan of my own, no place or person or ideal to cleave to, suddenly there was Charles. And Charles seemed more solid and inescapably present and accounted for than anyone else in my life, more real to me than Zack or Carol or my mother, my children or my husband. And Charles had a plan, he wanted to break out of prison, make his way to Libya, raise a guerrilla army there and return to Liberia and overthrow Samuel Doe; and he had a place, Liberia, that I had come to know better than any other place; and he had a dream: to establish in his country and, as I was beginning to think of it, mine, a socialist democracy that could by its very existence renew the dream of my youth. At that moment, it was for me a way, perhaps the only way, not to descend into cynicism or despair. It was a way to avoid utter collapse, a total nervous breakdown, hospitalization, drugs, and (why not?) suicide. When I walked through the gates of the prison, passed the security checks, and entered the visitors’ hall and sat down at my assigned table to wait for Charles to arrive from his cell, I had not known this, I could not even have imagined it, but as soon as he sat down opposite me and began to talk, I knew that, wherever he led, I would follow.

It would not be difficult for him to break out of here, he said. The inmates had considerable freedom of movement. He explained that the left field of the baseball field backed up to the section of the chain-link fence that was farthest from the watchtowers. The fence was ten feet high, with six strings of barbed wire at the top. Beyond the fence was a thicket of trees, and beyond the trees Route 1, the old coastal highway, which led south towards Cape Cod and north to Boston. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, beginning at ten o’clock, there was a baseball game between the two main cell blocks, A and B. Charles was the regular left fielder for the A team. There were always plenty of arguments and now and then a bench-clearing brawl that ended the game and got the players and the inmates watching the game sent back to their cells.

Charles would arrange to have his team’s pitcher deliberately, flagrantly hit a batter and initiate a brawl, and while everyone, including the watchtower guards, was distracted, he would scale the fence. It would be at least half a day before his absence would even be noticed, he said. “They don’t check every cell till nine o’clock at night, an’ by then I be long gone.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll be on my way to Libya,” he said. “If you does your job right.” He wanted me to wait in a car out on Route 1, parked at the side of the road, headed north. He wanted Zack with me. “White woman alone with a black man attracts attention. Nobody notices a white couple with their black friend in the back seat.” I was to provide Charles with a U.S. passport, a thing Zack had told him I was skilled at forging, a small carryon suitcase and change of clothes, five hundred dollars in cash, and a plane ticket to Cairo. Once Charles got to Cairo, he’d simply present himself at the Libyan embassy, and the next day he’d be in Tripoli, a guest of Mohamar Ghaddafi. At a coastal training camp east of Tripoli, half a thousand armed Liberian fighters were waiting for him to arrive and take command. “In twelve months’ time, we’ll be back in Liberia. In eighteen months, we’ll be in Monrovia, an’ Samuel Doe will be a dead man.”

I said, “I understand why you want me to help you. But why bring Zack in? Any white man would do, right? Zack’s only willing to do this for the money. Which he says you promised him. The money you and Woodrow stole from the people of Liberia,” I added.

“Stole it from Samuel Doe, you mean. He the one stole it from the people. And now it’s circulatin’ back to ’em, since it’s gonna help pay for weapons an’ transport an’ such, whatever Ghaddafi don’t wanna give us. As for our friend Zack, the freedom fighter,” he said, smiling, “I tol’ him I’d turn the money over to him if he helped break me outa this place. But that was before you come around. So now, if I don’t use him in the breakout and he finds out before it’s done an’ I’m outa the country, he’ll be mad enough to screw us both up. Zack’s a main-chance man, y’ know? Very opportunistic.”

“So you don’t intend to give him the money? Even if he helps you escape?”

Charles looked at me as if I were stupid. “Hannah, please. That money belongs to the people of the Republic of Liberia.”

“Dawn.”

“Right.”

I pushed my chair back and stood. “I’ll come back as soon as I know when everything will be in place. The passport is the hard part, but it shouldn’t take more than a few weeks at most.”

“Can do it any Monday, Wednesday, or Friday morning. When the prisoners play the all-American game of baseball.”

He stood and put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. I liked his smell. It may have been the first time in my life that a man had smelled right to me. No, not the first time. My father always smelled right to me. No other man. Until Charles. And none since.

TWO WEEKS LATER on an overcast Friday morning, Zack and I drove out from New Bedford on Route 1 in my mother’s car. I pulled over and parked on the gravel shoulder of the northbound lane. It was late August, unseasonably cool and threatening to rain, the trailing edge of a New England summer passing through. The leaves of the roadside oak and maple trees in the copse beyond had turned their dry undersides up, shifting the late summer morning light from pale green to silver. It was a little after nine.

Zack lighted a cigarette and looked nervously back and forth along the highway. Morning traffic was thin; Cape Cod weekenders from the Boston suburbs hadn’t started their pilgrimage to the sea yet. On the floor of the backseat was a small nylon carry-on bag. Inside the bag was a tan, tropical-weight suit, size forty-two, and a dress shirt and tie from Filene’s Basement. Inside the breast pocket of the suit jacket was an envelope with five one-hundred-dollar bills and a one-way Egypt Air ticket for the 1:05 p.m. flight from Boston to Cairo — everything drawn from my going-away gift from Samuel Doe, an irony that was not lost on me.

Also inside the jacket pocket was a U.S. passport in the name of Charles Davis. The photo was of a round-faced black man who resembled Charles only slightly, but close enough that a white man would think it was an exact likeness. This took place some fifteen years ago, remember, when it was safe to assume that Charles’s face and passport photo would not be examined by a black man in uniform until he got to Egypt. Also, back then, before Americans started seeing anyone whose skin wasn’t pink as a potential suicide bomber, security was light and the technology of surveillance was slow and unreliable.

Getting a passport for Charles had been a simple matter. I’d driven Carol to the Federal Building in Boston, where for the first time in her life she applied for her passport. Ten days later it arrived in the mail, and that evening I doctored it with Whiteout and a photo-booth head-shot of one of the cooks at The Pequod, a handsome black man named Dick Stephens, divorced and lonely, Carol said. I’d pretended to have a crush on him, had spent a day in Provincetown with him, and had asked for a picture for my wallet, so I could memorialize the lovely day and had promised with lowered eyes future payment for the favor. We snapped four pictures each; I gave him mine, and he gave me his.

Carol had been uneasy with what Zack and I were up to, especially after I assumed ownership of her brand new passport, which represented to her in tangible form the power and authority of the United States government. But by then she and Zack were once again sleeping together without me, and I had assumed the leadership position among the three of us and had made my mission the only important one. Zack happily complied. He believed that when I completed my mission, he would assume ownership of at least half, possibly more, of Charles’s million-dollar cache in some secret Caribbean bank account. According to Zack, well before we saw Charles off at Logan Airport, we’d stop at a Shawmut Bank branch in the suburbs, where Charles would arrange the transfer of the funds from his account to Zack’s little checking account at the New Bedford branch.

I asked him how he could be sure Charles would be willing and able to do that.

“No way Charlie won’t deliver the goods. Until he walks into the Libyan embassy in Cairo, we can always get him busted by the feds.”

“Not without busting ourselves.”

“We can drop a dime on him, and the feds’ll greet him when he lands. He’s connected to Ghaddafi and the fucking Libyans, man. He’s an escapee from an American prison. The Egyptians’d give him up in a minute.”

“Zack, you do that, and I swear I’ll kill you.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Sure. Suddenly you’re Weather Underground again. A revolutionary. A true believer. C’mon, you just want to fuck the guy.”

“Zack, I’m doing this to save my country.”

“Your country? What, Liberia?”

“Yes. My country. And my sons’ and my husband’s country. And their lives, I’m doing this to save their lives,” I said, and meant it, too. Believed it.

It had started to rain. Zack checked his watch. “Ten twenty-five. Shit. Where the fuck is he?” Southbound traffic was building into a steady stream. Inevitably, a trooper cruising for speeders would spot us and pull in behind the Toyota, ask us for IDs, and run the plates. My driver’s license, like my passport, was phony and long expired anyhow, and I was driving a car registered in my mother’s name.

“Maybe he fucked up getting over the fence,” Zack said. “I know that fence, and it’s not all that easy to climb. Maybe we oughta book.”

“No. We’ll wait.”

“How long? Some cop comes along, we’re in deep shit.”

“I won’t abandon him, Zack.”

“Yeah. Sure. C’mon, don’t go all high church on me. You’re in this for the money as much as I am,” he said.

“No. For maybe the first time in fifteen years, I’m acting on principle.”

“Those days, when it made some kind of sense to act on principle, are long gone, babe. Now the only people acting on principle are right-wing born-again Christians, and I’m not so sure about them. These are the eighties, babe.”

“Charles Taylor is acting on principle.”

“Yeah, right,” he said and turned to roll down the window and toss his cigarette, and there was Charles, standing in the rain beside the car, looking in at us with a broad smile on his wet face.

“Can you give a man a lift?” he asked and pulled open the rear door and got in.

DRIVING NORTH TOWARDS Boston we said little to one another. Charles exchanged his prison garb for the clothes I’d brought, and examined the ticket and cash and his new passport.

“Who’s this a picture of? This black man s’posed to look like me? Hell, I’m much prettier than this guy.”

“It’s the best I could do,” I said.

We were outside Natick, barely a half-hour from the airport. I felt strangely calm and clearheaded, as if I were merely dropping a friend off and didn’t have to go much out of my way to do it. Twice we passed a police car, and I had to remind myself to keep to the speed limit, for God’s sake, I’m helping a man break out of a federal prison, I’m a fugitive myself with a forged passport and driver’s license, my partner in crime seated next to me is a parolee, and if we’re stopped and caught, he’ll cut a deal in a minute, he’ll say anything, and will betray both me and Charles to keep from going back to prison.

Without turning, Zack said, “Charlie, maybe we should talk about our little agreement.”

“Eh? How’s that?”

“Well, as you no doubt recall, there was to be a certain payment for the services. You no doubt recall our earlier conversations on the subject. And now here we are, man. Almost home.”

In the rearview mirror I watched Charles nod and look out at the passing suburbs and smile as if to himself. He was silent for several long minutes.

Zack said, “Well? What about it? We gonna transfer those funds from your account in Switzerland or the Caymans or wherever the hell they are over to my account in New Bedford or…”

“Or what?”

“Or not. Because if not, then we’ve got a problem.”

“Really? Is that true, Hannah? I mean ‘Dawn,’ of course. Is that true? If I don’t pass Zack the money that Samuel Doe say I stole wit’ your husband, then we have a problem, you an’ me?”

“No,” I said. “This is strictly between you and Zack.”

“Good girl,” he said. “You a good girl. You a true Liberian patriot. But my friend Zack here, I dunno, man. Seems like he in this for the money. An’ once I give him the way to get it into his pocket, him don’t need me for nothin’ no more an’ can fuck up my travel plans real easy, if he want to. I think I’ll wait till I get me a boarding pass an’ they call my row to board the plane, before I give you what you want. You understand, Zack.”

“Yeah. I understand.”

Charles asked for a piece of paper and a pen. My mother’s list-making pad and ballpoint pen were clipped to a plastic holder stuck to the dashboard, and I handed him both. Charles wrote for a few seconds, tore off the top piece of notepaper, and returned the pen and pad. He folded the notepaper once and put it into his shirt pocket.

“This here,” he said and patted his pocket, “is a telephone number and a man’s name. When I board my plane for Cairo, I’ll give this paper to you. Then all you got to do is say your name to the person who answers and tell him the man whose name I wrote down gave you permission to arrange for the transfer of Charles Taylor’s funds. This telephone is in Washington, D.C. It’s a secret contact number only I know about, and the name on the paper is a name only I use. My code name. No one else knows both these things. Whoever answers at that particular telephone number and hears that particular name, he’ll know the instructions are comin’ straight from me. He’ll know to give you what you want, no matter what it is, no questions asked.”

“Why can’t we stop at a pay phone and make that call now?”

“Not enough time, Zack. Don’t want to miss my flight. Only one a day, y’know.”

“Sounds a little funny to me,” Zack said. “Can I trust you?”

“‘Course you can trust me, man. It’s what I owe you.”

We reached the airport at 11:45. I parked the car in the first empty space I saw, which put us on the third level of the parking garage, and the three of us raced down the stairs and into the international terminal, Charles loping along ahead of us as if he’d made this run many times before. When we arrived at the gate for Egypt Air, they had already begun the boarding procedure. A knot of first-class passengers, men in business suits with briefcases, an old lady in a wheelchair, and two couples with small children were already passing into the access way. Charles handed his ticket and passport across the counter to the young woman attendant, who hurriedly punched out his boarding pass and went back to calling out the rows. Charles turned around and faced me and Zack.

“Well, my fellow freedom fighters, we at a parting of the ways.” He reached for me and kissed me firmly on the lips, more a promise than a thank you. He released me slowly, then stepped away in the direction of the passengers lined up to board.

“Wait a minute!” Zack said sharply. “That little piece of paper in your pocket is mine, I believe.”

“Oh, sure, almost forgot,” Charles said and handed the paper over. “All the excitement of departure, I guess.” He smiled again, then quickly moved into line and walked through the gate and disappeared from sight.

Zack stared down at the piece of notepaper.

“Is it what you wanted?” I asked.

“I hope the fuck it is. It’d better be.”

“What’ll you do if it isn’t? What if the money never left Monrovia? It’s possible Samuel Doe has it by now, you know. It’s even possible the U.S. government has it.”

“Charlie knows I can still get to him, man. He won’t fuck me over. I know people, man. African people.”

“Oh, Zack.” I started walking back towards the main terminal. Quickly Zack caught up and touched my elbow and asked if he could have five dollars. I gave it to him, and he crossed to a newsstand and made change while I waited.

He stopped at the bank of phones just inside the main terminal. I moved next to him and stood there while he fumbled with the quarters and dialed. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a uniformed cop watching us. On a bench next to him two men with briefcases read newspapers as if they wanted to be seen reading newspapers. A maintenance man with a dustbin and push broom came to a meaningless stop twenty feet away and looked straight at me.

“Zack, I’ll be outside,” I said and walked with careful nonchalance through the door into the parking garage. No one appeared to follow me. The elevator crawled to the third level, and as soon as I was free of it, I ran for the car. I jumped in and started the motor and raced, tires squealing, for the exit, down the ramp to the second level — still no one following in the rearview mirror — and on down to the first level, and there was Zack crossing into the garage from the terminal, looking for me. He saw the car and ran towards it, his face angrily bunched, and I jammed on the brakes and stopped. He got in and slammed the door hard, and I hit the gas and exited the garage, stopping barely long enough to pay the parking fee, then drove full bore towards the tunnel under the bay and downtown Boston beyond.

Zack said, “I thought you’d pulled out on me, man. Why the hell would you want to do that?”

“I was just bringing the car down to meet you.”

“Oh,” he said, glum and downcast. He still held the piece of paper in his lap and studied it as if it carried a message difficult to read.

“Well? What happened?” I glanced at him. He looked like a child ready to cry putting on a big man’s face to hide it.

“You’re right about me,” he said.

“How?”

“I’m an asshole,” he said. “I fucking hate myself.” He turned away from me and toward the window so I couldn’t see his face.

“Was it a working number?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And…?”

“It was the number of the Liberian embassy in Washington, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh, dear,” I said, not very surprised. “So you just hung up?”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t just hang up. I should have. But I followed instructions. I told the guy, who had this fucking British accent, I told him my name and gave him the name of the guy that Charles wrote down. I said this guy was supposed to transfer the money being held for Charles Taylor into an account that I had the number for.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing at first. Then he asked my name again, and I told him. And then he laughed like hell. And hung up.”

We were silent for a few seconds. It had stopped raining, and the clouds were breaking up, and patches of blue sky behind them skidded south ahead of us. I asked Zack, “What was the name of the man who was supposed to do this, transfer the money into your account?”

“Sam Clement,” he said. “Who the fuck’s Sam Clement? You ever heard of him?”

“No,” I said. “I never heard of him.”

WHEN ZACK DECIDED to move out of the apartment we weren’t disappointed. His presence had become confusing and burdensome to Carol, who preferred my authority to his, although I don’t think it mattered to her which of us she slept with. In a strange way, Carol was never less present and accounted for than in bed; she was merely accommodating there, blandly accepting other people’s needs as if they were her own. Carol’s mentality was that of a permanent servant, ingrown and generations old, and what she liked and needed most, what she understood best in the world and in all her personal relationships, was authority. My apparently principled control of Charles’s breakout and flight and Zack’s humiliation by Charles’s million-dollar promissory note had deflated Zack’s ego and made his male bluster sufficiently defensive and obnoxious to put me in charge of our little family.

We live in packs as much as dogs or wolves, it sometimes seems, and like them need to be clear at all times about who’s the alpha dog. It’s a practical matter. For Carol, as long as I was in the pack, Zack’s ongoing presence only confused the question of authority. He didn’t announce his departure or even discuss it with us and didn’t leave a note behind to explain or say goodbye. Simply, one morning, a week after Charles’s breakout, Zack and his few possessions and clothes were gone.

“I guess he felt crowded here,” Carol said and shrugged. That same night I moved from the living room sofa to Carol’s bedroom, and the next morning at breakfast, Bettina said to me, “I like it better now, with you and Mommy together and him gone.” Bettina had learned early, practically from infancy, to be scared of men. It had always been men who took her mother from her, stuck her with her aunt or her grandmother while her mother behind closed doors did mysterious, private business with the men. Or if, like Zack, the men stuck around, they talked too much and treated her as if she were an inconvenience. They were too large, had rough cheeks and hands, loud voices, and were often drunk or high on drugs. Even Zack, who to his credit did try on occasion to pay attention to Bettina, because she was diffident as a cat and withdrawn around him, grew quickly bored and turned his attention elsewhere. With me she was only slightly less suspicious and distant, but I warmed to it; I knew it was merely a self-protective affect that probably resembled mine. Our innate shyness had a hostile edge to it, and she seemed to recognize and like the similarity as much as I, and soon we were like a favorite aunt and favored niece. I was still living off the money Samuel Doe had slipped me for leaving children, husband, and home with minimal fuss, so I didn’t need a job yet and was usually at the apartment when Bettina came home from school and took care of her nights when Carol was at The Pequod.

In the mornings before leaving for school, Bettina sat silently at the table and ate her Cheerios, while I, also silent, braided her long, pale hair into pigtails like mine, and Carol slept in. At night, before Bettina went to bed, I brushed her hair out again. Grooming. Before long, my days and nights were organized around Bettina’s, which helped me avoid thinking about what I was doing living here with this child and her mother and what I would do when my money ran out. It helped me avoid thinking about Liberia and Charles’s promise to give the country back to its people and what that might mean to Woodrow and our sons and to me, which meant that I didn’t have to ask myself if the promise Charles had made to me was as empty as the promise he’d made to poor, gullible Zack. And it helped me avoid thinking about the children I had left behind in Monrovia, my three African sons and their father, and the life I had, after a fashion, led there. Then one Friday late in September, Carol borrowed my car — my mother’s car — and she and Bettina and Carol’s mother drove to the White Mountains of New Hampshire to view the technicolor fall foliage, an annual rite for them, apparently, but for me little more than an occasion for making intelligence-deprived declarations about the beauty of nature. Not my cup of tea. I declined the invitation to join them, and for the first time since my return to America was alone for two whole days and nights. In the gray silence of the empty apartment — once I had vacuumed and dusted every room, finished the laundry, mopped the kitchen floors, and scrubbed the refrigerator down, once I was unable to come up with anything else to do that was in the slightest way necessary or merely useful to me or anyone else — my thoughts turned helplessly to my home in Monrovia. I sat down at the kitchen table with Bettina’s school tablet in front of me, opened it, and began a letter to my husband.

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 until … until Carol fell in love with a man, as I knew she would, and I would no longer be a suitable housemate or fantasy aunt for her daughter and would have to move on, to where I did not know. I was forty years old and had nowhere forward I could go and no permanent place to stay. All I could do was go back. Back to Africa.

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 the United States. (And what’s this about the new dog killing a cobra in the garden?)

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.

My dear wife,

I received your most recent letter yesterday and last night conveyed to President Doe your assurances stated therein. To my amazement he expressed a sincere desire to have you return to Liberia. He also apologized for what he said must have been a misunderstanding on our part. He claims never to have wished for you to be separated from your husband and children. He is a man who often changes his mind and policy, but I believe he is sincere in this matter and does indeed want to welcome you back, as he said, “into the official family of Liberia.” No doubt the American ambassador, Mr. Wycliffe, was helpful in changing the president’s mind.

It may be too late by the time you receive this letter, but if possible, could you be home for Christmas? It would be very nice for all of us if you could. It would especially please the boys.

By the way, this morning I stopped by the American embassy and spoke with our friend there. I wanted to confirm that your return would in no way trouble the U.S. authorities. He assured me that you are free to travel anywhere in the world and that he very much looked forward to seeing you here again.

Your loving husband,

Woodrow Sundiata

It was the last letter that I would ever receive from him, although I did not suspect it at the time, of course. I read it and immediately packed my clothes into my backpack and began to compose what I would say to Bettina when she got home from soccer practice and noticed my pack by the door and asked where I was going, and what I would tell Carol that night when she got home from work. I would tell them both the same thing, the essential truth, that I was leaving them in order to join my family and to prepare for the liberation of my country from a cruel dictator. It would make no sense to either of them, but they both would accept it as natural and inevitable. I had come into their lives like a pale ghost, and now I was leaving like one.