Voyager

by Russell Banks

  In the distance, we saw Saba, a green cone surrounded by a turquoise sea, looking like a volcanic island rising out of the South Pacific. From the air, Mount Scenery (aptly named), three thousand feet high, made the island look as tall as it was wide and long. A lower ring of mountains plummeted straight into the sea below, where we could make out huge black rocks and crashing waves. Not a beach in sight. And then we saw the landing strip, no bigger than a basketball court, stuck out on a promontory with sheer cliffs at both ends and a long drop to the sea.

  Scary, especially in a rattling old STOL. I was seated just behind the pilot and over his shoulder had his view of the approach, which I’d rather not have had: we were headed straight for a rock wall when suddenly he cut the engine back almost to a stall, and we dropped and then skidded to a stop a few feet from the precipice.

  It’s a Dutch island, a five-square-mile circle with just over a thousand residents, mostly fishermen and subsistence farmers, and four tiny villages. The population was approximately half black and half white, and there appeared to be no racial tension between them. Whites and blacks alike tipped their hats and smiled and greeted one another equally. Everything about Saba was miniaturized, squeaky clean, and green. The half-dozen tourists we passed appeared to be day-trippers from Sint Maarten. Like us, they gawked at the scenery, which was enchanting, climbed the thousand steps to the top of Mount Scenery for an otherworldly view of the entire island, and descended for a simple lunch at one of the two or three pleasant outdoor restaurants. You could see it all in a half day, which is what most visitors chose to do, and return to the discos and gaming tables in Sint Maarten.

  But you wouldn’t have penetrated the quaint surface of the place to the interesting microsociety that existed beneath it. For 250 years, fewer than a thousand white and black Sabans have lived on this tiny island side by side without the presence of tourism and the tortured history of the slave-powered plantation system to dehumanize the residents and their descendants and threaten the island’s fragile ecology. It was idyllic, a pocket-sized tropical province made possible because the inhabitants could grow enough to feed themselves year-round and thus needed to import very little, with nothing left over to sell to foreigners—no sugarcane, no white sandy beaches, no drugs, no bauxite, no oil. There was, therefore, no crime and no overweening wealth and no apparent poverty. The soil was fertile, the climate perfectly suited to the natural bodily needs and physical comfort of Homo sapiens. Most Sabans lived in small, neat white hillside cottages with gingerbread eaves and red tile roofs and a kitchen garden in back. The Sabans we met were shy, but hospitable and curious once they knew that we had more than a day-tripper’s interest in their island. There was a single narrow road paved with hand-cut stones that wound across the island from the airfield and passed through the four settlements (one can’t call them towns or even villages) of Upper Hell’s Gate, Windwardside, St. John’s, and the Bottom. Until the late 1940s, when the road was built, everyone walked everywhere. Most people, despite the recent availability of ten rental cars, still walked everywhere.

  We set up at Scout’s Place, one of the four or five small bed-and-breakfast guesthouses, run by Scout Thirkield, an expatriate American who had left Sint Maarten twenty-five years earlier because it was too crowded, whose cook, Diana, served wholesome, spicy West Indian food in an open-air dining room with grand views of the hills and the sea fifteen hundred feet below. This was the late-twentieth-century expatriate’s fantasy of the Caribbean, where the last few centuries seem almost not to have happened. Saba looked and felt outside time, at least modern time, like a Benedictine monastery in Tuscany or a Shaker settlement in rural New Hampshire.

  Later that first evening, as we walked beneath wide swaths of stars from Scout’s Place downhill to the settlement of Windwardside, I silently mused that if I ever wished to escape my past or, indeed, my present, I could slip away to the Dutch island of Saba. Yes, I could rent a little house on the side of a hill just beyond one of the villages. Perhaps the very hill we are now descending. I might plant a vegetable garden behind my house—maybe that whitewashed stucco cottage over there in the moonlight beside the road. To pay for my few living expenses I can learn from Scout’s chef, Diana, how to cook creole style and open a four-table restaurant in the shaded terrace. Once a month the packet boat or plane from Sint Maarten will bring me a replacement batch of books from the lending library in Philipsburg and batteries and tubes for my Hallicrafters two-way shortwave radio and a stack of English-language newspapers. I might begin a benign, low-key love affair with a Saban widow who has taken over her late husband’s position as the island postmaster. Our love affair will gradually intensify, until either the widow moves in with me or I move into her whitewashed cottage down in the settlement. Then the question of marriage will arise . . .

  My past and my present will have caught up with me again. My longing for escape will have begun again.

  If one is an escape artist, and one has finally managed successfully to escape—to the island of Saba, for instance—where does one run to then? Is it an infinite egress? I was surprised that even here, in the company of the woman I hoped would become my fourth wife, I had seduced myself for the hundredth time, if only briefly, into inventing a story about the possibility and pleasure of running away from my interlocked past and present and the future they portended.

  My compulsion, if that’s what it was, momentarily embarrassed me. Perhaps that’s why I was able to summon the courage to resume telling Chase the true story of the end of my first marriage. Or maybe I sincerely believed that, despite my past and slowly fading escapist fantasy of the present, this time my future really would be different, and thus I could risk revealing my past. Maybe, now that I had fallen in love with Chase, I was at last no longer an escape artist.

  There was no way in this for me to make myself look good—or even mildly sympathetic—and still tell what happened. Or what I thought happened. Or, on the island of Saba some twenty-eight years later, what I remembered as having happened. Or now, more than a half century later, what I imagine happened. But these were the indisputable facts. In May 1960, Darlene gave birth to our daughter, whom we named Leona. In September 1960, Darlene and Leona left Boston by Greyhound for Darlene’s parents’ home in Pinellas Park, Florida. Or was it November 1960? Or December? I don’t remember. I do know that I was still twenty years old and Darlene was still nineteen. I tried, and am trying again now, fifty-five years later, to recall how I made this take place, how, without my leaving our small, one-bedroom, third-floor apartment on Peterborough Street in Boston’s Back Bay, I managed to abandon my teenaged wife and infant daughter.

  But except for that deep knowledge—that it’s I who was responsible for it, that Darlene did not want to leave me or the city of Boston and the hardscrabble, bohemian life we had made for ourselves there, and did not want to raise our child without me beside her—I have almost no sequential, linked memories of the events of that summer and fall. I know only that somehow I managed to convince her to return to her parents in Florida and raise our daughter there alone. I did not abandon my wife and daughter; I drove them away.

  Over the years I have retained only isolated, disconnected scenes and images. If I tried to connect them now it would create a false narrative. I told Chase that I remembered packing and shipping Darlene’s and the baby’s clothing and bedding and photograph albums and the other personal possessions that she had asked for. We owned very little else: furniture mostly found on the street, a mattress on the floor, some Sears and Roebuck pots and pans, minimal kitchenware, a record player, books and records, many of them stolen. I remembered weeping guilty tears as, alone in the apartment, I sealed the boxes and wrote Darlene’s married name and her parents’ Florida address on the labels, and on the return labels my name and our Peterborough Street address.

  It was as if I had leaped from a cliff and was now in free fall, my life controlled solely by the force of gravity. Memories and desires and fears f
lashed past as I plummeted—not falling to earth, but out into deep space, as if drawn neither up nor down but away by the irresistible gravitational pull of an uncharted black hole located light-years beyond my personal planet. It was the first time, and by no means the last, that I had deliberately rejected the forces that had taken control of my life.

  No, that’s not quite true. I had done it at least twice before. Trial runs, as it were. Practice launches. In fact, my mother liked telling friends and strangers alike that even as a baby I was a runaway: in San Diego during the war, when my father was attached to the naval base there and I was three years old, I managed to untie the rope that she’d used to leash me to the back porch banister while she tended to my baby brother Steve inside, and rode my tiny tricycle across a four-lane highway into a cemetery where the police finally found me dipping VFW flags in a puddle. It was a story she enjoyed telling. And I have a clear memory of bicycling at the age of nine from our tenement apartment in downtown Concord, New Hampshire, five miles to the airport, where I planned to stow away on an outgoing flight to . . . where? I remember only the impulse and what it drove me to, not the plan, and the Concord police catching up with me at the airport. Perhaps I had no plan, no chart or map, only an impulse, liftoff, aimed at no destination other than the whole wide endless sky.

  In April 1956, my mother and her four abandoned children were living in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Two weeks after I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license, my high school pal Dario Morelli and I stole his father’s 1953 Oldsmobile 88 and lit out for the territory, heading west by southwest on Route 66. Eight weeks later, after a lengthy stop to raise gas money by working the night shift flipping burgers at a White Tower in Amarillo, Texas, we pulled up at the Pacific Ocean in Pasadena, where we got a room at the YMCA and jobs selling shoes at a Thom McAns. This time I had a plan. Morelli and I were planning to escape to Australia, but it wasn’t clear what or whom we were trying to escape from—our recently glimpsed fates, I suppose. Then one Sunday Morelli, who was Catholic, went to Mass and confessed to the priest what we had done, and the priest turned us in to the Pasadena police. Morelli’s father did not press charges, and we had enough gas money to drive the Olds back to him. Morelli got sent to military school, and I managed to make up three months’ lost high school homework in the remaining few weeks of the semester. The escapade became a line item in my academic record, however, and kept me from being offered a scholarship at Yale. But at Colgate University, where the administration was trying to broaden the student demographic without admitting too many blacks or Jews, my white, Presbyterian, fatherless family’s extreme poverty embellished my SAT scores and athletic achievements sufficiently that I was given a free ride—room and board and full tuition and a grant for books.

  In the fall of 1958, ten weeks into my first semester at Colgate, came the second—or fifth, or tenth—time I deliberately canceled control of my life. Confused and intimidated by my role as grateful beneficiary of the college’s attempt at affirmative action, I walked away from the scholarship, stole off-campus in the middle of a snowy autumn night, and to make sense of what I had done, hoping to avoid being called a dropout, which would have shamed my mother, who had finally recovered from my runaway with Morelli, and angered the high school teachers who had worked so hard to get me the scholarship, I declared that I had left college in order to join Fidel Castro and his men, who were holed up in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains, which I had read about in a long, glorifying article by Herbert Matthews in the New York Times. Which is how I washed up in Miami, on the north shore of the Caribbean Sea, a few months too late for the revolution, and moved to St. Petersburg, on the Gulf Coast, where I met and married Darlene.

  I told Chase that I remembered Darlene sobbing inconsolably facedown on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. I was sure this had happened early in our marriage, and it may as easily have been the bathroom floor of our garage apartment back in Lakeland as our third-floor flat on Peterborough Street. It happened early and often, however; I knew that much. It was always in the gray predawn light at the end of a night that had seemed interminable. Her nightgown was tangled around her body like a flimsy shroud. I saw the pink bottoms of her bare feet, her freckled shoulders and arms, her swollen wet face turned away from my gaze, half hidden beneath her long, blond, matted hair. More than weeping, she was keening, crying out from deep inside her chest for . . . for what? For something I could neither imagine nor give. My mother had always sobbed like that, as if panic-stricken, gasping for breath, flailing her limbs like a grieving widow, all but rending her clothes.

  I had learned early on to harden my heart to her cries. Even before I was twelve—before my father informed me that I was now the man of the house and walked out the door, leaving my mother and his four children behind—I had learned to stand just outside the bathroom or her bedroom or wherever my mother was having her weeping fit and silently wait for the storm to pass. I had learned that if I entered the room and threw my arms around her shuddering shoulders and wept alongside her or tried in vain to comfort her, which as a small child I had done many times, it would only extend her seizure long into the night. But if I did nothing more than stand by the open door and watch, while my two younger brothers and my little sister huddled together in the background like scared puppies, she would soon regain her composure, wipe her face, and smile bravely up at me, like an actress who knew that her performance hadn’t quite come off. It was the same with Darlene. So I watched and waited in silence, like a bodyguard, instead of a husband. Or son.

  I remembered telling Darlene—just before she agreed to leave me and return to her parents—that I no longer loved her, even though it was a lie. It would have been easier for both of us and for our daughter if it had been the truth, however. Because I loved Darlene then and for the rest of her life. Which would not have comforted her then or ever. But I think she knew it anyhow, because our daughter, Leona, must have believed it and could only have acquired that belief somehow from her mother, or she would not have had the courage as a fourteen-year-old girl to seek me out and eventually come to trust me enough to live with me and let me take care of her until she could take care of herself.

  “Each man kills the thing he loves,” wrote Wilde. I did not understand then how that was necessary or even possible, and certainly it was not desirable. The sentence didn’t make sense to me. But it was what I was doing. Or rather, what I tried and failed to do, kill the thing I loved, which was my love for Darlene and our baby girl. And so I not only permanently wounded Darlene’s heart and Leona’s, I wounded my own as well.

  I remembered staying out all night, playing chess for hours with my fellow beatniks at the Zazen Coffee House on Hemenway Street and later telling my troubles to sympathetic women in their apartments—not sleeping with them, at least at first, just talking and drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes and sometimes pot. One of the women was from Colombia, an artist, petite and pretty, who taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and beat me regularly at chess. To my surprise she revealed to me late one night, probably to keep me from coming on to her, that she was a lesbian, and while she thought Darlene was beautiful and sexy, she was not intelligent enough for me. Feeling somehow wronged, I left her apartment and never returned or played chess with her again.

  Another was an older, tall, blade-faced woman in her mid-twenties who had a long, thick, roan-colored braid that hung to her waist. She was rumored to be the mistress of Gerry Mulligan, a famous jazzman in his mid-forties, which is why, when she invited me into her bed, I said I couldn’t because I was married.

  Then there was an actual consummated love affair with the daughter of a black photographer, who I learned many years later was as famous as Gerry Mulligan, but whom I had not heard of then. She was a gifted pianist studying at the New England Conservatory of Music, and I remembered and told Chase that she had a Steinway baby grand piano in her apartment and played Chopin for me. I had never seen a Steinwa
y or heard Chopin before. It was a sexually fierce affair that briefly overlapped with the weeks before Darlene left with Leona for Florida. The affair continued for months afterward, until the woman abruptly quit school and ran off to Paris with a French art critic who was writing a biography of her father and with whom she had been sleeping whenever she went home to Manhattan on school holidays.

  I could not understand why, or quite believe, such women were attracted to me and found me interesting. This was shortly before I met Christine, who was then a theater student at Emerson College. She, too, seemed exotic and rarified, a type of female human being altogether new to me, unlike any woman I had known or loved, or so I then believed. She was from Richmond, Virginia, and, despite her Christian name, Jewish, and with her reckless and carefree ways—leaving her sumptuous Lord & Taylor winter coat in a taxi and showing up the next day with another, skipping her final exams for a road trip to Vermont, springing for meals for her impoverished beatnik friends and fellow students, living in an apartment on Beacon Street instead of a college dorm room—she let me know that her family was rich and she was spoiled. I didn’t care. I may even have been attracted to her because she was rich and spoiled. She wore her long chestnut-brown hair like Joan Baez and played the guitar and sang folk songs from the Weavers’ and Pete Seeger’s songbook. She was not melancholy in the way of folksingers, however. She was loud and had a raucous laugh. With her oval-shaped face held close to her listener’s face, dark brown eyes open wide, eyebrows raised, she spoke in a strangely affected Virginia Tidewater accent colored by long drawn-out vowels and swallowed consonants. She was verbally surprising and vulgar and funny, especially when describing her eccentric southern Jewish family, a mash-up of Aeschylus and Tennessee Williams, Electra meets The Glass Menagerie.