Well, I almost started to cry, writing that. I may have to re-write this letter entirely if I can’t stop being so maudlin. I do want to assure you that both your father and I continue to enjoy good health — although I had my gall bladder removed last summer, which was no big deal, really, and actually helped me shed a few excess pounds, thanks to the two-month-long nonfat diet that preceded the surgery. We’re as physically active as ever, especially your father, who has taken up bicycling lately with the same discipline and energy that he devotes to everything in his life. I’m content with tennis (mostly doubles nowadays) and golf in the summer months and swimming at the club pool in the winter. We’ve kept up with most of our old friends, all of whom constantly ask after you, of course, and we even took a white-water rafting trip down the Grand Canyon this spring with Bibby and Marsh Mansfield and John Kerry and his lovely wife (he’s a young Kennedy-type liberal Democrat running for Congress in the 5th district, a man who many of us think has presidential potential, certainly more than Teddy, but don’t get me started there). We don’t travel quite as much as we used to, although your father still does a fair amount of lecturing and book promotion for his publishers around the country and abroad. The Carter administration has asked him to join several federal commissions on health and childcare and so on, but he has steadfastly refused. He does serve on a number of corporate boards now, however, which take up a lot of the time that he once devoted to political activism. But with the war in Vietnam over and the struggle for civil rights behind us, he is much less active in politics, as am I, of course. Mostly, we’re engaged now by local and environmental issues, where we inevitably end up siding with the young idealists against the greedy capitalists. So, not too much has changed, I guess!
When I was a little girl, from as early as I can remember, we had a dog who loved me the same way I loved her, a white female Samoyed named Maya. Her name suggested Daddy’s taste, surely, not Mother’s, but I didn’t think of it that way then: Maya’s name came with her, and she embodied it, just as I did mine. I had no invisible friend to keep me company, and never wished for a brother or sister. I had Maya. Before all others, I loved Maya, and knew her, and she loved and knew me. We were authentically whole individuals to each other, unique and irreplaceable. Not that I thought she was human or that I was a dog — our species difference mattered less than if we’d had different genders. We played and studied together, slept together, even talked to one another in a language that only we two understood. But Maya grew old faster than I did, and when I was eleven and she was eleven, she developed arthritis and took to snoozing in the shade under Daddy’s car. Her habit was to lie under the rear bumper after she’d gone outside in the morning and had finished her business, as if the effort of peeing in the side yard necessitated a short period of private rest and reflection afterwards. This was before I went away to Rosemary Hall, and every morning, when he was not traveling, Daddy drove me to school at Huntington Chase. His habit was to start the car and run the engine for a minute before backing it out of the driveway, to give Maya time to crawl from beneath the car. But then, inevitably, there came the day, a blustery, unseasonably warm, spring-like February morning, when Daddy turned on the ignition, waited the usual ninety seconds before putting the car into reverse, and as soon as the car began to move, we heard and felt a bump underneath, and he and I knew instantly that he had run over Maya and killed her. I had just begun to insist on being called Scout then, and Scout didn’t cry when her dog was killed by her father. Without looking up from the open schoolbook in her lap, Scout said simply, “You ran over Maya.” I remember Daddy practically leaping from the car and lifting Maya in his arms. He held her as if she were a full-length fur coat and stood by the open car door, looking back at me with a strangely puzzled expression on his face, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he had done. “I’m so sorry, dear,” he said. I didn’t respond. In my rapidly hardening heart I knew that he’d grown weary of her inconvenience and the demands that her old age put on us and for an instant had willfully blocked out the fact of her existence. I had no word for it yet, but I believed in the unconscious and knew that it was very powerful, especially when it came to adult behavior. He said, “I think she was already dead, though. She was very old. Old and weak. I think she must have died before we came out. Or she’d have moved from under the car the way she always does. We’ll bury her in the backyard, okay? We’ll stay home this morning, you from school and me from the office, and we’ll bury her by the pear tree. How does that sound, Hannah?” “Scout,” I said and went back to my book. “Scout,” he repeated, his voice dropping to a whisper. Mother suddenly appeared at the door behind him. “What happened to Maya?” she asked. Daddy turned and showed her, and she said, “Oh, my! Are you all right, Hannah dear?” “Scout,” I corrected. “I’m fine,” I said and looked up at her. “It’s Maya who’s dead.” “Yes, of course. Yes. Poor Maya,” she said. I turned back to my book and pretended to read, while my parents stood there by the car, my father with the dog in his arms, my mother wringing her hands uselessly, the two of them staring in hurt confusion at their cold child. Without looking at them, I said, “It’s not like Maya’s a person, you know. A human being. And we don’t have to bury her by the pear tree. We can take her to the vet’s, and they can do whatever people do with dogs that die of old age.” And then I told my father to hurry up and drive me to school or I’d be late.
Dear Hannah, how I would love to be able to hug you and sit face to face with you and talk the night through. I wonder if it’s possible for us to visit you there. I understand, of course, that you can’t visit us here, but maybe we could fly over to Africa and be with you for a few days. It would mean so much to us if we could all be together again, however briefly. I would love to see where you work, meet your friends (especially this mysterious new man-friend you mentioned), and travel about the countryside some and “see the sights.” Neither your father nor I have been to Africa before, you know, although your father keeps saying he wants to go to South Africa and support the anti-apartheid movement in some fashion that’s appropriate to his profession and his public standing here in the U.S., probably by forming an international organization of physicians opposed to apartheid. It’s possible that we could come first to Liberia for a few days or a week and then fly on to South Africa. What would you think of that? Naturally, we wouldn’t want to inconvenience you in any way and would stay in a nearby hotel, rent a car, and so on, and would amuse ourselves quite capably while you were at work. We could hire a local guide and go sightseeing, then meet up with you afterwards. The very idea of it is exciting to me, and when I suggested it to your father, he was thrilled.
It amazed and disappointed me to see the ease with which my parents, simply by presenting themselves to me, could turn me into that cold child again. I read their letters and was transformed into Scout. Here I was, a woman in her middle-thirties who had accumulated a lifetime’s experiences that her parents would never even know about, let alone experience for themselves; yet, in their presence, even in as disembodied a form as an exchange of letters, my world shrank to the size and shape of theirs, as if I’d never left it.