Composing a Further Life

to have. She liked Joseph all right, but she—‘Who are these people?’ That was her whole thing. ‘How could you do this? We do not know these people.’ ”
    I commented that my impression was that at that time African Americans didn’t feel much identification with anybody in Africa and thought Africans were probably savages. “That was exactly their fear,” Ruth said. “Ooga booga. So it was all right that he was in this country becoming a learned person, but now what does he do? They were somewhat mollified that he seemed … the veneer seemed all right. When it came down to my being pregnant, she wanted to be sure that she saw and touched this baby herself and was able to imprint her view of the world on it. And they colluded with Joseph. So I came back to the States when I was seven months pregnant, and had Irv in Baton Rouge in the same hospital where I had my tonsils taken out. They checked him out, and he seemed like an okay enough infant. They thought, He’s like us. I was insistent that I was going to be a good wife, and that meant going over to his father in Geneva when he was just two or three months old.
    “Meanwhile, the negotiation about this dissertation that was supposed to be getting done was much more contentious than my husband thought it would be. So again, he and my parents decided, to my great rage, that I should come home. And I said, ‘If you send me home, this is the beginning of the end of this relationship, because I have a voice, and I don’t want to do this.’ And he insisted. In his mind, this was the right thing to do; he persuaded my parents it was the right thing to do. Again: I’m thirty-one years old, and he and my parents are going to decide for me? No. I did it, but that really started to erode the bonds between us.”
    “At some level your parents must have known it would,” I commented. “They must have thought they were getting you back.”
    “Well, I guess they did. Yeah. I think they may have thought—and I might have had fantasies, too—that maybe we were going to replay their story, that I was going to go to live with them. Joseph stayed a couple of years in Geneva, really working diligently on the damn dissertation. But it took a long time to negotiate what it was going to be, and then to do it. I don’t even remember what it was about anymore. Then the war really broke out. He was already a member of FRELIMO [the liberation movement], and he decided, ‘Well, hell, if I can’t get this dissertation written, I will do something to help my country and go back to Africa and fight.’ So that’s when the story veered off course. The longer the dissertation dragged out, the more he was feeling like, ‘Time’s a-wasting, I’ve got this wife, I’ve got this baby, I’ve got this nation. Why am I doing this?’ And not only did he have this wife, he had this angry wife, because by now I was saying, ‘If that’s what you want to do, that’s what you want to do. If you think you’re going to run me around and tell me what to do, well, to hell with you.’
    “We never figured out—I recognize now that I really never reached out to try to help him through. What was so damaging to the relationship were those expectations we each had. During the courtship, I had never seen what I considered to be this authoritarian behavior exhibiting itself. But of course we were in New York. That’s different from being thousands of miles away with no resources of my own.”
    So Ruth and Irv went back to Baton Rouge, where Ruth got a job, while Joseph went to war. “My mother and father were terrific caregivers, without a doubt, but I said to myself, ‘Self, I just don’t see this kind of arrangement continuing for very long.’ And funny, I don’t think my mother did either. I think, as dearly as she loved that little boy, it wasn’t what she had in mind for herself. She did it, almost reflexively. She had retired, I came home, there was a baby, so what do you do? I think she recognized (and I told her on a regular basis), that I wasn’t going to stay in Baton Rouge. So she was helping me and him prepare for the next adventure. I think she knew that.” Ruth filed for divorce, which came through in 1973. In June 1975, Portugal granted independence to Mozambique.
    “Irv and I went to California,” Ruth continued. “That was the second time that I have gone far away. I moved to California thinking I was going to remarry—someone I had known in New York,