Free My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer Page A

and their supporters. When she and my father made up their list of people to invite she suggested Hannah Plowman and he wrote the name without comment, as if that were just another guest. It surely would not have been like my mother to have included that woman out of some sort of guile, a test of my father’s reaction, of whether the woman herself would have the nerve to come to our house, now?
    What a thought to have about my mother. But when you are lying, in your presence at the table, in every expression on your face, in everything you customarily do, going in and out to school, fooling quite naturally over the telephone with friends, you can’t imagine anything that isn’t devious, anymore.

    The whole world is lying, fornicating and lying.
    I was at that party. Baby and I were there, first helping with the preparation of food and rearranging the furniture. Baby, carrying a gift of snacks, went with him to our neighbours to tell them there’d be music until late that night; from the day we moved in, my mother had established good if distant relations with these whites. They didn’t know about prison, about his political activities—one look at my mother and their Afrikaner fears that our skin meant dirty habits and noise they’d tolerate only from their own colour, were groundless. Everybody drank a lot—not my father, and my mother doesn’t drink at all—and Baby was over-made-up and amazed all those people with her wild dancing. She was good, but showing off to the men. I danced a few times, after a beer, but I could feel myself getting angry every time some tannie said I was growing up handsome as my father, and I could see him, his face painted with the sweat of his hospitality, shining pride. I don’t remember whether he danced with that woman. I can hardly picture her there at all. The moment when she arrived I was passing with a bottle of wine; it was the first time I’d seen her since the cinema and I’d thought about that face so much I could scarcely recognize it—this pink, scrubbed face, blonde hair springing back into shape like the coat of a wet dog, she must’ve washed it just before leaving for the party. She was smiling comradely at others’ greetings, not at me. A moment when suddenly I didn’t believe it: she had materialized, and his woman, that I had—like him, I know—always in my mind, vanished. My mother was signalling to me across the room at the group who were waiting for wine. There was a pretty comb in my mother’s tight and shiny crown of hair, she was neat and beautiful, with the special care she took to dress for parties; she so enjoyed feeding people.
    Baby cut her wrists when she spent a Saturday night with
a friend. She didn’t even do it at home, where she had her own room. You think of details like that—crazy—when you don’t have any explanation for what has happened. She didn’t die. A mess in somebody else’s bathroom and some stitches on the inner side of her wrists where you can see the freeways and bypasses of veins just under the skin. Baby is light-skinned, like my mother, not like my father and me. When she was in bed, repaired and sedated by Dr Jasood, for whom my mother worked, my mother came and sat down in the kitchen where I was reading the newspaper because I did not know what I should be doing; he, my father, had taken his briefcase that morning and said he had to be away that weekend. He had looked heavy-limbed, as if he had to make himself go; she must have believed there was some grave political crisis taking him away. She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at me as if she had known me her whole life, not just the span of mine which had begun in her body. As if I were her son and not her son. She said Dr Jasood had just told her it was evident to him that Baby took drugs, that her great liveliness was deep unhappiness. He had been at that party.
    She said to