A Singular Woman (42 page)

“The tears were a surprise,” Harker remembered. “Who's accustomed to having a fellow professional start crying in a private meeting over a disagreement about money? It should have told me how much stress she was under. What I took from that experience was what I would take from practically anyone: This is a person who is exhausted, who is extremely frustrated, and who is struggling. To this day, I don't know if there were struggles in her personal life that made her especially concerned about the personal-expenses side of it. That was an issue that led to tears. I don't know what it was anymore—about the housing, the car, not having enough gas money. These are little things that I had long since, in my own life, paid out of my own pocket. I was taken aback by some of it.”

Ann had found a small, sparsely furnished house in a
kampung,
a villagelike neighborhood within the city, where her neighbors were largely Indonesian. The street was so narrow, and space so tight, it took geometric precision for Sabaruddin to park Ann's car in its allotted space. The house had a little living room with a bedroom off it, a study, a bathroom, and a kitchen. There was room in the back for the one woman she employed as her
pembantu
. (The Indonesian word means “helper” but is variously translated as house staff, housekeeper, or servant.) Rens Heringa found the place to be “a poky, uncared-for little house” in a neighborhood very different from where Ann had lived earlier. Gillie Brown, a younger British woman whom Development Alternatives Inc. had retained in Jakarta to handle financial management and records, as well as other matters, called the house “an incredibly humble sort of place.” But Ann was not like other consultants—those who spoke no Indonesian, lived in “smart houses,” and relied on Brown to make arrangements. Brown felt a certain affinity with Ann, though Ann was twenty years her senior. Brown had left the United Kingdom in her mid-twenties with her husband and their three children—a three-year-old, a two-year-old, and a five-week-old baby. They had gone to live in a village in Bangladesh, then on a rice farm in southern Somalia. Trained as an engineer, she had grown accustomed to working in professional settings dominated by men. It seemed to Brown that the humble house was what Ann had wanted—to live surrounded by Indonesians, buying her food on the street. To Brown, Ann seemed to feel she had come home.

Some of Ann's oldest expatriate friends, including Nancy Peluso, had returned to the United States, but she picked up her friendships with Julia Suryakusuma, Yang Suwan, and others where she had left off. Made Suarjana, the young journalist Ann had first met in Yogyakarta in 1988, had moved by himself to Jakarta in February, though he would move with his wife and two children to Bali the following December. He saw Ann occasionally in Jakarta in 1994, he told me. When I asked him if he thought that Ann would have liked to have made a life with him, he told me she knew he was married. Her closest friends, however, did not remember Ann telling them that Suarjana had a wife. They told me they doubted that she knew—or if she did, that she must have believed the marriage was effectively over. Several, including Rens Heringa and Alice Dewey, used almost identical language in describing what Ann had told them about what had become of her relationship with Suarjana. “She told me that she felt that in the end, the difference in their ages was too large,” said Heringa, who spent time with Ann in the Netherlands in late 1993 and in Jakarta in late 1994 and early 1995. “They'd had a lovely time, but she didn't want to hold him back from having a full social life in Indonesia. Because she knew she was going to leave, what was going to happen to him? She sent him away. He got married.”

Late one night during the last week in November 1994, Bruce Harker, in his bed in Potomac, Maryland, received a telephone call from Ann in Jakarta. Ignoring the time difference, which she well knew, she must have felt the call could not wait. She had been having abdominal pains for some time, she told him, and the pain had become so severe at the workshop in Ciloto that she had returned to Jakarta to see a doctor. The doctor, a gynecologist at a clinic that specialized in treating expatriates, had concluded that Ann had appendicitis and had referred her to a surgeon at Pondok Indah Hospital, a high-end medical center in a wealthy neighborhood of Jakarta. Faced with the prospect of surgery, Ann was trying to decide whether to stay in Jakarta or fly to Singapore. For routine procedures, many longtime expatriates were comfortable with the best Indonesian hospitals. They did not consider themselves foreign enough to automatically mistrust Indonesian doctors. Furthermore, Ann had friends in Jakarta, as well as her
pembantu
and her driver, to help her out if she stayed. But other expatriates, and even some Indonesians, automatically went to Singapore for hospitalization, especially for anything major. Gillie Brown, who had taken her daughter to Singapore for an appendectomy, urged Ann to go there, too. “I thought she was nuts, staying in the country,” Brown told me. On the other hand, Harker had once had hip surgery in Singapore, he told Ann, which had been done so badly that it was later redone in the United States. “She wanted to know whether there was airfare and accommodations for her to go to Singapore in the budget,” Harker remembered. “I said, ‘Look, here's the deal. We didn't budget an appendectomy. You've got health insurance, that's taken care of. We can cover the airfare. We can cover a few hundred dollars.'”

Ann chose to stay in Jakarta. On November 28, 1994, the day before her fifty-second birthday, a surgeon at Pondok Indah removed her appendix. Three days later, she returned home to recuperate in her housekeeper's care. The incision healed promptly, she would tell her insurance company in a letter some months later, but the abdominal pain returned. Her surgeon advised patience, because recovery could take several months. When the pain became too much to bear, she returned twice to the medical clinic, where she saw two internists as well as a gynecologist she had not previously seen. According to her account to the insurance company, doctors at the clinic told her she had an abdominal infection and prescribed an antibiotic. After two and a half weeks on the drug, she felt no better. Meanwhile, she had returned to work after a week of resting at home. To some friends, she said simply that her recovery was going slowly. In e-mails and conversations with Nina Nayar, she seemed unconvinced by the diagnosis. She was lethargic and weak. When she ate, she felt immediately full. A masseuse to whom she had gone for a massage declined to continue, Ann told Dewey. “What is wrong with you is serious,” the masseuse warned.

On December 13, Ann met Rens Heringa at a Protestant church guesthouse in Jakarta where Heringa was staying, having arrived six days earlier on a two-month visit from the Netherlands. Ann was more distraught than Heringa had ever seen her. She was in constant pain and barely able to digest food. Weeping, she was certain that the diagnosis of appendicitis was wrong. “She said, ‘I have cancer,'” Heringa told me. “I said, ‘Ann, how do you know?' She said, ‘Well, I feel it.'” She reminded Heringa that her father had died from cancer—as if it was contagious or inherited. Heringa tried to reassure her. She told Ann about her own six-month recovery from an appendectomy in the late 1960s in Surabaya in East Java. She encouraged Ann to get a second opinion, but Heringa tried above all to calm her down. “Listen, this is because your father just died,” Heringa recalled saying. “Don't get things in your head. Have yourself diagnosed, absolutely. But try not to be carried away.”

On Christmas Day, Heringa told me, she met Ann and Made Suarjana for lunch. The occasion was not festive. Ann, for whom food had always been a source of great pleasure, ate almost nothing. “She clearly was in pain,” Heringa remembered. “Made was as concerned as I was. We both felt pretty helpless.” Five days later, Ann made an appearance at the birthday party of Ong Hok Ham, the historian. Three weeks later, she and Heringa made a plan for lunch, which Heringa's diary showed was canceled. “Isn't it strange, though, how we continued our regular routine of meeting at restaurants, almost denying what was going on with her?” Heringa said to me, after going back over her datebook. “It looks as if she was of two minds.”

In late January, Bruce Harker, in Maryland, received a second late-night call. This time, Ann sounded scared. She had had the appendectomy, she told him, and pain medication had got her through the recuperation. But the pain in her abdomen had returned with ferocity.

“How urgent is it?” Harker asked.

“Urgent,” Ann said. “I've got to get out of here and go home to Hawaii.”

Ann was afraid to board a flight to Honolulu without knowing that her employer would reimburse her for the cost of the ticket. At fifty-two years old, she did not have what Harker later called “the screw-you resources”—the financial freedom to do what she needed to do and take her chances. When she had asked her younger colleague Gillie Brown if the project had the money to cover the flight, Brown had referred her to Harker. By the time Ann reached him, she seemed to have made up her mind to leave. Harker understood. In that situation, a foreign resident in a place she loved would suddenly feel like she was in a world of strangers—no matter how much affection she had for the culture and the people.

“You have to do what you have to do,” Harker remembered telling her. “I can't authorize you to go—that's not something I can do without doing some homework. But just because I can't authorize you to go doesn't mean you shouldn't. Between you and me, two friends talking, I can't authorize you and buy you a ticket, but if you go home, you've made the strongest possible case for being reimbursed. Plus, you'll get the care you want.”

Ann slipped out of Indonesia quietly, keeping her fears to herself, for the most part. When she met with Gillie Brown to brief her on how to fill in as team leader, Ann reassured her: “You'll be fine. It'll only be a couple of weeks. I'll be back.” She told Julia Suryakusuma, who had postponed a planned birthday party for Ann, that she would be returning quickly. “Don't be long,” Suryakusuma said. “You promised to help me with some stuff.” Ann called Made Suarjana and told him simply that she was going to Hawaii for a checkup, which seemed reasonable enough. Yang Suwan, who had planned a celebratory birthday meal with Ann, was puzzled by not being able to reach her by phone. From late November on, Yang's calls to Ann's house went unanswered. Once, a man picked up the phone and explained simply that Ann had put off her birthday. On another occasion, he said Ann was very sick, but he did not say with what. A few days after that, Yang heard that Ann was no longer in Jakarta. It seemed unlike Ann not to explain, Yang thought, but Ann had always moved within multiple but separate circles of friends. Perhaps that was how she wanted to live, Yang figured. In which case, she should respect Ann's wishes.

Rens Heringa, however, glimpsed Ann's terror. The two women had been close friends for more than a decade and had many experiences in common. Both had grown up in the West and married Indonesian men whom they had met at university. Both had followed their husbands to Indonesia, raised children there, and eventually divorced. Both were anthropologists with an interest in handicrafts, Heringa specializing in textiles. Each had visited the villages where the other had done her fieldwork. They had circles of friends in common. The afternoon before Ann left Jakarta, in a torrential downpour of the sort that besieged the city during the rainy season, Heringa took a taxi to Ann's house. To Heringa, it seemed as if the world were weeping. The little house seemed bare. There were crates, half packed for shipping. “It was horrible,” Heringa told me. “We felt sure we wouldn't see each other again. She was in a bad way. This was just sad, very sad, because we had to say good-bye.”

On January 25, 1995, twenty-seven years after first arriving in Indonesia with Barry to join Lolo, Ann left for the last time. Madelyn Dunham met her in Honolulu and arranged for her to be taken to the Straub Clinic and Hospital. Several days later, she was seen by a gastroenterologist, who concluded within a week that her problem was not gastrointestinal. Next, she was referred to an oncologist, who, in the second week in February, diagnosed her illness as third-stage uterine and ovarian cancer. According to her correspondence with her insurance company, the disease appeared to have spread in her abdomen. She underwent a total hysterectomy and was sent home on Valentine's Day to recuperate in Madelyn's apartment, in her care. Once Ann had recovered from the immediate effects of the surgery, she embarked on a series of six monthly chemotherapy treatments intended to, as she described it, eradicate remaining traces of the cancer and prevent further spread.

Maya, who had graduated from the University of Hawai‘i with a bachelor's degree, had spent the fall of 1994 traveling in the southwestern United States and in Mexico, largely out of contact. After injuring a knee while hiking, she had spent several days in a bar at the Grand Canyon, drinking coffee and reading novels by William Faulkner, Tony Hillerman, and Ernest J. Gaines. There, in the bar and using a pencil, she had filled out an application to the graduate school of education at New York University. Several months later, in Mexico City, she had telephoned her grandmother in Honolulu and discovered that she had been accepted into a master's degree program. Moving to New York City in late December, she had found a job as a bartender to cover her rent while going to graduate school. After a week on the bartending job, she received a call from Madelyn. Ann had returned from Jakarta, Madelyn told her. The appendicitis had turned out not to be appendicitis. It was cancer.

Barack, meanwhile, was in Chicago, juggling multiple callings. At the time of his mother's diagnosis, he was three years out of law school and an associate in a Chicago law firm that specialized in civil rights cases; he was teaching part-time as a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School; his memoir,
Dreams from My Father,
which a literary agent had encouraged him to write after the
Harvard Law Review
election, was scheduled for publication in August 1995; and he had begun maneuvering toward possibly running for public office for the first time. The indictment in August 1994 of the congressman from the Second District of Illinois, Mel Reynolds, had prompted the state senator from Obama's district, Alice Palmer, to explore a bid for Reynolds' seat. By the time Palmer announced her candidacy for Congress in June 1995, Obama had already laid the groundwork for his campaign to fill her seat. On September 19, 1995, he announced officially that he was embarking on his first political campaign—a run for election to the Illinois State Senate.