A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [110]
One evening, shortly before dinnertime at the house in Kebayoran Baru, a group of young activists was gathered around Ann’s dining room table, working on a project, Yang Suwan recalled. There was a knock at the door. Yang went to open it and found a man she had never seen before with his arms full of jackfruits and packages. He was there to see Maya, he announced. When Maya ran in and hugged him, Yang was startled. She glanced back into the dining room. Ann’s expression had grown uncharacteristically dark. “I had never seen Ann’s face so changed, so not friendly,” Yang said. When Lolo left after ten minutes, the young people chided Ann, saying she should have invited him to dinner. After all, he was Maya’s father. “She looked so annoyed,” Yang remembered. “She didn’t want to talk.”
Ann’s visits with Barry were inevitably infrequent. When she went to work for Ford in early 1981, he was in his sophomore year at Occidental College in Los Angeles. That fall, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City. At least twice during her nearly four years at Ford, Ann arranged for him to fly to Indonesia to visit. “I would like to use my educational travel for dependent children this summer to have my son, Barry, come out to visit us,” she wrote to Kessinger in May 1981. Barry spent July in Jakarta, then went on to Pakistan to visit a friend from Occidental on his way back to the United States. A week before leaving Jakarta, he sent a telegram to Nancy Peluso, Ann’s friend, who had offered him her apartment on West 109th Street in Manhattan: “DO WANT THE APARTMENT WILL ARRIVE AT LATEST AUGUST 24 IN CASE COMPLICATIONS WIRE MOM.” The following summer, Ann and Maya visited him in New York City. And in May 1983, after graduating from Columbia, he flew again to Indonesia for a month, stopping in Los Angeles and Singapore to visit friends. “After Barry arrives I would like to take a week or ten days off,” Ann wrote to Kessinger in April. “If I can get reservations (this is right after the eclipse and right after JIS gets out), we would like to go to Bali.”
Richard Holloway, Ann’s friend from Semarang, recalled arriving to stay at Ann’s house and being startled to encounter Barry for the first time.
“There was this young black lad pumping iron in her garden,” Holloway remembered. “Very good-looking, great body, polite, personable.”
“‘This is my son, Barry,’” he recalled Ann saying.
“‘Nice to meet you.’”
Women, however, told me that Ann spoke often to them about Barry.
“Never did we get together where we didn’t hear, right up front, the first thing, what Barry was doing,” said Georgia McCauley. If Ann had received a letter from him, Yang Suwan said, she would be in a good mood all day. Saraswati Sunindyo, who had described Ann as “a big person with little ego,” said that little bit of ego pertained to her son. She would show his photograph “and say how handsome he is,” Paschetta Sarmidi, Ann’s secretary, said. “She spoke of Barack Obama a lot of times a day.”
“You married an African?” Sarmidi recalled asking.
“Yes.”
“Is he very black?”
“Yes!”
“How is Barry? Does he have his father’s skin?”
“Yes.”
“Is it like my skin?”
“No,” Ann answered. “Your skin is like a Hispanic. But Barack Senior, he is very black. Barry is very handsome. And he is very smart, Paschetta. My boy is brilliant.”
By February 1984, during his first year out of college, Barry was working for Business International Corporation, a small newsletter-publishing and research firm that helped countries with foreign operations understand overseas markets. Ann reported on his progress to Dewey.
Barry is working in New York this year, saving his pennies so he can travel next year. My understanding from a rather mumbled telephone conversation is that he works for a consulting organization that writes reports on request about social, political and economic conditions in Third World countries. He calls it “working for the enemy” because some of the reports are written for commercial firms that want to invest in those countries. He seems to be learning