A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [42]
By way of illustration of the differences between her mother and her grandmother, Maya imagined the way they might comport themselves on the same hypothetical path. Ann would pause to pick berries and seeds, study them curiously, find another path, veer off, stop, climb a tree, listen to the bamboo whistling in the wind. Madelyn would start at the beginning, march forward, sure-footed, chest up, head up, until she reached the end.
Did Madelyn counsel Ann to be more prudent? I asked.
“Probably with both of her marriages,” Maya said.
“Mom said that Tutu worried about her and wished that she could take the easier path,” Maya continued. “What was meant by that was obviously that here was someone from a different country, who had different cultural expectations, of a different race—in a country that had miscegenation laws in place. This was not the easy path, this was not the direct path. I think Tutu, according to Mom, expressed some concern. It was given more in a sigh than a scream. It was just sort of like, ‘What are we going to do?’” She added, “Tutu wished she would be more sensible and get a house and learn to drive and sit still.”
If Ann had a plan, it did not involve sitting still.
She was an unusual figure on campus. Jeanette Chikamoto Takamura was a sophomore when she met Ann during the 1966 academic year. Ann was working part-time as a student secretary in the office of the student government organization; Takamura, active in student government, hung out in the office between classes. Ann struck Takamura as a “natural intellectual,” with an outlook and orientation that was unusually global. She dressed in dashikis, kept African artifacts on her desk, and gravitated in conversation toward international topics. There was something enigmatic about her, Takamura found. She left an impression of detachment, perhaps because she seemed always to be thinking, as though her mind were operating on multiple planes. Takamura met Ann’s small, curly-haired son, Barry, whose father, Ann told her, had returned to Africa. The marriage, Ann said simply, had not worked out. On one occasion, Ann stunned Takamura by confiding to her that she wanted to send Barry to Punahou Academy, seen by many as the top prep school in Hawaii. “I’m thinking, ‘How in the world is she going to afford this?’” Takamura told me. “I remember thinking, ‘Do not say anything discouraging.’ So I said, ‘You know, Ann? I think you’ll find a way.’”
Several years earlier, late in 1963 or early 1964, Ann had shown up at “Indonesian Night” at the East-West Center in a borrowed sarong and kebaya, the long-sleeved, often cotton or silk blouse worn by Indonesian women. At her side was a twenty-seven-year-old Javanese graduate student named Lolo Soetoro, who had arrived at the university in 1962 in the second wave of Indonesian students on East-West Center grants. Ann and Lolo may have met at the tennis courts on campus; at least, that is how the story goes. “He was quite a tennis player,” Maya said. “She used to comment that she liked the way he looked in his white tennis shorts.” He was good-looking, amiable, easygoing, patient, and funny. He liked sports and he liked a good laugh. Benji Bennington, who was in Lolo’s year at the university and went to work at the East-West Center the month he arrived, said, “He wanted to meet people all the time. He wasn’t shy about using his English. He had a good sense of humor, and he loved to party. Yeah, he loved to party.”
Another Indonesian student, Sylvia Engelen, and a German student she later married, Gerald Krausse, brought a camera to “Indonesian Night” that year. In the fall of 2008, the Krausses opened a well-worn photo album on a coffee table in a living room in Rhode Island, where