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were divorced formally.” To Maya, Ann said Lolo’s job with the oil company kept them apart. “They were still, though, supposedly trying to make the marriage work,” Maya recalled. Years later, Ann suggested to Maya that Lolo, whose health was poor, had been feeling mortal and contemplating the possibility that his name might not carry on. “He must have been lonely, though, on some level,” Maya told me. “I mean, there was a lot of back-and-forth: She was in Hawaii; he was in Indonesia. I’m not sure that you can really build a satisfying marriage with so much movement. So that’s understandable—a pretty, lively thing who’s present when your wife is not. I’m not saying that I forgive him, because I was upset that he hurt my mother. But I can’t see that, even in advance of that, there was a marriage in the sense that I would expect a marriage to be—a sort of daily negotiation and conversation and affection and that sort of thing.”

Sometime in the late 1970s, Lolo became seriously ill. Returning home from a game of tennis at the Petroleum Club late one afternoon, Kadi Warner remembered Ann telling her, Lolo collapsed. The diagnosis was liver disease. Maya referred to it as cirrhosis; others told me that the damage to his liver was the result of a childhood illness acquired during the Japanese occupation. After at least one hospitalization in Jakarta in June 1977, it became apparent that Lolo needed a level of medical care that was not available in Indonesia. “They couldn’t treat him in Indonesia,” Warner said. “But because he was a local hire, he didn’t have the benefits to go outside. What Ann said was that she shamed the oil company into sending him out.” She appealed to his boss at Union Oil to allow Lolo to be treated in the United States. “She went in and wept on his boss’s desk, begging him to pay for Lolo to go to the United States,” Kay Ikranagara remembered. “She said, ‘You must send him to the United States, he will die without care.’ She cried on the desk till he agreed.” When I asked how Ann felt about having done that, Ikranagara said, “She was proud she’d done it. But she didn’t want to have to go through that again.”

Lolo was flown to Los Angeles, hospitalized, and treated there. His nephew, Sonny Trisulo, a student at the University of California at Los Angeles in the late 1970s, recalled visiting him in the hospital on several occasions. Before returning to Jakarta, Ann and Maya took Lolo to Honolulu to recuperate in the second-floor bedroom at Dewey’s house, overlooking the breadfruit tree.

Once, I asked Maya how her parents’ marriage had ceased to be a functioning marriage. She said she did not know. For a long time, she said, she was too “young and foolish and self-centered” to ask that sort of question. Later, she said, her mother may have shielded her from the truth. “She probably wanted to be very careful that my memories of him weren’t blemished in any way,” she said. “I mean, she was a great mom and really wanted to make sure that I wasn’t too hurt by things. It was not just that she didn’t want to speak ill of the dead; she didn’t want to speak ill of my father.”

Maya had written a short story, she said, in which a child keeps asking her mother, “Did you love him?” The mother keeps batting away the question. “I never really asked those questions,” Maya said. “It’s just a short story because I wondered later why I didn’t ask those questions about how much they loved each other. It was sort of like I felt, maybe in my youthful arrogance, that I knew. What I surmised, I guess, ultimately, was that they did love each other, but sometimes love isn’t quite enough. That it was a gentle love that followed a very passionate love that she had with Barack’s father. That my mother thought of my father as being a very sweet man but could be frustrated by his lack of communication about certain things. And ultimately, I think that she was disappointed that the marriage didn’t work. I felt so certain in that assessment of her feelings for him and her perception of him that I don’t think I ever asked.”

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