A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [92]
Sometime in 1979, Ann and Lolo agreed to divorce. According to Maya, Ann received a phone call in Semarang from Lolo, and by the end of the call, it had been decided. I heard several different accounts of the reason the marriage ended, some or all of which could conceivably be true. According to one explanation, offered by Peluso, Ann no longer believed that she and Lolo had anything in common. She was tired of trying to arrange for them to spend time together. According to Alice Dewey, Ann knew from Lolo’s doctors in Los Angeles that he had few years left to live. She knew from Lolo that he wanted more children, which she did not. So, according to Dewey, she did the practical and humane thing: She let him go. A third explanation came from Rens Heringa, who became a close friend of Ann’s around the time of her divorce and who later divorced her own part-Indonesian husband. Heringa told me bluntly, “She left him—on the pretext that she had to work, which was an acceptable pretext. The real reason was that it was hopeless. He couldn’t accept the way she was, and she couldn’t accept the kinds of things he expected.”
The divorce became final in August 1980, according to a passport application of Ann’s. Lolo married the woman Maya remembered encountering in her father’s home the day she and Ann had returned to Jakarta. He went on to father two more children, a son and a daughter, before dying of liver disease in 1987 at the age of fifty-two.
Ann’s relationship with Maya, who turned ten in 1980, was close and affectionate. Delightful and dimply, Maya was on her way to becoming extraordinarily beautiful. In many ways, Ann treated her like an adult. She took her everywhere, in a way that some people told me was common in Indonesia. “Many hours of my childhood were spent in the homes of blacksmiths or by their furnaces,” Maya has written. “When we visited the blacksmith known as Pak Marto, I would look for the reliably present feral dogs chasing chickens outside his home. . . . Mom took me to see potters, weavers, and tile makers, too.” In the house in Semarang, Ann had converted a room into a schoolroom, with desks for Maya and several other children from expatriate families. Lesson manuals, textbooks, workbooks, and school supplies arrived in boxes from the home instruction department of the Calvert Day School in Baltimore. A rotating roster of parents served as teachers, meeting in various households. Kadi Warner, whom Ann enlisted to teach world and United States history, told me that the Calvert system was the oldest formal homeschooling curriculum and was highly respected. “It was the standard internationally then,” she said. “If you went through that, you were prepared.” But Ann was not satisfied with the arrangement for Maya, Richard Holloway recalled. “That was a source of sadness and disappointment to her,” he said. “That she was failing as a mother by not giving her a better education than that.”
The dilemma was not uncommon. Some expatriate families were reluctant to enroll their children in international schools for fear that they would know only expatriate children. They wanted their children to appreciate the country in which they were living and to have local friends. So they sent them to local schools. But at a certain age, a child in a local school would not receive the preparation necessary to get into a university of the sort their parents attended. “So there is a real problem,” said Clare Blenkinsop, who faced the same issue later with her son. “I think that was