by Lamar Herrin
Each time they talked, it seemed, her mother had a tall tale to tell. She’d just served up a pasture of popping kids.
Well, on that short road, last week, her mother had closed on three houses, two as a buying agent and one as a seller. She attributed her extraordinary success to the goats. She’d personally taken the two buying families to the goat pasture on a sunny day, and the fleecy white kids had performed. The kids—Homo sapiens, now—had gone crazy. She’d made sure the buying agent for the house she was selling did the same. People, against their sensible best judgment, were so easily won. A boiler could be about to go, water damage all over the house, and goats on a sunny day could make them forget it. What does that tell you?
“What?” Annie replied. “That people like goats?”
“No, sweetie. That people are still children. Appeal to the child in a buyer, and you’ve got him. But it can’t be just anything. We’re not talking an old rope swing hanging from an oak tree. People have calluses on top of calluses just trying to stay alive in this world. It’s got to be something mysterious, powerful, but something as fresh as spring.”
Annie said, “Was there a boiler about to go, and was there water damage all over a house?”
“Please! The pasture of popping goats was a bonus. The houses were all first-rate. They’ll pass inspection like that.”
Her mother snapped her fingers. Her mother was a great finger snapper. Annie could hear it over the phone, and she could hear it in her mind’s ear. Time to get going—snap! I want that bed made up like this—snap! Let’s cut the shit, it’s over—snap! The popping goats and the snapping fingers, and she realized that in the midst of the tall-tale telling she hadn’t stopped thinking about her father.
She said, “I know you divorced him, but you have to stay friends. Friends look after friends—”
Her mother cut her off. “Annie, that’s enough about your father! I divorced him because I didn’t intend to stagnate with him. I’ve told you this a hundred times. It had nothing to do with love. The kind of love your father believes in doesn’t exist—it never did. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and watch him walk off the edge of the earth, if that’s what you’re saying. To be honest, he’d never find a way to get there. . . .”
“Where? The edge of the earth?”
“Anywhere beyond his beaten track!” There was some impatience in her mother’s voice now, and some heat, which Annie knew not to take personally. Unless she were taking her father’s side. “I wasn’t going to stay with him just because he lost a daughter. I lost a daughter. I wasn’t going to stay there and match his loss against mine. There’s a law of survival, you know. And if you don’t, there’s nothing they can teach you in that university worth a damn. I wasn’t going to let Ben pull me down, Annie— although ‘pull’ puts it too strongly. Not Ben—”
She stopped her mother there. “Give it a rest, Mom. Okay? Dad’s doing what he has to do.”
As usual, her mother handled her daughter’s occasional flare-ups of temper by marking off a cool distance on the phone. Then she said, “Oh, really? And what might that be?”
“He’s seeing me through school.”
He’s doing his court-ordered duty, nothing more or less, her mother might have replied. And Annie might have responded, You demanded it of him as a way of making clear how badly, how catastrophically, he had failed with Michelle.
Her mother asked her about her boyfriend, Jonathan, instead, and if Annie were being honest she would have admitted that Jonathan was beginning to bore her. It was either Cambridge or the Cape, and when the heat was bad, it was the family estate on Mount Desert Island in Maine. These were all places that Annie had in store. He, in turn, wanted to see the horse farms around Lexington. Calumet. Then, if she could show him a moonshiner . . .
She heard her father say it again. Your friend Jonathan sounds like a fellow who has yet to dig in to face the day that’s sure to come.
She winced and laughed at the same time. Her roommate, Valerie, who had just walked into the room, heard what might have sounded like a snarl and shot Annie a look. Valerie’s looks were always larger than life, more often than not exaggerated wrenchings of her features. Annie gave Valerie a look that backed her off.
Her mother said, “More intelligence than maturity, it sounds like to me. Once he grows up he might be something to call home about. You will call home, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You did say he was a handsome devil, didn’t you?”
“Did I?” She decided to include Valerie, who might be sulking from that last look. The fact was, Valerie was a dear friend who had been Annie’s roommate both in the dorm and in this apartment, and whose family life, if it didn’t include the death of a sister, did include a mother who had overdosed on sleeping pills and was not above threatening to do it again. Valerie’s father was hanging on for compassion’s sake, although Valerie would not have blamed him if he’d left. If he left, Valerie would inherit the whole of her mother. You could divorce a wife, but mothers lived off your blood.
“Valerie,” Annie inquired, “my mother wants to know if Jonathan is ‘a handsome devil.’”
“He’s a step up from that sleazeball you had before. Tell her that.”
Annie told her mother that Valerie said Jonathan was an improvement on his predecessor, nothing more.
It was time to get off the phone.
She said, “I’ve got a lot of work coming up—exams and stuff. Probably best not to call.” After a pause she added, “Hey, that’s great about the three houses. They used to have goats and cows on the Arts Quad, did you know that?” There was another pause, calculated, measured, not her intention. Then she said, “Call if you hear from Dad.” She insisted, “Call then.”
When Valerie asked her what all that had been about, Annie shook her head. Would she believe a herd of goats popping like popcorn over a field? Valerie bugged her eyes. Annie said she was going to class.
All her classes were on the Arts Quad. She had to cross a narrow gorge on a footbridge. Once on the quad, she could position herself in the right opening between the old stone buildings, half-covered with ivy, and let her eyes sail out to the horizon, where the glacially formed lake the university was built above took its first jag toward the west. It jagged east and west on its way north for forty miles. It was, in one spot, said to be six hundred feet deep. She frequently came here and looked at the lake before attending classes. It was a way of clearing the head, straightening the spine. It was also, as far as she could remember, the only tip her sister had given her about how to meet the rigors of the university. “Rigors” had been one of Michelle’s favorite words.
Beautiful, spectacular, sure, but as an act of self-discipline, learn to see through all that. Then you’re ready enter the classroom and not be distracted by the pretty phrases. If the professor has anything to teach you, that’s when you’ll learn.
Annie had been a freshman here when Michelle had begun her junior year abroad in Spain. They had not overlapped by a single day.
She was trying to pay attention to what her teacher was saying about the six causes of the Spanish-American War, a Catholic culture about to be replaced by a mercantile Protestant one, but it was mid-May and a lilac bush was in bloom whose scent was pouring in through an opened window. She closed her notebook and quietly slipped out the back door.
Her sister had died, her father had gone through a disorienting divorce, and Annie had survived with her friends, her health, her intelligence intact. And her beauty. Michelle had not been beautiful. Her defense system was so elaborately wrought that any natural warmth she might have had was smothered, though in unguarded moments she’d let it show. They’d had canaries in the house, and tropical fish, and more than once Annie had surprised her sister sitting before the cage or aquarium with something like wonder in her face. Once—only once that Annie could remember— Michelle had invited her sister to share it. They’d sat together and watched. The
canaries would hop from the floor of their cage, where the feeders were, to the top perch in one nervy zigzagging ascent. The guppies or black mollies or angelfish would swim placidly along, then suddenly describe darting arabesques. Michelle’s face in those moments shone with the iridescence of the fish and the canaries’ yellow glow.
Stripped of her defenses, her sister had had her beauty.
Where did her defenses get her, anyway?
Blown away.
Annie was alive on this lovely spring day. Tall, graceful as a dancer, warm-complexioned, tints of auburn in her hair. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were dark, but not bold, not forbidding. They scared nobody away.
Lips moist, teeth white. The face of somebody who laughed.
She had started to cry. She went and sat in the obscuring shade of an Arts Quad oak.
Curiously, she’d never blamed the people who had set the bomb and denied her another chance to get to know her sister. In her art history class she’d learned that the cornices of buildings built three and four hundred years ago were falling all over Europe. Pedestrians were sometimes killed. The Old World was crumbling, and those who frequented its streets ran the risk of falling with it. That was what had happened to her sister. The Old World had fallen on her. The Old World was more dangerous in that way than the New, but this oak could fall too. If it did she would join her sister, and their father would have no one left.
Her thought had taken a turn. Life and death were such fragile, flickering things, such whims of the moment, such accidents, that all the records we kept of them were the biggest joke of all. We recorded history to keep from laughing, out of sheer terrified disbelief, at ourselves. This oak, for instance, made mockery of anybody who sat with her back to it pondering the meaning of life, and of what belonged to whom. My life belongs to me. Then, poof! What life? What you? The oak had been planted when they’d cleared the Arts Quad of its goats and cows. That had been at least one hundred and twenty years ago. It had seen how many generations of students into the grave? Administrators? Trustees? Presidents? And the university owned it? She laughed, inside, on a deeper register. Someone sitting at her side might have heard it as a growl. It would be an honor to be killed by this oak tree, she thought. Just to be worthy of this oak tree’s attention would be an honor. This noble oak. Sprung from a tiny acorn. What a joke.
Its bark hurt her back. She pressed against it, mortifying the flesh, as monks and nuns and other religious fanatics did when they failed to have God’s attention. Her tears had dried and her eyes felt parched with the heat of an unaccustomed anger. She remembered something her sister had told her that suited her mood. They were in Michelle’s bedroom, where Annie had gone to return a sweater she’d not really had permission to wear, and which didn’t fit her in the first place. She was two years younger than her sister but had experienced a gangly spurt of growth and was already taller. Michelle accused Annie of having taken the sweater without her permission, and Annie, defiantly, put it back on and showed Michelle how woefully short it was in the arms. In her memory, it barely came to her forearms. It was tight in the shoulders. Buttoned up, it made it hard to breathe. It was some pale indeterminate color between beige, tan, gray and green, and quite simply, it was like being wrapped up in her sister’s skin. Annie took it off and flung it on the bed. She stood there with her superior stature to see what her sister would do. Michelle took her time hanging the sweater back up in the closet. Then she turned and said, “You know what you are?” Annie didn’t, but she knew not to bite at her sister’s question. “You’re their backup daughter. You know what that means? You’re the daughter they’ve got left over in case something happens to me. The backup daughter,” she repeated in a quieter, more private voice, clearly savoring the phrase.
It wasn’t her sister’s meanness—Annie was used to that—it was the private pleasure Michelle took that caused Annie to lash out.
“That’s just you! That’s just something you like to hear yourself say!”
Still savoring her pleasure, Michelle said, “I didn’t say it. Mother did. Mother was ready to stop with me, but Dad talked her into having you, just in case.” Then Michelle turned to her closet and ran her hand along her clothes. “There’s nothing in here that fits a backup daughter. Try the Salvation Army or someplace like that.”
Annie didn’t doubt that the phrase originated with her mother. She could hear her mother saying it now. Michelle could be forgiven, at that uncaring age when she could be expected to latch on to anything with an authoritative ring. But the sentiment Annie recognized as coming from her father, the foreboding. The world could crush you—an Old World cornice or a New World oak—and suddenly you would have nothing left. He no longer had Michelle, and he no longer had his wife. He had her, Annie, his backup.
He would not have put it that way. He would have said, Please, give me more life.
A book bag hit the dirt beside her. “It’s been realpolitik from the start. If students in the ’60s had known anything about American history they wouldn’t have felt so disillusioned.”
“Saltonberg?” she said.
“You left before he got to the good stuff. If we’re good at getting our innocence crushed, it’s because we defend our ignorance like nobody else.”
“I’ve heard it all before.”
“Carolyn . . . whatever her name is, the blond that sits on the front row . . . hadn’t heard it. She took offense. She took offense ‘mightily.’” With his Tennessee accent, he gave to the word a deep oratorical roll. This was her friend Chad, whose last name she couldn’t remember, so she called him Chad the Volunteer. “And Saltonberg told her she was proving his thesis for him, like any good American she was defending her ignorance, and he asked her if she would mind standing as his example. You didn’t see her come storming out?”
“Wanna get something to eat?” Annie said.
They crossed back over the gorge to Collegetown. She had a bagel with cream cheese and a carton of some juice mixture. While she ate, she got Chad to tell her about his town, Murfreesboro, and about his family. His father sold Buicks in town and had had the foresight to grab the Honda franchise when that was tantamount to desecrating the American flag. Thanks to Hondas—who bought Buicks anymore?—Chad was able to get out of town and come to this elite spot. Laughter. No sisters? No, a spoiled little brother and the mother who spoiled him. Scandals? Not really. A cousin who was gay. During a summer visit he’d come on to Chad, and Chad had let him. Really? Yeah, Chad had always liked him, and to be frank, he wasn’t exactly sure what it was they did. A single laugh. Really? No shit? Chad was young at the time. He was young now. Blow job, what did it mean? She sized him up. He was smart, clear-eyed, a face of such balanced proportions it’d be easy to draw, a shock of light brown hair on his forehead, unhidden, she decided. To top it off, a voice from home. Did he like it? He was amazed to see his cousin rooting down there, too amazed to get hard, much less to come.
And she was amazed to hear him go on like this. Southern boys didn’t talk about sex as freely as Northern boys did. She had her mouth open on a single soundless laugh. “Wild,” she said, and discovered she had put her hand on his leg under the table. When had she done that? And when had she reached up high enough to feel him go hard down a pants leg? But that was where she found her hand. Amazing. As if she were rewarding the loyalty of the family dog, she patted him there. Thanks for cutting a class. For coming to lunch with her. For telling her his stories. Out on the street, he wanted to take her to his apartment, which wasn’t far away. She followed him there. She’d begun to feel ghosted and guided by a not unfriendly intelligence, and she was curious to see where it took her, of the array of possibilities, which were the ones she had in store. It crossed her mind that if she wanted to conjure up her father after more than a month’s absence, this might be a way. Over there, across the street. Under that tree. Inside that doorway.
It was noon. It didn’t matter. She’d draw him out of hiding. He was in the closet.
Under the bed. Behind the bedroom door. Having been warned, her mother wouldn’t call.
III
Sabino Arana—a mysterious man. He’d been jailed by the Spanish government, charged with sending a letter of congratulations to Theodore Roosevelt for liberating the Cuban slaves from their Spanish masters. He considered Spaniards lazy, violent and drunken, a threat to the purity of any people they came into contact with; the Catalans, who, like the Basques, languished under Madrid’s rule, he considered godless. Arana himself was a devout Catholic, a sort of neo-Carlist. He espoused nonviolence. He believed the Basques were God’s chosen people and that their language was the language spoken in Eden before the fall.
They had been granted a “collective nobility” long ago; that meant, to a man, in their mountain strongholds, the Basques were a noble race. The fact that that title had been bestowed on them by a Castilian king for their defense of the Spanish realm didn’t bother Arana. Occasionally Castilian kings could be made to see the light. The Moors had never penetrated the Basque country; no Jews had. They had a blood that wouldn’t mix. A language only they could speak. The young men banded together and made periodic retreats to the mountaintops overlooking their towns. There they held their virile exercises and communed with God.
Searching for a face, Ben Williamson remembered Arana, a mystic, a holy fool, but a politician too and the founder of the largest political party in the Basque country. A pacifist. A fascist, if there ever was one.
He had not seen a face. College texts drawn off the shelves rarely contained photographs.
Basques were said to have a special cranial formation, and, it was true, a certain rare blood type. They were all black-haired, black-browed, with deep-set eyes and pronounced jaws. That was not a face.
When Franco rose it was to liberate Spain from the atheists, ideologues, soulless state planners. Yet he bombed the Basques savagely. Hermann Goering wanted to give his Luftwaffe a trial run before Germany attacked Britain and the rest of Europe; Franco pointed to a small Basque town and said, “There. It shall be a lesson to separatists. In its ruins, their shrine. You have my permission to make it disappear.” Guernica.
