House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  She wandered her father’s neighborhood until the first real light shone on the plastic-sheathed newspapers tossed in the driveways. When she found herself before her father’s house, she admitted defeat and turned up the drive. She unlocked the side garage door and then the passenger door to his car. She lifted the travel folder from the glove compartment and took it out to the light of day. On May 14 her father had flown from Lexington, Kentucky, to Kennedy Airport. That same evening he’d flown to Madrid, Spain. There was no return flight itinerary, but she read down all the information on the sheet and tracked him to the Palace Hotel in Madrid for May 15 and thereafter. There was no departure date.

  This was an advance itinerary—it said as much at the top of the sheet. Someone might be slated to fly to Madrid on May 14 and actually fly to Hong Kong. She quite understood. Beside the Palace Hotel booking her father—it was his handwriting—had scribbled “Hemingway.” Of Hemingway in Spain Annie had read two books. The Sun Also Rises was about an impotent man chasing a promiscuous woman around half of Europe and finally, in his frustration, running with the bulls in Pamplona, none of which, even allowing for a radical personality shift, she could imagine her father doing. The other was For Whom the Bell Tolls, about an American going to Spain to fight the good fight, which she’d read in high school not for its political sentiments but to see if the earth moved. Her father was no soldier either.

  It didn’t matter. Her father had not gone to Spain following Ernest Hemingway. He’d gone to look for Michelle. But Michelle was right here, shaking her head, and remarking, There’re just so many clear-minded, straight-thinking people in the world, and I had the bad luck to be born into a family without a single one. Annie lowered her head and let her arms fall. Grinding her jaw, she wept there in her father’s back yard.

  . . .

  She folded the itinerary into its folder and placed it on his bedside table as she got back into his bed. She closed her eyes and released a breath she must have been holding for hours, days, however long it had been, and sank out of sight. It was past noon when the phone woke her. Her father, she thought. But it was her mother and, strangely, in that moment it didn’t matter. The voice pulled her up out of the hole into which she had fallen, and she agreed to have lunch within the hour.

  Only after she’d hung up did she realize her mother had sounded upset, whether angry or worried or just perplexed she couldn’t decide.

  Some of all.

  They had lunch in a converted mansion that had once been out in the country and now was pretty much downtown. And she kicked herself. With its white columns, wide-planked floors, quaint rooms and fireplaces on whose mantels memorabilia rested that would trace this house back to its antebellum owners, before she sent him home she could have made Jonathan’s stay here even more memorable. Brick walkways wandered through magnolias outside. On the veranda stately rockers rocked. She didn’t know about the food. Her mother ordered something with clams. Annie hadn’t had breakfast yet, and asked, in the absence of bagels, for eggs, toast and coffee, which became Eggs Benedict.

  Her mother said, “What are you doing with yourself that you begin the day at one . . .” she consulted her watch, “twenty-five in the afternoon?”

  Her tone was disapproving, concerned and probing for the good stuff. Since Annie’d let Jonathan go off alone, her mother had insisted her daughter could swim for herself. She’d really meant “fish,” with the clear implication that bigger and better fish than Jonathan would not be swimming by. Secretly her mother was intrigued that Annie could let such a prize catch swim back to Boston—it revealed a capacity that she at that age most certainly hadn’t possessed. Even more secretly she might have been cheering her daughter on. Maybe her fondest and most unspoken ambition was for Annie to become a femme fatale.

  “Let me ask you a question, Mother,” Annie said, and because her mother prided herself on being a straight speaker (“I’ve made a list of every reason you shouldn’t buy this house. Here it is.”) and because she insisted on being spoken straight back to (“Save your moonlight on garden walls for your next wife.”), Annie went ahead. “When you went to Spain to bring back Michelle’s body, was it because Dad refused to go, or was it because you just wanted to do it yourself?”

  Her mother pushed back from the table. With the years and extra weight her face had gotten more darkly toned and very broad. When she was young it had been a healthy squared oval, even tomboyish, but there were photographs of her mother at Annie’s age when the large blue eyes had gone still and the full lips had parted and a woman of some strong and unsettling beauty had looked out at the camera. In a wedding photograph, her mother’s mouth was open to take in a piece of cake, but her eyes were gleaming and feeding on the person holding it out to her, her husband of perhaps two hours. The woman who sat before Annie no longer had those large avid eyes or that adventurous squared oval of a face. For a moment Annie thought she was about to get up and leave.

  But her mother had pushed back from the table only to push in closer, to retake her own position, as it were, and then advance it. “That’s done,” she declared, meeting her daughter head-on. “I’ve put that behind me now. That’s been three years.”

  “No one ever told me.”

  “You knew your father. You knew me. Did it seem peculiar? Did friends of yours begin to talk?”

  “Friends of . . . mine,” and she lingered on the word, “never said a thing.”

  “Well, friends of . . . ours,” and her mother gave the word a harsh emphasis, “knew your father and they knew me and they didn’t talk either.”

  “So he didn’t want to go? He couldn’t face it?”

  Once again her mother sat back. Then, pulling up close, she drew a breath through the congestion that had risen in her throat. “Sweetie, the State Department was going to send your sister’s body in a government casket accompanied by a guard all the way to our door. Don’t you see I couldn’t let them do that? Through all the airports, through Customs? The State Department was cooperative, but they are very impersonal people. I just rode with her. I just stayed at her side, that was all.”

  “Didn’t you have to identify the body in Madrid?”

  Her mother drew another steadying breath. The room was small. Annie had noticed that all antebellum houses had small rooms. So they could be heated better, she assumed, but she knew that people had been smaller back then. Michelle would have been a little taller than normal and Annie a giant. In such close quarters her mother’s control was admirable. “I didn’t ‘have to,’ but I did. I asked everyone to leave the room and told her she wasn’t alone, I just wanted her to know that.” She paused. “That wasn’t the reason your father didn’t want to go.”

  “The reason?”

  “That they would want him to identify the body.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t think he was afraid of that.”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t want to go because the minute they called to tell us what had happened he said good-bye to her. In some ways, whenever she walked out the door, when she went off to college, for instance, he said good-bye to her. It was how she was—it was how she was for him. A mother’s different.” And very briefly, a smile appeared on her mother’s lips—a trembling, brief and intimate smile, too intimate for this public place. A smile of solidarity and of defeat. A mother’s smile.

  Her mother had never smiled at her quite like that before.

  Nor had she ever, that Annie could remember, said anything quite that understanding about her father.

  She touched her mother’s hand on the table. In gratitude—no, really, in recognition of the moment—Annie took her side. “He might have said good-bye to her, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t go with you, just to help out, to offer his support.”

  “I know, sweetie.”

  “It doesn’t seen fair.”

  “Not much is.”

  “I mean,” and she kept it up, even as she wished she hadn’t, “to carry
the bags if that’s all he could manage. If he wouldn’t trip over himself.”

  She’d made him sound like the ex-husband and the father they knew, and Annie’s mother was quick to accept this invitation back to familiar ground. “Your father was born tripping over himself,” she said, and laughed.

  They ate their lunch. Annie’s eggs tasted of betrayal. Before she had finished, this small period room, with its little fireplace and token hearth, with its sepia-toned wallpaper and its high but narrow window onto the veranda that admitted a hazy column of antebellum light, had closed in on her and she felt the constriction in her throat. Her mother expanded to fill the confines of any room, and Annie hunkered down. Why was that? Antebellum, post-bellum, why was history always measured by its wars?

  After lunch, over her mother’s first cup of coffee and Annie’s second, Annie let her thoughts hang inquiringly in the air. “And so you never really got to see the city. . . .”

  “The city?”

  “Madrid. You just sat with the body . . . where? in the morgue or the embassy, and never really got to see anything. That seems like a shame. If Dad’d been with you, you could have taken turns and at least had a chance to look around.”

  “Annie, stop it.” Her mother affected a wearied tone.

  “I’m serious. I want to know what it’s like. A big city with a lot of noise, or does it have some special charm?”

  Her mother lowered her head. They had the room to themselves. A young couple of good, solid, traditionalist stock rocked in the rockers on the veranda and, if she knew anything about the type, dreamed of finding an old mansion like this and restoring it themselves. Five years, they could even see ten, working on evenings and weekends with their careers in full stride, and they’d have it. All it took was the commitment, and they excelled at commitments. Responsibilities? It’d be a responsibility, a house like this, high on the historical register. They had responsibility leaking from every pore.

  “I know it’s a lot,” her mother conceded, speaking into her coffee cup. “You lost a sister and then your parents split up. A bomb goes off in some foreign city and everything changes, overnight. Blame it on the terrorists if that’s what it takes. But this is something you’ve got to get over and go on with your life.” Her mother looked up, the eyes moist and heavy in their sockets. “I know that’s easy to say.”

  Annie got up, walked around the table and embraced her seated mother around the heavily fleshed shoulders. Their eyes never met. She sat back down and, still looking to the side, reached out and squeezed her mother’s hand.

  “Tell me about Madrid.”

  “Do you know where he is, Annie?”

  “He calls. He’s taking a break. He calls it his ‘interlude.’”

  “How does he sound?”

  “He sounds . . . he sounds like he’s regaining his strength.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re keeping him for yourself?”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “But not lost.”

  “Madrid, Mother.”

  “I got out of the embassy once. There was the inevitable bureaucratic delay, and they offered to take me someplace. To take my mind off it. Actually, the embassy people were nice. I said the Prado Museum.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The Velazquez, of course.”

  “Did Dad like museums?”

  “Not especially. He went once to the Museum of Modern Art in New York to see Picasso’s Guernica.”

  “He liked Spanish art?”

  “He went because everybody else did.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “I took you and your sister to see the skaters in Central Park. Don’t you remember?”

  She didn’t. Then she did. She remembered everything in a blazing clarity, in a cold so cold it stung. She remembered the heat in that cold, she remembered the way it shaped her face, and she remembered the fine stinging points of freedom in the air as she watched the skaters describe their effortless ovals around the ring. Then she remembered what had happened. Her mother had gone to rent skates for her sister and her. The man had handed Michelle’s skates out first, and she’d raced to put them on. But he couldn’t find Annie’s size. Her sister had gotten the last pair anywhere near Annie’s size, and Michelle, used to having her way, had been out on the ice before their mother could stop her. And Annie remembered what her mother had said. What all mothers said. She’d make it up to her. Let Michelle have her way, Annie’s mother would make it up to her.

  “I remember Michelle skating around and around and you and I sitting off on the sidelines watching her.” And since her mother valued honesty above everything, Annie finished her thought. “I remember hoping that maybe she’d fall and break a leg and I’d have my turn.”

  “Neither one of you skated,” her mother corrected her. “We all three sat and watched.”

  “No, Michelle did. We sat on a bench and you patted my leg and told me you’d make it up to me. Michelle wouldn’t always be number one.”

  Her mother shook her head.

  Annie said, “We froze.”

  Her mother prided herself on her tough skin because it wasn’t tough skin, it was a resilient skin; it was a fresh and fearless growth and she would not be brought down. Not by the tragic violence of the times, not by her ex-husband’s surrender to stagnation, and not by her daughter’s—her surviving daughter’s—headlong rushes when she trampled on her mother’s tender feelings, which she still had in spite of her fierce survivor’s code.

  She rose and gathered her things. Annie had to follow her out of the restaurant and onto the brick walkways that wound among the magnolias. The heat had turned oppressive and the light harsh during the time they’d been inside. In the parking lot they stood in the additional heat of softening asphalt, and the clinging smell of tar, while her mother clicked open her car with the remote. When she finally did turn to her daughter, Annie saw how the corrosive light had left her overexposed—the scalp was visible through the hair, the crater of each pore—and how the heat made all that flesh hang on her like sacks of sand. There were those wedding photographs Annie had thrilled to. She had a premonition that what was coming was a form of good-bye.

  It was a parting piece of advice.

  “You have time before school starts. I’d spend it thinking about your feelings for your sister. I know how you feel about me. We have a nice little rivalry going, but that’s all right because I love you, Annie, and at the end of the day I know you’re going to love me back. You’re sweet on your father, and that’s nice too, that’s the way it should be, and lucky for him— to have a beautiful, talented daughter who loves him the way you do. If anything goes badly wrong, he’ll make it up to you. I will too. But Michelle can’t. You either loved her or you didn’t, but if you didn’t there’s nothing Michelle can do to change your feelings now. It seems unfair, but if anything’s going to change you’re going to have to do all the work. It won’t be easy, but we’re talking about the rest of your life. You understand that, don’t you, sweetie? The rest of your life. You better begin to love your sister, or you’ll end up hating yourself.”

  How was she supposed to do that? Give me an exercise, Mother, a tip on how to love an unapproachable sister and I’ll do my best. Doubly unapproachable now, now that she was dead. Of course, being dead Michelle couldn’t edit Annie’s memories, but Annie’s memories could present themselves so quickly that she wouldn’t have time to edit them either. Michelle had grabbed that last pair of skates and raced out onto the ice and never looked back. Memories like that.

  The question was—the question whose answer might have supplied her with some real tips—how had her mother found a daughter to love?

  Annie stood beside the driver’s door as her mother stepped up into her van. Down came the windows and on went the air. A moment later, she’d be able to lower her face into the jet of cooling air and take her relief. Similar rel
ief awaited Annie in her father’s car, but she stood loyally by until her mother had gotten hers. Would Michelle have done that? Annie might have asked her question then: the five most lovable qualities, Mother, your older daughter possessed? Or the five least unlovable, if that’s the wording you prefer.

  When her mother had sufficiently cooled off, she turned in the driver’s seat before running the windows back up. “I have a colleague in the office. She’s new, transferred from Chicago, and her son’s here with her, visiting from the West Coast.” She paused and gave her next words a playful, scheming weight. “San Francisco, if I heard her right.” Annie didn’t doubt she’d heard her right. Of the two most desirable cities in the country for her mother, Boston and San Francisco were a toss-up. “Providing you brought some presentable clothes with you back from school, I could arrange a small dinner. . . .”

  “Have you seen a picture of this guy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nothing on your colleague’s desk? Family photos? When he was a baby, when he was a big-eared teenager with acne on his chin and when he was on his way to being a hunk?”

  “I told you, she’s new.”

  “We probably should wait.”

  “The pictures are bound to appear. They might be there when I get back.”

  “Sneak a look, okay?”

  “Will do.” Her mother gave a wink, which was like a mock salute. “In the meantime, see what you can do about finding a nice dress. If you want to we could do some shopping. It’s been a while. It’s been since,” and she ran her mind down the clothes hanging in Annie’s closet, wherever that might be, “that lavender dress I thought was too short for you. . . .”

  “If the guy in the photo looks good enough to buy a new dress for, you call.”

  Her mother held her face up to the opened window. Annie leaned in for the kiss. She kissed with her eyes shut, as if she didn’t want this last closeup look at what the heat had done to her mother and the air conditioning had failed to restore, or at what she, in the inconstancy of her own daughterhood, had done.