House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  She would know the trick. She had been running in this park for a month. It was where she came.

  When the light changed, Madeline Pratt led him across the street. He saw no runners at this late-morning hour. No students. But he put his daughter there; he allowed her to appear before him. The gold of her hair was drawn up in a ponytail. She ran with her upright carriage and measured stride. She wore light-colored shorts and shirts—pale greens, blues, oranges, pinks— clothes he’d never seen darkened with sweat. She wore her timer’s watch with the black band. She didn’t wear headphones. She would hear the world around her, as well as see it, smell it, feel its crunching give under her feet.

  On her face Ben saw an expression of great diligence, as though she were monitoring all her vital signs at once.

  He followed Madeline Pratt into the park. Tables were set out before a concession stand. Two women whose small children played on some teeter-totters were having coffee. These were working-class women—at least the jeans and featureless tee-shirts they wore indicated little interest in clothes. They wore no makeup; their hair did not look combed. There was a dry itemizing tone to their voices, with a hint of some grievance. He asked Madeline Pratt to have coffee with him. When he offered to bring the coffee to her, she cautiously corrected him. Even in such informal surroundings they would be served.

  He had what she had, a cortado, an espresso with a splash of warm milk. One sugar.

  Fate had brought his daughter here. For the last month of her life she’d run around this park, and there on the far side, beyond bushes and trees, he lost her to view. He believed he could hear her then, a sort of whispering pant, like a sound she made in her sleep, but she wasn’t calling him to come drive away the spooks of her dreams. She was simply on the dark side of his moon.

  He had no idea of the expression that had appeared on his face. But when Madeline Pratt said, “I can’t let you do this,” she was clearly more concerned for his well-being than her own, and he didn’t want that.

  “Take me there now,” he said. “I want to stand on the spot.”

  A building occupied the entire side of the block, tan-colored stucco alternating with columns of brick; it was four stories high, its two visible corners dominated by guard towers. There was a guard booth at the driveway leading in. From the sidewalk where he stood he estimated the distance across the street to where two Civil Guards patrolled their stretch of sidewalk at sixty feet. The Civil Guards were dressed in a darker, denser green than army green and carried machine guns slung over their shoulders. Sixty feet was the distance separating a pitcher from a batter. As a teenager he had pitched. These two Civil Guards might have been teenagers themselves. They had fresh bony faces that looked struck from the same Spanish mold. They had vigorous eyebrows and hair along their upper lips. The predecessor of one of them had not survived. Ben asked Madeline Pratt where, and she moved them farther along the sidewalk, up from the headquarters’ entrance. When she stopped, he estimated the distance between them and those two patrolling boys now at ninety feet, or the distance between home plate and first base. As well as Madeline Pratt could remember, his daughter had died here. There was a tree just inside the park, one of those low gnarled trees with what looked like carob pods hanging from its limbs. He could see how the bark had been blown away. What remained of the tree looked indestructible. The car loaded with dynamite had been parked almost directly across from the entrance where the two Civil Guards patrolled. And the blast had caught her here.

  “What kind of car?”

  Madeline Pratt had newspaper clippings from that day. As documents pertaining to the center she’d felt obligated to keep them. He could consult the clippings.

  But she must have remembered the car.

  She nodded. It was a Seat Ibiza. She looked up the street and raised her hand and pointed at an unexceptional white car wedged into a parking spot.

  “Like that one,” she said.

  It was a hatchback model. It had no trunk. There would be a storage area for luggage, but anyone peering in . . .

  “And other than my daughter and that Civil Guard . . . ?”

  “Two more people were slightly injured, and there was a lot of shattered glass. But I hope you’ll believe me when I say it was truly miraculous that there were no other casualties. I know that’s small consolation.”

  “It’s been two years and eight months since it happened. Look around. If you didn’t notice that tree, you’d never know. That building looks like it never got touched.”

  “They had to rebuild some. They put up a plaque beside the door.”

  “I don’t want to see it. What does it say? Does it even mention her?”

  Madeline Pratt bowed her head. “No,” she whispered, stage-whispered in the traffic noise, the noise of concentrated human habitation, “it’s what they always say when a Civil Guard is killed, that he died for the glory of his country.”

  Todo Por La Patria.

  Ben stood where she’d positioned him. The pavement had been littered and swept and rained on hundreds of times since his daughter had lain here. Each horn that blew, each motorbike that drilled by, took some of her with it. He looked back along the diagonal to the headquarters’ entrance. The two Civil Guards were hardly on alert; they chatted with each other, rocked back on their heels, and cradled their guns idly, like something they’d been told to hold on to for the duration of the day. He looked from them on another diagonal to where that white car was parked. As far as those boys knew, it too could carry explosives. It could wipe out Madeline Pratt and Ben Williamson where they stood, or the vagaries of the blast could reach the Civil Guards and countless others, instead, and leave the two of them unscathed.

  “They didn’t catch them, did they?” he said.

  Madeline Pratt shook her head. “They have a phrase they use in the press. Desarticular comandos, which means they disband a group of four or five terrorists operating in Madrid. Another comando, or another team, comes in from the Basque country to replace them. The authorities try to pretend otherwise, but it’s not really a matter of a particular person and a particular crime. . . .”

  “Why?” he asked. “Why do they pretend otherwise? So they can show that justice is being done?”

  “Yes, you know . . .” and she forced herself to look at him out of that desolate dead space around her eyes, “for society and especially for the families, so that they can get some sense of—”

  He stopped her. She was going to say “closure” or something equally cruel in its banal right-mindedness. “Closure” would have been a bomb blast out of that white Seat, and it hadn’t come.

  He smiled at her. He wanted her to take away this smile and study it, take it to heart. He saw her eyes widen and begin to glisten. She was a tall woman, almost his height, and he could feel the shakiness in her knees. “Go away,” he told her. “Go back to your students. It’s been long enough. Erase Michelle Williamson from your mind.”

  When she wouldn’t leave, he insisted. After she’d taken a few steps he called her back. “My daughter, when that car blew up, she was running away from the blast, wasn’t she? She was almost safe on first base.”

  When Madeline Pratt didn’t know what to say, he dismissed her entirely. He waved his hand in front of her face. She was so brittle-boned he could have crunched her into a powder, except that she deserved better than that, bereft of one of her most promising students through no real fault of her own.

  Late that afternoon Ben Williamson sat in El Parque de Buen Retiro watching the evening’s promenade. He was off the main thoroughfare, where, in addition to the promenaders, performers staged their mime and puppet and juggling shows, beggars begged, and teenagers ran amok. He was sitting in a formal garden of trimmed hedges and conical bushes whose leaves had the metallic glossiness of holly. Along the axis of this garden couples, mostly his age, walked arm in arm. It was quieter here. Behind him was a basin where a single jet of water spouted. There was a stone gate down to his left,
imposing enough to be an official portal, and beyond it lay a building belonging to the Prado Museum. Out of the ruckus of that main thoroughfare, up to his right he heard guitar music competing with a violin and human voices singing for their supper, all amplified, yet strangely remote. He heard the delicate splash of the water in the fountain behind him and the footfall on crushed stone of the deliberately pacing couples.

  He watched the couples, observed them closely as if he were recording his own heartbeat, his rate of respiration. Gentlemen in suits and gentlemen with canes seemed right, just as women dressed in tasseled shawls did. The evening was growing cool. But he saw more jeans and khaki and even exercise suits than he did elegant attire, and more running shoes and cheap versions of Birkenstock sandals than polished leather. But regardless of how they were dressed and out of what period of Spain’s history they seemed to emerge, as they paced by him it was as if he were being introduced to an elemental rhythm that was the social equivalent of his heartbeat, his breath-taking. People paired off and lasted the years so that they could come here in their middle age and round out the course of their lives. If he wanted to think of it that way.

  He drew a breath, and, arms linked, one couple replaced another. His heart beat, and to the music of that drum, the feet paced by. The water spilled back onto itself and rose again. The smells were the prickly unsweetened smells of an orderly procreation.

  If he wanted to think of it that way.

  Or he could think of it as lockstep. The pacing as penitential. The procreation a mockery. The fruits of their labor were up on that thoroughfare living by their wits.

  Until a bomb went off.

  Here in the Park of the Buen Retiro.

  What Madeline Pratt didn’t know was that Ben Williamson had spent days reading about ETA. Days he’d gone to visit his daughter Annie in college, he’d slipped into the library, found a carrel and pulled books down off the stacks. ETA—Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna—Basque Fatherland and Liberty. The only insurgency that Francisco Franco hadn’t been able to wipe out. Insurgency was in the Basque blood. One summer, in an effort to disrupt Spain’s tourist trade, ETA had planted bombs at random in favorite beaches on Spain’s costa azul and costa del sol. They’d buried the bombs in the sand. A German had had the bad luck to spread his towel over one.

  Why not here? Blow a hole in Spain’s generational chain. Here, this potbellied paterfamilias and his hobbled wife whose ankles turned in her shoes.

  Or this next couple, younger, much more attractive, she tall, blond, still with a coltish lift to her knees, and he sporting a jaunty handlebar moustache. Both stylishly dressed.

  One couple interchangeable with the next? He remembered what Madeline Pratt had said about “disarticulating comandos.” The futility of putting a face on what was essentially faceless. His daughter had had blue eyes, the blue of a mountain lake—he had seen the very lake in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park—but with a subtly tightened, puzzled look about them, as if at any moment that blue water were about to freeze. A mouth that was pensively pressed shut; a pert point to her chin. Across her temple there was a blue vein that gave her away, pulsing when she was otherwise composed. An eyelid also sometimes twitched. He too had had a twitching eyelid, but the time he’d called her attention to it had led to a rebuff. A twitching eyelid meant nothing. They had taken her away from him before he’d been able to find something that did mean something. He could see her now, far more clearly than when she had been alive, but she, of course, was her own shield. She’d died on her shield.

  Sitting there, witness to a procession he was ineligible to join, but, nonetheless—as his heart beat and his lungs filled—in a processional state of mind, all he could tell himself was that he’d need a face—one of theirs. He’d need a face to make a fair exchange.

  II

  As big a pest as her father could be, Annie had always considered him capable of a serious act. Her mother no longer did, and that, as far as her father went, was the difference between them. She didn’t know why she felt that way—she could cite no evidence—but every time she and her mother got in a discussion about him, that was the position Annie took. And they talked about him a lot. Her mother rarely visited her at college, whereas her father came often. After all, he was responsible for her education—it was the only financial demand her mother had made of him during the divorce. But her mother called. Her mother lived on the phone—luring house-hunters her way, proposing deals, closing deals. She had Annie on speed-dial on her apartment and cell phones.

  Annie could speak frankly to her mother, who wasn’t one of these easily offended sorts. Her roommate Valerie’s mother was like that, every phone call was an exhausting dance around what could and couldn’t be said and in exactly what tone. Annie could say, “Don’t call me for the next three days, I’ll be studying for a test,” and her mother wouldn’t. She had boyfriends—her current boyfriend was a blue-blooded Bostonian named Jonathan who regarded her Kentucky upbringing as exotic—and when she told her mother she’d be out of reach for a while, it was like a code phrase they had. Annie would be spending time with her boyfriend, and her mother was not to call. When she did call she didn’t pry into how her daughter’s little romantic idyll had gone. They understood each other— since her sister’s death, it was only natural that her parents would take extraordinary care with her. But in her mother’s case it represented no effort. It was how she was. Gail Williamson cared, she cared enormously, but she had absolutely no capacity for devotion. And that suited Annie fine.

  The only disagreement between them concerned her father. Her mother considered her ex-husband negligible, and Annie didn’t. Time had passed him by, and Annie, with nothing to back her up, begged to differ.

  She believed her father was lonely. He’d lost both his mother and father. His brother, Charley, lived in California and showed no interest in coming east. Her father had had a wife, and then he hadn’t. He’d had an older daughter, and then he hadn’t. But he still had her, his younger daughter, and he came often, even though he tried to stay out of her way. Once she’d seen him when he hadn’t bothered to tell her he was coming; it was as if he were haunting the campus. “He’s lonely, Mother,” she’d said. Her mother had answered, “Nonsense. I offered to fix him up with one of my clients. They would have suited each other fine. At the last moment he backed out and nearly cost me a sale.”

  Annie wondered about the ethics of that from any angle at which she cared to examine it. But her mother had an ease with ethics that could almost win you over.

  “I haven’t heard from him in more than a month,” Annie confided to her mother during their latest phone call.

  “Now that you mention it, neither have I. Are you worried?”

  She wasn’t, but that last time he’d visited he’d behaved strangely. They’d had dinner together. They’d talked about nothing in particular, then out of nowhere he’d made a comment about digging in to face the day that was sure to come, and she’d thought he was referring to some paper she was putting off writing, or upcoming exams. She’d laughed in his face. Then she’d kissed him good-bye. But he hadn’t left. Friends had seen him in the library, squeezed into one of the stack carrels, and once in the Government Department, standing before a professor’s door. Her sister had been a government major, with a concentration in international relations. The irony of that had struck Annie as criminal in itself. Maybe her father had gone to her sister’s professor to protest that at long last something had to be done.

  When she’d called his hotel for an explanation for his behavior, she was told he’d checked out. The programmed voice of the man who told her that left a cold empty space in her ear.

  She was annoyed with herself, that for her last communication with her father she had laughed in his face. And she was annoyed with him, that he would make her regret her laughter, that he would force her to accuse herself of laughing out of place.

  She liked to laugh. Her laughter was like her trademark. When Michel
le was alive her laughter was sometimes her only means of expression; then, when Michelle died, it was as if she were being forced to defend her laughter. Now she laughed every chance she got. “Digging in to face the day that was sure to come” was certainly worth a laugh.

  Yet in spite of herself, and especially in spite of her mother, she still considered her father capable of a serious act.

  “I want to see him, that’s all,” she explained to her mother. “I miss him.”

  After a puzzling pause, her mother said approvingly, “Well, good, good for you.”

  Then her mother began to tell her about Rennick Road. This was a road running out of town that Annie didn’t know. It was barely a mile long, and at least half of the land was taken up by what used to be a small dairy farm but was now given over to the raising of goats. Apparently in Greek and Arab restaurants there was a big city market for goat meat. But Annie had to imagine looking out over a pasture; instead of goats she was to see popcorn popping. Seemingly unprovoked, and from a standstill, the little white kids would leap straight up, and it was like watching corn pop. All over that pasture—pop, pop, pop!