House of the Deaf

by Lamar Herrin

  Ben nodded. One had hosted the Inquisition, as he recalled, and the other stood each other to pints of Guinness, then took potshots at Protestants out on the streets.

  “But there’re links. There’re even blood links. When the Spanish Armada was sunk, some sailors washed up on Irish shores. There’re families with surnames like Martinez and Rodriquez that trace their ancestry back to those times. Did you know that?”

  He shook his head.

  “I didn’t either. Jorge’s father told me about the Spanish Armada. I think he wanted to make clear the ways in which the Irish and Spanish were bound. I didn’t like him. I thought he was a tyrant. The family owned a large hotel in a wealthy part of the city. There were three brothers, two sisters and a saintly mother. Jorge was by far the best of the bunch. He was almost always good-humored and even-tempered, with a laugh that made you want to see the world his way. He had friends everywhere. When he asked me for a divorce, divorce wasn’t that common here, and I had no idea it was about to come to that—really, no idea at all, isn’t that strange? But it didn’t take long before I realized that I wanted it too. I wanted to be Jorge’s friend, not his wife. I wanted to be one of that admiring crowd. And since there were no children . . .”

  She looked across the table at him, very levelly now, the frankness in her pale blue eyes—weathered, faded and warm, like everything else— about as much as he could take. He looked away. A waiter he recognized was finally approaching to take his order.

  “I kept his name,” she declared. “Ortiz. I had no desire to go back being an O’Malley.”

  Ben ordered his evening’s beer. Then he called the waiter back and asked for a glass of red wine instead, vino tinto, from Ribera del Duero. Preferably something from a town called Medina del Rioseco?

  The waiter changed the order on his pad. He said, “Muy bien,” then left.

  Paula apologized. She wasn’t used to talking at length about herself like this. As if to take a break, she said, “Did you know that the real Café Gijon,” and she signaled to the wall of buildings beyond the traffic, “was the most famous literary café in Madrid. It’s where the writers at the turn of the century held their tertulias.”

  He didn’t know the word. The café he could make out through the windows behind him had wood-paneled walls and painted iron columns around which tables were clustered. Tourists were crowding in and out.

  “Conferences . . . colloquia,” she translated for him. “The Spanish are great talkers. But you know that already.”

  Juan had talked to him about his hometown, but other than that the longest anyone had gone on in his presence had been Americans: Leslie in praise of her animals and Paula in praise of her ex-husband. He’d forced the words out of Madeline Pratt’s mouth, and in the process had opened her wounds. Mostly he’d been looking at pictures, reading the Spanish papers word for word.

  The waiter, his left arm folded behind him, served Ben his wine, which tasted something like the wine Juan had served him, but he couldn’t be sure. It had a strong, dry, almost bitter clarity, and it passed down his throat offering no quarter. Ben asked the waiter to leave the bottle and to bring another glass for his . . . and the word he used was “amiga.”

  Paula said, “I won’t bore you anymore—”

  “No.”

  When Paula’s glass came they drank to meeting again here sometime soon.

  “That’s enough of me for one day,” she smiled. “The stage is yours if you want it.”

  He didn’t. He wouldn’t have known where to start. He and Paula Ortiz poured second glasses. There came a moment when he felt himself settle, the tension sloughing off him in low, shuddering waves. He thought of the sound of the hippos in the Zambezi River, their three-toned, chuffing descent of the scale.

  “When I came down here this afternoon,” Paula said, “I wondered if I’d see you again. I guess what I really wondered was how adventurous you were. On the strength of what Leslie said, had you already set off for Zimbabwe and the Zambezi River? I hoped not. And not because of the three mortal dangers. Because of the boredom. Leslie can find romance in mud and elephant dung. The rest of us would probably spend four or five sleepless nights and end up with a year’s worth of aches and pains.”

  “I liked Leslie,” he said.

  “I like her,” Paula insisted.

  “I’m not sure I believed her, but I’m pretty sure I believed in what she said.”

  “I’ll have to think about the difference.”

  “It’s simple, actually.”

  “Maybe in your head, Ben,” Paula replied. Then she added, “I’ll have to think about you.”

  “Don’t,” he advised her.

  “No?”

  “Not worth your time.”

  “Don’t be too humble, Ben. It’s not your style.”

  He was curious. What was his “style”? He wasn’t aware that he had one. Gail had accused him of being so stylistically outdated he could be said to be without, and he had believed her.

  He stood. He said he hoped to run into her again down here, once she’d made her rounds. Her rounds? The six or seven cafés she sat in. Where she’d have six or seven sets of friends? He didn’t ask. She’d made her ex-husband, Jorge, out to be such a friend to the world that maybe she didn’t need any more.

  She let him see her disappointment, and he showed her his exhaustion. He took her hand, whose knowing grip was instantly familiar to him. He withdrew his hand.

  The next afternoon he stood back at a distance, and she was there again. She was forcing him to find a new café to sit in if all he wanted was to watch the people parade by. Juan directed him to the Plaza Mayor, where he should have been sitting in the first place, an arcaded plaza so grand and spacious and symmetrically designed it was like an enormous theater in the round. Cafés with their clusters of tables were spotted on all sides. And another huge king on horseback presided over it all. If Puerta del Sol was where Spain circled a center, the Plaza Mayor was where Spain sat down. He tried it. But in the midst of the milling crowds he felt himself to be an isolated point. His mood turned somber, vaguely combative, and he thought of that ETA couple, “sentimentally linked,” who might have ordered his daughter’s death and whose divorce was now as permanent as prison could get. The man—his face—deserved all he got, but the woman—in her girl’s round-eyed, blind, headlong rush—was about to begin a withering that would take her to the grave. Ben concluded she deserved it too, perhaps even more than the man, who had been sinister from the start.

  The next day he went back to the Café Gijon on the Paseo del Castel-lana, where Paula Ortiz was waiting for him again and where he sat down.

  VI

  Here was a twist. Her mother, who had never worried about her ex-husband before because he had never given her cause, was beginning to worry, while Annie secretly hoped her father would stay at large longer than anyone had thought possible. She knew this seemed odd, and since she couldn’t account for it herself, she didn’t express it that way to her mother. It wasn’t exactly a disappearing act her father had performed, since he had called. He’d actually called a second time and left a message that said basically what he’d told Patty—that they were not to worry, that he was taking a break, that one fine morning he’d surprise her and walk in the door. Then, since he assumed she was living in his house, he told her a trick to get the air conditioning to work. It amounted to a double click after a three-count pause. Annie loved the dailiness of that tip, and the intimacy, although she kept the windows open on the screens and the air conditioner off. The tall trees that surrounded the house brought the breeze. She played the message again and again. There was both a casualness and a firmness about his voice, and a curious sense of pacing, as if he were putting one foot down at a time.

  She erased his message.

  Week after week she stayed in his house, drove his car. She dealt with Patty and with other high school friends as they appeared. She listened as her mother’s condescending amus
ement with her father turned to exasperation that masked a worry she didn’t want to admit to. She said the man she had been married to for more than twenty years didn’t have the resources to disappear and reappear like that. As illustration, she performed a crisp snap of the fingers. He had the money now—since his mother had died— and she didn’t doubt he had the need to step out of his skin and be someone else for a while. But he didn’t have the inner resources, and all this mysteriousness he was building up might come back to haunt him in a bad way.

  “I’m saying your father can’t take care of himself, Annie. He can’t see what’s in front of him long enough to do that.”

  “If you’re worried, why don’t you call the police?”

  “Because I’m no longer his wife. You’re his daughter. Why don’t you?”

  “Because I’m not worried,” Annie said, without saying she was secretly thrilled.

  Because she wasn’t, not exactly. “Thrilled” wasn’t exactly the word. She was in the town where she’d been born and brought up and she felt . . . dislocated. There were days when she felt she had never lived here. She’d step out onto the shaded streets and start to walk around the neighborhood, and the houses and the people who lived in them threw up a dull veil of strangeness. And this was a street she knew well; she’d had friends who’d lived in this neighborhood. No use to overdramatize it. She’d gone away, come home, and home had gone somewhere else. Happens all the time.

  Then she got pissed. Since she wasn’t answering his letters or calls, Jonathan had gotten in contact with her mother to express his concern, and her mother had taken his side. Annie did seem short-tempered and self-absorbed. And Jonathan had sounded so alert and winning, so “Bostonian,” on the phone. If her mother didn’t mind her asking, why was she treating him this way?

  Annie minded enormously.

  Jonathan, her mother had been told, had brought Annie halfway home and then been sent back while she took a bus. Why? If he’d come all the way Annie’s mother might have had a chance to meet him. She wasn’t being unreasonable. These were chances all mothers want. She didn’t say these were chances all mothers were due. Nor did she say that with Michelle’s death by how much her chances had been reduced, but Michelle’s death was always there, it was the backdrop for everything, the climate in which they conversed. It meant that at every turn there was a loss to be made good.

  On the other hand, Annie really didn’t mind at all.

  Jonathan had hinted that he was ready to give up Cape Cod or Mount Desert Island and complete the trip. Why didn’t she let him?

  No reason, it seemed. Jonathan could charm her mother, take her off Annie’s hands. Probably no one could do it any better.

  Her mother had him there the next day—it was as if he’d been waiting in the wings. It reminded Annie of the way Brian Paul had Patty convinced he was lurking behind every corner. And that really got her pissed.

  Jonathan said to her, “Your mother is formidable, and she’s very down home. It’s exactly how I pictured her. She’s a perfect match for the town, which is modern and growing fast but at heart is still a charming little place.”

  Annie replied, “Be careful. She’ll sell you a house.”

  “It wouldn’t take much,” he confessed, letting his flattery spill over. He was saying a woman who could give birth to the creature standing before him could sell him soap.

  It was strange to see him here, of course. He looked like JFK, except his chestnut-brown hair was straight, not wavy, and his eyes were large and open and eager while JFK’s were set back in his skull and narrowed—not in a smile, as JFK would have had you believe, but in a cold assessing slit. JFK was stiff-backed and used women and sex as a way to get loose and limber so he could go out and deal in the nation’s back rooms. But Jonathan really was lanky, loose and good-natured, whether he’d just gotten laid or not.

  They had supper in her mother’s condo, which overlooked a small lake. Her mother served gin and tonics, zucchini squares and sauteed mushrooms. After checking to make sure Jonathan wasn’t a vegetarian, she announced she had medallions of veal waiting on the stove. While she’d been preparing all this, she’d also sold a house that day, to a couple she’d gone up to weeks earlier while they’d been parked outside on the street, going over the listings in the paper with a look she knew well, that doggedly deliberate, one-listing-at-a-time look before panic sets in, and she’d said, “Come inside.”

  Nothing extraordinary—they’d settled for a modest Tudor-framed house on an untrafficked street, a house that needed some work. Everyone settled sooner or later. The agent’s job is to take the dream house they have in their heads and deconstruct it until it resembles something they might actually find on the ground. The good agent is the house-buyer’s guide back to reality. You bring them back too quickly and they’ll decompress.

  Annie had heard it all before—her mother’s real estate agent philosophy, really her philosophy for life. Jonathan hadn’t. He urged her to go on, and she didn’t mind regaling him with a few stories. She was dressed in a lime-colored gown that Annie hadn’t seen before, ample and elegant, whose neckline framed a necklace of silver dangles set with iridescent rhinestones. Her hair was teased and looked freshly frosted. Jonathan wore his tan blazer and one of those light-colored shirts with the long V collar that had been recycled from the ’40s or ’50s. Annie liked them. She liked the way they parted, as if they were inviting you to peel them off. They revealed a tuft of chest hair, not too hairy and not too dark.

  She wore jeans and a blouse of no particular style and no particular date. She’d showered, and when the time had come to spray on perfume, she hadn’t. She smelled her mother’s perfume, essence of rose, and Jonathan’s seafaring cologne; she smelled the toasted zucchini squares and the sauteed mushrooms, the gin and the effervescing tonic, the water below them, not too fresh and even fishy on a given breeze, the mud beneath the grassy banks, the metallic exhaust of air-conditioning units down on the ground. She could break it all down—the peepers peeped, the frogs croaked and split-tailed swallows made strafing runs at the insects hovering just over the water, tipping the surface with their wings. Breaking it down was easy.

  “My favorite sale of all time?”

  Her mother launched into the tallest of her tales, the story of a man she delighted in calling Mr. Maverick, the orneriest hombre in town. Maverick had a house out in a forest, a house he’d built with his own hands, and when the time came to sell it so he could move to Arizona and build another house—of cactus, she supposed—he made a big deal of it: seller to buyer, straight stuff, no sticky-fingered middlemen. He put an ad in the paper that sounded like a citizen’s revolt. Real estate agents were no better than government officials, tax collectors, parasites of the worst sort. Weeks passed, months, without a sale, and finally Maverick had to eat humble pie. He called her mother, who was instructed to come out under cover of night to hear what he had to say.

  Her fearless mother. She pretty much was. Next came the geese.

  “. . . enormous geese. I had never seen geese that big—big enough that when they stretched their necks they were looking at you eyeball to eyeball where you sat in the car—and they were fierce. Geese make great watch-dogs. Did you know that, Jonathan? I didn’t. They have this horrible hissing honk. Just like our man to have killer geese instead of killer dogs. I had to sit in the car and wait until he came out and ran them off. Geese went with the pond—they wouldn’t make it in Arizona—pond with the house. Maverick had this proposition to make, and if I’d swear not to breathe a word he’d make it to me. If I didn’t swear he’d call back his geese. Did I want some time to think it over?”

  A strategic pause. Her mother would be right back after she’d checked on the veal.

  Just for the record, Annie said, “You don’t know how many times I’ve heard this story. Want me to tell you how it ends?”

  “You do and I may never speak to you again.”

  “Promise?”

&n
bsp; “Your mom’s one of a kind.”

  “No one like her in Boston?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Exotic?”

  “Just a little bit larger than life.”

  “A little bit?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “How can you be ‘a little bit’ larger than life? Once you’re larger, how can you even measure? Measuring is for people who are not quite larger than life. Extra, extra large and all the way down to petite.”

  “C’mon.”

  “Just find some other way to describe her.”

  “Bighearted.”

  “Sounds small.”

  “Hasn’t she been a good mom to you . . . after all that’s happened?”

  This last Jonathan added hesitantly, and she knew if he could he would take it back. What did he know about all that had happened? Terrorists kill your sister half a world away for reasons that will never make sense to you, because you haven’t been there, you haven’t lived through it, and you’re left with a loss, a subtraction of one, an abstracted life. Your parents’ marriage enters that world of abstraction, and it’s gone too. Then you enter it.

  When the story resumed, real estate agent Gail Williamson accompanied the forbidding Mr. Maverick back into his house, and quite a house it was. There was a three-sided loft around the living room. There were built-in bookshelves, verandas and private decks off bedrooms. The dining area with its exposed columns and beams was charming. Maverick had taste. Flowers were on the table and prints and paintings on the walls. It quickly became clear to her: rough-hewn, fine-hewn, Mr. Maverick was more than one man. Prospective buyers couldn’t get a fix on him and, smelling a rat and risking the geese, they fled. Whereas she stayed and staked her claim.