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 Michelle 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!
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
