him for a while about a woman out walking with her five-year-old daughter who was identified as a disaffected ETA activist and was gunned down by her erstwhile comrades, with her daughter looking on. That image stuck with him for a while; then he forgot it too. He assumed the people who had killed that woman and bombed that supermarket and the people who’d opposed Franco and to whose cause he’d once thrilled were not the same.
The truth was, he forgot them all. He didn’t know if ETA had succeeded in its intentions or not. Or if it had gotten the best deal it could and, like everybody else in this impure world, had compromised.
He was in his midforties and felt older than that.
He had not lacked for money, not really. He’d made modest amounts of it buying and selling properties of diverse sorts. He’d been consulted. Without having a real specialty, certainly not a profession, he’d been a conduit; things had flowed through him. His father had built up the family fortune with a road construction company, which he, Ben Williamson, except for one summer spent shoveling blacktop, had never taken part in. But when his father died in his midsixties of a well-deserved heart attack, Ben’s mother, instead of selling the business as she’d been expected to do, hung on to it, hired a manager she could trust and watched it prosper.
No one had thought she could do it. She had been known as the heart of the party. She was the woman who gathered all the other partygoers around the piano and made them sing. On those midweek evenings when the next party was still days away, she might run through a few chords on the piano, and, regardless of where Ben was in the house, those chords were as good as a summons. They sang songs of a deep dark yearning—“When day is done and shadows fall I think of you”—and they sang twilit songs with a melancholy lilt—“We were sailing along, on Moonlight Bay”—and they sang songs to make your foot tap—“Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.” Some nights they sang through the songbook, and on some songs his mother might break away and sing harmony to her son’s melody. It was always a thrilling moment because he never knew when she was going to do it. The effect was as though he suddenly had another person sitting at his side, someone keeping pace with him but hanging just out of his reach, a potential match when the distance closed and the two voices sounded as one; someone who was no longer a mother.
“We could make believe I loved you. We could make believe that you loved me.”
He was young when she first sat him down on the piano bench and taught him these songs. How young? He sang with her before his voice changed, and he sang with her later when his voice had dropped an octave. Her voice was narrow in its range, and there were times he was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hit a high note, that the song would shatter and it would all end. He dreaded singing “Indian Love Song” for that reason. There was a high yodeling note she could reach but, he worried, wouldn’t be able to sustain— “I’ll be calling you . . . oo . . . oo . . .” She insisted they sing it too, he taking the Nelson Eddy part, she the Jeanette McDonald. That he and his mother would be calling their love back and forth to each other, as though from mountaintop to mountaintop, didn’t embarrass him. His father might be reading the evening paper in his living room easy chair, and he might give his paper a crackling snap. Upstairs, his older brother might slam a door. Their mocking disapproval didn’t bother him. He was afraid his mother’s quavering voice in that upper register might come apart. He was afraid there would be a final croaking note, and then she would fold up the sheet music, close the songbook, and bring the piano top down. It would be over.
His father died when, hands on, he was unable to open a tar-stuck valve on an asphalt spreader down at the yard and his heart exploded in his chest. His brother he rarely saw. Charley had gone west to college, caught the current of things out there, and made his fortune being a Californian. His mother made a go of the business and succeeded to a degree her husband hadn’t. And when her sense of things told her the times were about to turn, she sold the business for a handsome price. Then after informing her older and never unsuccessful son what she was going to do, she gave Ben, her companion in song, a significant part of that handsome sum. Outright. He immediately called Charley, and Charley laughed his qualms away. Charley said he’d earned it. All his mother really said was that he’d spent too many years bouncing around from job to job. She knew he wasn’t poor, but here was enough money to allow him to do what he really wanted to.
Which was?
To “stagnate,” his ex-wife would claim. It was her favorite word. She gave to its pronunciation a sort of bog-like gloom. With enough money Ben Williamson would become a bog unto himself. Give him some more and that bog would become quicksand.
His mother died a year after Michelle was killed. She too from a heart attack, also without warning, while she was having her morning coffee. She’d had no history of heart trouble. She couldn’t have been expecting it. Nonetheless, she’d had the presence of mind, as her body failed her, to place her coffee cup back in its saucer and move her breakfast plate aside before lowering her head to the table. She’d been alone. A friend who’d found her told him that she had died with her eyes sweetly shut and a smile on her face. He doubted the smile. His mother must have experienced a wrenching pain in her chest, but by the time he had driven there—a distance of over one hundred miles—the mortician had already gotten his hands on her and Ben didn’t know what with her parting expression she’d been trying to say.
He took his ex-wife’s point. She talked of a bog; he could feel himself going vague. He had a special sense for the mystery of things, but he was too soon overwhelmed. Defending himself, he could say the mystery was not supposed to be explained away. He could accuse not himself but those songs—the stardust of those songs. Smoke was supposed to get in your eyes. By nature, some things were unfathomable: “How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?”
But he lacked lasting power, a fierce finishing attention, the knack of knowing when he was about to betray himself.
With money his mother had given him, he’d sent his older daughter to Spain, assuming that a group of Basque men and women once implacably opposed to all things Spanish no longer was. He’d lost sight of them. His attention had wandered. They’d become part of his blur. They didn’t exist.
Too late, the books told him otherwise. He read squeezed into a student’s carrel in his daughter’s university. These carrels were reserved, and more than once he believed the student whose carrel he occupied had come and gone, preferring to study elsewhere rather than embarrass him. Whoever she was, she was a reader of Romantic poetry, for those were the books lined up on the shelf over the desk. He had been taught Romantic poetry in high school by a woman who had scanned every poem to death. He remembered the daffodils, of course, and a poet who wandered lonely as a cloud. And a single line: “I have been half in love with easeful Death.” He didn’t know who had written that, but, in its quiet candor, it was like the most intimate of whispers in his ear. It didn’t matter who had written it. An English Romantic poet had, and all English Romantic poets, he knew, had died young.
Michelle had just turned twenty-one. She had wanted to improve her Spanish. She had wanted to concentrate on international relations. She would have gone to Spain even if he’d sat her down and forced her to read every word in the books he’d come to two years and eight months too late.
In the ultimate analysis, ETA’s quest no longer corresponded to political realities but to psychological needs. A Basque’s need for a grievance was as elemental as his need for water and air. The psychological gave way to the spiritual, the mystical: there was, it was claimed, a sacramental side to ETA’s violence. In addition to provoking the average man’s outrage, each death achieved a moment’s transcendence. All the deaths together aspired to some sort of collective transcendence there on a Basque mountaintop. They expressed a violent yearning for God.
Ben had read that.
That massive
