Annie to lash out.
“That’s just you! That’s just something you like to hear yourself say!”
Still savoring her pleasure, Michelle said, “I didn’t say it. Mother did. Mother was ready to stop with me, but Dad talked her into having you, just in case.” Then Michelle turned to her closet and ran her hand along her clothes. “There’s nothing in here that fits a backup daughter. Try the Salvation Army or someplace like that.”
Annie didn’t doubt that the phrase originated with her mother. She could hear her mother saying it now. Michelle could be forgiven, at that uncaring age when she could be expected to latch on to anything with an authoritative ring. But the sentiment Annie recognized as coming from her father, the foreboding. The world could crush you—an Old World cornice or a New World oak—and suddenly you would have nothing left. He no longer had Michelle, and he no longer had his wife. He had her, Annie, his backup.
He would not have put it that way. He would have said, Please, give me more life.
A book bag hit the dirt beside her. “It’s been realpolitik from the start. If students in the ’60s had known anything about American history they wouldn’t have felt so disillusioned.”
“Saltonberg?” she said.
“You left before he got to the good stuff. If we’re good at getting our innocence crushed, it’s because we defend our ignorance like nobody else.”
“I’ve heard it all before.”
“Carolyn . . . whatever her name is, the blond that sits on the front row . . . hadn’t heard it. She took offense. She took offense ‘mightily.’” With his Tennessee accent, he gave to the word a deep oratorical roll. This was her friend Chad, whose last name she couldn’t remember, so she called him Chad the Volunteer. “And Saltonberg told her she was proving his thesis for him, like any good American she was defending her ignorance, and he asked her if she would mind standing as his example. You didn’t see her come storming out?”
“Wanna get something to eat?” Annie said.
They crossed back over the gorge to Collegetown. She had a bagel with cream cheese and a carton of some juice mixture. While she ate, she got Chad to tell her about his town, Murfreesboro, and about his family. His father sold Buicks in town and had had the foresight to grab the Honda franchise when that was tantamount to desecrating the American flag. Thanks to Hondas—who bought Buicks anymore?—Chad was able to get out of town and come to this elite spot. Laughter. No sisters? No, a spoiled little brother and the mother who spoiled him. Scandals? Not really. A cousin who was gay. During a summer visit he’d come on to Chad, and Chad had let him. Really? Yeah, Chad had always liked him, and to be frank, he wasn’t exactly sure what it was they did. A single laugh. Really? No shit? Chad was young at the time. He was young now. Blow job, what did it mean? She sized him up. He was smart, clear-eyed, a face of such balanced proportions it’d be easy to draw, a shock of light brown hair on his forehead, unhidden, she decided. To top it off, a voice from home. Did he like it? He was amazed to see his cousin rooting down there, too amazed to get hard, much less to come.
And she was amazed to hear him go on like this. Southern boys didn’t talk about sex as freely as Northern boys did. She had her mouth open on a single soundless laugh. “Wild,” she said, and discovered she had put her hand on his leg under the table. When had she done that? And when had she reached up high enough to feel him go hard down a pants leg? But that was where she found her hand. Amazing. As if she were rewarding the loyalty of the family dog, she patted him there. Thanks for cutting a class. For coming to lunch with her. For telling her his stories. Out on the street, he wanted to take her to his apartment, which wasn’t far away. She followed him there. She’d begun to feel ghosted and guided by a not unfriendly intelligence, and she was curious to see where it took her, of the array of possibilities, which were the ones she had in store. It crossed her mind that if she wanted to conjure up her father after more than a month’s absence, this might be a way. Over there, across the street. Under that tree. Inside that doorway.
It was noon. It didn’t matter. She’d draw him out of hiding. He was in the closet. Under the bed. Behind the bedroom door. Having been warned, her mother wouldn’t call.
III
Sabino Arana—a mysterious man. He’d been jailed by the Spanish government, charged with sending a letter of congratulations to Theodore Roosevelt for liberating the Cuban slaves from their Spanish masters. He considered Spaniards lazy, violent and drunken, a threat to the purity of any people they came into contact with; the Catalans, who, like the Basques, languished under Madrid’s rule, he considered godless. Arana himself was a devout Catholic, a sort of neo-Carlist. He espoused nonviolence. He believed the Basques were God’s chosen people and that their language was the language spoken in Eden before the fall.
They had been granted a “collective nobility” long ago; that meant, to a man, in their mountain strongholds, the Basques were a noble race. The fact that that title had been bestowed on them by a Castilian king for their defense of the Spanish realm didn’t bother Arana. Occasionally Castilian kings could be made to see the light. The Moors had never penetrated the Basque country; no Jews had. They had a blood that wouldn’t mix. A language only they could speak. The young men banded together and made periodic retreats to the mountaintops overlooking their towns. There they held their virile exercises and communed with God.
Searching for a face, Ben Williamson remembered Arana, a mystic, a holy fool, but a politician too and the founder of the largest political party in the Basque country. A pacifist. A fascist, if there ever was one.
He had not seen a face. College texts drawn off the shelves rarely contained photographs.
Basques were said to have a special cranial formation, and, it was true, a certain rare blood type. They were all black-haired, black-browed, with deep-set eyes and pronounced jaws. That was not a face.
When Franco rose it was to liberate Spain from the atheists, ideologues, soulless state planners. Yet he bombed the Basques savagely. Hermann Goering wanted to give his Luftwaffe a trial run before Germany attacked Britain and the rest of Europe; Franco pointed to a small Basque town and said, “There. It shall be a lesson to separatists. In its ruins, their shrine. You have my permission to make it disappear.” Guernica.
Ben had seen the painting. He had stood before it in the Museum of Modern Art. At the time it was an obligatory stop on his tour of the city. He’d come with his wife and two girls, when they were small. Yet only he had felt obliged. The museum guide had explained that the painting was to remain here, in the land of the free, until real freedom was restored in Spain. He remembered the guide’s almost quipping and partisan aside: since Spain had never been a free country, it was hard to imagine just what Picasso had had in mind. And too late to ask him since the exiled Spanish master had recently died. The chances were Guernica would be here in MOMA for years to come.
After the great visceral howl that came off the painting had died down, what Ben remembered was its playfulness. He would not remember it being painted in blacks and whites and grays. He would swear it was painted in the primary colors of a child.
ETA was born when the commander of the Allied forces that had rid the rest of the continent of fascism, but had failed to do so in Spain, came to Madrid to extend an approving hand to Franco in his stand against communism. Ben didn’t remember this. He was far too young. He didn’t really remember Ike, except as a sort of cloudy grandfatherly visage hovering over the country during the first years of Ben’s life. Ike came and shook Franco’s hand, and separatist Basques, who had been waiting for years for the Allied hero to give them their D-Day, split from the dominant nationalist party and became an armed insurgency.
He had read that and had no reason to doubt it. Nineteen fifty-nine. In that year, that cloudy grandfatherly visage had looked down on his daughter. But a cloudy grandfatherly visage was not a face.
The books agreed that Franco had used the Basques to set the rest of Spain an example. The Galicians, the Valencians, the Mallorcans, the Canary Islanders, the