Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Late summer evening, and Estelle sat watching Randall cooking the hamburgers and Freddie working on his story. Somewhere in back, the cicadas, harbingers of autumn, were chirring away. Their neighbor Jerry Harponyi, who played cello in the city orchestra, was watering his garden, and when he saw Estelle across his back fence, he raised his hand, still holding the garden hose, to wave. The water gubbled, airborne, in a snakelike line, before falling.

“No, there isn’t,” Randall said. “But let’s not talk about this now. By the way, I’ve drafted about seven of the neighbors to play softball in the park in an hour. And Freddie said he’d join us.”

“Freddie said that?”

“Yes. I used all my persuasive skills.”

“What did you say?” Estelle asked.

“I said it’d be nice if he played.”

“He didn’t object?”

“I just said that it’d be a nice gesture.” Well, Estelle thought, that was Randall, all right: the King of Nice Gestures. “After all, you bought him that baseball bat. And he loves you, you know.”

“Who?”

“Freddie, your grandson.”

“No, he—”

“Of course he does, Stel. Please. You’re the only thing in this world holding him on.” He looked at her with a smile, his face disfigured momentarily by smoke from the grill. “I can’t do it the way you can. You’re his lifeline. Don’t you know that? Can’t you see it?”

Harponyi waved again. “Looking forward to the game!” he shouted, and the water from his hose flung itself out again in patterns in the air.

“Me?”

“Yes, my dear. You. You’re a rock, an anchor. You’re all he’s got. I love you, too, you know, but I’m not desperate. Anyway, you know what position you should play?”

“No,” she said. “First base?” She always liked it when Randall told her he loved her.

“No,” Randall said. “Outfield. You need a rest. You can just stand out there and wait for balls to fall into your glove. Like a nun. Like a little sister of mercy.”

“I’d enjoy that, I think,” Estelle said.

Standing in the outfield, with the sun setting below the park’s trees to the west, Estelle felt the early-evening breezes blowing across her forehead, the same breezes that blew Randall’s hair backward on the pitcher’s mound, so that he looked surprised, or like one of the Three Stooges, she couldn’t remember which one. With grown children of his own, and his own sorrows — his wife had pitched herself through a window eight stories up two months after learning that she had inoperable cancer — Randall had every right to be moody, or grumpy at times. Or just sour. But, no: he was relentless in his cheerfulness. And tiresome, if you didn’t share it. Somehow the tragedies he had lived through hadn’t altered him. They had no relevance to him. There he was. In the fading light, he still gleamed a little.

Randall had just struck out Harponyi, the cellist. The first baseman, a fifteen-year-old from across the street, whistled and cheered. His name was Tommy. He was already chunky with muscle, a real athlete who in a year or two would be playing high-school football, and for a moment Estelle wondered whether it wasn’t a bit unfair to have boys like that playing on their side. But it all balanced out: their second baseman was an office temp who lived down the block and who was, at this very moment, talking on her cell phone, and their shortstop was old Mr. Flannery, a retired social studies teacher who lived on the corner and who looked a bit like Morgan Freeman. He was old but wiry. Freddie, when he came to bat, wouldn’t have a chance if the ball went toward Mr. Flannery.

These are my people, Estelle thought, and bless them all, here in Part Two. Strange how one’s heart could lift sometimes for no particular reason. On the other side of the park, the sounds of the soccer players, their outcries, rose into the air and made their way toward her. A fly buzzed around her head, and she smelled the strangely green smell of the outfield grass. She pounded her fist into the baseball glove, a spare that Randall had found somewhere in the basement.

Freddie was up. He was practice-swinging the bat that Estelle had bought for him that morning. His swings were slow, and even without a ball anywhere near them, they seemed inaccurate, approximate.

Stepping up to the plate, Freddie took one hand off the bat to shade his eyes against the sun. When he saw his grandmother, he waved. Estelle waved back.

Randall’s first pitch hit the ground a few feet in front of Freddie and rolled to the catcher, Tommy’s brother, who threw it back to Randall. “Good eye,” Estelle shouted, and people laughed.

The next pitch went into the strike zone, and Freddie swung at it and missed, by a considerable margin. His physical movements were like those of an underground creature rarely exposed to the light. The umpire, an insurance adjuster who lived with Harponyi, called the first strike.

Freddie took another practice swing.

When Randall threw the next pitch, Estelle could see that it would go into the strike zone and that Freddie would swing at it and connect with it, and when he did, the ball soared up, a high fly, slowly ascending, and as it rose into the air, Freddie headed toward first base, not really looking at where he was going but watching the ball instead and then glancing at his grandmother underneath it. For a brief moment they exchanged glances, Estelle and Freddie, and he seemed to grin; and then the ball began its descent, as Freddie, watching it again, headed toward Tommy, the first baseman, a boy as solid as he, Freddie, was soft. Tommy had taken up a stance and had braced himself with his elbow out, and Estelle saw that when Freddie got there, he would slam into Tommy like an egg thrown into a wall. Estelle tried to shout to Freddie to look where he was going, but her shout caught in her throat out of fear or terror, just before the ball dropped in its leisurely way, with perfect justice, into her outstretched glove.

MY COUSIN BRANTFORD was named for our grandfather, who had made a fortune from a device used in aircraft navigation. I suppose it saved lives. A bad-tempered man with a scar above his cheekbone, my grandfather believed that the rich were rewarded for their merits and the poor deserved what they got. He did not care for his own grandchildren and referred to my cousin as “the little prince.” In all fairness, he didn’t like me, either.

Brantford had roared through his college fund so rapidly that by the age of twenty-three, he was down to pocket change. One bright spring day when I was visiting New York City and had called him up, he insisted on taking me to lunch at a midtown restaurant where the cost of the entrées was so high that a respectful noonday hush hung over the restaurant’s skeletal postmodern interior. Muttering oligarchs with monogrammed shirt cuffs gazed at entering patrons with a languid alertness. The maître d’ wore one of those dark blue restaurant suits, and the wine list had been printed on velvety pages set in a stainless-steel three-ring binder.

By the time my cousin arrived, I had read the menu four times. He was late. You had to know Brantford to get used to him. A friend of mine said that my cousin looked like the mayor of a ruined city. Appearances mattered a great deal to Brantford, but his own were on a gradual slide. His face had a permanent alcoholic flush. His brownish-blond hair was parted on the right side and was too long by a few millimeters, trailing over his collar. Although he was dressed well, in flannel trousers and cordovan shoes, you could see the telltale food stains on his shirt, and the expression underneath his blond mustache had something subtly wrong with it — he smiled with a strangely discouraged affability.