Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Aunt Margaret turned out to be wrong about Camille, who was not a sentimentalist after all. I met her for the first time at the memorial service five years after she and my cousin Brantford had become a couple. By then, she and Brantford had had a son, Robert, and my cousin had ended his life by stepping out into an intersection into the path of an oncoming taxi at the corner of Park Avenue and Eighty-second Street. If he couldn’t live in that neighborhood, he could at least die there. He suffered a ruptured spleen, and his heart stopped before they admitted him to the ER. He had entered that intersection against a red light — it was unclear whether he had been careless or suicidal, but it was midday and my cousin was accustomed to city traffic. Well. You always want to reserve judgment, but the blood analysis showed that he had been sober. I wish he had been drunk. We could have blamed it on that, and it would have been a kind of consolation.

One witness reported that Brantford had rushed onto Park Avenue to rescue a dog that had been running south. Maybe that was it.

In the months before his death, he had found a job working in the produce department at a grocery. When he couldn’t manage the tasks that he considered beneath him — stacking the pears and lining up the tomatoes — he took a position as a clerk behind the counter at a pet food store on Avenue B. A name tag dangled from his shirt. He told me by telephone that he hated that anyone coming into the store could find out his first name and then use it. That offended him. But he loved that store and could have worked there forever if it hadn’t gone out of business. After that, he worked briefly at a collection agency making phone calls to deadbeats. He edited one issue of a humorous Web literary magazine entitled The Potboiler . What Brantford had expected from life and what it had actually given him must have been so distinct and so dissonant that he probably felt his dignity dropping away little by little until he simply wasn’t himself anymore. He didn’t seem to be anybody and he had no resources of humility to turn that nothingness into a refuge. He and Camille lived in a cluttered little walk-up in Brooklyn. I think he must have felt quietly panic-stricken, him and his animals. Time was going to run out on all of them. There would be no more fixes.

I wanted to help him — he was almost a model for me, but not quite — but I didn’t know how to exercise compassion with him, or how to express the pity that Aunt Margaret said I shouldn’t feel. I think my example sometimes goaded him into despair, as did his furred and feathered patients, who couldn’t stand life without him.

At the memorial service, Camille carried the baby in a front pack, and she walked through the doors of the church in a blast of sunlight that seemed to cascade around her and then to advance before her as she proceeded up the aisle. Sunlight from the stained-glass windows caught her in momentary droplets and parallelograms of blues and reds. When she reached the first pew, she projected the tender, brave dignity of a woman on whom too many burdens have been placed too quickly.

Afterward, following the eulogies and the hymns, Camille and I stood out on the lawn. Aunt Margaret, with whom I had been sitting, had gone back to her apartment in a hired car. Camille had seemed surprised by me and had given me an astonished look when I approached her, my hand out.

“Ah, it’s you,” she said. “The cousin. I wondered if you’d come.”

I gave her a hug.

“Sorry,” she said, tearfully grinning. “You startled me. You’re family, and your face is a little like Branty’s. You have the same cheerful scowl, you two.” She lifted baby Robert, who had been crying, out of the front pack, opened her blouse, drew back her bra, and set the baby there to nurse. “Why didn’t you ever come to see us?” she asked me, fixing me with a steady expression of wonderment as she nursed the baby. “He loved you. He said so. He called you Bunny. Just like one of his animals.”

“Yes. I didn’t think … I don’t think that Brantford wanted me to see him,” I said. “And it was always like a zoo, wherever he was.”

“That’s unkind. We had to give the animals away, back to the official rescuers. It was not like a zoo. Zoos are noisy. The inmates don’t want to be there. Brantford’s creatures loved him and kept still if he wanted them to be. Why’d you say that? I’m sure he invited you over whenever you were in town.”

She looked at me with an expression of honesty, solemn and accusing. I said, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

“Yes. It’s always a beautiful day. That’s not the subject.”

I had the feeling that I would never have a normal conversation with this woman. “You were so good for him,” I blurted out, and her expression did not change. “But you should have seen through him. He must have wanted to keep you for himself and his birds and cats and dogs. You were his last precious possession. And, no, he really didn’t invite me to meet you. Something happened to him,” I said, a bit manically. “He turned into something he hadn’t been. Maybe that was it. Being poor.”

“Oh,” she said, after turning back toward me and sizing me up, “ poor . Well. We liked being poor. It was sort of Buddhist. It was harder for him than for me. We lived as a family, I’ll say that. And I loved him. He was a sweetie, and very devoted to me and Robert and his animals.” She hoisted the baby and burped him. “He had a very old soul. He wasn’t a suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you all right?”

“Why?”

“You look like you’re going to faint.”

“Oh, I’m managing,” I said. In truth, my head felt as if the late-afternoon sunlight were going right through the skull bones with ease, soaking the gray matter with photons. “Listen,” I asked her, “do you want to go for a drink?”

“I can’t drink,” she said. “I’m nursing. And you’re married, and you have children.” How old-fashioned she was! I decided to press forward anyway.

“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s have coffee.”

There is a peculiar lull that takes over New York in early afternoon, around two thirty. In the neighborhood coffee shops, the city’s initial morning energy drains out and a pleasant tedium, a trance, holds sway for a few minutes. In any other civilized urban setting, the people would be taking siestas. Here, voices grow subdued and gestures remain incomplete. You lean back in your chair to watch the vapor trails aimed toward LaGuardia or Newark, and for once no one calls you, there is nothing to do. Radios are tuned to baseball, and conversations stop as you drift off to imagine the runner on second, edging toward third. Camille and I went into a little greasy spoon called Here to Eat and sat down at a table near the front window. The cook stared out at the blurring sidewalk, his eyelids heavy. He seemed massively indifferent to our presence and our general needs. The server barely noticed that we were there. She sat at one of the counter stools working on a crossword. No one even looked up.

Eventually the server brought us two cups of stale, burned coffee.

“At last,” I said. “I thought it’d never come.”

The baby was asleep in the crook of Camille’s right arm. After a few minutes of pleasantries, Camille asked me, “So. Why are you here?”

“Why am I here? I’m here because of Brantford. For his memory. We were always close.”

“You were?” she said.

“I thought so,” I replied.

Her face, I now noticed, had the roundedness that women’s faces acquire after childbirth. Errant bangs fell over her forehead, and she blew a stream of air upward toward them. She gave me a straight look. “He talked about you as his long-lost brother, the one who never came to see him.”