Charles Baxter: Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

He took a leave from the bank and stayed with his mother in Grosse Pointe Shores for two weeks, where he tried to get used to the shock of his brother’s and sister-in-law’s deaths and to having Gregory around all the time. Burrage was terrified by every minute of his entire future earthly life. For his part, Gregory went back to sucking his thumb and sat slumped in front of the television set all day, crying in the evening when the children’s programming ended. At times he fell asleep during Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and emitted tiny snores. After Burrage had finally taken all of his nephew’s toys over to his condominium in Ann Arbor, he moved Gregory out of his mother’s home and into his. Six months later Burrage’s mother sold her house and moved to Arizona, obviously dazed but not yet incompetent.

After a few weeks, Gregory stopped asking when his mommy and daddy were coming back, but he became more interested in television than ever, especially cartoons and broadcasts of church services. He explained to Burrage that people prayed on television, and he wanted to know how it was done. This request was the first one he had made to Burrage that did not have to do with getting dressed, going to the bathroom, or eating a meal. Burrage hadn’t been brought up in a religious household, didn’t know anything about prayers, and said so.

“I want to know how,” Gregory said. “They all do it on TV. What do I do?”

“I don’t know,” Burrage told him. “But try this: kneel beside the bed at night and put your head down and close your eyes. Think of what you’re happy about. Then think about the things you want. That’s what people usually do when they pray.” He stopped and waited. Then he asked, “Why do you want to start doing something like this?”

“It might help,” Gregory said.

In this way, Burrage hit on the idea of astrology and horoscopes. He had noticed, at a time when he thought they had nothing in common, that Gregory’s birthday and his own were both in May, making them Taureans. One night, while Gregory was curled at his end of the sofa watching television and he himself was reading the paper, he found an astrology column and read the entry for Taureans aloud: “Show greater confidence in yourself and others will pay more attention to your ideas and comments. You cannot handle a project all alone. Share the work — and the glory.” At first Gregory said nothing, as if he hadn’t heard, but then he turned to Burrage and asked, “What’s that?”

Burrage explained that it was his fortune for tomorrow, and that the woman who wrote it was a kind of fortune-teller, and people believed that she could see into the future and tell what was about to happen before it actually happened.

“How?” Gregory asked. “How does she know?”

“It’s called astrology,” Burrage said. “It’s based on the stars and the planets. People think the planets have mysterious forces. They cause things. This says you should share your games at school tomorrow and be nice and not hog everything and not be afraid. Mostly it says not to be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid,” Gregory said, his eyes on the television.

“I know you’re not. But here it says that the stars will help you out not being afraid.”

“Okay,” Gregory said.

In Ann Arbor, a bookish town, Burrage had no trouble finding a paperback guide to astrology. The one he chose had a bloated, menacing star on the cover, either a red giant or an arcane symbol of some sort. At the cash register he felt quite sheepish, as if he had emotional difficulties that he was trying to cure by himself, but the clerk didn’t seem to care very much about what books he bought. He took the book to his car, drove to the nursery school, picked up Gregory, and went home. That night, after Gregory was asleep, he read the book straight through, dismayed by its complexity. Casting Gregory’s horoscope would take some time. He took fifteen minutes off from his lunch break at the bank the next day to read relevant sections of the book, which he had brought along in his briefcase, and the next night he began to put Gregory’s horoscope together at the kitchen table.

Sun in Taurus: constructive, practical, down-to-earth. Burrage marked down Gregory’s Earth sign, appropriate for farmers and others with persistence and domestic virtues. Hitler, the book informed him, had been a Taurus, as was Walt Whitman. Discouraged, he read on. At his birth, Gregory’s moon was in Cancer: “You may have a strong bond with your mother. You are good at camouflage. You excel at impersonations.” Ascendant or rising sign: Gemini. “Gemini ascending has special problems with bankers and clergymen.” Burrage read this sentence again. “ Gemini ascending has special problems with bankers and clergymen. ” He continued on. “You may hold several jobs at one time. You may well be divorced. You may lose your children.” Burrage could not get Gregory’s sign for Mercury; the procedure was too complicated. He paged through the book for Gregory’s Venus sign, which was also Gemini. “Venus in Gemini makes you pleasant, sociable, and relaxed.” The rest of the description applied only to adults. As for Mars, at Gregory’s birth, it had been in Leo: “You are friendly. But you tend to be self-centered and see most events in your own terms. You may have a habit of blowing small things out of proportion.”

“What’s that?” A voice out of nowhere came from behind Burrage. He turned around and saw Mrs. Schultz looking over his shoulder at the horoscope he was constructing. She was carrying a pair of garden clippers, their blades caked with dirt.

“Mrs. Schultz! This is a horoscope. How did you get in?”

“I was tending to things. I thought this was my house. Your front door was unlocked, and so I came in. I get confused in this place because all these damn-fool buildings look alike.” She gazed down at the table with an expression of pained amusement. “A horoscope? I thought you were a grown-up.”

“I am a grown-up. I’m using it for Gregory. He needs it.”

The noise Mrs. Schultz made could have been throat-clearing, laughter, or a cough. Burrage decided that he would not ask which one it was. “In that case,” she said, “I won’t stay. I’m going home, and you don’t have to help me this time. I’ll find my way by myself, without a horoscope. What’s that music I hear? Glenn Miller. Well, that puts me back into the bloom of youth.” She did not shuffle out but picked up her feet ostentatiously. Burrage watched her disappear down the hall and go out the front door, which she left open. He went back to work.

Burrage’s composite horoscope for Gregory presented his nephew as a rather shaky and split character with extraordinary requirements for domestic stability. The planetary signs, however, were somewhat obtuse when they were not contradictory, so Burrage decided to change them, to revise the sky. Where there was weakness, Burrage inserted strength. Where he found indecision or calamity, he substituted resolve and good fortune. In place of trauma and loss he wrote down words like “luck” and “intelligence.” This, he thought at first, would invalidate the horoscope, but he decided that if the planets had real influence, then they were influencing him now to alter Gregory’s life-plan. It was their wish.

He put up Gregory’s planetary wheel on the refrigerator door. Above the wheel he wrote down Gregory’s virtue-words in blue and yellow crayon. For the next week, he explained the chart to Gregory and told him what the planets said he would be like. He explained what all the words were and what they meant. At first Gregory was silent about all this, but one morning he asked Burrage if he could take his horoscope to school. Given permission, he put the chart in his Lone Ranger lunchbox. That afternoon, when he got into the car, he said that most of the other kids wanted Burrage to make up their horoscopes but that the only one he really had to do was Magda Brodsky’s.