Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Jeremy announced the problem by asking, “What do we do tomorrow?”

Harriet kicked her way out of bed and walked over to the television, on top of which she had placed a guide to the Southwest. “Well,” she said, opening it up, “there are sights around here. We haven’t been into the mountains north of here. There’s a Kiowa Indian pueblo just a mile away. There’s a place called Arroyo Seco near here and—”

“What’s that?”

“It means Dry Gulch.” She waited. “There’s the Taos Gorge Bridge.” Jeremy shook his head quickly. “The D. H. Lawrence shrine is thirty minutes from here, and so is the Millicent A. Rogers Memorial Museum. There are, it says here, some trout streams. If it were winter, we could go skiing.”

“It’s summer,” Jeremy said, closing his eyes and pulling the sheet up. “We can’t ski. What about this shrine?”

She put the book on the bed near Jeremy and read the entry. “It says that Lawrence lived for eighteen months up there, and they’ve preserved his ranch. When he died, they brought his ashes back and there’s a shrine or something. They call it a shrine. I’m only telling you what the book says.”

“D. H. Lawrence?” Jeremy asked sleepily.

“You know,” Harriet said. “ Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ”

“Yes, I know.” He smiled. “It wasn’t the books I was asking about, it was the quality of the books, and therefore the necessity of making the trip.”

“All I know is that it’s visitable,” she said, “and it’s off State Highway Three, and it’s something to do.”

“Okay. I don’t care what damn highway it’s on,” Jeremy said, reaching for the book and throwing it across the room. “Let’s at least get into the car and go somewhere.”

After breakfast they drove in the rental car out of town toward the Taos ski valley. They reached it after driving up fifteen miles of winding road through the mountains, following a stream of snow runoff, along which they counted a dozen fishermen. When they reached the valley, they admired the Sangre de Cristo Mountains but agreed it was summer and there was nothing to do in such a place. Neither blamed the other for acting upon an unproductive idea. They returned to the car and retraced their steps to the highway, which they followed for another fifteen miles until they reached the turn for the D. H. Lawrence shrine on Kiowa Ranch Road. Jeremy stopped the car on the shoulder. “Well?” he asked.

“Why do we have to decide about everything?” Harriet said, looking straight ahead. “Why can’t we just do it?”

He accelerated up the unpaved road, which climbed toward a plateau hidden in the mountains. They passed several farms where cattle were grazing on the thin grasses. The light made the land look varnished; even with sunglasses, Harriet squinted at the shimmering heat waves rising from the gravel.

Jeremy said, “What’s here?”

“I told you. Anyhow, the description isn’t much good. We’ll find out. Maybe they’ll have a tour of his inner sanctum or have his Nobel Prize up in a frame. The book says they have his actual typewriter.”

Jeremy coughed. “He never won the Nobel Prize.” Harriet looked over at him and noticed that his face was losing its internal structure and becoming puffy. Grief had added five years to his appearance. She saw, with disbelief, a new crease on his neck. Turning away, she glanced up at the sky: a hawk, cirrus clouds. The air conditioner was blowing a stream of cool air on her knees. Her gums ached.

“Only two more miles,” Jeremy said, beginning now to hunch over the wheel slightly.

“I don’t like this draft,” she said, reaching over to snap off the air conditioner. She cranked down the window and let the breeze tangle her hair. They were still going uphill and had reached, a sign said, an elevation of nine thousand feet. Jeremy hummed Martian jazz as he drove, tapping the steering wheel. The little dirt road went past an open gate, then cut in two, one fork going toward a conference center indicated by a road marker, the other toward the house and shrine. They came to a clearing. In front of them stood a two-story house looking a bit like an English country cottage, surrounded by a white picket fence, with a tire swing in the backyard, beyond which two horses were grazing. They were alone: there were no other cars in sight. Jeremy went up to the door of the house and knocked. A dog began barking angrily from inside, as if the knocks had interrupted its nap. “Look at this,” Harriet said.

She had walked a few steps and was looking in the direction they had come from; in the clear air they could see down the mountain and across the valley for a distance of fifty miles or so. “It’s beautiful,” she said. Jeremy appeared from behind her, shielding his eyes although the sun was behind him. “What’re you doing that for?” she asked.

“You have dark glasses. I don’t.”

“Where’s the shrine?” she asked. “I don’t see it anywhere.”

“You have to turn around. Look.” He pointed to the picket fence. At its north corner there was a sign that Harriet had missed.

SHRINE

“That’s very quaint,” she said. “And what’s this?” She walked toward the fence and picked a child’s mitten off one of the posts. Mickey Mouse’s face was printed on the front of the mitten, and one of his arms reached up over the thumb. She began laughing. “It doesn’t say anything about Mickey Mouse in Fodor’s . Do you think he’s part of the shrine?”

Jeremy didn’t answer. He had already started out ahead of her on a path indicated by the black pointing finger. Harriet followed him, panting from the altitude and the blistering heat, feeling her back begin to sweat as the light rained down on it. She felt the light on her legs and inside her head, on her eardrums. The path turned to the right and began a series of narrowing zigzags going up the side of a hill at the top of which stood the shrine, a small white boxlike building that, as they approached it, resembled a chapel, a mausoleum, or both. A granite phoenix glowered at the apex of the roof.

“The door’s open,” Jeremy said, twenty feet ahead of her, “and nobody’s here.” He was wearing heavy jeans, and his blue shirt was soaked with two wings of sweat. Harriet could hear the rhythmic pant of his breathing.

“Are there snakes out here?” she asked. “I hate snakes.”

“Not in the shrine,” he said. “I don’t see any.”

“What do you see?”

“A visitors’ register.” He had reached the door and had stepped inside. Then he came back out.

She was still ten feet away. “There must be more. You can’t have a shrine without something in it.”

“Well, there’s this white thing outside,” he said breathlessly. “Looks like a burial stone.” She was now standing next to him. “Yes. This is where his wife is buried.” They both looked at it. A small picture of Frieda was bolted into the stone.

“Well,” Jeremy said, “now for the shrine.” They shuffled inside. At the back was a small stained-glass window, a representation of the sun, thick literalized rays burning out from its center. To their left the visitors’ register lay open on a high desk, and above it in a display case three graying documents asserted that the ashes stored here were authentically those of D. H. Lawrence, the author. The chapel’s interior smelled of sage and cement. At the far side of the shrine, six feet away, was a roped-off area, and at the back an approximation of an altar, at whose base was a granite block with the letters DHL carved on it. “This is it?” Jeremy asked. “No wonder no one’s here.”