Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Lowering his head and facing the blackboard, Fenstad reviewed problems in logic, following point by point the outline set down by the textbook: post hoc fallacies, false authorities, begging the question, circular reasoning, ad hominem arguments, all the rest. Explaining these problems, his back turned, he heard sighs of boredom, boldly expressed. Occasionally he glanced at the back of the room. His mother was watching him carefully, and her face was expressing all the complexity of dismay. Dismay radiated from her. Her disappointment wasn’t personal, because his mother didn’t think that people as individuals were at fault for what they did. As usual, her disappointed hope was located in history and in the way people agreed with already existing histories.

She was angry with him for collaborating with grammar. She would call it unconsciously installed authority. Then she would find other names for it.

“All right,” he said loudly, trying to make eye contact with someone in the room besides his mother, “let’s try some examples. Can anyone tell me what, if anything, is wrong with the following sentence? ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem.’ ”

The three sanitation workers, in the third row, began to laugh. Fenstad caught himself glowering and singled out the middle one.

“Yes, it is funny, isn’t it?”

The man in the middle smirked and looked at the floor. “I was just thinking of my unique problem.”

“Right,” Fenstad said. “But what’s wrong with saying, ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem’?”

“Solving it?” This was Mrs. Nelson, who sat by the window so that she could gaze at the tree outside, lit by a streetlight. All through class she looked at the tree as if it were a lover.

“Solving what?”

“Solving the problem you have. What is the problem?”

“That’s actually not what I’m getting at,” Fenstad said. “Although it’s a good related point. I’m asking what might be wrong logically with that sentence.”

“It depends,” Harold Ronson said. He worked in a service station and sometimes came to class wearing his work shirt with his name tag, HAROLD, stitched into it. “It depends on what your problem is. You haven’t told us your problem.”

“No,” Fenstad said, “my problem is not the problem.” He thought of Alice in Wonderland and felt, physically, as if he himself were getting small. “Let’s try this again. What might be wrong with saying that most people have a unique problem?”

“You shouldn’t be so critical,” Timothy Melville said. “You should look on the bright side, if possible.”

“What?”

“He’s right,” Mrs. Nelson said. “Most people have unique problems, but many people do their best to help themselves, such as taking night classes or working at meditation.”

“No doubt that’s true,” Fenstad said. “But why can’t most people have a unique problem?”

“Oh, I disagree,” Mrs. Nelson said, still looking at her tree. Fenstad glanced at it and saw that it was crested with snow. It was beautiful. No wonder she looked at it. “I believe that most people do have unique problems. They just shouldn’t talk about them all the time.”

“Can anyone,” Fenstad asked, looking at the back wall and hoping to see something there that was not wall, “can anyone give me an example of a unique problem?”

“Divorce,” Barb Kjellerud said. She sat near the door and knitted during class. She answered questions without looking up. “Divorce is unique.”

“No, it isn’t!” Fenstad said, failing in the crucial moment to control his voice. He and his mother exchanged glances. In his mother’s face for a split second was the history of her compassionate, ambivalent attention to him. “Divorce is not unique.” He waited to calm himself. “It’s everywhere. Now try again. Give me a unique problem.”

Silence. “This is a trick question,” Arlene Fisher said. “I’m sure it’s a trick question.”

“Not necessarily. Does anyone know what ‘unique’ means?”

“One of a kind,” York Follette said, gazing at Fenstad with dry amusement. Sometimes he took pity on Fenstad and helped him out of jams. Fenstad’s mother smiled and nodded.

“Right,” Fenstad crowed, racing toward the blackboard as if he were about to write something. “So let’s try again. Give me a unique problem.”

“You give us a unique problem,” one of the sanitation workers said. Fenstad didn’t know whether he’d been given a statement or a command. He decided to treat it as a command.

“All right,” he said. He stopped and looked down at his shoes. Maybe it was a trick question. He thought for ten seconds. Problem after problem presented itself to him. He thought of poverty, of the assaults on the earth, of the awful complexities of love. “I can’t think of one,” Fenstad said. His hands went into his pockets.

“That’s because problems aren’t personal,” Fenstad’s mother said from the back of the room. “They’re collective.” She waited while several students in the class sat up and nodded. “And people must work together on their solutions.” She talked for another two minutes, taking the subject out of logic and putting it neatly in politics, where she knew it belonged.

The snow had stopped by the time the class was over. Fenstad took his mother’s arm and escorted her to the car. After easing her down on the passenger side and starting the engine, he began to clear the front windshield. He didn’t have a scraper and had forgotten his gloves, so he was using his bare hands. When he brushed the snow away on his mother’s side, she looked out at him, surprised, a terribly aged Sleeping Beauty awakened against her will.

Once the car had warmed up, she was in a gruff mood and repositioned herself under the seat belt while making quiet but aggressive remarks. The sight of the new snow didn’t seem to calm her. “Logic,” she said at last. “That wasn’t logic. Those are just rhetorical tactics. It’s filler and drudgery.”

“I don’t want to discuss it now.”

“All right. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”

They rode together in silence. Then she began to shake her head. “Don’t take me home,” she said. “I want to have a spot of tea somewhere before I go back. A nice place where they serve tea, all right?”

He parked outside an all-night restaurant with huge front plate-glass windows; it was called Country Bob’s. He held his mother’s elbow from the car to the door. At the door, looking back to make sure that he had turned off his headlights, he saw his tracks and his mother’s in the snow. His were separate footprints, but hers formed two long lines.

Inside, at the table, she sipped her tea and gazed at her son for a long time. “Thanks for the adventure, Harry. I do appreciate it. What’re you doing in class next week? Oh, I remember. How-to papers. That should be interesting.”

“Want to come?”

“Very much. I’ll keep quiet next time, if you want me to.”

Fenstad shook his head. “It’s okay. It’s fun having you along. You can say whatever you want. The students loved you. I knew you’d be a sensation, and you were. They’d probably rather have you teaching the class than me.”

He noticed that his mother was watching something going on behind him, and he turned around in the booth so that he could see what it was. At first all he saw was a woman, a young woman with long hair wet from snow and hanging in clumps, talking in the aisle to two young men, both of whom were nodding at her. Then she moved on to the next table. She spoke softly. Fenstad couldn’t hear her words, but he saw the solitary customer to whom she was speaking shake his head once, keeping his eyes down. Then the woman saw Fenstad and his mother. In a moment she was standing in front of them.