Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“What a wonderful class,” Fenstad’s mother said on the way home. “I hope you’re paying attention to what they tell you.”

Fenstad nodded. “Tea?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Where’re you going after you drop me off?”

“Skating,” he said. “I usually go skating. I have a date.”

“With the pharmacist? In the dark?”

“We both like it, Ma.” As he drove, he made an all-purpose gesture. “The moon and the stars,” he said simply.

When he left her off, he felt unsettled. He considered, as a point of courtesy, staying with her a few minutes, but by the time he had this idea he was already away from the building and was headed down the street.

He and Susan were out on the ice together, skating in large circles, when Susan pointed to a solitary figure sitting on a park bench near the lake’s edge. The sky had cleared; the moon gave everything a cold, fine-edged clarity. When Fenstad followed the line of Susan’s finger, he saw at once that the figure on the bench was his mother. He realized it simply because of the way she sat there, drawn into herself, attentive even in the winter dark. He skated through the uncleared snow over the ice until he was standing close enough to speak to her. “Mother,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

She was bundled up, a thick woolen cap drawn over her head and two scarves covering much of her face. He could see little other than the two lenses of her glasses facing him in the dark. “I wanted to see you two,” she told him. “I thought you’d look happy, and you did. I like to watch happiness. I always have.”

“How can you see us? We’re so far away.”

“That’s how I saw you.”

This made no sense to him, so he asked, “How’d you get here?”

“I took a cab. That part was easy.”

“Aren’t you freezing?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m freezing or not.”

He and Susan took her back to her apartment as soon as they could get their boots on. In the car Mrs. Fenstad insisted on asking Susan what kind of safety procedures were used to ensure that drugs weren’t smuggled out of pharmacies and sold illegally, but she didn’t appear to listen to the answer, and by the time they reached her building, she seemed to be falling asleep. They helped her up to her apartment. Susan thought that they should give her a warm bath before putting her into bed, and, together, they did. She did not protest. She didn’t even seem to notice them as they guided her in and out of the bathtub.

Fenstad feared that his mother would catch some lung infection, and it turned out to be bronchitis, which kept her in her apartment for the first three weeks of February, until her cough went down. Fenstad came by every other day to see how she was, and one Tuesday, after work, he went up to her floor and heard piano music: an old recording, which sounded much-played, of the brightest and fastest jazz piano he had ever heard — music of superhuman brilliance. He swung open the door to her apartment and saw York Follette sitting near his mother’s bed. On the bedside table was a small tape player, from which the music poured into the room.

Fenstad’s mother was leaning back against the pillow, smiling, her eyes closed.

Follette turned toward Fenstad. He had been talking softly. He motioned toward the tape machine and said, “Art Tatum. It’s a cut called ‘Battery Bounce.’ Your mother’s never heard it.”

“Jazz, Harry,” Fenstad’s mother said, her eyes still closed, not needing to see her son. “York is explaining to me about Art Tatum and jazz. Next week he’s going to try something more progressive on me.” Now his mother opened her eyes. “Have you ever heard such music before, Harry?”

They were both looking at him. “No,” he said, “I never heard anything like it.”

“This is my unique problem, Harry.” Fenstad’s mother coughed and then waited to recover her breath. “I never heard enough jazz.” She smiled. “What glimpses!” she said at last.

After she recovered, he often found her listening to the tape machine that York Follette had given her. She liked to hear the Oscar Peterson Trio as the sun set and the lights of evening came on. She now often mentioned glimpses. Back at home, every night, Fenstad spoke about his mother in his prayers of remembrance and thanksgiving, even though he knew she would disapprove.

SATURDAY MORNING at the zoo, facing the lions’ cage, overcast sky and a light breeze carrying the smell of peanuts and animal dung, the peacocks making their stilted progress across the sidewalks. I was standing in front of the gorge separating the human viewers from the lions. The lions weren’t caged, exactly; they just weren’t free to go. One male and one female were slumbering on fake rock ledges. Raw meat was nearby. My hands were in my pockets and I was waiting for a moment of energy so I could leave and do my Saturday-morning errands. Then this girl, this teenager, appeared from behind me, hands in her pockets, and she stopped a few feet away on my right. In an up-all-night voice, she said, “What would you do if I shot that lion?” She nodded her head: she meant the male, the closer one.

“Shot it?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know.” Sometimes you have to humor people, pretend as if they’re talking about something real. “Do you have a gun?”

“Of course I have a gun.” She wore a protective blankness on her thin face. She was fixed on the lion. “I have it here in my pocket.”

“I’d report you,” I said. “I’d try to stop you. There are guards here. People don’t shoot caged animals. You shouldn’t even carry a concealed weapon, a girl your age.”

“This is Detroit,” she explained.

“I know it is,” I said. “But people don’t shoot caged lions in Detroit or anywhere else.”

“It wouldn’t be that bad,” she said, nodding at the lions again. “You can tell from their faces how much they want to check out.”

I said I didn’t think so.

She turned to look at me. Her skin was so pale it seemed bleached, and she was wearing a vaudeville-length overcoat and a pair of high-top tennis shoes and jeans with slits at the knees. She looked like a fifteen-year-old bag lady. “It’s because you’re a disconnected person that you can’t see it,” she said. She shivered and reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. “Lions are so human. Things get to them. They experience everything more than we do. They’re romantic.” She glanced at her crushed pack of cigarettes, and in a shivering motion she tossed it into the gorge. She swayed back and forth. “They want to kill and feast and feel,” she said.

I looked at this girl’s bleached skin, that candy-bar-and-cola complexion, and I said, “Are you all right?”

“I slept here last night,” she said. She pointed vaguely behind her. “I was sleeping over there. Under those trees. Near the polar bears.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I wasn’t alone all night.” She was answering a question I hadn’t asked. “This guy, he came in with me for a while to be nice and amorous but he couldn’t see the point in staying. He split around midnight. He said it was righteous coming in here and being solid with the animal world, but he said you had to know when to stop. I told him I wouldn’t defend him to his friends if he left, and he left, so as far as I’m concerned, he is over, he is zippo.”

She was really shivering now, and she was huddling inside that long overcoat. I don’t like to help strangers, but she needed help. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “You want a hamburger?”