Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

But in the restaurant, he played the gentleman: he talked about landscape architecture, landscaping generally, so that the conversation took a lackadaisical turn toward the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, and she talked about her work and her scholarship, about Pérez Galdós, the polite chitchat of two people who possibly want to get to know each other, post-sex, and she wondered whether they would ever talk about anything that mattered to them, and whether all his talk about souls was just a bluff, a conversational shell game. She was about to ask him where he had grown up, where he had been educated, what his parents had been like, when he said, “Let’s take a walk. Let’s go down to the river.” The bill for the dinner came, a considerable sum, and he paid in cash, drawing out a mass of twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, a monotonous and mountainous pile of twenties, all the cash looking like novelty items, and Melinda thought, This man has no usable credit.

Across the Mississippi River near St. Anthony Falls stands the Stone Arch Bridge, built of limestone in the nineteenth century for the railroad traffic of lumber and grain and coal in and out of Minneapolis. After the railroad traffic ceased, the bridge had been converted to a tourist pedestrian walkway, and he took her hand in his as they strolled over the Mississippi River, looking at the abandoned mills on either side, and the rapids and the locks directly below.

“They don’t manufacture anything here anymore, you know,” he said to her, close to a whisper.

“The buildings are still here.”

“Yes,” he said, “but they’re ghosts. They’re all ghosts. They’re shells.”

“But look at the lights,” she said. “Lofts and condos.”

“They don’t make anything in there anymore,” he said. “Except babies, sometimes, the thirtysomethings. Otherwise, it’s all a museum. American cities are all becoming museums.” He said this with a wild, incongruous cheer, as a devil would. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you one true thing. Listen up.”

“What’s that?”

“When I was a little boy, I lived three or four blocks down from where you lived. I’ve told you this. You don’t remember me. That’s all. You don’t remember. I remember you, but you don’t remember me. No one ever remembers me. One night I was playing in the living room, with my toy armies, and your mother came to our door. I think she was drunk. But I didn’t know that. She rang the bell and she entered our house. My parents were upstairs, or somewhere. Your mother came into the house and looked at me playing with my soldiers, and she looked and looked and looked. She smiled and nodded. And then she asked me if I would like to go away with her, said that she had always wanted to take a boy like me with her on her travels.”

“How did you know it was my mother?” Melinda asked, between shivers.

“I was eight years old. Maybe nine. Everyone knew about your mother. Everyone. I had been warned. You knew that. Everyone knew that. But she had a nice face.”

“Where did she say she wanted to take you away to?”

“She had this look in her eyes, I still remember it,” Augenblick said. “You have it, too. She wanted to disappear and to take someone along with her. That night, it was going to be me. Your mother was famous in this neighborhood. But everybody thought she was harmless.”

“Well, she was a success,” Melinda said, the shivers taking her over, so that she had to clutch a guardrail. “In disappearing.” She leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek, a show of bravery. “Death is such a cliché,” she said. “She disappeared into a cliché.”

“Is it?” He wasn’t looking at her. “That’s news to me. She grabbed me by the hand and she took me for a walk and then she tried to get me into the car, but I broke her hold on me and I ran back to my house.”

“Yeah,” she said, dreamily. “Death. It’s so retro. It’s for kids and old people. It’s an adolescent thing. You can do better than dying. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough ,” she quoted from somewhere. “Anyway, she disappeared, and so what?” It occurred to her at that moment that Augenblick might have leapt off the bridge to his death but that he had, just then, changed his mind, because she had said that death was a cliché. That was it: he looked like a failed suicide. He was one of those.

“She gave me the scare of my life,” he said. “Your harmless mother. She scared everybody until she was gone. Shall we go back now?” he asked. “Should we go somewhere?”

“No,” she said. “Not again. Not this time.” She waited. “We’re going to stay right here for a while.”

He eventually dropped her off at the front door of her father’s house, thanked her, and drove off in his car, which, he had explained, was a Sterling, a nonsense car. She guessed that the license plates on the car had been stolen so that he could not be traced. Whoever he was — Augenblick! what a name! — he would not return. She wondered for a moment or two what his name actually had been, where he had worked, and whether any of it, that is, the actual, mattered, now or ever.

She paid the babysitter and then went upstairs to check on Eric.

The ghosts of the house, she imagined, were gathered around her son. The couples who had lived here from one generation to the next, the solitaries, the happy and unhappy, the gay and the straight and the young and the old: she felt them grouped behind her as a community corralled in the room, touching her questioningly as she bent over the crib and watched her boy, her perfection, breathe in and out, his Catalan-American breaths.

She tiptoed into her father’s room. He was still sitting up, carefully studying the wallpaper.

“Hey, Daddy,” she said.

“Hey, sugar,” he replied, tilting his head in his characteristically odd way. “How did it go? Your date with this Augenblick?”

“Oh, fine,” she said, shunning the narrative of what had happened, how she had fought off his information with a little kiss. Her father wouldn’t be interested — especially about her mother.

“I didn’t like him. He wasn’t out of the top drawer.”

“More like the middle drawer. But that’s all right,” Melinda said. “I won’t see him again.”

“Good,” her father said. “I thought he was a fortune-hunter, after your millions.” He laughed hoarsely. “Heh heh. He looked very unsuccessful, I must say, with that dyed hair.” He tilted his head the other way. “I went to the Gates of Heaven today,” he said, “on the bus. The number eight bus.”

“How did it look?” she asked. “The gates?”

“Tarnished,” he said. “They could use a shine. No one ever seems to do maintenance anymore. The bus was empty. Even though I was the thing riding on it.” He tilted his head the other way. “Completely empty, with me at a window seat. That was how I knew I was almost gone. Honey, you should have more friends, better friends. Someone who doesn’t make you groan.”

It didn’t shock her, somehow, that he had heard them. “I have friends. Just not here. I’m moving back home,” she said. “To my house. Where I live. I can’t stay here anymore, Daddy. I can’t take care of you anymore. I love you, Daddy, but I can’t do it. I’ll arrange for somebody to watch you and to cook.” She leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know, honey. Staying here makes you a child, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” She could feel the goddamn tears flooding over her. And she could feel the ghosts of the house gathering around him , now, easing his way into the next world that awaited him. And somewhere on the planet, her mother, too, drove toward the horizon, forever. “I’ll watch out for you, though. I’ll drop in. I’ll check on you.”