Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

The dead branch, scaly and virus-ridden, was located about halfway up. The tree branches felt pleasantly rough on the soles of his bare feet, and when he reached the dead branch, after an easy climb past ripe autumnal apples about to fall, he realized that sawing through the dead wood would be effortless. He glanced down at Mrs. Andriessen, and then up at the sky. He began to work.

He had almost finished when he heard the Adult say, “Nicholas, I really do appreciate what you’re doing, believe me.”

Maybe he was tired, or feverish, but he heard her utter the sentence in blue , royal blue, the color of the northern lights and Granny W.’s inscriptions, and he felt himself spiral into light-headedness. The blue words, having entered his brain, had a sky-feeling to them, a spirit of clarity. But that was crazy. Spoken words had no color to them and never would, in this world. The first words spoken by God had been in color, according to the ancient texts, but who believed in that now? He gripped a branch in order to stabilize himself, to keep himself from swaying. The dizziness left him, but the blue, somehow, remained.…

He dropped the handsaw. The Adult hopped out of the way of it, though it had landed nowhere near her feet. Nicholas clutched a branch to keep himself from falling.

By the time he came out of the shower and had dressed, Mrs. Andriessen had brewed some espresso and was sitting in her living room reading Edith Wharton’s stories. “Want some?” she asked, glancing at him and holding up her cup.

“Espresso? In the afternoon? No, thanks,” he said, shaking his hands to dry them. He was still barefoot, because one of his socks had a hole in it, which he did not care to display.

She put her book aside, having placed a marker on the page where she had stopped, and rubbed rather violently at her forehead. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to climb up in that tree to cut that branch. But a few weeks ago, I had a dream about you, Nicholas. In this particular dream, you were aloft in an apple tree, and you were surveying the countryside. God knows how you got up there, but then you were sawing away at a dead branch, and I was down below, and when I woke, I thought: Well, maybe I should see to it that the dream is … I don’t know, enacted.” She said the last word with a slightly embarrassed inflection. “A person rarely gets that chance.”

“I used to climb trees,” Nicholas said. “When I was a boy.”

“Yes, I know,” the Adult said. “You once told me. Perhaps that’s what led to the dream.” She gazed at him quickly, as if a longer gaze would incriminate her. Mrs. Andriessen had a spooky way of suffering silently in Nicholas’s presence, but her reticence appeared to be impregnable. Now she looked over at Granny Westerby’s wine bottle. “ ‘Fear and love his loins,’ ” she read. “That’s a royal blue she used.”

“She told me that she painted it with the sky,” Nicholas offered.

“Did she actually say that? That she painted it with sky?”

“Yes. And it was strange, just now, when I was up in that tree, you said something — about how you appreciated what I was doing, and when I heard those words, when I heard you say them, they were … I can’t explain it. They were blue. I heard them in color. I heard them in blue.”

The Adult leaned back and closed her eyes. “I’m not surprised. Do you know the origin of the phrase ‘royal blue’?” He shook his head, but she didn’t open her eyes to see. She seemed to know perfectly well where the gaps in his knowledge lay. She knew what he didn’t know. “It was a particular tint used in the fabrics set out to greet the visiting heads of state, royalty — in the decorative regalia, the canopies, for example. Royal blue was a color associated with the aristocracy and with hospitality. I don’t know if it’s related to the phrase ‘blue blood,’ but I doubt it. That particular phrase, as I remember, is from the Spanish. Do you know how a person would demonstrate blue blood?”

“No,” Nicholas said. Outside, the wind was coming up, and the trees beyond the yard swayed gracefully.

“By staying indoors,” she told him, turning toward him and speaking urgently. “By not getting a tan in the fields doing fieldwork, so the skin would stay white and the veins would remain visible. Also, the phrase refers to purity, freedom from … Arabic bloodlines. Which would have been considered an infection, in those days. In Spain. You know: the Moors.” She seemed bored by her knowledge, the length and breadth of it. “Isn’t that interesting? Considering recent events? Free of Arabic blood? Blue blood?”

“Daphne is pregnant,” Nicholas told Mrs. Andriessen. He stood up to pace for a moment. “She told me a few days ago.” He sat down again. Their conversations had, over the past year, acquired a stream-of-consciousness effect, two people thinking as one, although Nicholas knew that the Adult was usually thinking for both of them. Most of the time, he didn’t really know what Mrs. Andriessen thought, except when she cast her glances on him.

“Is she? Lucky you,” the Adult said. “Daphne pregnant again. She won’t have an abortion this time, will she? Will you? Of course not. You’ll have the most beautiful child, the two of you. Just a glorious thing. But everything changes now. Love is tested. Can’t go on as before. You’ll have weight, my dear.”

“Weight? I don’t—”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. You shouldn’t take me literally.” She reached out and touched his knee. “I meant ‘weight’ in the other sense.”

“Yes, I know.”

She leaned back. The Adult often gave the impression that she was both excited and dismayed by Nicholas. “Do you? Well. Here’s a little story. When I was a girl, we lived close by a Swedish immigrant family, the Petersons. They were the neighborhood laborers and lived in a coach house. He worked as a caretaker and she took in laundry. She also acted as everyone’s part-time nursemaid, if you know what I mean.”

Nicholas nodded, bewildered.

“They had a son, about my age, an angelic type, beautiful, and a prodigy, or so everyone said, though I don’t remember in what — maybe in everything. A terrible fate. Children like that catch the attention of the gods. He could draw and remember word for word whatever you said, and he had every athletic gift you could imagine: running, balls and bats, the works. Terrible! Also, he was manifestly smarter and more alert than his parents, and they were so proud of him, and he could sit down at the piano and play short Bach and Chopin pieces by ear, and no one even knew in that environment where he had heard them. Gustav, this boy’s name was. And then when he was ten years old, he developed a brain tumor, fate being what it is, and when he died of it, his father became so blind with rage and grief that he began to throw all their worldly goods, everything they owned that could be picked up, out of the coach house window. He’d throw out the coffeepot and the lamp, and his wife would calm him down, but the next day his grief would return, and he’d break up a kitchen chair and throw it out the window, poor man, and then the radio and the kitchen blender and the telephone. Whatever he could get his hands on, anything that could be mobilized, he threw out that window. You’d see this little heap of household objects on the driveway. Some languages have a term for grief madness, but English doesn’t. Isn’t that a shame?”

Nicholas nodded again. What on earth was she talking about?

“When those airplanes hit those buildings,” she said, “on that day when you were up here a month ago, do you know what I did?” She didn’t stop to look at him or to wait for his response. “After you left, I took the mower out and mowed the back lawn, by myself. It didn’t require mowing. The grass had been cut two days before. But I had to do an ordinary task. I had to anchor myself to daily life. To make a routine, to recapture what I love about banality. Then I drove into town, late afternoon, and I gave blood. And what did you do, my darling friend?”