Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi said, still looking past the window. “I want you to think about pyramids. And what was inside. The bodies of the pharaohs, of course, and their attendant treasures. Scrolls. Perhaps,” Miss Ferenczi said, her face gleeful but unsmiling, “these scrolls were novels for the pharaohs, helping them to pass the time in their long voyage through the centuries. But then, I am joking.” I was looking at the lines on Miss Ferenczi’s skin. “Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi went on, “were the repositories of special cosmic powers. The nature of a pyramid is to guide cosmic energy forces into a concentrated point. The Egyptians knew that; we have generally forgotten it. Did you know,” she asked, walking to the side of the room so that she was standing by the coat closet, “that George Washington had Egyptian blood, from his grandmother? Certain features of the Constitution of the United States are notable for their Egyptian ideas.”

  Without glancing down at the book, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion. She said that when people die, their souls return to Earth in the form of carpenter ants or walnut trees, depending on how they behaved—“well or ill”—in life. She said that the Egyptians believed that people act the way they do because of magnetism produced by tidal forces in the solar system, forces produced by the sun and by its “planetary ally,” Jupiter. Jupiter, she said, was a planet, as we had been told, but had “certain properties of stars.” She was speaking very fast. She said that the Egyptians were great explorers and conquerors. She said that the greatest of all the conquerors, Genghis Khan, had had forty horses and forty young women killed on the site of his grave. We listened. No one tried to stop her. “I myself have been in Egypt,” she said, “and have witnessed much dust and many brutalities.” She said that an old man in Egypt who worked for a circus had personally shown her an animal in a cage, a monster, half bird and half lion. She said that this monster was called a gryphon and that she had heard about them but never seen them until she traveled to the outskirts of Cairo. She wrote the word out on the blackboard in large capital letters: “GRYPHON.” She said that Egyptian astronomers had discovered the planet Saturn but had not seen its rings. She said that the Egyptians were the first to discover that dogs, when they are ill, will not drink from rivers, but wait for rain, and hold their jaws open to catch it.

  “She lies.”

  We were on the school bus home. I was sitting next to Carl Whiteside, who had bad breath and a huge collection of marbles. We were arguing. Carl thought she was lying. I said she wasn’t, probably.

  “I didn’t believe that stuff about the bird,” Carl said, “and what she told us about the pyramids? I didn’t believe that, either. She didn’t know what she was talking about.”

  “Oh yeah?” I had liked her. She was strange. I thought I could nail him. “If she was lying,” I said, “what’d she say that was a lie?”

  “Six times eleven isn’t sixty-eight. It isn’t ever. It’s sixty-six. I know for a fact.”

  “She said so. She admitted it. What else did she lie about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Well.” He swung his legs back and forth. “You ever see an animal that was half lion and half bird?” He crossed his arms. “It sounded real fakey to me.”

  “It could happen,” I said. I had to improvise, to outrage him. “I read in this newspaper my mom bought in the supermarket about this scientist, this mad scientist in the Swiss Alps, and he’s been putting genes and chromosomes and stuff together in test tubes, and he combined a human being and a hamster.” I waited, for effect. “It’s called a humster.”

  “You never.” Carl was staring at me, his mouth open, his terrible bad breath making its way toward me. “What newspaper was it?”

  “The National Enquirer,” I said, “that they sell next to the cash registers.” When I saw his look of recognition, I knew I had him. “And this mad scientist,” I said, “his name was, um, Dr. Frankenbush.” I realized belatedly that this name was a mistake and waited for Carl to notice its resemblance to the name of the other famous mad master of permutations, but he only sat there.

  “A man and a hamster?” He was staring at me, squinting, his mouth opening in distaste. “Jeez. What’d it look like?”

  When the bus reached my stop, I took off down our dirt road and ran up through the backyard, kicking the tire swing for good luck. I dropped my books on the back steps so I could hug and kiss our dog, Mr. Selby. Then I hurried inside. I could smell brussels sprouts cooking, my unfavorite vegetable. My mother was washing other vegetables in the kitchen sink, and my baby brother was hollering in his yellow playpen on the kitchen floor.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, hopping around the playpen to kiss her. “Guess what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “We had this substitute today, Miss Ferenczi, and I’d never seen her before, and she had all these stories and ideas and stuff.”

  “Well. That’s good.” My mother looked out the window in front of the sink, her eyes on the pine woods west of our house. That time of the afternoon her skin always looked so white to me. Strangers always said my mother looked like Betty Crocker, framed by the giant spoon on the side of the Bisquick box. “Listen, Tommy,” she said. “Would you please go upstairs and pick your clothes off the floor in the bathroom, and then go outside to the shed and put the shovel and ax away that your father left outside this morning?”

  “She said that six times eleven was sometimes sixty-eight!” I said. “And she said she once saw a monster that was half lion and half bird.” I waited. “In Egypt.”

  “Did you hear me?” my mother asked, raising her arm to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand. “You have chores to do.”

  “I know,” I said. “I was just telling you about the substitute.”

  “It’s very interesting,” my mother said, quickly glancing down at me, “and we can talk about it later when your father gets home. But right now you have some work to do.”

  “Okay, Mom.” I took a cookie out of the jar on the counter and was about to go outside when I had a thought. I ran into the living room, pulled out a dictionary next to the TV stand, and opened it to the G’s. After five minutes I found it. Gryphon: variant of “griffin.” Griffin: “a fabulous beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion.” Fabulous was right. I shouted with triumph and ran outside to put my father’s tools in their proper places.

  Miss Ferenczi was back the next day, slightly altered. She had pulled her hair down and twisted it into pigtails, with red rubber bands holding them tight one inch from the ends. She was wearing a green blouse and a pink scarf, making her difficult to look at for a full class day. This time there was no pretense of doing a reading lesson or moving on to arithmetic. As soon as the bell rang, she simply began to talk.

  She talked for forty minutes straight. There seemed to be less connection between her ideas, but the ideas themselves were, as the dictionary would say, fabulous. She said she had heard of a huge jewel, in what she called the antipodes, that was so brilliant that when light shone into it at a certain angle it would blind whoever was looking at its center. She said the biggest diamond in the world was cursed and had killed everyone who owned it, and that by a trick of fate it was called the Hope Diamond. Diamonds are magic, she said, and this is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved. George Washington had died because of a mistake he made about a diamond. Washington was not the first true president, but she didn’t say who was. In some places in the world, she said, men and women still live in the trees and eat monkeys for breakfast. Their doctors are magicians. At the bottom of the sea are creatures thin as pancakes that have never been studied by scientists because when you take them up to air, the fish explode.

  There was not a sound in the cl
assroom, except for Miss Ferenczi’s voice, and Donna DeShano’s coughing. No one even went to the bathroom.

  Beethoven, she said, had not been deaf; it was a trick to make himself famous, and it worked. As she talked, Miss Ferenczi’s pigtails swung back and forth. There are trees in the world, she said, that eat meat: their leaves are sticky and close up on bugs like hands. She lifted her hands and brought them together, palm to palm. Venus, which most people think is the next closest planet to the sun, is not always closer, and, besides, it is the planet of greatest mystery because of its thick cloud cover. “I know what lies underneath those clouds,” Miss Ferenczi said, and waited. After the silence, she said, “Angels. Angels live under those clouds.” She said that angels were not invisible to everyone and were in fact smarter than most people. They did not dress in robes as was often claimed but instead wore formal evening clothes, as if they were about to attend a concert. Often angels do attend concerts and sit in the aisles, where, she said, most people pay no attention to them. She said the most terrible angel had the shape of the Sphinx. “There is no running away from that one,” she said. She said that unquenchable fires burn just under the surface of the earth in Ohio, and that the baby Mozart fainted dead away in his cradle when he first heard the sound of a trumpet. She said that someone named Narzim al Harrardim was the greatest writer who ever lived. She said that planets control behavior, and anyone conceived during a solar eclipse would be born with webbed feet.

  “I know you children like to hear these things,” she said, “these secrets, and that is why I am telling you all this.” We nodded. It was better than doing comprehension questions for the readings in Broad Horizons.

  “I will tell you one more story,” she said, “and then we will have to do arithmetic.” She leaned over, and her voice grew soft. “There is no death,” she said. “You must never be afraid. Never. That which is, cannot die. It will change into different earthly and unearthly elements, but I know this as sure as I stand here in front of you, and I swear it: you must not be afraid. I have seen this truth with these eyes. I know it because in a dream God kissed me. Here.” And she pointed with her right index finger to the side of her head, below the mouth where the vertical lines were carved into her skin.

  Absentmindedly we all did our arithmetic problems. At recess the class was out on the playground, but no one was playing. We were all standing in small groups, talking about Miss Ferenczi. We didn’t know if she was crazy, or what. I looked out beyond the playground, at the rusted cars piled in a small heap behind a clump of sumac, and I wanted to see shapes there, approaching me.

  On the way home, Carl sat next to me again. He didn’t say much, and I didn’t, either. At last he turned to me. “You know what she said about the leaves that close up on bugs?”

  “Huh?”

  “The leaves,” Carl insisted. “The meat-eating plants. I know it’s true. I saw it on television. The leaves have this icky glue that the plants have got smeared all over them and the insects can’t get off ’cause they’re stuck. I saw it.” He seemed demoralized. “She’s tellin’ the truth.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think she’s seen all those angels?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t think she has,” Carl informed me. “I think she made that part up.”

  “There’s a tree,” I suddenly said. I was looking out the window at the farms along County Road H. I knew every barn, every broken windmill, every fence, every anhydrous ammonia tank, by heart. “There’s a tree that’s … that I’ve seen …”

  “Don’t you try to do it,” Carl said. “You’ll just sound like a jerk.”

  I kissed my mother. She was standing in front of the stove. “How was your day?” she asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Did you have Miss Ferenczi again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  “She was fine. Mom,” I asked, “can I go to my room?”

  “No,” she said, “not until you’ve gone out to the vegetable garden and picked me a few tomatoes.” She glanced at the sky. “I think it’s going to rain. Skedaddle and do it now. Then you come back inside and watch your brother for a few minutes while I go upstairs. I need to clean up before dinner.” She looked down at me. “You’re looking a little pale, Tommy.” She touched the back of her hand to my forehead and I felt her diamond ring against my skin. “Do you feel all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and went out to pick the tomatoes.

  Coughing mutedly, Mr. Hibler was back the next day, slipping lozenges into his mouth when his back was turned at forty-five-minute intervals and asking us how much of his prepared lesson plan Miss Ferenczi had followed. Edith Atwater took the responsibility for the class of explaining to Mr. Hibler that the substitute hadn’t always done exactly what he, Mr. Hibler, would have done, but we had worked hard even though she talked a lot. About what? he asked. All kinds of things, Edith said. I sort of forgot. To our relief, Mr. Hibler seemed not at all interested in what Miss Ferenczi had said to fill the day. He probably thought it was woman’s talk: unserious and not suited for school. It was enough that he had a pile of arithmetic problems from us to correct.

  For the next month, the sumac turned a distracting red in the field, and the sun traveled toward the southern sky, so that its rays reached Mr. Hibler’s Halloween display on the bulletin board in the back of the room, fading the pumpkin-head scarecrow from orange to tan. Every three days I measured how much farther the sun had moved toward the southern horizon by making small marks with my black Crayola on the north wall, ant-sized marks only I knew were there.

  And then in early December, four days after the first permanent snowfall, she appeared again in our classroom. The minute she came in the door, I felt my heart begin to pound. Once again, she was different: this time, her hair hung straight down and seemed hardly to have been combed. She hadn’t brought her lunchbox with her, but she was carrying what seemed to be a small box. She greeted all of us and talked about the weather. Donna DeShano had to remind her to take her overcoat off.

  When the bell to start the day finally rang, Miss Ferenczi looked out at all of us and said, “Children, I have enjoyed your company in the past, and today I am going to reward you.” She held up the small box. “Do you know what this is?” She waited. “Of course you don’t. It is a Tarot pack.”

  Edith Atwater raised her hand. “What’s a Tarot pack, Miss Ferenczi?”

  “It is used to tell fortunes,” she said. “And that is what I shall do this morning. I shall tell your fortunes, as I have been taught to do.”

  “What’s fortune?” Bobby Kryzanowicz asked.

  “The future, young man. I shall tell you what your future will be. I can’t do your whole future, of course. I shall have to limit myself to the five-card system, the wands, cups, swords, pentacles, and the higher arcanes. Now who wants to be first?”

  There was a long silence. Then Carol Peterson raised her hand.

  “All right,” Miss Ferenczi said. She divided the pack into five smaller packs and walked back to Carol’s desk, in front of mine. “Pick one card from each one of these packs,” she said. I saw that Carol had a four of cups and a six of swords, but I couldn’t see the other cards. Miss Ferenczi studied the cards on Carol’s desk for a minute. “Not bad,” she said. “I do not see much higher education. Probably an early marriage. Many children. There’s something bleak and dreary here, but I can’t tell what. Perhaps just the tasks of a housewife life. I think you’ll do very well, for the most part.” She smiled at Carol, a smile with a certain lack of interest. “Who wants to be next?”

  Carl Whiteside raised his hand slowly.

  “Yes,” Miss Ferenczi said, “let’s do a boy.” She walked over to where Carl sat. After he picked his five cards, she gazed at them for a long time. “Travel,” she said. “Much distant travel. You might go into the army. Not too much romantic interest here. A late marriage, if at all. But the Sun in your major arcana, that’
s a very good card.” She giggled. “You’ll have a happy life.”

  Next I raised my hand. She told me my future. She did the same with Bobby Kryzanowicz, Kelly Munger, Edith Atwater, and Kim Foor. Then she came to Wayne Razmer. He picked his five cards, and I could see that the Death card was one of them.

  “What’s your name?” Miss Ferenczi asked.

  “Wayne.”

  “Well, Wayne,” she said, “you will undergo a great metamorphosis, a change, before you become an adult. Your earthly element will no doubt leap higher, because you seem to be a sweet boy. This card, this nine of swords, tells me of suffering and desolation. And this ten of wands, well, that’s a heavy load.”

  “What about this one?” Wayne pointed at the Death card.

  “It means, my sweet, that you will die.” She gathered up the cards. We were all looking at Wayne. “But do not fear,” she said. “It is not really death. Just change. Out of your earthly shape.” She put the cards on Mr. Hibler’s desk. “And now, let’s do some arithmetic.”

  At lunchtime Wayne went to Mr. Faegre, the principal, and informed him of what Miss Ferenczi had done. During the noon recess, we saw Miss Ferenczi drive out of the parking lot in her rusting green Rambler American. I stood under the slide, listening to the other kids coasting down and landing in the little depressive bowls at the bottom. I was kicking stones and tugging at my hair right up to the moment when I saw Wayne come out to the playground. He smiled, the dead fool, and with the fingers of his right hand he was showing everyone how he had told on Miss Ferenczi.