Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  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.

  She wore two green plaid flannel shirts and a thin torn jacket. Like Fenstad, she wore no gloves. Her jeans were patched, and she gave off a strong smell, something like hay, Fenstad thought, mixed with tar and sweat. He looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing penny loafers with no socks. Coins, old pennies, were in both shoes; the leather was wet and cracked. He looked in the woman’s face. Under a hat that seemed to collapse on either side of her head, her face was thin and chalk-white except for the fatigue lines under her eyes. The eyes themselves were bright blue, beautiful, and crazy. To Fenstad, she looked desperate, percolating slightly with insanity, and he was about to say so to his mother when the woman bent down toward him and said, “Mister, can you spare any money?”

  Involuntarily, Fenstad looked toward the kitchen, hoping that the manager would spot this person and take her away. When he looked back again, his mother was taking her blue coat off, wriggling in the booth to free her arms from the sleeves. Stopping and starting again, she appeared to be stuck inside the coat; then she lifted herself up, trying to stand, and with a quick, quiet groan slipped the coat off. She reached down and folded the coat over and held it toward the woman. “Here,” she said. “Here’s my coat. Take it before my son stops me.”

  “Mother, you can’t.” Fenstad reached forward to grab the coat, but his mother pulled it away from him.

  When Fenstad looked back at the woman, her mouth was open, showing several gray teeth. Her hands were outstretched, and he understood, after a moment, that this was a posture of refusal, a gesture saying no, and that the woman wasn’t used to it and did it awkwardly. Fenstad’s mother was standing and trying to push the coat toward the woman, not toward her hands but lower, at waist level, and she was saying, “Here, here, here, here.” The sound, like a human birdcall, frightened Fenstad, and he stood up quickly, reached for his wallet, and removed the first two bills he could find, two twenties. He grabbed the woman’s chapped, ungloved left hand.

  “Take these,” he said, putting the two bills in her icy palm, “for the love of God, and please go.”

  He was close to her face. Tonight he would pray for her. For a moment the woman’s expression was vacant. His mother was still pushing the coat at her, and the woman was unsteadily bracing herself. The woman’s mouth was open, and her stagnant-water breath washed over him. “I know you,” she said. “You’re my little baby cousin.”

  “Go away, please,” Fenstad said. He pushed at her. She turned, clutching his money. He reached around to put his hands on his mother’s shoulders. “Ma,” he said, “she’s gone now. Mother, sit down. I gave her money for a coat.” His mother fell down on her side of the booth, and her blue coat rolled over on the bench beside her, showing the label and the shiny inner lining. When he looked up, the woman who had been begging had disappeared, though he could still smell her odor, an essence of wretchedness.

  “Excuse me, Harry,” his mother said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  She rose and walked toward the front of the restaurant, turned a corner, and was out of sight. Fenstad sat and tried to collect himself. When the waiter came, a boy with an earring and red hair in a flattop, Fenstad just shook his head and said, “More tea.” He realized that his mother hadn’t taken off her earmuffs, and the image of his mother in the ladies’ room with her earmuffs on gave him a fit of uneasiness. After getting up from the booth and following the path that his mother had taken, he stood outside the ladies’-room door and, when no one came in or out, he knocked. He waited for a decent interval. Still hearing no answer, he opened the door.

  His mother was standing with her arms down on either side of the first sink. She was holding herself there, her eyes following the hot water as it poured from the tap around the bright porcelain sink down into the drain, and she looked furious. Fenstad touched her and she snapped toward him.

  “Your logic!” she said.

  He opened the door for her and helped her back to the booth. The second cup of tea had been served, and Fenstad’s mother sipped it in silence. They did not converse. When she had finished, she said, “All right. I do feel better now. Let’s go.”

  At the curb in front of her apartment building he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Pick me up next Tuesday,” she said. “I want to go back to that class.” He nodded. He watched as she made her way past the security guard at the front desk; then he put his car into drive and started home.

  That night he skated in the dark for an hour with his friend Susan, the pharmacist. She was an excellent skater; they had met on the ice. She kept late hours and, like Fenstad, enjoyed skating at night. She listened attentively to his story about his mother and the woman in the restaurant. To his great relief she recommended no course of action. She listened. She didn’t believe in giving advice, even when asked.

  The following Tuesday, Fenstad’s mother was again in the back row next to York Follette. One of the fluorescent lights overhead was flickering, which gave the room, Fenstad thought, a sinister quality, like a debtors’ prison or a refuge for the homeless. He’d been thinking about such people for the entire week. For seven days now he had caught whiffs of the woman’s breath in the air, and one morning, Friday, he thought he caught a touch of the rotten-celery smell on his own breath, after a particularly difficult sales meeting.

  Tonight was how-to night. The students were expected to stand at the front of the class and read their papers, instructing their peers and answering questions if necessary. Starting off, and reading her paper in a frightened monotone, Mrs. Nelson told the class how to bake a cheese soufflé. Arlene Fisher’s paper was about mushroom hunting. Fenstad was put off by the introduction. “The advantage to mushrooms,” Arlene Fisher read, “is that they are delicious. The disadvantage to mushrooms is that they can make you sick, even die.” But then she explained how to recognize the common shaggymane by its cylindrical cap and dark tufts; she drew a model on the board. She warned the class against the Clitocybe illudens, the Jack-o’-Lantern. “Never eat a mushroom like this one or any mushroom that glows in the dark. Take heed!” she said, fixing her gaze on the class. Fenstad saw his mother taking rapid notes. Harold Ronson, the mechanic, reading his own prose painfully and slowly, told the class how to get rust spots out of their automobiles. Again Fenstad noticed his mother taking notes. York Follette told the class about the proper procedures for laying down attic insulation and how to know when enough was enough, so that a homeowner wouldn’t be robbed blind, as he put it, by the salesmen, in whose ranks he had once counted himself.


  Barb Kjellerud had brought along a cassette player, and told the class that her hobby was ballroom dancing; she would instruct them in the basic waltz. She pushed the PLAY button on the tape machine, and “Tales from the Vienna Woods” came booming out. To the accompaniment of the music she read her paper, illustrating, as she went, how the steps were to be performed. She danced alone in front of them, doing so with flair. Her blond hair swayed as she danced, Fenstad noticed. She looked a bit like a contestant in a beauty contest who had too much personality to win. She explained to the men the necessity of leading. Someone had to lead, she said, and tradition had given this responsibility to the male. Fenstad heard his mother snicker.

  When Barb Kjellerud asked for volunteers, Fenstad’s mother raised her hand. She said she knew how to waltz and would help out. At the front of the class she made a counterclockwise motion with her hand, and for the next minute, sitting at the back of the room, Fenstad watched his mother and one of the sanitation workers waltzing under the flickering fluorescent lights.

  “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.

  Westland

  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, h
e 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?”

  “I’ll eat it,” she said, “but only if you buy it.”

  I took her to a fast-food restaurant and sat her down and brought her one of their famous giant cheeseburgers. She held it in her hands familiarly as she watched the cars passing on Woodward Avenue. I let my gaze follow hers, and when I looked back, half the cheeseburger was gone. She wasn’t even chewing. She didn’t look at the food. She ate like a soldier in a foxhole. What was left of her food she gripped in her skinny fingers decorated with flaking pink nail polish. She was pretty in a raw and sloppy way.

  “You’re looking at me.”

  “Yes, I am,” I admitted.

  “How come?”

  “A person can look,” I said.

  “Maybe.” Now she looked back. “Are you one of those creeps?”

  “Which kind?”

  “The kind of old man creep who picks up girls and drives them places, and, like, terrorizes them for days and then dumps them into fields.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not like that. And I’m not that old.”

  “Maybe it’s the accent,” she said. “You don’t sound American.”

  “I was born in England,” I told her, “but I’ve been in this country for thirty years. I’m an American citizen.”

  “You’ve got to be born in this country to sound American,” she said, sucking at her chocolate shake through her straw. She was still gazing at the traffic. Looking at traffic seemed to restore her peace of mind. “I guess you’re okay,” she said distantly, “and I’m not worried anyhow, because, like I told you, I’ve got a gun.”