Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  Estelle raised her head, closed her eyes, and breathed in. “You could have thrown that ball,” she said. “Couldn’t you?”

  “No,” Freddie said. “It’s just a trick. They’re trying to mess with us.”

  “Incidentally, I think,” Estelle said, “that Randall is organizing a softball game for after dinner. We’ll use your new bat!”

  “Oh, that’s great. That’s just great.”

  “Don’t you want to try it?”

  He treated her to his silence.

  Well, at least there was the Bakken Electrical Museum. After they had returned to the car, Estelle drove Freddie to his favorite place on the southwest side of the lake, the museum where they had a working Theremin installed. Freddie had been here half a dozen times, and each time he would push impatiently past the exhibits near the front door to the Theremin in the middle of the museum’s stairwell. He’d turn on the old instrument and raise his hands in the air between the two antennae.

  Here, he was in his element. His hands raised like a conductor, with his fingers out, Freddie would tap and poke the air in front of him, and from the old Theremin came pitched noises that sounded like music but really weren’t music, Estelle thought, any more than screaming was like singing. According to the information on the explanatory wall plaque, other Theremins had been used for the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the movie scores for Spellbound and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Freddie, when he played this thing, had a beatific smile on his face, as if he were summoning his monsters from the deep. Once he had played “Jingle Bells” for her on it, and Estelle thought she would jump out of her skin with revulsion. He had learned through trial and error where to poke the air for certain pitches. Apparently he had a musical ear. He was getting good at it. Soon he would be playing “My Funny Valentine” on this thing and scaring away everybody.

  But you couldn’t take a kid down to the MacPhail Center for Music for Theremin lessons, and you couldn’t bring out your grandson in front of the guests to have him play his Theremin, causing the other grandmothers to applaud, because Freddie wasn’t really presentable, and neither was this music, which sounded like the groans of the dying, oscillating at sixty cycles per second.

  Still, she watched him, poking and prodding the air and producing the hellish glissandos, with something like admiration. Her own sons were not like that. There was no other boy like him.

  “There’s no one else like him,” Estelle said to Randall, who was bending over the grill, the left side for the hot dogs, the right side for hamburgers. He had put on his chef’s apron and was worrying the hamburger buns on the edge of the grill with a spatula. Freddie sat writing his story on a picnic bench, on the other side of the back deck. He was concentrating with fierce inward energy.

  Late summer evening, and Estelle sat watching Randall cooking the hamburgers and Freddie working on his story. Somewhere in back, the cicadas, harbingers of autumn, were chirring away. Their neighbor Jerry Harponyi, who played cello in the city orchestra, was watering his garden, and when he saw Estelle across his back fence, he raised his hand, still holding the garden hose, to wave. The water gubbled, airborne, in a snakelike line, before falling.

  “No, there isn’t,” Randall said. “But let’s not talk about this now. By the way, I’ve drafted about seven of the neighbors to play softball in the park in an hour. And Freddie said he’d join us.”

  “Freddie said that?”

  “Yes. I used all my persuasive skills.”

  “What did you say?” Estelle asked.

  “I said it’d be nice if he played.”

  “He didn’t object?”

  “I just said that it’d be a nice gesture.” Well, Estelle thought, that was Randall, all right: the King of Nice Gestures. “After all, you bought him that baseball bat. And he loves you, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Freddie, your grandson.”

  “No, he—”

  “Of course he does, Stel. Please. You’re the only thing in this world holding him on.” He looked at her with a smile, his face disfigured momentarily by smoke from the grill. “I can’t do it the way you can. You’re his lifeline. Don’t you know that? Can’t you see it?”

  Harponyi waved again. “Looking forward to the game!” he shouted, and the water from his hose flung itself out again in patterns in the air.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, my dear. You. You’re a rock, an anchor. You’re all he’s got. I love you, too, you know, but I’m not desperate. Anyway, you know what position you should play?”

  “No,” she said. “First base?” She always liked it when Randall told her he loved her.

  “No,” Randall said. “Outfield. You need a rest. You can just stand out there and wait for balls to fall into your glove. Like a nun. Like a little sister of mercy.”

  “I’d enjoy that, I think,” Estelle said.

  Standing in the outfield, with the sun setting below the park’s trees to the west, Estelle felt the early-evening breezes blowing across her forehead, the same breezes that blew Randall’s hair backward on the pitcher’s mound, so that he looked surprised, or like one of the Three Stooges, she couldn’t remember which one. With grown children of his own, and his own sorrows—his wife had pitched herself through a window eight stories up two months after learning that she had inoperable cancer—Randall had every right to be moody, or grumpy at times. Or just sour. But, no: he was relentless in his cheerfulness. And tiresome, if you didn’t share it. Somehow the tragedies he had lived through hadn’t altered him. They had no relevance to him. There he was. In the fading light, he still gleamed a little.

  Randall had just struck out Harponyi, the cellist. The first baseman, a fifteen-year-old from across the street, whistled and cheered. His name was Tommy. He was already chunky with muscle, a real athlete who in a year or two would be playing high-school football, and for a moment Estelle wondered whether it wasn’t a bit unfair to have boys like that playing on their side. But it all balanced out: their second baseman was an office temp who lived down the block and who was, at this very moment, talking on her cell phone, and their shortstop was old Mr. Flannery, a retired social studies teacher who lived on the corner and who looked a bit like Morgan Freeman. He was old but wiry. Freddie, when he came to bat, wouldn’t have a chance if the ball went toward Mr. Flannery.

  These are my people, Estelle thought, and bless them all, here in Part Two. Strange how one’s heart could lift sometimes for no particular reason. On the other side of the park, the sounds of the soccer players, their outcries, rose into the air and made their way toward her. A fly buzzed around her head, and she smelled the strangely green smell of the outfield grass. She pounded her fist into the baseball glove, a spare that Randall had found somewhere in the basement.

  Freddie was up. He was practice-swinging the bat that Estelle had bought for him that morning. His swings were slow, and even without a ball anywhere near them, they seemed inaccurate, approximate.

  Stepping up to the plate, Freddie took one hand off the bat to shade his eyes against the sun. When he saw his grandmother, he waved. Estelle waved back.

  Randall’s first pitch hit the ground a few feet in front of Freddie and rolled to the catcher, Tommy’s brother, who threw it back to Randall. “Good eye,” Estelle shouted, and people laughed.

  The next pitch went into the strike zone, and Freddie swung at it and missed, by a considerable margin. His physical movements were like those of an underground creature rarely exposed to the light. The umpire, an insurance adjuster who lived with Harponyi, called the first strike.

  Freddie took another practice swing.

  When Randall threw the next pitch, Estelle could see that it would go into the strike zone and that Freddie would swing at it and connect with it, and when he did, the ball soared up, a high fly, slowly ascending, and as it rose into the air, Freddie headed toward first base, not really looking at where he was going but watching the ball instead and then glancing at his
grandmother underneath it. For a brief moment they exchanged glances, Estelle and Freddie, and he seemed to grin; and then the ball began its descent, as Freddie, watching it again, headed toward Tommy, the first baseman, a boy as solid as he, Freddie, was soft. Tommy had taken up a stance and had braced himself with his elbow out, and Estelle saw that when Freddie got there, he would slam into Tommy like an egg thrown into a wall. Estelle tried to shout to Freddie to look where he was going, but her shout caught in her throat out of fear or terror, just before the ball dropped in its leisurely way, with perfect justice, into her outstretched glove.

  The Cousins

  MY COUSIN BRANTFORD was named for our grandfather, who had made a fortune from a device used in aircraft navigation. I suppose it saved lives. A bad-tempered man with a scar above his cheekbone, my grandfather believed that the rich were rewarded for their merits and the poor deserved what they got. He did not care for his own grandchildren and referred to my cousin as “the little prince.” In all fairness, he didn’t like me, either.

  Brantford had roared through his college fund so rapidly that by the age of twenty-three, he was down to pocket change. One bright spring day when I was visiting New York City and had called him up, he insisted on taking me to lunch at a midtown restaurant where the cost of the entrées was so high that a respectful noonday hush hung over the restaurant’s skeletal postmodern interior. Muttering oligarchs with monogrammed shirt cuffs gazed at entering patrons with a languid alertness. The maître d’ wore one of those dark blue restaurant suits, and the wine list had been printed on velvety pages set in a stainless-steel three-ring binder.

  By the time my cousin arrived, I had read the menu four times. He was late. You had to know Brantford to get used to him. A friend of mine said that my cousin looked like the mayor of a ruined city. Appearances mattered a great deal to Brantford, but his own were on a gradual slide. His face had a permanent alcoholic flush. His brownish-blond hair was parted on the right side and was too long by a few millimeters, trailing over his collar. Although he was dressed well, in flannel trousers and cordovan shoes, you could see the telltale food stains on his shirt, and the expression underneath his blond mustache had something subtly wrong with it—he smiled with a strangely discouraged affability.

  “Bunny,” he said to me, sitting down with an audible expunging of air. He still used my childhood name. No one else did. He didn’t give me a hug because we don’t do that. “I see you’ve gotten started. You’re having a martini?”

  I nodded. “Morning tune-up,” I said.

  “Brave choice.” Brantford grinned, simultaneously waving down the server. “Waitress,” he said, pointing at my drink, “I’ll have one of those. Very dry, please, no olive.” The server nodded before giving Brantford a thin professional smile and gliding over to the bar.

  We had a kind of solidarity, Brantford and I. I had two decades on him, but we were oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins. I had always seen in him some better qualities than those I actually possessed. For example, he was one of those people who always make you happier the moment you see them.

  Before his drink arrived, we caught ourselves up. Brantford’s mother, Aunt Margaret, had by that time been married to several different husbands, including a three-star army general, and she currently resided in a small apartment cluttered with knickknacks near the corner of Ninety-second and Broadway.

  Having spent herself in a wild youth and at all times given to manias, Brantford’s mother had started taking a new medication called Elysium-Max, which seemed to be keeping her on a steady course where life was concerned. Brantford instructed me to please phone her while I was in town, and I said I would. As for Brantford’s two half sisters, they were doing fine.

  With this information out of the way, I asked Brantford how he was.

  “I don’t know. It’s strange. Sometimes at night I have the feeling that I’ve murdered somebody.” He stopped and glanced down at the tableware. “Someone’s dead. Only I don’t know who or what, or when I did it. I must’ve killed somebody. I’m sure of it. Thank you,” he said with his first real smile of the day, as the server placed a martini in front of him.

  “Well, that’s just crazy,” I said. “You haven’t killed anyone.”

  “Doesn’t matter if I have or haven’t,” he said, “if it feels that way. Maybe I should take a vacation.”

  “Brantford,” I said, “you can’t take a vacation. You don’t work.” I waited for a moment. “Do you?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’d like to. Besides, I work, in my way,” he claimed, taking a sip of the martini. “And don’t forget that I can be anything I want to be.” This sentence was enunciated carefully and with precise despair, as if it had served as one of those lifelong mottoes that he no longer believed in.

  What year was this? 1994? When someone begins to carry on as my cousin did, I’m never sure what to say. Tact is required. As a teenager, Brantford had told me that he aspired to be a concert pianist, and I was the one who had to remind him that he wasn’t a musician and didn’t play the piano. But he had seen a fiery angel somewhere in the sky and thought it might descend on him. I hate those angels. I haven’t always behaved well when people open their hearts to me.

  “Well, what about the animals?” I asked. Brantford was always caring for damaged animals and had done so from the time he was a boy. He found them in streets and alleys and nursed them back to health and then let them go. But they tended to fall in with him and to get crushes on him. Wherever he lived you would find recovering cats, mutts, and sparrows barking and chirping and mewling in response to him.

  “No, not that,” he said. “I would never make a living off those critters,” he said. “That’s a sideline. I love them too much.”

  “Veterinary school?” I asked.

  “No, I couldn’t. Absolutely not. I don’t want to practice that kind of medicine with them,” he said, as if he were speaking of family members. “If I made money off those little guys, I’d lose the gift. Besides, I don’t have the discipline to get through another school. Willpower is not my strong suit. The world is made out of willpower,” he said, as if perplexed. He put his head back into his hands. “Willpower! Anyhow, would you please explain to me why it feels as if I’ve committed a murder?”

  When I had first come to New York in the 1970s as an aspiring actor, I rode the subways everywhere, particularly the number 6, which in those days was still the Lexington IRT line. Sitting on that train one afternoon, squeezed between my fellow passengers as I helped one of them, a schoolboy, with a nosebleed, I felt pleased with myself. I had assimilated. Having come to New York from the Midwest, I was anticipating my big break and meanwhile waited tables at a little bistro near Astor Place. Mine was a familiar story, one of those drabby little tales of ideals and artistic high-mindedness that wouldn’t bear repeating if it weren’t for the woman with whom I was then involved.

  She had a quietly insubstantial quality. When you looked away from her, you couldn’t be sure that she’d still be there when you looked back again. She knew how to vanish quickly from scenes she didn’t like. Her ability to dematerialize was purposeful and was complicated by her appearance: day and night, she wore dark glasses. She had sensitivity to light, a photophobia, which she had acquired as a result of a corneal infection. In those days, her casual friends thought that the dark glasses constituted a praiseworthy affectation. “She looks very cool,” they would say.

  Even her name—Giulietta, spelled in the Italian manner—seemed like an affectation. But Giulietta it was, the name with which, as a Catholic, she had been baptized. We’d met at the bistro where I carried menus and trays laden with food back and forth. Dining alone, cornered under a light fixture, she was reading a book by Bruno Bettelheim, and I deliberately served her a risotto entrée that she hadn’t ordered. I wanted to provoke her to conversation, even if it was hostile. I couldn’t see her eyes behind those dark glasses, but I wanted to. Self-possession in any form attracts
me, especially at night, in cities. Anyway, my studied incompetence as a waiter amused her. Eventually she gave me her phone number.

  She worked in Brooklyn at a special school for mildly autistic and emotionally impaired little kids. The first time we slept together we had to move the teddy bears and the copies of the New Yorker off her bed. Sophistication and a certain childlike guilelessness lived side by side in her behavior. On Sunday morning she watched cartoons and Meet the Press, and in the afternoon she listened to the Bartók quartets while smoking marijuana, which she claimed was good for her eyesight. In her bathtub was a rubber duck, and in the living room a copy of Anna Karenina, which she had read three times.

  We were inventive and energetic in our lovemaking, Giulietta and I, but her eyes stayed hidden no matter how dark it was. From her, I knew nothing of the look of recognition a woman can give to a man. All the same, I was beginning to love her. She comforted me and sustained me by attaching me to ordinary things: reading the Sunday paper in bed, making bad jokes—the rewards of plain everyday life.

  One night I took her uptown for a party near Columbia, at the apartment of another actor, Freddy Avery, who also happened to be a poet. Like many actors, Freddy enjoyed performing and was good at mimicry, and his parties tended to be raucous. You could easily commit an error in tone at those parties. You’d expose yourself as a hayseed if you were too sincere about anything. There was an Iron Law of Irony at Freddy’s parties, so I was worried that if Giulietta and I arrived too early, we’d be mocked. No one was ever prompt at Freddy’s parties (they always began at their midpoint, if I could put it that way), so we ducked into a bar to waste a bit of time before going up.

  Under a leaded-glass, greenish lamp hanging down over our booth, Giulietta took my hand. “We don’t have to go to this … thing,” she said. “We could just escape to a movie and then head home.”