Gryphon

  ALSO BY CHARLES BAXTER

  FICTION

  The Soul Thief

  Saul and Patsy

  The Feast of Love

  Believers

  Shadow Play

  A Relative Stranger

  First Light

  Through the Safety Net

  Harmony of the World

  POETRY

  Imaginary Paintings and Other Poems

  PROSE

  The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot

  Burning Down the House

  AS EDITOR

  A William Maxwell Portrait

  (with Edward Hirsch and Michael Collier)

  The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting

  Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life (with Peter Turchi)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Charles Baxter

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found at the end of the volume.

  The following stories originally appeared in book form: “Harmony of the World,” “Horace and Margaret’s Fifty-second,” and “The Would-be Father” in Harmony of the World (University of Missouri Press, 1984, and subsequently published by Vintage Books in 1997); “The Eleventh Floor,” “Gryphon,” “Surprised by Joy,” and “Winter Journey” in Through the Safety Net (Viking, 1985, and subsequently published by Vintage Books in 1998); and “The Cures for Love,” “Flood Show,” “Kiss Away,” and “The Next Building I Plan to Bomb” in Believers (Pantheon Books, 1997).

  Some stories were previously published in the following: “The Old Murderer” and “Royal Blue” in The American Scholar; “Poor Devil” in The Atlantic; “Ghosts” and “Mr. Scary” in Ploughshares; and “The Cousins” and “The Winner” in Tin House.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baxter, Charles, [date]

  Gryphon : new and selected stories / Charles Baxter.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37956-6

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A854G79 2011 813′.54—dc22 2010013785

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket photograph: Hartwig House, Truro, 1976, © Joel Meyerowitz, Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, N.Y.

  Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  FOR DAN FRANK

  AND IN MEMORY OF MICHAEL STEINBERG

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Would-be Father

  Horace and Margaret’s Fifty-second

  Harmony of the World

  Winter Journey

  Surprised by Joy

  The Eleventh Floor

  Gryphon

  Fenstad’s Mother

  Westland

  Shelter

  Snow

  The Disappeared

  Kiss Away

  The Next Building I Plan to Bomb

  Flood Show

  The Cures for Love

  Poor Devil

  Ghosts

  Royal Blue

  The Old Murderer

  Mr. Scary

  The Cousins

  The Winner

  About the Author

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  The Would-be Father

  WIPING OFF THE kitchen counter after dinner, Burrage happened to glance at the window over the sink and saw a woman’s face outside, peering in. The face had an inquisitive but friendly expression. It belonged to Mrs. Schultz from across the street, who tended to wander around the Heritage Condominium complex in the early evening while under the influence of powerful medications prescribed for her after-dinner and bedtime pains.

  “Hi, Mrs. Schultz,” Burrage said, waving a sponge. “Are you all right? Do you know where you are?”

  “I think so,” she said, waving back. Her gray hair was bundled at the top of her head, and the lines around her mouth rose when she smiled. “I think I know where I am, if I’m across the street and if you are who I think you are. I wanted to see that boy of yours. Also, I’m thirsty. Can you pass a glass of water to me through this window?”

  “I can’t, Mrs. Schultz,” Burrage said. Looking boyish and preoccupied, as was usual for him, he pointed at the window. “Screens. And Gregory’s already in his pajamas. See how late it’s getting?” Mrs. Schultz glanced up, but it was still too early for stars. All the same, she nodded. “Let me take you home.” He dried his hands, poured a glass of water, and glanced down the hall. Gregory’s door was closed, but Burrage could hear him singing. He carried the water outside to where the old lady stood near the arborvitae, slowly moving her left hand back and forth in the air. Burrage realized that she was trying to brush away gnats. “Here,” he said, putting the glass in her other hand. She sipped it, thanked him, and gave it back. Then she took his arm, and together they crossed the street. It was spring: he could hear children playing softball in the distance.

  “You said it was late,” she said, “but I don’t see any stars.”

  They walked up the sidewalk to her front door, which was wide open, and Burrage turned her around so that they faced his house. He could smell onions, or something acidic, coming from the inside of her condominium, a permanent smell and a sign that she had lost the knack of effective housekeeping.

  “The days are longer now, Mrs. Schultz. Daylight savings time. Look over the roof of my garage at the sky. What do you see? Do you see anything?”

  “I see a dot,” she said.

  “That’s Mars,” Burrage told her, letting out a breath with the word. “The red planet. So you see? It is getting dark. I’m leaving you here, okay? You should do yourself a favor and go inside now. Try to get some rest. Will you be all right?” Mrs. Schultz stared at his shirt buttons. “You should try to be all right,” he said.

  “Oh, it’s you I’m worried about, not me,” she said. “What a man in your position does, after all. And that dot, Mars. It’s right over your house, isn’t it? It’s not over my house.” She looked at him with her I’m-not-so-dumb face. “Thank you anyway. I’ll go in now. Say good night to that little boy of yours.”

  “I will.”

  She turned once more and went in. Burrage watched her trudge down the hall toward the living-room chair in front of the perpetually blaring television set. He reached inside her door to make sure the lock was set and then closed it before going back.

  Gregory was kneeling at the side of his bed, his arms stretched out over the patchwork quilt, his fingers clasped tightly together. The only illumination in the room came from the Scotty dog night-light, which cast a pale glow on the bed and dresser and made them look like toy furniture used in a circus act. Gregory, who was five years old, was praying to Santa Claus. With his face buried in the quilt, his words broke out with difficulty, a mumble of wishes.

  On the opposite side of the room was a narrow rocking chair, next to a low table on which was placed a windup double-decker bus and an ashtray. Above them was a wall poster of Paddington Bear, a poster the boy had outgrown. Burrage’s routine was to go into the room, kiss Gregory good night, light up a cigar, and turn on the boy’s cassette recorder, which would play the same selecti
on of tunes as always, Glenn Miller’s greatest hits, starting with “Moonlight Serenade.” When Burrage had been a boy himself, suffering from asthma and unable to sleep, his mother would play Glenn Miller on the phonograph. In this way he became accustomed to falling asleep to the big-band sound.

  His prayers finished, the boy climbed into bed and waited for Burrage to tuck him in. He was used to Burrage’s cigars and now liked the smell at bedtime. After Burrage entered, he kissed Gregory and, as usual, sat down to be close to the ashtray, before tapping the button on the recorder.

  “Where were you?” Gregory asked.

  “Mrs. Schultz was over here. I had to help her back across the street.” He waited a moment. “Did you say your prayers?”

  “Yeah,” the boy said. He picked up his stuffed dragon and made a sound.

  “Was that a roar,” Burrage asked, “or a yawn?”

  “He’s sleepy,” the boy said. “Tell me a story. Tell me a story with me in it. Tell me my horoscope.” As always, he tripped over the word. “What’s happening tomorrow?”

  “Don’t you want to hear a bunny story or something?”

  “No. My horoscope.”

  “Okay.” Burrage took a deep breath. “The planets are in a good position for you tomorrow, especially Mercury and Venus. They’ll take good care of you, just like today. The stars are really interested in what will happen to you at school tomorrow, and they want to know how you’re doing. They want to know if you’ve learned the alphabet and if you’re getting along better with Rosemary.”

  “I don’t like her,” the boy said. “She kicks people and steals cookies from my lunch.”

  “The stars will take care of you,” Burrage said softly. “When you see Rosemary, just get out of her way and do something else. She just acts funny sometimes. I know from your horoscope that you’ll find plenty of crayons and clay to play with.”

  “A train,” the boy said sleepily.

  “You will find a train,” Burrage said, blowing out cigar smoke, “and you can play with the train if you share it. Rosemary won’t bother you. Anyhow, it’ll be a fine day. The planets and the stars have decided that it’ll be sunny tomorrow morning, and you’ll also be playing outside in the sandbox or on the jungle gym. You’ll laugh a lot and there’s a good chance you’ll play hide-and-seek. I have a feeling that there’ll be peanut-butter sandwiches in your lunchbox tomorrow. Now go to sleep. Sleep tight.” Half asleep, the boy made roaring-dragon sounds. Burrage leaned back in the rocking chair to finish his cigar and listen to Glenn Miller.

  Burrage is Gregory’s uncle, in actual fact. Burrage’s brother Cecil, Gregory’s father, and Cecil’s wife, Virginia, were on their way back from seeing a movie when they were hit head-on in a residential area of Ann Arbor by a kid who was testing the potential of his father’s Corvette. At the time, Burrage was living with a red-haired woman named Leslie who was about to move out anyway: her company had relocated her in Seattle. Very little of what happened to Burrage in this period of his life entered his permanent memory. The phone rang all the time, and he had to talk to lawyers whose names he could never remember. He had to go to the Hall of Justice by himself and sign documents. Cecil and Virginia’s will said quite explicitly that Burrage was to be the guardian of Gregory should anything happen to them; Burrage had known about this will but had thought it would never be unlocked from the safety deposit box where it had been stored against the day.

  He took a leave from the bank and stayed with his mother in Grosse Pointe Shores for two weeks, where he tried to get used to the shock of his brother’s and sister-in-law’s deaths and to having Gregory around all the time. Burrage was terrified by every minute of his entire future earthly life. For his part, Gregory went back to sucking his thumb and sat slumped in front of the television set all day, crying in the evening when the children’s programming ended. At times he fell asleep during Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and emitted tiny snores. After Burrage had finally taken all of his nephew’s toys over to his condominium in Ann Arbor, he moved Gregory out of his mother’s home and into his. Six months later Burrage’s mother sold her house and moved to Arizona, obviously dazed but not yet incompetent.

  After a few weeks, Gregory stopped asking when his mommy and daddy were coming back, but he became more interested in television than ever, especially cartoons and broadcasts of church services. He explained to Burrage that people prayed on television, and he wanted to know how it was done. This request was the first one he had made to Burrage that did not have to do with getting dressed, going to the bathroom, or eating a meal. Burrage hadn’t been brought up in a religious household, didn’t know anything about prayers, and said so.

  “I want to know how,” Gregory said. “They all do it on TV. What do I do?”

  “I don’t know,” Burrage told him. “But try this: kneel beside the bed at night and put your head down and close your eyes. Think of what you’re happy about. Then think about the things you want. That’s what people usually do when they pray.” He stopped and waited. Then he asked, “Why do you want to start doing something like this?”

  “It might help,” Gregory said.

  In this way, Burrage hit on the idea of astrology and horoscopes. He had noticed, at a time when he thought they had nothing in common, that Gregory’s birthday and his own were both in May, making them Taureans. One night, while Gregory was curled at his end of the sofa watching television and he himself was reading the paper, he found an astrology column and read the entry for Taureans aloud: “Show greater confidence in yourself and others will pay more attention to your ideas and comments. You cannot handle a project all alone. Share the work—and the glory.” At first Gregory said nothing, as if he hadn’t heard, but then he turned to Burrage and asked, “What’s that?”

  Burrage explained that it was his fortune for tomorrow, and that the woman who wrote it was a kind of fortune-teller, and people believed that she could see into the future and tell what was about to happen before it actually happened.

  “How?” Gregory asked. “How does she know?”

  “It’s called astrology,” Burrage said. “It’s based on the stars and the planets. People think the planets have mysterious forces. They cause things. This says you should share your games at school tomorrow and be nice and not hog everything and not be afraid. Mostly it says not to be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Gregory said, his eyes on the television.

  “I know you’re not. But here it says that the stars will help you out not being afraid.”

  “Okay,” Gregory said.

  In Ann Arbor, a bookish town, Burrage had no trouble finding a paperback guide to astrology. The one he chose had a bloated, menacing star on the cover, either a red giant or an arcane symbol of some sort. At the cash register he felt quite sheepish, as if he had emotional difficulties that he was trying to cure by himself, but the clerk didn’t seem to care very much about what books he bought. He took the book to his car, drove to the nursery school, picked up Gregory, and went home. That night, after Gregory was asleep, he read the book straight through, dismayed by its complexity. Casting Gregory’s horoscope would take some time. He took fifteen minutes off from his lunch break at the bank the next day to read relevant sections of the book, which he had brought along in his briefcase, and the next night he began to put Gregory’s horoscope together at the kitchen table.

  Sun in Taurus: constructive, practical, down-to-earth. Burrage marked down Gregory’s Earth sign, appropriate for farmers and others with persistence and domestic virtues. Hitler, the book informed him, had been a Taurus, as was Walt Whitman. Discouraged, he read on. At his birth, Gregory’s moon was in Cancer: “You may have a strong bond with your mother. You are good at camouflage. You excel at impersonations.” Ascendant or rising sign: Gemini. “Gemini ascending has special problems with bankers and clergymen.” Burrage read this sentence again. “Gemini ascending has special problems with bankers and clergymen.” He continued on. “You may hold sever
al jobs at one time. You may well be divorced. You may lose your children.” Burrage could not get Gregory’s sign for Mercury; the procedure was too complicated. He paged through the book for Gregory’s Venus sign, which was also Gemini. “Venus in Gemini makes you pleasant, sociable, and relaxed.” The rest of the description applied only to adults. As for Mars, at Gregory’s birth, it had been in Leo: “You are friendly. But you tend to be self-centered and see most events in your own terms. You may have a habit of blowing small things out of proportion.”

  “What’s that?” A voice out of nowhere came from behind Burrage. He turned around and saw Mrs. Schultz looking over his shoulder at the horoscope he was constructing. She was carrying a pair of garden clippers, their blades caked with dirt.

  “Mrs. Schultz! This is a horoscope. How did you get in?”

  “I was tending to things. I thought this was my house. Your front door was unlocked, and so I came in. I get confused in this place because all these damn-fool buildings look alike.” She gazed down at the table with an expression of pained amusement. “A horoscope? I thought you were a grown-up.”

  “I am a grown-up. I’m using it for Gregory. He needs it.”

  The noise Mrs. Schultz made could have been throat-clearing, laughter, or a cough. Burrage decided that he would not ask which one it was. “In that case,” she said, “I won’t stay. I’m going home, and you don’t have to help me this time. I’ll find my way by myself, without a horoscope. What’s that music I hear? Glenn Miller. Well, that puts me back into the bloom of youth.” She did not shuffle out but picked up her feet ostentatiously. Burrage watched her disappear down the hall and go out the front door, which she left open. He went back to work.

  Burrage’s composite horoscope for Gregory presented his nephew as a rather shaky and split character with extraordinary requirements for domestic stability. The planetary signs, however, were somewhat obtuse when they were not contradictory, so Burrage decided to change them, to revise the sky. Where there was weakness, Burrage inserted strength. Where he found indecision or calamity, he substituted resolve and good fortune. In place of trauma and loss he wrote down words like “luck” and “intelligence.” This, he thought at first, would invalidate the horoscope, but he decided that if the planets had real influence, then they were influencing him now to alter Gregory’s life-plan. It was their wish.