Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [159]
It didn’t shock her, somehow, that he had heard them. “I have friends. Just not here. I’m moving back home,” she said. “To my house. Where I live. I can’t stay here anymore, Daddy. I can’t take care of you anymore. I love you, Daddy, but I can’t do it. I’ll arrange for somebody to watch you and to cook.” She leaned down to kiss the top of his head.
“I know,” he said. “Oh, I know, honey. Staying here makes you a child, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.” She could feel the goddamn tears flooding over her. And she could feel the ghosts of the house gathering around him, now, easing his way into the next world that awaited him. And somewhere on the planet, her mother, too, drove toward the horizon, forever. “I’ll watch out for you, though. I’ll drop in. I’ll check on you.”
“No, you probably won’t,” he said. “No one does. But that’s all right. That’s how it happens. By the way, do you hear that violin? That girl is practicing as if her life depended on it.”
Melinda bent her ear to the silence. “Yes,” she agreed. “I do hear it. All the time. Morning and night. It never stops.”
Royal Blue
AFTER CALLING IT QUITS with being a model and actor—his eyes were a bit too close together for the big time—Nicholas went into the business of acquiring and selling folk art. He and Daphne lived in Brooklyn, where she worked as a real estate agent, and in early autumn he had been up in New Paltz, at the country house of one of his clients, Mrs. Andriessen. Daphne referred to Mrs. Andriessen as “the Adult.”
The Adult, a childless woman of a certain age, owned a largish woodstone-and-glass house with a lap pool, along with views of trees and a lake. She had a crush on Nicholas, which evened things out slightly between them. Every month they ate lunch together in either New Paltz or one of the neighboring restaurants near her city place on East Eighty-sixth, where she spent the weekdays during the winter. On weekends, and during much of the spring, summer, and fall, she stayed put in the country, filling her days with gardening, reading, and bird-watching. The Adult had two degrees from Princeton, one in art history and another in Slavic languages, and she sat on top of several million dollars that she shared with her husband, who resided most of the year in Shanghai. He spoke fluent Mandarin and had a business that the Adult never referred to, because, she said, she was ashamed of it. His income allowed her a measure of indolence. Various accommodations had been made.
She was a tall, brown-haired woman who walked with the deliberation and poise of a former dancer. She laughed easily, but her beauty was complicated by her eyes, which were deep and haunted, and by her distracting habit of falling into thoughtful silences.
When you entered the Adult’s house, period-instrument Baroque music would usually be making its way out of the audio system in the living room, and in the foyer you would be confronted with a signboard painted in red on oak slats.
The chariots rage in the streets, they rush to and fro in the squares, they gleam like torches, they dart like lightning, they are the messengers, they are like stones thrown from the field for the plows straight path. Who shall tell the truth of the law and of righteousness? Only I, saith THE LORD.
Nicholas had found this signboard in Kansas a year or so after he had started up a private dealership. A retired dairy farmer, Nahum Fester Cobb, who had put up this sign and others alongside the dirt road leading to his cow barn, had painted it. Nicholas knew that the Adult, his best client, would like it, although “like” was not quite the correct word for the way she responded to these artifacts. He had once asked her if she wanted folk art around the house because it was cutting-edge, and she had scowled.
“The ‘cutting edge,’ ” she said, “has cut its way right out of what I’m interested in. I wish you wouldn’t use clichés like that, Nicholas.”
“What are you interested in?” Nicholas inquired.
“Terror and prophecy,” the Adult said quietly, taking a sip of her iced