Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [165]
He dropped the handsaw. The Adult hopped out of the way of it, though it had landed nowhere near her feet. Nicholas clutched a branch to keep himself from falling.
By the time he came out of the shower and had dressed, Mrs. Andriessen had brewed some espresso and was sitting in her living room reading Edith Wharton’s stories. “Want some?” she asked, glancing at him and holding up her cup.
“Espresso? In the afternoon? No, thanks,” he said, shaking his hands to dry them. He was still barefoot, because one of his socks had a hole in it, which he did not care to display.
She put her book aside, having placed a marker on the page where she had stopped, and rubbed rather violently at her forehead. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to climb up in that tree to cut that branch. But a few weeks ago, I had a dream about you, Nicholas. In this particular dream, you were aloft in an apple tree, and you were surveying the countryside. God knows how you got up there, but then you were sawing away at a dead branch, and I was down below, and when I woke, I thought: Well, maybe I should see to it that the dream is … I don’t know, enacted.” She said the last word with a slightly embarrassed inflection. “A person rarely gets that chance.”
“I used to climb trees,” Nicholas said. “When I was a boy.”
“Yes, I know,” the Adult said. “You once told me. Perhaps that’s what led to the dream.” She gazed at him quickly, as if a longer gaze would incriminate her. Mrs. Andriessen had a spooky way of suffering silently in Nicholas’s presence, but her reticence appeared to be impregnable. Now she looked over at Granny Westerby’s wine bottle. “ ‘Fear and love his loins,’ ” she read. “That’s a royal blue she used.”
“She told me that she painted it with the sky,” Nicholas offered.
“Did she actually say that? That she painted it with sky?”
“Yes. And it was strange, just now, when I was up in that tree, you said something—about how you appreciated what I was doing, and when I heard those words, when I heard you say them, they were … I can’t explain it. They were blue. I heard them in color. I heard them in blue.”
The Adult leaned back and closed her eyes. “I’m not surprised. Do you know the origin of the phrase ‘royal blue’?” He shook his head, but she didn’t open her eyes to see. She seemed to know perfectly well where the gaps in his knowledge lay. She knew what he didn’t know. “It was a particular tint used in the fabrics set out to greet the visiting heads of state, royalty—in the decorative regalia, the canopies, for example. Royal blue was a color associated with the aristocracy and with hospitality. I don’t know if it’s related to the phrase ‘blue blood,’ but I doubt it. That particular phrase, as I remember, is from the Spanish. Do you know how a person would demonstrate blue blood?”
“No,” Nicholas said. Outside, the wind was coming up, and the trees beyond the yard swayed gracefully.
“By staying indoors,” she told him, turning toward him and speaking urgently. “By not getting a tan in the fields doing fieldwork, so the skin would stay white and the veins would remain visible. Also, the phrase refers to purity, freedom from … Arabic bloodlines. Which would have been considered an infection, in those days. In Spain. You know: the Moors.” She seemed bored by her knowledge, the length and breadth of it. “Isn’t that interesting? Considering recent events? Free of Arabic blood? Blue blood?”
“Daphne is pregnant,” Nicholas told Mrs. Andriessen. He stood up to pace for a moment. “She told me a