Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [166]
“Is she? Lucky you,” the Adult said. “Daphne pregnant again. She won’t have an abortion this time, will she? Will you? Of course not. You’ll have the most beautiful child, the two of you. Just a glorious thing. But everything changes now. Love is tested. Can’t go on as before. You’ll have weight, my dear.”
“Weight? I don’t—”
“No, no, I don’t mean that. You shouldn’t take me literally.” She reached out and touched his knee. “I meant ‘weight’ in the other sense.”
“Yes, I know.”
She leaned back. The Adult often gave the impression that she was both excited and dismayed by Nicholas. “Do you? Well. Here’s a little story. When I was a girl, we lived close by a Swedish immigrant family, the Petersons. They were the neighborhood laborers and lived in a coach house. He worked as a caretaker and she took in laundry. She also acted as everyone’s part-time nursemaid, if you know what I mean.”
Nicholas nodded, bewildered.
“They had a son, about my age, an angelic type, beautiful, and a prodigy, or so everyone said, though I don’t remember in what—maybe in everything. A terrible fate. Children like that catch the attention of the gods. He could draw and remember word for word whatever you said, and he had every athletic gift you could imagine: running, balls and bats, the works. Terrible! Also, he was manifestly smarter and more alert than his parents, and they were so proud of him, and he could sit down at the piano and play short Bach and Chopin pieces by ear, and no one even knew in that environment where he had heard them. Gustav, this boy’s name was. And then when he was ten years old, he developed a brain tumor, fate being what it is, and when he died of it, his father became so blind with rage and grief that he began to throw all their worldly goods, everything they owned that could be picked up, out of the coach house window. He’d throw out the coffeepot and the lamp, and his wife would calm him down, but the next day his grief would return, and he’d break up a kitchen chair and throw it out the window, poor man, and then the radio and the kitchen blender and the telephone. Whatever he could get his hands on, anything that could be mobilized, he threw out that window. You’d see this little heap of household objects on the driveway. Some languages have a term for grief madness, but English doesn’t. Isn’t that a shame?”
Nicholas nodded again. What on earth was she talking about?
“When those airplanes hit those buildings,” she said, “on that day when you were up here a month ago, do you know what I did?” She didn’t stop to look at him or to wait for his response. “After you left, I took the mower out and mowed the back lawn, by myself. It didn’t require mowing. The grass had been cut two days before. But I had to do an ordinary task. I had to anchor myself to daily life. To make a routine, to recapture what I love about banality. Then I drove into town, late afternoon, and I gave blood. And what did you do, my darling friend?”
“I drove home, as you know,” he said. “It took a long time.”
“Ah, Nicholas,” she said. “Your foot is bleeding.” She reached out and took his foot in her hand and gave him an expression of sweet concern. From a pocket, she drew out a piece of cloth and daubed at a small bloody scratch on his instep.
She was beautiful enough to sleep with, he thought, and it wouldn’t exactly be demeaning or patronizing, but he wasn’t going to make that particular pass at her and take her into the bedroom and undress her and sleep with her underneath one of Granny W.’s signs. Another blue motto. It had been hung above the bed, a cryptic sentence: SORROW ABIDETH BESIDE MY JOYOUS HEART. He wouldn’t willingly give the Adult the Nicholas-treatment in that bed no matter what, even if there