Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [171]
“A spaceship?”
“Shh.” The old man put his finger to his lips. “Mum’s the word.” Then he jabbed Ellickson in the ribs. “Maybe I’m kidding! Maybe there’s no spaceship!”
Ellickson returned to his house, uncertain about the nature of the conversation he had just had.
For his daughter, Barbara, Ellickson had been putting together a dollhouse, and now, for his son, Alex, he was writing a letter. He hadn’t been able to get past “My dear son” despite many attempts. It was as if his heart had suffered a blockage, and the language of feeling that other parents drew upon effortlessly had been denied him. He loved his son, but to say so in so many words seemed unthinkable. If you just put it like that, with the love right out on the table, the words would lack force. They would sound fatuous. Nothing would stand behind such a statement, especially after a father’s drunken misbehavior, and besides, the kid might be spoiled if you said it flat-out like that.
Ellickson felt that he had had to earn every single bit of love that he himself had ever received, and that if he hadn’t tried to satisfy everyone’s expectations for him, he would have been promptly thrown out into the street to die in the gutter like a dog. He still might suffer that fate. He sat at his desk, pen in hand, staring out the window at his neighbor, who was now putting in a bed of petunias.
“Fourteen years ago,” Ellickson finally wrote to his son, “I met your mother at a rock concert. Maybe we told you this story. We were standing together in the aisle of this big converted bus terminal downtown that had been turned into a club, and then we both started to dance at almost the same time, and before long, we introduced ourselves.” The place had been thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of weed, and the band, Town Dump, had only an approximate sense of how they should be playing, but somehow, despite their ineptitude, or because of it, the musicians lit up the audience, and Ellickson had found himself dancing with this beautiful young woman who had appeared magically in front of him. “Your mother,” Ellickson wrote, “was wearing a speckled-green T-shirt with a little pin on it, and plain blue jeans, and she was the prettiest woman who had ever looked me in the eye and taken me by the hand.” This confession was not quite the appropriate history for him to be laying out for his son, he realized, but he couldn’t think of what else to write, or what other route to take toward an apology. “I started to fall in love with your mother right there,” Ellickson wrote. “We talked for hours that following week.”
Ellickson had had many girlfriends and one ex-wife by that time. He was ready for love to strike. On their first real date, when he had taken the girl he had met at the rock concert out for a spaghetti dinner and a movie, he knew this one, this Laura, would be serious. “And then what happened, what really did it for me, was that your mom took me over to where she lived and played the guitar for me and sang a song she had written herself.” She had had a sweet voice. The song was about how things pass and how you have to reach for the moment. Ellickson had always carried a torch for women who raised their voices in song.
“What I’m saying is that I’m not a bad person. My dad used to take me deer hunting in the woods up north,” Ellickson continued, in a new paragraph, not wanting to write about how everything had gone wrong with Laura. The letter to his son was growing a bit disconnected, he knew, but this wasn’t an English composition, this was a soul statement. “When you’re older, I’ll take you deer hunting if you want to go up to the woods with me. I haven’t really done any hunting