Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [194]
A day or so after having lunch with Brantford, I went up to visit Aunt Margaret. She had started to bend over from the osteoporosis that would cripple her, or maybe it was the calcium-reducing effects of her anti-depressant and the diet of kung pao chicken, vodka, and cigarettes that she lived on. She was terrifyingly lucid, as always. The vodka merely seemed to have sharpened her wits. She was so unblurred, I hoped she wasn’t about to go into one of her tailspins. Copies of Foreign Affairs lay around her apartment near the porcelain figurines. NPR drifted in from a radio on the windowsill. She had been reading Tacitus, she told me. “The Annals of Imperial Rome. Have you ever read it, Benjamin?”
“No,” I said. I sank back on the sofa, irritating one of the cats, who leapt up away from me before taking up a position on the windowsill.
“You should. I can’t read the Latin anymore, but I can read it in English. Frighteningly relevant. During the reign of Tiberius, Sejanus’s daughter is arrested and led away. ‘What did I do? Where are you taking me? I won’t do it again,’ this girl says. My God. Think of all the thousands who have said those very words in this century. I’ve said them myself. I used to say them to my father.”
“Your father?”
“Of course. He could be cruel. He would lead me away, and he punished me. He probably had his reasons. He knew me. Well, I was a terrible girl,” she said dreamily. “I was willful. Always getting into situations. I was … forward. There’s an antiquated adjective. Well. These days, if I were young again, I could come into my own, no one would even be paying the slightest attention to me. I’d go from boy to boy like a bee sampling flowers, but in those days, they called us ‘wild’ and they hid us away. Thank god for progress. Have you seen Brantford, by the way?”
I told her that I had had lunch with him and that he had said that he felt as if he had killed somebody.
“Really. I wonder what he’s thinking. He must be all worn out. Is he still drinking? Did he tell you about his girlfriend? That child of his?”
“What child? No, he didn’t tell me. Who’s this?”
“Funny that he didn’t tell you.” She stood up and went over to a miniature grandfather clock, only eight inches high, on the mantel. “Heavens,” she said, “where are my manners? I should offer you some tea. Or maybe a sandwich.” This customary politeness sounded odd coming from her.
“No, thank you.” I shook my head. “Aunt Margaret, what child are you talking about?”
“It’s not a baby, not yet. Don’t misunderstand me. They haven’t had a baby, those two. But Brantford’s found a girlfriend, and she might as well be a baby, she’s so young. Eighteen years old, for heaven’s sake. He discovered her in a department store, selling clothes behind the counter. Shirts and things. She’s another one of his strays. And of course he doesn’t have a dime to his name anymore, and he takes her everywhere on his credit cards when he’s not living off of her, and he still doesn’t have a clue what to do with himself. Animals all over the place, but no job. He spends all day teaching dogs how to walk and birds how to fly. I suppose it’s my fault. They’ll blame me. They blame me for everything.”
“What’s her name? This girl?” I asked. “He didn’t mention her to me.”
“Camille,” Aunt Margaret told me. “And of course she’s beautiful—they all are, at that age—but so what? A nineteenth-century name and a beautiful face and figure and no personality at all and no money. They think love is everything, and they get sentimental, but love really isn’t much. Just a little girl, this Camille. She likes the animals, of course, but she doesn’t know what she’s getting into with him.” She looked at me slyly. “Do you still envy him? You mustn’t envy or pity him, you know. And how is Giulietta?” Aunt Margaret had never approved of Giulietta and thought my marriage to her had been ill-advised. “And your darling children? Those boys? How are they, Benjamin?”
Aunt Margaret turned out to be wrong about Camille, who was not a sentimentalist