Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [63]
“It’s just happiness,” Fenstad said. Quickly he checked her apartment for any signs of memory loss or depression. He found none and immediately felt relief. The apartment smelled of soap and Lysol, the signs of an old woman who wouldn’t tolerate nonsense. Out on her coffee table, as usual, were the letters she was writing to her congressman and to political dictators around the globe. Fenstad’s mother pleaded for enlightened behavior and berated the dictators for their bad political habits.
She grasped the arm of the sofa and let herself down slowly. Only then did she smile. “How’s your soul, Harry?” she asked. “What’s the news?”
He smiled back and smoothed his hair. Martin Luther King’s eyes locked onto his from the framed picture on the wall opposite him. In the picture King was shaking hands with Fenstad’s mother, the two of them surrounded by smiling faces. “My soul’s okay, Ma,” he said. “It’s a hard project. I’m always working on it.” He reached down for a chocolate-chunk cookie from a box on top of the television. “Who brought you these?”
“Your daughter Sharon. She came to see me on Friday.” Fenstad’s mother tilted her head at him. “You want to be a good person, but she’s the real article. Goodness comes to her without any effort at all. She says you have a new girlfriend. A pharmacist this time. Susan, is it?” Fenstad nodded. “Harry, why does your generation always have to find the right person? Why can’t you learn to live with the wrong person? Sooner or later everyone’s wrong. Love isn’t the most important thing, Harry, far from it. Why can’t you see that? I still don’t comprehend why you couldn’t live with Eleanor.” Eleanor was Fenstad’s ex-wife. They had been divorced for a decade, but Fenstad’s mother hoped for a reconciliation.
“Come on, Ma,” Fenstad said. “Over and done with, gone and gone.” He took another cookie.
“You live with somebody so that you’re living with somebody, and then you go out and do the work of the world. I don’t understand all this pickiness about lovers. In a pinch anybody’ll do, Harry, believe me.”
On the side table was a picture of her late husband, Fenstad’s mild, middle-of-the-road father. Fenstad glanced at the picture and let the silence hang between them before asking, “How are you, Ma?”
“I’m all right.” She leaned back in the sofa, whose springs made a strange, almost human groan. “I want to get out. I spend too much time in this place in January. You should expand my horizons. Take me somewhere.”
“Come to my composition class,” Fenstad said. “I’ll pick you up at dinnertime on Tuesday. Eat early.”
“They’ll notice me,” she said, squinting. “I’m too old.”
“I’ll introduce you,” her son said. “You’ll fit right in.”
Fenstad wrote brochures in the publicity department of a computer company during the day, and taught an extension English-composition class at the downtown campus of the state university two nights a week. He didn’t need the money; he taught the class because he liked teaching strangers and because he enjoyed the sense of hope that classrooms held for him. This hopefulness and didacticism he had picked up from his mother.
On Tuesday night she was standing at the door of the retirement apartment building, dressed in a dark blue overcoat—her best. Her stylishness was belied slightly by a pair of old fuzzy red earmuffs. Inside the car Fenstad noticed that she had put on perfume, unusual for her. Leaning back, she gazed out contentedly at the nighttime lights.
“Who’s in this group of students?” she asked. “Working-class people, I hope. Those are the ones you should be teaching. Anything else is just a career.”
“Oh, they work, all right.” He looked at his mother and saw, as they passed under a streetlight, a combination of sadness and delicacy in her face. Her usual mask of tough optimism seemed to be deserting her. He braked at a red light and said, “I have a hairdresser and a garage mechanic and a housewife, a Mrs. Nelson, and three guys who’re sanitation