Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [64]
“I want to meet him,” she said quickly. She scowled at the moonlit snow. “A man with ideas. People like that have gone out of my life.” She looked over at her son. “What I hate about being my age is how nice everyone tries to be. I was never nice, but now everybody is pelting me with sugar cubes.” She opened her window an inch and let the cold air blow over her, ruffling her stiff gray hair.
When they arrived at the school, snow had started to fall, and at the other end of the parking lot a police car’s flashing light beamed long crimson rays through the dense flakes. Fenstad’s mother walked deliberately toward the door, shaking her head mistrustfully at the building and the police. Approaching the steps, she took her son’s hand. “I liked the columns on the old buildings,” she said. “The old university buildings, I mean. I liked Greek Revival better than this Modernist-bunker stuff.” Inside, she blinked in the light at the smooth, waxed linoleum floors and cement-block walls. She held up her hand to shade her eyes. Fenstad took her elbow to guide her over the snow melting in puddles in the entryway. “I never asked you what you’re teaching tonight.”
“Logic,” Fenstad said.
“Ah.” She smiled and nodded. “Dialectics!”
“Not quite. Just logic.”
She shrugged. She was looking at the clumps of students standing in the glare of the hallway, drinking coffee from paper cups and smoking cigarettes in the general conversational din. She wasn’t used to such noise: she stopped in the middle of the corridor underneath a wall clock and stared happily in no particular direction. With her eyes shut she breathed in the close air, smelling of wet overcoats and smoke, and Fenstad remembered how much his mother had always liked smoke-filled rooms, where ideas fought each other, and where some of those ideas died.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand again. Inside Fenstad’s classroom six people sat in the angular postures of pre-boredom. York Follette was already in the back row, his copy of Workers’ Vanguard shielding his face. Fenstad’s mother headed straight for him and sat down in the desk next to his. Fenstad saw them shake hands, and in two minutes they were talking in low, rushed murmurs. He saw York Follette laugh quietly and nod. What was it that blacks saw and appreciated in his mother? They had always liked her—written to her, called her, checked up on her—and Fenstad wondered if they recognized something in his mother that he himself had never been able to see.
At seven thirty-five most of the students had arrived and were talking to each other vigorously, as if they didn’t want Fenstad to start and thought they could delay him. He stared at them, and when they wouldn’t quiet down, he made himself rigid and said, “Good evening. We have a guest tonight.” Immediately the class grew silent. He held his arm out straight, indicating with a flick of his hand the old woman in the back row. “My mother,” he said. “Clara Fenstad.” For the first time all semester his students appeared to be paying attention: they turned around collectively and looked at Fenstad’s mother, who smiled and waved. A few of the students began to applaud; others joined in. The applause was quiet but apparently genuine. Fenstad’s mother brought herself slowly to her feet and made a suggestion of a bow. Two of the students sitting in front of her turned around and began to talk to her. At the front of the class Fenstad started his lecture on logic, but his mother wouldn’t quiet down. This was a class for adults. They were free to do as they liked.
Lowering his head and facing the blackboard, Fenstad reviewed problems in logic, following point by point the outline set down by the textbook: post hoc fallacies, false authorities, begging the question, circular reasoning, ad hominem arguments, all the