Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (65 page)

Mallard had stopped massaging his wife’s feet, and both he and his wife were staring at Krumholtz, their attention fixed on him. Mallard lightly dropped his wife’s legs on the floor, rose, and took Krumholtz’s glass, refilling it, and then returned it to him. Krumholtz could not stop himself. Where had this story come from? It wasn’t untrue, exactly, even though it hadn’t happened.

“And Michael seemed to be all right for a while, and he thrived, and by the time he reached his fifth birthday, we thought we were out of the woods. But then, and I wouldn’t be telling you this if it weren’t the end of the day and I weren’t tired out—”

“Go right ahead,” Ellie Mallard said. “Disunburden yourself.”

“Thank you. He … he became sick. It began with coughing, and he lost his appetite, and he was pale, and he never had any energy, which you’re not expecting in a child that age, they’re animals really, or they
should
be, running and shouting all the time, that’s what nature intended, I mean, but instead he, I mean Michael, would sit in a chair morning until night, listlessly, you know, and usually television was all he could do, and we at least gave thanks for that.… Well, we couldn’t get a diagnosis from the pediatrician, and of course, it was understandable. Who knows how to look? Or where? We did one blood test after another, I mean,
they
did,
they
did one blood test after another, beyond what our insurance could pay for, those ghouls, though I suppose I shouldn’t say that, they mean well, those medical professionals, and each time,
each time
we went in, Michael would start crying before they had even taken the blood, which tore at my heart. He’d just see the exterior office door, which was painted this bright terrible frightening red, not comforting at all, and he’d start howling. How can you get used to the suffering of a child? I mean, you can’t. You can’t get used to it. Or you
shouldn’t
. There’s nothing there in that situation you should ever accept. And he was bleeding from the nose all the time, and sometimes from his mouth, for no reasons that we knew, and then finally we got a diagnosis.”

“What was it?” Ellie Mallard asked in a whisper.

“Chronic thrombocytopenic purpura,” Krumholtz said. He had once written an article about the disease and knew something about it. “And there’s no cure for it and no treatment and invariably it’s fatal. So … well, we had a certain amount of time. There was this question we were facing. What should we do?
What should we do with the time we had left with our little boy?
It’s such a terrible decision. I mean, no one can make a decision like that. Of course we asked Michael what he wanted to do, we had to ask him, what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. He didn’t want to go to any of those destination places. He said he wanted to sit by the window.”

Krumholtz took another swig of the scotch.

“Michael sat by the window, and he would narrate what he saw,
almost as if he could imagine what his adulthood might have been like. People going to work in the morning, people coming home in the evening, laboring at their jobs. And the sun, traveling across the sky. And the street. And the birds. And squirrels. There was one particular bird, a sparrow that came by for the bread crumbs that Michael put out on his windowsill. And then, when Michael died, the sparrow came by waiting for him, for the food he had put out there. The bird would hop out on the sill and chirp. Then one night we heard a terrible thump against Michael’s window. The next morning we found the sparrow on the lawn. It seemed to have flung itself against his window. When I bent down to pick it up, I discovered that its heart had stopped.”

Well, he had his triumph: the winner and his wife were in tears. The damn tears: against the riches of the world, they changed almost nothing. But now Krumholtz felt a power surging through him. No one would dare to move him from his comfortable position on the sofa. He took another swig. “Oh, stop,” Ellie Mallard said, touching a hankie to her face. But he wasn’t finished. The boy, Angus, had come into the room and was staring wide-eyed at his mother. And now here was Gretel, dressed just like her brother, in the doorway, listening intently, and alarmed by the parental weeping. Krumholz did not intend to budge: he would sit there, with his audience in front of him, elaborating this story of suffering and terror for as long as he pleased. He had just gotten started.

About the Author

Charles Baxter is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including five novels,
The Feast of Love
(nominated for the National Book Award),
The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play
, and
First Light
, and four previous collections of stories:
Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net
, and
Harmony of the World
. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Permissions Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpts from “Gimme Shelter,” words and music by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, copyright © 1968 (renewed) by ABKCO Music, Inc., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

European American Music Distributors LLC: Excerpt from
Harmonie der Welt
by Paul Hindemith, copyright © 1952 by Schott Music, Mainz, Germany. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music, Mainz, Germany.

The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare: Excerpt from “Alice Rodd” and excerpt from “Ann Poverty” from
Ding Dong Bell
by Walter de la Mare. Reprinted by permission of The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and the Society of Authors as their representative.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: “The Disappeared,” “Fenstad’s Mother,” “Shelter,” “Snow,” and “Westland” from
A Relative Stranger
by Charles Baxter, copyright © 1990 by Charles Baxter. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.