Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Mr. Scary

FOR RICHARD BAUSCH

THERE WAS SOME SORT of commotion at the end of the checkout line. Words had been exchanged, and now two men, one tall and wide-shouldered, the other squat and beefy, were squaring off against each other and raising their voices. Their shoes squeaked on the linoleum. The short one, who had hair from his back sprouting up underneath his shirt collar, was saying a four-letter word. The other man, the tall one, shook his head angrily and raised his fist. An elderly security guard was rushing toward them. He didn’t seem up to the task, Estelle thought. He was just a minimum-wage retiree they had hired for show.

“Good God,” Estelle said to her grandson, “there’s going to be a fistfight.”

The boy didn’t glance up from his phone gadget. He held it in his palm and was rapidly clicking the letters. “They’re just zombies,” the boy said quietly and dismissively after a glance.

“Well, how do you know that?” the grandmother asked, trying for conversation. “I’ve never met a zombie.” The men seemed to have calmed down a bit. They were just rumbling at each other now.

“Zombies like discount stores,” the boy, whose name was Frederick, said patiently, as if he had to explain everything. He still wasn’t looking at the two men. “They eat plastic when they can’t get brains.” The boy glanced up, showing his grandmother his bright blue eyes. “Just look around if you don’t believe me,” he said. “This junk? It’s all theirs.” The fight between the two men seemed to bore him, before the fact. Almost everything bored him.

Another security guard had arrived, a red-faced fellow with a crew cut. He would put a stop to things. Together with the older security guard, he herded the two men toward the service area. So: that had happened. Now it was over. Estelle handed the baseball bat she was buying for Frederick to the checkout clerk, who scanned it and who then held out her palm for money.

“You don’t see that every day,” Estelle said to the clerk, who was frowning.

“Ain’t none of my business,” the clerk said with a shrug.

Estelle handed the bat to her grandson, who took hold of it in his left hand while keeping up his writing with his right.

“You’re giving this to me because why?” the boy asked, glancing up.

Estelle sighed. She no longer waited for thanks for anything from him. Gratitude was simply beyond his abilities.

“For your baseball games,” she said, over her shoulder.

“What baseball games? I don’t play baseball.”

“Thank you,” the checkout clerk said behind her, belatedly, as if prompting Frederick. He followed his grandmother, his eyes downward again, oblivious to her, to the partly cloudy sky outside the automatic doors, to the untied shoelace on his left foot, to his own waddling walk, to the folds of fat under his T-shirt, to the gift of the unthanked aluminum baseball bat. The poor child. He had been so beautiful once, years ago, with a smile to light up the world, and now — well, just look at him.

They drove across Minneapolis and stopped for a red light in front of the Basilica. At the corner traffic island stood a bearded panhandler with a cardboard sign that read: HOMELeSS VetERaN. ANYThING WILL HeLP. GoD BLeSS. The man’s face was wreathed in sunburned desolation, and she was reaching into her purse for a dollar when her grandson spoke up from the backseat.

“Grandma, don’t give him anything.”

“What? Why?” Estelle asked.

“He’s a pod,” the boy said.

“What?”

“You know. A pod. A replicant.”

Estelle looked in the rearview mirror and saw the boy scowling malevolently at the homeless man.

“No, I don’t know. Why do you say such things?”

“See, for starters, he’s in the stare-at-you army,” the boy said, with his eerie talent for metaphor. “They stare at you. That’s the pod game plan. I can always tell. I have radar. That guy is garbage.” Frederick laughed to himself. “He’s the lieutenant colonel of garbage.”

“No human is garbage,” his grandmother said defiantly, rolling down her window, “and I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”

“Okay, fine,” the boy said, “but I’m just saying … How come you like these creeps?”

But she had already reached through the car window and placed a dollar bill in the man’s palm, and when he said, “Thank you, and God bless you,” Estelle felt a small sensation of satisfaction and pride. He might be a bum, but he knew how to be thankful.

“I suppose you think he’s a zombie, too,” Estelle said, as she rolled the window back up.

“No,” the boy replied. “He’s a … replicant. Like I told you. He looks like a human being, but he isn’t. Just like this car we’re in now seems like a real car.” Frederick smiled at his grandmother, a private smile, but the smile seemed to be poisoned somehow by the baby fat on his twelve-year-old face and by the boy’s customary malice, a thin screen for his unhappiness. Often his face was unreadable — it was as if he had trained his facial expressions to be ungrammatical. The poor child: he even had a double chin, making him look like a preteen Rotarian. Curled into himself, having returned to his phone gadget, Frederick radiated waves of unsociability and ill will. His being hummed with animosity toward the world for having staged the enactment of his various miseries. His revulsion at life had a kind of purity, Estelle thought.

Really, all she wanted to do was to take him into her arms and hold him. But he was too old for that now. What had worked once, all that love she had given him, no longer did.

“Mass times force equals velocity,” the boy said, just before his grandmother dropped him off at Community day camp. “It’s true. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t. But actually, Freddie, that doesn’t sound quite right.”

“Well, it’s true. Absolutely. I’ve been studying physics. And mass times force equals velocity. That’s why a baseball travels faster if you hit it hard. You’re forcing the ball to, like, accelerate.” He waited for his words to sink in. “To escape inertia. You want to hear something else? This is even more amazing. Gravity equals weight times voltage. That’s Yardley’s Theorem.”

“Yes. Well, okay. We’re here,” Estelle said, pulling to a stop in front of the Community day camp building, a grim yellow concrete-block affair with a flagpole hoisting a limp flag just inside the turning circle. During the winter, the building served as a community center. During the summer, they offered activities for kids from ages eight to twelve, with trips to spots of local interest. Last week the boys and girls had visited an institution for assisted living, giving each old person a gift of their own devising. Frederick had given his own old person an African violet. The day camp counselors also staged sports activities on the playground in back. Frederick hated all of it and performed his sullen silence with great majesty whenever Estelle picked him up.

“Do I have to go in there?” the boy asked, once she had stopped.

“Well, I did drive you over here. Kiddo, give it the old college try.”

“I’ve done that all summer.”

“So do it again.”

“They all hate me,” Frederick said. “They throw their lunch food at me.”

“Throw it back.”

“Yeah, that’ll work. They throw sandwiches. Which explode.”

“Well, can’t you—”

“I got a cupcake in my hair yesterday.”

“Make an effort—”

“All right, all right,” he said.

“To go in there—”

“I said all right.”

There was a brief air pocket of dead silence.

“See you in a few hours,” Estelle muttered, as her grandson heaved himself out of the car. He was still writing something on his phone. He also had words penned on his arm.

“Don’t bother coming back. Just call the coroner,” the boy shouted, closing the car door and causing the baseball bat to roll again on the floor.

Her husband, Randall, down on his knees in the garden, waved to Estelle absentmindedly with his trowel as she pulled up on the driveway. “Not enough fertilizer for the pansies,” he said to her once she was out of the car and behind him, leaning on him. Using his customary tone of comic despair, he said, “And I’ve been overwatering the snaps, damn it. Look at them.” He stood up, shaking his head before turning and giving Estelle a quick kiss on the lips. When he did, the brim of his sun hat poked against her forehead. “Drop him off okay?” Randall asked.

“So I bought him a baseball bat,” Estelle said, putting her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “It was a hopeful gesture.” She straightened her husband and dusted him off. “But he stayed grumpy. Oh, and this is interesting: there was a fight in the checkout line at the discount store.”

Randall nodded, gazing at her carefully. “Sure. Of course there was,” he said. As always, she was taken aback by his capacity for understanding her, for knowing her least little mood. “Stel,” he said, “I’ve made some lemonade, and … Freddie’s disposition isn’t your fault, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.” She whistled to the dog, who regarded her with indifference from his shade under the crab apple tree. “I just wish sometimes that Freddie were, oh, I don’t know, more … normal, and I hate myself for wanting that. Who wants normal?”

“You do,” he said. “Well, let’s have a softball game on the vacant lot when he gets home. Us and a few normal neighbors. With his new baseball bat.”

“A softball game?”

“Yes. With Freddie. Or maybe we should just let him be.” He gave her hand another squeeze and preceded her into the house, holding the door open behind him. How considerate! Randall had always been considerate: he was one of those easygoing people — affable, graceful, thoughtful — on whom the sturdy world depended, and although her little secret was that she was fatigued with him and felt almost no passion for him, she still needed to have his calm presence around. He was like a preservative, and she would fight to keep him if she had to. He played poker once a week with his chums; he drank one beer per evening; he was semi-retired from his veterinarian practice; he never raised his voice. He was even a graceful and attentive lover. What a paragon of virtue Randall was! Nothing to excess, this husband. But he had never been wild, and Estelle couldn’t help herself: she was bored by people like him. Secretly, men who started fistfights attracted her. They had sap. But it was boredom that had the staying power.

“Here,” Randall said, handing her a lemonade in a Dixie cup.

“Thank you,” she said, leaning forward into him again. His skin had a kind of slippery silkiness, an odd texture for the exterior of a middle-aged man. Her first husband, the dreaded Matthew, whose nickname had been Squirrel — winsome womanizer, alcoholic, self-centered bum, gate crasher, liar, charmer, deadbeat, and cheat — had felt like hair and sandpaper. Sex with him had always been burningly raw and fecund. Children came from it, three of them. Where was Squirrel Van Dusen now? Pittsburgh? Or was it Tucson he had recently called from, yes, somewhere in the Southwest, that sunny haven for bums, asking for a tide-over loan for his newest harebrained scheme? It was hard to keep track of him: Randall had taken the most recent call and kept her from whatever Squirrel had asked for. She still had a soft spot for the guy. The flame could not quite be extinguished. Human wreckage had always attracted her. “The Bad Samaritan,” Randall had called her once, in that not-quite-teasing way of his.

“It’s a stage he’s going through,” Randall said, sitting down at the dinette. “Frederick’s going through a stage. All boys go through a stage. They have to practice at being bad before they become men.”

“You were never bad.”

“Well, okay. I guess I never was,” Randall said thoughtfully, nodding his head once and turning away from her. “Not like that.”

“You always got up at five o’clock. To pray. With the birds. Like Saint Francis. You were a boy scout,” she said, knowing she was being petty. “You still are.”

“That’s unkind. And I never prayed, not like that. I prayed to someday meet someone like you. Actually, Estelle,” he said, fixing her with a look, “what are we talking about? This isn’t about me, is it? Or Frederick?”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

“Well, my dear, what is it about?”

She looked at him. Behind her, she could hear the leaves of the ash tree stirring in the dry summer wind. She could even hear the electric clock in the stove, which gave off a dull but thoughtful hum, as if it were planning something.

“It’s about the usual,” she said. Of course he knew what it was about. He always knew.

They’d run off together as teenagers forty-five years ago, Estelle and Squirrel, and when their kids were still toddlers, they’d crisscrossed the country in the Haunted Buick. What fun it was, being young, rootless, those hours of driving when music would start up for no apparent reason underneath the car’s dashboard and then stop a few minutes later. There was a short in the radio, but Squirrel liked to say that the Buick was haunted. An announcer would begin speaking in midsentence from that same place under the dashboard, and Squirrel would say, “Where did he come from?” You couldn’t switch the radio off: the dial didn’t work. The Buick was beyond all that.

In those days, Estelle and Squirrel never stopped anywhere for longer than a few months. They would cross the border into yet another state they hadn’t yet ravaged looking for opportunities, surefire moneymaking projects to put them on the map, as Squirrel liked to say. That was the expression he used after dark in bed with Estelle in one motel or another, whispering to her about what and where they would be, someday. They’d be settled; and happy; and rich. They’d be on the map. The children, the two boys and Isabel, the youngest, whom they called Izzy, slept in the other bedroom, a clutch of little snorers and bed wetters.

All the trouble had been manageable at first. In Maine, there had been midnight phone calls from a girlfriend Squirrel had acquired somewhere, and a day later they were treated to her sudden arrival on the doorstep of their rented duplex. She’d been coarsely attractive, this girlfriend, furiously chewing bubble gum, and her waitress name tag was still pinned to her blouse over (Estelle could not help noticing) her plump right breast. Cheryl. She was pregnant, this waitress, this Cheryl, said. She wanted satisfaction. Satisfaction! What a word. Or else. Or else what? She would be back, she said, with a court order. Estelle and Squirrel packed the car that night and were gone the next morning, the kids still asleep in the backseat by the time the sun came up. Estelle didn’t speak to Squirrel, except about necessities, for a month after that.

In Montana, Squirrel’s partner-in-business threatened them all — another midnight call! — with a court suit and, if that didn’t work out, personal revenge Western style with a semiautomatic. By the time they had relocated in northern Minnesota, as temporary managers of the Trout Inn on Ninemile Lake, Estelle thought they were finally free of adventures. They’d come to the calm expository part of the movie, the part after the big opening attention-getting mayhem. Squirrel’s mischief-making had been all used up, she thought, just flushed right out of him, and she was relieved.

And then one night Estelle had awakened to find that Squirrel had entered her while she’d been sleeping and was thrusting into her with a wild look on his face, with his hands around her neck as if he planned to strangle her, and she screamed at him and shook him off. She loaded the still-sleeping kids into the Buick, against Squirrel’s pleading, and took off for Minneapolis. She remembered to take what money there was, and the credit cards, Squirrel pleading with her but not stopping her, and the children crying.

That was Part One of her life. Now she was in Part Two. There would never be a Part Three. Of that she was sure.

Midafternoon, Estelle pulled her car into the turning circle for Community day camp. Of course, Freddie was already there out in front, staring up into the sky as if he were waiting for helicopter rescue. He lumbered toward the car, opened the front passenger-side door, and poured himself in. He aimed the air-conditioning vents toward his face.

“How was it today?” Estelle asked, too brightly.

Freddie sat silently as if the question were much too complicated to be answered. Finally, he said, “We’re going to put on a play.”

“Yes, I think you told me that,” Estelle said. “What is it? What’s the play?”

“We’re all writing it. Or they are. The kids and the counselors.” He gave her his best sour look. “It’s called Wonderful World.”

“And who do you play?” Estelle asked.

“Me? I play Mr. Scary.”

“Mr. Scary? Who’s that? And what do you do?”

“I stand up at the beginning of the play and I recite my fear monologue and scare everybody.”

“Well, that’s nice,” Estelle said, trying to put the best face on things. “Do you have it? The monologue? Could you read it to me?”

“Yeah,” Freddie said. “I got it right here with me.” He heaved himself upward, trying to get his hand into his trouser pocket. After much poking, he pulled out a grimy sheet of paper. Her grandson unfolded the paper and began to read. His delivery sounded like a voice-over in a horror movie. “Fear,” Freddie intoned. “What is fear? You and I live with, interact with, fear. We know fear, but we shun it. But what if one were to embrace fear? Not to live with it, but to be it, to become fear. In our everyday lives we divorce ourselves from fear. We tell ourselves it is distant, it is unreal, it is abstract. But this is not so. Fear is tangible, more tangible than you or I. What if a man became fear? Where would fear live? He would dwell among us, hidden but not unseen. Who would fear be? For what would fear strive? What would be the face of fear? Ha ha ha ha.”

“Very good, Freddie. But, well, that’s a strange monologue to give to a twelve-year-old,” Estelle said, after recovering herself. “The words are awfully big. What does it have to do with a wonderful world?”

“It’s like what you have to get out of the way? Before the world is wonderful? And yeah, well, that’s what they gave me,” Freddie said, slumping down in the car. “The counselors wrote it. That’s what Mr. Scary says. I’ve got to memorize it. Also we made T-shirts today. I mean, we wrote words on T-shirts. So they became ours.”

“What did you write?”

Freddie held his shirt up. With laundry marker, he had written GOT HERPES? on his. “Well,” Estelle said, “that’s not very nice.”

“It’s supposed to be a public health warning,” Freddie said. “A wake-up call.”

“And the other kids, did they throw food at you?” Estelle asked.

“Not today,” Freddie said. “Today was a good day. They liked how I did the Mr. Scary monologue.”

“Freddie,” Estelle asked, “do you really have to laugh at the end of that? It’s a little corny.”

“The ha ha ha ha part? I added that,” her grandson told her. “That’s my contribution.” He took out his phone gadget and began tapping letters.

“Are you texting someone?”

“No,” Freddie said. “I’m writing a story.”

“Oh, good,” Estelle said. “What’s it about?”

“The underworld,” he told her.

Sometimes, on certain days when Estelle had found herself sitting on the front stoop of the house, her coffee cup cooling between her palms, and the morning breeze riffling her hair, Freddie still eating his breakfast cereal inside, she would imagine that the way her grandson had turned out, with his sorrow and obesity and malice, had its own logic. But then at other times, particularly when the breeze stopped, time halted as well. And when that happened, Estelle was no longer sitting on the front stoop with her coffee but was back there, in time, in Part One, taking her daughter, Isabel, to a guidance counselor, and then to that killingly expensive, pill-dispensing psychiatrist in the circular building with curved interior walls that made Estelle think of a gigantic brain, and they, all of them, the brilliant professionals and Estelle herself, were trying to talk Izzy out of the sullen and then manic rages — shoplifting, a stolen car, drug-taking, car wrecks, God knows what kinds of sex, and with whom — that had overtaken her and turned her into this oblivious bingeing adolescent force-of-nature who’d actually driven once into a parked fire truck. Well, at those moments nothing had its own logic, or it had the wrong kind of logic, because you couldn’t talk anybody out of anything, could you? No. How many young women had managed to do what her daughter had accomplished? Had smashed a stolen car into a fire truck? An achievement. Her teenage accomplices had fled, but Isabel had stayed there, dazed behind the wheel but boldly confident that such an excellent accident gave her special monster status. Who else, among Estelle’s acquaintances, had also hit, though not very hard, a pedestrian in a parking lot? Her daughter, Isabel, had, and had been unrepentant. He shouldn’t have been there, she had said of her victim, a retired dentist. In her taste for mayhem, Isabel had truly been Squirrel’s child. So there was a logic to her actions, of a sort.

Estelle thought that her own life had veered between long patches of drudgery, weeks and months filing claims in an insurance office during the day and then racing home to cook dinner for her children and to put them to bed, typical single-mom scheduling, and then, the next job, working in the front office at the veterinarian hospital where she’d met Randall, accompanied by a choral background of barking. Yes, all that domesticity. And classes taken at the community college, including art history, her new passion. Then other stretches of time superimposed themselves on the dull ones, the moments of high drama, first the ones staged by Squirrel and then the ones staged by her daughter. Her two sons, Carl and Robert, seemed frightened by their little sister and had landed jobs after school at grocery and hardware stores; poor souls, solid citizens before their time, they almost didn’t count, those boys.

But Isabel! Even on medications, she drank anything, she took anything, she went anywhere at night; she seemed to have no home place except the deep nothingness that she sought out. In Squirrel, those traits had been charming, for a while — they looked good on a boy — but with Isabel they were as charmless as her scowling face. There was really something demonic about her, almost bestial. Estelle imagined her as she saw her back then: twisted up with injuries, avoiding eye contact, the blond hair matted and unwashed, her jeans caked with dirt, her fierce young woman’s sexuality attracting the worst of the boys who gleefully hovered around her waiting for her next bold move.

One night, one of many late nights, Isabel had come home at three in the morning. Estelle had awakened out of a shallow and dream-infected sleep and gone into Isabel’s room, where Isabel had thrown herself on the bed in the dark. She was muttering, and after Estelle switched on the lamp, she noticed that the pillow where her daughter rested her head had turned gray at the indentation. Isabel never showered anymore, and she smelled like a feral child.

“Where have you been?” Estelle asked her, trying not to yell.

“I’ve been inside and outside,” Isabel said. “I’ve covered the world.” She giggled. “Like that paint? That covers the world? I’ve done that.”

“Jesus. What am I going to do with you?” Estelle said to herself, to the walls. “At least get undressed. At least get some sleep. And you’re grounded,” she said, automatically.

“Undressed?” Isabel asked. Every facial expression she gave her mother indicated that any and all requests were, at that moment, preposterous. “You want me undressed, Mom? Like those nine-to-five people who are undressed? Who go to sleep?”

“Yes,” Isabel said. “Like those people.”

Isabel glanced up at her mother. Picking herself up, she stood next to the bed, then lowered her jeans. “See?” she said. “I can do this.” She swayed and laughed at herself. “Wanna see something?” She laughed again. “I’m a magician. I can do this amazing trick. Just watch. You’ve never seen this before in your life. I can make my panties stick to the ceiling.”

“What?” Estelle said.

After stomping her blue jeans to the floor, Isabel lowered her underwear and clumsily stepped free. She bent down and picked up her underpants — pink, Estelle noticed, her heart breaking — and then threw them up at the ceiling. They fluttered back down to the floor.

Isabel gazed upward and said wonderingly, “I thought it would work. I had such a good time.”

Estelle was staring, too. Her mind moved slowly. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, poor Mom,” Isabel said. “You’re so sheltered. Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

“Well,” Isabel said, putting her hand on her mother’s shoulder to keep herself from swaying, “I was with a boy tonight. And we … you know. And, Mommy, did you know that after you do it, I mean when you do it with a boy, it drains out of you? Later? Onto what you’re wearing? And it makes your clothes … sticky. And that’s why I thought my underwear would be up there on the ceiling!” she concluded, triumphantly. “Except it isn’t.”

Of course Isabel would become pregnant. There was no such thing as safe sex with Isabel. Of course she would have a baby and give it to her mother to raise after naming the baby Frederick (who came out of his mother brown, so his father must have been African-American, or something), and of course she would disappear quickly afterward, leaving no known address.

Poor crazy Isabel. Poor Freddie, her son. It wasn’t about individuals anymore; it was about the generations, and what they handed down. The courtrooms, the hospitals, the doctor’s offices, the classrooms, the jails where they had put Izzy overnight: sometimes, sitting on the back stoop with her coffee cup, Estelle felt all those places descending over her, as if another person had lived that part of her life and had not yet survived it but now was inhabiting her own body. Clouds would cross the sky, cumulus clouds puffy with their own complacency.

In the car, with Freddie explaining about his hero, Argo, and his descent into the underworld, Estelle turned toward Lake Calhoun. When she parked near the beach, Freddie sat up and said, “What’re we doing here?”

“I thought it would be nice to go outside,” Estelle said. “Just a stroll. It’s summer, Freddie. We’ve got a little time before dinner.”

“Of course it’s summer. I mean, what are we doing here?”

“Well, look at the swimmers.” Outside the car, she walked ahead of him in the midafternoon glare on a sidewalk that ran parallel to the beach. At some distance from them, young men and women were playing volleyball. Out on the lake she could see swimmers splashing each other, and, beyond them, hazed in the hot Impressionist light, the sailboats. The air smelled of suntan oil and lake vegetation. People were bicycling past on the bike paths, and everywhere men and women, children and dogs were enjoying themselves. Pop music floated on the air from some radio.

“I hate it here,” Freddie said, from behind her. Estelle could hear the shuffling of his shoes on the sidewalk. “I need to practice my Mr. Scary monologue.”

“We should have brought your swimming trunks.”

“I can’t swim.”

“You could learn.”

“Not if I don’t want to, I can’t,” he said. “I’d rather sleep with the fishes.”

“The fish. Not fishes. Fish. You shouldn’t be so negative,” Estelle told him.

“You mean I’m supposed to be happy?” He inflected the word with scorn. “Happiness sucks.”

“Well, you could try,” his grandmother said, feeling a wingfeather of hopelessness. Just to her right, a boy about Freddie’s age, maybe a bit older, bronzed with the sun, a kid who obviously lived outdoors, was tossing a football to a friend. The wingfeather beat against Estelle as she watched him. Happiness came only to those who never asked for it.

“I’d rather be Mr. Scary,” Freddie said. One of the boys close to them threw his football unsteadily, and it landed near the sidewalk. Freddie stared at it before kicking it out of the way. One of the boys said, “Throw it here!” while Freddie continued on.

Estelle raised her head, closed her eyes, and breathed in. “You could have thrown that ball,” she said. “Couldn’t you?”

“No,” Freddie said. “It’s just a trick. They’re trying to mess with us.”

“Incidentally, I think,” Estelle said, “that Randall is organizing a softball game for after dinner. We’ll use your new bat!”

“Oh, that’s great. That’s just great.”

“Don’t you want to try it?”

He treated her to his silence.

Well, at least there was the Bakken Electrical Museum. After they had returned to the car, Estelle drove Freddie to his favorite place on the southwest side of the lake, the museum where they had a working Theremin installed. Freddie had been here half a dozen times, and each time he would push impatiently past the exhibits near the front door to the Theremin in the middle of the museum’s stairwell. He’d turn on the old instrument and raise his hands in the air between the two antennae.

Here, he was in his element. His hands raised like a conductor, with his fingers out, Freddie would tap and poke the air in front of him, and from the old Theremin came pitched noises that sounded like music but really weren’t music, Estelle thought, any more than screaming was like singing. According to the information on the explanatory wall plaque, other Theremins had been used for the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the movie scores for Spellbound and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Freddie, when he played this thing, had a beatific smile on his face, as if he were summoning his monsters from the deep. Once he had played “Jingle Bells” for her on it, and Estelle thought she would jump out of her skin with revulsion. He had learned through trial and error where to poke the air for certain pitches. Apparently he had a musical ear. He was getting good at it. Soon he would be playing “My Funny Valentine” on this thing and scaring away everybody.

But you couldn’t take a kid down to the MacPhail Center for Music for Theremin lessons, and you couldn’t bring out your grandson in front of the guests to have him play his Theremin, causing the other grandmothers to applaud, because Freddie wasn’t really presentable, and neither was this music, which sounded like the groans of the dying, oscillating at sixty cycles per second.

Still, she watched him, poking and prodding the air and producing the hellish glissandos, with something like admiration. Her own sons were not like that. There was no other boy like him.

“There’s no one else like him,” Estelle said to Randall, who was bending over the grill, the left side for the hot dogs, the right side for hamburgers. He had put on his chef’s apron and was worrying the hamburger buns on the edge of the grill with a spatula. Freddie sat writing his story on a picnic bench, on the other side of the back deck. He was concentrating with fierce inward energy.

Late summer evening, and Estelle sat watching Randall cooking the hamburgers and Freddie working on his story. Somewhere in back, the cicadas, harbingers of autumn, were chirring away. Their neighbor Jerry Harponyi, who played cello in the city orchestra, was watering his garden, and when he saw Estelle across his back fence, he raised his hand, still holding the garden hose, to wave. The water gubbled, airborne, in a snakelike line, before falling.

“No, there isn’t,” Randall said. “But let’s not talk about this now. By the way, I’ve drafted about seven of the neighbors to play softball in the park in an hour. And Freddie said he’d join us.”

“Freddie said that?”

“Yes. I used all my persuasive skills.”

“What did you say?” Estelle asked.

“I said it’d be nice if he played.”

“He didn’t object?”

“I just said that it’d be a nice gesture.” Well, Estelle thought, that was Randall, all right: the King of Nice Gestures. “After all, you bought him that baseball bat. And he loves you, you know.”

“Who?”

“Freddie, your grandson.”

“No, he—”

“Of course he does, Stel. Please. You’re the only thing in this world holding him on.” He looked at her with a smile, his face disfigured momentarily by smoke from the grill. “I can’t do it the way you can. You’re his lifeline. Don’t you know that? Can’t you see it?”

Harponyi waved again. “Looking forward to the game!” he shouted, and the water from his hose flung itself out again in patterns in the air.

“Me?”

“Yes, my dear. You. You’re a rock, an anchor. You’re all he’s got. I love you, too, you know, but I’m not desperate. Anyway, you know what position you should play?”

“No,” she said. “First base?” She always liked it when Randall told her he loved her.

“No,” Randall said. “Outfield. You need a rest. You can just stand out there and wait for balls to fall into your glove. Like a nun. Like a little sister of mercy.”

“I’d enjoy that, I think,” Estelle said.

Standing in the outfield, with the sun setting below the park’s trees to the west, Estelle felt the early-evening breezes blowing across her forehead, the same breezes that blew Randall’s hair backward on the pitcher’s mound, so that he looked surprised, or like one of the Three Stooges, she couldn’t remember which one. With grown children of his own, and his own sorrows — his wife had pitched herself through a window eight stories up two months after learning that she had inoperable cancer — Randall had every right to be moody, or grumpy at times. Or just sour. But, no: he was relentless in his cheerfulness. And tiresome, if you didn’t share it. Somehow the tragedies he had lived through hadn’t altered him. They had no relevance to him. There he was. In the fading light, he still gleamed a little.

Randall had just struck out Harponyi, the cellist. The first baseman, a fifteen-year-old from across the street, whistled and cheered. His name was Tommy. He was already chunky with muscle, a real athlete who in a year or two would be playing high-school football, and for a moment Estelle wondered whether it wasn’t a bit unfair to have boys like that playing on their side. But it all balanced out: their second baseman was an office temp who lived down the block and who was, at this very moment, talking on her cell phone, and their shortstop was old Mr. Flannery, a retired social studies teacher who lived on the corner and who looked a bit like Morgan Freeman. He was old but wiry. Freddie, when he came to bat, wouldn’t have a chance if the ball went toward Mr. Flannery.

These are my people, Estelle thought, and bless them all, here in Part Two. Strange how one’s heart could lift sometimes for no particular reason. On the other side of the park, the sounds of the soccer players, their outcries, rose into the air and made their way toward her. A fly buzzed around her head, and she smelled the strangely green smell of the outfield grass. She pounded her fist into the baseball glove, a spare that Randall had found somewhere in the basement.

Freddie was up. He was practice-swinging the bat that Estelle had bought for him that morning. His swings were slow, and even without a ball anywhere near them, they seemed inaccurate, approximate.

Stepping up to the plate, Freddie took one hand off the bat to shade his eyes against the sun. When he saw his grandmother, he waved. Estelle waved back.

Randall’s first pitch hit the ground a few feet in front of Freddie and rolled to the catcher, Tommy’s brother, who threw it back to Randall. “Good eye,” Estelle shouted, and people laughed.

The next pitch went into the strike zone, and Freddie swung at it and missed, by a considerable margin. His physical movements were like those of an underground creature rarely exposed to the light. The umpire, an insurance adjuster who lived with Harponyi, called the first strike.

Freddie took another practice swing.

When Randall threw the next pitch, Estelle could see that it would go into the strike zone and that Freddie would swing at it and connect with it, and when he did, the ball soared up, a high fly, slowly ascending, and as it rose into the air, Freddie headed toward first base, not really looking at where he was going but watching the ball instead and then glancing at his grandmother underneath it. For a brief moment they exchanged glances, Estelle and Freddie, and he seemed to grin; and then the ball began its descent, as Freddie, watching it again, headed toward Tommy, the first baseman, a boy as solid as he, Freddie, was soft. Tommy had taken up a stance and had braced himself with his elbow out, and Estelle saw that when Freddie got there, he would slam into Tommy like an egg thrown into a wall. Estelle tried to shout to Freddie to look where he was going, but her shout caught in her throat out of fear or terror, just before the ball dropped in its leisurely way, with perfect justice, into her outstretched glove.