Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Fenstad’s Mother

ON SUNDAY MORNING after communion Fenstad drove across town to visit his mother. Behind the wheel, he exhaled with his hand flat in front of his mouth to determine whether the wine on his breath could be detected. He didn’t think so. Fenstad’s mother was a lifelong social progressive who was amused by her son’s churchgoing, and, wine or no wine, she could guess where he had been. She had spent her life in the company of rebels and deviationists, and she recognized all their styles.

Passing a frozen pond in the city park, Fenstad slowed down to watch the skaters, many of whom he knew by name and skating style. From a distance they were dots of color ready for flight, frictionless. To express grief on skates seemed almost impossible, and Fenstad liked that. He parked his car on a residential block and took out his skates from the backseat, where he kept them all winter. With his fingertips he touched the wooden blade guards, thinking of the time. He checked his watch; he had fifteen minutes.

Out on the ice, still wearing his churchy Sunday-morning suit, tie, and overcoat, but now circling the outside edge of the pond with his bare hands in his overcoat pockets, Fenstad admired the overcast sky and luxuriated in the brittle cold. He was active and alert in winter but felt sleepy throughout the summer. He passed a little girl in a pink jacket, pushing a tiny chair over the ice. He waved to his friend Ann, an off-duty cop, practicing her twirls. He waved to other friends. Without exception they waved back. As usual, he was impressed by the way skates improved human character.

Twenty minutes later, in the doorway of his mother’s apartment, she said, “Your cheeks are red.” She glanced down at his trousers, damp with melted snow. “You’ve been skating.” She kissed him on the cheek and turned to walk into her living room. “Skating after church? Isn’t that some sort of doctrinal error?”

“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 workers. Plenty of others. One guy you’ll really like is a young black man with glasses who sits in the back row and reads Workers’ Vanguard and Bakunin during class. He’s brilliant. I don’t know why he didn’t test out of this class. His name’s York Follette, and he’s—”

“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 rest. Explaining these problems, his back turned, he heard sighs of boredom, boldly expressed. Occasionally he glanced at the back of the room. His mother was watching him carefully, and her face was expressing all the complexity of dismay. Dismay radiated from her. Her disappointment wasn’t personal, because his mother didn’t think that people as individuals were at fault for what they did. As usual, her disappointed hope was located in history and in the way people agreed with already existing histories.

She was angry with him for collaborating with grammar. She would call it unconsciously installed authority. Then she would find other names for it.

“All right,” he said loudly, trying to make eye contact with someone in the room besides his mother, “let’s try some examples. Can anyone tell me what, if anything, is wrong with the following sentence? ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem.’ ”

The three sanitation workers, in the third row, began to laugh. Fenstad caught himself glowering and singled out the middle one.

“Yes, it is funny, isn’t it?”

The man in the middle smirked and looked at the floor. “I was just thinking of my unique problem.”

“Right,” Fenstad said. “But what’s wrong with saying, ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem’?”

“Solving it?” This was Mrs. Nelson, who sat by the window so that she could gaze at the tree outside, lit by a streetlight. All through class she looked at the tree as if it were a lover.

“Solving what?”

“Solving the problem you have. What is the problem?”

“That’s actually not what I’m getting at,” Fenstad said. “Although it’s a good related point. I’m asking what might be wrong logically with that sentence.”

“It depends,” Harold Ronson said. He worked in a service station and sometimes came to class wearing his work shirt with his name tag, HAROLD, stitched into it. “It depends on what your problem is. You haven’t told us your problem.”

“No,” Fenstad said, “my problem is not the problem.” He thought of Alice in Wonderland and felt, physically, as if he himself were getting small. “Let’s try this again. What might be wrong with saying that most people have a unique problem?”

“You shouldn’t be so critical,” Timothy Melville said. “You should look on the bright side, if possible.”

“What?”

“He’s right,” Mrs. Nelson said. “Most people have unique problems, but many people do their best to help themselves, such as taking night classes or working at meditation.”

“No doubt that’s true,” Fenstad said. “But why can’t most people have a unique problem?”

“Oh, I disagree,” Mrs. Nelson said, still looking at her tree. Fenstad glanced at it and saw that it was crested with snow. It was beautiful. No wonder she looked at it. “I believe that most people do have unique problems. They just shouldn’t talk about them all the time.”

“Can anyone,” Fenstad asked, looking at the back wall and hoping to see something there that was not wall, “can anyone give me an example of a unique problem?”

“Divorce,” Barb Kjellerud said. She sat near the door and knitted during class. She answered questions without looking up. “Divorce is unique.”

“No, it isn’t!” Fenstad said, failing in the crucial moment to control his voice. He and his mother exchanged glances. In his mother’s face for a split second was the history of her compassionate, ambivalent attention to him. “Divorce is not unique.” He waited to calm himself. “It’s everywhere. Now try again. Give me a unique problem.”

Silence. “This is a trick question,” Arlene Fisher said. “I’m sure it’s a trick question.”

“Not necessarily. Does anyone know what ‘unique’ means?”

“One of a kind,” York Follette said, gazing at Fenstad with dry amusement. Sometimes he took pity on Fenstad and helped him out of jams. Fenstad’s mother smiled and nodded.

“Right,” Fenstad crowed, racing toward the blackboard as if he were about to write something. “So let’s try again. Give me a unique problem.”

“You give us a unique problem,” one of the sanitation workers said. Fenstad didn’t know whether he’d been given a statement or a command. He decided to treat it as a command.

“All right,” he said. He stopped and looked down at his shoes. Maybe it was a trick question. He thought for ten seconds. Problem after problem presented itself to him. He thought of poverty, of the assaults on the earth, of the awful complexities of love. “I can’t think of one,” Fenstad said. His hands went into his pockets.

“That’s because problems aren’t personal,” Fenstad’s mother said from the back of the room. “They’re collective.” She waited while several students in the class sat up and nodded. “And people must work together on their solutions.” She talked for another two minutes, taking the subject out of logic and putting it neatly in politics, where she knew it belonged.

The snow had stopped by the time the class was over. Fenstad took his mother’s arm and escorted her to the car. After easing her down on the passenger side and starting the engine, he began to clear the front windshield. He didn’t have a scraper and had forgotten his gloves, so he was using his bare hands. When he brushed the snow away on his mother’s side, she looked out at him, surprised, a terribly aged Sleeping Beauty awakened against her will.

Once the car had warmed up, she was in a gruff mood and repositioned herself under the seat belt while making quiet but aggressive remarks. The sight of the new snow didn’t seem to calm her. “Logic,” she said at last. “That wasn’t logic. Those are just rhetorical tactics. It’s filler and drudgery.”

“I don’t want to discuss it now.”

“All right. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”

They rode together in silence. Then she began to shake her head. “Don’t take me home,” she said. “I want to have a spot of tea somewhere before I go back. A nice place where they serve tea, all right?”

He parked outside an all-night restaurant with huge front plate-glass windows; it was called Country Bob’s. He held his mother’s elbow from the car to the door. At the door, looking back to make sure that he had turned off his headlights, he saw his tracks and his mother’s in the snow. His were separate footprints, but hers formed two long lines.

Inside, at the table, she sipped her tea and gazed at her son for a long time. “Thanks for the adventure, Harry. I do appreciate it. What’re you doing in class next week? Oh, I remember. How-to papers. That should be interesting.”

“Want to come?”

“Very much. I’ll keep quiet next time, if you want me to.”

Fenstad shook his head. “It’s okay. It’s fun having you along. You can say whatever you want. The students loved you. I knew you’d be a sensation, and you were. They’d probably rather have you teaching the class than me.”

He noticed that his mother was watching something going on behind him, and he turned around in the booth so that he could see what it was. At first all he saw was a woman, a young woman with long hair wet from snow and hanging in clumps, talking in the aisle to two young men, both of whom were nodding at her. Then she moved on to the next table. She spoke softly. Fenstad couldn’t hear her words, but he saw the solitary customer to whom she was speaking shake his head once, keeping his eyes down. Then the woman saw Fenstad and his mother. In a moment she was standing in front of them.

She wore two green plaid flannel shirts and a thin torn jacket. Like Fenstad, she wore no gloves. Her jeans were patched, and she gave off a strong smell, something like hay, Fenstad thought, mixed with tar and sweat. He looked down at her feet and saw that she was wearing penny loafers with no socks. Coins, old pennies, were in both shoes; the leather was wet and cracked. He looked in the woman’s face. Under a hat that seemed to collapse on either side of her head, her face was thin and chalk-white except for the fatigue lines under her eyes. The eyes themselves were bright blue, beautiful, and crazy. To Fenstad, she looked desperate, percolating slightly with insanity, and he was about to say so to his mother when the woman bent down toward him and said, “Mister, can you spare any money?”

Involuntarily, Fenstad looked toward the kitchen, hoping that the manager would spot this person and take her away. When he looked back again, his mother was taking her blue coat off, wriggling in the booth to free her arms from the sleeves. Stopping and starting again, she appeared to be stuck inside the coat; then she lifted herself up, trying to stand, and with a quick, quiet groan slipped the coat off. She reached down and folded the coat over and held it toward the woman. “Here,” she said. “Here’s my coat. Take it before my son stops me.”

“Mother, you can’t.” Fenstad reached forward to grab the coat, but his mother pulled it away from him.

When Fenstad looked back at the woman, her mouth was open, showing several gray teeth. Her hands were outstretched, and he understood, after a moment, that this was a posture of refusal, a gesture saying no, and that the woman wasn’t used to it and did it awkwardly. Fenstad’s mother was standing and trying to push the coat toward the woman, not toward her hands but lower, at waist level, and she was saying, “Here, here, here, here.” The sound, like a human birdcall, frightened Fenstad, and he stood up quickly, reached for his wallet, and removed the first two bills he could find, two twenties. He grabbed the woman’s chapped, ungloved left hand.

“Take these,” he said, putting the two bills in her icy palm, “for the love of God, and please go.”

He was close to her face. Tonight he would pray for her. For a moment the woman’s expression was vacant. His mother was still pushing the coat at her, and the woman was unsteadily bracing herself. The woman’s mouth was open, and her stagnant-water breath washed over him. “I know you,” she said. “You’re my little baby cousin.”

“Go away, please,” Fenstad said. He pushed at her. She turned, clutching his money. He reached around to put his hands on his mother’s shoulders. “Ma,” he said, “she’s gone now. Mother, sit down. I gave her money for a coat.” His mother fell down on her side of the booth, and her blue coat rolled over on the bench beside her, showing the label and the shiny inner lining. When he looked up, the woman who had been begging had disappeared, though he could still smell her odor, an essence of wretchedness.

“Excuse me, Harry,” his mother said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

She rose and walked toward the front of the restaurant, turned a corner, and was out of sight. Fenstad sat and tried to collect himself. When the waiter came, a boy with an earring and red hair in a flattop, Fenstad just shook his head and said, “More tea.” He realized that his mother hadn’t taken off her earmuffs, and the image of his mother in the ladies’ room with her earmuffs on gave him a fit of uneasiness. After getting up from the booth and following the path that his mother had taken, he stood outside the ladies’-room door and, when no one came in or out, he knocked. He waited for a decent interval. Still hearing no answer, he opened the door.

His mother was standing with her arms down on either side of the first sink. She was holding herself there, her eyes following the hot water as it poured from the tap around the bright porcelain sink down into the drain, and she looked furious. Fenstad touched her and she snapped toward him.

“Your logic!” she said.

He opened the door for her and helped her back to the booth. The second cup of tea had been served, and Fenstad’s mother sipped it in silence. They did not converse. When she had finished, she said, “All right. I do feel better now. Let’s go.”

At the curb in front of her apartment building he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Pick me up next Tuesday,” she said. “I want to go back to that class.” He nodded. He watched as she made her way past the security guard at the front desk; then he put his car into drive and started home.

That night he skated in the dark for an hour with his friend Susan, the pharmacist. She was an excellent skater; they had met on the ice. She kept late hours and, like Fenstad, enjoyed skating at night. She listened attentively to his story about his mother and the woman in the restaurant. To his great relief she recommended no course of action. She listened. She didn’t believe in giving advice, even when asked.

The following Tuesday, Fenstad’s mother was again in the back row next to York Follette. One of the fluorescent lights overhead was flickering, which gave the room, Fenstad thought, a sinister quality, like a debtors’ prison or a refuge for the homeless. He’d been thinking about such people for the entire week. For seven days now he had caught whiffs of the woman’s breath in the air, and one morning, Friday, he thought he caught a touch of the rotten-celery smell on his own breath, after a particularly difficult sales meeting.

Tonight was how-to night. The students were expected to stand at the front of the class and read their papers, instructing their peers and answering questions if necessary. Starting off, and reading her paper in a frightened monotone, Mrs. Nelson told the class how to bake a cheese soufflé. Arlene Fisher’s paper was about mushroom hunting. Fenstad was put off by the introduction. “The advantage to mushrooms,” Arlene Fisher read, “is that they are delicious. The disadvantage to mushrooms is that they can make you sick, even die.” But then she explained how to recognize the common shaggymane by its cylindrical cap and dark tufts; she drew a model on the board. She warned the class against the Clitocybe illudens, the Jack-o’-Lantern. “Never eat a mushroom like this one or any mushroom that glows in the dark. Take heed!” she said, fixing her gaze on the class. Fenstad saw his mother taking rapid notes. Harold Ronson, the mechanic, reading his own prose painfully and slowly, told the class how to get rust spots out of their automobiles. Again Fenstad noticed his mother taking notes. York Follette told the class about the proper procedures for laying down attic insulation and how to know when enough was enough, so that a homeowner wouldn’t be robbed blind, as he put it, by the salesmen, in whose ranks he had once counted himself.

Barb Kjellerud had brought along a cassette player, and told the class that her hobby was ballroom dancing; she would instruct them in the basic waltz. She pushed the PLAY button on the tape machine, and “Tales from the Vienna Woods” came booming out. To the accompaniment of the music she read her paper, illustrating, as she went, how the steps were to be performed. She danced alone in front of them, doing so with flair. Her blond hair swayed as she danced, Fenstad noticed. She looked a bit like a contestant in a beauty contest who had too much personality to win. She explained to the men the necessity of leading. Someone had to lead, she said, and tradition had given this responsibility to the male. Fenstad heard his mother snicker.

When Barb Kjellerud asked for volunteers, Fenstad’s mother raised her hand. She said she knew how to waltz and would help out. At the front of the class she made a counterclockwise motion with her hand, and for the next minute, sitting at the back of the room, Fenstad watched his mother and one of the sanitation workers waltzing under the flickering fluorescent lights.

“What a wonderful class,” Fenstad’s mother said on the way home. “I hope you’re paying attention to what they tell you.”

Fenstad nodded. “Tea?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Where’re you going after you drop me off?”

“Skating,” he said. “I usually go skating. I have a date.”

“With the pharmacist? In the dark?”

“We both like it, Ma.” As he drove, he made an all-purpose gesture. “The moon and the stars,” he said simply.

When he left her off, he felt unsettled. He considered, as a point of courtesy, staying with her a few minutes, but by the time he had this idea he was already away from the building and was headed down the street.

He and Susan were out on the ice together, skating in large circles, when Susan pointed to a solitary figure sitting on a park bench near the lake’s edge. The sky had cleared; the moon gave everything a cold, fine-edged clarity. When Fenstad followed the line of Susan’s finger, he saw at once that the figure on the bench was his mother. He realized it simply because of the way she sat there, drawn into herself, attentive even in the winter dark. He skated through the uncleared snow over the ice until he was standing close enough to speak to her. “Mother,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

She was bundled up, a thick woolen cap drawn over her head and two scarves covering much of her face. He could see little other than the two lenses of her glasses facing him in the dark. “I wanted to see you two,” she told him. “I thought you’d look happy, and you did. I like to watch happiness. I always have.”

“How can you see us? We’re so far away.”

“That’s how I saw you.”

This made no sense to him, so he asked, “How’d you get here?”

“I took a cab. That part was easy.”

“Aren’t you freezing?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m freezing or not.”

He and Susan took her back to her apartment as soon as they could get their boots on. In the car Mrs. Fenstad insisted on asking Susan what kind of safety procedures were used to ensure that drugs weren’t smuggled out of pharmacies and sold illegally, but she didn’t appear to listen to the answer, and by the time they reached her building, she seemed to be falling asleep. They helped her up to her apartment. Susan thought that they should give her a warm bath before putting her into bed, and, together, they did. She did not protest. She didn’t even seem to notice them as they guided her in and out of the bathtub.

Fenstad feared that his mother would catch some lung infection, and it turned out to be bronchitis, which kept her in her apartment for the first three weeks of February, until her cough went down. Fenstad came by every other day to see how she was, and one Tuesday, after work, he went up to her floor and heard piano music: an old recording, which sounded much-played, of the brightest and fastest jazz piano he had ever heard — music of superhuman brilliance. He swung open the door to her apartment and saw York Follette sitting near his mother’s bed. On the bedside table was a small tape player, from which the music poured into the room.

Fenstad’s mother was leaning back against the pillow, smiling, her eyes closed.

Follette turned toward Fenstad. He had been talking softly. He motioned toward the tape machine and said, “Art Tatum. It’s a cut called ‘Battery Bounce.’ Your mother’s never heard it.”

“Jazz, Harry,” Fenstad’s mother said, her eyes still closed, not needing to see her son. “York is explaining to me about Art Tatum and jazz. Next week he’s going to try something more progressive on me.” Now his mother opened her eyes. “Have you ever heard such music before, Harry?”

They were both looking at him. “No,” he said, “I never heard anything like it.”

“This is my unique problem, Harry.” Fenstad’s mother coughed and then waited to recover her breath. “I never heard enough jazz.” She smiled. “What glimpses!” she said at last.

After she recovered, he often found her listening to the tape machine that York Follette had given her. She liked to hear the Oscar Peterson Trio as the sun set and the lights of evening came on. She now often mentioned glimpses. Back at home, every night, Fenstad spoke about his mother in his prayers of remembrance and thanksgiving, even though he knew she would disapprove.