That Old Cape Magic

by Richard Russo

  Dot sighed and looked off into the middle distance. She’d clearly heard this sentiment expressed many times before.

  “You probably didn’t know, but she was writing a pistolary when she died.”

  Griffin glanced at Dot, who rolled her eyes. “A Western?” Griffin asked.

  “No, a pistolary. You don’t know what that is?”

  He confessed he didn’t.

  “Well, she was writing one of those,” he said. “Your Joy’s a lot like her mother.”

  Ah, Griffin thought, Joy was still his. At least as far as her demented father was concerned.

  “All three girls take after their mother, of course, but Joy’s the most like Jilly Always was.”

  “And Laura’s like her mother,” Griffin added, hoping he might take comfort in further feminine continuity.

  But Harve just blinked at this, clearly unsure who this Laura might be.

  “Laura’s the bride,” Dot informed him under her breath. “We’re here for her wedding.”

  “Well of course we are,” Harve said. “You think I don’t know my own granddaughter?” Then, to Griffin, “She thinks I forget things, but I don’t. Like you. I remember perfectly well you could never keep your damn head down. You still don’t, I bet.”

  “You’re right, Harve, I still look up.”

  Harve nodded sadly, as if to admit that human beings were frail creatures indeed. Impossible to teach most of them the rudiments of anything, much less a complex activity like golf. “You look up,” he said, looking up, his watery blue eyes fixing on Griffin, “all you’ll ever see is a bad shot.”

  Then he looked away again, and Griffin could tell he was following the errant shot’s trajectory in his mind as it sliced off into the dark woods, out of sight, where he could hear it thocking among the trees.

  “I know this really isn’t the time or place,” said Brian Fynch, dean of admissions and Joy’s boss. The rehearsal dinner was over, and people had been encouraged to reconfigure over dessert. Griffin had been seated with Andy’s family, a smaller group, all of whom seemed a bit cowed by the size and sheer decibel level of Joy’s family (Jane and June were both shriekers). For his part, Griffin had been grateful to be seated with them.

  Fynch was a tall man, and his suit was well tailored and expensive looking. He seemed comfortable in it, as men who wear suits every day often are. His haircut was early Beatles, sweeping bangs at the eyebrow line, ridiculous, Griffin couldn’t help thinking, for someone his age, a few years younger than Joy, and Griffin immediately dubbed him “Ringo.” Joy had introduced him as her “friend” (the very word Laura had used on the phone when she told him her mother would also be bringing someone to the wedding). “Jack” was how he himself had been introduced to Fynch, as in Jack, of whom you’ve often heard me speak and weep and curse. He chided himself: But come on, Griffin, get a grip. Joy had probably said nothing of the sort. In fact, be grateful. She’d have been well within her rights to introduce him as her soon-to-be ex, which would have been worse. He didn’t realize he’d been half hoping she’d introduce him as her husband (which he still was, after all) until she didn’t.

  At any rate, he and this “friend” had been chatting amiably for the last ten minutes. Ringo claimed they’d actually been introduced last spring (“No reason for you to remember”) when he came on board. Came on board? his mother snorted. What is he, a pirate? (Silent when he and Laura were in the maze and also during dinner, she was feeling gabby again and seemed to have even less use for Brian Fynch than her son did. Normally her opinion wouldn’t have mattered, but she did know her academics.) Ringo loved the college, he went on, as if someone had been spreading vicious rumors to the contrary, and he hoped it would be the last stop on what he termed his “long academic journey.” Long and pointless, perhaps, but hardly academic. It was a wonderful opportunity, really, the kind that came along once in a lifetime. His “team” in admissions was first-rate, though its star, “just between us,” was Joy. (Oh, you smarmy bastard, both son and mother concluded in the same instant.) In fact, Ringo wished he had a half dozen more just like her. This fairly ambiguous remark he delivered with such convincing innocence that Griffin wondered if maybe he and Joy were just friends. He’d been attentive and solicitous to her all evening, but there was certainly nothing to suggest any intimacy between them, though of course she wouldn’t have permitted such a display at her daughter’s wedding.

  “I wouldn’t bring it up, believe me, but Dean Zabian heard I was going to be seeing you this weekend, and I promised I’d ask if your situation for the coming academic year had clarified itself.”

  It was possible, Griffin supposed, that things had come about just as Fynch claimed. The dean of faculty might well have asked him to inquire. But the far more likely scenario was that Fynch was a sly meddler, an insinuator who’d sought out the dean, not vice versa. Zabian could be forgiven for growing impatient for Griffin to make up his mind, but he more likely would have asked this favor of Joy rather than Ringo. And of course if he really wanted to know, the person to ask was Griffin himself.

  “Of course everyone’s hoping you’ll be returning in the fall,” Fynch was saying, “but if you can’t—”

  “I understand,” Griffin said. “Tell Carroll I won’t hang him up much longer.”

  “It’s not like your replacement’s a washout or anything,” Fynch continued, oblivious that he’d been given full permission to discontinue this particular conversation. “The department could probably limp along for another semester or two, but as Dean Zabian put it, ‘She’s no Jack Griffin in the classroom.’”

  Griffin smiled, now certain that he (and his mother) were right about Ringo’s character. The implied omniscience, the overfamiliarity, the flattery… what a putz. He thought of the elderly woman he’d spoken to in Truro this time last year who’d been looking for the right occasion to use fart-hammer. Well, here it was.

  With relief, he noticed that a young man wearing a blazer with the hotel’s insignia on the pocket was conferring with Joy, who turned to point him out. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, making a show of taking out his checkbook. At this Ringo turned on his heel and fled, apparently convinced he could provide no further service.

  “Mr. Griffin?” said the young man, who appeared to be holding an invoice. “Maybe we should go someplace more private?”

  He nodded agreeably and let the checkbook slide back into his jacket pocket. “What are we going to do?”

  Turning bright purple, the fellow looked even younger and, Griffin realized too late, clearly gay.

  By the time he’d settled up and returned to the private dining room, the mostly teenaged waitstaff was busy clearing away the last of the dessert dishes and tossing stained tablecloths into portable hampers with more energy and enthusiasm than they’d exhibited earlier in the evening. They probably had a party to go to, Griffin supposed. Hard to believe that Laura herself was past all that now, the anticipation of a young night and its many possibilities. The rehearsal guests had all gone out onto the porch, below which, on the lawn, a drunken game of volleyball was under way, with just enough light from the porch to play by. Andy’s family, many of whom had traveled a long way that day, had evidently decided to call it a night, so it was just Joy’s that remained.

  Harve, looking tired and agitated, sat at the far end of the porch, near the top of the long, sloping wheelchair ramp. He’d nodded off during the later stages of the dinner, though he refused to admit it, even after snorting violently awake, which caused Jared and Jason to reenact the event for the edification of the children at the designated kids’ table, after which they were all snorting awake and falling out of their chairs. The old man was now struggling to get up out of his chair, apparently determined not to be wheeled down the ramp past the volleyballers. Griffin sympathized, though Dot apparently didn’t. With an assist from Joy’s sister Jane, she pushed him back into his seat and told him, unless Griffin was mistaken, to behave. Whatever Harve sai
d back caused her to spin on her heel and head indoors in the general direction of the ladies’ restroom, leaving Jane to reason with her father.

  Joy was at the far end of the porch, talking to her other sister, June, and June’s husband, but Griffin could tell she was monitoring the situation. According to Laura, the whole family—Harve and Dot, her mother, Jane and June and their families, Jason and Jared—was sharing the large cottage at the water’s edge apart from the main hotel. Its dark outline was visible against the night sky, its windows glowing warmly yellow. No doubt it would remind Joy of the house they’d rented when she was a girl. Jane and June had probably remembered to bring board games, and after Harve and the smaller children were put to bed, the rest of them would stay up late playing Monopoly and Clue, swapping all the old nostalgic family stories. Griffin, who’d heard these too many times, nevertheless felt a twinge of regret (admit it) at being suddenly outside the family circle. Would Ringo, ridiculous oaf that he was, be invited to the table tonight and given Griffin’s Professor Plum game piece, his silver thimble? He’d made a point of telling Griffin that he was staying in the hotel proper, but that might just be for appearances. He now joined Joy and her sister and brother-in-law, and when Griffin saw him rest his hand lightly on the small of her back, it occurred to him that having just discharged his primary responsibility of the evening, he could slip away unnoticed and probably not be missed.

  Why didn’t he want to? He was standing in the porch doorway trying to figure that out when his mother said, You know who you remind me of, don’t you? Which Griffin took to be a rhetorical question. I thought you told Laura I was just like you, he fired back, and the shot must have landed, because she shut up. Off to the right he noticed a small alcove from which he could see, without being observed himself, both the porch and the game on the lawn below. A coffee urn had been set up on a sideboard, and that, he decided, was probably a good idea before he drove back up the peninsula. He poured himself a cup and closed the door, lest someone notice him and decide he needed company.

  With the exception of pregnant Kelsey, the whole wedding party, as well as some of the teenaged guests, had been recruited to play volleyball. The little kids wanted to play, too, and were running around with their arms up, though the game was taking place well above them. Laura and Andy were on the back line, and when they stopped to kiss, the ball landed right at their feet, causing their teammates to groan. Jared and Jason had positioned themselves on opposite sides of the net and were shoving each other back whenever one of them violated the neutral zone. “Coming right down your throat, J.J.,” Jason warned, and when the ball came over the net he spiked it hard, clearly aiming at his brother, but the shot careened away and narrowly missed Kelsey, who was watching, one hand under her belly, from what she’d wrongly imagined was a safe distance.

  “Hey, hey, easy! Watch out for the little ones!” June called from the porch, and was promptly ignored.

  I hope you aren’t going to tell me you enjoy these people, his mother said. He’d been hoping she’d been shut out when he closed the door behind him, but no such luck. You forget how well I know you, she continued. Pretend otherwise all you want, but you’ve always wanted to be done of these people, and now you are. This sentimental mood you’re in doesn’t become you.

  I’m ignoring you, Mom, he told her, focusing his attention on a small boy who was acting out below. Furious at being ignored, he’d sat down right in the middle of the court, his lower lip sticking out, his face a thundercloud.

  A little monster, that one, his mother observed.

  No, Mom, he’s a child, Griffin said, though she might be right.

  Andy, apparently fearing the boy might get trampled, picked him up and set him on his shoulders and, when the ball came over the net, managed to position himself so the kid could hit it. The ball went directly into the net, but his face was aglow with importance, and he raised his arms in triumph, as he’d clearly seen some athlete do on TV, and was given a round of applause.

  You don’t like children, you don’t like volleyball and you don’t suffer fools gladly.

  Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think, Mom.

  Fine. Be that way.

  Let’s talk about something else, shall we?

  We can discuss whatever you like. The weather, if you prefer. Remember how it snowed that last two weeks?

  Did he ever. Giant drifts of powder banked two-thirds of the way up the hospital window. Laura’s flight out had been one of the last before the airport closed, and it hadn’t reopened until Christmas Eve. Twice Griffin had to walk a good mile from the hospital to his motel, the roads impassable, his car plowed in.

  In the days following Laura’s surprise visit, his mother became increasingly agitated. The morphine calmed her breathing, but something was clearly troubling her that had to do with her granddaughter, Griffin suspected, though he had no idea what. “She’s so …,” she began several times, her thought always trailing off, as if she were trying to articulate something just beyond her grasp. The oxygen made her mouth dry, so Griffin gave her some ice chips to suck on, thinking that might help, but they didn’t. “She’s so …”

  “She’s so what, Mom?”

  She fell asleep, still struggling, and Griffin drifted off as well, awaking to the sound of her voice.

  “She’s so … kind, isn’t she?”

  Kind? That was the word she’d been straining to locate? It was as if the concept were fabulously exotic, one she’d read about but hadn’t personally encountered until now. Either that or she’d done a quick genetic scan, looking for and not finding a familial antecedent.

  “Yes,” he said, feeling his throat constrict with pride. “She is that.”

  “She makes me almost”—she was struggling again now, and Griffin guessed that another unfamiliar concept was groping blindly toward articulation—“ashamed.”

  The next day, however, she was more herself. “She’s not brilliant, though, is she?” she said, staring off into space. They’d been sitting quietly for the last hour, each in private thought. “I doubt she’ll go back to school.”

  “Actually, she’s smart as hell,” Griffin told her, instantly angry. “More important, she’s happy, Mom. She’s going to marry someone she loves and who loves her.”

  “Happy,” she repeated, catching his eyes and locking in. “Only very stupid people are happy.”

  A few short hours, Griffin remembered thinking. That’s all it had taken for her to reflect upon kindness in general and her granddaughter’s in particular, then to discard it as a cardinal virtue.

  They didn’t discuss Laura after that, but he continued to feel the ghostly residue of her visit, and unless he was mistaken, his mother did, too. Her decline seemed more rapid now, though over the long days that followed she rallied several more times, much as the doctors had predicted. The peaks weren’t nearly so high, however, and the valleys were lower. The morphine necessary for her breathing, in ever larger doses, made things weird, then weirder. Each time a dose was administered, her breathing became less labored and she was calmer, but not, somehow, any more at peace.

  “She’s battling something,” one of the nurses remarked. “That’s not unusual at this stage. We may never know what it’s about.”

  When she let him, he read to her or they watched television listlessly until the morphine took her under. He’d brought “The Summer of the Brownings” with him from L.A., and he worked on it while she slept. Something about his mother’s frail condition, together with the small, rhythmic sounds of the hospital room, made the story accessible in a way it hadn’t been the summer before on the Cape. At one point, though, his mother had awakened unexpectedly and asked what he was working on so intently. “Oh, them,” she sniffed when he told her, clearly disappointed by his choice of subject matter. Thinking it might please her, he said she’d been helpful. “You told me last June that it was asthma the little Browning girl suffered from, and about Peter eventually dying in Vietnam.�
�� But she claimed to have no memory of the conversation. “How would I know what happened to those people?” she said when pressed. He couldn’t figure out what to make of it. His mother’s usual MO was to feign knowledge she didn’t have, not to confess ignorance.

  As Christmas bore down on them, his exhaustion, fueled by sleepless nights and cafeteria food, began to take its toll, and Griffin felt his tenuous grip on reality begin to fray, as if he, too, were being dosed with morphine. He found himself sleeping when she did, dreaming fitfully, the Browning story in his lap. More than once he awoke with his mother’s eyes on him, an enigmatic smile playing on her lips. “You aren’t the only one with a story to tell, you know,” she said one afternoon.

  “I’m sure that’s true,” he replied. He had exactly no desire to be the beneficiary of any morphine-fueled revelations, and the nurses had warned him to try to steer clear of upsetting topics. He hoped she’d let the subject drop, but a few minutes later, she said, “I bet you didn’t know your father and I were lovers right to the end.”

  That, as it turned out, was the opening salvo, a warning shot across his bow, the beginning of what over the next few days he’d come to think of as his mother’s Morphine Narrative. Chronically short of breath now, she delivered it the only way she could, in short installments, like an old Saturday matinee serial. After each segment she closed her eyes and slept, or pretended to, leaving him to digest and puzzle over what she’d told him.

  The real reason Claudia had abandoned his father, his mother now explained, was that she’d discovered they were still sexually involved. She’d visited him off and on that whole period, telling Bartleby—who was easy to lie to, since he preferred not knowing anyway—that she was attending conferences. She claimed Griffin himself had nearly found them out when he visited his father in Amherst. She’d meant to leave well before he arrived, but her car, parked in plain sight in the driveway, wouldn’t start. The engine had turned over just in the nick of time. They’d actually driven past each other on his father’s street, but he’d been off in his own world and hadn’t noticed her. The first installment had ended here, and when Griffin asked why she was telling him these things at such great cost, she said, “So you’ll know. You think you know all about your father and me, but you don’t.”