That Old Cape Magic

by Richard Russo

  For a time nobody noticed Griffin, who lay unconscious beneath the hedge, with only his feet sticking out, or else they concluded he was conversing with Harve in the yew above. He came to in stages, as if from a long, luxurious nap, his senses returning one at a time, beginning with smell. He lay on his back, on soil that smelled richly of fertilizer, recently applied. His eyes were open, but there was nothing to see. Wait, that wasn’t quite true. What he was looking at, when he squinted, resembled a pen-and-ink drawing, except that its intricate lines wouldn’t stay still and were encased, at the edges, in dense fog. Wellfleet, he thought. Somehow he’d been transported back to the fog capital of the world, where no doubt he’d be expected to scatter his father’s ashes and this time do it right. But he didn’t have the ashes, Joy did, and had promised to give them back, though here he was in Wellfleet without them. Then, finally, there was a sound track, played through a crackling, blown speaker, nearby voices, lots of them, all talking and shouting at once. Why couldn’t he see who they belonged to? He was trying to sort out these complexities when he felt someone grab him by the ankles and pull him back into the world.

  And what a world! For the next ten minutes he stood (swayed, actually) by himself, trying to make sense of it by going over in his mind what he believed to be true, allowing what he hoped were hard facts to surface, like gaseous bubbles through mud, into his wobbly consciousness. He wasn’t in Wellfleet, he was in Maine. He’d come here with a woman not his wife to attend his daughter’s wedding. To this same wedding his wife had also come, accompanied by a man who was not Griffin. His left eye was swollen tightly shut as a result of his being sucker punched (why?) by one of his brothers-in-law (which?). His father-in-law had, like a character in a fairy tale, got trapped in a tree. Highly improbable—all of it—and yet evidently true. It wasn’t someone’s opinion; no alternative theory had been advanced. He would have liked to talk it over with someone, but even his mother seemed to have abandoned him.

  But hold on, he’d spoken to somebody after being yanked from under the hedge, hadn’t he? Who, though? And what had they talked about? It couldn’t have happened more than five minutes ago, but the memory was gone. He thought about joining the others over at the hedge where Harve was still imprisoned. Joy and Laura were over there, but so were Andy and Ringo, which made him super… what was the word? Unnecessary. The twins were there, too, and if he joined them without invitation, they might punch him again. He doubted this would actually happen, but couldn’t be sure. He still didn’t understand why they punched him the first time, and whatever their reason, it might still pertain. Super…?

  Gradually, the dense Wellfleet fog in his brain began to lift, and then he noticed a woman sitting all by herself on a bench facing the ocean. Her scowl, together with how defiantly her arms were crossed over her chest, suggested that neither the hedge nor the crowd fixated on it was of the slightest interest to her. Griffin was aware he should know who this woman was, so he concentrated on her identity until it finally revealed itself. She was Dot, Harve’s second wife. Pleased with himself for recognizing her and anxious to test the coherence of his speech, he decided to join her. When he sat down, though, she said, “Go away,” without even glancing in his direction to see who it was.

  Having only just arrived and feeling woozy from his journey, he was unwilling to depart quite yet, not until he’d discovered what she was doing all by herself, glowering at the unoffending ocean, when her husband had just been swallowed by a tree. An idea occurred to him that might explain it, so he said, “They can be tough …” He meant to go on but didn’t, his voice sounding remote in the echo chamber of his head.

  She did turn to regard him now, her eyes narrowing. She seemed to be trying to decide if his sympathy was something she wanted, or if her misery was company enough. “That,” she said, pointing at his eye with her index finger, its tip sculpted to a frighteningly lethal point, “is what I feel like when I’m around those people. Like I’m being …pummeled. Bludgeoned. Battered. Cudgeled.”

  That seemed to Griffin a tad overstated, but he knew what she meant, and having just struggled to construct a four-word sentence fragment, he envied her ability to summon so many impressive, violent synonyms. Clearly nobody’d punched her lights out recently. Together they swiveled on the bench to afford themselves a better view of what was transpiring at the hedge. People seemed to be taking turns talking to it. Had the bush been burning, the whole thing would have been biblical.

  “All he ever talks about is that woman,” Dot said, as if she were able to see Harve at the center of the yew. “I want to scream, ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead’.” When she said this, the volume in Griffin’s head went down, back up, back down again, a wire loose somewhere.

  “They were married a long time,” he ventured, benignly, he thought.

  But she turned quickly and glared at him. “Then why marry me?” she demanded.

  For the life of him Griffin couldn’t think of a reason for Harve or anyone else to marry her, and she must have seen this register on his face, because she was suddenly standing over him with her fists clenched. Good Lord, he thought, was she going to punch him, too? He barely knew her. “Superfluous,” he said, the word he’d needed earlier suddenly coming to him.

  “Why don’t you just …”

  When she paused, Griffin’s mind raced ahead, supplying the words fuck off, though of course women in their late sixties didn’t say that.

  “… fuck off,” she concluded, and strode away in the general direction of the parking lot.

  He watched her go, then glanced at the spot where she’d been sitting, trying to decide if the woman had really been there, if the conversation had actually taken place. A couple minutes later his daughter, looking exhausted and despondent, sank down next to him on the bench and rested her head on his shoulder. Which was nice. “Where’s Andy?” he said, hoping that wherever he was he’d stay there for a while.

  “He’s gone to get the car,” she told him, or at least that’s what he thought she said. She was sitting right next to him, but he could barely hear her. “You ready to go?”

  “Where?”

  She lifted her head to regard him. “The hospital?”

  “Shouldn’t we wait until they extra … extratake …”

  “Extricate?”

  “… Harve from the hedge?”

  “Dad,” she said, her mother’s sternness creeping into her voice, “we’ve already had this conversation.”

  “When?”

  “Ten minutes ago. You were supposed to wait for me by the tree.”

  He was?

  “Look at me,” she said, taking him by the chin. The sensation wasn’t nearly as pleasurable as having her rest her head on his shoulder. “Your eyes are dilated. Did you land on your head?”

  He had no memory of landing at all, but the last thing he wanted was for her to be worried about him. “I’m fine,” he assured her. “People need to quit punching me and telling me to fuck off, but otherwise …” Unable to complete the sentence, he considered the word count impressive, nonetheless.

  Behind them a chain saw roared to life, and its sheer volume reconnected something in Griffin’s cranial circuitry. The world’s many varied sounds were again playing at their normal volume. Also, the earlier conversation with his daughter, the one in which he’d promised to wait by the tree, was suddenly there in its entirety. It was she and Andy who’d pulled him from beneath the hedge, he now recalled.

  “I must be allergic to yew,” Laura said, scratching at her forearms.

  “To me?”

  She stopped scratching and looked at him.

  “Oh. Yew. Gotcha.” Now that he looked at them, her arms were grotesquely swollen.

  “You’re definitely coming to the hospital,” she said. “You’re concussed.”

  “They’ll have Benadryl,” he assured her, still a beat behind but catching up fast.

  “Yeah, right,” she said with a sweeping gestu
re that took in the whole resort. “Benadryl’s going to make all this fine.”

  “Hey, it could’ve been worse,” he said.

  She waited patiently for him to explain how, which took a minute. Then another. Among the crowd at the hedge was a pregnant young woman. He knew her, just not her name. Then suddenly that was there, too. “Kelsey could have fallen in with the others,” he said, pleased with himself for saying something that might, if closely examined, actually be valid. “The shock could’ve sent her into labor.”

  “You know, I never thought of that,” his daughter said in a golly-gee voice. “Or a disgruntled hotel employee could’ve laced our dinners with arsenic, in which case we’d all be dead instead of just hideously maimed.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to cheer you up.”

  Staring at her Popeye forearms, he finally realized she was weeping.

  “Dad,” she said, “tomorrow’s my wedding day, and I’m going to be ugly.”

  Over at the hedge, the chain saw sputtered and died. Taking advantage of the silence, he quietly said, “No, you’re going to be beautiful. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Andy pulled up then, and they climbed in, Laura next to her fiancé, Griffin into the back. The car was identical to his rental, right down to the color and features. It even had a copy of the same literary magazine on the dash. He patted his pants pocket, but felt no keys. Unless that was them dangling in the ignition. “So this is my car?” he asked, and they both turned around to stare at him.

  “Yes, Dad. This is your car. You gave Andy the keys. You’re scaring me.”

  Before driving off, they were treated to one last bizarre sight: Jared and Jason, shaking what remained of the mutilated hedge like madmen, until finally it surrendered from its dark center an elderly man in a wheelchair. Out Harve tumbled, somehow landing wheels down on the lawn, to wild cheers.

  “He’s out,” Andy said, taking his bride’s hand. “See? Everything’s going to be fine.”

  And she smiled, believing him, Griffin could tell. He’d just told her the same thing, but of course he was no longer the person from whom his daughter needed such reassurances. Which meant there was nothing to do but relax in the backseat, which was where you put people you don’t have to listen to, even when it’s their car.

  The tiny regional hospital was really more of a clinic, and its usually sleepy, preseason emergency room had been overwhelmed by the first wave of injured wedding guests, not all of whom had been seen to by the time Laura, Andy and Griffin arrived, moments ahead of the ambulance bearing Joy and her father, which in turn was closely followed by a small flotilla of cars. Harve, finally pried loose from his chair, was wheeled in on a gurney Griffin caught a glimpse of him as he rolled by surrounded by EMTs. His cheeks were a grid of angry scratches, and a nasty-looking abrasion ran from his neck down his shoulder. Otherwise, he looked to be in reasonably good condition. He’d been wearing a baseball cap, and its bill had protected his eyes. Jane and June, on opposite sides of the gurney, having reluctantly given their father over to the professionals, now provided narration as they sped past the front desk: “See, Daddy? We’re at the hospital already. Look at all the nurses. You like nurses, remember? They’ll fix all your scratches …”

  Harve was able to sum up his circumstance in a single, hoarse croak. “Hurt,” he said.

  Curious to see how bad his own injuries were, Griffin located a men’s room off the main corridor. What he saw in the wall-length mirror shocked him. His swollen eye looked hideous, as if the eyeball had been removed from its socket, a tennis ball inserted in its place and the skin stretched over it and sewn shut. There was also a trail of dried blood beneath his left nostril, a deep scratch on his forehead and bits of hedge in his hair. Dear God, was he really going to walk his daughter down the aisle tomorrow looking like this? Would sunglasses, assuming he could find a pair, even fit over something that size? He could feel other urgent questions forming in his still-addled brain, but before he was able to resolve any of them the door to the men’s room swung open and one of the twins walked in. The stubbled one. Which was …

  Unzipping, whichever twin it was stepped in front of the single wall urinal. “Okay,” he said, studying Griffin in the mirror, his urine hitting the porcelain with enough force to make Griffin envious. “Settle an argument. Jared says our family’s fucked up. I say no.”

  Griffin, making a mental note that unless he was speaking of himself in the third person this was Jason, pointed to his grotesque, swollen eye.

  “You shouldn’t have called us morons,” he said.

  “I didn’t.” Hadn’t his mother offered that observation, in the privacy of his own brain?

  “We both heard you. We were standing right there.”

  “Huh,” Griffin said, reluctantly entertaining the possibility that a dead woman had, albeit briefly, taken control of his larynx.

  “Also, we thought you’d pushed our father into the hedge.”

  “Why would I do that, Jason?” Griffin said.

  “You’ve never liked any of us,” he said, as if stating a well-known fact. “Plus you were the only one who could have done it. Standing just where he’d been with that shit-eating grin on your face. Same one you’ve got now.”

  Griffin turned to examine his face in the mirror. What he saw there was a grimace, not a grin. A well-earned grimace, come to that.

  “Like you were enjoying the whole thing,” Jason continued. “Jared thought the same thing.”

  “Jason,” Griffin said, “you and your brother arriving at the same conclusion isn’t really a test of its validity. Seek some genetic variety would be my advice.” Griffin half expected this observation to provoke further hostility, but it didn’t.

  “It’s true,” the other man chuckled. “We sort of share a brain, don’t we? Always did. No reason to call us morons, though.” Finished, he gave it a shake, zipped up and came over to the sink.

  Griffin stepped aside so Jason could wash his hands. His forearms were striped with angry yew scratches, but they weren’t swollen like Laura’s. “I apologize if I called you a moron.”

  “What do you mean if?”

  “And I wasn’t enjoying it,” he told him, to set the record straight.

  “I’m just saying it’s how you looked. Call it a misunderstanding, I guess. Anyway, nobody died, and tomorrow’s a new day,” he said, vigorously washing his hands of the old one and yanking a paper towel from the dispenser. “You think this wedding’s fucked up, you should try Iraq.”

  “Yeah, sure, but New England weddings aren’t supposed to invite that kind of comparison,” Griffin said, pleased that he was again capable of making such subtle distinctions, more or less effortlessly.

  “I’m only saying,” Jason shrugged, tossing his wadded-up towel into the bin. He apparently saw no need to elaborate further on what, exactly, he was only saying.

  “Tell your brother all families are fucked up,” Griffin said. “It’s not an argument either of you can win.”

  “That’s truly warped,” Jason said. “You know how you end up if you go through life thinking like that?”

  “No, how?”

  “You end up like you. One working eye, with twigs and shit in your hair.”

  Griffin couldn’t help smiling, though it literally hurt to.

  “I’m sorry I punched you, though,” Jason admitted thoughtfully. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I realize now it probably wasn’t just because you called me a name and pushed Pop into the hedge. The way I’m figuring it, subconsciously?” Here he pointed at his forehead, perhaps to suggest where such delicate, refined “figuring” took place. “Subconsciously, I was still pissed at you for being such a prick to my sister. You think that’s possible?”

  Griffin did, consciously.

  At the nurses’ station he was told his wife was in examination room 2B, where he was treated to an unexpected sight: Brian Fynch, glassy-eyed, being wheeled out of the room on a gurney On h
is forehead, a knot the size of an egg pushed up through his Ringo bangs. Griffin was pretty sure he hadn’t been one of those hurt when the ramp collapsed, so … what? He’d been injured at the hospital?

  Inside the room, Joy, dressed for some reason in a pale blue Johnnie, was seated on the examination table, looking shell-shocked. “What happened to …” He’d been about to say Ringo, but caught himself.

  His wife sighed deeply. “I warned him not to keep looking at it.” She showed him her finger, which lay at an almost anatomically impossible angle. “But I guess he couldn’t help it. He got really pale, and then …” She pointed at the wall, specifically at an indentation in the plaster that looked to be about the same size as a college dean’s forehead. Griffin had to look away lest she observe one of those vintage shit-eating grins Jason had accused him of wearing earlier. When he finally turned back, though, he saw that Joy herself was smiling. A grudging, guilty smile, but still definitely a smile. “You know the wet sound a ripe cantaloupe makes when you drop it on the kitchen floor? That’s what he sounded like.”

  “Jesus,” Griffin said, feeling genuine sympathy for the man. His wife’s finger was a truly gruesome sight, enough to make a squeamish man light-headed, and he was, like his father before him, a squeamish man.

  “Don’t you faint, too,” she said, slipping the hand under her Johnnie.

  Back in the men’s room, after washing his face, Griffin had congratulated himself that the abstraction and confusion he’d felt after being pulled from under the hedge had mostly dissipated, but now, studying his wife, he wasn’t so sure. “I guess my question would be, why did you have to get undressed for them to set your finger?” Also, how in the world had she gotten undressed with her finger bent back like that?