That Old Cape Magic

  “Why is that so important?” he asked, but she just smiled, her eyes drooping toward sleep. Did she mean to imply that he was wasting his time writing about the Brownings when instead he could’ve been writing about them? That a writer with real imagination wouldn’t have been “off in his own world” when he could have been off in theirs?

  The sex, she told him with a sly smile (of invention or memory?), was better than it had ever been when they were married. Cheating with rather than on each other had added another whole layer of excitement. Later, after his father and Claudia returned to the university, they’d just kept on. In the end the fat cow had given his father an ultimatum—herself or his ex-wife—never dreaming what his choice would be (that sly smile broadening now).

  Each time she dozed, Griffin was certain she’d either forget the story she was telling him or, upon awakening, not have the strength to continue, but he was wrong. The tale seemed to satisfy some need as fundamental as breathing. “Let her tell it,” the nurse advised.

  “But it’s not even true. She’s exhausting herself spinning a ridiculous yarn that neither one of us believes. It’s complete bullshit.”

  Which got him a stern look. “Not to her. Your mother was a professor, right? She’s professing. She’ll stop when she’s ready, or when she can’t go on.”

  Whenever she resumed the story, he felt his heart plunge, thinking, Here we go again, but gradually, as the snow outside drifted higher and higher up the hospital window, he became intrigued and eventually fascinated by the tale that struggled to be born even as its teller slipped away.

  At some point one of Bartleby’s grown children had tumbled to what was going on between them, which explained why, when their father died, the siblings were united in their determination that she not inherit a farthing, the little shits. Not that she really cared. Bartleby never had anything she really wanted (yet another sly smile here, to let Griffin know she wasn’t just talking about worldly goods). She even claimed she’d continued to visit his father, though less frequently, at his subsequent academic postings. Indeed, they’d remained lovers for as long as he was physically able, and they hadn’t entirely broken off the relationship even then.

  Could any of this be true? Griffin couldn’t decide. The story didn’t really track, or rather it tracked for a while, then jumped the tracks, then somehow climbed back on again. In an attempt to reconcile them, he made a mental point-by-point comparison of the Morphine Narrative and the earlier one. At least one detail of the morphine version was factually untrue. Griffin had never visited his father in Amherst, so either his mother was confused in her recollection of who’d almost caught them when her car wouldn’t start (Claudia, returning from Charleston?) or she’d invented the entire episode. The problem was there were relatively few flagrant discrepancies, and resolving the ones there were wasn’t terribly helpful. The skeleton of the two tales was pretty much the same, so it came down to plausibility, to each story’s interior logic.

  Griffin hated to admit it, but in one respect the Morphine Narrative was marginally more credible. In the original, when his mother informed him, with great satisfaction, about his father’s disastrous year at Amherst, he—the veteran of a thousand sets of studio notes—had objected there was no way she could know everything she claimed to. His father was in one place and she in another, and even with a vast network of academic spies, the story she was pitching would have been, of necessity, a patchwork quilt of secondhand testimony. What his father had been thinking as he first outlined Claudia’s dissertation, and later as he composed an introduction and, finally, throwing caution to the wind, wrote the whole thing, was something only he could testify to, and he certainly wouldn’t have told her. But if there was any truth to the Morphine Narrative, then of course his mother had been there in Amherst, an off-and-on eyewitness. If they really were lovers, the story wasn’t secondhand but rather based on her own observations, however sporadic. His intimate revelations to her during this period therefore made a kind of sense. But if she’d been a regular visitor, his father couldn’t have been lonely; and if he wasn’t lonely, then missing Claudia hadn’t unhinged him; and if he wasn’t unhinged, why had he written her dissertation? Had he, in fact, written it?

  In almost all respects, though, his mother’s original saga was far more credible. Its general thrust—Look how far your father has fallen without me to look after him—was completely in character. It wasn’t just how she would feel, but indeed any woman similarly horse-traded. Its logic was consistent, and the visual evidence corroborated it. Griffin hadn’t visited him during his year at Amherst, but he’d seen him shortly after his return and vividly recalled his physical and emotional state, his health ruined, his nervous system shattered. Emaciated, ill, exhausted, he’d looked like a desperately lonely man who’d come unglued. That’s what his mother’s gleeful account had prepared Griffin to see, granted, but still. If he credited the Morphine Narrative and his parents had instead been having the best sex of their lives, then his haggard, distraught appearance afterward was due to what, carpal fatigue? And if he and Griffin’s mother were still passionately involved, why would he have surrendered a cushy full professorship for crappier jobs? And why keep such a secret from his son?

  But that, of course, was the whole point of the latter version. You never knew us. You thought you did, but how wrong you were. Our lives were a glorious secret, even from you. And this was also the problem in a nutshell. The most compelling thing about the Morphine Narrative was his mother’s need to tell it. At a stage of life when most people wanted to unburden themselves, why had she so desperately needed to lie? With so little time left, why use your last ounce of strength to invent such an elaborate falsehood? What difference could it possibly make to her what he thought about their marriage? No, the whole thing was nonsense, and the clincher was this: if the Morphine Narrative was true, in whole or part, then why, before falling ill, had his mother been so adamant that his father’s ashes be scattered on one side of the Cape, her own on the other? If their lives were intertwined right to the end, wouldn’t she want their ashes to commingle?

  Still, the nearer she got to the end—of her Morphine Narrative, of her life—the more he found himself wanting the story to be true, or if not true at least not completely false, not completely morphine. He kept hoping for a load-bearing detail strong enough to support the weight of its creaky structure, to fortify the too-often-chimerical motives of its characters. If she’d told him, for instance, that she’d been with his father when he died at that rest stop on the Mass Pike, that they’d decided to make one last trip to the Cape together, maybe hoping to find a little bungalow there, he’d have believed her, and not just because he’d never told her the details of how his father had been discovered in the passenger seat, never shared his suspicion that a woman had been with him. Okay, there’d still have been cause for doubt (if his mother was the mystery driver, why had she run off?), but also reason, at least a writer’s reason, to believe. Because in its own way that ending would have been perfect, symmetrical, implied in its beginning. A love story.

  Perhaps the oddest thing of all was how satisfied his mother had been when she finally finished telling it. Whatever urgency had driven the story evaporated when she finally let her voice fall. She no longer seemed to care whether he believed her or not, and shortly thereafter she’d lapsed into virtual silence for the three days that remained to her. “When is Christmas?” she wondered at one point, and he had to think. He’d been measuring time by her narration and by the snow, which by then had nearly covered the window, darkening the room in the middle of the day.

  “The day after tomorrow,” he told her.

  “You’ll be going home then,” she said.

  “No, I’ll be spending Christmas here,” he told her. “Did you really think I meant to leave you alone?”

  “How,” she asked, matter-of-factly, “does having you sit there day after day make me any less alone?”

  He then d
id think about leaving, going home, and he might have if he’d known where home was, but he didn’t, not anymore, and so he’d stayed. On Christmas morning she asked if he remembered how as a boy he liked to crawl under the tree and look up at the lights. And later that afternoon she said, “So … your marriage is ruined,” and he said yes, he supposed it was. After that, he remembered her saying only one other thing. “He’d be here,” she assured him, smiling, “if he wasn’t dead.”

  Unlike so many of her smiles, this one was neither sly nor lewd. Beatific was more like it. And for that reason he said, “I know, Mom. I know.”

  She was right about one thing: the fucking kid was a monster.

  Tired of trying to play volleyball with a kid on his shoulders, Andy returned him to his oblivious mother, but the little brat was having none of that. He clearly enjoyed being the center of attention and liked the applause even more, so he followed Andy right back onto the court, his arms raised, demanding to be restored to Andy’s shoulders. By this time all the other kids had been coaxed away by parents who were calling it a night. Several of the little ones had fallen asleep, and others were rubbing their eyes.

  Seeing the kid had followed him back into the fray, Andy took him by the wrist and tried to pull him gently back to the sideline, but no dice. Wrenching his hand free, the little bastard balled it into a fist and punched the groom in the groin.

  Witnessing this, his mother, instead of marching onto the court and removing the brat by force, went down on one knee and entreated him. “Come on now, Justin, come to Mommy. Can’t you see you’re holding up the game? And you hurt that nice boy. Come on now, sweetie.” But Justin had other thoughts. His original strategy had worked before, and he saw no reason why it shouldn’t again. Ignoring his mother, he plopped down on the court and stuck out his lower lip.

  Five bucks says she gives up, Griffin’s mother said, which was precisely what the woman did, returning to her conversation. Tell me you wouldn’t like to blister his little behind.

  I’m going home now, Mom, he told her. Why don’t you stay here, since you’re enjoying yourself so much.

  The game resumed, rather tentatively now, the players trying as best they could to navigate around the pouting boy. Andy was taking deep breaths and leaning on his bride, who seemed to be inquiring, given these new developments, what their prospects now were for a successful prewedding night. By the time Griffin emerged onto the porch, parents were calling their teenagers off the court, and the game began to break up. His sulk pointless now, the brat got to his feet and ran crying toward his mother. Griffin saw what was going to happen next before it did. Stationary, the kid had been relatively safe, in full view of the players in the back line, as well as those dancing around the net. But now the ball was in the air, and the kid wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Jason, no doubt hoping for one last hard spike at his brother, lunged a step to his right and leapt, his knee catching the boy under the chin and snapping his head back. The next instant the kid lay flat on his back, motionless, and before Griffin could prevent her from weighing in, his mother said, Good. Or possibly, face it, the sentiment so succinctly expressed was his own.

  Jane and June let out simultaneous, identical yelps, and everyone on the porch hurried down onto the lawn, where a circle formed around the fallen child, his mouth now open and working like a fish’s, though no sound came out. Griffin, alone on the porch and ashamed of himself (or his mother), caught a quick glimpse of the little shit’s bloody face. Finally able to catch his breath, he began to wail, and his mother, gathering him to her ample bosom, joined in. “Oh, poor sweetie! Poor, poor sweetie! What happened? Did the big people play too rough?”

  Jason looked like he might object to this characterization, but being responsible for the kid’s injuries, he decided on a different tactic. “He’s all right, aren’t you, sport,” he said, tousling his hair. “He’s a tough guy.” Whereupon the brat broke free of his mother’s grasp and tried to punch Jason where he’d punched Andy. This time, though, he was trying to punch a marine, whose crack training allowed him to deftly parry assaults from even the most malicious seven-year-olds. But the kid’s intent couldn’t have been clearer, the groining strategy apparently his default mode.

  “Justin!” his mother barked, taking him by the shoulders and spinning him around to face her. “What did Mommy say about hitting people there? Didn’t she tell you it’s not nice?” Whereupon he punched her in the same place.

  It had been Griffin’s intention to say a quick goodbye to Joy and Laura, but they were now at the center of the commotion on the lawn, and he decided against it. The entrance to the wheelchair ramp was close at hand, and with everyone distracted he’d be able to slip away unnoticed, using the yew hedge for cover all the way to the parking lot. Even as he planned this, something tugged at his short-term memory like a continuity problem in a movie (hadn’t the main character’s shirt been unbuttoned in the previous frame?), though only when he started down the incline and saw the splintered railing right where the ramp made a ninety-degree turn did he realize what it was: that just a few moments ago an impatient Harve had been sitting here.

  When Griffin got close, he could hear him groaning. The railing was rotten—he could see that much—and had snapped on impact. Due to the severe slope of the lawn, the porch was at this point a good ten feet above it, the top of the hedge a couple feet below. The yew was still quivering when he peered over the side. “Harve?” Griffin said. “You okay?”

  The voice that answered sounded more like a child’s than a grown man’s. “Won’t… go,” it said.

  It wasn’t difficult to piece together what must have happened. His father-in-law, abandoned by his daughter when the brat got clobbered, and too impatient to wait for assistance, had tried to navigate the ramp on his own and lost control of his chair. He was now planted headfirst in the hedge, his chair on top of him, its wheels up and still spinning. Actually, no, that last part couldn’t be right. The wheels were turning, all right, but that was because Harve, invisible beneath the chair but apparently still in the saddle, was pushing on them like mad, trying to power himself out of this predicament, apparently unaware that he was capsized in the yew’s branches, suspended eight feet in the air.

  Griffin kneeled, leaned over and reached down as far as he could; the nearest spinning wheel was just beyond his fingertips. From somewhere behind and above there came a shriek, and he didn’t have to turn to know that Dot had returned, no doubt expecting to find her husband where she’d left him. For a woman her age, she had a hell of a set of pipes on her. “Nooo!” she wailed. “Is he deaaad?”

  “Harve,” he told his father-in-law, “stop spinning the damn wheels.” Poised as precariously as he was—a large man, with the additional weight of the chair on top of him—he easily could snap one of the branches, Griffin feared, and impale himself on it.

  “Won’t… go, goddammit,” the unseen Harve grunted, still fully committed to his impossible exit strategy.

  Now, in addition to Dot’s wailing, Griffin heard the thunder of feet pounding up the porch steps and then down the narrow ramp. “Daddy!” screamed a frantic voice that he first identified as Joy’s, then realized, no, it must be one of her sisters’.

  He reluctantly rose to his feet. The chair, alas, was out of his reach, and it probably wasn’t a great idea to grab on to the wheels anyway. The thing to do—he should’ve realized this from the start—was to extract him from below. But the urge to peer over the side into the palsied hedge was irresistible, as the crowd now gathered at the busted railing attested.

  Jared was among the first to arrive and immediately dropped to his knees and leaned forward to grab hold, though the chair was just beyond his reach as well.

  “That’s not going to work,” Griffin said, placing a hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Maybe you and Jason and I can pull him out from below.”

  For a moment Jared appeared to consider this suggestion. But then, getting to his feet, h
e seemed to really take in who’d just spoken to him, and his expression instantly morphed from thoughtfulness to rage. That would have been perplexing enough, even if Jason hadn’t been standing right next to him with the same identical fucking look on his face.

  Honestly, Griffin’s mother said. Would you look at these two morons?

  It was as if they could hear her.

  “You son of a bitch,” Jared said, that worm wriggling again beneath his temple, and before Griffin could object, a fist (Jared’s or Jason’s?), foreshortened, suddenly caught him flush on the cheekbone, and he felt himself lift off the ramp, his body describing a parabola in the air above the hedge. He could sense the ground coming up to meet him, but before it did he heard, or thought he heard, a loud splintering sound and a chorus of screams. What the… ? he managed to think, but that was as far as he got.

  Say good night, his mother advised, just as the screen went black.

  10

  Pistolary

  The splintering sound Griffin heard as he went airborne was the wheelchair ramp collapsing under the weight of fifty well-fed celebrants. Those closest to the broken railing went into the yew, several landing on top of Harve and driving him deeper into its dark interior, where he bellowed piteously When Joy fell, the middle finger of her right hand got caught in the spokes of her father’s chair, the digit snapping like a twig. She should have been among the first to be rushed to the emergency room—most of the other injuries were only cuts and abrasions—but she refused to leave with her father still trapped in the hedge. The remaining guests gathered in a semicircle to watch Jason and Jared try to shake him loose. The hedge was far too thick, however, and its branches seemed naturally designed to funnel human victims straight down into its dark, dense center. Though they were slow to realize it, the twins’ efforts actually made matters worse by snapping some of the interior branches that were supporting their father, their fresh, sharp ends probing his soft flesh and making him howl in pain until he grew hoarse and then, finally, silent. The hotel manager urged patience while they looked for the head groundskeeper, who apparently had the only key to the locked shed where the chain saw was kept.