That Old Cape Magic (19 page)

His first thought was she’d decided to come anyway, but of course this couldn’t be Joy. His mother never would have allowed her daughter-in-law to hold her hand. “Look who’s here,” she said. Only when Laura turned to face him did Griffin recognize her. “Would you mind absenting yourself from felicity awhile?” his mother said after he and his daughter had embraced. “My granddaughter has come a long way to see me, and she can only stay an hour.”
“It’s okay, Daddy,” Laura told him when he tried to object.
“Yes, do run along,” his mother said triumphantly, pleased, he could tell, both by his reluctance and the fact that he would have prevented this visit if he could’ve.
They’d had very little contact when Laura was a child. His mother had visited a couple months after Laura was born, “to help out,” but when Joy handed her the baby, she’d grasped her as gingerly as you would something unclean. Laura had regarded her grandmother with interest, smiled, then projected a stream of sour yellow milk onto her. Quickly handing the baby back to Joy, his mother had spent the next fifteen minutes at the sink, scrubbing her blouse with a dishcloth. She’d planned to stay for a week, but after two days, during which she never changed a single diaper, she made a flimsy excuse and flew back to Indiana. “Who changed
your
diapers, I wonder?” Joy said, finding the whole episode amusing, whereas Griffin had been homicidal.
The two thousand miles separating them had been an adequate buffer during Laura’s childhood, but even after they moved to Connecticut, things didn’t change much. Only when Laura was a junior in high school and thinking about where to apply to college did her grandmother begin to show much interest. She thought Laura should go to Yale, of course, and turned up her nose at the small liberal arts colleges her granddaughter was most keen on, the same ones where she and Griffin’s father had once hoped to secure jobs. “Safety schools” was how she now regarded them. “Dear God, not Williams,” she told Laura. “Do you know the kind of people who send their progeny to Williams? Rich. Privileged. White. Republican. Or, even worse, people who aspire to all that.” Not so unlike your other grandparents, she meant. “Their kids aren’t smart enough to get into an Ivy but have to go somewhere, so God created Williams.” Griffin couldn’t imagine why, but Laura actually seemed to enjoy talking about all this with her grandmother (who called it brainstorming), and sometimes their phone conversations went on for forty-five minutes or an hour. It probably served him right that these all took place behind the closed door of his daughter’s bedroom. “Your grandmother has a lot of opinions,” Griffin told her. “That doesn’t mean they should carry much weight.” What he was doing, of course, was fishing, curious as to just how many and which opinions she was sharing with his daughter. “Oh, I don’t know,” Laura had responded noncommittally “She has some good ideas.” But she didn’t say what they were.
Joy warned him not to press the issue. Laura was old and smart enough to sift ideas, and his mother needn’t be treated like a venomous snake. He’d reluctantly given in, but when his mother suggested she be the one to accompany Laura on the Yale-Columbia-Cornell swing of what they all referred to as the Great American College Tour, he put his foot down. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, managing, with great effort, not to raise his voice, but failing to keep the anger out of it, “but you don’t get to infect my daughter with your snobbery and bitterness. All that ends here, with me.”
It had been a horrible thing to say, full of the very bitterness he was accusing her of. He regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, but there was no taking them back, nor could he quite bring himself to apologize.
“You have to call her back,” Joy said when he confessed what he’d done.
But he hadn’t. Nor did he soften and allow her to take Laura on that trip, managing it all by himself. They never referred to the matter again, but he knew his mother too well to imagine she’d forgotten. She no doubt saw her granddaughter’s hospital visit as a kind of revenge, or so it had seemed to him, banished to the nurses’ lounge, where he willed the big clock on the wall to move, damn it. At the end of the hour, Laura seemed fine, and he felt relieved that nothing too terrible had transpired, but as soon as they were in the car Laura broke down and sobbed all the way to the airport. Though it probably shouldn’t have, the intensity of her grief had surprised Griffin. No doubt she was coming to terms with the likelihood that she’d never see her grandmother again, but there seemed to be more to it, as if she was also mourning that someone who should’ve been important to her had remained a stranger. And whose fault was that? His mother’s, for being completely disinterested until so late in the game? It was tempting to lay the full blame on her, but deep down Griffin knew that if she’d shown interest in Laura any earlier, he would have just stepped between them that much sooner. He’d behaved as if she were a serpent because, God help him, he believed her to be one.
“I thought she’d want to know all about the man I was going to marry,” Laura told him now, her eyes filling at the memory of that hour in the hospital, indeed their last visit, “but when I tried to tell her about him …”
Griffin waited, but when his daughter seemed unable to continue, he completed her thought. “She wasn’t very curious?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted, wiping her eyes on her wrist. “When I talk about Andy, all my friends say their gag reflex kicks in. They say we’re nauseatingly in love.”
“Happiness sucks as a spectator sport, darlin’.”
“I guess. Anyway, after I told Grandma a few things about Andy, she interrupted, saying, ‘You need to get tougher.’ When I asked her why, she said marriage is combat. Somebody hurts, somebody gets hurt. One does, the other gets done to.”
“You know she was on morphine, right?”
“It wasn’t so much what she said that got under my skin. It was the funny way she was looking at me, like she could see deep down and knew I had it in me to be cruel. That if somebody had to get hurt, it’d be Andy, not me.”
“Sweetie, you say she was looking at you, looking
into
you, but I doubt it. Your grandmother was a narcissist, and they don’t really look outward. To them the world just reflects their own inner reality. She saw love as a trap. Therefore, you should, too.”
She sat up straight now. “All I know is I don’t ever want to break his heart.”
“You won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Absolutely.”
Had he been writing this scene in a script, the conversation wouldn’t have ended there. His fictional daughter would have asked the obvious questions. How could he possibly promise that she wouldn’t do the very thing he was doing? Wasn’t she his daughter? But it wasn’t a script, and his real-life daughter was too kind to say what she was thinking, maybe even too kind to think it.
“What I’ve been wondering is whether you’ll ever forgive me.”
“Oh, I already have,” she said, shouldering him hard but playfully, then getting to her feet. Apparently the father-daughter segment of the program was drawing to a close. “I’m still pretty mad at you, though,” she admitted.
“I know,” he said, rising as well. “Me too.”
When they emerged from the maze, she said, “Grandma told me one other thing, actually. About you.”
“What’s that?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“She said you’d never admit it, but you’re just like her.”
Damn right you are
, his mother said, agreeing with herself.
Everyone did seem to be on their best behavior, just as Joy had promised. He’d no sooner gotten himself a glass of wine than Jared—at least he was pretty sure it was Jared, given the shaved skull—came over and extended his hand, which Griffin saw no reason not to take. Whichever brother he was shaking hands with looked like what he was, a career marine: lantern jawed, thick necked, improbably muscled. “So,” he said, pumping Griffin’s hand in his crushing grip, “no hard feelings?”
Jared, then. Note to self: Jared, skull; Jason, hair. Griffin said no, there were no hard feelings.
The twins were a family enigma, born nearly a decade after Joy (Jane and June were older, the girls all spaced in two-year intervals) and completely different in temperament. As boys they’d worried Harve and Jill by fighting constantly and ferociously, neither ever seeking parental redress or justice. They fought until they bled, then fought some more. But suddenly all of that was over. Instead of wanting to kill each other, they had each other’s backs. With the leftover energy they took to bodybuilding and making gentle, sometimes not so gentle, fun of their father, first behind his back, later to his face. Neither had married. Now in their forties, they still liked heavy-metal music, strip clubs and the kind of women one met there.
“Two sides to every story, I guess,” Jared said, a worm squiggling under the skin of one temple, evidence how costly, for him, such magnanimity actually was. “Push comes to shove, I have to side with my sister, but …”
“I’m kind of on her side myself,” Griffin told him, because it was true, but also because it seemed like a good idea to suggest to Jared that pushing really needn’t come to shoving. Or punching, or stomping, or castration. All of which had apparently been on the table at one point. Brother Jason (not hair so much as stubble, really) was watching them from across the room, Griffin noticed, his expression, well,
murderous
was probably too strong a word. “I hear your brother left the service,” Griffin ventured, genuinely curious that either twin should do something so brazenly individualistic.
Jared snorted, glancing over his shoulder at his brother and raising his voice enough to be sure he could hear him. “Yeah, well, Jason always was a pussy.”
“We’ll see, J.J.,” his brother called back. This was short for Jared the Jarhead, the nickname he’d immediately picked up when he joined the marines. As if there weren’t enough
J’s
in the family already. “You wait.”
Joy’s father was indeed in a wheelchair along the far wall. A tall, angular woman who Griffin assumed must be Dot stood sentry at his elbow, and when he approached, she bent at the waist to whisper, like a handler to a pol, in Harve’s ear. To remind him who Griffin was? That he and Joy had separated?
“What?” Harve barked at her, and then, when she repeated whatever she’d told him, said, “Hell, I know who it is.” He extended a feeble, palsied hand, and Griffin felt an unexpected surge of pity. His father-in-law had always been a robust man, but no more. His pale blue eyes were watery, their lids outlined in bright red, as if with a cosmetic pencil.
“Jack,” he said, “are you keeping your head down?”
“Look up and all you’ll see is a bad shot,” Griffin replied. “It’s good to see you, Harve.”
The man nodded. “You know my wife died?”
“Yes,” said Griffin. He’d attended Jill’s funeral, of course, and thought about reminding Harve of this but decided not to. “Yes.”
“He knows,” said Dot, unhelpfully.
“Hell of a thing,” Harve said, unwilling to let go of the subject. “I hope you never have to go through it.”
“Me too,” Griffin said, realizing that despite Joy’s warning he’d given him far too much cognitive credit. If he knew about their separation, he’d clearly forgotten. Either that or someone had informed him that Griffin was bringing a guest to the wedding, and it was this woman he was hoping wouldn’t die on him.
“Hope you never have to walk into a room and find your wife in a heap on the floor.”
“Harvey,” Dot said, “you’re going to upset yourself.”
“Because that’s no fun, let me tell you,” he went on, ignoring her completely. “No replacing a woman like that.”
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.