What he’d do, Griffin decided, was take Route 6 all the way to Provincetown, have a late breakfast there, then poke back up the Cape on tacky old 28. He wondered if it would still be lined with flea markets, as it had been when he was a kid. His father, an avid collector of political ephemera and an avowed Democrat, could never pass one without stopping to make sure there wasn’t an old Wendell Willkie campaign button its owner didn’t know the value of lying at the bottom of a cardboard box. Republican artifacts were another of his guilty pleasures. “All your father’s pleasures are guilty,” his mother claimed, “and deserve to be.” Of course Route 28 would take twice as long, but there was no hurry. Joy wouldn’t arrive until evening, probably late, and the sooner he got to the B and B where she’d booked a room for the wedding, the sooner he’d feel compelled to open the trunk of the convertible, which contained, in addition to his travel bag and his bulging satchel, the urn bearing his father’s ashes, which he’d pledged to scatter over the weekend. He wasn’t sure that disposing of cremated midwestern academics in Massachusetts waters was strictly legal, and would have preferred that Joy be there for moral support (and as a lookout). Still, if he happened upon a quiet, serene and deserted spot, he might just do the deed by himself. Hell, maybe he’d dump the portfolios in as well-an idea that made him smile.
Pilgrim Monument had just appeared on the horizon when his cell phone vibrated in the cup holder, and he pulled over to answer it. In the last nine months, since his father’s death, he’d been in several minor but costly fender benders, so this seemed safer than talking and driving at the same time, though there wasn’t as much room on the shoulder as he would’ve hoped for. A truck roared by, too close for comfort, but no one else was coming. He’d just have to make it quick.
He assumed the caller, at this hour, had to be Joy, but it wasn’t. “Where are you?” his mother wanted to know. Lately, she didn’t bother saying hello or identifying herself. In her opinion he was supposed to know who it was, and thanks to her tone of perpetual annoyance and aversion to preamble, he usually did.
“Mom,” he said, not all that anxious to testify to his present whereabouts. “I was just thinking about you.” A lone gull, perhaps concluding that he’d pulled over to eat something cheesy, circled directly overhead and let out a sharp screech. “You and Dad both, actually.”
“Oh,” she said. “Him.”
“I’m not supposed to think about Dad?”
“Think about whomever you want,” she said. “When did I ever pry into your thoughts? Your father and I may not have agreed on much, but we respected your intellectual and emotional privacy.”
Griffin sighed. Anymore, even his most benign comments set his mother off, and once she was on a roll it was best just to let her finish. Their respect for his privacy had been, he knew all too well, mostly disinterest, but it wasn’t worth arguing over.
“I have my own thoughts, thank you very much,” she continued, implying, unless he was mistaken, that he wouldn’t want to know what these were, either. “And they are full and sufficient. I can’t imagine why your father should be occupying yours, but if he is, don’t let me interfere.”
The circling gull cried out again, even louder this time, and Griffin briefly covered the phone with his hand. “Did you call for a reason, Mom?”
But she must’ve heard the idiot bird, because she said, her voice rich with resentment and accusation, “Are you on the Cape?”
“Yes, Mom,” he admitted. “We’re attending a wedding here tomorrow. Why, should I have alerted you? Asked permission?”
“Where?” she said. “What part?”
“Near Falmouth,” he was happy to report. The upper Cape, in her view, was strictly for people who didn’t know any better. You might as well live in Buzzards Bay, drive go-carts, play miniature golf, eat clam chowder thickened with flour, wear a Red Sox hat.
“Marriage,” she sneered, what he’d told her apparently now registering. “What folly.”
“You were married twice yourself, Mom.”
When Bartleby died several years back, she’d hoped there might be a little something in it for her, at least enough to buy a small cottage near one of the Dennises, maybe. But an irrevocable trust let his rapacious children take everything, and they’d been unrepentant in their greed. “You made our father’s final years a living hell,” one of them had had the gall to tell her. “Did you ever hear such nonsense?” she’d asked Griffin. “Did they even know the man? Could they imagine he’d ever been happy? Was there ever a philosopher who wasn’t morose and depressed?”
“The bride’s Kelsey,” Griffin told her. “From L.A., remember?”
“Why would I know your California friends?” This was no innocent question. Though she wouldn’t admit it, his mother was still resentful of the years he and Joy and then Laura had spent out West, out of her orbit. And she’d always considered his screen-writing a betrayal of his genetic gifts.
“Not our friend. Laura’s.” Though it was entirely possible, now that he thought about it, they’d never met. It had always been Griffin ’s policy not to inflict his parents on his wife and daughter, who’d really gotten to know her grandmother only after they moved back East.
“How does it look?”
“How does what look?”
“The Cape. You just told me you were on the Cape, so I’m asking how it looks to you.”
“Like always, I guess,” he said, not about to confess that his heart had started racing on the Sagamore Bridge, that he still loved something that she and her hated husband also loved.
“They say it’s too crowded now. I guess we had the best of it. You, me, the man occupying your thoughts.”
“Again, what were you calling about, Mom?”
“Fine,” she said. “Change the subject. I need you to bring me some books, and I’ll e-mail you the titles. I assume you’ll be visiting at some point? Or have I seen the last of you?”
“Are these books I’ll be able to find? For instance, are they in print, or is this yet another fool’s errand you’ve designed for me?” Since Bartleby’s death, Griffin had become the man in his mother’s life, and she enjoyed nothing more than setting him the sort of impossible task, especially of the academic variety, that would’ve been easy if he’d done with his life what she’d intended instead of what he himself had preferred.
“Just because you can’t find what I ask for doesn’t mean it’s a fool’s errand. You belong to a generation that never learned basic research skills, who can’t even negotiate a card catalog.”
“They don’t have those anymore,” he said, for the pleasure of hearing her shudder.
Which she denied him. “You think typing a word into Google and pressing Go is research.”
There was, he had to admit, some truth to this. Back in his screenwriting days, he’d always happily delegated research to Tommy, who was genuinely curious if easily distractible. Confronted with his own ignorance, Griffin preferred to just make something up and move forward, whereas his partner, not unreasonably, preferred making sure their narrative had a sturdy, factual foundation. “You do know that when the cameras roll they’re going to be pointing at something in the real world, right?” he’d asked. To which Griffin would reply that the cameras were never going to roll if they kept getting bogged down in background.
“The things I require are all at Sterling,” his mother continued. “I still have privileges there, you know.”
It was entirely possible, Griffin knew, this was the real reason she’d called: to remind him of who she was, who she’d been, that she still had privileges at the Yale library. She might not actually need any books.