“Not until then?”
“I haven’t even turned in my final grades yet. The trunk of my car’s full of student portfolios.” Not to mention Dad’s ashes, he almost added.
“You actually read them?”
“Didn’t you read yours?”
“We had no portfolios, your father and I,” she reminded him. “We had exams. Our students wrote papers with footnotes. We taught real courses with real content.” Their metaphorical cameras had also been pointed, in other words, at something that actually existed. “Assigned readings. Rigor, it was called.”
A car blew by, its Dopplering horn loud enough to startle him. “Are you sure I’m qualified to do your photocopying? What if I screw up?”
“So, what were you thinking… about your father and me?”
For a moment he considered telling her he feared he was becoming his father, that this was what his recent bouts of indecision, not to mention the fender benders, might be about. But of course it would anger his mother, and prolong the conversation, if he suggested he was more like his father than her. “I thought you didn’t want to pry, Mom. Isn’t that what you just said, that my thoughts are my own?”
“They are, of course. Still, as a personal favor, couldn’t you arrange to think about your father and me separately?”
“I was remembering how happy you both got on the Sagamore Bridge, how you sang ‘That Old Cape Magic’?” And how miserable you both were in the same spot going the other direction. “As if happiness were a place.”
But she wasn’t interested in this particular stroll down memory lane. “Speaking of unhappy places, when you visit, I want you to look at this new one I’m at.” Her third assisted-living facility in as many years. The first was connected to the university and full of the very people she’d been trying to escape. The second was home to mid-fucking-western farmwives who read Agatha Christie and couldn’t understand why she turned up her nose at the Miss Marples they thrust at her, saying, “You’ll like this one. It’s a corker!”
“I mean really look at it,” his mother continued. “It’s certainly not what we imagined.”
“What did we imagine, Mom?”
“Nice,” she said. “We imagined it would be nice.”
Then she was gone, the line dead. The whole conversation had been, he knew from experience, a warning shot across his bow. And his mother was, after her own fashion, considerate. She never badgered him during the last month of the semester. A lifelong academic, she knew what those final weeks were like and gave him a pass. But after that, all bets were off. The timing of today’s call suggested she’d been on his college’s Web site again and knew he’d taught his last class. He knew it was a mistake to get her a laptop for her birthday even as he bought it, but in her previous facility she’d been accused of hogging the computer in the common room. Also of hogging the attentions of the few old men there, a charge she waved away. “Look at them,” she snorted. “There isn’t enough Viagra in all of Canada.” Though she did admit, as if to foreshorten ruthless interrogation on this subject, that there was more sex in these retirement homes than you might imagine. A lot more.
He supposed it was possible she really did need the books from Sterling. At eighty-five, her physical health failing, she was still mentally sharp and claimed to be researching a book on one of the Brontës (“You remember books, right? Bound objects? Lots and lots of pages? Print that goes all the way out to the margins?”). But he made a mental note to check her list to make sure he couldn’t find them in his own college library.
When a semi roared by, he noticed a foul odor and wondered what in the world the trucker was hauling. Only when he turned the key in the ignition did he see the viscous white glob on his shirtsleeve. The gull had shit on him!
His mother had made him a stationary target, and this was the result.
2 Slippery Slope
By the time Griffin ’s parents got divorced, each claiming they should’ve cut the cord sooner, that they’d made each other miserable for too long, he was in film school out West, and he’d thought it was probably for the best. But neither had prospered in their second marriages, and their careers suffered, too. Together, or at least voting together, they’d been a force to reckon with in English department politics. Singly, often voting against each other, they could be safely ignored, and the worst of their enemies now sniped at both with impunity. Of the two, his mother seemed to fare better at first. Openly contemptuous of the young literary theorists and culture critics when she was married to Griffin ’s father, she’d reinvented herself as a gender-studies specialist and became for a time their darling. One of her old “guilty pleasures,” Patricia Highsmith, had become respectable, and his mother published several well-placed articles on her and two or three other gay/lesbian novelists. Panels on gender were suddenly all the rage, and she found herself chairing several of these at regional conferences, where she hinted to her large and largely lesbian audiences that she herself had always been open, in both theory and practice, as regards her own sexuality. And perhaps, he supposed, she was. Bartleby, who’d begun their marriage preferring not to argue and ended it preferring not to speak at all, remained philosophical when these innuendos were reported back to him. Griffin had assumed his mother was exaggerating his withdrawal from speech, but a few months before his unexpected death (going to the doctor was something else he preferred not to do), he’d paid them a quick visit and they’d all gone out to dinner and the man hadn’t spoken a word. He didn’t seem to be in a bad mood and would occasionally smile ruefully at something his wife or Griffin said, but the closest he came to utterance was when a piece of meat lodged in his windpipe, turning his face the color of a grape until a passing waiter saw his distress and Heimliched him on the spot.
But his mother’s self-reinvention, a bold and for a time successful stroke, had ultimately failed. When the university, mostly at her suggestion and direction, created the Gender Studies Program, she of course expected to be named as its chair, but instead they’d recruited a transgendered scholar from, of all places, Utah, and that had been the last straw. From then on she taught her classes but quit attending meetings or having anything to do with departmental politics. Unless Griffin was mistaken, her secret hope was that her colleagues, noticing her absence, would try to lure her back into full academic life, but that hadn’t happened. Even Bartleby’s passing had elicited little sympathy. While she continued to publish, run panels and apply for chairperson positions at various English departments, her file by this time contained several letters suggesting that while she was a good teacher and a distinguished scholar, she was also divisive and quarrelsome. A bitch, really.
Despite deep misgivings, Griffin had accepted the university’s invitation to attend his mother’s retirement dinner. (Joy had volunteered to go as well, but he insisted on sparing her.) There happened to be a bumper crop of retirees that year, and each was given the opportunity to reflect on his or her many years of service to the institution. He found it particularly disconcerting that his mother was the last speaker on the program. He supposed it was possible the planners were saving the best, most distinguished retirees for last, though more likely they shared his misgivings about what might transpire, and putting her last represented damage control. When it was finally her turn, his mother rose to a smattering of polite applause and went to the podium. That she was wearing an expensive, well-tailored suit only deepened apprehension. “Unlike my colleagues,” she said directly into the microphone, the only speaker of the evening to recognize that fundamental necessity, “I’ll be brief and honest. I wish I could think of something nice to say about you people and this university, I really do. But the truth we dare not utter is that ours is a distinctly second-rate institution, as are the vast majority of our students, as are we.” Then she returned to her seat and patted Griffin ’s hand, as if to say, There, now; that wasn’t so bad, was it? What she actually said in the stunned silence was, “Here’s something strange. For the first time in over a decade, I wish your father were here. He’d have enjoyed that.”