“Hey, hey, easy! Watch out for the little ones!” June called from the porch, and was promptly ignored.
I hope you aren’t going to tell me you enjoy these people, his mother said. He’d been hoping she’d been shut out when he closed the door behind him, but no such luck. You forget how well I know you, she continued. Pretend otherwise all you want, but you’ve always wanted to be done of these people, and now you are. This sentimental mood you’re in doesn’t become you.
I’m ignoring you, Mom, he told her, focusing his attention on a small boy who was acting out below. Furious at being ignored, he’d sat down right in the middle of the court, his lower lip sticking out, his face a thundercloud.
A little monster, that one, his mother observed.
No, Mom, he’s a child, Griffin said, though she might be right.
Andy, apparently fearing the boy might get trampled, picked him up and set him on his shoulders and, when the ball came over the net, managed to position himself so the kid could hit it. The ball went directly into the net, but his face was aglow with importance, and he raised his arms in triumph, as he’d clearly seen some athlete do on TV, and was given a round of applause.
You don’t like children, you don’t like volleyball and you don’t suffer fools gladly.
Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think, Mom.
Fine. Be that way.
Let’s talk about something else, shall we?
We can discuss whatever you like. The weather, if you prefer. Remember how it snowed that last two weeks?
Did he ever. Giant drifts of powder banked two-thirds of the way up the hospital window. Laura’s flight out had been one of the last before the airport closed, and it hadn’t reopened until Christmas Eve. Twice Griffin had to walk a good mile from the hospital to his motel, the roads impassable, his car plowed in.
In the days following Laura’s surprise visit, his mother became increasingly agitated. The morphine calmed her breathing, but something was clearly troubling her that had to do with her granddaughter, Griffin suspected, though he had no idea what. “She’s so…,” she began several times, her thought always trailing off, as if she were trying to articulate something just beyond her grasp. The oxygen made her mouth dry, so Griffin gave her some ice chips to suck on, thinking that might help, but they didn’t. “She’s so…”
“She’s so what, Mom?”
She fell asleep, still struggling, and Griffin drifted off as well, awaking to the sound of her voice.
“She’s so… kind, isn’t she?”
Kind? That was the word she’d been straining to locate? It was as if the concept were fabulously exotic, one she’d read about but hadn’t personally encountered until now. Either that or she’d done a quick genetic scan, looking for and not finding a familial antecedent.
“Yes,” he said, feeling his throat constrict with pride. “She is that.”
“She makes me almost”-she was struggling again now, and Griffin guessed that another unfamiliar concept was groping blindly toward articulation-“ashamed.”
The next day, however, she was more herself. “She’s not brilliant, though, is she?” she said, staring off into space. They’d been sitting quietly for the last hour, each in private thought. “I doubt she’ll go back to school.”
“Actually, she’s smart as hell,” Griffin told her, instantly angry. “More important, she’s happy, Mom. She’s going to marry someone she loves and who loves her.”
“Happy,” she repeated, catching his eyes and locking in. “Only very stupid people are happy.”
A few short hours, Griffin remembered thinking. That’s all it had taken for her to reflect upon kindness in general and her granddaughter’s in particular, then to discard it as a cardinal virtue.
They didn’t discuss Laura after that, but he continued to feel the ghostly residue of her visit, and unless he was mistaken, his mother did, too. Her decline seemed more rapid now, though over the long days that followed she rallied several more times, much as the doctors had predicted. The peaks weren’t nearly so high, however, and the valleys were lower. The morphine necessary for her breathing, in ever larger doses, made things weird, then weirder. Each time a dose was administered, her breathing became less labored and she was calmer, but not, somehow, any more at peace.
“She’s battling something,” one of the nurses remarked. “That’s not unusual at this stage. We may never know what it’s about.”
When she let him, he read to her or they watched television listlessly until the morphine took her under. He’d brought “The Summer of the Brownings” with him from L.A., and he worked on it while she slept. Something about his mother’s frail condition, together with the small, rhythmic sounds of the hospital room, made the story accessible in a way it hadn’t been the summer before on the Cape. At one point, though, his mother had awakened unexpectedly and asked what he was working on so intently. “Oh, them,” she sniffed when he told her, clearly disappointed by his choice of subject matter. Thinking it might please her, he said she’d been helpful. “You told me last June that it was asthma the little Browning girl suffered from, and about Peter eventually dying in Vietnam.” But she claimed to have no memory of the conversation. “How would I know what happened to those people?” she said when pressed. He couldn’t figure out what to make of it. His mother’s usual MO was to feign knowledge she didn’t have, not to confess ignorance.
As Christmas bore down on them, his exhaustion, fueled by sleepless nights and cafeteria food, began to take its toll, and Griffin felt his tenuous grip on reality begin to fray, as if he, too, were being dosed with morphine. He found himself sleeping when she did, dreaming fitfully, the Browning story in his lap. More than once he awoke with his mother’s eyes on him, an enigmatic smile playing on her lips. “You aren’t the only one with a story to tell, you know,” she said one afternoon.
“I’m sure that’s true,” he replied. He had exactly no desire to be the beneficiary of any morphine-fueled revelations, and the nurses had warned him to try to steer clear of upsetting topics. He hoped she’d let the subject drop, but a few minutes later, she said, “I bet you didn’t know your father and I were lovers right to the end.”
That, as it turned out, was the opening salvo, a warning shot across his bow, the beginning of what over the next few days he’d come to think of as his mother’s Morphine Narrative. Chronically short of breath now, she delivered it the only way she could, in short installments, like an old Saturday matinee serial. After each segment she closed her eyes and slept, or pretended to, leaving him to digest and puzzle over what she’d told him.
The real reason Claudia had abandoned his father, his mother now explained, was that she’d discovered they were still sexually involved. She’d visited him off and on that whole period, telling Bartleby-who was easy to lie to, since he preferred not knowing anyway-that she was attending conferences. She claimed Griffin himself had nearly found them out when he visited his father in Amherst. She’d meant to leave well before he arrived, but her car, parked in plain sight in the driveway, wouldn’t start. The engine had turned over just in the nick of time. They’d actually driven past each other on his father’s street, but he’d been off in his own world and hadn’t noticed her. The first installment had ended here, and when Griffin asked why she was telling him these things at such great cost, she said, “So you’ll know. You think you know all about your father and me, but you don’t.”