Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Most of her mother’s friends, such as Aunt Debra and Emily Wetherwax, are like part of the family, people you joke with and call by the first name, but Mrs. Cavanaugh, though she’s not that much older than her own mother, has always been either Mrs. Cavanaugh or Tommy’s mother. And not just because of the man she’s married to and how he runs everybody’s life here, but because she has always been, though seemingly unassuming, such a person of quiet power herself — elegant, serene, president of just about everything at one time or another. It has been something of a shock to see her now in her plastic shower cap, scrunched up with her disease and melting into her bedclothes, her eyes dark and beady, spectacles on the end of her pinched nose, lips thin and unpainted, hands like tender claws. Her home care nurse, Concetta Moroni, Moron’s mother, a happy round-faced lady widowed by the mine disaster, was here when Sally arrived and she brought her a glass of ice tea, then took advantage of Sally’s visit to dash off to pick up a prescription and some fresh fruit. Tommy has told her that Concetta is turning his mother, after her crazy evangelical episode, into a Roman Catholic, and, sure enough, she crossed herself when Mrs. Moroni waved goodbye from the bedroom door.

Now she is showing Sally photos of her sorority house at college, telling her the life stories of each of the women in the pictures, whom they married or didn’t but should have, which are divorced or deceased (“I will be one of the first!”), the famous ones, the infamous ones, the lost ones. There are lots of photos taken at school dances with many different guys on her arm — her beaus, as she calls them. Sometimes in funny costumes, sometimes in jackets and dresses, often in tuxedos and formal gowns.

“Is that Mr. Cavanaugh?” Sally asks, pointing at one of them.

“No, that’s someone else.” She glances up at Sally over her wire-rimmed spectacles with a little half-smile much like the one on her own little-girl face in the photo of bawling Tommy. “Bring me the phone, will you, please, dear?”

Mrs. Cavanaugh’s mischievous look causes Sally to hesitate, but only for a moment. She winks (sisters!) and brings the phone on its long cord in from the hallway, waits until she puts the call through (“Is Edgar Thornton there, please? This is Irene Cavanaugh. That’s all right. I’ll wait…”), then slips away, peeking into the other rooms off the hall until she finds Tommy’s. The usual boy stuff on the walls and shelves, probably not much changed since he went off to college. Virtually no books, except for a Boy Scout manual, some baseball annuals and comicbooks, plus a few books he probably had to buy for freshman courses and has never read. Plato’s Republic , Homer’s Iliad , Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, The Golden Bough . Not much to start a conversation with, except perhaps the Boy Scout manual. Mentally awake, morally straight should be good for a gag or two. She thumbs through for it and finds tucked inside a Polaroid shot of someone’s shaggy pudenda. Guess whose. Why would someone want such a thing? Back to history, memory, nostalgia. Anticipated nostalgia. So: basically good news. If he had some grass somewhere, she’d steal it, but there’s none to be found.

On her way back into the sickroom, she hears Mrs. Cavanaugh say, “No, she’s not from around here; by my calculations, she lives about an hour and a half away,” and she decides to wait in the hall. “A private what? Oh, you mean a detective. Well, thank you, Thorny, but I don’t think I want to know. What in eternity, where we’re all going, does it matter? Yes, I know. He told me he was going to do that. I’m sorry for you, Thorny, but we knew he wouldn’t take this lying down. Bernice? That poor noble woman! Well, you must defend her, Thorny. No, I’ve been cruelly cut off from those kind Christian people. I’m becoming a Catholic now, you see. That’s why I was hoping there was enough money left to go to Lourdes. My new nurse will take me. It won’t be cheap. I’ll probably have to be transported there on a litter.” Sally hears Mrs. Moroni returning downstairs and goes in to warn Tommy’s mother. “What? Oh, I have to go now. Yes, I know you switched to an evangelical church for my sake, Thorny. Now, for our sake, I’m asking you to switch again.”

First tee. “That’s a hook,” he informs her when his drive (“Watch this carefully,” he had instructed her) flies into the woods on the left. When he leans close to show her how to grip the club, Sally has to hold her breath. She misses the ball altogether on the first swing. “Keep your head down! Elbow straight!” The second follows his into the woods, though not so deep. She finds her ball then helps him find his. He explains that there is a course ground rule that allows him to put his ball back out on the fairway. That’s the swath down the middle with the mowed grass. The trees and high weeds to either side is the rough. Which, to the left, is where her second shot again goes and his soon follows. She helps him find it. It is a long hole. Par 12 for beginners. Bogeyed.

Second tee. She thinks about the grip, makes an adjustment, sends the ball not very far but straight down the middle. “How did you do that?” her father asks. She shows him. He tries it. Same result: hooked into the rough. He can’t find the ball. She goes to help but he gets impatient and throws another ball down in the middle of the fairway. “Charge me a stroke,” he says. This time she’s at the edge of the green in four, but it takes her another six to get it in the hole. He claims to be there in five, not counting the three times he moved the ball out of the rough, and says his four-foot final putt is a “gimme,” and picks it up without hitting it, nearly toppling when he leans over.

Third tee. She suggests his problem might be he is standing too near the ball and is hitting it with the heel of his club, which is why it keeps flying left. “I think you should stand back a half step.” “If I stand back any further, I won’t be able to see the dadblame ball.” But he takes a nip from his hip flask and has a try, teeing up the ball, assuming his stance, then stepping backwards. He trips over his own feet and sits down hard, which enrages him. He tells her to mind her own business. He struggles confusedly to his feet, takes a wild swat at the ball and knocks it into the woods again. His mood is worsening. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea after all.

Fourth tee. The hole is called a dogleg, because it has a bend — in this case around the woods that hide the old city cemetery off to the right. Yesterday, Billy Don told her a weird story. Darren supposedly went back there on his own and discovered that the small empty grave they found with the golf balls in it had been filled in. Billy Don said Darren’s face was completely white when he told him this. They both assumed it was a supernatural event, a kind of message from the beyond. “Like we got too close to the truth or something.” She considers knocking her next drive over in that direction and going to take a peek while pretending to be hunting for her ball. But it’s not in her nature to do less than she can do and she is beginning to enjoy swinging one of these dumb sticks with the ball-bopper at the end. Besides, another foursome is closing in behind them and her father will need help looking for his ball on the other side of the fairway. So she sends it down the middle again. By now she is beating her father even when he lies about his strokes.

Fifth tee. He finishes off the contents of his hip flask, and swinging loosely and more or less blindly, sends his drive deep down the middle of the fairway. She is strangely moved by the slow loft and arc of the ball. “Now that’s how it ought to be done,” he says. “But it takes practice.” For once he’ll be able to find his own ball. If he can walk that far. The other golfers are already approaching the green behind them: Tommy and his father, Reverend Dreyer in his straw boater, and the new town manager. The slicker who cost her father his job. She tries too hard to impress and tops her ball, sending it bouncing a few yards in front of them. Her father turns to the royal family and shrugs apologetically, what can you do, instructs her once more, loudly, on keeping her head down, eye on the ball.