Richard Russo - That Old CapeMagic

That surprised him, and he paused before responding, half expecting his mother, who was, after all, right over the hedge, in easy shouting distance, to offer her own two cents’ worth. Perhaps the maze had confounded her. “Any idea why?”

She shrugged. “Seeing her like that last December, I guess. All the tubes and the oxygen. She looked so tiny and all wasted away.”

How well he remembered. It had been December when she visited, just a couple weeks from the end. By then, mentally and emotionally exhausted, Griffin had checked into an extended-stay motel near the hospital. The doctors had warned him that patients like his mother sometimes lived on for months after being put on morphine, but it seemed to him that his mother was dying as she’d lived, on the academic calendar. He doubted she’d begin another semester.

The day of Laura’s unexpected visit had been a particularly difficult one. Several times during the night his mother had been awakened by nurses taking her vitals and talking noisily in the corridor outside her room. As a result she’d been irritable all morning, convinced she’d not been given her morphine, though both the duty nurse and her chart testified otherwise. At midday Griffin had gone back to his motel to shower and eat something. When he returned, he discovered that his mother had a visitor, her first, not counting himself. A woman was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed, her back to the doorway, holding his mother’s hand. Joy, he thought, and felt some ice dam in his heart break apart at the possibility. Back in November she’d called him in L.A. to say she had to fly to Sacramento the following week. She could stop in Indiana going or coming back if he needed her to. He’d wanted desperately to say yes, but he heard himself say no, he had things under control. When he asked if everything was okay in California, she said yes, that it was just some family stuff she had to attend to. And not his family anymore, was her clear implication, which he had to admit he had coming.

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.”