That Old Cape Magic

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, perhapsconcluding 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 mightbe 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 inprint, 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