“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.”
“Why is that so important?” he asked, but she just smiled, her eyes drooping toward sleep. Did she mean to imply that he was wasting his time writing about the Brownings when instead he could’ve been writing about them? That a writer with real imagination wouldn’t have been “off in his own world” when he could have been off in theirs?
The sex, she told him with a sly smile (of invention or memory?), was better than it had ever been when they were married. Cheating with rather than on each other had added another whole layer of excitement. Later, after his father and Claudia returned to the university, they’d just kept on. In the end the fat cow had given his father an ultimatum-herself or his ex-wife-never dreaming what his choice would be (that sly smile broadening now).
Each time she dozed, Griffin was certain she’d either forget the story she was telling him or, upon awakening, not have the strength to continue, but he was wrong. The tale seemed to satisfy some need as fundamental as breathing. “Let her tell it,” the nurse advised.
“But it’s not even true. She’s exhausting herself spinning a ridiculous yarn that neither one of us believes. It’s complete bullshit.”
Which got him a stern look. “Not to her. Your mother was a professor, right? She’s professing. She’ll stop when she’s ready, or when she can’t go on.”
Whenever she resumed the story, he felt his heart plunge, thinking, Here we go again, but gradually, as the snow outside drifted higher and higher up the hospital window, he became intrigued and eventually fascinated by the tale that struggled to be born even as its teller slipped away.
At some point one of Bartleby’s grown children had tumbled to what was going on between them, which explained why, when their father died, the siblings were united in their determination that she not inherit a farthing, the little shits. Not that she really cared. Bartleby never had anything she really wanted (yet another sly smile here, to let Griffin know she wasn’t just talking about worldly goods). She even claimed she’d continued to visit his father, though less frequently, at his subsequent academic postings. Indeed, they’d remained lovers for as long as he was physically able, and they hadn’t entirely broken off the relationship even then.
Could any of this be true? Griffin couldn’t decide. The story didn’t really track, or rather it tracked for a while, then jumped the tracks, then somehow climbed back on again. In an attempt to reconcile them, he made a mental point-by-point comparison of the Morphine Narrative and the earlier one. At least one detail of the morphine version was factually untrue. Griffin had never visited his father in Amherst, so either his mother was confused in her recollection of who’d almost caught them when her car wouldn’t start (Claudia, returning from Charleston?) or she’d invented the entire episode. The problem was there were relatively few flagrant discrepancies, and resolving the ones there were wasn’t terribly helpful. The skeleton of the two tales was pretty much the same, so it came down to plausibility, to each story’s interior logic.
Griffin hated to admit it, but in one respect the Morphine Narrative was marginally more credible. In the original, when his mother informed him, with great satisfaction, about his father’s disastrous year at Amherst, he-the veteran of a thousand sets of studio notes-had objected there was no way she could know everything she claimed to. His father was in one place and she in another, and even with a vast network of academic spies, the story she was pitching would have been, of necessity, a patchwork quilt of secondhand testimony. What his father had been thinking as he first outlined Claudia’s dissertation, and later as he composed an introduction and, finally, throwing caution to the wind, wrote the whole thing, was something only he could testify to, and he certainly wouldn’t have told her. But if there was any truth to the Morphine Narrative, then of course his mother had been there in Amherst, an off-and-on eyewitness. If they really were lovers, the story wasn’t secondhand but rather based on her own observations, however sporadic. His intimate revelations to her during this period therefore made a kind of sense. But if she’d been a regular visitor, his father couldn’t have been lonely; and if he wasn’t lonely, then missing Claudia hadn’t unhinged him; and if he wasn’t unhinged, why had he written her dissertation? Had he, in fact, written it?