Straight Man

seemed to be of the opinion that serious sprains could be mended with a washcloth. Once I was scrubbed, she pronounced me good as new.
    Lately, every time I see my mother, she reminds me of Norma Desmond. It’s not physical, really. My mother is a slight woman, but in recent years, as her eyesight has begun to fail, her use of makeup has become less subtle, and the effect is more severe. Her eyebrows seem plucked into a permanent arch, emphasizing that severity. Her clothes are old and out of fashion, though expensive and obsessively cared for. She’s the only woman I know who routinely wears lots of jewelry. She applies lipstick before leaving the house, regardless of her destination, and again at the table after meals in public. I can never decide whether she looks as if she’s about to go somewhere or as if she’s expecting important company. Either way, she’s ready for her close-up. I’m no Cecil B. DeMille, but I can play that role. I tell my mother she looks wonderful.
    Which she ignores. “I see you were conversing with my ubiquitous landlord,” she remarks. “I’ve had to install new shades. The old ones kept inching up, and that man has more excuses for walking past my windows. He’s nosier than an old woman.”
    “He’s looking after you, Mom,” I suggest.
    “No, he’s looking
at
me. Keeping track of my comings and goings. He’s afraid I might be seeing someone.”
    “Well,” I concede. “That too.” My mother has lived here for four or five years now, since she retired from teaching, and Mr. Purty’s attentions have been a more or less constant complaint. A couple months after she moved in, she came home one afternoon and found him in the basement working on the relic of a furnace. When he left, she called a locksmith, and the next time Mr. Purty found it necessary to enter he discovered he was without a valid key to his own house. “What if I need to get in?” he asked, not unreasonably. “You can knock, like everyone else,” my mother informed him. “What if you ain’t here?” he wanted to know. “If I’m not here, you don’t need to get in,” he was informed.
    “If you’d married him like I told you to, you wouldn’t have him lurking around all the time,” I remind her. “You know how devoted he is. By now you’d have convinced him to take you to live in Europe.”
    “True,” my mother concedes. She’s very aware of the spell she’s cast on her landlord. “But then I’d be in Europe with Charles Purty. What if I met someone I liked there?”
    “Suit yourself, Mother.”
    “I will,” she assures me. “It’s lunchtime. Have you eaten? Would you like a sandwich?”
    This is not an easy decision. My stomach is indeed growling, having been teased into expectation by the dean’s corned beef. Still, I know what to expect from my mother. Always an austere woman, she’s become positively spartan in old age. I don’t know what kind of sandwich she has in mind, but I know it will be thin, elegant, mostly bread. On the other hand, this may be my last opportunity for any sort of lunch today. I tell her a sandwich sounds good.
    Actually, the worst of my mother’s austerity manifested itself after my father left her for the first of his graduate students. I suspect my mother saw in this new circumstance very few attractive choices. Apparently the most appealing was the opportunity for theater. Instead of beggaring my father in the divorce settlement like a sensible woman, she let him off the hook and began to live in what she referred to as the straitened circumstances of an abandoned woman. Her plan, I imagine,was to humiliate my father, which shows how little she understood him if she thought, even for an instant, that such a tactic was likely to succeed. If she wanted to pretend that the dissolution of their marriage had left her destitute, that was fine with him, provided he himself was not made destitute for real.
    The simple truth was this. They were both professors at a good midwestern university when my father left, and my mother was well respected and kept her position when my father and Trophy Wife Number One left for the East and life in the academic fast lane. She wasn’t then and hasn’t been since, so far as I know, strapped for money, though she chose to live far below her means in a shabby genteel university house while she continued to teach, and here in Charles Purty’s flat since she retired and moved to Railton.
    The sandwich my mother